Why Would God Sacrifice Himself ...

[Red Terror]

If the Father is God and Jesus is God, does that mean that God sacrificed himself to himself in order to appease himself. I find this to be confusing, I mean why didn't an all-knowing and omnipotent God create a different plan where his son didn't need to be brutally murdered. Why did God need a plan to redeem us in the first place? If he is all powerful then he should not need to devise a plan at all, He should simply wish for it to be and it would be, no plan or bloodshed required. I don't mean to sound like a doubting Thomas, these are just things I think about.

Why would God sacrifice himself to himself in order to persuade himself to change the laws and punishment that he himself had imposed since the foundation of the universe??? Food for thought. What are your thoughts on the subject? Vale.

[Jackson Richardson]

Red has raised a very important point about the nature of Christianity which deserves a considered response. While I consider it, here are my immediate thoughts.

God is revealed for Christians in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. In Jesus on the cross totally humiliated, God is totally identified with humans in their mortality, pain, humiliation and alienation. Yet out of that, came an experience of new life, hope and reconciliation with God.

The earliest Christians naturally explained their experience of such liberation in imagery and terms from Jewish scriptures, among others that of sacrifice.

Paul put it simply in 2 Corinthians 5 “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them,”

[Jackson Richardson]

Why would God sacrifice himself to himself in order to persuade himself to change the laws and punishment that he himself had imposed since the foundation of the universe???

Because he hadn't. Paul is a great and convoluted lengths to point out that fulfilling the requirements of the Law is not what God requires, only faith in him as revealed by Jesus.

[Red Terror]

Because he hadn't. Paul is a great and convoluted lengths to point out that fulfilling the requirements of the Law is not what God requires, only faith in him as revealed by Jesus.

Why couldn't God have said, "Let there be forgiveness" just as he said "Let there be light" and it was so. In other words, by divine executive decree he, in his omnipotence, could have declared the whole human race free from guilt. Amen.

[Jackson Richardson]

Why there is evil and suffering if there is a good God is always an intellectual problem. But evil and suffering are part of the world, come what may. At least faith in a God identified with human suffering gives hope often to those in the most wretched circumstances and identifies evil and suffering for what they are and not just something to put up with if you're unlucky.

Your general point is dealt with far more wittily and passionately than I could manage by Terry Eagleton in that link I gave on another thread, which you can look at if you are genuinely interested in more than aggressive point scoring.

[totoro]

See to me, its like, God was there, but to everything there is an opposite. Hence where God is not, there is evil. Or at the very least a dark void of nothing, which could be a kind of evil maybe?