Christ's death - could anything else have been expected?

[Lazerlike42]

God obviously forsaw Christ’s death and all the events leading to it. He knew what would happen and used this in his divine plan.

However, I started thinking…

Could anything else have been expected? If God came down to earth as man, could we really expect anything else than for man to kill Him? Could God exist among men without being killed? It would seem to me that as humans we are so caught up in our own ways and in sin that if God were to come down, He was GOING to get killed, no question about it.

I hope I am wording this well.

 

[Mystophilus]

Lazerlike42:

Could anything else have been expected? If God came down to earth as man, could we really expect anything else than for man to kill Him? Could God exist among men without being killed? It would seem to me that as humans we are so caught up in our own ways and in sin that if God were to come down, He was GOING to get killed, no question about it.

I would suggest that there have been a number of cultural situations which would have accepted the presence of the Incarnate God with much less of a reaction than the Jews showed.

God chose a time and place in which the society was extremely stressed. The Jews were pressured from within by factional differences between the Zealots and the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law and the Sadducees. They were pressured from without by the Roman army of occupation. As a result, the society was already very tense, and it was a society which was extremely intolerant of religious heterodoxy. There have been a great number of societies which have not faced those pressures.

So far as anyone knows, the Nordic peoples never even had a concept for heterodoxy, possibly because they never had an organised ecclesiastical hierarchy. Had Jesus gone among them, there is no reason to think that they would have killed him, although would have been extremely disdainful of his pacifism. The Mongols were utterly pluralist, and would have had a similar reaction: as long as a man can ride and shoot, what else do you need? I would guess that the same would apply to various Native North American groups, particularly the non-nomadic ones (e.g., Pueblos?) but I know very little about them.

God chose just the right time and place to get Jesus killed.

 

[Eileen_T]

God the Father gave mankind Jesus (God the Son) to redeem them. There had to be a death/sacrifice and it was inevitable from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden.

If you search the OT, every covenant God entered into with His people was sealed with blood.

Jesus became man knowing what it would entail. When John the Baptist saw Him at the Jordan he said “Behold the Lamb of God” ie sacrificial lamb.

 

[Lazerlike42]

Oh I know that. I’m taking that aspect away from it and just plain saying look, you had this world of sinners, you had Jesus come down… forgetting about the fact that God planned it that way, would He have had a chance otherwise?

 

[Ghosty]

Every time people sin, whether against Moral Law or Natural Law, they are killing God in their hearts. There is no reason to expect that they would do otherwise when God walks among them.

This isn’t a case of “bad time and place”, this is a spiritual fact understood by the Church going back to before the time of Abraham, indeed to our first parents. He would have surely been killed in the land of the Norse, just as he was in Palestine. Sure, the Norse had a concept of gods walking among men, and didn’t have as strict an adherence to an orthodoxy, but they sinned mortally as surely as anyone. Remember, Man is made in the image of God, not the image of Odin. Man has been destroying this divine image from time immemorial, and culture means nothing in this regard. Sure, the Norse may not have killed Odin if he walked with them, or even Vishnu, but they would most definately have killed God.

Peace be with you!