"holy_wood:
Theres allot of symbolism that goes in with the crucifixion account but if the Jews had not rejected Christ and he had lived to die a natural death would we still be saved by him dying a sinless man and then ressurect to prove his divinity?
Jesus could not have died a natural death. Death is a consequence of being born with original sin, which Jesus didn’t have. Jesus could only have been killed by a willful act of murder.
You answer for your own sins, let me clarify that for everyone…
It is impossible to answer for your own sins. Each sin is an infinite evil, and humans are only capable of finite good.
Anyway, it’s a common Catholic saying that one drop of Jesus’ blood would have been enough to redeem all of humanity. So, why did he give all he had? The answer is less tricky that you might think: because he had so much to give. Jesus loves us, and in allowing himself to be crucified, he bestows such eternal and infinite value as to make us worthy of God’s love as his children.
Here’s how I’ve come to understand it: even after the fall, humanity didn’t really
need to be “saved.” God could have just chosen to ignore Adam and Eve’s sin. “Oh, you ate the fruit? Well, are you sorry? Yes? Ok, back to eden you go.” But were he to do that, he would destroy the very point and purpose of humanity. God made us from nothing, and to a certain extent, that’s what we are: tiny motes of crystallized nothingness worth nothing to nobody. Humans aren’t meant to be crystals, though, but scions of God’s love, to be God’s children, to be gods ourselves (lower case “g,” of course). Humans are meant to be shining suns, glowing with God’s love, to be creatures that God can love and that love God back (because love unrequited is subtly wrong somehow).
So, our actions have to have consequences. When a human does something good, it is meant to be momentous, but this also means that our evil actions need to have equal weight. So, if a human sins, it
must damn him to hell. If you kill someone, you have done something so terrible that
as a consequence you earn eternal torture. Lesser sins don’t deserve less, either. Spitting on a church as a joke, saying an unkind word to a friend, even the sexual sins (which are sins of weakness rather than cruelty), all of them make you deserve constant unending torture. Were this not so, our good actions would be utterly meaningless and humanity’s reason for being would be unmade. And since everyone (except Mary) has sinned, we all deserve the hell of old Baptist sermons, and worse.
But God doesn’t want that. Our sins have to have consequence, but he doesn’t want that consequence to be eternal death, so something else has to act as a stand-in consequence. We have to lose something instead of our souls, but we don’t have anything of commensurate worth, and no amount of good actions (which are finite) can overcome the never ending tide of sin.
Enter Jesus. By becoming man, he can suffer, and since he is God, his suffering is infinitely meritorious. Thus, sin still has consequence and man is still capable of becoming a worthy container of God’s love, but he has pulled a bait-and-switch with the consequence: sin now causes the crucification and death of Jesus rather than our eternal damnation. You have to chose to allow Jesus to take your sins to the grave and leave them there, but it is still wrong to refuse his offer since his offer is an act of pure, infinite love, what C.S. Lewis calls charity, and the refusal of love is itself a sin when the love is correct (and when it’s from God, it is
always correct).
Jesus is what gives us the hope of Heaven. You still have to take that hope and run with it, but without Jesus’ death, there would be no hope of life.
You need to maybe read the NT. You really have no concept of Christianity. No where does it say Chrsitans believe they can do whatever the heck they want and face no consequence. I suggest you take some time to read the boards here. You will see the the RCC is very strict and requires repentance (confession) at least once a year. We will not be disappointed. On the contrary, while I agree there are good muslims, hindu’s, budists, you name it, Jesus said himself no one comes to the Father but through HIM - it seems as though non-christians are the “doomed” ones. Of course I can’t say for sure as I am not Jesus obviously but this is what our Bible says and we believe it for the same reason you believe yours.
