Did God Really Require the Sacrifice?

What does the death of Jesus reveal about the character of God?

For centuries, Christians have taught that Jesus died for our sins. But have we ever stopped to ask a deeper question: Why was His death necessary?

E. J. Waggoner, a nineteenth-century Christian writer wrote:

“Of course the idea of a propitiation or sacrifice is that there is wrath to be appeased. But take particular notice that it is we who require the sacrifice, and not God.”

— The Justice of Mercy, Present Truth, UK, August 30, 1894.

Did God require the death of an innocent substitute before He could forgive humanity? Or have we sometimes understood the cross through ideas about sacrifice and appeasing divine anger that deserve a closer examination?

The Bible presents us with some fascinating questions. God commanded sacrifices, yet the prophets repeatedly tell us that He desires mercy, justice, and faithful hearts rather than ritual offerings alone. Jesus taught us to see the Father through Him, and the New Testament declares that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.

How do these passages fit together? And could there be another way to understand the cross — one that places God's love, rather than the need to appease His anger, at the very centre of the story?

This article does not claim to have every answer. Instead, it invites us to examine the biblical evidence, consider an alternative perspective, and ask whether our understanding of Christ's death is consistent with the character of the God Jesus came to reveal.

The question is not whether Jesus' sacrifice matters. It is whether we have fully understood what that sacrifice tells us about God.

Let us look at the evidence and consider the question for ourselves.

To begin with, I think we need to separate the following three questions:

1. Who requires a sacrifice? Does God say He requires it, or does He say He never wanted it?
2. Who brings about Christ’s death? Is it God demanding a payment, or human beings rejecting and killing Jesus?
3. What does Christ’s death accomplish? Does it change God's attitude toward us, or reveal God's love and reconcile us to Him?

There are biblical passages that seem to pull in different directions, so let's give both sides a fair hearing.

Scriptures That Challenge the Idea That God Demands Sacrifice

These are some of the strongest passages we are investigating.

Jeremiah 7:22–23

God says, in the King James Version, that He did not command Israel concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices when He brought them out of Egypt. Instead, He emphasises obedience: “Obey my voice, and I will be your God.”

This is particularly interesting. Read in context, it contrasts sacrificial religion with the relationship and obedience God actually sought. However, the wider Old Testament does contain commands about sacrifices, so we need to consider how Jeremiah's statement relates to those laws.

Hosea 6:6

“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” — KJV

Jesus quotes this in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7. He uses it to challenge people who condemn others while failing to show mercy. That makes it difficult to argue that ritual sacrifice, by itself, is what God values most.

Psalm 51:16–17

David says that God does not delight in sacrifice and that the sacrifices God truly desires are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

The point is not that repentance is a payment that buys forgiveness. The emphasis is on a changed heart rather than an animal's death.

Isaiah 1:11–17

God asks what all the people's sacrifices mean to Him when their hands are full of wrongdoing. He tells them to stop doing evil, seek justice, and defend the oppressed.

This is a powerful challenge to the idea that sacrifice can satisfy God while people continue to act unjustly.

Matthew 9:13

Jesus repeats God's words: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.”

Notice that Jesus uses this principle while welcoming sinners. His response to sin is to call people back to God, not to demand that someone suffer before He is willing to show mercy.

But are there Scriptures that appear to say God required a death?

Yes — and we should not overlook them.

Scripture	What it says or appears to imply
Leviticus 17:11	God gives blood a role in atonement because the life is in the blood.
Isaiah 53:10	The suffering servant's life is described in language that the KJV translates as God being pleased to bruise him.
Romans 3:25	God presents Christ as a propitiation (KJV), or a sacrifice of atonement in some translations.
Hebrews 9:22	Says that under the law, forgiveness is associated with the shedding of blood.
Hebrews 9:26–28	Presents Christ's sacrifice as occurring once to deal with sin.

Romans 3:25 is especially important because it explicitly says that God presented Christ as the means of atonement.

That does not automatically settle the question of why God did so. For example, providing a sacrifice is not necessarily the same as needing to be appeased by one. But we must honestly acknowledge that the New Testament deliberately connects Christ's death with God's saving action.

Who actually demanded Jesus' death?

Here is another set of passages worth considering.

• Matthew 27:20–26: The chief priests and elders persuade the crowd to call for Jesus' death, and Pilate hands Him over to be crucified.
• Acts 2:23: Peter says Jesus was delivered up according to God's foreknowledge and purpose, yet was crucified and killed by human hands.
• Acts 3:14–15: Peter accuses his hearers of rejecting the Holy and Righteous One and killing the Author of life.
• Luke 23:34: Jesus asks the Father to forgive those who are crucifying Him.
• These passages show human beings demanding and carrying out Jesus' death, while Acts 2:23 also says God's purpose was involved. The crucial interpretive question is whether God's purpose was to require a death as payment, or to accomplish salvation through Christ's faithful self-giving even as human beings rejected Him.

The texts establish human responsibility for the crucifixion; the precise relationship between that responsibility and God's purpose is what we need to examine.

A particularly revealing question: did Jesus portray the Father as reluctant to forgive?

Consider the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11–32.

The father does not demand that the son be punished before he can welcome him home. He sees his returning son, runs to him, embraces him, and celebrates his return.

That is a picture Jesus Himself gives of the Father's heart.

Then consider John 14:9, where Jesus tells Philip that whoever has seen Him has seen the Father. And John 3:16 says that God loved the world and gave His Son.

The sequence matters: the passage says that God's love is the reason He gives His Son. It does not say that God begins to love humanity because His Son dies.

That is a strong reason to question any explanation of the cross that makes the Father less merciful than Jesus.

Opening conclusion: Scripture clearly challenges the idea that God delights in sacrifice or that He can be bought off by someone's death. It also clearly presents Christ's death as part of God's saving purpose. The question is whether the sacrificial system reveals God's ultimate desire, accommodates a human world organised around sacrifice, or uses sacrifice as a symbol pointing beyond itself to Christ.

Questions About the Meaning of Christ’s Death

1. Does the Bible say, “Human beings required Christ's death, but God did not?” That is an interpretation to test against the whole body of Scripture, not a direct biblical quotation.
2. Does the cross reveal a God who must be persuaded to forgive, or a God who is already reaching out to reconcile humanity to Himself?
3. Did human beings invent the idea that a god must receive a blood sacrifice to forgive sin, and then project that idea onto the God of the Bible?

These are serious questions, and we should investigate them without deciding the answer in advance.

There is an important distinction here. Human societies certainly practised sacrifice to their gods, but the fact that people did this does not, by itself, prove that every biblical sacrifice originated as a human invention. We need to examine what the Bible actually says about the origin and purpose of its sacrificial system.

Four Key Biblical Passages

We will start with these four passages.

1. Psalm 40:6–8

The psalmist says that God did not desire or require burnt offerings and sin offerings, but desired a person who would do His will. Hebrews 10:5–10 applies this passage to Christ. That is striking: Christ comes to do God's will, and the passage contrasts that will with the sacrificial system.

2. Micah 6:6–8

Micah imagines someone asking whether thousands of rams, rivers of oil, or even their firstborn could make things right with God. The answer is not to offer a bigger sacrifice. It is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

That directly challenges the human idea that a sufficiently costly death can settle the problem of sin.

3. Jeremiah 7:21–23

God puts obedience and relationship ahead of offerings. The passage is sometimes interpreted as a forceful way of saying that sacrifices without obedience are worthless, rather than a denial that God ever instituted sacrifices. So it supports your question, but it is not conclusive on its own.

4. Ezekiel 18:20–23, 30–32

God says that the person who sins is accountable for their own sin, calls the wicked to turn from their ways, and asks, in effect, why they should die. He says He takes no pleasure in anyone's death and calls people to turn and live.

This is particularly relevant to the question of whether God needs somebody to die before He can forgive.

What about the animal sacrifices God appears to command?

Here is the difficult evidence we must not avoid: Leviticus does contain instructions for sacrifices, including sin offerings. So it would be too strong to say the Bible plainly teaches that all sacrifice was invented by humans and never commanded by God.

There is, however, a genuine historical question about how Israel's sacrificial practices developed in the wider ancient Near Eastern world. Sacrifice was widespread among neighbouring cultures, and scholars study Israel's practices alongside those traditions. That context makes your question reasonable, but it cannot by itself establish that Israel's entire sacrificial system was a human invention.

My present assessment is this: there is strong biblical evidence that God does not delight in sacrifice as a means of buying His favour, and that He desires mercy, justice, repentance, and life. Whether the sacrificial system itself was a human institution that God accommodated, or a system He instituted for a different purpose, requires a closer reading of the relevant passages.

And there is one question I would put at the centre of our investigation:

If God explicitly says He takes no pleasure in death and calls people to turn and live, what would make Him require the death of His own Son before He could forgive them?

That question doesn't settle the answer by itself. But it is exactly the question we should test against the Scriptures, including the passages that appear to say the opposite.

So let’s look at the passages that describe where the sacrificial system came from and what God intended it to accomplish.

The key passage: Leviticus 17:11

God says:

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls.” — Leviticus 17:11, KJV

Notice the wording: “I have given it to you.”

It doesn't say that God needs blood to satisfy His own desire. It says He gave the people the blood for a purpose. That leaves room to ask whether God was accommodating a human understanding of sacrifice, assigning a new meaning to an existing practice, or establishing a sacrificial system for His own reasons. The verse alone doesn't settle which interpretation is correct.

A Closer Look at Abraham and Isaac

In Genesis 22, Abraham believes he must offer Isaac, but God stops him and provides a ram instead. The story ends with Isaac alive, not sacrificed.

That could be read as a contrast with religions in which human sacrifice was practised: the God of Abraham stops the killing and provides an alternative. But we should be careful not to claim that this one story proves the entire theory.

And in the New Testament, Romans 8:32 says God “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.” That is the sort of passage we must examine closely. Does it mean God required His Son's death, or that God gave His Son over to a world that would kill Him, in order to save humanity? The wording permits a real debate about the mechanism, even though it clearly presents the giving of the Son as God's action.

There is a serious biblical case for questioning whether God operates according to the human idea that someone must die before forgiveness is possible.

The next step is to examine the earliest biblical sacrifices — Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, Noah in Genesis 8, and Abraham in Genesis 22 — and ask what the text actually says God requested, what people chose to offer, and what God did in response. That may help us distinguish God's stated wishes from the assumptions people brought to Him.

Let's follow the story from the beginning and let the Scriptures speak for themselves. Our question throughout will be:

When a sacrifice appears in the Bible, did God ask for it because He required a death, or did people offer it because they believed that was how to approach God?

We'll distinguish three things as we go: what the passage explicitly says, what we can reasonably infer, and what remains uncertain. That last category matters, because truth is more important than proving either side of the argument.

1. Cain and Abel — Genesis 4:1–7

Cain brings an offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel brings the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions.

God accepts Abel and his offering, but does not accept Cain and his offering.

What does the passage actually tell us?

• Both men bring offerings.
• Abel's offering involves an animal; Cain's involves produce.
• God does not explain here that an animal had to die because sin required blood.
• God speaks to Cain about doing well, sin, and mastering it — not about bringing a better sacrifice.

That last point is interesting. God tells Cain that if he does well, he will be accepted (Genesis 4:7). The immediate emphasis is on Cain's conduct and heart.

But here is the limitation: the passage doesn't tell us why Abel's offering was accepted and Cain's wasn't. Hebrews 11:4 later says Abel offered his sacrifice by faith, but it doesn't explicitly say that Cain's offering was rejected simply because it lacked blood.

So we cannot honestly conclude from Genesis 4 that God demanded an animal's death. Nor can we prove from it that the animal offering was purely a human idea.

2. Noah — Genesis 8:20–22

After leaving the ark, Noah builds an altar and offers burnt offerings from clean animals and birds.

The text says that the Lord smells the pleasing aroma and responds with a promise concerning the earth.

This is our first particularly interesting question: who initiated the sacrifice?

The passage says Noah built the altar and offered the animals. It doesn't say God instructed him to make that offering at that moment.

That supports the observation that this particular sacrifice was Noah's initiative, at least as the story is written.

However, Genesis 7:2–3 has already distinguished clean animals from unclean ones, so the narrative gives Noah instructions about the animals before the flood. It is possible that the author expects readers to understand Noah's offering within a wider tradition of worship.

And we mustn't overlook the other side: the language of a pleasing aroma is also used in later passages where God explicitly commands offerings. That means the Bible does portray God as accepting sacrificial worship, even when a particular sacrifice is initiated by a person.

3. Abraham and Isaac — Genesis 22:1–14

This is probably the most emotionally difficult passage for our investigation.

God tells Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham prepares to obey, but at the crucial moment the angel of the Lord stops him. A ram is provided and sacrificed instead.

We must acknowledge what the text says: in the story as written, God does command Abraham to offer Isaac. We cannot simply pretend otherwise.

But notice how the story ends:

• Isaac is not killed.
• Abraham is prevented from carrying out the sacrifice.
• An animal is provided instead.
• Abraham names the place in connection with the Lord's provision.

The ending makes God's provision central. It also distinguishes the God of this story from the expectation that a human child must actually be killed.

Some biblical scholars interpret the account as a story that rejects human sacrifice; others emphasise Abraham's faith and obedience. The passage has a complex history of interpretation, so we should not claim that every scholar agrees on its purpose.

What does this tell us about your question?

It gives us a reason to ask whether God was confronting Abraham's understanding of what devotion to a deity required. But the text explicitly describes the command as a test from God, so the idea that Abraham simply invented the demand is not what the passage directly says.

That leaves a significant question: was the test intended to teach Abraham something about God's character and provision, rather than to establish that God truly wanted Isaac's death?

The story's ending certainly gives us grounds to explore that possibility.

4. The Law of Moses — Leviticus 17:11

Now we reach the clearest statement about blood and atonement.

God says that He has given the Israelites blood upon the altar to make atonement for their lives.

There are two important observations here.

First, the text does explicitly assign the sacrificial use of blood to God. We cannot say the biblical sacrificial system was only a human invention.

Second, it says that God gave the blood to the people for this purpose. It does not explicitly say, “I need to see blood before I am willing to forgive you.”

Scholarly discussion of the Hebrew wording recognises that the verse's precise explanation of how blood makes atonement is debated. The blood may function as the means of atonement through its association with life, or it may have a more ransom-like function. The verse does not itself spell out every later Christian theory about Christ's death.

That distinction matters. A practice can be instituted by God without every explanation later attached to it being correct.

5. What did God say He actually wanted?

Let's compare those sacrificial passages with God's own statements about His character.

Hosea 6:6

God says He desires mercy rather than sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Ezekiel 18:23

God asks whether He takes any pleasure in the death of the wicked, and answers by calling them to turn from their ways and live.

Micah 6:6–8

When the people ask what they should bring to God — even escalating to the possibility of offering their firstborn — the answer is justice, mercy, and humble fellowship with God.

Psalm 40:6–8 and Hebrews 10:5–10

These passages contrast sacrifices and offerings with doing God's will. Hebrews applies the passage to Christ, who comes to do that will.

Taken together, these passages strongly challenge the idea that the ultimate solution to sin is to find something valuable enough to satisfy God's appetite for punishment.

They do not, by themselves, prove that God merely accommodated human expectations when instituting the sacrificial system. But they do warn us against assuming that the presence of sacrifice means God needs suffering in order to become merciful.

6. What Have We Learned About Sacrifice So Far?

Here is my honest assessment of the evidence so far.

Question	What the evidence supports
Did ancient people sacrifice to their gods?	Yes. Sacrifice was widespread in the ancient Near East.
Does the Bible portray people initiating some sacrifices?	Yes. Noah is a clear example in Genesis 8.
Does the Bible portray God commanding sacrifices?	Yes. The Mosaic law contains explicit commands, and Genesis 22 portrays a command to Abraham.
Does the Bible say God delights in death or needs to be persuaded to love humanity?	Not as a general principle. Several passages challenge that idea directly.
Does the Bible explicitly say God instituted sacrifice because humans expected it?	No. That explanation is an interpretation, not a direct statement in the text.
Is it possible to distinguish God's purpose in sacrifice from later human explanations of it?	Yes. That is a legitimate question for biblical interpretation.

7. Human Sacrifice and God's Attitude Towards It

This is where the evidence becomes particularly revealing.

Deuteronomy 12:29–31

Israel is warned not to adopt the worship practices of the nations around them. Verse 31 says that those nations did things the Lord hates, including burning their sons and daughters as offerings to their gods.

The message is direct: Israel must not assume that the religious practices of other peoples are acceptable to God.

Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–5

These passages prohibit giving children to Molech. Leviticus 20 prescribes severe consequences for the practice. Whatever the precise historical meaning of the term Molech—scholars debate whether it denotes a deity or a type of offering—the passages clearly condemn the practice they describe.

Jeremiah 7:30–31

This passage is especially striking. God condemns the people for building high places where they burn their sons and daughters, and says:

“which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.” — Jeremiah 7:31, KJV

That is powerful language. God explicitly denies having commanded this practice.

There is a historical complication: some biblical passages suggest that certain Israelites believed they were offering children to their own God, rather than to a foreign deity. Scholars continue to debate how those passages relate to the Bible's clear prohibitions.

But Jeremiah's statement gives us a principle we should take seriously: people can practise something religiously and attribute it to God even when God says He did not command it.

8. The Firstborn: Redemption Rather Than Sacrifice

Here is another important detail.

God claims Israel's firstborn as His own, but the law provides for the firstborn son to be redeemed rather than sacrificed. Compare Exodus 13:13 and Numbers 18:15–16.

That distinction matters. The firstborn belongs to God, but that does not mean God demands that the child die. The child is redeemed through a substitute payment.

This is consistent with the ram provided in Genesis 22: God provides an alternative to Isaac's death.

It doesn't prove that all animal sacrifice arose from human expectations, but it does show that belonging to God does not automatically mean that a human life must be taken as an offering to Him.

9. A Difficult Passage: Ezekiel 20:25–26

Here God says that He gave Israel statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live, and that He allowed them to become defiled through the offering of their firstborn.

This passage has been interpreted in different ways. Some understand it as God handing people over to the consequences of their rebellion; others see it as a difficult statement about divine judgment and Israel's religious practices.

We cannot confidently use it as proof that God accommodated human sacrificial expectations. But it does raise a profound possibility: the Bible sometimes describes God allowing people to experience the consequences of their own choices, rather than endorsing those choices as His ideal.

That distinction may be relevant to our investigation.

10. What the Evidence Tells Us About Human Sacrifice

I think we have reached an important point.

• The Bible portrays sacrifice as part of the religious world of ancient humanity.
• Some sacrifices were initiated by people, while others were explicitly commanded by God.
• God expressly condemned child sacrifice, even though some Israelites apparently practised it in religious settings.
• The Bible repeatedly places mercy, justice, repentance, and life above ritual sacrifice.
• Some passages suggest that God's response to human rebellion includes allowing people to experience the consequences of their choices.

What we have not yet proved is that God commanded Israel's animal sacrifices specifically because people expected a sacrifice from Him. That remains a possible interpretation, not an explicit biblical explanation.

And I don't want us to confuse two different claims:

1. God may have accommodated people within a sacrificial culture.
2. God may have instituted sacrifices to teach a truth about sin, forgiveness, and life.

Both are possible explanations to investigate. The biblical text must decide between them, as far as it allows us to.

11. Jesus’ Death: God’s Purpose and Human Responsibility

Here is the question I want us to carry into the New Testament:

If God repeatedly opposed the idea that human beings should be killed to satisfy a deity, could Jesus' death be the ultimate exposure of what human beings do to God when He comes among them?

Consider John 15:25, where Jesus says He was hated without a cause. Consider Acts 7:52, where Stephen accuses the religious leaders of betraying and murdering the Righteous One. And consider Luke 23:34, where Jesus asks the Father to forgive those who are crucifying Him.

These passages place human rejection and violence at the centre of the crucifixion story.

Yet the New Testament also says God gave His Son for us (John 3:16; Romans 8:32). So our next task is to investigate how those two truths fit together.

Did God give His Son to be killed because He required a victim, or did He give His Son to save humanity, knowing that humanity would kill Him?

Let's move to the heart of the question: Who Required Christ’s Sacrifice? Jesus' own understanding of His death. Before we rely on later theological explanations, we should ask what Jesus said He came to do, who wanted Him dead, and what His death was meant to accomplish.

One distinction will guide us throughout:

• God giving His Son does not automatically mean God demanded that His Son be killed as a payment.
• Human beings killing God's Son does not automatically mean His death was outside God's saving purpose.

The question is how those two realities fit together in the biblical account.

12. The Wicked Tenants: A Parable of Rejection

Jesus tells a story about a landowner who plants a vineyard and rents it to tenants. When he sends servants to collect the fruit, the tenants beat and kill them. Finally, he sends his son, thinking they will respect him. Instead, they kill the son too.

Jesus then asks what the owner will do to those tenants.

The religious leaders recognise that the story is directed at them.

Notice the pattern:

1. The owner sends messengers.
2. The tenants reject and abuse them.
3. The owner sends his son.
4. The tenants kill the son to serve their own interests.

The son is not killed because the owner needs a death to forgive the tenants. He is killed because the tenants reject the owner's representative and want to retain control.

This is a parable, so we shouldn't force every detail into a complete theory of atonement. But it is a powerful picture of how Jesus portrays humanity's treatment of God's messengers — culminating in the rejection of God's Son.

Compare it with Acts 7:51–52, where Stephen accuses the religious leaders of resisting the Holy Spirit and killing those who announced the coming of the Righteous One.

The repeated biblical pattern is that God sends; human beings resist and sometimes kill.

13. Did Jesus Say His Father Required His Death?

Let's examine several passages where Jesus speaks about His approaching death.

John 10:17–18 — “I lay it down of myself”

Jesus says:

“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” — John 10:18, KJV

He also says He has authority to lay down His life and take it again, and that He received this commandment from His Father.

This passage is important to both sides of our question.

It supports the view that Jesus' death was a willing act of love, not simply a victim being forced to pay a debt. Yet Jesus also describes laying down His life as something connected to His Father's command.

So we cannot use this passage to say that the Father had nothing to do with Jesus' death. But neither does it explicitly say that the Father needed to punish an innocent person before He could forgive humanity.

The command could be understood in the context of Jesus' whole mission: to reveal the Father, rescue humanity, and remain faithful even when that mission leads to death.

Matthew 26:52–54 — Jesus refuses to defend Himself

When one of His disciples uses a sword during His arrest, Jesus tells him to put it away. He asks whether He could not appeal to His Father for more than twelve legions of angels, but then says the Scriptures must be fulfilled.

Here we see Jesus refusing to escape the consequences of His mission through violence.

But the passage also raises a difficult question: what does it mean for the Scriptures to be fulfilled? Jesus understands His death as part of God's purpose, not merely as an unfortunate accident.

That still leaves open whether the purpose was to satisfy a requirement for punishment or to carry God's saving love through the very violence that humanity would inflict on Him.

Luke 23:34 — “Father, forgive them”

As Jesus is being crucified, He prays:

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Think about the timing. Jesus asks the Father to forgive His executioners while they are killing Him.

He does not say, “Father, now that I have suffered enough, You may forgive them.” The prayer itself presents forgiveness as something Jesus is already seeking for them.

We should be careful: the verse's presence in some early manuscripts is disputed by textual scholars. Nevertheless, the prayer is part of the received Gospel text and is consistent with Jesus' wider teaching about forgiving enemies (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27–28).

It gives us a vivid picture of Jesus' attitude towards His killers: not vengeance, but mercy.

14. John 3:16–17: Love as the Reason for the Gift

This passage is familiar, but let's pay attention to its logic.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son...” — John 3:16, KJV

And verse 17 continues by saying that God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

The order is significant:

1. God loves the world.
2. God gives His Son.
3. The purpose is salvation, not condemnation.

God's love is the reason for the gift. The text does not say that God first needed to be persuaded to love us, or that Jesus' death changed an unwilling Father into a loving one.

But we must also be precise: John 3:16 doesn't, by itself, explain every aspect of why Jesus had to die. It tells us the motivation and purpose of God's gift; we need other passages to understand the role of the cross.

15. Romans 5:8–10: God's Love Before the Cross

Paul writes that God demonstrates His love for us in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. He then says that we are reconciled to God through the death of His Son.

This is one of the strongest passages for our investigation.

Notice that God demonstrates His love towards people who are still sinners. The death of Christ is an expression of that love; it is not described as the event that first makes God love them.

However, Paul also uses the language of reconciliation through Christ's death. Christians disagree about precisely how that reconciliation works. Some understand the death as satisfying divine justice; others emphasise God's self-giving love, the defeat of sin and death, or humanity's restoration to God.

The passage clearly establishes God's prior love. It does not, on its own, settle every question about atonement.

16. Romans 3:23–26: God’s Provision for Sin

Here is where we must give the alternative interpretation its strongest hearing.

Paul says that all have sinned and that people are justified freely by God's grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus. He then describes God as presenting Christ as a hilastērion — a Greek term translated in various ways, including “propitiation,” “atonement,” or “sacrifice of atonement.”

Paul goes on to connect this with God's righteousness and His treatment of sin.

This is the most serious challenge to a view that says Christ's death was entirely a human expectation with no divine requirement involved. Paul does not merely say that humans killed Jesus and God turned the tragedy into something good. He deliberately presents Christ's death as part of God's saving work.

But there is an important distinction between these two claims:

• God provides Christ as the means of dealing with sin.
• God must inflict death on someone before He is willing to forgive.

The first is clearly present in Romans 3. The second is an interpretation of how the first works; it is not simply a quotation of Paul's words.

The Greek term itself does not resolve the debate. Its meaning and background are discussed by scholars, and we should not build an entire doctrine on one English translation.

17. Does God Reconcile Us to Himself?

Now consider 2 Corinthians 5:18–19.

Paul says that God reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, “not imputing their trespasses unto them.”

This wording deserves our attention.

Paul places God at the centre of the reconciling action. God is the one reaching out to humanity. He is not portrayed as standing at a distance, waiting for human beings to persuade Him to become merciful.

This fits remarkably well with the picture Jesus gives of the father welcoming the prodigal son in Luke 15.

Yet it does not mean that sin is unimportant or that reconciliation requires no transformation. In the same passage, Paul appeals to people to be reconciled to God. The relationship is to be restored, and people are called to respond.

A distinction worth holding onto is that God can take sin seriously without requiring a sacrifice to change His attitude towards sinners.

Whether that is the best complete explanation of the cross remains the question we are investigating.

18. Where the Evidence Stands So Far

I think the biblical evidence is giving us a clearer picture, but we have not reached a final verdict.

What the passages strongly support

• God loved humanity before Christ died for us.
• Jesus willingly laid down His life.
• Human beings rejected and killed Jesus.
• God acts through Christ to reconcile humanity to Himself.
• Scripture repeatedly challenges the idea that sacrifice can replace mercy, justice and a right relationship with God.

What remains to be established

• Whether God instituted the sacrificial system to accommodate human expectations, or for another purpose.
• Whether Christ's death was required by a principle of divine justice, or whether it was the inevitable consequence of God's saving mission into a sinful world.
• How passages about sacrifice, redemption, judgment and forgiveness fit together without forcing any of them to say more than they actually say.

The next passage I would examine

I suggest we now turn to Hebrews 9–10, because it directly connects the Old Testament sacrificial system with Christ's death. In particular, Hebrews 10:5–10 says God did not desire sacrifice and offering, yet presents Christ as coming to do God's will.

That tension is right at the centre of your question.

We should also examine Isaiah 53, because it contains some of the strongest language suggesting that the servant's suffering is connected with God's purpose. We must understand that passage honestly, rather than avoid it because it is difficult.

19. Hebrews 9–10: Did God Require Sacrifice, or Provide a Way Beyond It?

These chapters are crucial because the writer of Hebrews deliberately compares the old sacrificial system with the death of Jesus.

Hebrews 10:1–10 — the tension in the text

The writer says that the sacrifices offered repeatedly under the law could not make worshippers perfect. If they could, the sacrifices would have ceased. Instead, they served as a reminder of sins.

Then the writer quotes Psalm 40:

“Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me.” — Hebrews 10:5, KJV

And a few verses later:

“Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” — Hebrews 10:9, KJV

The writer concludes that Christ's offering of His body accomplishes what the repeated sacrifices could not.

Let's consider what this actually tells us.

First: the writer does not portray the repeated sacrifices as God's ultimate solution to sin. They were insufficient to accomplish the final result.

Second: the passage contrasts sacrifice and offering with Christ's coming to do God's will. It is reasonable to ask whether Christ's obedience and self-giving reveal something deeper than the idea that God simply needs a victim.

Third: the writer still describes Christ's bodily offering as part of God's will. We cannot honestly say Hebrews teaches that Jesus' death had nothing to do with God's purpose.

The real question is what God's will involved. Was it that an innocent person must be punished to satisfy God? Or was it that Christ would faithfully accomplish God's purpose of rescuing humanity, even at the cost of His own life?

Hebrews 10 does not spell out the whole answer in those exact terms. But it does challenge the assumption that repeated blood sacrifices were God's ultimate desire.

20. Isaiah 53: The Hardest Passage for This View

This is where we must slow down, because Isaiah 53 contains language that can sound very much like God intended the servant to suffer.

The passage describes a servant who is rejected, wounded, oppressed and killed. Christians have traditionally understood this servant as Jesus.

Three parts are especially important.

Isaiah 53:4–5 — “wounded for our transgressions”

The servant bears griefs and carries sorrows; he is wounded because of human transgressions and bruised because of human iniquities.

One reading is that the servant receives the punishment sinners deserve, satisfying the requirements of divine justice.

But another question is possible: does the servant suffer because of human sin, bearing its consequences and bringing healing to others, rather than because the Father must inflict punishment on an innocent victim?

The wording tells us that the servant's suffering is connected to our wrongdoing and our healing. It does not, by itself, explain every mechanism of that connection.

Isaiah 53:7–9 — what do people do to the servant?

The servant is oppressed, led like a lamb to slaughter, and cut off from the land of the living. The passage also describes injustice and violence.

This matters because the suffering is not portrayed as an abstract transaction detached from human behaviour. It happens in a world where the innocent can be mistreated and killed.

There is a strong parallel with the Gospel accounts of Jesus, who is condemned and executed despite Pilate finding no basis for the charges against Him (Luke 23:13–25).

Isaiah 53:10 — “it pleased the LORD to bruise him”

Here is the difficult verse. The KJV says that it pleased the Lord to bruise the servant and put him to grief.

We must not hide that wording. It is one of the strongest texts used to argue that the servant's suffering was part of God's purpose.

However, the Hebrew verb translated “pleased” can express willing or intending, and the verse continues by speaking of the servant's life as an offering for sin. We need to read the whole passage, not simply substitute our preferred interpretation for the wording.

There are two important distinctions:

• God can intend to accomplish salvation through the servant's suffering without necessarily delighting in suffering for its own sake.
• But if we claim that God merely watched an entirely unforeseen event, that would not fit Isaiah 53's presentation of the servant's suffering as part of God's purpose.

The question is not whether God is involved. Isaiah says He is. The question is what God intends through the suffering, and what that tells us about His character.

21. Isaiah 53: The Servant’s Suffering and Its Purpose

Look at Isaiah 53:11–12. The servant sees the results of his suffering, justifies many, bears their iniquities, and intercedes for transgressors.

The passage ends not with God finally becoming loving, but with the servant bringing benefit to those who have done wrong.

This fits an important biblical theme: God works to restore sinners through the faithfulness of His servant.

But we should be careful about one thing. The words “offering for sin” in Isaiah 53:10 connect the servant with the sacrificial system. They cannot simply be ignored. Any interpretation of the cross must explain why the Bible uses this sacrificial language, not dismiss it as a mistake.

The question is whether sacrificial language means that God requires someone to be killed in order to forgive, or whether God uses the language and imagery of sacrifice to explain how the servant gives himself to rescue people from sin.

Those are different claims.

22. Acts 2:23: God's Purpose and Human Responsibility

Peter says of Jesus:

“Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” — Acts 2:23, KJV

This verse holds two things together:

• Jesus' death was within God's purpose and foreknowledge.
• Human beings crucified Him, and Peter calls their actions wicked.

It doesn't say that God was the one who physically killed Jesus. Nor does it say that the crucifixion was outside God's purpose.

This gives us a third possibility beyond the two extremes of “God demanded a victim” and “God had nothing to do with the death”: God may have purposed to save humanity through Christ's mission, while human beings remained responsible for the violent death that mission brought about.

That interpretation still needs to explain Isaiah 53 and the sacrificial language in Hebrews. But it takes Acts 2:23 seriously without making God the moral equivalent of the people who crucified Jesus.

Why Did Jesus Have To Die? - Page 2