Why God Had to Die

I’ve met many people who believe Jesus is not truly the eternal, self-existent Almighty God who came in the form of a man. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons are only two of the more well-known groups who teach that error. 

But they are not alone in their false teaching. Many people who sit in pews and preach from pulpits also deny the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity.

The Holy Spirit provides more than ample evidence throughout the Bible as to the absolute eternal and self-existent deity of Jesus. The connection the Holy Spirit makes for us between the epistle to the Hebrews and the prophecy in Jeremiah of a new covenant is one example:

“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 31:31-32).

God confirmed the first covenant when Moses sprinkled the blood of the sacrificial animals on the altar in the wilderness Tabernacle (e.g., Exodus 24, Leviticus 14). But God tells us through Jeremiah that He also intended to replace the old covenant with a new one.

Fast forward 1500 years to the birth, life, and sacrificial death of the God-Man. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us in chapter nine: 

“For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ . . . cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

“For this reason [Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant, so that, since a death (i.e. of sacrificial animals) has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. For where a covenant is, THERE MUST OF NECESSITY BE THE DEATH OF THE ONE WHO MADE IT (emphasis mine) For a covenant is valid only when men are dead, for it is never in force while the one who made it lives.” (Hebrews 9).

In other words – and this is the critical point that illustrates the deity of Jesus – for the New Covenant to take effect, God HAD TO DIE and shed His blood.

If Jesus is not the eternal and self-existent God in the form of a man, then the New Covenant promised through Jeremiah has not yet occurred. Which means you and I are still in our sins. And our only destiny after death is eternal judgment.

God had to die – to effect the New Covenant.