Why A Death?

(concept 1) There is a God who created everything and it was good.


(concept 2) There were present forces of good and evil .....a decision was made within the inner counsel of the Godhead that a remedy for sin, death, and even all evil would be in readiness.

Some of the problems : Original man, Adam, managed to trade his elevated position of being in dominion to the Tempter. The rule of sin and death begins.

Death and decay of ourselves and what we love, and even of our experience of the capacity to love becomes rampant, and there's nothing lasting that we can do about it

(concept 3) God illustrates His requirement of justice and his desire to have mercy. It begins with the fact that blood needs to be shed when a lamb is killed for the coverings that He provides Adam and Eve. It is further expounded in the Mosaic law, when all approach to God is dependent upon sacrifice. That there is wrong done, that justice is required, that the harm done has cost life, all begins to be illustrated in lives, history, and law.

(concept 4) God shows His desire to return man to relationship with Himself; first through the tribes of Israel, then within the Church. One of the first things is to restore freedom and give healing, revealing different aspects of His nature that were lost to man's consciousness (as evidenced by their religions).
The difficulty that keeps arising in all this is that the system of the law and its sacrifices only shows mans inability to fill the bill. The huge chasm between God and man becomes evident. God shows many things about Himself throughout His interactions with Israel, and despite the fatal flaw that entered with the first Adam, God gives light and indications of what He has planned as a remedy. Repeatedly, the words of the Law and Prophets give indicators of a certain man who is anointed, the way a king or priest would be, to help mankind. In some places ,God indicates that it is He, Himself, who will save the situation and restore relationship, and even to overcome death itself.Someone said it this way:"The fall of Adam in the garden neither took God by surprise nor obstructed the fulfillment of His purpose."

But the whole point, the whole point, of this is that wrong started to be done, wrong against God in rebellion, escalated to wrong against fellow man, and then all the wrongs of the list that any culture would care to compile of murder, stealing, oppression in its many manifestations, all of it. This wrong cried out for redress and justice. The justice within God required a payment, and even man himself would accuse God if there was none. So something had to make payment of blood for blood.

There is a Christian idea called predestination and a lot of philosophy has come out of that idea, but the account simply says that God knew ahead of time how man would choose to eat of knowledge of good and evil, and that a decision was made within the inner counsel of the Godhead that a remedy would be in readiness (that is why it is expressed that the lamb of God was sacrificed from the foundation). Now a timeout:

Many balk at the idea of the trinity, but they have absolutely no problem seeing humans at least in two or more parts. The account looked at here says man has three parts: body, soul, and spirit, in an image (representation) of God. It says God has a plurality in one. Elohim (plural) says "Oh, Israel, The LORD is One".

But God does not primarily describe Himself by Justice, but by Loving kindness and Mercy. If He wanted only Justice, it would have ended in the garden of Eden. Adam, dead. Devil, obliterated. Creation, wiped out. Mistakes and problems over.

The plan began to be instituted: Jesus, Last Adam, living a perfect life in relationship to God and his fellow man; The Son within the Godhead living under the conditions of man, restricted within the body to the dependency of the first Adam,but without the fatal flaw inherent within him. (That was why the virgin birth, no transference of Adam's dominant sin nature, yet a fully human nature)

So why do we need this Jesus? Why do we need him to pay for our sin? We can't pay; we can't live free enough from evil to avoid coming under the penalty of death. We can't return to right standing with God. Once Jesus died, a completely innocent man, death had no calls on Him, and in fact, He now could require redress. In exchange for His life, battered, abused, broken, and despised, He required.... us. He wanted us for Himself, so that the Father God could have many sons, so that the plans of the Godhead which are described as beyond what we could ask for ourselves or conceive of, could give us experience of Love, God fully expressed as Love. But the free moral agency is still in force: we must choose to come to Him, we must choose to accept and believe.

We can't get that right standing without Jesus, we can't earn it for ourselves, it is The Son making a gift of Himself, at the Fathers will. The full effect of this is that we enter into a life where the slate is wiped clean, sin and its effects go into remission-fade in power, and lifeflow from God in a spiritual life is restored. If Christ did not overcome death and rise from the dead, then none of this can become ours. The New Testament compares it to the life of a seed. One seed, unburied, with only its husk enclosing life cannot give the harvest of many seeds. It has to take on the new form of the plant to produce more seed.

Jesus is described as "glorified", He has regained all the powers of the Sonship that He had to lay aside to be on our same plane, as our example and as fully identified with us. He has been given other prerogatives as well, He has life within himself, he has a name which is given to enforce His will in the earth in order to diminish that which evil(spiritual principalities and powers) usurped. And more that I am sure I am not covering.

With this I have done the best within my present capabilities to answer the question within Christianity, why his death was necessary and how it works that it pays for my sin. This presents the answer as I can understand it, with the full admission that questions are left unanswered for many. That is the diversion at decision making time. This can only look at the Christian view of what makes the world awry and what is given to deal with that. It is not even complete within that. It is only what I presently work with, in an encapsulated form,and doesn't even go into the subjects of heaven,hell and other general subjects.

DISCLAIMER: This is my understanding within my faith. I offer it for consideration by way of an answer.