Why did God make his son die for us?

I've heard that some militant atheists accuse God of being a sadistic monster who forced Christ to go to the cross. A simple reading of Scripture shows this idea as manifestly false.

Jesus had plenty to say regarding his impending crucifixion. For instance, he said he had power to lay down his life and to take it up again, thus showing his confidence in his resurrection. He also declared that, "Greater love has no man but that he should lay down his life for his friends." These two statements alone show that he was willing to take our sins upon himself in order to rescue us from hell.

Furthermore, the scripture declares that Christ's mission to save whosoever believed in him and his atoning work was planned before the universe was created. It wasn't some half-baked plan or, as some think, that everything went sideways on Jesus. The gospels record several incidents where Christ could have been killed. The first one was when Harod had all the children two years or under killed in Bethlehem. The Pharisees and a synagogue congregation tried to murder him as well but he slipped through the crowd for his time was not yet come.

God is portrayed in the Bible as the heavenly Father because he has tried so hard to protect humanity from harm but without turning us into robots. Israel, through whom he established the lineage of Christ, constantly went through periods of apostasy but God didn't utterly snuff them all out. Think about this. Would you or I tolerate the horrendous disrespect and scorn continually heaped  on us as is dished out to God? I doubt it.

Old Testament prophesies also predicted that God's innocent son would take our punishment for sin. Read the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. It's like he saw and recorded the whole trial and crucifixion of Christ. I could dig up more instances but this blog post would become too long.

You Think You're Going to Heaven is my next book and I hope to delve deeply into this and other questions which people invariably ask. I've wondered about these things myself and I want to share the answers I've found.

Can we believe the Bible?

How can such an ancient collection of writings be believed in the twenty-first century? This is a question many liberal Christians ask. Atheists also doubt the truthfulness of Scripture on the assumption that it's merely a collection of Jewish fables and prophetic ramblings.

One proof of the validity of the Bible is historical evidence. Liberal Christian scholars doubted the existence of the Hittites until ruins of their cities were discovered by archeologists. The same was true of Jericho. In fact, archeologists even found the bricks which composed the walls of the city. Just as the Bible said, the bricks formed a ramp all around so the Israelites could go up into it.

Prophecy also has shown how the Bible couldn't have been written by clever men or scribes long after the events took place. Who could have predicted the sack of Tyre by Alexander the Great and how he scraped the ruins of the mainland city into the sea to build a causeway. He was able to raze the island city as a result. This is just one of many accurate predictions from Scripture.

Some scholars claim that the Bible is filled with translation errors. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that, as just one example, the book of Isaiah had been translated almost completely without errors. The New Testament also was basically unchanged from the earliest manuscripts. Some critics cite the final verses of Mark's gospel as proof of forgery but the truth they contain doesn't conflict with the other gospels and epistles.

I could go on at length about this but I'll save it for my next book. You Think You're Going to Heaven? will, I hope, provide plenty of evidence for the integrity of Scripture as the final court of arbitration. God willing, I expect to finish the book and have it published in a few years.