Why did Christ have to die?

'Why did Christ have to die?'

— John 3: 14

When our Lord spoke of his death, he said, ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.’ Why? Why must he die?

It will not suffice to say, ‘God loves us so greatly that he wants us to live with him for ever in heaven.’ My wife lives with me in my home. I love her so much that I want her to live with me in my home for ever. But I have not died for her. Why did Jesus have to die? The answer to that question is vital. Learn the answer to that question and you will learn the gospel.

The apostle Paul gives us the answer to that question. Being inspired by God the Holy Spirit, Paul wrote this answer: the Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross, so that God ‘might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus’. You see, we are guilty sinners. God is holy, righteous, just and true. And a perfectly holy and just God could never save, justify and accept any sinner until atonement is made for his sin. A holy God must punish sin. Before the sinner can go free, God’s holy, infinite wrath and justice against the guilty sinner must be satisfied. The Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross to satisfy God’s infinite wrath and justice against the sins of his elect, so that God in perfect justice might justify the ungodly. This is the gospel. This is the doctrine of Holy Scripture. The Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate God-man, is that one ‘whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation [a satisfactory sacrifice] through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus’ (Romans 3:25-26). The Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross to make an all-sufficient, satisfactory sacrifice for sin. ‘Now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself’ (Heb. 9:26).