Jesus Christ: Why Did Jesus Have to Die?
Jesus had an amazingly productive ministry, teaching and healing thousands. He attracted large crowds. He could have healed thousands more by traveling to the Jews and Gentiles who lived in other areas.
But Jesus allowed this work to come to a sudden end. He could have avoided arrest, but he chose to die instead of making his ministry get bigger. Although his teachings were important, he had come not just to teach, but also to die.
Death was an important part of Jesus’ ministry. This is the way Christians remember him, through the cross as a symbol of Christianity and through the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. Our Savior died.
The Old Testament tells us that God appeared on earth several times. If Jesus wanted only to heal and teach, he could have simply appeared. But he did more: he became a human. Why? One reason is so that he could die.
To understand Jesus, we need to understand his death. His death is part of the gospel message and something all Christians should know about.
Born to die
Jesus said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). He came to give his life, and his death would rescue others. Jesus told his disciples that he would suffer and die, but they did not seem to believe it.
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” (Matthew 16:21-22)
Jesus rebuked Peter for not accepting this teaching. Jesus knew that he must die, because the Scriptures said so. “How then is it written about the Son of Man, that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt?” (Mark 9:12; 9:31; 10:33-34).
“Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.… “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” (Luke 24:26-27, 46)
It all happened according to God’s plan: Herod and Pilate did only what God had already decided would happen (Acts 4:28). In the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus knew that he would soon be crucified, Jesus asked his Father if there might be some other way, but there was none (Luke 22:42). His death was necessary for our salvation.
The suffering servant
Jesus said it was written in the Old Testament. Jesus quoted Isaiah 53:12 when he said: “This scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled’” (Luke 22:37). Although Jesus never sinned, “he was counted among the lawless.” Notice what else is written in Isaiah 53:
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed…. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [He was] stricken for the transgression of my people….
He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with affliction.… You make his life an offering for sin…. because he poured out himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors. (verses 4-12)
Isaiah describes someone who suffers not for his own sins, but for the sins of others. Although he would be “cut off from the land of the living” (verse 8), that would not be the end of the story. “He shall see his offspring and shall prolong his days…. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous” (verses 10-11).
This is what Jesus did. He gave up his life for his sheep (John 10:15). In his death, he carried our sins and suffered for what we had done wrong; he was punished so that we might be made complete. Through his suffering and death, our spiritual illness is healed; we are made righteous, acceptable to God.
Dying an accursed death
“Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse,” says Deuteronomy 21:23. Jews considered any crucified person to be condemned by God. As Isaiah wrote, people would consider him “struck down by God.”
Jesus’ crucifixion shattered the disciples’ hopes. They said, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21).
Their hopes were dramatically restored when Jesus appeared to them after his resurrection, and at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit filled them with new conviction to tell everyone about salvation in Jesus Christ. They had unshakable faith in the most unusual hero: a crucified Messiah.
Peter told the religious leaders, “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30). By using the word tree, Peter was reminding the leaders about the curse associated with crucifixion. But the shame was not on Jesus —it was on the people who crucified him. God blessed Jesus because Jesus did not deserve to die. God had reversed the shame.
Paul referred to the same curse in Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’” Jesus suffered the curse that we deserved so we could escape the curse of the law, which is death.
Jesus was put in the place of someone he was not (a sinner), so that we could be put into a place we did not deserve (salvation). “For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin,[1] so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
He carried our sins (figuratively speaking) so that we might be declared righteous through him. Because he suffered what we deserved, he redeemed us (rescued us) from the curse of the law. “Upon him was the punishment that made us whole” (Isaiah 53:5). Because he suffered death, we can be made complete, restored to a good relationship with God.
Message of the cross
The disciples never forgot the shameful way that Jesus died. Sometimes that was the focus of their message: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Paul called the gospel “the message about the cross” (verse 18). Paul reminded the Galatians that “Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified!” (Galatians 3:1).
Why is the cross good news? Because that’s how Jesus rescued us from death and gives us eternal life in his kingdom. Paul focused on the cross because it is the key to Jesus being good news for us. We will not be raised into glory unless in Christ we are made “the righteousness of God.” Only then do we join Jesus in his glory. The crucifixion is part of the process by which we are transformed from the old creation to the new.
Paul says that “Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8; 2 Corinthians 5:14; 1 Thessalonians 5:10); he also says that he “died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3; Galatians 1:4). He “bore our sins in his body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24; 3:18).
Paul also says that we died with Christ (Romans 6:3-8). By being united with him in faith, his death counts as ours. It is as if we were on the cross, receiving what our sins deserved. But Jesus did it for us – and because he did it, we can be forgiven and counted as righteous.
He takes our sin and death; he gives us righteousness and life. The prince became poor, so that we poor people might share in the wealth of his kingdom.
Jesus used the word ransom to describe our rescue, but the ransom wasn’t paid to anyone — this is a figure of speech to indicate that it cost Jesus a great amount to set us free. In the same way, Paul talks about Jesus redeeming us, buying our freedom, but he didn’t pay anyone. When God redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt, he didn’t pay anyone (Exodus 6:6).
In the death of Jesus, our sins are set aside. But this does not mean that Jesus “paid off” an angry God. The Father is just as merciful as Jesus is, and Jesus is just as angry about sin as the Father is. He is angry at sin because sin hurts the people he loves. Jesus is the Judge who condemns (Matthew 25:31-46), as well as one who loves sinners so much that he dies for them.
When God forgives us, he does not pretend our sins never existed. Sins have serious consequences—consequences we can see in the cross of Christ. Humanity’s tendency to sin cost Jesus pain, shame and death.
The gospel reveals that God acts righteously in forgiving us (Romans 1:17); his mercy is part of his righteous character. He does not ignore our sins, but takes care of them in Jesus Christ. Figuratively speaking, God presented Jesus as a sacrifice for our forgiveness. Jesus volunteered to suffer the penalty of our sins on our behalf. The cross shows us God’s love as well as his justice (Romans 5:8).
As Isaiah says, we are made whole because of what Christ did. In another figure of speech, Paul says that we were once far off from God, but through Christ we have been brought near (Ephesians 2:13). We have been given a good relationship with God through the cross (verse 16). Our relationship with God depends on Jesus Christ, including his death.
Christianity is not a list of things to do—it is accepting that Christ has done everything we need to be right with God—and this was done on the cross. “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10).
God reconciled the universe through Christ, “making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). He did this before we believed it, before we were even born. Since we are reconciled through him, all our sins are forgiven (verse 22). Reconciliation, redemption, ransom, forgiveness and justification all result in the same thing: eternal life and peace with God.
Victory!
Paul uses an interesting image of salvation when he writes that Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities” by making “a public example of them, triumphing over them in it [the cross]” (Colossians 2:15). He uses the word for a military parade: the winning general brings captured enemy soldiers in a victory parade at home. They are disarmed, humiliated, and put on display.
What looked like a shameful death for Jesus was actually a great victory, because through the cross, Jesus conquered our spiritual enemies, including Satan, sin and death. They have no authority over us, because their claim on us has been fully satisfied in the death of Jesus, the innocent victim. Our enemies cannot demand any more; they have already been “paid.” They cannot threaten us.
“Through death,” Jesus was able to “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). “The Son of God was revealed for this purpose: to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). It was done on the cross.
Endnote
[1] This is a figure of speech. If Jesus actually became sin, he would not deserve to be brought back to life. But he was standing in the place of sin, he was representing sin. Some translations say that he became a sin offering, because the Greek word could be used for both sin and its offering.
Author: Michael Morrison, edited 2026
