Recently, one of our online listeners asked if the crucifixion of Christ was necessary for human salvation. They heard a presenter say that the death of Christ was not necessary for salvation, only His resurrection is important. The presenter also suggested that Jesus’ death on the cross was only to reveal the ends of demonic and human systems of power and authority, not to provide something needed for salvation. His position is that the resurrection demonstrated power over demonic authority, which is what actually provides salvation.

It is likely that the individual who posits this position is seeking to move away from the flawed penal/legal theology, which is based on the lie that God’s law functions like human law, in which “justice” is the infliction of punishments to pay the legal crime debt to the Sovereign. This distortion about God’s law has led to flawed atonement models in which God is presented as the source of death inflicted upon His creation as punishment, and Jesus is then presented as the solution who takes God’s inflicted punishment upon Himself and then returns to heaven to present His blood/sacrifice to the Father in order to pay the Father off so that the Father will have His wrath/anger propitiated and not be required by law to kill us.

So I applaud the effort to move away from the distorted and erroneous penal/legal system, which undermines trust in God. However, the proposed solution fails to understand the true nature of sin, how reality works, and the necessity of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice for humanity to be saved from sin.

Let me be clear: Humanity could not be saved from sin without the sinless life, voluntary, substitutionary death of Christ—it was a requirement, not of some penal/legal system, but of how life and reality are constructed by God to work. It was a requirement of God’s design law, the laws of life, just like breathing is a requirement of life.

My view is that life requires perfect harmony with God in all domains of our being—spirit, soul, and body. When Adam and Eve broke trust with God, they corrupted their spirit, the breath of life breathed into Adam at His creation, with fear and selfishness. Prior to believing Satan’s lies, they were animated and motivated by a sinless spirit of love and trust in God. When they believed the lies, they corrupted their animating spirit with fear and selfishness, which caused them to run and hide from God, blame others, and try to cover up what they had done.

This state of being is incompatible with life, out of harmony with God, and naturally results in death unless healed, fixed, corrected, by our Creator. Every human since Adam and Eve sinned is born in sin, conceived in iniquity (Psalm 51:5), born with the same shared spirit, breath of life, passed down through the generations. We are all born terminal—with a terminal condition we did not choose. Thus, salvation requires removing the cause of death from humanity, which is the corrupt spirit of fear and selfishness, and replacing it with a sinless spirit love, and trust, built upon truth (For a full exploration of this, please see our magazine Salvation and You: What It Really Means to Be Saved.)

While God could have formed a new human body out of dirt and breathed into it a new, sinless breath of life to make a sinless human, that human would not be related to the humanity He’d already created in Eden and, therefore, could not resolve the sin problem Adam brought upon us.

The only way to save the same humanity, the same species created in Eden, was for Christ to partake of that very same life, which He did through Mary (Romans 1:3), but to also infuse a new sinless breath of life, spirit, which He did through the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:7), and then live sinlessly as a human being to purge, remove, eliminate, the cause of death, the spirit of fear and selfishness, and then rise again in a purified humanity.

Thus, any attempt to remove the death of Christ as a requirement for salvation is misguided. And the Bible provides the evidence that the death of Christ was a requirement for our salvation in multiple ways:

• The long history of the sacrificial system in which the sacrificial animal represents Christ and is necessary for the removal of sin. Prior to the Levitical law and priesthood, God had already instructed Adam, Abel, and the patriarchs to participate in this ritual. There is nothing in this ceremonial teaching that suggests it’s designed to reveal the abuse of human authority and power. But it does teach that without the death of the Lamb of God, the sin of the world could not be removed (John 1:29).
  
  
• Jesus’ teaching: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24, 25 NIV84). The seed must die in order for new life to come forth—and Jesus connects this to salvation: We must also die to the life inherited from Adam, the spirit of fear and selfishness, and be reborn with the spirit of love and trust, the life of Christ. In Jesus, these two spirits warred, and He lived sinlessly, died to the life corrupted by Adam, and arose in a humanity animated only by the sinless life of love and trust. Thus, He becomes the source of salvation for all who obey Him (Hebrews 5:9).
  
  
• This is further confirmed by what happened in Gethsemane. Christ became sin though He knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), and He fell down, dying, and would have died there if an angel hadn’t come from heaven and strengthened His humanity to endure a little more (Luke 22:43).
  • In Gethsemane, Christ would have achieved the purging of the spirit of fear and selfishness when He chose to surrender all to His Father. His death would have occurred without the crucifixion had the angel not strengthened him.
  • This highlights that salvation required Christ’s incarnation, sinless life, voluntary sacrificial and substitutionary death, and resurrection—not as a legal payment, but as the only means, in reality, to eliminate the cause of death from humanity and restore the cause of life.
  • This answers another question many ask: What if Christ had not died on the cross, or what if the Jews had accepted Him as Savior and hadn’t rejected Him, would He still have had to die on the cross? He would have died in Gethsemane, revealing and demonstrating that sin cuts one off from God and causes death, and that God does not lay a hand on the sinner. Jesus would have surrendered perfectly and eliminated the spirit of fear and selfishness, and He would have revealed the truth about the cause of death and that the Father is not the source of death, and He would have purified humanity and rose again.

Jesus’ death would have happened in Gethsemane had He not been strengthened. Meaning, the crucifixion as a means of His death wasn’t required for Christ to complete His mission to save us, but it was permitted by God for another reason—and that is it exposed Satan as the murderer he is and that embracing imposed laws results in people who claim to worship God, believe in the Bible, keep the Sabbath, eat the right foods, dress the right way, and pay a full tithe but who are God’s enemy. They will use the methods of imposed “law” and force to kill God Himself. Therefore, the position of the presenter suggesting that the cross is a demonstration of demonic and human legal power to kill is correct.

However, it is incorrect to suggest that the death of Christ was not necessary for our salvation.