Pastor John, many people understand that Jesus died, but my question is twofold initially.

Why did he have to die?

And why does my sin necessitate death?

Well, the Bible is clear that the wages of sin is death, the soul that sinned it shall die.

And at the very beginning when God created everything, he basically said, if you eat of the

true of the knowledge, a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you're going to die.

So God ordained that sin would be punished by death.

There's no other way to explain that. I mean, that was God's design, that those who sin

will die. And also that every sin will be punished because God is absolutely holy. Every sin has to be punished.

Well, when Adam led the human race and Eve led the human race into sin and everybody was born a

sinner, how do they escape that? Then are they all just going to die both physically and

eternally separated from God forever in hell? No, God designed that he would redeem them by providing a substitute.

That's why even in the Old Testament, an animal was brought and sacrificed on the altar

through all the history of Judaism.

Every single day, in the morning and evening, every day for centuries, millennia, they were killing animals and killing animals and killing animals.

That was a demonstration that sin produces death, bloodshed.

But none of those animals could take away sin.

None of them.

They were pictures of what men deserved to cause them

to cry out to God and ask for forgiveness. One sacrifice was sufficient and one alone. And that's when

God put all the sins of all the people who would ever believe on his son on the cross. And he paid for

them in full.

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