"Why did Jesus have to die and why is it so meaningful?"

(Click the title to see the original Facebook thread this is from. There may be contextual issues of understanding and references that do not make sense otherwise. I will attempt a long version at some point so that such points become moot, but for now, enjoy!)

As promised, I'm going to attempt to answer this for you. It's something I've written on several times, each time adding a bit more as I understood more, so I should be able to give you a fair amount. My only concern is length. I could write, if not a whole book, then a decent sized chapter in a book, on this very question. My purpose here will be to give you a basic overview in Christian philosophical and theological understanding of these issues, so that you can lay the groundwork for understanding the details, should you choose to go into them further.

As Pamela has already begun with the notion that God meant for man to be happy, I will begin there as well, for continuity's sake, if nothing else.

And to do that, I'll have to address some differences between what we mean when we say, "happy" as opposed to what is commonly understood by happiness. Christians understand happiness to be the teleological end of Man, in that Man's nature and purpose is happiness, and that happiness is achieved through communion with God, who made Man, in a loving relationship. Happiness to Christian theology is NOT an emotion, nor is it related to pleasure and suffering, the two emotions most commonly related to it.

Which is why Bob would object that if we're meant to be happy, why is there suffering, while Pamela would respond that plenty of suffering people have been happy. Both are responding with equally valid points given their world views. The issue is that they see the world so differently that they will talk right past each other.

Bob's objection, however, is the one that most concerns us, because it's the most relevant to Christ's sacrifice, and thus to YOUR questions. Why is there so much suffering on Earth if we were meant to be happy, and presumably that pleasure would be a part of that (which is hardly an unsafe assumption, all things considered)?

The Christian response is that Adam and Eve, who are not only the first two humans, but also representatives of all of humanity (even in the ancient Hebrew, the word Adam means simultaneously "dust" and "Mankind," while Eve means, "Mother of Nations"). The characters in the second Creation myth are to be understood not only as two actual people (though all the events may not have happened literally, as they are myths) but even more importantly as the entirety of humanity. And the point of the story, more than anything else, is that humanity fell.

The Christian belief is that humans were created completely and totally good, and that there was no sin in the created world. The Christian belief is STILL that humans and all created things are baseline good, something we will return to shortly. The Fall, without getting into too much detail, was the result of humans choosing through their own wills to go against God's will, and this is often described to have occurred through pride and a desire to be independent, as well as temptation from the Devil, ha-satannah. Prior to the Fall, the Earth was perfect. No suffering, no spiritual death (damnation), not even physical death. No natural disasters, no calamities, etc.

The Fall is considered an event which is atemporal. In other words, while it occurred within the flow of time, its consequences were felt both before it and after it, in such a way as to distort reality itself. Pam offered a computer program analogy, and it really is the best possible one currently for explaining it.

Imagine that a brilliant computer programmer creates a program which is a virtual Eden, and places within it actors who have the ability to affect their program, a la the One in the Matrix, for instance. This is Creation 1.0. The actors within the program who have the ability to alter the program then do something drastically against the original programming of the system.

If the original programming of the system was designed so that these actors and the original programmer could interact in a meaningful way through their mutual assent, then this action on the part of the actors in the program would be something contrary to that programming, such that it alters the entire program. With the alteration of the program, Creation version 2.0, everything changes, and nothing changes, from the perspective of the entities within the program. To their best ability to perceive, the world never changes. When a computer program is changed, like Facebook, for example, the old materials that accumulated before the update don't remain in the old format, they take on the new format. Someone joining Facebook for the first time would never know there was an old format that was over written. Someone using Facebook through the updates would notice the changes, but never be able to go back to the original, and never be able to show others what it was like, because despite the update happening at a finite moment in time, the effects apply to the memory cache and to future usage.

It's the same for us. The Fall "updated" our reality, such that Adam and Eve went from being sinless and living in paradise to living in a world with suffering and disasters, death and disease and corruption of every good thing. And everyone coming after them, coming after the "update" has always and only known the updated version, never the original. And as they look back on history, all they'll ever see is the effects of the update on the original materials, never the original materials as they were supposed to be and once were.

Now, the first question I would ask here is why? Why did the Fall do this, and what was the most important ramification?

So we have Creation 1.0, wherein no one ever dies, everything is perfect, etc. Remember how I said Christian believe humans and everything else is baseline good? That is because Christianity believes that things, ie entities which participate in the act of existence, are good because the act of existing is good. Anything that exists = good. This is largely because all goodness requires that a thing exist in order to apply.

The reason we believe God is Good, is because we conclude that God is the act of existence itself, (the arguments for this I won't go into, as I'm trying to be as brief as I can). Because God is the act of existence itself, we believe that every thing that exists, exists because God wills for it to exist, and that only God could end that existence.

This means that Goodness, for Christianity, entails every thing in the world, and the world itself. Evil, on the other hand, is the negation of goodness. Which means that THINGS are always good, but actions and choices can be good or evil. I can choose to deny something good, for example by taking someone's life, a good thing, and destroying it. That's evil, the act itself. And I am injured by it, but I remain existent and thus baseline good. I can also choose to embrace something good, like having a child, and nurture a new existence, which is good. The act is good, and it's good for me.

Now humans exist, but we're not quite that simple. Christians believe that entities can exist but not be physical, like God and angels and demons. These are entities which exist, yet are not physical. They have no physical life, but still exist. Humans, however, have both an existence, and a physical life.

So we exist in Creation 1.0, and we have physical bodies. Our existence, as I've noted, is solely dependent on God's will. But our lives, as they are not our actual existence, but the, shall we say, manifestation of our existence here, are within our own power. In Creation 1.0, our lives are neither ending nor corrupted by any sickness or problems. We have perfect physical bodies to go with our untainted spirits, and that commingling of body and spirit is what we call the soul, which is the true human nature, spirit and body together.

Back to Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve disobey God. Remember for a moment the elements of the myth: They eat of a tree which has a particular kind of knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, as its fruit, and which they are told they will die if they eat of it. This is a myth, it's not necessary to believe that there was an actual tree or a talking serpent, etc., but the lessons and truths are still intact, even if we don't believe the alleged facts. The truth is that humanity at the very edge of its collective distant memory, passed on a story, even then very old, about how things were once better, and then changed, and that that fall involved disobedience against God, which gave to us a knowledge of good and evil which we didn't have before, and brought the consequence of evil, death, into the world.

What is this knowledge of good and evil? Good question! It's not the ability to morally evaluate something, as some interpret the story, because Adam and Eve in their dialog with the snake clearly seem to know that it isn't right to eat the apple, even if they don't understand why God has commanded it. That knowledge is more likely the experiential knowledge of evil, and the realization of the loss of good that that knowledge would entail necessarily through the eating of the apple they weren't supposed to eat. In other words, it was knowledge of evil because it was the only evil thing they could choose to do, and again, it probably wasn't literally the eating of an apple. The true rebellion was in disobedience, it was in the desire to be "like God," that the snake awoke in humanity, the act itself could have been any number of things.

Why is death the consequence? Death is the consequence because life is the greatest good of humanity which is directly within humanity's power to alter. In other words, the entities in Creation 1.0 have the ability to alter the entire code of the software, they can change anything in the program itself, but they can't change the hardware, and they can't delete the program. So they can destroy their own existence within the program, but only the Programmer can destroy the computer itself and delete the program itself. Which means that humans can deny the second greatest good, life, but that they can never assault their own existence, because their existence is willed for constantly by God, and for Him to remove that willing would be for God to do evil, which He logically cannot do.

Thus God always wills for us to exist, and when we rewrote the program such that all the good things in the world were corrupted, we altered everything that existed save our own basic existence. Life itself ended in death, and everything in the world changed to reflect it, with natural disasters and tragedies, disease, famine, war, etc. Death, like all evils, is not a thing in and of itself, but the negation of a good, life. We have life, a good, and then it ends, because we corrupted the original programming.

Thus we have why the Fall did this, and what it's mosts important ramification was. The Fall did it because disobedience to God, who is the source of Good, thus entailed that all good things in our world came under assault and corruption, and the most important ramification of this is our own loss of immortality.

What we often call this is the fall from Grace, meaning that prior to the Fall, we had a nature which was focused upon Love, selflessly, with God and each other, and afterwards we not only became more selfish with each other, we became selfish towards God, and turned away from Him, so losing His Grace, which helps guide us towards goodness.

That, btw Bob, is why all humans are accountable for Original Sin. It doesn't mean we are all GUILTY of that sin, it means that that sin affected the relationship of the entirety of humanity with God. We became deprived of the Grace we need to have our end in God, and thus happiness in the Christian world view. While we're not individually guilty for that first sin, we are guilty of our own sins, and we've all been a part of that sundered relationship.

Which brings us to Christ. Why do we NEED Christ, and what was so momentous about what He did?

We need Christ to bridge the gap that developed between God and Man, so that Man could return to God and no longer be deprived of God's Grace. This bridging would allow Mankind to once again have its telos fulfilled, we could commune with God in Love, and have that happiness.

Now, Pamela has already touched somewhat on this subject, in that there is an apparent contradiction between mercy and justice.

Humans are still good, remember. We exist, and so are good. But we're deprived of Grace and we do evil things, making our relationship with God antagonistic. And our actions are evil, which means that as a Just entity, God cannot allow them to go without redress. But because we are still good, God still loves us, and desires for us to have our end be with Him. So Justice demands that evil be redressed and addressed, but Mercy pleas that humanity be brought back to God.

As Pamela said, the solution to this is that God Himself must address and redress the grievances of evil in the relationship, since humanity is simply incapable of restoring the relationship and curing itself. And this isn't a "snap the divine fingers, all is forgiven, humans can come home" sort of deal. Justice DEMANDS that the consequence of sin, ie Death, be met, it's the logically necessary effect of the actions we committed. Now, God, being Loving, cannot ask a member of His Creation to die for this, even if one of us were capable in our nature of taking on the consequences of the entirety of our species.

Which leaves God as the one who has to do it. And as Pamela noted, Justice also demands that a HUMAN meet the consequences, as it was humans who entailed them. So God had to become a human to do it.

That is where Christ enters the picture, the God-Man, the being who is 100% God and 100% Man, and so can bridge the gap between humanity and the Divine.

Skipping then a huge amount of material, we will fast forward to the end of Christ's life, and the momentous events of the Passion.

What happens? The God-Man, according to both ancient prophecies of the Hebrew people whom God prepared exactly for the purpose of His eventual coming, and according to His own words and statements, was executed for crimes He didn't commit, in an expression of many of the worst sins we're capable of. He was murdered, plain and simple, the sin in which the consequences of Death are most obviously and keenly realized, and murdered in an exquisitely brutal fashion.

And so Christ, the God-Man, did what He came to Earth in the first place to do, He came to die at the murderous hands of His own Creation. He had to die, He had to die at human hands, and He had to die unjustly, and He used that to His advantage to deliver His final lesson on pain, that we must embrace it to meet God, not flee from it, and thus find our happiness with God. For God Himself suffered horribly, and that is where we will first encounter Him. And that, Bob, brings you full circle. Why is there less happiness and how can Pamela speak of Joy in suffering? Because humans chose for evil and so brought about the corruption of pleasure and the proliferation of suffering, and God Himself embraced suffering so that we might come back to Him.

Christ dies upon the Cross, and His last words are words of forgiveness. And all of Creation 2.0 shudders, the sky goes black, the earth quakes, etc., for the program has literally killed the Programmer. God-Man died and the whole of humanity's sins were laid upon His shoulders in those hours of evil, so that He took upon Himself the punishment of every person who would turn away from Evil and come back to God throughout all of human history, both before and after. For the Passion and the subsequent Resurrection are also events that are timeless. Like the Fall, they rewrote Creation, beginning at the Passion and ending at the Resurrection.

And that's where we answer the final branch of the question. Why is it so meaningful? Not only is it meaningful because Christ takes our sin upon Himself and its consequences, thus allowing us to be re-united with God, but because of what happens AFTER the Death of the God-Man. Remember, Death was the consequence of Human sin, Human rejection of God. Death came into the world through human hands. But the God-Man who died also Rose. Death itself, which had conquered all life and corrupted all physical existence, was conquered in turn by the God-Man, and Creation 2.0 became Creation 3.0, the Earth entered into a new program. And Creation 3.0 existence such that Humanity's will was respect, it's choices remained, and the world yet knew the consequences of human sins, yet humanity could, if it willed to join with God, return to Him and His Good, and know the happiness it was meant for, which would end, ultimately, in the conquest of Death for all those who joined the God-Man, and in the perfection of all that was once perfect and then Fell, the New Earth that will occur after the Last Judgment.

It is meaningful because not only do we now have hope of coming to know God as we never had before (at least from our perspective) but because we also have the hope of a world and an existence as we were meant to have it all along. For humanity was always meant to be both body and spirit, united as I said in the human soul. It is our greatest hope to be united with God and have our spirits with Him united again with the perfected Bodies that were once ours.

And that is the short version, haha.

PS: Another twist in the Justice/Mercy issue is humans doing penance, but we can address that later.