WARNING: What I will be writing here is mostly speculative, not doctrinal. While what I have to say is based, I believe, on what the Bible has to say on the subject of salvation, it is merely a model for the salvation process that has helped me understand Yahveh and his idea for my life a bit more. The facts are that Jesus has died for our sins and that belief in him and acceptance of that forgiveness is the only way to be saved. How that works is more of a guess than a fact, so take the rest of this post with that large grain of salt in mind.
For the vast majority of my life, I have been taught that the reason Jesus had to die for us was that somebody had to die for God's wrath to be appeased and for us to be forgiven and only Jesus could do it. It was like that because we have sinned, we are sentenced to death. But Jesus took our place on the cross and so now we are off the hook.
But these concepts never really made a lot of sense to me. I mean, if a governor pardons a man on death row, it is not like he sends someone to take the man's place. Or if someone is given parole or sentenced reduced so that they are set free long before they have completed their sentence, no one sits in their cell for them. And if someone were convicted of a crime, we would not let someone serve their sentence in their stead. Such notions are so ridiculous as to be laughable. It defeats the whole point of justice and order, which by the way are two of the central tenets to who Yahveh is. If someone is given grace, we let them go with no question; the guilty are punished, not the innocent. Why can we not go to God and say that we are sorry and we will try to do better next time and then move on? What is up with this someone having to die thing? It makes no sense.
If Lucifer and his cohorts repented after having fallen, would someone have needed to die for them? In her monumental work Patriarchs and Prophets, Ellen White strongly suggest that no, that would not have been the case. Instead, had the angels repented, they would have been immediately restored to a relationship with Yahveh (pg. 40). So what makes our situation different? Why did Jesus have to die for us?
What if God is not the one who demanded someone to die for us? What if it was rather Satan? I know that sounds a little crazy at first, but bear with me as I explain.
Let us go back to before the very beginning, before the concept of sin had entered anyone's mind. All anyone ever knew was Yahveh's way of doing things. Then Lucifer rebelled and became Satan and sin was introduced to the universe. Suddenly there were two ways of doing things, two ways that are diametrically opposed to each other.
Satan is not, contrary to popular belief, Yahveh's antithesis. Sin is. Sin is everything Yahveh is not. Yahveh is a person: sin is not. Yahveh is creation: sin is destruction. Yahveh is love: sin is hate. Yahveh is existence: sin is non-existence. Yahveh is joy: sin is misery. I think you get the picture. At any rate, sin found personification and a medium in the being of Lucifer, more accurately known now as Satan.
So we have these two systems: Yahveh's way and sin's way. This brings us down to earth where Yahveh creates a paradise for us humans. In the middle of this paradise are two trees which are symbolic of the two ways. One tree is the Tree of Life, which is representative of Yahveh's way. The other is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, what is symbolic of sin's way. Yahveh laid out things pretty straightforward: eat from the Tree of Life is to choose me as your Lord and King; eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to choose sin (through Satan) as your Lord and King. Something very important to note here is that Yahveh gave us the freedom to choose.
Most of us know the story. After an undisclosed period of time, our wonderful parents decided to try out sin's way. There was one slight catch to all this. Remember how we said that sin is Yahveh's antithesis? Well that means that if Yahveh's way is freedom, then sin's way is tyranny. The reason that there were always two trees is that we always had the freedom to choose. But once we swore allegiance to sin, we lost the freedom to choose Yahveh's way. Sin, through Satan, became the Lord of both us and our world.
Since that time, the culture and kingdom of sin (also, but somewhat inaccurately called the kingdom of the world) has dominated this planet. Everything about this world is soaked almost to the core with sin's system. This is the kingdom and culture we are born into. This is the people that we are.
Now because sin and Yahveh are so opposed, the two cannot coexist, at least not for any significant amount of time (you may think 6000 years is significant, but compared to eternity it is not). Neither can be contained: Yahveh in his expanding creation and sin in its expanding destruction. Inevitably, one must destroy the other.
In order for peace, harmony, joy, love, and all the things that make the Kingdom of Heaven what it is, the Kingdom of Sin must be destroyed. This means that all the people in the Kingdom of Sin must be destroyed. That means us. As the allegory Pilgrim's Progress alludes to, this world is the City of Destruction, one that will, sooner or later, live up to its name.
So to sum up our situation, we are members of the Kingdom of Sin. We have no choice in this matter, for sin cannot allow that choice. The Kingdom of Sin, whose territory happens to be this earth, is scheduled for destruction. To put it succinctly: we are screwed.
This is the part of the story where Jesus comes in. Instead of simply destroying us, he offers instead to let himself, Yahveh/God, be destroyed. If he does this, then the Kingdom of Sin must allow us the same choice Adam and Eve had all those millennia ago: the choice to follow Yahveh or to follow sin. It is like we are being held for ransom. This gives sin what it truly wants, the destruction of its enemy and its victory.
So Jesus came and, ironically, died on a tree thereby giving us the second Tree of Life; the Cross. He paid our ransom, satisfying sin's claim and giving us the freedom to choose his path. The one thing that sin did not take into account is that Jesus' creative nature could not allow him to remain destroyed, raising him from the dead to life everlasting, giving those of us who choose him the same.
This means that salvation is more than just having our sins forgiven and getting a sort of "get out of jail free" card. To be saved Paul says in Romans 10 is to "confess with your mouth that 'Jesus is Lord' and to believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead". Jesus is now our Lord, not sin. Salvation is changing our citizenship from the Kingdom of Sin to the Kingdom of Heaven.
From this then comes a change in culture which results in a change of who we are from the inside out. We become different people, better people, people who live out what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about. The Kingdom of Sin is so ingrained in us that this change happens slowly, but it does happen. But we must also want it. Part of being saved is truly desiring a change. This is not salvation by works; this is the works of salvation.
So then the death of Christ was not necessarily to take our place, but to ransom us from the culture of sin, a culture that did not allow the freedom of choice. Thanks to Jesus Christ, we now have that choice. So, who is your Lord?
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