Why did Jesus have to pay for our sins if God could simply forgive them?
Read Dave’s answer
Answer 1
Because one of the attributes of God is perfect Justice. Mercy cannot rob Justice. God will never break the laws of Justice that He Himself established. He gave each human being a keen sense of Justice innate in our consciousness, and we would instinctively know if God was being unjust by “snapping his fingers” and absolving the sins of Hitler and Gandhi simultaneously without repentance.
Therefore, as Paul wrote, “the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Since the inescapable consequence of sin is the death (spiritual and physical) of the sinner, all of us will die.
As the Son of God and the son of Mary, Jesus was half divine and half human. He therefore had the power to die because of his human half, even though he honored his divine half and overcame His human half, and never sinned. So he “gave up the ghost” (gave up His Spirit) on the cruel cross. But He also had power over death, through the resurrection or restoration of his Spirit to His body, because of His Divinity. By so doing, through means we don’t fully understand, He overcame death and guaranteed that every human being who ever lived will be resurrected. As the Bible says, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
Jesus also conquered sin. In the Garden of Gethsemane the evening before the crucifixion, Jesus took upon himself the sins and injustices of all mankind. He literally felt and experienced the guilt and sorrows and pains and sufferings of every single person who ever lived, is living, or ever will live. As the only sinless person who ever lived, and as The Son of God, He was the only person who could have possibly accomplished such an atonement. Because he paid the price for the sins and injustices of the world, He made it possible for each one of us, through the process of Faith, Repentance, and acceptance of symbolic ordinances such as Baptism by water and spirit, to overcome our sins through the grace of God and the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and become a new creature in Christ and inherit the kingdom of God and the veritable mansion and Eternal Life that He has prepared for us.
God’s Plan of Salvation is a beautiful thing, and perfectly consistent with both the Justice and Grace of a loving Father in Heaven, who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have Everlasting Life through the Atonement He wrought.