Questions from a Muslim friend

 JM and Julie will attempt to model
fruitful dialogue between Christians
and Muslims

Julie Samia Mair is the Baltimore Muslim Examiner.  She and James-Michael have decided to do a series of Q&A articles in order to help foster honest dialogue and thoughtful engagement between Christians and Muslims.  Below is Julie's question to JM.  Be sure to check her Examiner page for her response, as well as future questions from JM. 

Julie asks:

"If God is omnipotent, why did He he take the human form in Jesus (pbuh) and die on the Cross for human salvation? Is not God able to do all things, including forgiving us for our sins directly? And how does salvation through Jesus (pbuh) interact with individual responsibility and accountabilty for our bad deeds?"

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JM responds:

Julie, thanks for this question.  It is a good one and one that cuts to the core of the differences between Christian and Islamic conceptions of God.  Before answering directly I want to make a couple of quick observations that serve to ground my beliefs and may help you understand where I'm coming from more clearly.

1. Whenever we ask a "why?" question about God, we must always keep in mind that the answer may not be forthcoming or it may have to remain in the hypothetical.  God is ultimately beyond our comprehension (something we both can agree on!), so His motives are not always clearly perceived.  My answer to your question will, therefore, be admittedly non-dogmatic. 

2. Christianity at its core is a religion of historical claims rather than philosophical maxims.  Theology flows out of historical events rather than preceeding them.  Thus, my starting point is the historical interaction between God and His people culminating in the person and works of Jesus.  From those events the Christian seeks to draw theological conclusions; but such conclusions are not the foundation.  Therefore, if a philosophical position which seeks to make sense of the events turns out to be wrong, it does not negate the truth of the events themselves--it just negates the theological conclusion in question.  This is why there can be varying degrees of difference among Christians when it comes to theology and philosophy and yet we can still maintain unity of faith.  (Though admittedly many Christians have not recognized this and been needlessly divisive and schismatic...as have, I'm sure, many Muslims of various traditions of Islam.)

So, to answer your question directly...

Scripture reveals that God chose to enter in to humanity in order to deal with the problem of Sin once and for all.  Both the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament affirm this, as we'll see shortly. 

According to the Bible, Sin is not just doing wrong actions.  Throughout Scripture Sin is personified as almost a living active force in opposition to God that humans have sold themselves under as slaves (see Romans ch.6 for the clearest depection of this concept).  In order for humans to be freed from Sin's grasp, the just requirements of God's holiness needed to be met.  Humanity had sinned, therefore humanity had to pay the penalty for sin. 

But since the penalty for sin is ultimately death and separation from God, this seems to raise a dilemma for God who had created everything good and who loved His creation--especially Humanity created in His image.  He cannot just forgive all the sin and evil in the world; to do so would be unjust.  Imagine a child-molester or serial rapist saying "I'm sorry" and the judge then just letting him go free.  That would not be a just judge!  How much more just, then, is God, the Judge of all the Earth?! 

So God had to punish humanity for its sin.  But this means that God's creatures--all of whom had sinned--would be destroyed by His judgment.  God, being all-merciful (something else you and I can agree on!) does not desire this to happen. In His love He desires to forgive, but in His justice, He cannot leave humanity's sin unpunished.  How can God punish sin in humanity yet still forgive humanity? 

That's the dilemma.  The Hebrew Prophets foresaw the solution and the New Testament records it taking place.  As a human, God would take the penalty for human sin upon Himself. 

Isaiah 49:5-10
And now the LORD says--he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the LORD and my God has been my strength--he says:
"It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth."

This is what the LORD says-- the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel--to him who was despised and abhorred by the nation, to the servant of rulers:
"Kings will see you and stand up, princes will see and bow down, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."

Isaiah 53:1-5 & 8-12
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
...
By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring
and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

2Corinthians 5:14-21
For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.  Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.

And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Thus, through the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, God was somehow, in some way entering into humanity's plight and fighting the battle on our behalf--except where we failed repeatedly, He won decisively!

This brings us to the second part of your question.  What does this mean in terms of us being accountable for our evil deeds?  Though this could well be deserving of a whole other article on the nature of Sanctification and Holiness, I'll try to give a brief answer. 

The Incarnation made salvation available to all who would lay hold of it through faith.  That is, God doesn't force everyone to accept His offer and His Lordship in their lives; rather, He leaves the option for humanity to continue going their own way and remaining enslaved to Sin.  However, for those who do accept His salvation, He indwells through His Holy Spirit and actually gives them the ability to live lives of holiness and obedience to His will.  This is what Christians refer to as "abiding in Christ" or "walking in the Spirit."  Those who claim to follow Jesus, yet do not walk in His ways are deceiving themselves.  Some Christians believe that such people were never truly indwelled by God, other Christians believe that they may have been, but have chosen to reject God and go their own way, thus putting themselves back into slavery under Sin.  Where Christians agree is that those who reject God through their continuing to remain in sin, whose lives don't bear the "fruit of the Spirit", will not inherit the Kingdom of God (1Corinthians 6).  But the good news is that all that is needed for renewed fellowship with God and forgiveness and cleansing from sin is for one to confess and turn away from sin, or to use the language of Scripture, to "repent" (1John 1:9).  The idea that someone can "just believe" in Jesus, while still living a sinful life, and inherit the Kingdom of God is one that is foreign to the Bible...but widely held among nominal Christians unfortunately. 

In his book "Let's Start with Jesus", theologian Dennis Kinlaw puts it this way:

The arm of the Lord, the solution to the problem of our sin, is none other than Jesus himself, the son of Mary and the Son of God.  When God could not find a human person through whom he could solve the human problem, he became one in his Son.  Paul felt the glory of this: "For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!" (Rom. 5:15)...And in that sacrifice of himself, the one untouched by the curvature to self that has doomed us all, took upon himself our guilt and our sin--our curse--and made possible our deliverance from the sin that brought his death.

The only possibility for human salvation was for God's holy-love to enter into a human person, to incarnate itself in one of us.  Therefore, the eternal Son, in whose likeness we were made, became one of us in Mary's boy.  The triune nature of the being of God and the personal nature of the creature made it all possible.  Only Christianity among the religions of the world is a religion of atonement; God himself can atone for the sins of his creatures.  Such an incarnation and atonement can occur in no other religion because there is no other religion with a triune God and with the biblical understanding of personhood.  [pp.131-132]

I hope this helps answer your question.  The topic of the Incarnation is one that has occupied thousands of pages over the centuries--and rightly so!  How much more unfathomable a topic is there than the nature of God's being??  Yet for the follower of Jesus, we must take the data that history has presented us with (namely His life, death and Resurrection) and use that as our theological compass.