Why is there a need for a sacrifice by Jesus?

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To believe in God, and to submit your will to His are two separate and distinct things. "You believe in one God? You do well: the devils also believe and tremble" (James 2:19). But devils are mere hearers of the truth, and not doers (James 1:22), which means they willingly reject doing God's will, which is perfect. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof of God, they can and do sin anyway. Since God's will is that all men are saved, and He loves everyone better than anyone else, including themselves—since His will is exclusively perfect—to choose other than God's will is to choose suffering, or, a falling short of happiness, which is suffering. The extreme is choosing directly to defy God and know the consequences (Hell), which leads to Hell without exception. An example is knowing adultery is a grave sin, and proceedings to commit adultery. You know God sends those to hell who do it, and yet you look God in the face and do it, and have no excuse for doing so except that you choose to freely—which means God, who gave you free will, must send you to Hell—there are no unwilling citizens of heaven, only those who do the will of the Father: "Not every one who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but he that does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21).

Therefore, since once a punishment is merited, it must be given in order for justice to be said to exist, all mortal sins merit hell by their very nature, as described above; fallen mankind is also negatively not owed heaven as a reward or blessing (whereas they were originally blessed or gifted with it), so infants and those who have not sinned but leave this world and enter the next without the gift of regeneration—the gift, not the payment—do not receive the beatific vision, or, heaven, but at best a natural happiness besides seeing God face to face.

So God did not owe mankind a remedy for this, inasmuch as it is simple justice, which He by nature must uphold in order for Himself to be righteous or just. In this sense, the Incarnation, and the Redemption in Christ were not necessary.

However, if we speak of it as necessary, we mean that it was necessary for us to escape the wrath of God, because without a redemption, we would have to pay an eternal debt which can never be paid: we can commit an infinite sin, but are not capable of infinitely pleasing acts to repair the injustice, unlike God the Son, who can render to God something more powerful than sin and the justice He is owed.

Mercy with God cannot be the same as with man. For God to have mercy, He cannot obscure or take away justice, which is good—Him being Good itself. He must do what justice does, that is, its equivalent. Jesus must, if mankind is to be saved from their punishment in hell, offer a satisfaction worthy of such a punishment, which His suffering abundantly fulfills and does. A satisfaction we could not offer, even given all eternity in hell. Jesus can do this with His offering, and He did. This is the only reason the human race didn't end with a damned Adam and Eve.

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Christ could have made superabundant satisfaction for our sin with one drop of His Precious Blood, as St. Bernard said, so His passion was not necessary in the sense of "anything which of its nature cannot be otherwise" (Summa Theologica III q. 46 a. 1 "Whether it was necessary for Christ to suffer for the deliverance of the human race?" co.).

Yet, the Passion was necessary in another sense, for these achieving these purposes (ibid.):

  1. on our part, who have been delivered by His Passion, according to John (3:14): "The Son of man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting."

  2. on Christ's part, who merited the glory of being exalted, through the lowliness of His Passion: and to this must be referred Lk. 24:26: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?"

  3. on God's part, whose determination regarding the Passion of Christ, foretold in the Scriptures and prefigured in the observances of the Old Testament, had to be fulfilled. And this is what St. Luke says (22:22): "The Son of man indeed goeth, according to that which is determined"; and (Lk. 24:44,46): "These are the words which I spoke to you while I was yet with you, that all things must needs be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning Me: for it is thus written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead."

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