Did God sacrifice Jesus?

Suppressed Perspectives

One of the central ideas in Christianity is that God sacrificed his only son. Hebrews 10 verses 12 to 14 reads:

But after Christ offered one sacrifice for sins, forever, he sat down at the right side of God. 13 And now Christ waits there for his enemies to be put under his power. 14 With one sacrifice he made perfect forever those who are being made holy

And John 3 verse 16 reads:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

In other words, God sacrificed Jesus, but they both sat together shortly after. God gave his son to the world, but he is with him now, which contradicts the idea of a sacrifice. If you were to make a sacrifice, you “endure a loss” for a worthy goal. For example, we could say that our parents sacrificed their energy to bring us up. Once lost, that which is sacrificed is gone for good. In the biblical case, God did not lose Jesus, for they sat together after just three days, not even a week. When Abraham hoped to sacrifice his son, he was to lose him forever. In place of Isaac, Abraham lost the ram that appeared out of nowhere forever. Losing something forever is the keyword when defining a sacrifice. Unlike Abraham, God did not lose his son or anything in place of Jesus.

The argument that Jesus died for three days to save the world is also a central idea in Christianity. If you were to think about it just slightly, you would realize that dying on a Friday while knowing that you would rise on Monday is not a big thing. People last in a coma for years, with a well-documented case of someone who woke up after 27 years. For a person who lost 27 years of their life, dying and waking up after three days sounds like a blink of an eye. Again, in the case of Jesus, he died knowing that the whole world would worship him, and thus, the reward was motivating enough. As if dying with the assurance of resurrection after three days is not unconvincing enough, he does so knowing that he would be worshipped afterward.

Christians ask a rhetorical question about who else could have sacrificed themselves for the world. Their answer is usually “no one,” but if you were to think of people who sacrificed their lives entirely to save their loved ones, you would tell that, yes, a lot of people would sacrifice to save the world. It is what firefighters do every now and then, and so do soldiers when fighting on the front line. To some, the payment or the reward they get back is not even worth it.

Assuming that Jesus was indeed a sacrifice, what was he saving people from? Sin. You believe that Jesus saved you from sin, yet you still sin. When a firefighter saves you from a burning house, you get out of the fire while they endure burns or even die. On the other hand, Jesus’s sacrifice was inconsequential as it did not resolve the problem. If God wanted to prevent further sinning, there were simpler ways, such as reconciling with Satan the so called originator of sin.