Caller: My question is, Why would God kill Himself, or commit suicide, because of what Adam did? Why can’t God forgive Adam, you know, because He’s a forgiving God why did He have to kill Himself?
Pastor Doug: Good question. The Lord is not only a loving Father and Creator, He is the ultimate King and Judge, and He has laws, and when a law is broken there is a penalty for that law. And God’s law is not like civil law where we vacillate a lot in how we implement penalties. I know of somebody who recently got thrown in jail for several years for possessing marijuana I’m not justifying this and at the same time somebody else who is guilty of deliberate murder gets an equal sentence. You know what I’m saying? In the world, there’s unequal justice, but God’s laws are perfect. And if the penalty for sin is death, while God wants to forgive man, the penalty must be paid. God loved us—He said “I will pay the penalty”.
Caller: Yes. He’s a just God. He has to do justice in everything He thinks of, in everything that He does. If Adam committed the sin, Adam should have been punished, not that God punishes Himself. I’ll give you an example: If a criminal appears before a court and before the judge, and the judge says, ‘Well, put me in jail and relieve this criminal’, then justice is not served. When God killed Himself, Adam is going unpunished. So why would He have to kill Himself because God didn’t do this in Himself? Adam did it, so Adam is the guilty one and we see in the Bible that God punished Adamhe was banished from paradise-
Pastor Doug: Well, you’re leaving out the component of love, Solomon. Let me give you an example: There was a king who had a son, and he told his subjects, Nobody was supposed to look upon his harem. Well, the penalty was to have their eyes put out if they looked on the king’s harem. The king’s son thought, I don’t have to listen to the king’s laws, I’m the prince, and he went waltzing off into the harem one day and after all the women screamed the word got back to the king that his crown prince had broken his law. Well, the king had to keep his law, but he also loved his son.
So what he did was he put out one of his son’s eyes and one of his own. This tells you something about how much God loves us in that He didn’t want to destroy us for sinning, but He said ‘I will take your suffering that you deserve because I love you so much’. It’s something like—I heard about a boy who kept disobeying his mother and she finally reached her wits end. This was in the days back when they used to take their kids out behind the woodshed. And she said, ‘I can’t put up with this any longer. I want you to go find a willow switch and bring it to me’. They lived out on a farm, so he went down by the creek and he got a willow switch and brought it back.
She said, ‘That’s not big enough. Get a bigger one’. He brought back another and she said ‘That’s not long enough or thick enough. Get a bigger one’. So he came back he’s just trembling now with this big long thick willow switch and she hands it to her son and says, ‘Now I want you to beat me because I have failed you as a mother in that I haven’t been able to teach you to obey.’ It so broke his heart that he would have to beat his mother that he changed. So God has shown us something about His character in that He loves us and suffered for us.
Caller: I understand the example you gave. But what I’m saying is like, where is justice being done when you’re punishing somebody who is innocent because of someone who is guilty, so where is the justice in this? God is supposed to be a God of justice and love, and love doesn’t mean that you kill an innocent being.
Pastor Doug: Well, that innocent being is dying voluntarily. Another example, Solomon, I know you believe the book of Daniel. In the book, Daniel, the Bible says that the king made a law that whoever prays to anyone but the king for thirty days would go to the lion’s den. Daniel was caught praying. The king did not want Daniel to go to the lion’s den, but he could not change his law. So for one night he put him in the lion’s den.
Then after that, he threw into the lion’s den those that had tricked him. And so the king—a king that makes a law but doesn’t keep it-. God so loved us that He didn’t want us to take the sin penalty, which is death, He said ‘I will take it for you so that you can live’. He basically purchased us redemption. I hope that helps a little bit, but that’s probably all we can cover on that right now.