WHY DIDN'T JESUS DIE OF OLD AGE?   PART FOUR

Humans would enter life through the death of Jesus Christ. As we explained earlier, that would be possible because before He became a human, Jesus was the God who created humans and their world.  And since He had created everything, and was therefore worth more than everything, His death could be a legitimate replacement for the death of all humans.

So Jesus would die.

Human life is in the blood. It is the circulation of the blood that gives flesh its life, and without blood, either through its loss or the stopping of its circulation, human life ceases:

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11)

Thus, the shedding of blood is the symbol of death.  And the death of Jesus, the shedding of His blood, is the central point of the Scriptures.  From that point, the Scriptures look back to early symbols that would explain, yet not explain, the circumstances of, and the reason for, Jesus' death. As Hebrews says:

“And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.” (Hebrews 9:22)

About seven hundred years before the time of Moses, there was a man called Abraham. He was not only of the Godly line, the Woman's seed, but his descendants would also be chosen to be the bearers of life.  That is, Jesus would be one of his descendants.  As well as that, Abraham's descendants would be the writers and keepers of the Scriptures.

God intended that these descendants, who we know as the Israelites, would embrace the knowledge and wisdom of the Scriptures and so lead all humans into permanent life.  That didn't happen, because the people whom God had chosen - the Israelites - didn't want what God was offering them.  As God said:

“And Jehovah said to Moses, I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. And now leave Me alone, so that My wrath may become hot against them and so that I may consume them.” (Exodus 32:9-10)

God didn't destroy them, because Moses persuaded Him not to, but they didn't improve and they were still the same after Jesus had returned to heaven, when Stephen accused them (and got murdered for doing so):

“O stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so you do.” (Acts 7:51)

The people were stiff-necked, but they were still the keepers of the Scriptures. And the Scriptures contained the knowledge which Satan had been hiding since the time of Noah. Knowledge which was not known to the Israelites themselves, but which would be revealed by Jesus Christ, both by His words and by the circumstances of His life and death.

The Scriptures told, in veiled language, what would happen in the future. So that, when such things came to pass, they would give authority to the Scriptures which foretold them. They told in advance everything about Jesus Christ and what would happen to Him, but being veiled, they needed to be explained:

“And Jesus said to them, O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all things that the prophets spoke!  Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” (Luke 24:25-27)

Jesus Himself was what the Scriptures were about. And the people of the Scriptures, the Israelites, in the rituals of their religion, would act out what would happen to Jesus. Although they wouldn't understand that what they were doing was looking ahead to the death of their future Messiah, Jesus.

For example:

“And the priest shall kill the goat of the sin offering which is the people's, and shall bring in its blood to the inside of the veil, and shall do with its blood as he has done with the blood of the bull, and shall sprinkle it on the mercy-seat, and at the front of the mercy-seat.” (Leviticus 16:15)

The ritual was acting out the future slaying of Jesus Christ.  The priests and the people thought that, by this ritual, they were having their sins removed, which is what God wanted them to think. But in fact, the blood of an animal couldn't remove the sins of a human, because the blood of an animal has no more effective value than the blood of a human. As Hebrews says:

“for it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4)

The blood didn't remove people's sins, even though they thought it did, but why did God choose to have the removal of their sins represented by the slaying of animals? Isn't that rather bizarre and cruel?

Yes. But as we'll see, there was no other way to represent the removal of sins, except by representing the removal as a death. In this case the death of an animal. [As a gruesome aside, in Satan's Cushite religions, children, not animals, were often sacrificed.]

The removal of sin, in the Israelite religion, was represented by the death of an animal, because it was actually representing the future death of the Human, Jesus Christ.

As we have seen, the death of the God-become-Human, Jesus Christ, was necessary in order to remove human sins and allow humans to live forever.  The ritual of the Israelite religion was merely playing that out, yearly, ahead of the actual event.

And since life is in the blood, blood must be shed in order to bring about death. The real death, the effective death, had to be that of Jesus, so His blood had to be shed.

Why? Why couldn't He have died of old age? The important thing was His death, not how it occurred, so why couldn't he have died by having His blood stop circulating, as in some disease causing heart failure after a long life?

For the same reason Jesus could not be murdered when He was born. Because while His death was crucial to human survival, His life was also crucial to human survival. Because His life, its circumstances and His teaching, explained how humans could make the choice between living forever or dying forever. He had to explain in detail how humans could enter life through His death.

Because accepting eternal life involves a process. Humans have to take certain steps in order to take up the Gods' offer of life. So Jesus had to explain that process. And of course to do that, He had to survive to maturity.

But that doesn't explain why He had to die in such a brutal way, at the peak of His vitality. He could have explained the knowledge vital to humans, and still died in old age. So why His early, brutal, death?