DID GOD DIE ON GOOD FRIDAY? by Adriel Sanchez for Core Christianity
The centerpiece of Good Friday is the cross of Jesus Christ. On the Friday before Easter, Jesus was crucified and died. This creates a dilemma in the mind of some. If Jesus is God, how could he die? After all, God cannot change (Mal. 3:6), so how are we to make sense of Jesus’ death? Was it real?
Believe it or not, some people in church history said it was not! Early on, there was a heretical group that plagued the Christian church called the Gnostics. This group was known for believing that the redemption of our spirits could be gained through the acquisition of secret knowledge.[1]The Gnostics also did not like matter very much, so the idea that Jesus had a body, and that he suffered ,was out of the question.[2]
Some were so determined to safeguard the transcendence of God that they could not fathom the idea of God suffering. One such person who maintained this position was the heretic Nestorius. Nestorius contended that the Divine Person (the Word in John 1:1) could not share in human suffering. This caused him to distinguish sharply between the two natures of Jesus Christ (human and divine). Sometimes it even seemed like Nestorius was splitting Jesus into two persons, where the Divine person would act on some occasions and the assumed human would act on others.[3] This may be a little confusing, but it highlights the fact that this issue was a sticky one for the early church. Nevertheless, early Christian leaders like Ignatius of Antioch seemed to have had no problem talking about God suffering.[4] And in places like Acts 20:28, Paul could say that God obtained the church “with his own blood.” How then are we to make sense God suffering and dying?
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