We went to a lovely Christmas Eve candlelight service with family this year. It was the first time in years we had been in an institutional church. The preachers did a tag team message on, “Why?” and it got me thinking of how my understanding of the Gospel has changed.

Traditional evangelical teaching says Papa had to send Jesus down here to die for us on the cross. The standard message is, Papa was locked into sacrificing His only beloved Son to assuage His wrath. However, what if the whole sacrificial system was really instituted by man as our way to appease our perception of God? Did Papa really setup the whole sacrificial system? It just sort of appears in the Genesis story as a thing we humans do, not necessarily as a thing God commanded initially.

It is a universal concept that we must appease God, but does He really want worship through sacrifice or is it worship through fellowship that pleases Him most? Would it not be that He prefers fellowship, by virtue of the revelation of His all consuming love through Jesus? In the Garden, “before the fall”, Papa walked with Adam in the cool of the day. What better image of perfect fellowship could there be?

It makes much more sense to me that God sent Jesus to obliterate our misunderstanding of worship. To show us exactly what Papa is really like through Jesus’ life here. To let us let us know how much he wants fellowship with us. Jesus submitted to our twisted sacrificial system to break through our traditions and prove that God’s way of Love and Grace are indeed higher than our systems of religion.