Why Did it Have to be Jesus Who Died and A Perfect Angel Couldn’t Die for Us?

Why Did it Have to be Jesus Who Died and A Perfect Angel Couldn’t Die for Us?

Let me ask you another question to answer this question: “What would you say if I told you you could confess your sins to an angel and be forgiven of your sins? If You’re a Christian you would say this is blasphemy. Only Christ can forgive sin! This is also why it had to be Christ who died in our place. It would be blasphemy for an angel to try to die as an atonement for our sins. An angel cannot atone, because only a divine Being can make atonement.

When Jesus healed a paralyzed man he said these words before curing him of his physical condition “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” Then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your mat, and go home.”

Matthew 9:6 BSB

Only Jesus has authority to forgive sins. It takes Someone divine to forgive sins. Why is this? Because God is the lawgiver and His character is the law. It is His law we break when we sin. It is His authority we rebel against if we sin, not an angel's. No angel has such authority. If you disobey, you fall under the power of sin and death. An angel, who is also subject to the law, under the law, and not divine, can only by their actions obey or break the law for themselves. But they can’t clear you of sin, because they lack divinity. Only Christ is divine and can cancel out your sins by his divine authority.

Of course, even Christ could not have canceled out our sins unless he died in our place. So the authority to forgive sins rests on two points, and actually three points...

1. Must be divine 2. Must have died in our place. 3. Must have lived a perfect, sinless life that could then be transferred to our account, and His righteousness imparted into our own hearts. An angel could die as punishment for its own sins, but it can’t transfer it’s account to us if it chooses not to sin. There can be no transferring of accounts from beings both under the law. It also can’t impart its righteous character into our heart and change our heart; it takes divine power to do that and divine authority. We gain no righteousness of our own and no character change from an angel’s faithful obedience and perfect life. An angel has holiness that is derivative, not original. Even angels get their holiness from God - from His Holy Spirit dwelling within them and moving them to do acts of love and goodness; they do not possess holiness without Him, as is made extremely apparent by how wicked the fallen angels became when they left God and worshipped themselves. God alone is the Source and Standard of holiness, not an angel. Only the one who had the authority to write the law, could forgive us for breaking it, and put us in right standing with the divine law.

To put it another way, we are at odds with God. We’ve sinned against God, not an angel, and so we need a transaction done with God Himself in order to make things right with God.

Our problem isn’t one of being at odds with an angel – we’re at odds with God’s law and God Himself and must be brought back into right relation with the divine and that’s just not something that the blood of an angel could apply to or absolve or affect in any way.