Apologetics: How Can the Sacrifice of Christ Be Ok If The Law Prohibits Human Sacrifice?

This is the kind of objection that's brought frequently by individuals who are hostile to the Christian faith.

I remember Christopher Hitchens when he was alive.

He basically conceived of the cross as an instance of divine child abuse

and basically said that the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement was the most

immoral doctrine in all of the scriptures.

As is often the case in many of these supposed contradictions, one of the things that happens is with these

contradictions, what you find is that the individuals who are

making these claims essentially are equivocating.

They're comparing two different types of things and collapsing them all under the same kind of rubric and

basically unable to make some basic moral distinctions that are necessary

to think through any kind of moral issues.

As you think about a question along these lines, you think about dealing with these supposed contradictions in general,

often what you're going to find is if you just make some simple basic qualifications, the supposed

contradiction will basically fall apart.

And that's the same case that's happening in this supposed contradiction.

As you read through the Bible, one of the things you're going to find is that Leviticus 18 .21 says this, You shall not

give any of your children to offer them to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God.

I am the Lord.

Leviticus 20 .2 says, Say to the people of Israel, any of the people of Israel or the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives

any of his children to Moloch shall surely be put to death.

The people of the land shall stone him with stones.

Now one of the things you're going to find there is that you don't find in these kinds of passages a universal

condemnation against human sacrifice in general.

You find a condemnation against human sacrifice as it relates to forcing an

individual against their will, forcing a child to sacrifice their own

life in the service of false religion.

So what's prohibited here is offering your sons and daughters to a false God who doesn't exist.

Now the reason why the Bible would prohibit this is because this God doesn't exist for one.

But then for two, our God's a jealous God who demands universal loyalty to him above all

else.

And any act of worship or service to any supposed God who doesn't actually exist is going to be fundamentally a

rejection of his lordship.

And so it wouldn't matter what the service was that Moloch demanded.

Any service that's performed to Moloch itself would be fundamentally unlawful or fundamentally illicit.

But then there's a unique element of this that is particularly egregious in that children are

not typically capable of making complicated moral choices along these lines.

So the idea of a cross itself is going to be in distinction between this idea of

child sacrifice contrary to what Christopher Hitchens was saying.

Jesus was actually 33 years old and no longer a child as far as that's concerned when he died on the cross.

But then the idea of the cross was the idea of voluntary self -giving of one's own life for the sake of

other people.

But then in the idea of child sacrifice, one of the things that you're going to find is that a child is forced to die for

others against his will, whereas in the kind of sacrifice that happened on the cross, it was

fundamentally Jesus voluntarily laying down his life for the sake of others.

So as you think about trying to work through a supposed contradiction along these lines, one of the things you're going to

find is there isn't this universal condemnation against human sacrifice, period.

What you find is there is this condemnation against sacrifice of children to false gods.

So that's part of the distinction that an individual who is morally honest is going to have to

make in thinking through some of these issues.

But then there's also more going on with these passages than what might first come to mind.

Now no one, basically, there's very few people who are going, or

functionally probably no one, who is going to in total reject the idea of human sacrifice

across the board.

In order to have any kind of concept of bravery or courage, you're going to have to have some kind of

category for voluntarily self -giving of one's life in the service of others.

When soldiers go to battle, if there was a soldier who dropped himself on a grenade in order to save his

squad, essentially everyone would praise that soldier as being a brave soldier.

And that praise would be given despite the fact that his bravery came at the expense of human

sacrifice.

So the idea of human sacrifice in general can be a good thing depending upon the circumstance.

If you were an individual who essentially saw a criminal trying to

kidnap a woman or beating up someone or attempting to rape someone or something along those lines, and you stepped in to

stop it and essentially allowed the lady to get away, and it ended up costing your own life,

everyone would consider that an act of bravery, and everyone would consider that an act of human sacrifice.

If you saw a child in a burning building and you went inside that burning building in order to save that child, and you

brought the child out, and it ended up costing you your life, again that would be an example of human sacrifice, and again that would be

considered morally upright or an act of bravery or an act of courage or something that we should be praised.

So when you think about the idea of human sacrifice in general, Jesus does provide an example of

human sacrifice, but it was an example that was voluntarily given.

Jesus says, no one takes my life from me, but I voluntarily lay it down.

Human beings fundamentally had a sin problem, and that sin problem had to be fixed, and Jesus was

the perfect man who came of his own volition in order to fix that fundamental sin problem.

So Jesus, who was God, became man and fundamentally fixed that problem, and did so not being forced by anyone

outside of himself to do something that he otherwise didn't want to do.

He voluntarily laid down his life in service of those whom he loved, and the Bible will tell us that greater love hath

no man than to lay down his life for his friends.

So if we're trying to answer the question, how can human sacrifice be okay when the law prohibits human sacrifice, the answer to

this supposed contradiction is fairly simple.

The law does prohibit an individual from forcing another human being against their will to lay down their

life for you in service of a false god, but there is no categorical rejection of human

sacrifice in general.

Contrary to those who wish to find the contradiction here, there simply isn't one that exists.

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