I commend Deborah for posing the one question that prompts so many honest seekers to reject the Christian faith. For me, the OP's question needs to be reformulated as these 4 basic questions:
(1) How can anyone's death, even the death of God's Son, possibly have anything to do with my guilt?
(2) Why can't God simply forgive the penitent without Jesus's crucifixion and then transform them through the power of the Spirit?
(3) Why is God not unlovingly sadistic if His wrath needs to be assuaged by the death of an innocent human sacrifice?
(4) Why shouldn't the ancient (Jewish and Gentile) belief in appeasing sacrifice be dismissed as a primitive superstition based on absurd widespread concepts of a vindictive god or gods?
I will address these 4 questions in my next planned post.
(1) How can anyone's death, even the death of God's Son, possibly have anything to do with my guilt?
(2) Why can't God simply forgive the penitent without Jesus's crucifixion and then transform them through the power of the Spirit?
(3) Why is God not unlovingly sadistic if His wrath needs to be assuaged by the death of an innocent human sacrifice?
(4) Why shouldn't the ancient (Jewish and Gentile) belief in appeasing sacrifice be dismissed as a primitive superstition based on absurd widespread concepts of a vindictive god or gods?
I will address these 4 questions in my next planned post.