Sacrifice plays a central part in the traditional religions of Africa. Traditional Africans offer sacrifices to either obtain divine favour, to appease the wrath of an angry deity, as a means of fellowship, to prevent or avert impending doom, or for gratitude ⸺sacrifices are offered for different purposes. Other types of sacrifices are similar to the Old Testament system of sacrifice: substitutionary, propitiatory, votive, expiatory sacrifice, etc. However, the supreme form of sacrifice in most African traditional societies is human sacrifice, though this happens occasionally. Animals are mainly used for sacrifices. Human sacrifice is done when there is an epidemic, death among young people in the community, or other exigent rituals to be done.

It is a widely held belief that an animal’s killing may spare individual and collective lives. In that context, animals are thus slaughtered to safeguard the community. It is also a consistent understanding that the animal’s life is passed onto the people to which they are closely connected to strengthen and protect them. In this respect, both wild and domesticated animals are sacrificed. The most typical domesticated animals used in this process are sheep, goats, cattle, dogs, and fowl. Wild animals are used in rain-making ceremonies, as well as to chase away epidemics and public danger and to purify the environment.1 However, in Hebrews 10:1-4, the writer insists that the sacrifice of Jesus is superior, not only to the Old Testament system of sacrifice but also to all other human-constituted systems of sacrifice. “The law is only a shadow of the good things coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason, it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? The worshipers would have been cleansed once and for all and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins because the blood of bulls and goats can’t take away sins . . . we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:1-4 10b; emphasis mine).

The sacrifice of Jesus, the Son of God, is the final, perfect and only adequate sacrifice for the sins of humanity. Cornelius Olowola summarily puts it this way:
1. The Sacrifice of Christ atones for sin, while African sacrifices could only remove ceremonial
pollution (at least, it is believed to be), but they cannot remove the guilt of sin (Heb. 9:13, 14). Christ
can atone for sin because he was without sin.
2. Christ’s sacrifice is substitutionary. One reason for African sacrifice is to offer an animal (or sometimes a human being) to replace another individual or a community. But Christ’s sacrifices are the perfect, complete offering for those evils worse than any physical disease in man’s life.
3. Christ’s sacrifice made him the mediator of the new covenant (Heb. 9:15). This renders all traditional sacrifices useless because man has been redeemed and granted God’s promised inheritance through Christ’s mediatorial death.
4. Christ’s sacrifice destroyed the power of the evil one (Heb. 2:14-15). Since Christ overcame the evil powers, there is no need for African Christians to sacrifice anything to appease malevolent spirits. They only need to appropriate Christ’s death to experience freedom from the evil one.
5. Christ’s sacrifice reconciles man to God; African sacrifices are sometimes offered to appease the spirits’ anger. But man’s problem is his disobedience to God, which has made him sinful. Through Christ’s sacrifice, God has opened the way to reconciliation (Rom. 5:8; 2 Cor. 5:18-21).2

Therefore, through the death of Jesus, the estrangement from our Creator has been healed; we are ransomed, redeemed, and forgiven, and we can be adopted into God’s family. Jesus’s sacrifice ended the necessity for every form of sacrifice because He offered the perfect sacrifice once and for all.

What good is the death of Jesus without His resurrection? The truth of His resurrection offers humanity the greatest hope. His death demonstrated His love, but His resurrection demonstrated His power—“. . . it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Him.” (Acts 2:24b, emphasis mine).

The resurrection’s historical fact is the foundation for the Christian faith. It is not an optional article of faith ⸺it is faith! The resurrection of Jesus Christ and Christianity stand or fall together. One cannot be true without the other. Belief in the truth of Christianity is not merely faith in faith ⸺ours or someone else’s, ⸺but rather faith in the risen Christ of history. Without the historical resurrection of Jesus, the Christian faith and the church itself are worthless exercises in futility if Jesus has not been literally and physically raised from the dead.

Without the resurrection, we might as well forget God, church and following moral rules and “feast and drink, for tomorrow we die!” (1 Cor. 15:32).3

In their book Evidence for The Resurrection, Josh and Sean suggest six reasons why people fear death and how the resurrection of Jesus gives us freedom from the fear of death. Six reasons why we fear death:4
1. Death is mysterious and unknown. It is expected to fear the unknown. Getting married, moving to a new city or making a new investment can all bring a certain amount of apprehension because
we don’t know exactly what to expect. But death poses a more excellent mystery than anything else; it is
the greatest of all unknowns. Once having entered that realm, no one ever returns to tell us about
it. It is something we can never truly understand until we experience it ourselves.
2. We have to face death alone. If we could all join together and face the unknown mysteries of
death in a group, perhaps it would be easier to bear the thought of it. But we cannot. We must travel alone into that night.
3. We are separated from our loved ones. We want to know if our relationships can continue
after this life. Will we ever meet our loved ones again?
4. Our hopes and dreams will not be realised. When we die, our goals die with us. We cannot continue to build our dreams. Death ends the best of our plans.
5. Death raises the possibility that we will be annihilated. We fear that death could mean the
end of everything. After our death, will we continue to exist?
6. Death is unavoidable. Even with today’s scientific advances that extend the length of our lives, all of us will die. Even Methuselah, the Old Testament patriarch who lived almost 1,000 years, eventually succumbed to death. The Bible tells of a few people who were brought back from the
dead, but all of them except Christ died again. No one can escape the inevitability of death.

Not only is death inevitable and fearsome, but sometimes it hits suddenly in ways we could never have anticipated. Such uncertainty can be debilitating, even for believers in Jesus. Despite their belief, they can still wrestle with the emotional pain of death. We grieve deeply the loss of our loved ones, even though we do not grieve as people without future hope. While the Bible never promises complete deliverance from the emotionally challenging aspects of death, we are told that victory over the utterly paralysing fear of it is within our grasp. Anticipating heaven doesn’t get rid of our apprehensions about the unknown aspects of death, but it can help to minimise the fear that death brings by putting it in a larger context and seeing it from a new perspective. Genuinely understanding the biblical doctrine of resurrection has the added benefit of freeing us from the debilitating fear of our final journey into the unknown realm. The power of the resurrection is in a class of its own. In resurrecting Jesus from the dead, God has done what we cannot do: He has conquered the powers of death. Although we may fear the process of dying, death itself need not be feared. The resurrection of the crucified Christ provides the hope that God, not death, will ultimately control our destiny.6

Although sceptics have attempted to discredit the fact of Christ’s resurrection by providing alternative theories to the resurrection of Jesus and also offering other explanations for the resurrection like the hallucination theory, swoon theory, wrong tomb theory, and the Qur’an’s claim that Jesus was not killed or crucified on the cross, another person who looked like him took his place on the cross (Sura 4:157-158), and many other illogical objections. There are many reasons why the substitution legends are not historically credible.

First, they contradict the extant eyewitness testimony that “Jesus of Nazareth” was crucified (Matt. 27; Mark 14; Luke 23; John 19).

Second, these substitution legends are contrary to the earliest extrabiblical Jewish, Roman, and Samaritan testimony about the death of Christ.7

In The Risen Jesus and Future Hope, Gary Habermas reports that virtually all scholars from across the ideological spectrum—from ultra-liberals to Bible-thumping conservatives—agree that the following points concerning Jesus and Christianity are actual historical facts:
1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
2. He was buried, most likely in a private tomb.
3. Soon afterwards, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, and sad, having lost hope.
4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his interment.
5. The disciples had experiences that they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.
6. Due to these experiences, the disciples’ lives were thoroughly transformed. They were even
willing to die for their belief.
7. The proclamation of the Resurrection took place very early, from the beginning of church history.
8. The disciples’ public testimony and preaching of the Resurrection occurred in Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried shortly before.
9. The gospel message centred on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
10. Sunday was the primary day for gathering and worshipping.
11. James, Jesus’ brother and a sceptic before this time, was converted when he believed he also saw the risen Jesus.
12. Just a few years later, Saul of Tarsus (Paul) became a Christian believer due to an experience that he also believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.8

The resurrection of Jesus is the most critical event in human history. It is the focus of the Christian faith, where our hope rests. Without His resurrection, the apostle Paul said:
(a). our preaching is useless (1 Cor. 15:14);
(b). our faith is vain (vs.14);
(c). the apostles are false witnesses about God (vs.15);
(d). believers are yet in their sins (vs 17);
(e). the dead in Christ are perished (vs. 18).

The implications of Jesus’s resurrection are enormous. It fully confirms the truth and validity of what Jesus taught and is the most significant proof of His divinity. Also, a great benefit to believers in Christ is that Christ’s resurrection guarantees their
resurrection. Believers shall one day wear a glorified body like Jesus— a body free from pains, diseases, weakness, decay, deterioration and the agony of death.

Jesus Christ is unlike other world leaders; He is not like Muhammad, Buddha, Alexander, or Caesar. He is God. He is not the chairman of the board of world leaders; He is God. He is not a lesser or inferior god but the Almighty God. Therefore, any man can do the greatest good to others by introducing them to Jesus as the Lord and the Saviour of the whole world. In conclusion, despite the apparent religious plurality in Africa, I agree with the sentiment of F.F. Bruce that Christianity is the religion—the final and true religion.9

References

1 Molefi Kete Asante & Ama Mazama ed., Encyclopedia of African Religion (California: SAGE Publications,
Inc., 2009), 56

2 Cornelius Olowola, African Traditional Religion and the Christian Faith (Ghana: Africa Christian Press,
1993), 47

3. Josh McDowell & Sean McDowell, Evidence For The Resurrection (California, USA: Regal, 2009), 46
4. Ibid., 52
5. Ibid, 52-3.
6. Ibid, 57
7. Geisler & Saleeb, Answering Islam, 287

8 Norman L. Geisler & Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist (Illinois, USA: Cross Way Books, 2004), 300-1.