Christ’s Death as the Perfect Sacrifice for Sin: An African Context

By Ebenezer Afolabi
Culled from The Uniqueness of Christianity: Presenting Jesus to non-Christians in Africa

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Sacrifice plays a central part in the traditional religions of Africa. Traditional Africans offer sacrifices as means 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. There are also other types of sacrifices that are similar to Old Testament system of sacrifice: substitutionary, propitiatory, votive, expiatory sacrifice, etc. However, the supreme form of sacrifice in most African traditional societies is the human sacrifice ⸺though this happens occasionally. Animals are mostly used for sacrifices. Human sacrifice is done when there is epidemic, death among young people in the community or other exigent rituals to be done. It is a widely held belief that the killing of an animal may spare individual as well as collective lives. In that context, animals are thus slaughtered in an effort to safeguard the community. It is also a consistent understanding that the life of the animal 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 of domesticated animals used in this process are sheep, goat, 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, by implication, it is also superior to all other human constituted system of sacrifice. “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are 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? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to 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 guilt of sin (Heb. 9:13, 14). Christ can atone for sin because he himself was without
  2. Christ’s sacrifice is One of the reasons for African sacrifice is to offer an animal (or sometimes a human being) to take the place of another individual or a community. But the sacrifices of Christ, is the perfect, complete offering for those evils which are worse than any physical disease, in the life of man.
  3. Christ’s sacrifice made him the mediator of the new covenant (Heb. 9:15). This renders useless all traditional sacrifices because through the mediatorial death of Christ, man has been redeemed and granted God’s promised
  4. Christ sacrifice destroyed the power of the evil one (Heb. 2:14-15). Since Christ overcame the evil powers, there is no need for African Christian to sacrifice anything to appease evil spirits. They only need to appropriate Christ’s death in order to experience freedom from the evil
  5. Christ’s sacrifice reconciles man to God; African sacrifices are offered sometimes to appease the anger of the spirits. But man’s problem is his disobedience to God which has made him sinful. God himself, through the sacrifice of Christ has opened the way of 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, redeemed, forgiven, and we can be adopted into the family of God. The sacrifice of Jesus ended the necessity for every form of sacrifice because He has offered the perfect sacrifice once and for all.

On the final note, of what good is the death of Jesus without His resurrection? The truth of His resurrection offers mankind 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 historical fact of the resurrection is the very 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 suggests 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 normal to fear the 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 greater 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 dark
  3. We are separated from our loved ones. We wonder if our relationships can possibly continue after this life. Will we ever meet our loved ones again?
  4. Our personal hopes and dreams will not be 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 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, sometimes it hits suddenly in ways we could never have anticipated. Such uncertainty can be debilitating, even for believers in Jesus. In spite of 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 difficult aspects of death, we are told that victory over the utterly paralyzing 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 minimize the fear that death brings by putting it in a larger context and seeing it from a new perspective. Truly understanding the biblical doctrine of resurrection has the added benefit of freeing us from debilitating fear of our final journey into the unknown realm.5

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, but 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 are contrary to the extant record of eyewitness testimony that it was “Jesus of Nazareth” who 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

 

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