Richard Dawkins keeps asking a question that sounds simple and isn’t: if God is omnipotent and merciful, why the incarnation, the sacrifice, the cross? Why not just say ‘I forgive you’ and be done with it?
The mistake is in what people assume omnipotence means. It’s never meant God can contradict His own nature. God cannot lie. God cannot deny Himself. That’s not a limit on power — that’s what perfection looks like.
Drop the usual Christian answer too, because it’s also wrong: God didn’t need a clever mechanism to reconcile justice and mercy, like a contractor solving a zoning conflict. Righteous, holy, loving, merciful — these aren’t ingredients mixed together. They’re one nature. So the real question isn’t how God finds a loophole. It’s how a necessarily righteous God reconciles genuinely guilty people to Himself without becoming something other than Himself.
Picture a judge sentencing a murderer, guilt established beyond doubt, who simply says, ‘I’m merciful, so I forgive you, case dismissed.’ Something’s wrong. Justice evaporated. So did the victim. So did the moral weight of what happened. Calling evil irrelevant doesn’t make it mercy — it makes it a lie about what evil is.
Romans 3:21-26 is the most compressed answer in the Bible. Christ is presented publicly as an atoning sacrifice to show God’s righteousness, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Just. Justifier. Both words, held together. God justifies the guilty without stopping being just — not by declaring sin never mattered, but while keeping His own righteousness intact.
The incarnation isn’t God patching a gap in His own knowledge or need for experience. The Son takes on the nature He’s come to redeem, entering Adam’s race as our representative, fulfilling the righteousness Adam failed at. And He doesn’t stop at living among us — He moves toward something specific: pierced for our transgressions, bearing our sins in His body on the tree, a ransom for many.
Gethsemane makes the necessity concrete. ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ Then: ‘If this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ If there were another way consistent with God’s purpose, this is where we’d see it taken. The cup doesn’t pass.
Here’s the extraordinary part: God doesn’t ask humanity to climb back up to Him. He provides the satisfaction Himself. The lawgiver puts Himself under the law. The righteous one stands in for the unrighteous. The judge absorbs the judgment.
So why couldn’t God just forgive? He does — that’s the whole announcement of Christianity. The real question was always what forgiveness has to mean. If forgiveness means evil doesn’t count, Christianity rejects that on the spot. Evil counts because people count. A God who waved away evil wouldn’t be more loving for it. He’d be less than just.
God doesn’t need blood, suffering, or experience. But He cannot deny Himself. Having purposed to redeem people who don’t deserve it, He does so without contradicting His own holiness. He remains just. And He becomes our justifier.
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