Hi Christiana.

May I ask again, Who do you say killed Jesus?

I never accused you of anything. I merely said, “I get the idea that you did not read all of my post and the link I provided to The Berean Call.” “I get the idea” means “I think,” “I assume,” “I surmise,” “I presume.” It is not an accusation, just to set the record straight. So, please stop accusing me of things I never said.

Christian, Thank you for your comment.

May I ask again, Who do you say killed Jesus?

Hi Christiana.
You wrote:

I don’t know who Mr Botha is but I’m not sure if he meant that men actually killed the Lord but that was the intention of their hearts.

Ignorance, or not being sure of what someone means when he or she says something in the realm of the Gospel, is dangerous. As I said, “Therefore, the words you use, and its inherent semantics, can and often do have an enormous influence on people, especially when they do not care or bother to discern these semantics in the light of Scripture.”

Were you involved in the killing of Jesus, perhaps just slightly, while the Jews were more deeply involved and, therefore, more severe in their killing of Jesus because they had a different angle from which they worked? What do you suppose was this angle that surpassed the universal angle of sin? Perhaps, you would say, “Yes, my sins killed Him.” Well, in that case your sins and the sins of the Jews at that time (same difference) helped to procure our salvation, which, of course, is ludicrous.

Riekert Botha’s poster does not convey the fact that sinful thoughts in our hearts amount to the actual deeds and, therefore, man actually killed Christ. It was not merely sinful thoughts in people’s hearts that killed Him. Your argument portrays precisely what I warned people against. It is a kind of Phariseeism which boasts, “I, or we didn’t kill Jesus, they did; those varmints and deicidal Jews did it.”

I get the idea that you did not read all of my post and the link I provided to The Berean Call. Had you done so, you would rather have focused on what Jesus said and not what Riekert Botha or even Peter said at Pentecost. Jesus said, He received a command of his Father to lay down his life of Himself. Had He not done so Himself, and others took his life, He would have been disobedient to his Father. How can you trust someone who emphatically said, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” and then fails to lay down his own life so that sinful men could kill Him? Was He lying when He said, “No man taketh it (my life)?” Laying down one’s life may mean to be willing put yourself in harm’s way so that others may kill you, like a soldier who lays down his life to save others. But Jesus did not only say, “I lay it down of myself.” He elaborated what He meant by adding the phrase, “No man teaketh it from me.” No man is “no man.”

You seem to have been influenced by Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion.” As Dave Hunt said, “The Hebrew noun chabburah translated “stripes” is singular in Isaiah:53:5, indicating one blow from God wounding Christ “for our transgressions,” bruising Him “for our iniquities”—not the many stripes of scourging that were a major focus of Mel Gibson’s attempt to show that Christ’s physical sufferings paid for the sins of all mankind. Do you really believe that what Christ physically endured in the scourging and crucifixion was equal to what sinners will endure for all eternity in the lake of fire?” His great physical pains He suffered by the hand of men did not kill Him, and neither did it pay for our sins.

He laid down his life of Himself to be killed, not by the hands of men, as He said, but by the hand of his Father. God slew his Son because THAT, and nothing else, could ever fully pay for our sins.