Beyond Their Reach?

Beyond Their Reach?

“None of them can ever redeem a brother

Or give to God a ransom for him. 

(The ransom price for their life* is so precious

That it is always beyond their reach)”

(Psalm 49:7-8 NWT)

In Witness theology, death is the full payment or penalty for sin. A man’s death has no upper limit of sins for which it can pay for.[1] Every sin a man has committed is fully paid for once he has died. Duration of death, which they regard as a “state” of non-existence, cannot coherently be said to have any punitive or pecuniary value for reasons we explain in another essay.[2] All those who are resurrected are said to have still fully paid for their pre-death sins because they had died, their being resurrected notwithstanding. It does not matter what sins they had committed, how many, or whether they were dead for a long or a short time. That they had died and were dead for any period of time is sufficient for them to have fully paid for all of their sins.

Once we establish this principle, it becomes hard to see why they can say that the Atonement is necessary. Every man is capable of fully ‘acquitting’ himself of sin and so it appears superfluous to have someone else pay for his sins. Yes, there is supposedly the matter of Adamic sin, inherited imperfection, that needs to be dealt with; and those who are resurrected are not deemed worthy of everlasting life on a paradise earth merely because they have died; indeed, they did not deserve to come back to life at all. But none of these can supply the necessity of the Atonement.

Witnesses do describe the Atonement as Christ repurchasing for mankind that which Adam had lost for himself and his descendants: everlasting life on a paradise earth. And they say that justice requires that something be given that is equivalent to this: a perfect man must die and relinquish his right to continued human existence. This, they say, an imperfect man cannot do. But should we take this at face value? Is this something that Witness theology can coherently claim?

We do not believe so. For one thing, it does not appear to take seriously the very radical claim that a man’s own death is the full payment for his sin. If it is the full payment for sin, there should be no further debt or liability for penalty arising from inherited sin or personal sin; both have the same penalty, since there is but one unchanging law for sin: the wages sin pays is death.

But they don’t deserve to be resurrected! Neither did Adam deserve to come into existence in the first place.

But they will need to be healed of all moral, spiritual, and physical imperfections! Sure, but once a man has provided the full payment for his sins, what legal obstacles could prevent God from simply employing the same “mechanism” that will be used to bring redeemed mankind to this state of perfection (e.g., the binding of Satan, the influence of the holy spirit, etc.) without a ransom?

But they do not deserve everlasting life on a paradise earth! Neither did Adam before he came into existence nor, in fact, when he sinned. That sort of justification had not yet been granted to him at that time. Moreover, this justification to everlasting life is supposedly only (provisionally)[3] granted to redeemed mankind after they pass the final test, at which point the ransom could no longer avail them. It is not something that Christ merits for them in the first place. They themselves must prove worthy of it.

But they will commit sins in the interim! Since a man’s death is the full payment for sin, God can simply kill them all on a Friday and resurrect them on a Sunday.

For these reasons, we believe that there is simply no good reason to think that if men can fully pay for their own sins by their own deaths that there needs to be a ransom at all. We would go further and suggest that if one grants that if death is the full penalty or payment for sins, then even an imperfect man could have provided the (unnecessary) ransom just as well as Christ had. That is, his death would have the same sin-atoning power as Christ’s death does.

All that is necessary for this to work – for an imperfect man to at least fully pay for all the sins of the world – is for him to be the substitute for all other men. If he can stand in their stead, his death would be the full payment for their sins as well as his. And we would argue that there is no good reason for a Witness to object to the possibility that a sinner could substitute for the whole world, for the following reasons.

First, Witnesses acknowledge animal substitution was permitted in Abraham and Isaac’s case and under the Law. The deaths of these animals did not have quite the same sin-atoning properties that Christ’s death is said to have in Witness theology, nor the sin-paying properties that a man’s own death has for his sin according to their theology, but they illustrate that Witnesses think that another lesser being can substitute for a sinful man so as to spare his life. If this is possible, then a sinful man’s equal, another sinful man, surely could do so in a more effectual way.

Second, Witnesses acknowledge that imperfect men can be punished for the sins of others. This does not always happen so as to relieve the other party of liability to punishment. But to concede that one person can be punished for the sins of another is to go a long way to concede substitution. Witnesses acknowledge the historicity of the following examples: one generation of Amalekites being destroyed for what their forefathers had done, David being spared while his son was punished, Gehazi not only bringing Naaman’s leprosy upon not only himself but upon his descendants after him too, Israel suffering for all the righteous blood that had been spilled upon the earth.[4]

Third, our hypothetical sinful substitute’s death has sufficient payment power, so to speak, to fully pay for all the sins of the word if the man himself had committed all of them. If a man were to have lived two trillion years (so twenty-five-billion eighty-year-lives worth of sinning) and then to be killed, he would have fully paid for those sins merely by having died. Witness theology is forced to concede this point, since it says that death fully pays for all of the sins that a man has committed.

We argue that, given the premises discussed above (as well as in other essays) Witness theology cannot coherently deny this conclusion. They should say that a sinful man could die for the sins of the world just as well as they say that Christ actually did. That means that something else has got to give: the value of the Atonement must be greater, the penalty due for sin must be greater, etc. But until these doctrines are revised, this remains the sad reductio that their theology entails. It is merely an extension of the idea that indefinitely many perfect rational creatures could have paid for the ransom just as well as Christ did and the idea that a man can fully pay for his own sins.

[1] This includes unpardonable offenses and those who will, they say, not be resurrected, such as Adam. They still will have fully paid for them when they die. We touch upon this point in the other essay mentioned below.

[2] See “How Much More Severe?” here.

[3] As we argue elsewhere, redeemed mankind still has the potential to sin, even after they pass the so-called final test; so they could lose this justification for everlasting life.

[4] “In King Saul’s time Amalekite bands were found roaming throughout hundreds of miles of wilderness from the border of Egypt to Havilah, a designation that may include north-central Arabia. At this time Jehovah commanded Saul to execute the Amalekites on account of “what Amalek did to Israel when he set himself against him in the way while he was coming up out of Egypt.”” (September 1, 1963 Watchtower, p. 534)

“Thus the grievous sin of David was forgiven—though not without punishment, let it not be forgotten” August 15, 1963 Watchtower, p. 509)

“As a result, Gehazi was stricken with leprosy. So his greed, coupled with his deceptiveness, cost Gehazi his privilege of continuing to serve as Elisha’s attendant, besides bringing leprosy on himself and his offspring.” (Insight on the Scriptures Vol. I, p. 905)

“Because Zechariah courageously chastised Israel’s leaders, “they conspired against him and pelted him with stones at the king’s commandment in the courtyard of Jehovah’s house.” But, as Jesus foretells, Israel will pay for all such righteous blood spilled. They pay 37 years later, in 70 C.E., when the Roman armies destroy Jerusalem and over a million Jews perish.” (March 1, 1990 Watchtower, p. 24)