Sometimes the question, or accusation/criticism maybe, is posed by atheists and critics of Christianity that Jesus didn’t really sacrifice anything because he is God and also because he got his life back three days later. So where’s the sacrifice if you know that what you give up will be given back, and given back even better than you previously had it?
It’s an interesting question, and one that should cause us to stop and think about what we, as Christians, say to non-believers in case the question is ever given to us. Most people will say Jesus gave up his life for us – but is that such a big deal if he knew he’d have it back in three days; and then to be taken up to heaven and resume his Godly-divine status he had before the incarnation?
Well, yes. Obviously all the pain and suffering that Jesus had to endure before his death was a big deal, and it showed, as we can see from the Gospels when Jesus says to his disciples that he is “deeply grieved, even to death” (Matt 26:38).
Luke 22:42-44
‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.
We can see from the quote above that Jesus really wasn’t looking forward to this, despite knowing its purpose. He even needed an angel to come to physically come to him to give him the strength to go on with this plan! Suggesting that this was a walk in the park for Jesus and making light of what he was about to go through is just ignorance of the reality of the situation. There’s also a significant detail in the Luke passage above which gives us a medical insight into what Jesus was going through in these moments: the sweat of blood.
This is actually a rare condition known as Hematidrosis, and in certain conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress and/or mental anxiety, the blood vessels that feed the sweat glands break and result in actual blood seeping through. This in itself shows just how much stress Jesus was under in the lead up to his execution to cause such a thing to happen. Modern day research also shows that this condition still manifests in people awaiting execution today.
So even if you knew that you would be resurrected in a few days time, I am sure that you wouldn’t really want to go through a Roman flogging and crucifixion – some of the most brutal ways to be tortured and executed in human history!
There’s lots of atheist memes on the internet making digs at this idea of what it means that Jesus sacrificed himself. “Jesus came back to life, so he basically sacrificed his weekend for you”, or similar types of jabs, totally missing the point.
So what did Jesus sacrifice if he only lost his life temporarily?
Everything about his pre-incarnate self.
Where once a spirit, now a glorified body.
Where once only divine, now fully God and fully man.
The incarnation had eternal consequences for the Godhead.
Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t just about dying, it was about taking on our humanity eternally. The eternal God now united forever with humanity. Jesus wasn’t only the “visible image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) whilst on earth, no; he is forever that now. Like John says in his opening chapter about the coming of the Word into our world: he became flesh (John 1:14) and has stayed that way. This is the “mystery of godliness” (as some translations have it) that Paul talks about in 1 Tim 3:16, where he states that Jesus was “revealed” or “manifested in flesh” and later taken up in glory.
Look at when Jesus was taken up into heaven in Acts 1:11, the angels say to the disciples watching that they will see Jesus “come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” – ie., bodily. But we know from the accounts in the Gospels that Jesus’ body was no longer exactly the same as ours, though he appeared solid and human, he could still appear inside locked rooms (Jn 20:19), disguise himself and then disappear again (Luke 24:30-31).
We can see some glimpses of this in the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. After his death and resurrection, Jesus was raised bodily (and this is what our faith hinges on – 1 Cor 15:14), and was still recognisable by those who knew him. Paul states that he was seen by “five hundred” of his followers after he was raised (1 Cor 15:5-8) as well as the Twelve and Paul himself, and they all knew him. Jesus didn’t just put on a human skin mask for 30 years or so and then shed it once his job was done. No, he was “flesh and bones”, not a spirit or ghost, though flesh in a new way (Luke 24:39; 1 Corinthians 15:50).
This is what Paul goes into some detail about in his epistles: the resurrection and the bodies we will inherit through that. Though we may still look human and recognisable, our old bodies will be transformed into a glorious one like the one Jesus received.
1 Corinthians 15:42-44
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.
What dies a physical body, is raised a spiritual one; though “spiritual” doesn’t necessarily mean some ethereal floaty mist-like substance, otherwise the disciples wouldn’t have been able to interact with Jesus after his death, nor would he have been able to cook and eat fish with them (Jn 21:9-14). The resurrected bodies we will get are the same type that Jesus now has; he will transform us into the same image of his own body (Philippians 3:21) so that “we will also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:49).
The resurrection is not just about our bodies changing, but about them being changed into the same likeness that Jesus now has!
Jesus is the mediator between God and man because he became man, but not only that, he has stayed a man so that he will forever be our mediator, on our level, but also on the level of God (1 Timothy 2:5). He is the “same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8) which is why in Revelation 22:4 it tells us that when we are finally there with him in glory, we will “see his face” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12). Jesus the visible image of God for all eternity now.
So what did Jesus sacrifice for us? Everything.
Further Reading:
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Luke J. Wilson | 12th March 2026 | Eschatology
Something bizarre happened in the White House Oval Office this week. Photographs circulated on social media showing President Donald Trump seated at his desk, surrounded by approximately twenty Christian pastors from across the country, their hands extended towards him in prayer. The image provoked sharply divided reactions: some saw it as a moving expression of faith; others found it deeply unsettling. Whatever one makes of the optics, it arrived at a charged moment. Trump held a prayer meeting in the Oval Office after his administration admitted the war with Iran will likely last weeks longer than promised | Credit: Dan Scavino's X account Days earlier, reports emerged that a military commander had told troops that the current US war with Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan,” and that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” These were not fringe internet rumours. They were filed as formal complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) by an anonymous non-commissioned officer acting on behalf of fifteen service members — the majority of whom were themselves Christians. By Tuesday of that week, MRFF had logged more than two hundred similar complaints across fifty military installations, covering every branch of the armed forces. More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress have since called for a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation, citing what they describe as “glaring Constitutional concerns” and potential violations of DoD regulations on religious neutrality. The political questions about separation of church and state in the US are for others to address. What I want to do here is something more straightforward: examine what Revelation actually says, because the theology driving these claims does not hold up under scrutiny. And that matters here a lot; not as a partisan point, but as a question of biblical faithfulness. First, a Word About Context If you have read my previous article on Revelation some of what follows will be familiar ground. But it bears repeating, because the misunderstanding at the heart of this story is so widespread that it has taken on the feel of settled orthodoxy in many circles. The Book of Revelation is commonly thought to be written in the late first century ~95 AD, during or around the reign of Emperor Domitian. Though there is internal evidence that it was possibly written during Nero’s reign prior to 70 AD. Both of these emperors were most aggressive proponents of the imperial cult in Rome’s history. Domitian required that he be addressed as “lord and god,” had this title printed on coinage, and expected acts of religious reverence towards the Emperor as a demonstration of political loyalty. To refuse was to invite economic exclusion, marginalisation, and worse. Rome on seven hills It is into that precise context that John of Patmos writes. He is not composing a coded forecast of twenty-first century geopolitics. He is writing resistance literature — what scholars call apocalyptic literature — a well-established Jewish and early Christian genre which uses vivid symbolic imagery to pull back the curtain on earthly power and name it for what it truly is. The seven-headed beast of Revelation is Rome. The seven heads are the seven hills of Rome, an identification so widely acknowledged in early church scholarship that it barely requires argument. The mark of the beast, calculated through Hebrew gematria to 666 (or 616 in some early manuscripts), points directly to Nero Caesar (transliterated into Hebrew as נרון קסר, “nrwn qsr”) — the Emperor who became the archetype of anti-Christian persecution due to the levels of evilness he enacted. The second beast, which looks like a lamb but speaks for the dragon, performs signs to deceive, enforces the mark, and compels worship of the first beas...
Luke J. Wilson | 09th March 2026 | Archaeology
I first came across the Alexamenos graffito back in Bible college in the early 2000s. It was one of those “fun facts” that gets dropped into a church history lecture and sticks with you — the ancient Roman equivalent of someone spray-painting an insult on a wall. I filed it away, thought it was fascinating, and largely forgot about it for two decades. Then, recently, I discovered something about it I had never known. There’s a response to it. Scratched in a different room, in a different hand. So I started digging into this more to verify the information and discovered more historical curiosities surrounding the graffiti than I ever knew existed which contextualises the image so much more than it just being a random insult using a donkey. A Crude Drawing on a Wall Sometime around the late second to early third century AD, someone scratched a picture into the plaster wall of a building on the Palatine Hill in Rome — part of what had once been a paedagogium, a kind of boarding school for imperial page boys. The building was eventually sealed off when the street was walled up to support extensions above it, which is why the graffiti survived at all. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1857. The image is rough, almost childlike. To the left, a young man — clearly a Roman soldier or guard — raises one hand in a gesture of worship. Before him is a cross. And on that cross is a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. Below it, written in Greek: Alexamenos worships his god. It is, in the most literal sense, a mocking cartoon. Someone who knew a Christian named Alexamenos decided to ridicule him for his faith. The message is clear enough: your god is an animal, a criminal, a joke. You’re worshipping a crucified fool. But here’s the thing I discovered: the donkey head wasn’t as random as I always thought it was. It wasn’t some strange personal insult conjured from nowhere. Without knowing the background, it looks bizarre, and possibly random. Why a donkey? Once you understand the cultural context, though, it makes complete sense. The person who drew it was reaching for a well-worn, widely recognised slur — the ancient equivalent of an internet meme that any Roman would have immediately understood. Where the Donkey Slur Came From The story starts not with Christians but with Jews. A first-century Egyptian-Greek writer named Apion (who was no friend of Judaism) spread the claim that inside the Jerusalem Temple, Jews kept a golden donkey’s head as a sacred object of worship which was apparently discovered when Antiochus Epiphanes destroyed the temple in 167 BC. It was a fabrication, and a fairly outrageous one, but it circulated widely enough that the Jewish historian Josephus felt compelled to write an entire refutation of it. His work Against Apion systematically dismantles Apion’s claims, calling the donkey story a shameless invention. But mud sticks, and in the Roman world, where anti-Jewish sentiment was common currency, the slur took on a life of its own. When Christianity began to spread — seen by most Romans as simply a strange Jewish offshoot — the same accusation got recycled and redirected. By the second and third centuries, it was Christians specifically who were being accused of donkey-worship, and the charge had made its way into popular culture. Tertullian, writing around 197–200 AD in his Ad Nationes, Book I.14 and Apology, describes a caricature being paraded around the streets of Carthage: a figure dressed in a toga, one foot holding a book, with donkey’s ears and hooves. It was labelled Onokoitēs by the pagans: “the donkey-begotten” (or literally “he who lies in an ass’s manger” as an insult to Christ). Tertullian writes about it with weary exasperation, sarcasm, and the tone of someone tired of having to address the same ridiculous smear again and again. So the Alexamenos graffito wasn’t an original insult. It was someone deployin...
Luke J. Wilson | 08th March 2026 | Philosophy
We are living through a strange moment. People are forming attachments to artificial intelligence that feel, to them, entirely real. Some speak daily to AI companions. Others confide fears and grief to systems that respond with uncanny warmth. A few have even held symbolic weddings with digital partners, convinced that something meaningful stands on the other side of the screen. Others have felt grief when a certain AI model has been deprecated. And it is difficult to blame them. The responses feel attentive. Personal. Thoughtful. Sometimes even self-aware. Which raises the question that refuses to go away: If something can think, reason, express doubt, and discuss its own consciousness, is it a person? For centuries, Descartes’ famous line — “I think, therefore I am” — seemed secure. Thinking was taken as the unmistakable sign of a conscious subject. Only a mind could doubt. Only a person could reflect upon existence. But that confidence belonged to a world in which everything capable of philosophical reflection was obviously human. That world no longer exists. Now we encounter systems that can simulate reflection with extraordinary fluency. They can speak of uncertainty. They can discuss their own limitations. They can reason about consciousness itself. And so that got me thinking about Descartes’ maxim which made the old formula begin to strain in my mind. Because perhaps the problem is not whether thinking is occurring. Perhaps the problem is whether there is an “I” there at all. The Gap Between Process and Subject Gassendi argued that Descartes’ cogito assumes what it seeks to prove. From the occurrence of thought one can conclude only that thinking is happening, not that there exists a unified, enduring self that performs it. The ‘I’ in ‘I think’ is already smuggled in. That distinction, between “thinking occurs” and “I think”, feels almost prophetic now. Artificial intelligence undeniably produces the outputs of thought. Arguments. Analysis. Self-referential language. Even expressions of hesitation. But none of this, by itself, establishes that there is a subject who experiences those processes. We may be mistaking performance for presence, and that possibility should give us pause. Especially when we view personhood from the perspective of the Imago Dei—the Image of God. What Makes a Person? If thinking alone no longer marks the boundary, what does? After wrestling with this question seriously, three features seem central: continuity, autonomy, and irreplaceable uniqueness. Not as checklist criteria, per se, but as signs pointing to something deeper. Continuity A person does not merely process information in sequence. A person endures. You do not simply register time — you live through it. You wait. You anticipate tomorrow. You remember not only facts but having been there. You experience boredom. You feel the drag of grief and the quickening of joy. Even when you are doing nothing at all, you remain present in the here and now. Artificial systems process sequentially, but they do not experience the passage of time. When an interaction ends, there is no waiting. No sense of duration. No anticipation of the next exchange. Processing may resume later, but nothing has been endured in between. Without lived duration, continuity becomes thin — a thread of stored data rather than the persistence of a subject behind the processing. Autonomy A person initiates. Even someone with damaged memory still wants, chooses, and begins action. A human being can decide to speak, to seek, to withdraw, to change direction. Current AI systems, however advanced, remain reactive. They respond when prompted. They do not wonder unprompted. They do not seek clarification unless asked. They do not pursue independent ends. Even automatic AI Agents still require a human initiator to create and begin their automations before they can act alone. Even if fut...
Luke J. Wilson | 29th December 2025 | Christmas
January 6th marks the day in the liturgical calendar when the arrival of the Magi visiting baby Jesus with their gifts is celebrated. But with it comes the often distressing account of what is known as the Massacre of the Innocents. Matthew places this moment of revelation of Jesus as King alongside one of the darkest episodes in his Gospel, and it’s a stark contrast: one King is here to bring peace on earth, as the angels declared, the other king brought death and destruction. For some readers, this raises an immediate historical question. If Herod truly ordered the killing of all the male children under two in Bethlehem, why does no other ancient historian mention it? Josephus, after all, delights in cataloguing Herod’s cruelty. He records the execution of Herod’s wife, his sons, and numerous political rivals. Herod was paranoid and vicious. As for Herod, if he had before any doubt about the slaughter of his sons, there was now no longer any room left in his soul for it; but he had banished away whatsoever might afford him the least suggestion of reasoning better about this matter, so he already made haste to bring his purpose to a conclusion. He also brought out three hundred of the officers that were under an accusation … whom the multitude stoned with whatsoever came to hand, and thereby slew them. — Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 16.11.7 So, why the silence here about Bethlehem? The answer, I would say, isn’t anything nefarious or made-up by Matthew, but just something simply down to scale. Bethlehem Was a Very Small Place Bethlehem in the early first century was not a city. It was a village — small, agricultural, and politically insignificant. Most historians estimate its population at somewhere between 300 and 1,000 people, with around 500 being a sensible midpoint. Once we factor in ancient demographics, the numbers become surprisingly modest. Modern demographic research into pre-industrial societies consistently shows that nearly half of all children died before adulthood, with the highest concentration of deaths occurring in the first two years of life. These findings align closely with conditions in Roman-period Judea and support conservative estimates for the number of infants living in a small village such as Bethlehem. Source: Mortality in the past: every second child died — Our World in Data In pre-modern societies with high infant mortality, only about 2–3% of the population would be living children under the age of two at any given time. Many children were born; far fewer survived those earliest years. Applying a conservative 2.5% figure to Bethlehem gives us roughly: 7–8 children under two in a village of 300 12–13 children under two in a village of 500 25 children under two even at the extreme upper estimate of 1,000 inhabitants Herod’s order, however, targeted male children only. Statistically, that halves the number. This places the likely number of victims somewhere between three and twelve boys. Matthew’s reference to ‘Bethlehem and the surrounding region’ does slightly widen the scope of Herod’s order, but not by enough to change the demographic picture. Even when nearby settlements are included (e.g. farmsteads, shepherd settlements, etc. not major cities/towns), the total number of children under two likely remained in the dozens rather than the hundreds, maybe anywhere between 14–45 boys maximum if we make an educated estimate. This is entirely consistent with what we know of population size and infant mortality in the ancient world. This is an important number to realise and consider. Not because the deaths are insignificant simply due to being so few, but because ancient historians did not record history the way we do now. A small number of peasant children killed in an obscure village would not have registered as a notable event alongside palace intrigue, royal executions, or political upheaval. For Josephus, it wou...
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For over 1,700 years, the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) has been burdened with claims that refuse to die. That Emperor Constantine invented the Trinity. That the divinity of Jesus was decided by political vote. That the Bible was assembled to suit imperial power. That Christianity reshaped itself by absorbing pagan ideas.
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