Why Did Jesus Have to Die? · Group Guide

Discussion Questions

1. 1

   Read Isaiah 53:4-6 out loud. Kent pointed out that Isaiah wrote "pierced" roughly 150 years before crucifixion had been invented, and 650-700 years before Jesus was born. What lands differently when you read those verses as something written that far ahead of the event?

2. 2

   Kent walked through the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 — two goats, one killed to pay for the people's sins and one driven out of the camp carrying them away. He noted Jesus was crucified outside the city walls and said, "He is our Azazel." What does each of those two goats show that the other one doesn't?

3. 3

   Kent said Jesus stayed silent at his trial when a word in his own defense could have ended it — the witnesses could not even agree. Isaiah 53:7 calls it a lamb that does not open its mouth. Why do you think that silence is part of the picture rather than a detail?

4. 4

   Kent grew up around sheep and said they are "not the rocket scientists of the animal kingdom" — that wandering off from the shepherd is not just rebellious, it is stupid, because on your own you are defenseless. Where have you wandered off and called it independence?

5. 5

   Garrison Keillor's Uncle John cried every Thanksgiving when he prayed, because he had never gotten over the cross. Kent named the opposite reflex: "yeah, but that was 2,000 years ago." Which of those two is closer to where you are right now, and what got you there?

6. 6

   Kent ended with the Australian pastor who found a newborn lamb alive under its dead mother, covered in her blood, and then said plainly: he takes my sin, I get his righteousness. What is one thing you are still carrying as though the bill were still yours — and who will you say it out loud to before next Sunday?