Why did Jesus die?

When Jesus died by crucifixion at the first Easter, was it a human sacrifice? God hated the pagan practice of human or child sacrifice among some of the Canaanite people of Old Testament times (those who worshipped Molech, Leviticus 18:21.) Why would he have made his own son Jesus die, to appease himself, in the very manner he called despicable and abominable in the Old Testament? It doesn't make sense.

In the Old Testament, God did require animal sacrifices, as a way of dealing with the people's wrongdoings, to restore a right relationship with him. And it is true that in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews calls Jesus the one perfect sacrifice, paying for all our wrongdoings, doing away with the need for the sacrificial system.  Evangelical western Christianity has tended to home in on the language of sacrifice to explain the death of Jesus on the cross.

But I have read and heard a few things recently that have made me see it a bit differently. I have followed some debates as to whether Jesus was really appeasing his own father's anger on the cross. Could that be right? And when we say that Jesus "paid the price" for our sins, whom exactly was he paying? Was he paying God? Or satan? CS Lewis' first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, speaks to that a bit when the boy Edmund is captured by the White Witch - Aslan meets the Witch at night and offers himself instead of Edmund and so he Aslan is killed on the Stone Table. But the person demanding and extracting the payment is the Witch, not Aslan. She seems to be in the role of Satan. And after submitting to obey the ancient law (equivalent with the OT Law?) Aslan overcomes the law and death itself, is resurrected, and quickly joins his people who are already fighting the Witch, defeats and destroys her, restores all the poor creatures who have been subjugated to her, and frees Narnia to be the harmonious, beautiful, joyful land it was originally intended to be.

This story seems to fit with the understanding of the Christian Gospel which I heard described a few nights ago by Brad Jersak, under the title "The Beautiful Gospel." In his telling of the Gospel, he descries how, as often as human beings turn their back on God in rejection of him or his ways, God moves to where they are and faces towards them again, always seeking and longing to be face to face with them (us). He talked about something like "the unending pursuit of a relentless God" - but pursuing us with love, not anger. God longing for us to be in relationship with him.

In the beautiful Gospel, God never punishes us for our sin. That is not his desire nor his method. He does though let us take the consequences of sin. Every selfish act has bad consequences one way or another. For example, our friendships and family life get marred when we act selfishly or get angry, when we don't count each other's needs as equal to our own. Sometimes we don't suffer the consequences of our own selfishness, but other people do (like when we wear a cheap T-shirt made by a child-labourer somewhere else n the world) - and other times we do suffer consequences of other people's wrong-doing - like when greedy government policies result in poor planning and, for instance, the flooding of land which could have been avoided. Nobody is being punished - but we are living in a world where everybody's actions have consequences, for good or bad, and we are all bound up in it together.

So when Jesus died on the cross, it was not that God nailed him there to make him pay for us. It was that God entered the world as Jesus, God in man, and lived a perfect life. In telling the truth that he was the Son of God, and in gaining so much popular support because of his wise teaching and loving miracles, he incurred the anger of the ruling parties, who used the system to get him put to death. Jesus gave himself up to dying, he was not forced to do it by an angry God. It was a self-sacrifice, to carry through to the bitter end the battle between God and Satan. Jesus death was like the lightning rod for all of satan's hatred of God, for all the consequences of sin in the world, for all time. And the death was not the end - as in the Aslan story - Jesus overcame death, rose out of the tomb, and entered heaven. It is incredible - it is supernatural -, but, he is God.