Was Jesus Born So He Could Die?

A few years ago, I heard a preacher at an evangelical church claim that Jesus was born in order to die. My immediate reaction was that there was something wrongheaded about this way of thinking. Accepting this claim meant that dying was the really important thing Jesus did; the rest of his life was like a preliminary to the main event. I knew where the preacher was coming from. He assumed the same teaching about Jesus’s death that I had received as a child: that through the death of Jesus the penalty for sin had been paid so that God could turn from wrath to forgiveness. But it now seems to me that seeing dying as Jesus’s main accomplishment gets things backwards.