I am extremely displeased when people talk about the wrath of God or how, “the word propitiation refers to the fist of the Father, striking the Son….” or anything else that presents Jesus as a being, completely separate from His Father, a Father who is allegedly abusive and violent. That’s just wrong, unbiblical, and evil. I’ve said many times before, this really is a hill I will die on.
So, so many people are separated from God because they have heard these half-truths, these false personifications, these misunderstandings, and internalized them. The God they reject is actually made in the image of their rage filled alcoholic father, their violent mother, or any other angry, out of control person they’ve ever had the misfortune of being exposed to.
They perceive that false image of God and quite rightly recoil in horror. Not only will I not follow such a “god,” I refuse to believe he exists. Maybe that is completely illogical, but it is moral. Such a “god” should not be followed. Our innate morality written on the tablet of our heart, is designed to revoke the authority, even to revoke the very existence of that which we believe is evil.
So the first verse that is really important to hang onto is John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1, they are One. Jesus is God in human form, fully human, fully Divine. God came to Earth on a rescue mission and laid down His life like a soldier might throw himself over a land mine to save his brothers, or a husband might step between his wife and a mugger, or perhaps like a father might drown while rescuing his son. It was an act of great sacrificial love, not an act of cosmic child abuse. John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
The next verse that is really important is Matthew 3:17, “and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
God is steadfast, unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is not praising “His beloved Son in whom he is well pleased” one minute, and pouring out His wrath upon Him in the next moment.
Psalm 22 is also a verse that applies here. On the cross Jesus says, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” From that one line many people falsely extrapolate that God abandoned Jesus, that He was forsaken, that God was so disgusted with Him, He left Him to die alone.
The thing is, Jesus quoted the Bible all the time and it is a very prophetic book. It speaks of the coming Messiah over and over again. So, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is actually the first verse of Psalm 22, a Psalm that ends with, “They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”
The sky has already darkened at this point, the temple curtain has already been torn, and Jesus is declaring His victory, repeating the words of prophecy. He is not lamenting His feelings of abandonment. He cannot be abandoned, because He and the Father are One.
We who live today are, “a people yet unborn and He has done it!” Rejoice!
There really is a, “Light so lovely, that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” One the hardest things to do however, is to convince people that God loves them, that God so loved the world that He basically gave Himself, that the world through Him might be saved.
God does not “hate our sin,” He hates the separation from Him that our sin causes. Jesus came to reconcile us to Himself, to end the separation, to bridge the gap, to tear down the curtain.
We could do a word search of “propitiation,” we could speak of the origins, of the Ark of the Covenant, of the cherubim guarding the yet empty throne upon it, guarding “the mercy seat.” Those verses are prophetic in their own right, they speak of the coming of Jesus, of how He shall be seated in victory upon that throne, and bridge the gap as our propitiation, our mercy seat, our cover. “Propitiation” is not the angry fist of God nor is it sacrificing our children to a violent volcano “god” in a Pagan ritual. Jesus is our propitiation, our cover, our mercy seat, our torn veil, the Ark of the Covenant revealed to us, and He is now seated in victory.
He is not a victim, He actually chose to lay down His life for us. He wanted to save us, He desired to do it. In Matthew 26:53 He tells us quite clearly, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” He had a choice. He chose to save us.
We could do a word search, we could read the Bible, we could post scripture, but at the end of the day I know this issue is actually a heart problem, a spiritual issue, and it’s just not the kind of thing that can be healed with facts and figures. It is our heart that gets it wrong, it is a relationship fracture, a disconnect that causes us to recreate God in our own image, or worse, in the image of those who cause us to recoil.
Jesus really is, “a Light so lovely that we want to know the source of Him with all our hearts.” He and the Father are One, He and the Holy Spirit are One, and it is a relationship we are invited into. The bible speaks often of being IN, as in, “is Christ IN you, are you IN Christ.” It is an invitation to come to Him, to come into Him, and it requires a decision made from your heart.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
I’m struggling to find the right words here; please bear with me.
The redemption that happened when Jesus endured the cross has many analogies. No single analogy covers the fullness of what was accomplished. They all fall short, but together they portray the victory of good over evil, the debt of sin paid in full, the wrath of God transferred away from sinners by the willing substitution of his own Son, and much much more.
To object to one of the analogies because other people have misused it is understandable, but I would prefer to see the misuse challenged rather than the analogy dropped. God is not a hate-filled child abuser. God is love. But, being love, God hates sin because of the damage it causes to the people he loves. God hates it, IB, when people are hateful and hurtful toward you, because he loves you. You are capable of forgiving them, though, because God has forgiven them. The debt for their sins–and your sins and my sins–was paid in full on the cross.
We cannot remove the doctrine of God’s wrath toward sin from the Bible. But we can understand and share the good news that his wrath has been lifted from sinners because of the voluntary sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the only-begotten Son of God. Yes, people will twist the description of that sacrifice into a horrid parody of redemption. And some who engage in that distortion call themselves Christians. But the cross remains ugly because sin is ugly, and sin was heaped upon Jesus at the cross. The man Jesus felt the separation sin places between sinners and God. His anguish at that separation echoed back in time to be recorded by David in Psalm 22. You are right, though, in saying that the victory won by Christ on the cross is also recorded in that Psalm. J.
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Good words, Salvageable. Well said.
The problem being, I have yet to meet anyone preaching the alleged wrath of God, the alleged hatred of God, who is not reflecting precisely that same persona upon their brothers and sisters. Conversely I have never met anyone breathing in the love and mercy of Christ who is not also sharing that with everyone around them.
The bible does not say by their wrath you shall know them, or by their condemnation of sin you shall know them, or by their hatred you shall know they are my disciples, it says, “you will know my disciples by their love for one another.”
The fist of God slamming into His innocent Son is not love, it is abuse and evil. The analogy doesn’t just need to be dropped, it needs to be pruned out and burned with all the other deadwood.
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“God does not “hate our sin,” He hates the separation from Him that our sin causes.”
Can’t get on board with that. He hates both.
“The God they reject is actually made in the image of their rage filled…”
While I don’t disagree that this can’t be projection, there’s not a single human being alive who hasn’t met an angry person, so this reasoning seems a little wonky.
All questions of the Trinity aside, I’d just ask this: if God wasn’t bringing wrath, what was Jesus surrendering to? A human punishment? Zero value. The shocking nature of God sacrificing his son is exactly what proves his determination to achieve our rescue. You seem to put the credit on the Son for all this…it belongs on the Father, too. He wasn’t a bystander. He did this. Especially if they are one.
It may sound awful, but Jesus never seemed to think so. It would be putting words in the Son’s mouth to protest what the Father did. Just look at Isaiah 53:10.
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“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him….” is a literary device, a way of saying, He was pleased to give His life to save us. “For God so loved the world” and “for the joy that was set before Him…”
It is not a statement declaring that God is sadistic and delighted in torturing His Son.
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Not sadism, but intention – the same way we discipline our children. He’s a lot more interested in us being saved than the alternative. Jesus was willing, he’s alive now, and we’re saved into the bargain.
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To equate the crucifixion with discipline just horrifies me, Brandon.
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My natural instincts don’t exactly leap to embrace it, either, and neither did Jesus’ (as we see in Gethsemane). But Jesus was wholly, single-mindedly given over to it. He knew the exact nature of his death throughout his entire ministry, prophesied it, accepted it. I’m going to share his viewpoint on the thing, whether it agrees with my incumbent instincts or not.
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IB, you’re up against a deeply-entrenched atonement theory that has dominated Western evangelicalism, even though it was not the dominant version for over 1,000 years of Christian history. Good luck with that! 🙂
But I’m totally with you on this one. The reason we cringe is because we should cringe. It’s not God! I’ve done extensive studies on this over several years because it didn’t sit right with me either. I will just point out a couple things here. It’s interesting that the older Septuagint (LXX) doesn’t render Isa. 53:10 the way the later Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts rendered it. Here’s two English translations of the LXX:
“And the Lord desires to cleanse him from his blow. If you give an offering for sin, your soul shall see a long-lived offspring.”(Isaiah 53:10 LXX – NETS)
“The Lord also is pleased to purge him from his stroke. If ye can give an offering for sin, your soul shall see a long-lived seed” (L.C.L. Brenton)
The Greek word that the Hebrew text rendered “crush” is καθαρίσαι (katharisai) in the LXX. This is where we get the English word, “cauterize” (like to cauterize a wound). We find variations of the word katharisai in the New Testament. It means “to cleanse, render pure, purify.”
For instance, we find this same Greek word in Matthew 8:2 (words in brackets added):
“A leper came up to him, knelt down, and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean“ [katharisai | καθαρίσαι]
The early church fathers basically saw the atonement as restorative justice, not retributive justice. The Eastern Orthodox still see it this way. We could break it down into two simplified parts:
First, God heals, forgives, and restores the perpetrator—us—by fusing our human nature to His divinity (by His hypostatic union). He healed our diseased human condition by fusing it to Himself and burying it in the grave forever!
Second, we see God restoring the victim—Jesus—by cleansing Him of our blow, and vindicating Him by raising Him up on the third day and making Him Lord over all! (Phil.2:8-11)
For me, this is the only version that is consistent with the nature of God and not projecting our religious sense of appeasement onto Him. But, like I said, good luck trying to get hardened Evangelicals to agree with you on that one (except me). 🙂
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Ha! Thanks Mel, it seems as if I am often a wee bit out numbered here! I had no idea how this kind of atonement theory really permeates so much of our faith.
I appreciate the word history too, the translations and intended meaning in those passages. In my mind “crush” is a good thing, like you crush grapes to get wine or crush flower petals to release the fragrance.
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“Crush” is good as long as you’re not saying that God was “pleased” to crush Jesus. That does makes Him sadistic no matter how you try to spin it to fit your conclusions. And I would try to make it work if I had to, but that’s not the case. Jesus certainly was crushed, not by God, but by the weight of our sin.
A few interesting things here. We have no original Hebrew Bible text anywhere. It was lost. The Masoretic manuscript (that we base Western Christian Old Testament on), while very reliable, was compiled by Jewish scholars around the 8th century AD. And this is where it gets tricky because translation sometimes must be interpolated, so bias can creep in, and the prevailing Rabbinical interpretation of Isaiah 53 by the 8th century was that the “Suffering Servant” is Israel. So, in that sense, it would make sense to them that God was “crushing” Israel for their disobedience. But it doesn’t make sense that He would crush Jesus. That would make Him a cosmic child abuser. But the LXX’s rendition makes total sense.
Also, the LXX was translated into Greek in the second and third century BC. It was the Scripture used by the apostles, quoted in the Epistles, and the early church fathers. If I have to choose which translation copies speaks to the heart of God, I’m going with the LXX.
We should also keep in mind that there are several atonement theories that are just as plausible as Penal Substitution, some are much older, and they don’t make God into a monster. So, it’s not heretical to disagree with this particular view, even though it dominates Western Christianity (although that’s beginning to change). I will go with the one that makes God sound like Jesus.
And I’ll go run for cover now 🙂
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@Brandon
Think you have a point, but some Christians have trouble with God hating anything. They don’t stop to think that we were made in God’s image. Don’t we hate that which hurts those we love? Is there something wrong with that? Well, when we are speaking of people there can be. We tend to confuse sin with sinners. God, however, has no trouble making the distinction.
Jesus lived a perfect life in the presence of imperfect people. To do that He had to suffer, and He had to learn too, apparently. He who was God had to be perfected.
I am fear we are still dull of hearing. At least I don’t understand everything in this passage. Fortunately, we don’t have to understand exactly what happened or how it happened, but it is important we believe it did happen, that Jesus paid the price for our sins.
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The “fist” aspect of the analogy can go. It’s a misstatement about God’s wrath at sin. “Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him” is a literary device the way every phrase is a literary device. It does meant that both Father and Son were pleased to redeem sinners through the voluntary suffering of the Son. No, God does not delight in torture. Yes, he does hate sin and wants to destroy sin. He destroys sin by nailing sin to the cross with his Son, killing it with his Son, and leaving sin dead and buried as his Son rises to life again.
The wrath of God against sin is used by the Bible writers and by most Christian preachers. I don’t think all of them are haters or are spreading hate. Quite the reverse: when they reveal the righteous wrath of God in its enormity, they open the way to reveal the love of God which is far more immense than his wrath.
If the analogy of the cross as punishment for sin transferred to the sinless Son of God makes you uncomfortable, by all means use the other analogies: Jesus paying our debt, or Jesus defeating our enemies. But realize that something about your own past or personality spoils the analogy for you; while we both know people who distort the analogy, it is very helpful to the faith of some Christians. J.
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“….while we both know people who distort the analogy, it is very helpful to the faith of some Christians.”
At what cost? At what price? It not only drives people away from Jesus, it is not even good doctrine! Even I will not follow a God with an angry fist who delighted in crucifixion and execution just to discipline us. Such a god is perverse immoral, not Holy, not the Lord I know!
It doesn’t just “make me uncomfortable,” it makes me furious because it is so blasphemous, such a dark and ugly bit of slander.
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Truthfully, IB, what happened in those courtrooms and in the streets of Jerusalem and on the cross outside of Jerusalem should make you and me furious, sick at heart, and horrified. Too often we let our Passion Plays become too much Play and too little Passion. Our anger should not be at God, though. It was NOT the Father’s fist that struck Christ; it was the fists of temple guards and of Roman soldiers. But as others have pointed out yesterday and today, “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities… and by his wounds we are healed.” We should be angry at evil in the abstract and at particular sinners. We should be angry at the devil, the sinful world around us, and the sin still dwelling within each of us. But before that anger boils over into hatred–whether of thoughts or words or actions–we discover that in his Passion Christ defeated the devil, the sinful world around us, and the sin still dwelling within each of us. We don’t have to stay at the foot of the cross weeping, for (as you are fond of saying, and rightly so), He is risen indeed.
The sacrificial love of Christ is lovely; it is pure and perfect, and it redeems our sinful hearts. The cross is ugly. It reveals the brutality of sin and the cost of sin. Even though we do not remain at the cross, we also do not ignore the cross. While we live in this sin-polluted world, the ugly cross is our assurance of forgiveness, of life, of a share in His victory. If we grasp for glory without the cross, we have left Christ’s fellowship and are in danger of building our own religion. J.
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Truly, it’s not what happened in courtrooms long ago nor on the streets of Jerusalem that troubles me, but what is happening right now within our church, among believers. If we believe these false doctrines, we have ALREADY built our own religion and missed the entire point.
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What is the false doctrine? I’m not sure I’m following.
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The false doctrine is that the Father and Son are separate beings, so the wrath filled, child abusing Father tortured His innocent Son to punish us for our own sin.
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I can see where the intent or heart of the Father being abusive is false, but I believe Father and Son are separate parts of the Triune God. Not that anyone can really understand the Trinity.
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Yes, the Trinity is beyond human understanding. One God, yet three Persons. They speak to one another, love one another, and do things for one another. So the one Christ, fully human and fully God, can experience the wrath of the Father and feel abandoned by the Father while remaining one with the Father. J.
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May I copy and use that quote meme by Madelein L’Engle?
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I hope so, because that’s what I did. 🙂
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LOL! Thank you so much. 🙂
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BTW this hill you’re willing to die on? It is one of the few I am willing to die on also!
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Amen! It’s good to have a hill to die on…..well sort of, I think. 🙂
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The Father and the Son are One, yes, but at the same time the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father. They are One, and they are distinct. I don’t understand how this can be, yet Scripture insists it is true.
In the same way, the Father went with the Son to the Cross, AND the Father turned his face away from the Son at the Cross. Again, I don’t quite understand how both can be true at the same time, yet by faith I trust it is so.
You are correct when you say “the fist of God slamming into his Son is abuse, and evil”. That is the paradox, the scandal of the Cross – that the most vile and evil of all actions is precisely what we are saved by; only a real sacrifice – the blood of an innocent – can pay for real sin. The Father doesn’t exactly get off scot-free in this transaction either. He risks tarnishing his good Name (as your analogy demonstrates) in the exchange. What blows me away is that He is willing to take the hit…for me.
The Cross WAS an act of evil, yet that is where our salvation was accomplished. The Bible does not shy away from this, and calls it a scandal, for what could be more scandalous than a Father who forsakes the Righteous Son – yes, even abuses the Son’s love for the Father, asking of him what no father should ever ask of a son? The Bible does not shy away from looking at the scandal of the Cross full in the face, and perhaps neither should we.
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“…..what could be more scandalous than a Father who forsakes the Righteous Son – yes, even abuses the Son’s love for the Father…”
I really don’t know whether to burst into tears or just go throw up, but this is so not true.
The scandal of the cross was about grace and restoration, not about Father smashing in His innocent child’s face with an angry fist, nor was it about abusing the Son’s love for His father. If that is what people believe than what people believe is wrong.
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Some of your “counselors” remind me a bit of Job’s counselors. The Lord has all this sorted out already, but human language is woefully lacking when it comes to us using it to communicate to each other the Mind of Christ. I find this frustratingly true on a daily basis.
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“Human language is woefully lacking” when it comes to describing holy things–there’s no doubt about that. But God has given us his message in the Bible, using our human language to communicate to us.
As for Job’s counselors, they were saying that we get what we deserve in this world, that God makes no mistakes and therefore that suffering and evil must be his will. That message is wrong. We get better than we deserve because Jesus humbled himself and took on himself suffering and punishment he did not deserve. No one who points to that truth is sounding like Job’s counselors. J.
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Yes, the mystery of the Trinity, and also the mystery of the two natures of Christ. He could suffer as a man and still be unchanged and unchanging as true God. I’ve been reading quite a bit about that lately. J.
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Thank you!
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I encourage you to look at Abraham and Isaac as a foreshadowing of God’s heart towards the cross to come. Yes, Abraham (the Father) was willing to give Isaac (the Son), but Isaac was willing to lay down his life as the Father requested. God was willing to sacrifice Jesus, and Jesus was willing to die in our place. The abusive Father analogy is never accurate to begin with.
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Yes, and God stopped Abraham’s hand. He did not want Abraham to kill Isaac! God did not tell us that story because He was advocating child sacrifice, in fact the precise opposite.
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A sinful human’s death could not accomplish salvation, so it would be pointless. Jesus as the perfect, sinless Lamb of God could step in and die for sinners. It’s tragic, but sin demanded punishment – the only way for God to remain just was to punish Jesus in our place.
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God did not torture Jesus to punish us for sin. That is morally incongruent. That makes God evil and unjust.
God’s solution to the problem of sin was to stand in the gap on our behalf, in an act of great compassion and sacrificial love. The only way for God to remain just was to lay down His very life for us in an act of great compassion, not in the pursuit of punishment and wrath.
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Agreed. Jesus was punished for our sins so we wouldn’t be. The cross demonstrates a compassionate and loving God, One that loved us so much He gave His son.
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Quite right–God did not torture Jesus to punish us. Jesus accepted our punishment to set us free–free from sin, free from death, free to be the people he first created us to be.
God does stand in the gap in great compassion and sacrificial love. No disagreement there. But this does not cancel the reality of the wrath of God toward sin. Without that wrath there is no gap. Without that wrath there is no separation. And without that wrath God is evil and unjust, approving of sin and making himself a partner to sin. J.
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Pingback: Why the cross? – Salvageable
Amen. A light so lovely…
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The source of ‘that light,’ that light which lighteth every man that comes into the world- is governed by the Father of lights-
One would be therefore hard pressed to think that the Father would cut the hands off His son when He hears: can you please pass the potatoes,
Even in judgement God is gracious and kind.
Forsaken and nearness and dearness both kissed. Christ hath done all things well.
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Good luck with your campaign. “The work of the Trinity is indivisible.” These de facto polytheistic atonement stories ignore the Bible [“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself …” 2 Cor 5:19] and are a good example of finite human beings having the audacity to imagine that God is beholden to our metaphors. The idea that God is LESS moral than human beings is nonsense. When that’s our theology, we’ve got to know we’ve got some rethinking to do. You go, girl!
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…a good example of finite human beings having the audacity to imagine that God is beholden to our metaphors.
Yes. God is more than any of us could ever imagine. But he is also what the words in the Bible say he is. We claim that those are his words in the Bible, and so we should take things at face value (and not as metaphors) when we describe behaviors of God that God himself has described for us. So – with regard to whether there is a degree of separation among the entities that make up the trinity consider the following. I won’t quote scripture because I don’t intend for this to be a throwdown. Just food for thought. But each of these points comes from a specific scripture(s):
– Jesus said that no man can come to the Father except through him (Jesus)
– Jesus said that no man could come to him except that the Father, which had sent him (Jesus), draw them.
– Jesus said that all that the Father gives him, he would not cast out.
– The Bible says that no man can say that Jesus is Lord without the help of the Holy Spirit.
– The Bible says that, after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father.
– The Bible says that, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgivness of sin.
– The Bible says that Jesus was designated as the lamb to be slain for our sin before the world was created. That means before Adam and Eve were created. Jesus was designated as the rescue for the sins Adam and Eve would commit before they were even created. (God was the creator. He created whatever he wanted to create. He could have created Adam and Eve to not need a savior, but he didn’t …)
These are things that God’s Words says. They are not metaphors. And they cannot be true without a.) some degree of separation among the three entities (Father; Son; Holy Spirit), and; b.) some degree of forethought and planning about what they wanted to have happen in this present creation.
We can create God in our own image; we can imagine a God that we would be comfortable giving our allegience to. God warns us not to do that. God is our creator, and he does all that he please, whether we like it or not. God tells us that in the Bible as well. And I have never thought that God’s plain word to us (I do all that I please – [whether we like it or not]) was a metaphor.
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I do not want to hijack someone else’s blog.
Here’s a quick clarification for the record: I did not say the Triune God is a metaphor. I also do not think orthodox theology understands the persons to be “separate.” Clearly not so separate that orthodox Christianity fails to be monotheistic. One and only one God is our story and we’re sticking to it. So, the persons are not as separate as a human father is from a human son, despite the way preachers talk in church sometimes. The persons are distinct.
The hermeneutical issue of the status of Biblical words about God and the extent to which we can or should understand them as literal language is a much longer conversation.
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I appreciate your words, Hat. Naturally there is some mystery, some metaphor and allegory needed to wrap our brains around the nature of the Trinity. I guess the part that is so important to me is that we fully understand the unity of the relationship, like how there is “one flesh” between husband and wife or how “my child is my heart,” or any other examples of close and loving human relationships that we may have to draw from.
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Here’s something I think you will like, along these lines. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/04/16/penal-substitutionary-atonement-and-the-living-christ/
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Hey Memi, hope you are well. Seems like these last two posts, and the comments have been hard for you to process.
As always, I may say some oddball things, but they are always meant to be helpful.
Just to start with the absurd, in John 6 below, Jesus was not promoting cannibalism, ; – ) but He was saying that we have to partake of His personal sacrifice to be reconciled with God.(eat his flesh and drink his blood)
Please note that Jesus, God Himself, spoke these hard truths, and many turned their backs on Him when He spoke them.
I like Madeleine L’engle, but as nice as she may be, she is not Lord, Jesus is.
Jesus did and does teach some hard things, searing light at times, that illuminates our darkness, so that we may see our darkness, and give it up!
Hope that helps Memi, and redemptive Easter to all of us, when it comes!
Amen.
John 6
53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. 54 The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, 55 because my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven; it is not like the manna[l] your ancestors ate—and they died. The one who eats this bread will live forever.”
59 He said these things while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
60 Therefore, when many of his disciples heard this, they said, “This teaching is hard. Who can accept[m] it?”
61 Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were complaining about this, asked them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you were to observe the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 The Spirit is the one who gives life. The flesh doesn’t help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. 64 But there are some among you who don’t believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning those who did not[n] believe and the one who would betray him.) 65 He said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted to him by the Father.”
66 From that moment[o] many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “You don’t want to go away too, do you?”
68 Simon Peter answered, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”[p]
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This teaching is not “hard,” this teaching is flat out wrong.
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Pingback: On atonement theories and the nature of God | In My Father's House
Well, IB, you certainly opened a can of…can’t say “worms”…maybe I could say “You opened a box of TNT.” Being a student of God (that’s another way of saying “theologian”) I see something in all of those theories of atonement. But in the last few years, I’ve been drawn back to the very beginning–what God design and intended before The Fall. There God said, “Look, if you do what I’ve told you not to do, then you die.” Why would God say such a thing? Because His holiness cannot tolerate sin. Sin indeed has a price on it–yes, a penalty.
Jesus paid that price–that penalty. I know it sounds horrible to some, that The Father would punish The Son for our sins. But for me, this describes the beauty of God’s love for us sinners. God does the unthinkable–becoming one of us in order to die for all of us. If you consider that God actually did turn His back on Jesus–Jesus suffering not for Himself but for us sinners–that is a most unbelievable, incredible kind of love. This is the love God has for us. I could say more….maybe I will in another blog….
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This was an excellent rebuttal to the false notion that God is an abusive and ruthless father. Many of the subsequent comments are equally biblically sound responses.
I posted a related Article to my blog – The Physical Body of Christ @ https://mjthompsons.wordpress.com/the-physical-body-of-christ/. It specifically addresses the reason Christ repeated the cry of the Psalmist “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
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I never could understand how some people think of God in such a way.
Now I know why.
All I can share is my experience.
God has shown me nothing but love.
When I was lost in the wilderness of addiction, He was right there protecting me and I didn’t know it.
He has a plan for each and every one of us..
Thanks for the insight.
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Wow!! Did you ever jump into a deep one, my friend.
After reading some of the comments, it is clear that several do not understand Isaiah 53. When the Bible speaks of the Father being pleased to wound the Son, it was not because He was happy to see the suffering. It was because He was joyful over the outcome or the end result of that suffering. He was wounded for us…He was bruised for us…the chastisement for our peace was put upon Him… our sicknesses were placed upon Him.
11 As a result of the anguish of His soul,
He will see it and be satisfied;
By His knowledge the Righteous One,
My Servant, will justify the many,
As He will bear their iniquities.
Hebrews 12:2 says that “for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross…” The joy was the reestablishment of a relationship. We can never truly comprehend such a love.
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Amen, Patrick! I’m with you 100%. That’s exactly how I see it, too.
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I guess God is more easily rejected when we remodel Him into something repulsive, He is more easily accepted when we proceed in the opposite direction, too. He may get a laugh out of this … And He remains what He is regardless and so also with His universe, seems to me.
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