At the Cross, Jesus was not rendering satisfaction for debts, but demonstrating forgivevness of sins, thereby conciliating offenders by God’s evident love and graciousness!

“ONE-TRACK MIND”

Forgive me if it seems to me that penal substitution advocates have a one-track mind. Have you noticed that it never faintly occurs to them to ask what ever became of God’s “necessary” rewarding (premial) justice? This is surely a most debilitating blind spot, or worse, tunnel-vision in their perception. By “justice,” they always and only mean penal, punitive justice, which a vast host of Scriptures in both Old and New Testaments testify to be but one aspect of justice, yet with the rewarding or restorative facet remaining the chief part of justice! In fact, offenders were usually (except in capital crimes) “punished” PRECISELY BY BEING REQUIRED TO RESTORE TO THEIR VICTIMS, WITH A NECESSARY SURPLUS. [6/13/11;5/19/24]

At the Cross, Jesus was not “accomplishing a real satisfaction for the debt of sin,” he was demonstrating a real forgiveness of the deed of sin perpetrated there. It was his gracious forgiveness there (instead of sending in the angelic troops) that God further endorsed on the third day by utterly reversing the deadly effects of their murderous deed—itself worthy of death!—by raising His Son from among the dead and bequeathing him sovereignty over all. GOD’S TRIUMPHANT TRUMP! [6/13/11; 5/19/24]

Penal substitution does not connect the dots of Biblical texts and terms regarding the Atonement, it crosswires them. [6/14/11]

Once we grasp the premial nature of the Atonement we can see the teachings of Jesus in their true light, for he fulfilled them in his career and death to a degree otherwise obscure and even contradictory (on the penal substitution assumption), for in that case he would be exemplifying what is impossible in principle for us to emulate, thus undermining their ethical relevance and societal force. Yet on premial assumptions Christ accomplished to perfection, along with a stupendous supercompensating award from God’s rewarding justice for the sake of the whole doomed race, what the rest of us human beings can in principle undertake to a worthy extent in the power of the Spirit he procured for us, despite our being born in sin. Thus Christ’s total work both accomplished the impossible and thereby acquired the power that enables us to make a very commendable start at “doing the impossible” too! This is the engine of the Kingdom of God! The true Christian ethic and lifestyle is an exploitation of the New Covenant powers the Lord Jesus Christ made available by his death and resurrection. These outcomes are fruits of God’s justice to Jesus that so happily reversed his voluntarily assumed plight on behalf of our salvation, and goes on to rid us of sin and the dread of death. In this magnificent manner, the Lord’s redemptive ETHIC and EXAMPLE and EFFORTS ALL COALESCE IN UNANIMOUS TESTIMONY! [6/15/11; 5/19/24]

ABERRATIONS OF THE ATONEMENT

When the premial justice of God taught by the apostles of Jesus fell into obscurity around the 4th century, theories of the atonement (and, since the Protestant Reformation, of justification as well) began to proliferate. To this very day they show few signs of settled resolution. A host of aberrations litter the historic landscape to pose hazardous snares to the would-be convert and unwary saint alike. Theologians keep trotting out many of them before our gaze, but they are phantoms, partial truths, double images, or patchwork affairs. [6/15/11; 5/19/24]

Even were a penal substitution advocate to half-heartedly acknowledge the bare existence of God’s premial justice, they could accord it NO PLACE OR ROLE IN THE ATONEMENT! It would stand virtually IDLE within their system of “necessities“! It remains merely a feckless drone with no power to save! Very different is the apostle Paul’s assessment of God’s saving righteousness, i.e., restorative justice. Had Martin Luther understood exactly how God’s justice saves those who have faith, the message of the Reformation could not easily have been co-opted to the service of a penal, punitive ideology of the Atonement and its many tragic ethical, legal, military, economic, industrial, environmental, societal, domestic, and other outcomes, which are only continuing to mount ominously in our uncomprehending day. [6/16/11; 5/19/24]

PENAL SUBSTITUTION: Systematizing the Deception

It is not by accident that penal substitution has gained such prominence in Protestant Christianity. It has succeeded in systematizing the deception (Eph. 4:14) that God’s penal justice could actually somehow bring salvation, while it completely suppressed the voice of God’s premial justice that constitutes the authentic golden thread of divine salvation throughout wholesome Scripture. How the boa constrictor of Calvin’s rigorously novel theory of penal substitution could have strangled the Pauline proclamation of God’s resurrectionary justice toward the Lord Jesus can perhaps only be accounted for by the power of the sinful fleshly impulse toward personal avenging in combination with steady steps of systematic rationalizations that undermined sound exegetical treatments of key passages, all while cross-wiring them in new patterns that were both more amenable to fleshly dispositions of mind, less challenging to faith in a God of miracles, less demanding of obedience to the directives of the Lord Jesus, and less inclined to the example of his obedience to the death of a cross. Jesus became a weak substitute rather than a mighty Lord and a commanding Leader. [6/8/11;5/17/24]

God’s surrender of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was not as a payment of our human debt of sin; if anything, IT ENORMOUSLY AGGRAVATED THE DEBT! IT SWELLED THE SIN OF ISRAEL TO THE BURSTING POINT! If there was any possible hope for Israel to make payment for her many sins (especially of slaying the prophets), by her own righteous deeds, it was utterly BANKRUPTED and totally demolished by the summum malum of CRUCIFYING JESUS! This was not a “deposit” into their “heavenly account” but a massive OVERDRAFT!

The direct implication of this stark fact is that God’s plan for the salvation of Israel, indeed, of all humankind, entailed and demanded THE MOST PATENTLY OBVIOUS DEBT FORGIVENESS EVER UNDERTAKEN IN HISTORY! (And we, in turn, are to forgive as our heavenly Father has thus forgiven us!) The Cross was the last straw; so little did this crime “pay off” God’s penal justice for any human sins (whether of “the elect” or the whole world) that, to the contrary, it greatly compounded human sin, yet happily evoked God’s own personal REPAYMENT to Jesus for his colossal loss. This is the astonishing way the Gospel actually works, contrary to the longstanding but novel traditions of the ‘magisterial’ Protestant Reformation. [6/8/11; 5/17/24]

Penal substitution THROWS STUMBLING BLOCKS AND SNARES BEFORE PEOPLE, thus injuring faith and the credibility of the Message about Jesus Christ. In particular, it is subversive of the character of God the Father. It perversely rationalizes the Atonement according to a strictly penal model that is inherently and irremediably offensive. With excruciating irony, the penal satisfaction accounting of the assassination of God the Son amounts to a character assassination of God the Father, unintentional though it always appears to be. [6/10/11; 5/17/24]

“GOD IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SATISFY, BUT EASY TO PLEASE.” — George MacDonald, quoted in Jan Karon, In the Company of Others (New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010).

The historic record of God’s justice to Jesus is what creates the trust that conciliates hesitant sinners to Them; thereupon God sends them His Holy Spirit with assorted powers to corroborate the truth with gracious tokens of Their love. SWEET!!!

“And for the lamb he shall pay fourfold [LXX, sevenfold], because he did this thing, and since he had no pity!” 2 Samuel 11:6.

This prophetic exposure of David’s sin with Bathsheba (“sheba” also meaning “seven”) is “[i]n keeping with the law in Exodus 21:37.” *

*Everett Fox, Give Us a King!: Samuel, Saul, and David. A new translation of Samuel I and II with an introduction and notes by Everett Fox. New York: Schocken Books, 1999, p. 203, note 6. [3/16/11]

Everything we get by believing the Gospel is ipso facto accounted to faith. Therefore, because we receive the Holy Spirit when we believe, that is, the dispensing of the righteousness of the New Covenant (2 Corinthians 3:7-9) in Christ’s blood (Hebrews 13:20), then that righteousness is reckoned or imputed to us as we believe (Romans 4). In this marvelous way, God honors our simple faith in His own proclamation about His Son’s suffering abuse on our behalf, since faith is nothing in itself, but is dependent (is dependence!) upon external testimony and proof for its very existence. [3/17/11]

The spirit of Calvinism, insofar as it is distinguished from other streams of Christianity, tends to be uniquely punitive, joyless, smug, and abusive. Those (among other) destabilizing qualities and traits are, I would suggest, inseparable reflexes of the penal satisfaction theory of the Atonement and are well (if only partially) summarized by the Five Points of Calvinism that constitute key points where it hardened up against the gentle corrective attempts of Jacob Arminius, who otherwise, it should be emphasized, had no special bone to pick with Calvinism (as represented in Calvin’s own writings, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Belgic Confession). Insofar as the offending theory is radically false, the spirit of Calvinism is, by reflex, an evil spirit and produces evil fruits that battle against the fruits of the Spirit, good intentions to the contrary notwithstanding. Since Calvinism early became callused against the gentle discipline of Arminius it has repeatedly churned out attitudes contradictory to the authentic graciousness of God for Christ’s sake. Once the penal substitution theory is effectively overthrown by premial restitution, all Five Points must fall like dominoes, and attitudes will morph accordingly. [3/18/11; 4/17/24]

It is difficult to read Hugo Grotius’s refutation of Faustus Socinus’s critique of satisfaction theories of the Atonement without the growing conviction that he is all too often merely quibbling and captious. (See Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ. [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2001]; reprint of A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine [Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962]), pp. 389-409). He ‘divides and conquers’ by splitting hairs and neglecting the basic thrust of Socinus’s treatment, and before long takes to swallowing camels. [3/18/11]

God does not “demand” faith from us, which we somehow have to “work up.” Much rather, He gives testimony, i.e., proof by way of eyewitness reports by credible observers concerning His own historic interventions on behalf of His beleaguered Son, AND THIS HISTORICAL RECORD ITSELF GENERATES FAITH IN THOSE WHO HEAR, EVEN IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES. ONLY PROOF, TESTIMONY, EVIDENCE, etc. HAVE SUCH POWER TO CREATE FAITH. So, believing, at bottom, is not itself the problem here. God has invested much that is necessary to induce faith within sin-darkened hearts between the covers of the Bible. Furthermore, He has followed up with signs, miracles, healings, and other powerful interventions before the eyes of every generation since then as additional corroboration. So if people do not trust Him upon reading/hearing such a well-attested (not to add Spirit-inspired) Story and observing the powers of God’s impending Kingdom in their midst, it is not for lack of these fiducial requisites (although, to be sure, the latter are too often in meager supply due to the inroads of cessationist theories among our teachers). Rather, it is because they love the darkness rather than the Light for their acts are vicious” (John 3:19), hence they are hating the Light lest their acts get exposed and they get put to shame.

All this means that the necessary condition of faith in order to be saved is no high-handed, arbitrary, harsh “demand,” as it were, to make “bricks without straw,” nor is it (as Calvinistic doctrine is wont to insist) “impossible without the gift of the Holy Spirit to make it effectual in the elect.” For the Gospel itself, the resurrectionary Explanation for the cross, the Proclamation of Christ, is itself the power of our salvation, which, when believed, is THEREUPON further corroborated by an empirical outpouring of the Holy Spirit to immerse and embrace us in a fuller consciousness and enjoyment of salvation’s reality by actual experience. This all amounts to an exhibit of “graciousness [in the outpoured Spirit] in exchange for graciousness [in the Reasoning of the Gospel]”—the fruit of spiritually examining the favors God is making ready for us via the Spiritual words He has matched them with in Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:9-16). [3/18/11; 4/17/24]

Closed-system, zero-sum mundane economics and commercial finance cannot comprehend either the ex nihilo wealth-creation that exclusively accounts for the vast super-compensation rendered to the Lord Jesus Christ by the Creator for bearing outrageous injustices, nor can it fathom the gratuitous giveaway program of welfare to unworthy sinners that came in its wake. PENAL SATISFACTION is thus perpetually at cross-purposes with PREMIAL RESTITUTION.

Perhaps the central ‘gratifying’ or ‘satisfying’ feature of penal substitution is the sense that a certain ‘number’ or ‘quantity’ of sins can be ‘completely paid for,’ thus supplying a kind of ‘closure’ to the system, also psychologically. Everything seems ‘symmetrical’ and ‘clinched.’ But this is illusory. In fact, it creates a false security that, in practice, actually compromises a dynamic, vital, covenantal relationship with the living God. The ethical results of such an impersonal—even mechanical or automatic—schema are often appallingly dis–grace-ful. False security can breed conceit and arrogance, clannishness and sectarianism.

The inner certainty and spiritual assurance we crave as fragile mortals are founded on the solid proof of God’s graciousness in spite of any ‘amount’ of sin. That proof has been granted in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from a crucifixion by vicious sinners who were thereby spared immediate, well-deserved termination.

However, when the authentic original interpretation of the ‘Crossurrection‘ composite of integrally linked events comes to be denatured into a penal event followed by a mere resurrection rubber-stamp, then the full impact of those tandem Messianic events is debased and disempowered from delivering its intended full redemptive payload and veers off its divine trajectory. But properly understood and proclaimed, the ‘Crossurrection‘ trumps any other conceivable method or means of providing confident assurance of God’s gracious acceptance, and all without breeding unbefitting presumptuousness. This is because God deliberately made sure there were plenty of qualified, diverse, and independent eyewitnesses to both of its key historic components as well as to Jesus’ career of powerful miraculous deeds, peerless ethical instruction, and prophetic fulfillments in startling sync with literally scores of ancient prophecies recorded in Israel’s ancient Scriptures.

For the same reason, any talk of ‘merits‘ here is unbiblical—a vain attempt to ‘compute’ a conjectured economic exchange rate between sins and pardons. All such recourses are carnal calculations with deceptive utility and positive harm. Such fundamental departures from native biblical vocabulary and conceptuality are shoals easily avoidable by prioritizing concordant analysis of recurrent biblical patterns of usage, whether of words, numbers, names, metaphors, themes, or even whole narrative episodes. [2/6/11; 10/11/23]

In addition to the eyewitness testimony of the disciples of Jesus to his career, crucifixion, and resurrected existence, the miracle-working testimony of the Holy Spirit ever since Pentecost may be added to those weighty considerations that establish God’s extraordinary graciousness and forgiveness, and which far surpass the deceptive grounds of ‘penal substitution,’ i.e., a conjectured ‘penal satisfaction of God’s penal justice‘ by Christ, which is but quicksand.

Lutheranism, Calvinism, Arminianism (at least in the form of its influential but idiosyncratic articulation by Hugo Grotius), and Amyraldianism, each in varying degree, suffer under the imaginary burden of establishing a surer ‘economic’ basis for God’s amazing grace than the unalterable written witness of the New Testament conjoined with the continuous experiential witness of the Holy Spirit. [2/8/11; 10/12/23]

By the Cross, Satan imagined that he had successfully stamped out his rival for rule of planet earth along with his miraculous restorative powers. But it so happens that these creation-restoring powers of the Holy Spirit bequeathed to Jesus as Messiah were his right, due to his lifelong maturing obedience to God his Father. Therefore, when Jesus was deprived of his life, including those powers that were his property and rightful possession, Satan committed a criminal act deserving, by the rules of divine justice, DUE COMPENSATION, which, in this unexpectedly exceptional case, just so happened to be ABSOLUTELY OVERWHELMING! And it is this unparalleled supercompensation that Christ personally bequeaths to us as a pure gift—immersion in the Holy Spirit of unquenchable life. Without Christ’s brutal experience of abuse unto death, this compensation would never even have existed for us, because never called into existence by the exigencies of reparative justice to him. Praise God from Whom such Blessings flow!

This peculiar feature of divine justice—supercompensation—may also account for the necessity (in view of God’s intended outcome of salvation for ALL who trust Him) of His Son’s even suffering a curse of the Law of Moses (which God Himself had stipulated, of course) as well as temporary abandonment at the cross. For THESE EVILS (although by no means to be construed as ‘divine punishments’ administered substitutionarily on behalf of sin/sinners who all ‘deserved’ them), WOULD LIKEWISE NEED TO BE JUSTLY SUPERCOMPENSATED BY GOD. And such compensation would constitute proof that those particular abuses were not ‘signs of God’s wrath’ but definitive precursors, even beneficent enhancements, of His impending justly due GRACIOUSNESS, indeed, His very SPIRIT OF GRACIOUSNESS! [2/8/11; 10/12/23]

Generally speaking, an “atoning” deed is whatever may be deemed necessary to bring peace in a particular circumstance of hostility or grievance. It ‘makes everything alright,’ relatively speaking. It induces conciliation and friendly relations between contending parties by joint agreement. However, the Atonement that God pre-planned far surpassed the limitations and relativity of the countless cultural conventions for achieving nominal interpersonal amity post-conflict. For God’s own method, at last, satisfactorily tackled “the Last Enemy,” Death itself, which hovers menacingly behind every terrestrial animosity and injury. (See, for example, Don Richardson’s noteworthy account in his famous book, Peace Child.) [2/8/11; 10/12/23]

God’s judicial intervention to raise Jesus from the dead took off guard the prevalent assumptions about how He should/could/would avenge injustices.

The Kingdom of God advances or recedes on earth to the extent we are victorious in spiritual battle over whatever temptations Satan may hurl and our dying flesh may arouse in league with his kingdom of vice and viciousness in the dark alleys and public squares of battleground-Earth. God’s Kingdom, therefore, will never enjoy irreversible gains, given the vicissitudes of the cosmic struggle. “Building the Kingdom” is hence a deceptive metaphor and, in any case, one not found in the New Testament. Nota bene!

Eternal vigilance is the unvarying rule. Christ’s disciples ‘carry around’ his Kingdom with them wherever they go. Their duty is to let their light shine in the enveloping darkness and not let their lamps go out…or run out of Oil! Rather, we should ever be full of the Spirit—the power of God that constitutes the very ‘essential Oil‘ of His Kingdom. In this way we give credit to our Father in heaven; we must take no credit to ourselves for the mighty works He may do through us, even potentially greater things than Jesus did while on earth. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead took everyone by such a startling surprise that it took some time before they finally realized that they had just beheld the justice or “righteousness” of God in unprecedented exhibit on behalf of salvation! For it turned out to be a rewarding act rather than a penal act, which everyone had grimly come to expect from God whenever He periodically breaks through with justice. The apostle Paul tried to clarify this at large in the book of Romans—full of Resurrection, yet with not a single mention of the Cross—this being his longest epistle by far! Nor did Paul ever mention the “wrath of God” in connection with the Atonement. Nor, again, did he ever hint that God needed to ‘be reconciled’ with mankind (an orthodox evangelical commonplace). In addition, he dropped hints everywhere that that justification is a function of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. These obvious hints should have shepherded theologians to draw very different conclusions than they actually have. Evidently something has gone terribly wrong among their ranks. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

Those vaunted ‘scientific’ skeptics who query, “Why would a rational God want to deceive His rational creatures by creating life forms almost instantaneously that bear the marks of age if, in fact, He actually did create them in mere moments?” are bringing a cartload of uniformitarian assumptions about “age” to their heftily loaded question. In truth, God has happily provided an “origins” manual, so that we don’t get snared by our own deceptively plausible assumptions, necessarily drawn (as they must be) from our own limited historical and personally empirical experience (whether or not we possess scientific credentials).

However, by way of reinforcement of His identity as the Creator who possesses power sufficient for such instantaneous creation, the Bible also contains many multiple-eyewitness reports of God’s astounding powers over His creation, not the least of which amount to re-creation of injured and even non-existent body parts…in a matter of moments, not eons. Eyewitness testimony by unprejudiced observers (and even more so by honest observations issued by witnesses prejudiced against the possibility of such phenomena) should count for something, after all. The implications should be unmistakable. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

As much as a ransom is a SUBSTITUTION or EXCHANGE, just so little is it penal or punitive. In other words, a ransom, insofar as it entails the trade of a person (instead of, e.g., currency or commodities) is always a NON-PENAL SUBSTITUTION. Indeed, it is normally associated with a sense of great and wrongful, even extorted, loss…yet one recouped by a worthwhile gain. Whenever a human being happens to serve as a ransom price, especially if a volunteer, we regard the deed as admirable, noble, even heroic, but certainly not penal.

Ultimately, this final hideout of ‘penal substitution‘ advocates is found to be no protection at all, but a sure proof of their gross negligence of observable Biblical data. [1/27/11]

THE CROSS AND THE ‘TRINITY’

The cross is the landmark watershed event when it comes to ‘sorting out’ and ‘dividing up’ the ‘Trinity.’

Was the Son revealing, manifesting, and displaying there how the Father forgives, or was the Son ‘paying off’ the Father there for our debt of sins instead? It absolutely cannot be both, for they are mutually exclusive operations.

Was Jesus showing us the utter single-mindedness of Deity, or was he performing a ‘satisfaction‘ to another member of the ‘Trinity’ instead? It absolutely cannot be both, for they are diametric opposites.

There can be no fence-sitting on the matter. Was the Son always “walking in the Spirit” of his Father and, therefore, “always doing [his] Father’s desire,” and thus showing us how to resist the lusts of his mortal flesh (see Edward Irving, et al), even to the extent of obediently allowing himself to get strung up and nailed to a cross by his foes, and thus qualifying himself for a mighty act of deliverance by his Father’s categorical justice, expressed by exorbitant GRACIOUSNESS? Or was he setting himself up as a sitting duck so that his Father could assault him with wrath to show us how much He hated sin (presuming that His Son literally, mysteriously, ‘became sin’ on the cross)? It cannot be both of these radically disparate scenarios.

Was the deep darkness that descended out of nowhere on that scene of tragedy an indication of how much God deplored the sin that was being perpetrated by the dark powers upon His ever-beloved Son, the Light of the world, being agonizingly snuffed out on that high-noon showdown between Deity and depravity, or was it a heavenly sign of how much the Father abominated the ‘sin’ that His Son had allegedly been made for us? For it cannot be both; they are irreconcilable. [1/28/11]

THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE OF CHRIST WAS NOT PENAL

Jesus did, to be sure, suffer abuse ‘vicariously’ on our behalf—the Just One on account of the unjust multitude.  But even more surely, this vicious abuse was not at the hand of God but of Satan, the “Great Dragon” (Rev. 12:9) who wished to destroy the Son of Mankind and his seed.  God’s Chosen and Anointed One bore the humiliating crime of the Cross, instigated by the Adversary, so that his Father could openly demonstrate in the most persuasive and endearing manner conceivable the overwhelmingly overcompensating magnitude of his righteousness by rescuing Jesus from the inveterate foe of humanity and yanking his stinger out forcibly.

Viewed from this apostolic perspective, we can finally grasp clearly and fathom precisely what this ‘vicariousness’ shields us from:  not the wrath of God but the fury of Satan.

By ‘paying‘ such a ‘vicarious’ ransom to our diabolical captor, Jesus effected a de facto exchange that Satan by no means intended, but which his foolishness could not forestall:  we went free!  Hallelujah!

The exact mechanics of this liberation bear closer scrutiny.  By suffering this radically unjust abuse and death, Jesus won for us, as our divine Champion, the compensatory award (δικαιωμα) of agelong life, including the present, phenomenal down payment of that future allotment:  the promised Wholesome Spirit of Life. This charisma (χαρισμα), in all its variegated splendor (especially against the backdrop of a creation in the throes of remorseless entropy) is the empirical right of all those who by mere (!) faith are honored by a just God with the status of sons/daughters and heirs in His future Kingdom.  It is precisely this gift (δορημα) of agelong life, including its foretaste in Wholesome Spirit, that liberates us from Satan’s authority, because it both frees us from slavery via fear of death and furnishes an internal power source to resist Satan’s corrupting blandishments.

This means that the divine solution to ‘the sin problem’ (as Evangelicals are so fond of putting it) comes by way of the reversal of the death sentence against our sin, as was so fully and satisfactorily proved by the outpour of agelong life—along with its undeniable evidences, including the performance of signs, miracles, powers, and healings—-into the hearts of those who get sprinkled with the innocent blood of Christ, by faith.

Thus sinners actually, amazingly, get indemnified, and their sins get removed, erased, cleaned off, released/forgiven, by the very ‘stuff’ from which our sins alienated us—tangible life itself!  The innocent blood of the Lamb of God does everything for us!  It is God’s UNIVERSAL ANTIDOTE (literally, a remedy to ‘give in answer/response‘ or ‘counter‘ to a poison).  It solves everything redemptively:  it absolves wrongdoing; it dissolves opposition; it resolves alienation.  Within the blood of Messiah resides agelong life, salvation, justification, forgiveness, sanctification, deliverance, freedom, cleansing, erasure (of sins), peace, conciliation, ransom, and more.  This blood is figured in the water of baptismal immersion, the wine of the Lord’s Supper, and the oil of therapeutic anointing.  The living soul is “in” the blood.  Thus, by permitting the guilty shedding of his own innocent blood on our behalf, Messiah surrendered his Jewish flesh to injustice only to win it back again, glorified beyond ethnicity, along with a justly overcompensated surplus of life to give away gratuitously to whomever desires it, regardless of ethnic or national origin or any fleshly distinctions whatever that have divided human beings.

In sum, Jesus suffered the abuse of Satan’s full fury ‘vicariously’ for us so that we might escape death, thus also the fear of death, and consequently abject slavery to Satan and sin.  But did this effect an escape from God’s wrath, which burns against incorrigible sins?  The decisively unambiguous answer to this ‘burning’ (ahem) question must be “yes and no.”  No, if you mean this ‘vicarious’ fact ‘deflects’ God’s indignation away from our sins (and we must be warned against mistaking God’s delay or stay of execution for ostensive ‘deflection‘); but yes, if you mean that this ‘vicarious’ shedding of innocent blood for guilty flesh achieves removal of sin from the guilty sinner, thus removing the cause for wrath in the first place.

It is this simple distinction that accounts for the seriousness with which the early church took the Lord’s Supper.  For here they were collectively (think: Passover) feeding on the flesh and blood of the Lamb of God/Good Shepherd (!) who hereby takes away sin.  [4/10/06]

Yet for all this ‘vicarious‘ action by Messiah Jesus on our account, there is not the slightest hint of a ‘penal’ substitution.  ‘Penal substitution’ is premised on a compromised notion of God’s righteousness that imagines it appearing at the Cross, though in fact God did not show up until three days later to play His hand by ipso facto CONDEMNING THE CROSS as a horrible miscarriage of justice…in fact, an out-and-out  mortal sin! Even so, nothing that can’t be corrected by a little divine power and timely action.

This was “a secret having gotten hushed during agelong times” (Rom. 16:25), “having gotten concealed from ages and generations” (Col. 1:26) yet now unveiled for our wonderment: the incomparable wealth of glory of this secret—-Christ among us, our expectation of future glorification (Col. 1:27)—-which salvation is graciously accessible via the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5, 16:26)!

Yet in this connection, there is still one more piece of the ‘puzzle’ that theologians have made out of the Atonement that, once we see how it fits, will take our breath away!

At the Cross there is not the slightest hint of ‘penal’ or ‘punitive’ action against Jesus’ enemies and killers.  This must be absorbed at full value before we can adequately appreciate Messiah’s abuse for what it really was:  SATAN’S SIN. For God all along knew who the ultimate enemy was.  Therefore, He did not go after Satan’s pawns; He was laying a trap for big game.  After all, Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it.  These are collateral benefits of nullifying the works of Satan.

Vindictive human justice predictably would have ladled out reprisals, punitive overcompensations, penal ‘satisfactions’ as the price of the crime of the Cross.  Christ’s enemies should have ‘paid for‘ their premeditated enormity!  God should have crushed them with brimstone and incinerated them with fire from heaven!  But all in good time…

Are we disappointed?  Are we unsettled, ‘unsatisfied’ that God did not break forth with evident penal, punitive retribution to ‘fully satisfy’ His wrath on those wretches?  Isn’t it enough that He fully exposed Satan’s intended trickery and forever crushed his head, shattered his authority over Adam’s heretofore doomed offspring?  Must He also vent Himself on Satan’s wretched slaves and dupes?

What an injustice that would have been!  Petty reprisals are beyond the intentions of the Savior of the world.  Yet did we perhaps expect God, alternatively, to unleash that anger upon His own obedient Son as a ‘substitute’ somehow for not doing it to his envious, hateful, embittered enemies?  How hideous!

The work of total obedience was completely finished at the Cross; all that was now called for—all that Messiah’s absolutely innocent blood (i.e., “just soul“) was “crying out” for—-was proper avenging.  This observation necessarily implies that no avenging of any sort—especially no penal satisfaction, no punitive action whatsoever—by his Father could conceivably have been present to sully the pure, stark, stunning faithfulness, obedience, subordination, surrender—-Jesus’ filial love, openly, publicly, uniquely, exhibited on that cursed tree…of LIFE!  Accordingly, to perceive the Cross as the key to everlasting life we must see how it was indissolubly linked to the impending Resurrection that would actually—-historically—–set things right, restoring the harmony of the created universe disrupted by sin.  Once this cosmic fact is resolutely grasped, every deficient impulse to compromise the transparency of this radical criminality by imputing divine punitive, penal motives into its ordained significance will melt away in the beaming sunshine of divine love—both Son’s and Father’s—radiating Their rescuing wisdom untainted.

So, Peter Abelard was right…but only half right; he was right about the Cross but wrong in his silence about the Resurrection.  Yet even if he did have that detail wrong (or out of view), Anselm was no less wrong.  For although he would surely have sensed Abelard’s explanation to be incomplete, yet he himself presumed to add words without knowledge and ventured far beyond the apostolic pattern of sound explanations.  (This, at least, Abelard did not dare to do at this point.)  Yet both suffered virtual blindness about the justifying significance of the Messiah’s resurrection.  Even Paul Peter Waldenström, who perhaps came closer than most writers since the early Ante-Nicene church, and until the late 20th century, to understanding the nature of the Atonement, did not fully explore, expound, and secure this indispensable, and by his time still long-missing, link.

All penal, punitive theories of the Atonement are dead wrong and have proven to be deadly for far too many discerning prospects who, sadly, even tragically, took offense.  Is this the Devil’s revenge?  Is Satan making a comeback by twisting the liberating Proclamation of God’s Kingdom into a dull, incomprehensible God-dishonoring caricature—a grotesque gargoyle, ironically, in his own infernal image?  If so, then theologians have been his most amenable agents in this crafty stratagem of disinformation.  They have insinuated penal motives and punitive impulses between the virgin lines of wholesome Scripture.  They see penal satisfactions and divine wrath around the turn of every page.  Such theological rigor is akin to rigor mortis.  It reads death into the words of life!

But, sadly, there is more.  By reading penal or punitive elements into the Cross they underplay, neglect, ignore, and suppress where such elements actually did turn up on the historical stage, and by clear prophecies from both Old and New Testaments!  For Daniel the prophet as reiterated by Jesus himself in the Olivet Discourse pointed a long warning finger in the direction of 70 A.D., one generation—”this generation“!—beyond the Cross.  Exactly 40 years after their execution of their Messiah, the citizens of Jerusalem below, Jerusalem “after the flesh,” having remained stubborn to the graciousness of Jehovah Who gave them this merciful reprieve, suffered the terrors of God’s punitive, penal avenging to a degree that utterly defies polite description.  The “abomination of desolation” (Daniel 9:26-27) exhibits the wrath of God in no uncertain terms, with bold and bloody strokes!  These pathetically doomed Jews had hardened themselves to the proffered graciousness of Jehovah in Jesus, their Messiah, spanning forty years of mercy, tolerance, patience, and kindness by Israel’s God.  Their cup of wrath was now full and brimming over, recollecting, ironically, the fateful extermination of nations they themselves had started displacing some 15 centuries earlier.  When the Christians in Jerusalem beheld, even in reportedly awe-inspiring portents in the sky, what was looming, they fled in obedience to their Master’s warning a generation earlier and narrowly escaped the barely describable internecine slaughter that the imbedded Jewish reporter Flavius Josephus less squemishly recorded for the instruction of later generations.

For their murder of their own Savior Jerusalem paid with horrific suffering of brutal, merciless mutual savagery that beggars sober, much less polite, description.  Josephus is our window into this unleashing of divine retribution in his eye-witness account, The Wars of the Jews.

Yet for all that, it did not atone!  Their national destiny was irreversibly cut off.  The Covenant with Jewish Israel was over and done with, having been exhausted in the covenantal curses against her national ethnic disobedience, shockingly climaxing in their savage coup de ‘grâce’—hanging “the King of the Jews” on an inglorious gibbet for gawkers to mock, scorn, and shame.  This singular culminating crime sealed their spiraling doom. God henceforth would choose all who dare believe His ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ concerning Jesus to become “a chosen race, a ‘royal priesthood’, a ‘wholesome nation’, a procured people,” so that they “should be recounting the virtues of Him Who calls you out of darkness into His marvelous light, who once were ‘not a people’ yet are now the people God, who ‘have not enjoyed mercy’, yet now are ‘being shown mercy'” (1 Peter 2:9-10) and shall thereupon inherit allotments in His impending kingdom.  And in this way—that is, standing in faith (Rom. 11:20,23)—shall all Israel, that is, “true Israel” who do not remain stubborn to the Son be likewise saved and equally grafted and incorporated into the one body of Messiah.

Here, then, was authentic and well-deserved penal recompense, yes, divine avenging; yet ‘satisfaction’ scarcely covers the goods. Where does wholesome Scripture so much as allude to such outpourings of righteous indignation as ‘satisfying‘ to God, (i.e., as ‘paying off’ an accumulated debt of sin)?  Such tragedies are only cause for mourning, for the staggering losses seem irreversible.   “The indignation of God is getting revealed from heaven on all irreverence and injustice of humans who are retaining the truth in injustice“ (Rom. 1:18), as was pre-eminently the dubious state of highest spiritual privilege from which the ancient nation of Israel so ignominiously, shatteringly plummeted.  It may be mercifully delayed, yet not averted from stubbornly unrepentant sinners.

What certainly did ‘satisfy’ God was His Son’s obedience regardless of the torments inflicted by the ones his love sent him to save. Satan was remorseless and hopeless, so will suffer for the ages of the ages the torments of the Lake of Fire.  Human beings who refuse to accept God’s appointed means for getting rid of their sins will also be tormented commensurate with their sins and be ultimately consumed by the fires of judgment.  This is no small loss.  Some measure of it can be gauged by the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12; 13:42,50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28) that attends the contemplation, while in the Unseen, of their own final extermination in light of what they might have gained—–agelong joy, life, glory, and rule over a new earth where no injustice will exist to diminish happiness.  What a loss!  What a destruction!  Yet HOW GREAT A SALVATION is awaiting those who keep on trusting and obeying!  [4/11/06]

Provoking Satan’s FURY prefaced God’s FAVOR!

In what sense(s) did the Resurrection vindicate Jesus?  Supremely, it vindicated him, including by implication all he had claimed about himself. Thus his vindication by the Father would have to embrace his claims to be without sin, to be subject to the Law of Moses, to be the prophesied Messiah, to be the very Son of God, to be the Master/Lord of all nations (even Jehovah in the flesh!) and hence to be the Savior of the world, the promised Chosen One of God. Nothing less than this full-orbed identity of Jesus is implied by his getting raised from among the dead.

Jesus fully and completely kept the Law of Moses in the only way in which it was ever meant to be kept:  from the heart, in spirit, and by the Spirit’s power. His conflicts with the scribes, Pharisees, and other leaders of the Jews were never over any real violation of Mosaic Law, at least anent the manner that God Himself actually intended it to be observed. That this must be the case is exhibited by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This endorsement from God Himself decisively vindicated Jesus’ own take on the Law of Moses! In other words, it certified Jesus’ method of interpretation or ‘hermeneutic’ in the face of his self-endorsed enemies and murderers.  It showed them up as nigglers and hypocrites, petty and tricky, haughty and envious, vicious and treacherous—in a word: Law-less.  This was an elite crowd of habitual Law-breakers with entrenched impunity.

The Judaizing, the Phariseeical, ways of ‘honoring’ Moses’ Law were shallow, superficial, burdensome, overwrought, unbalanced, a colossal charade—in a word, profoundly unjust! The confrontations of Jesus with these petty tyrants gave scope for him to expose their obsession with the letter of the Law while missing the core justness of God altogether and tragically misleading God’s people down the path toward the national ruin of 70 A.D.  Jesus’ yoke was, by contrast, easy and his legal load, light. His directives were what he had heard from his Father, and they were life agelong. His own resurrection unmistakably confirmed that end result with a great weight of glory (evident proof).

In order to save the earth, this extraordinary work of His hands, from utter destruction as a result of sin, its attendant evils. and consequent death—sin being inextricably necessary within a scheme of things where the ultimate goal is to bring up mature offspring who would need to learn, in the face of seductive temptations to do otherwise, how to voluntarily choose what is right and pleasing to their Creator so they could qualify eventually to inherit and justly manage all the works of God’s hands, bringing them to fullest fruitfulness, life, and glory—God would have to conceive and execute a cosmic plan that somehow would justify Him in returning agelong life, our seemingly lost legacy, to the human race for free, in spite of sin and its just due, death. Such a plan would also have to make a shelter, shielding, or protective covering (–hilas–) around sins so that, since their accumulation evokes God’s just/rightful indignation, they do not destroy the inheritors whose very advance toward full human maturity is predicated on their often learning from trial and error (transgression/offense) against God’s just directives.

The exquisite solution entailed allowing, and in a sense even provoking, Satan. A key tactical element of this plan was the choice of Judas to be a disciple, who would betray the Savior into the hands of leaders whose envy was aggravated by his righteousness, wisdom, and miraculous restorative powers from on high. They, in turn, could be expected to falsely accuse, mock, insult, dishonor, variously abuse, and at length crucify God’s Chosen One. It was this dastardly process, irresistible to Satan out of long mendacious and murderous habit, that God leveraged to justify Himself in reversing it for the sake of the world’s salvation.  Satan took the Bait and vented himself with terrifying rage upon God’s Son.  He found Judas, all too amenable to his infernal enticements by then, and filled him with depraved determination to sell out his own Master for a paltry 30 pieces of silver. After all, he was a well-practiced thief. Was he trying to cover a debt so as not to be discovered, in hopes that Jesus would make a miraculous getaway somehow?  Some have conjectured as much.

However that may be, it was this monumental sin of the Jews, in combination with Roman Imperial injustice, foreknown by an all-wise God, that triggered Him to bare His righteous arm from heaven and rescue His just servant on earth, whose innocent blood, viciously shed, cried out from the ground for avenging better than the blood of just Abel. And so God did avenge almost instantly by manifesting celestial justice (dikaiosune) in tandem with its just recompense (dikaioma) before the stunned astonishment of angels in heaven, mortals on earth, and, before long, even to those “under the earth” to whom the soul of Jesus heralded his mighty triumph-to-be and who were invited to faith in him—a faith he then dramatically certified by getting exalted out of the Unseen by the Spirit of his Father on the third day. Such a spectacle had no historic precedent, even among the deeds of Jesus himself, in terms of glory, power, and permanence, even Lazarus notwithstanding. [4/8/06]