SURPRIZE! SURPRIZE!

September 19, 2018:  The Day of Atonement

Welcome to Art Prize #10, Grand Rapids, Michigan!  Coincidentally and significantly, it commenced on September 19th, which is The Day of Atonement on the Jewish calendar.  I hope you find the SURPRIZES that follow to be happy ones, even life changing!

(This piece is dedicated to a local professor of theology for challenging me to summarize in two pages the Atonement achieved for all by God’s awarding justice to the Lord Jesus Christ.)

What if it was not the suffering of Christ on the Cross per se, but his obedience of sinless endurance that was of such great worth in God’s sight that he won the PRIZE of God’s extraordinary graciousness, overflowing for free to others in the Gift of the Holy Spirit?

What if the New Testament records that Jesus and his emissaries heralded and proclaimed: “God,” “the Kingdom of God,” “the graciousness of God,” “the acceptable year of the Lord,” “His Son,” “Christ,” “Christ crucified,” “Jesus Christ,” “the name of Jesus Christ,” “the Word,” “the Gospel,” “your salvation,” “repentance,” “faith,” “the declaration of faith,” “peace,” and “good,” but never the Cross, per se?   Hmmm

What if the original words translated ‘atone/atonement’ in the Bible are not used for appeasing, pacifying, placating, or propitiating God, but rather for protectively covering/sheltering/shielding humans from His indignation on account of their accumulated sins?

What if the Cross of Christ was a transcendent injustice perpetrated by officials of Israel and Rome alike, under Satanic inspiration, calling for God’s own just avenging of his sinless blood to make an atoning cover around the appalling crime lest the people perish?

What if the Gospel announces the revelation, manifestation, setting forth, and display of God’s SURPRIZING justice that raised Jesus from the dead after this suicide mission?

What if God’s love didn’t actually need to accomplish our salvation by resorting to His Son’s crucifixion, so long as He could find some other means of public, official, priestly, conspiratorial, treasonous, terrorizing, degrading, agonizing, inescapably fatal execution?

“Wait!” you respond with SURPRIZE, “Why did Jesus have to be killed at all?”  Okay.  So how would you stage a rescue operation better designed to prove God’s benign saving prowess than to face Him, let’s say, with His own dear Son’s treacherous criminalization and brutally violent death to exercise it on?  What am I missing?

Is it really SO SURPRIZING that God should strategically surrender His beloved Son (with his full agreement) to diabolical forces of envy, jealousy, and hatred with a centuries-long criminal record of murdering prophets, so that He might have a golden opportunity of showing His love and power to avenge such vicious atrocities by more than reversing the already executed fatal sentence, thus justifying immortal life and compensating royal exaltation to the divine throne for the Victim, without so much as a slap for the guilty offenders, but instead a full pardon and generous terms of peace, plus adoption into a vast inheritance, all in return for repentance and faith?

Ponder the following “resuppositions” that reinforce this premial Atonement in the Bible:

1. Sacrificial blood represented not death but life-from-the-dead, that is, resurrection.

2. “The righteousness of God” (as commonly translated) refers to God’s justness—in particular, His restorative or rewarding justice to Jesus Christ, the sinless Victim, instead of His immediate penal justice to the now reprieved offenders who assailed him.

3. In Paul’s epistles, “the faith of Christ” refers to Christ’s own faith/faithfulness to God’s will, outlined in His covenanted directives and promises in the Law and Prophets, even through the shuddering enormity of undeserved torments and cruel death by crucifixion.

4. God’s “surrendering” and “forsaking” His precious Son to his malicious but clueless foes, who hung him on timber in order to render him a curse according to the Law of Moses, worked to facilitate the spectacle of God’s supervening rescuing justice directly to Christ himself, and thereupon offer all nations the more ancient precedent of blessings sworn to Abraham and his Seed by oath and covenant, in view of his faith.

5. On account of Christ’s own faith, God deems human faith as justness apart from works of Moses’ Law, since faith is not a work, so accords with God’s pure graciousness.

6. God awarded His Son directly with the justice of resurrection from the dead, in other words, with what he personally deserved for bearing sins themselves (not their guilt, nor penalty, but their injury) from those he came to save, instead of taking revenge on them.

7. Therefore, God did not need to unleash His rightful wrathfulness upon His Son’s slayers, since He had already conveyed overcompensating graciousness to Jesus by raising him out of the death they caused and exalting him over them to His throne above.

8. Furthermore, God did not need to satisfy His penal justice toward sinners indirectly on Christ, because He already satisfied the demands of restorative justice directly to him via resurrection and great glory, thence effecting atonement, conciliation, and real peace.

9. The superabundance of God’s just award to Christ on account of his deserts, Christ further graciously dispenses to all who exert faith in him, freely redistributing his promised Holy Spirit, which in turn cleanses sin from believers and empowers them to proclaim that God raised the Lord from the dead and extends forgiveness to all who trust.

10. The point of Christ’s humiliation, suffering, and execution was not to ‘pay for’ sin in any sense but to get rid of the damned stuff. For by worthily winning a cosmic outpour of Holy Spirit from on high in return for surrendering and submitting to outrageously wrongful damnation himself, Christ turned the tables and damned sin instead, justifying an inheritance of everlasting life for all those enslaved to sin and Satan by fear of death, endowing them with God’s Spirit of wholesomeness to pour His love into their hearts and develop disciples zealous for justice and good works to herald His kingdom worldwide.

By Ronald Lee Roper for Art Prize #10, Grand Rapids, MI, Sept. 19 (Day of Atonement)-Oct. 7, 2018.

Welcome to the launch of “The Premial Atonement” blog!

I bid you a hearty welcome to a brand new blogsite, “The Premial Atonement,” this Sunday, March 11, 2012!  I’m delighted you paused a moment in your web search to visit a site with an unfamiliar word like “premial” in the title.  I especially hope you will feel well rewarded by your curiosity.  Coincidentally, “premial” (as in “premium”) comes from the Latin word for reward, even as “penal” is derived from the word for punish.  So why do we need another new word?  I’ll explain a moment.

This site will be devoted to exploring the many facets of the great Biblical teaching about salvation that the Lord Jesus Christ was sent by God to achieve for mankind.  The heart of that salvation has generally come to be known as the “Atonement.”  The dominant Protestant version of this doctrine is commonly called “penal substitution” or “penal satisfaction.”  It is based on a view of God’s justice that is predominately penal or punitive, maintaining that atonement for sin was accomplished by God punishing Christ as a substitute to pay or satisfy our debt of sin through expressing His wrath against it at the crucifixion.

IN STARKEST POSSIBLE CONTRAST, I will argue that atonement was achieved by God raising Christ from the dead.  The blood of “flawless” sacrificial victims prophetically signified “life from the dead,” i.e., the power of Christ’s resurrection–this amounted to a compensatory outpouring of God’s own life-making Holy Spirit–made freely available to cleanse from sins, accordingly providing protective cover concerning them.  Of course, this means that whatever happened at the cross was not justice at all but rank injustice, and that it demanded compensation from God’s rewarding, restorative, or premial justice.  It follows that God did not express his wrath or anger at the cross in the least.  That was exclusively an exhibit of Satan’s fury against the Son of God.  But by enduring in faithful obedience to his Father through both life and death, Jesus’ sinless blood demanded the spectacular show of God’s premial justice that simultaneously made him victorious over the Adversary as well as Messiah of Israel and Lord of all nations.

So how does that victory save anyone other than Jesus, you may ask?  Answer:  God’s rewarding justice was actually overcompensatory, or what I call “super-compensation.”  Another new word.  (Sorry.)  This was a common element of justice throughout the Old Testament.  Injustice demanded restitution by offenders to their victims.  For most offenses, this requirement brought restoration not only to the victim but, in another sense, also to the offender.  The degree of super-compensation depended on the type of crime and motive of the offender.

In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, the unjust sentence was death by crucifixion–public, brutal, and utterly decisive.  Since he just so happened to be the Son of God Himself, and perfectly sinless, this amounted to the official murder of one who should never have died at all–ever!  This was a crime of the first order and worthy of severe avenging.  Yet Christ did not invoke his princely prerogatives to immediately do so against the envious Jewish perpetrators, and he even requested God to forgive the Roman executioners outright, in view of their ignorance.  God honored His Son’s grievously impugned innocence by exerting Himself in an unprecedented act of justice:  raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him to His own right hand on the throne of the universe.  Obviously, then, it was needless to demand the death even of the murderers since the results had been totally reversed, and some!  Pardon and peace were graciously proclaimed instead.

That super-compensatory just award of rightful damages included Christ’s inheritance of the whole created universe.  Some reward!  This judicial judgment not only stopped Satan in his tracks, it entailed a down payment of that inheritance for any other human being who wished to become a daughter or son of God, namely, the unspeakable gift of His very own Holy Spirit of life that cleanses us from our sins and makes us children and heirs in His Kingdom.  God mercifully specified the condition to be an enduring faith in the simple proclamation of Jesus as Lord, who conquered by his cross and resurrection and deserves our loyal obedience to his directives.

Thus God did a magnificent end run around penal justice altogether, when it came to atonement.  What we are left with, accordingly, is not “penal substitution” at all, but what we might call “premial inclusion.”  This is depicted in the Christian practice of baptism–immersion into the (wrongful) death and (rightful) resurrection of Messiah Jesus, now Lord of all.  In other words, our own rightful death as sinful descendants of Adam thereby gets exchanged for the destiny of our Savior.  He was slain as a Ransom to the totally clueless Devil, suffering his abuse even to the savage death on a Roman cross.  But his absolutely innocent blood cried out to God for a true justice such as the world had never seen and could scarcely imagine.  Such a deal!

There is so much more to be said….  But that must be left for future blogs.  If this teaser leaves you hungry for more, by all means stick around.  You are most welcome, not only to read my posts but to respond with your own comments and, as time allows, engage in discussion.  Be alerted that I may indulge in various genres to relate these wonderful truths recorded in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.  Expect also some variety of theological discourse, whether so-called biblical, exegetical, historical, systematic, or philosophical.

However, whether in the guise of prose or poetry, parable or parody, proverb or puzzle, etc., and whether by my own writings or excerpts from others’, my single aim will be to announce and explain with clarity and candor the redemptive message about Jesus Christ, the risen Lord.

May God be pleased to accompany these musings and discussions with His Spirit of wholesomeness, graciousness, and peace.  In that spirit, I look forward to learning and communing together with you under the tutelage of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.