77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #74)

74.     How is the Atonement related to sanctification?

The strenuous labors of Jesus to remain faithful to his Father’s desire, even under humiliating and excruciating attacks and pitiful demise as an executed traitor to Rome, rendered him perfect in human wholesomeness and evoked God’s justice to display his complete acquittal by raising him miraculously to life again right out of the dank tomb.  By way of further restitution, God poured forth for the sake of Jesus’ reputation a greater magnitude of His Spirit than ever possible under less extreme circumstances.  In turn, God gives portions of that indescribable Present to all who trust Christ as Master, energizing us to keep the directives he conveyed from the Father and so develop into mature offspring in preparation for assuming appropriate ruling functions in the new creation that’s ahead.  Hence our Lord’s teaching is essential to our becoming mature in wholesomeness; reflecting his Father’s own personality, which he ideally modeled for us.  Our participation in the Spirit of holiness that enabled him to rise above abuse successfully also leads us along the way his directions point—that same true path of wholesome love and thriving vigor despite daily troubles and disheartening difficulty.  Our sanctification is instantaneous the moment we trust the Proclamation and get baptized, entitling us to be called “saints”!  But then, of course, we have to practice the art!  Practice makes perfect.  So sanctification is parallel to justification, which similarly possesses both instantaneous and progressive features.  Our holiness and uprightness alike turn on the axis of faith in the Proclamation that God exalted Jesus by means of “Crossurrection”, and both stay activated only by the energy of Christ’s own resurrected life dwelling in us by his living Explanation and sanctifying Spirit.

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #57)

57.     “What did the Cross achieve?”

If Jesus had not died on the Cross, God could not have shown the magnitude of His own justice and graciousness by more than reversing such a degrading death and thereby bequeathing him such a superabundant reward that even we could share in the treasure!  The Cross was necessary so that God could burst forth beyond all historic precedent in a demonstration of overwhelming graciousness to His abused Son as the rightful and just award in recompense for his putting up so patiently with those who destroyed him.  The Cross pulled out all the stops, although the organ of God’s graciousness had been playing many a lovely prelude all along.  Through Jesus the award reaches us too!  He is the prototype of human maturity, perfectly following the lead of the Holy Spirit, free from the prosthetic of Moses’ Law, bounding exuberantly, amenably, toward mastery of all the works of his Father’s hands.  God’s superabundantly over-compensating graciousness, visible in the historic Resurrection, was His exquisite counterpoint to His Son’s own graciousness throughout his entire childhood, youth, manhood, ministry, and suffering of highhanded and treacherous abuse.  Furthermore, ever since Pentecost this favor is generously passed along to all who believe, so that their misdeeds are both rightfully and graciously wiped out.  These actions historically demonstrated the Father’s graciousness in answer to, and supreme endorsement of, His Son’s own manifest graciousness throughout his lifetime, thereby strikingly revealing an ethically united front that winsomely invites our emulation everywhere and in everything.  “Grace in exchange for grace”!

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #37)

37.     Didn’t Christ pay for all our sins at the Cross?

Not one Scripture asserts that Christ paid for sin(s), or that his crucifixion was a payment, or that sacrifices were payments, or that they depicted a payment, or even that sin can be paid for in principle.  Where Scripture is silent, we would be wise to follow suit.  Much rather, Jesus acquired a people, bought and paid for by his invaluable blood.  This is the uniform and repeated teaching of apostolic Scripture.  The exchange was elegantly simple.  He, the perfectly Just One, volunteered to undertake the fateful hardships of this suicide mission in order to win the prize, i.e., God’s graciously vast overpayment to him for all his trouble, so that he in turn could graciously give it away to the needy and broken—us.  It was for us!  And our salvation.  Now he has a family, siblings, descendants, and heirs together with him to inherit property in Kingdom come.  Big group hug!  This is God’s answer to evil.  Could there even be such an ultimate overcompensating settlement against evil, in God’s justifying wisdom, unless evil existed in the first place?  And in a universe where evils are necessary in order to bring about greater goods, there must be a clear proof of this calculus so we can take heart and keep battling evil and grow to proper human maturity.  The historic Cross was the lightning rod to trigger the awe-inspiring discharge of God’s immense reservoir of graciousness via electrifying Resurrection power.  Without it He could not have gotten our attention—we were that far gone.