Christ’s Resurrection ATONED FOR His Crucifixion

One of the favorite words that “penal substitutionary” theologians of the Atonement use to characterize their theory is “objective,” in preference to “subjective.”  However, their very emphasis on this polarity appears to mask their implied but less flattering choice of an “external” rather than “internal” atoning operation.  In other words, the Atonement is objective only at the cost of being external or merely outward.  The New Covenant as expounded in the New Testament, to the contrary, decisively emphasizes the internal or inward cleansing effected by the Spirit of holiness.  The Book of Hebrews reveals that the ascended Christ’s work in heaven achieved what the Levitical Day of Atonement only foreshadowed.  Yet the Atonement only achieved its intended goal when human hearts, by faith, get “sprinkled” with the life-giving “blood” of the“Lamb”—get baptized with the resurrectionary power that God repaid Jesus for obediently enduring such a wrongful death.  [6/17/08; 6/28/16]

Exposing and expounding the Truth of the Resurrection at full power, full potency, is playing with fire, electricity, dynamite. No. More! This Message is accompanied by a veritable nuclear power. And although it is certainly clean energy, there is nothing tame about its mighty potential. It is nothing to toy with. [6/18/08]

CHRIST’S RESURRECTION ATONED FOR HIS DEATH! [6/18/08]

The ancient Levitical ritual of laying a hand or hands on the sacrificial victim depicted complicity in the future laying a hand or hands on their own Messiah to take his life by an aggravated act of sin. For this was to lead to a display of how God could and would nullify sins by his own righteousness, graciousness, power, and glory, and thereby restore agelong life and immortality to sinful ones who trust and obey. This ritual did not teach any sort of “transference” of “guilt” to the sacrificial victim; it portrayed having a hand in the slaughter itself. It therefore represented the sinning process itself—depriving the innocent of their life!  In other words, it denoted the sin of murder.  [6/18/08]

DOES GOD’S WRATH EVER FALL ON BELIEVERS?

The question whether God’s wrath ever falls on believers in Jesus Christ is decisive in the controversy over whether or not it fell on Christ Jesus himself at the Cross and, for those who insist that it did, how exactly that wrath was handled—deflected, quenched, exhausted, etc. If, however, there was no wrath whatever from God at the Cross, then God can exhibit, indeed historically has often exhibited, His wrath on believers when they depart far from the way of righteousness. Then it is obviously meant as corrective, but that may hardly mitigate its painful experience. Indeed, such judgments (kri-) may even be fatal (1 Corinthians 11:29-34); the upside is that they happily pre-empt condemnation (katakri-) with the world. So there’s wrath and there’s wrath. There’s wrath now and there’s “the wrath to come” (Matthew 3:7, Luke 3:7). This latter is obviously condemnatory, and believers are not intended to experience it, for its escape is part and parcel of our salvation (1 Thessalonians 5:9). And, to be sure, wrath (-org-) does not appear to be activated toward believers in the New Testament. In the Psalms, however, we do see words like this applied to the veritable experience of the believing Psalmists, but it is always nuanced carefully and appears corrective as well as brief, not destructive or lasting. Even in the so-called messianic Psalms, since their primary reference is still to ‘sinful psalmists’, there is no reason to insist on its application to a sinless Messiah. Things are not always as they seem. This becomes clear after the Resurrection of Messiah Jesus, when he finally makes crystal clear to his students why things had to happen as they did and opens up their minds as he opens up the Scriptures to show their true interpretation so as to qualify them to be his authentic witnesses and heralds of the real Truth.

However, for those who allege that God’s wrath did fall on Jesus at the Cross, the resolution is much more difficult, enigmatic, and unsatisfying. For they then have to account for its continuing, though only occasional, outbreaks from heaven, even though it has allegedly been “quenched,” “deflected,” or “exhausted” by Christ at the Cross. Such a mechanism, indeed, such a vocabulary, is alien to the New Testament explanation of the subject.

Moreover, the New Testament uses the word wrath/anger/indignation, predicated of God, to refer, significantly, to the historic event of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple due to the sins of its stubborn, unrepentant inhabitants, and especially the sin of the Cross. Once God “exhausted” His penal anger on that wicked, adulterous generation, its mention becomes moot except as having established a predictable pattern, prophetically declared and historically fulfilled as confirmation, of God’s personal behavior or conduct regarding human conduct or behavior relative to His Son and what he claimed, prophesied, taught, and directed in the New Covenant in his blood. Such an established, covenantal pattern has great utility for instructing all the nations beyond Israel (which was used for a model to illustrate the pattern) concerning what to expect from God in response to our own actions. This covenantal pattern is the basis for our knowledge of God, enabling us to exert self-correction and providing us security in our relationship with Him. The authoritative testimonies of history throughout the Scripture narratives back up and substantiate its claims and requirements. Ambiguous “eschatological” fulfillments projected into the distant (or even allegedly near) future have comparatively little behavioral effect. Yet the grim termination of ethnic, civic Israel in 70 A.D. packs a potent lesson, especially when understood as the primary lightning rod for the exhibit of God’s genuine and prophesied flash of wrath from heaven in answer to Israel’s sin[-offering] of sacrificing their own most eminently qualified King in an abomination of human sacrifice on a Roman cross. To be sure, as a voluntary self-sacrifice to Israel’s assassinating proclivities, the submissiveness of Jesus to his Father’s instructions was immensely pleasing and satisfying to God and duly won him a super-compensatory inheritance and lordship over all of it, via resurrection from among the dead plus incomparable glorification in heaven thereafter.

All this goes to explain why any divine anger at the Cross was not only completely unnecessary, but absolutely impossible. It is an alien fabrication and grossly unworthy of God as revealed in the Bible. We must allow Scripture in its own inspired terms to teach us about God’s character under the guidance of the Spirit of wholesomeness that authored it. The artifice of “penal substitution” must be exposed as the counterfeit it is, and we must press on to maturity without any further need of shadowy substitutes for the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit. [6/18/08]

No wrath of God at the Cross, ALLEGED appearances to the contrary.

Is it conceivable that John the Baptist should have warned about “the wrath to come” (Matthew 3:7, Luke 3:7), meaning the impending Jewish wars and conclusive destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, and that Jesus should have warned about the very same events in his woes against the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:29-39, Luke 13:34-35) and in his Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 17:20-37, 21:5-36) and even on his very way to be crucified (Luke 23:27-31), and that even the apostle Paul should have alluded to them (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, 2 Thessalonians 1:4-10, Romans 2, etc.), yet, regardless of all these Scriptures, THAT ANYONE MIGHT SOMEHOW IMAGINE THAT GOD’S WRATH WAS COMING AT THE CROSS?  [11/04/07]

By raising His Son from the dead, God was decisively demonstrating that NONE OF JESUS’ SUFFERING OF ABUSE HAD ORIGINATED FROM HIS (GOD’S) OWN WRATH AT ALL!  THE RESURRECTION PROVED GOD’S NEVER-CHANGING GRACIOUSNESS TOWARD JESUS, DESPITE AMBIGUOUS APPEARANCES TO THE CONTRARY.  THE RESURRECTION EXPOSED THE JEWISH OPINION THAT “GOD HIMSELF HAD CURSED JESUS” AS RADICALLY FALSE AND CONCLUSIVELY DISPOSED OF THEIR SLANDER THAT GOD’S WRATH WAS “PROVED BY THE CROSS.”  [11/04/07]

The demons were not expelled from the whole world by Jesus; most were left for us to handle!  Jesus is Joshua!  The demons are the “wild beasts” of the promised land.  The conquest is to be achieved “little by little” at the hands of God’s people—the “children” not of Israel merely, but of God Himself.  We get to participate in the victories!  We need to put our armor on!  Our spiritual weapons in hand!  This age is for our conquering this present world in this way!  [11/04/07]

Traditional critical scholarship (whether taken in hand by Evangelicals or by its more authentic promulgators) generally is impotent to grasp the true and even obvious relation between Jesus’ miraculous career and his resurrection.  Apologist for the Gospel accounts often seem to be treading water…or at least thin ice, no less than over-eager prosecutors!  (James G. Kallas, however, pointed the right direction in The Significance of the Synoptic Miracles.  SPCK, 1961.)  The historical validity of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is implicit in all the other miracle narrations.  It is hardly possible, much less credible, that they could be veritable eyewitness history, yet it be not!  Jesus had dropped more than a few hints concerning his rising from the dead, and HE HAD EVEN DEMONSTRATED IT AND, FURTHERMORE, TAUGHT AND COMMANDED AND COMMISSIONED ALL HIS LEARNERS TO PRACTICE RAISING THE DEAD TOO!  So his own resurrection by no stretch of a jaundiced imagination stands alone and isolated from either his evident actual power to effect it or his predictions that “thus it must be.”  All those “tedious” recordings and corroborations, in the Gospel writings, of unnumbered oral histories about this amazing man, Jesus, COULD ONLY MEET THEIR HISTORIC CLIMAX IN…RESURRECTION AS USUAL!  [11/05/07]