The Day God Overreacted.

If God had meant the Cross to be a riveting exhibit of what He thinks of sin, of His hatred of it, of His wrath toward it, then wasn’t He rather late on the draw? Four millennia of sinful civilizations had flowed over the “damn” by that time! They surely could have benefited from such a graphic crucifix to remind them of God’s “bad attitude” and damning responses toward sin. BUT IN FACT THEY HAD SUCH TESTIMONIES ALL AROUND THEM! That’s what Romans 1:18 through 3:20 are all about. God had never left Himself without testimonies either of His wrath or of His good acts (Acts 14:17) and kindnesses (Romans 2:4) in His achievements, not to mention His imperceptible power and divinity (Romans 1:20), during that long stretch of redemptive prehistory. HE DIDN’T NEED THE CROSS TO TEACH THAT LESSON. No, no! What the Cross taught, what it revealed, but of course only in conjunction with the Resurrection, was the righteousness of God that alone could SAVE us from all that terrifying wrath—that litany of ruins that littered the cradles of civilization.

How did these diametric opposites ever get so dismally confounded in theologies of the Cross? How could they all (?) have been so blind to the real meaning of the Cross of our Master Jesus, the Messiah, as the hideous CULMINATION of human wrong demanding, at long last, a definitive answer from Heaven itself by way of a SOLUTION? The Cross, in sum, finally rang God’s doorbell, and He heard and answered and did the unheard of by completely reversing and overcompensating this consummate execution, giving the perpetrators the advantage of habeas corpus long enough for the corpse to cool and stiffen helplessly. THEN AND ONLY THEN, with a supernal flourish, Jehovah OVERREACTED and sent the universe sprawling in astonished disarray. What happened next can only be described as: Nice. Neat. Cool. Sweet. And, really really Fair. Okay, so I’m at a loss for words.

However, that’s not the end of the story. Sadly, possibly because the proximate ending was so horrible, God, in His discretion, left it deliberately out of Wholesome Scripture, although He did close His holy eyes and point us in the right direction to find it. He even arranged to have a sympathetic Jewish eyewitness record it—Josephus, a virtual ambassador and mediary between Rome and Jerusalem, equipped with not a little wisdom from on high. In 70 A.D., the termination of that wicked generation which crucified God’s appointed and Anointed Son as an exile, outside His own “vineyard” and capital city 40 years earlier, in 30 A.D., GOD’S WRATH DESCENDED WITH UNMATCHED FURY. Nothing like it had ever befallen Jerusalem before, and its equal has never occurred since. This tragedy stands prominent, alone, and unspeakably ugly as the festered carbuncle of Israel’s history. And God lanced it. This gross episode makes for uncomfortable and exclusively adult reading. And that’s where you’ll find the paramount exhibit of God’s wholesome hatred of case-hardened sinners, now virtually identified with their cherished, unforgiven, full-grown sins, in out-and-out rebellion against His own long-announced and well-illustrated Kingdom of love, righteousness, mercy, forgiveness, amenability, peace, kindness, and abounding joy. They had stiffly rebuffed that kind of Kingdom, and, instead, got what they were asking for: vengeance.  “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25).  [5/30/07]

Riddle: Did Jesus bear the WRATH of GOD or the SIN of HUMANS?

Answer:  Jesus Christ did not come to bear ‘the wrath of his Father’; he came to bear the sin of his brethren!  There is a world of difference and a great gulf fixed between the two ideas, and with nearly opposite implications for God’s character.  Jesus came to manifest the authentic image of the Father.  Without such a transparent magnification, God ends up with a serious “image problem.”  For then Jesus appears to “pay off,” “pacify,” “appease,” or “satisfy” an alleged aspect of God’s character instead of mirroring the whole of it and commending it to us for our own imitation and emulation.  The behavioral repercussions of a misrepresentation here can be ugly indeed, and in any case dictate sprawling evil ramifications for ethics.  Christ died and rose from the dead not “to pacify and reconcile God” but to pacify and conciliate us!  [10/16/96]  (Refer to chap. 8, “Atonement,” in the “BIOGRAPHY” link under Barton W. Stone, on the right.)

We know that all of God’s people, whether before or after Pentecost, will inherit God’s Kingdom at the general resurrection.  On this score there is no distinction between them.  But the death and Resurrection of Christ did interpose a profound difference between our respective pre-resurrection experience of God’s future Kingdom.  We will all inherit God’s Kingdom after the Last Trumpet sounds, when the dead are raised and the living changed.  But we who trust Christ and his Proclamation in this age may enter that Kingdom even now, and receive the Wholesome Spirit of sonhood whereby we can taste its great powers and giftings (charismata).  This is why it was said by Jesus that even the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist, for John never experienced this outpouring of the Spirit and, indeed, didn’t do one sign!  (Jn. 10:41)  While even the least in the Kingdom may now have miraculous giftings routinely and even do greater things than Jesus (John 14:12)!  [07/08/07]

Christ’s lawless and unjust Crucifixion justified God in repaying him superabundant life.  This extraordinary repayment was God’s just award (dikaioma) to him for his unjust suffering on our behalf.  Christ’s Resurrection to immortality, in other words, was his just award for suffering unto death, and equates to the justifying of the verdict of superabounding life in return!  (Rom. 5:17-21, Gal. 3:21-22, Heb. 7:15-19, 1 Tim. 3:16, 1 Cor. 15:45)  This means that Christ was indeed “raised because of our justifying” (Rom. 4:25), both because the verdict of justification was, in effect, declared immediately at his unjust execution, even though not carried out until “three days” later by the actual bestowal of his just award of getting raised to life agelong, but also because the award was sufficient in magnitude for “whosoever will”!  (Rev. 22:17)  [11/01/96]

We seldom approach the account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead by considering Jesus’ own experience of it.  What was its function for Jesus himself?  Is it possible that this very touching memoir intends also to teach us how much the Father loved His Son and wanted to assure him of His own full power and intention to raise him from the dead as he faced his own sure and certain death in Jerusalem?  The trial in the Garden of Gethsemane, not to mention what followed, was inconceivably grueling.  It reveals much about Jesus’ humanity.  No one could take his existence away from him; he laid it down voluntarily, yet not without great struggle, in which that foretaste of the joy lying before him—so recently manifested in the resurrection of his own dear friend Lazarus—must have contributed considerably to his resolve.  [11/04/96]

It is astounding to consider that the Jews themselves, by self-concerned execution of their own legitimate, divinely-attested, miracle-working, super-wise, graciously merciful, life-saving Messiah were by their own hands essentially slitting the throat of their own fondest hopes and covenanted blessings!  For what was the nation without its true King except doomed!  The Jewish leaders had allied themselves with the Herodian dynasty of almost unspeakably corrupt non-Jewish usurpers!  Jesus had both taught and exemplified the way of justice and peace, of wisdom and prosperity, of liberty and joy for Israel’s national life.  By highhandedly rejecting Jesus as Jehovah’s Messiah, they sealed their fate as a nation and invoked the curse of Moses’ Law upon their own heads:  “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” they had cried unbelievingly (Mt. 27:25).  So be it.  Yet even so, for any who still might repent and trust Jesus there would be safekeeping from the Divine wrath coming upon Jerusalem and the Temple and the Jewish people within one generation of their treason, their treachery, against God’s Anointed and Chosen One.  From then on, “election” would have to be understood as the status of all–whether Jew, Greek, Circumcision, “Foreskin,” barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, male, or female (1 Cor. 12:13, Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11)–who by trust get immersed in Christ for the washing away or release of their sins and thereupon obtain the Holy/Wholesome Spirit of promise, the Spirit of sonship, the blessing of Abraham, the father of all the faithful, for all the nations of earth.  [11/06/96]