God was never our enemy, rather, by our own sins against Him, we became His enemies. This means that we humans never needed to propitiate Him, contrary to the dark imaginations and superstitions of the pagan nations, but rather He took divine measures to propitiate us! This is why the language of the New Testament is uniformly unilateral in its tendency on this matter. The Father dispatched His only-born Son as a propitiation concerned with (in other words, a shelter, shielding or protection around) the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2), including the sins of those who trust Him, but not theirs alone.
We cannot be shielded from God’s anger against hardened sinfulness, for it cannot, in principle, be appeased; but He can put a protective covering around our sins so that we are saved from His anger against them. And, He Himself supplies this sheltering via the blood of His unjustly executed Son, whose innocence and sinlessness cried out to God for His just avenging from his lethal enemies.
God, as we know, heard from heaven and raised their blameless Victim from among the dead with great proof, then exalted him on high to the throne of the universe at His own right hand, giving him superabundant overcompensation for his obedience in subjecting himself to suffering abuse from his enemies (though he was never their enemy, but, quite the contrary, went around forgiving sins without compensation and healing sinners from the dread consequences of their misdeeds in conscience and body).
Thus, wherever God sees this innocent blood sprinkled on guilty hearts by faith, He answers by sending down a measure of the rightful award for Jesus’ obedience and wrongful treatment: the gift of the Wholesome Spirit which, by its vivifying power, actually reverses the degenerative direction of our spirits and testifies to us that we are now immortal newborns in His agelong Kingdom!
The Lord’s Supper is the beautiful sign that we are now actual participants in God’s own nature via the Spirit He has given us. By this we feed on His agelong life and nourish our souls repeatedly until the resurrection of our bodies. [2/5/04]
“No good deed will go unpunished,” because there is a Devil, yet no undeserved punishment will go unrequited, because there is a God. [2/8/04]
THE COVENANTAL STRUCTURE OF GOD’S KINGDOM
The covenantal structure of the Kingdom of God was announced in the prophecy of the New Covenant in Jer. 31:31-34, quoted in Heb. 8 and 10, whereby He would impart His “law to their comprehension” and write it “on their hearts” and, moreover, “be protective to their injustices” and “under no circumstances be reminded of their sins and their lawlessnesses.” These two facets, then, God’s law etched on our hearts and our sins forgotten from God’s heart, constitute the key epicenters of God’s new rule over his people. These are signified by communion and immersion, respectively. In both of these, the outpouring of the promised present of God’s Wholesome Spirit plays a decisive new role distinct from that in the Old Covenant (at least in sheer volume and variety of manifestations, not to mention frequency!). On account of Jesus’ perfect obedience to the Father, He won the prize promised by the Father under the Old Covenant, which none other had ever come near qualifying for. It is this that ushered in the New Covenant with gratuitous and superabundant blessings and overwhelming graciousness and consequent gifts or donations or favors of Wholesome Spirit. All in Messiah! All of this is the gratuity of the Father’s own righteousness or justice by raising the Son from among the dead! It is the rightful claim or recompense of the wrongful injuries suffered by Jesus! God pulled off an incredible coup against Satan’s kingdom of darkness! God raised up Jesus “because of our justifying,” or on account of our rectifying, as the fruit of Messiah’s obedience even to such a humiliating and undeserved death on a cross.
In Messiah Jesus, the old humanity got destroyed, along with its mortality, corruption, and sin, and a brand new humanity was born above, with citizenship in the New Jerusalem on Mount Zion above! And now, by the “good seed” of God’s Proclamation of His Kingdom, He begets us into that new or “second Adam” by immersion when we repent and trust the Message.
By this immersion into Messiah’s body of new humanity all our past sins, transgressions, offenses, and injustices are washed off, forgiven, not accounted against us, covered over, not remembered, cleansed away, erased! And all this is done by the vivifying power of the Wholesome Spirit, the very same power that raised Jesus from among the dead, and which now empowers us to start obeying the directives of Messiah, the Master (and, in truth, Jehovah-savior: Jesus) “from the heart,” that constitutes the second aspect of God’s Kingdom of Heaven over the earth during this otherwise wicked age.
This second facet, signified by communion, is the ingestion into our hearts and minds of the declarations, explanations, directives or teaching of Jesus as found recorded by his learners and commissioners in the Gospels. This is the “law of Messiah,” the true “law of liberty” that sets us free as we continue to “eat and drink” his “flesh and blood,” which are “Spirit and life.”
The exalted Messiah is now the “Tree of Life” from whose fruit, the Wholesome Spirit, we partake regularly at the Master’s Dinner. There we feed on the milk and meat of his Explanation and grow thereby into wholesomeness and maturity, i.e., into the image, character, and nature of God the Father as we view these in His only-born Son and, in turn, mirror them by emulation within our respective environs.
The operations of God’s Wholesome Spirit, the very substance and essence of God’s Kingdom newly covenanted in Jesus, the Messiah, can therefore be summarized as washing and nourishing. These both are accomplished or ‘applied’ as we trust God’s Explanation that He spoke finally and with unequalled authority throughout the career of Jesus, His only-born Son, in the flesh. Thus God’s revealed Declaration and His commissioned Spirit or Motivation work together to testify by explanation and action to His Reign over the earth during this age (in part), as well as to the nature of its ultimate contents when this age is consummated and we can finally inherit our allotments in it without sin, death, or enemies to oppress us: the New Heavens and New Earth in undimmed glory. [2/18/04]
The Premial Atonement 