Romans 3:25 refers to the demonstration of PREMIAL GRACIOUSNESS at Christ’s resurrection, not to any display of PENAL WRATH at his crucifixion.

IF “His righteousness” in Romans 3:25 is premial instead of penal, whose “revelation” (1:17), “manifest[ation] (3:21), and “display” (3:26, twice) is supremely visible in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, THEN the following phrase, “because of the bypassing of the penalties-of-sins [hamartematon] which occurred before in the forbearance of God,” must be construed as precisely the ancient spectacle of premial justice on display.  For the passage goes on to parallel “His righteousness” in “the current era,” that is, God’s display of premial justice in raising Jesus from the dead , by which God showed Himself “to be just [by overwhelming His Son with the life-making Holy Spirit of graciousness, power, and glory] and a justifier [by virtue of its superabundant gratuitous spillover] of the one who is from the faithfulness of Jesus” (3:26).

This explains the peculiar phraseology, “the bypassing [paresin] of the penalties-of-sins [hamartematon],” which means the overlooking of the exaction of the consequences of sins in some display of punitive wrath.  For precisely such a bypass was supplied by the protective cover (hilasterion) Paul has just referred to (v. 25), in the graciousness of God.  For it was the “faithfulness in [en, i.e., “within” or “inside (of)”, not eis, which would denote “trust in”–a meaning unattested by any identical construction elsewhere in Scripture] Christ’s blood” (3:25) that called forth an immediate exhibit of His graciousness toward Christ instead of immediate wrathfulness toward his crucifiers.  His wrath could wait (40 more years, till 70 A.D.) against any stubborn holdouts among the criminal offenders; by contrast, His graciousness could not delay being exhibited toward the sinless Victim!  And that’s the story of the whole Bible.  For God’s “longsuffering” or “forbearance: (anoche) is intended to lead to repentance (Romans 2:4), and He is “not tardy…but patient…not intending any to get destroyed, but all to make room for repentance” (2 Peter 3:9; cf. Romans 2:4-11).  [8/15/10]

The foregoing premial interpretation of this famously “difficult” Pauline passage is reinforced by Paul’s squeezing in the clarifying words of verse 24:  “Getting justified gratuitously to His graciousness, through the release [apolutroseos] which is in [en] Christ Jesus.”  The word “release,” commonly rendered “redemption” or “deliverance,” is predicated both of “sins” (Colossians 1:14), “offenses” (Ephesians 1:7), and “transgressions” (Hebrews 9:15) via Christ’s BLOOD, as well as of bodily mortality itself (Romans 8:23, Ephesians 1:14, 4:30, Hebrews 11:35) via RESURRECTION.  And the two kinds of release are clearly linked.  As I have been at great pains to demonstrate elsewhere and often, sacrificial blood represents resurrected life in Biblical thought.  [7/17/21]

The premial solution to God’s atoning righteousness solves, by the same token, the historic irresolution regarding the real nature of justification, as we might have expected!  God’s giving Jesus at his resurrection what he deserved for willingly bearing the hyper-sinful attacks that his envious enemies imposed but which he did not deserve (and which God had never “demanded”!), at his cross, provides a whole new and jubilant thrust to the meaning of “justice/righteousness” and its cognate terms, such as “justification,” wherever they occur in Paul’s letters on the subject.  Not to add that it brings closure to the depressing debates over the connection of justification (and atonement) to the work of the Holy Spirit.  In one fell swoop a hornet’s next of afflicting problems is cast down and trampled in the dust.  [8/15/10]

God graciously gives us the “New Law” of Christ in our hearts instead of indignantly holding Moses’ ancient Law over our heads.

The ancient people of Israel, much less the sects of Jesus’ day, seemed somewhat clueless, for practical purposes, about what true Law-keeping might look like. So when Jesus actually demonstrated it in great detail, explaining himself as he went along, they did not recognize it and hence called it “lawlessness” and “sin,” and called him a “blasphemer”!

That being the case, how could that Old Covenant possibly be suitable for people who, like Jesus himself, actually walk in the Spirit of wholesomeness? That old wineskin burst at the Cross when its curse tried to hold Jesus in Hades. He burst through on the third day with New Wine gushing down from an ever-flowing spigot on high, starting at the Day of Pentecost. That heavenly fluid, like oil, nourished, fueled, lubricated, and illuminated an inconceivable, “unrecognizable” new lifestyle of obedience to a heavenly Father that could never have been learned in a million years under Moses’ tutelage.

This requires that a New Law actually get inserted into the very core of each human personality to coach, mentor, teach, instruct, train, discipline, inform, counsel, enlighten, etc. That’s why the Ten Commandments of Sinai are barely mentioned in the New Testament, even by Jesus, who never lists any but the last six, radically reinterprets the meaning of the Sabbath, and doesn’t explicitly mention the first three. [6/17/08]

The quaint notion, repeated often by J. I. Packer, that the “propitiation” (actually, protective covering) “quenched” God’s wrath, perfectly epitomizes the penal substitutionary error concerning the precise mechanism that links the Messianic climax to the “averting” (another misleading term) of God’s wrath, much less the magnification of God’s GRACIOUSNESS! FOR GOD’S WRATH IS UNQUENCHABLE! Scripture never represents His wrath as “something that needs to be ‘quenched’ so that God’s graciousness can be expressed.” Or anything remotely similar.

But worse (if that is possible…and it is!), this peculiar notion routinely, designedly, shunts right past the right answer, which deals directly (“objectively”!) with the sin problem, and instead presumes to expound “a great mystery” at the heart of the divine personality—something about which they claim a secret knowledge and the right to divulge and describe with their own made-up technical vocabulary.

And furthermore, in view of how these gnostic teachers vaunt their “superior” estimation of the “great sinfulness of sin,” this habitual skirting of the authentic apostolic linkage becomes all the more reprehensible, rendering them hypocritical, their boast unjustified. For the seriousness of sin requires a therapy more serious than a MERELY EXTERNAL (they dub it “objective”) treatment “in the eyes of God” (!) but one that is internal within our stricken souls—“in the bodies of humans”!

This is all explicable on the grounds that God’s agenda is our sonship.  It is our sin (not His wrath) that gets in the way of our maturation. God can hold His wrath all He wants­ and that would accomplish nothing toward treating our internal sinfulness. Mankind would only wax worse and worse, as God Himself proved historically over and over and over again, according to Old Testament testimony. This illustrates, for those with eyes to see, that God, in Christ, was up to something much more radical in this treatment—a CARDIECTOMY! God was preparing to transplant His own divine contents—His heart of love, graciousness, and truth—via the gratuitous gift of His very own uncreated Spirit of wholesomeness inside of us—a heart of flesh instead of stone! And only this “procedure,” this “operation,” by the qualified Divine Surgeon, could possibly achieve the therapeutic breakthrough that successfully brings sinners to sonhood, qualified and worthy to inherit parcels in God’s Kingdom come in the New Earth.

To summarize, God never provided some weird way to “quench His own wrath (“out of love,” of course) by righteously exhausting it (“out of love,” of course) on His own completely innocent Son (“out of love,” of course) in place of unloading it on the guilty (“out of love,” of course) because of his ‘holiness’ (“and not just His love,” “of course”!). Of course.

Much rather, God “provided a protective shielding” “concerned with the sins of the whole world” of mankind, through the covenant faithfulness of Messiah Jesus, even to the vicious shedding of His sinlessly innocent blood, which triggered God to display His own covenant righteousness and raise him from the dead, giving him glory to “atone for” his condign humiliation at the hands of rebels against God. And in the meantime (i.e., the time during which his righteous, self-controlled indignation against those who still stayed stubborn built up and started to make Him mean), God kept up His “testimony of good acts,” filling human hearts “with nourishment and gladness” (Acts 14:17), pouring out “the wealth of His kindness and forbearance and patience” (Romans 2:4) so He wouldn’t have to display His destructive wrath! For God’s “natural” impulse is to not show wrath, to not get mad, but to be patient, longsuffering, merciful, i.e., to wait and see how humans unfold, blossom, develop. Therefore, any notion of waltzing out with a sure-fire “divine method” (even!) of keeping God from getting mad, of “keeping Him happy,” of “quenching His (“holy,” of course!) impulse to fly off the handle and squash sinners, AS IF HE NEEDED SUCH A NOSTRUM TO CONTROL HIS MERCURIAL TEMPER is unspeakably demeaning.

Would this mean that the more we grow in maturity of ‘holiness’, the more we can expect to need our (now!) increasingly holy (read: “sanctified”) wrath against increasingly repulsive sin increasingly quenched by increasingly more innocent substitutes? The inner logic of “penal substitution” is an unstable time-bomb, ready at any moment to go off and blow our ethics all to smithereens. Penal substitutionary religion has a criminal record to back it up. [6/17/08]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #24)

 24.       Weren’t the Levitical sacrifices intended to avert God’s wrath toward sin?

Not per se.  They were divinely appointed as prophetic shadows prefiguring God’s way of cleaning sin out of human hearts, because cumulating sins are what actually provoke his mounting anger.  Not the averting of divine wrath, but the more essential cleansing of human hearts from sin is what the mainstay of the sacrificial system depicts in shadowy detail.