If God could not experience and feel genuine suffering from evils occurring in His creation, then how would it be possible for us to become like Him, knowing and emulating His just behavior in response to evils?

Is it just possible that our experience of suffering evils is somehow intended to help us understand how God suffers from evils? Can He experience suffering? Did He experience suffering from evils only in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ? Isn’t it a part of becoming like God in character that we learn to experience and feel about evils the same way God experiences and feels about them? Doesn’t this require God to experience or know evils somehow the way we human beings do? And doesn’t the Lord Jesus simply reflect and reveal his Father’s own feelings and attitudes toward evils? How could we mature into the image and likeness of God Himself if He can’t feel evils and then respond in a normative manner that we could emulate? [3/8/12]

So-called “penal substitution: is impossible no matter how we construe the meaning of “penal” or of “substitution.” If by “penal” we refer to an attitude of God, then it is impossible because no such attitude could be expressed by a just God against a sinless man, nor is any postulated in Scripture by a fair reading. Nor could such a penal expression toward a sinless person serve as a “substitute” for others so as to prevent penalties from falling either on recalcitrant evildoers to avert their ultimate destruction or on erring believers to correct their misbehavior before it becomes habitual and destroys their faith.

On the other hand, “penal” could hardly refer to the attitude of those who inflicted wounds and abuse on the Lord, because that suffering assuredly does not substitute for ours. In fact, he informs us that no servant is greater than his lord, so we should expect similar ill-treatment from the world. [3/8/12]

Jesus’ resurrection from the dead justified him from any sin that had been ascribed to him by his wicked accusers and false witnesses (Rom. 6:7, cf. 2 Cor. 5:16, 1 Tim. 3:16, Rom. 4:23-5:2, 18, 21; 8:1-4, 10-11.) [3/10/12]

The power of Christ’s resurrection rectifies sins by reversing their evil effects, even as it reversed, yes, even more than reversed, Christ’s death—the effect of his cross. This is how Christ’s work deals with and in fact expunges sin, i.e., via the vivifying, death-and-evil-reversing power of the Holy Spirit, poured out of heaven superabundantly on believing sinners as a fruit of Christ’s unjust abuse-taking getting reversed by God’s premial justice to him, then overflowing graciously to us from there! Thanks be to God for His unspeakable Gift! [3/28/12]

Penal Substitution defenders must minimize and downgrade the fierceness of Christ’s contest against Satan at the cross. That is the only way they can “glorify” their pet hobby horse—Christ’s “suffering God’s wrath”! This means that the REAL BATTLE AGAINST SATAN GETS POOH-POOHED, DIS-HONORED, AND MARGINALIZED TO MAKE ROOM FOR A MYTH OF DEFAMING MAGNITUDE! From such slander how does God save His honor? With penal substitutionary theologians for friends, why would God need enemies! For if the Son suffered the Father’s wrath, then the Father suffers the penal substitutionary advocate’s slander, misrepresentations, in a word, DISHONOR. And this, in turn, means that God suffers the repulsion, repudiation, rejection, withdrawal, and recoiling of sinners in need of His redemptive love and authentic, premial justice! God gets wretchedly disgraced! Is that not, then, a “doctrine of demons” that dares to defame God by turning the cross into a demonstration of divine wrath and away from a divining of demonic rage! [3/21/12]

How ironic it is that the ‘evangelical’ Protestant theory of Christ’s “penal substitution should be met by the Islamic conjecture about Jesus’ “penal substitution by a luckless lookalike! The simplest way to subvert such a “poetic” twist of penal justice is to reassert premial justice at Christ’s resurrection, which entails the gracious inclusion of all who believe it! [3/31/12]

Not a theologia crucis but a theologia resurrectionis is what we need, indeed, that is exactly what Paul’s Epistle to the Romans actually teaches, or rather harps on over and over again! [3/31/12]

Sin was CONDEMNED when Death was DAMNED.

By his resurrection from the death of the cross, Jesus ipso facto condemned the sin that was depicted by that cruciform sin-offering (hamartia), for he was now alive forevermore, and the sin of theocide was itself thereby rendered null and void—dead. And that’s how the mercy and graciousness of God made peace with outright criminal types and conciliated (at least some of) them back into royal fellowship and full dignity as sons and heirs of God, now fruitful seed, bearing fruit of righteousness unto wholesomeness. For since “sin reigns in death” (Romans 5:21), when Jesus was taken down from the cross and rose up from the grave, death was taken down to Hades, and along with it, sin was condemned as accessory to the crime of the Cross. And, in turn, we who trust God in Christ are rendered dead to sin and forever alive to God, through that resurrectionary deliverance which is in Christ Jesus! [3/29/09]

To the related questions, “Does God suffer [abuse]?” And “Does the Lord Jesus continue to suffer [abuse] even after his trial and cross?”, a counter question may serve to answer: “Do parents suffer [abuse] when their children (whether young or adult) are suffering [abuse]?” Consider even the passage in Acts 9:4 where the risen Lord Jesus speaks to Saul the persecutor of the church: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” [3/31/09]

The German New Medicine (GNM) has demonstrated how mammals suffer in their own bodies the hurts of those they hold dear, nurture, love, and cherish. If this is true of “living souls,” and especially of human beings, how must it hold also and even more profoundly for the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the body which is his assembly! Moreover, the GNM has persuasively established the link between the brain phenomenon termed a “Hamer focus” and the correlated cell duplication/diminution in respective organ tissues of the body. Thus a perceived injury or trauma is experienced simultaneously and proportionately in both body and head (brain)! And since this is the way our Creator made us, is it hardly possible that such links do not exist between the body of Christ and Christ the Head? This leads us to believe he must somehow literally suffer [abuse] right along with us, and this will not—can not—end for him until it ends for us at our glorification as sons and daughters. [3/31/09]

Some tricks can only be played on a fool. The crucifixion of the Son of God was such a “trick”—and what a Fool sauntered up to the plate! His legendary criminal record made him the ideal victim for such a ruse! He had fooled Adam and Eve. He fooled Cain and Lamech. He fooled Pharaoh, Balaam the prophet, king Saul, Absalom, Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Ahab, Sennacherib, Haman, yes and a host of notable saints as well. He was at the peak of his game when Jesus came along. [3/31/09]

All the strutting and fuming and fussing of preachers talking up the so-called “moral law” is starting to sound like an excuse for not growing up into the “Law of Christ.” The apostle Paul, on the other hand, almost never refers to the Law of Moses (Torah) except to argue for leaving it behind as something fine for little children and helpful to convict lawbreakers of their sin, but hardly suitable to bring saints to full maturity. For this they have the inestimable boon of the very Spirit of wholesomeness—a positive power not only to energize doing the full-bore desire of God, but in addition to inform us as to the actual elaborated and ramified contents of that desire…along with whatever else we may need from “the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2).

How strange, even foreign, it should sound to the ears of seasoned saints to hear preachers harping on “the Decalogue of Moses” as exposing “the whole world” of sin, but never hear that the Holy Spirit of God is more than qualified to “convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). Such aberrant, deficient, doctrinaire pulpiteering risks actually quenching the Spirit of God, rebuffing our heavenly Life Coach, disdaining “God’s unspeakable Gift”—the just deserts of Christ’s faithfulness! Let’s grow up and stop retarding God’s kids from attaining their full potential…full power! [4/01/09]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #41)

41.     Was the work of the Cross exclusively Godward?

The Cross of Jesus ‘influenced’ God by demonstrating the Master’s own loyal obedience to Him, in the face of towering injustices, thus provoking God’s speedy reversal of the crime and His vindication of Jesus as Messiah and Lord with overcompensating glory and blessings.  It ‘influenced’ mankind by showing the lengths to which God—both Father and Son—was willing to go to prove his love, without any show of vengeance or hostility toward our sinful race in the bargain, thus prompting a conciliatory attitude in alienated sinners and supplying us with the Holy Spirit for free, by faith, to erase our wrongdoings and empower a new life of good (even though flawed) activities worthy of praise and reward.  Additionally, and crucially, the Cross ‘influenced’ Satan too, for it drew out all his cowardly rage and, in a triumphant irony, thereby only increased the amount of God’s reparative damages to Jesus (and of penal retribution to Satan, in the final Lake of Fire) when Jesus steadfastly proved undeviating in faithful obedience.  The physical body of Jesus was the final battlefield of the agelong war raging between the kingdoms of Light and Darkness for possession of earth’s human and natural resources.  The fact that Jesus held out to the last breath without breaking down and calling either angel or Deity to save himself was a decisive Satanward thrust, the finishing stroke that forever pulled the stinger (i.e., sin, powerfully aggravated by the Law of Moses—curses and all) of the last enemy, Death (under whose reign sin reigned), which was under the control of Satan.  For God Himself could now rightly intervene to justify Jesus with a superabounding degree of life-making Spirit to inaugurate and fully fund the renewal of creation!  The Cross accordingly possesses a threefold vector of influence.