I hope you have enjoyed a bountiful Thanksgiving Day, full of grateful reflections on God’s great goodness and benignity toward us in spite of whatever the Enemy can throw at us! October 5th was the date of my previous blog, and in the meantime I have started a second blog site dealing more with the outflow and implications of a premial understanding of God’s justice—a justice He calls us to reflect across the full horizon of our lives during this vicious age of the world (Gal. 1:4).
Today—Black Friday—I am starting a new series on this Premial Atonement blog site. These reflections started during a serious six-week bout with undulant fever that took me down during the spring of 2006. That illness turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. A quarter century of wrestling with the nature and meaning of the Atonement came to a head and a kind of final clarity emerged that has taken years to unfold. I shall be sharing those insights with you starting today. I hope you can join me in this public elaboration. I only hope I can keep up with any responses you may wish to contribute along the way. Further clarification is sure to occur as we labor together.
I hope this serves as a fitting introduction to the Advent season just ahead. May God bless us all!
Ron
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If salvation had been effected at the Cross, then many of us might not even exist, much less be saved. The reason is simple. If Jesus had saved himself there, by calling on “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matt. 26:53; cf. 27:39-43), his enemies could scarcely have stood a chance of surviving and, in any case, he would only have achieved the kingship over Israel, if that, since an angelic attack would have decimated his prospective subjects! He could only win a kingdom over all the nations by way of over-compensation by being willing to pass all the way under the waters of death. He traded the kingdom of Israel for the Kingdom of God over the universe! Thus we non-Jews can enjoy salvation too. [3/28/06]
Jesus himself suffered in the wake of witness intimidation. His disciples, all of whom constituted an inner circle of witnesses to all his communications and activities, both public and private, could have come to his defense during his trial, yet all but one fled that fearful event. Official (in this case) intimidation by the temple guards was sufficient to keep them at a ‘safe’ distance. And the possibility of Peter’s being called to testify on Jesus’ behalf was enough to terrify him to turn tail. [4/1/06]
The invidious separation forged by the early gnostic schismatic Marcion (died c. 160 A.D.) between a violently wrathful God of the Old Testament and a Jesus meek and mild severed the unity of the divine character and shattered the integrity of Their singular intention. The authentic New Testament resurrectionary rationale for the abuse of Messiah by Satan became (if it had not already been) obscured by this imputed disharmony within Deity.
However, the false teacher Marcion’s misattribution of unjust violence to Jehovah and of feckless, sentimental love to Jesus created a two-headed monster out of the one God. Furthermore, it impugned the consistent and uniform nature of God’s Justice in both testaments (covenants). It sheared the Old Testament away from the New Testament. The overcompensatory stipulations of Old Testament justice were deemed harsh and cruel, so the overcompensation of the Resurrection and Exaltation in return for the Crucifixion was not discerned as essentially identical with that earlier principle. The so-called ‘Atonement‘ became an insoluble enigma. Eventually. Marcion’s alleged ‘Old Testament‘ God inflicted His wrath on his ‘New Testament‘ God and the rest is grim history, which repeated itself during the Protestant Reformation, by a strange and needless irony. [4/2/06]
The Premial Atonement 