Ronald Lee Roper
Sacrificial blood is associated with every soteriological (“salvation”) expression in the New Testament:
Forgiveness of sins (Matt. 26:28; Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:22)
Rescue from divine indignation (1 Thess. 1:10, cf. Rom. 5:9)
Life everlasting (John 6:53-58; 1 John 5:5-13,20)
Freedom from the law of slavery to sin and the fear of death (Rom. 8:2,21-23, cf. John 6:53-58,
5:21-26; 1 John 5:6-12,20; Heb. 2:10-3:6; Gal. 4:22-5:1; 1 Cor. 7:22-23, 6:20; Rev. 5:9, cf. 1 Pet. 1:18-19)
Procuring the church of God (Acts 20:28)
Atoning/protective shelter around sins (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:14-18; 1 John 1:7-2:2)
Justification (Rom. 5:9)
Salvation (Rom. 5:9)
Blessing (1 Cor. 10:16)
Deliverance/liberation (Eph. 1:7; [Col. 1:14;] Rom. 3:24-25; Heb. 9:15)
Nearness to God (Eph. 2:13)
Peacemaking with God and between Jew and Gentile (Col. 1:20; Eph. 2:13-14)
Reconciling the universe to Christ—earth and heaven, Jew and Gentile (Col. 1:20-22, cf. Eph. 2:16; Rom. 5:8-11)
Uniting Jew and Gentile into one new humanity, one body in Christ (Eph. 2:11-4:5; Col. 3:15)
Ministry in the Holy Places (Heb. 9:7-8,11-12,25-26, 10:19, 13:11)
Redemption everlasting (Heb. 9:12)
Hallowing/sanctifying us (Heb. 9:13, 10:29, 13:12)
Cleansing everything from sin (Heb. 9:13-14,19-23, 10:2; 1 John 1:7)
Obtaining the promised everlasting inheritance (Heb. 9:13-18, cf. Tit. 3:5-7; 1 Pet. 1:1-4)
Dedicating covenants (Heb. 9:15-18, 10:19-20)
Rejecting sin (Heb. 9:25-26)
Eliminating sin (Heb. 10:4, cf. 10:11)
Perfecting to finality those who have gotten sanctified (Heb. 10:12-22)
Making Passover to protect from the exterminator of the firstborn (Heb. 11:28)
Crying out for divine avenging for being murdered (Heb. 12:24, 11:4; Rev. 6:10, 19:2)
Leading up from the dead the Great Shepherd himself, the Lord Jesus (Heb. 13:20)
Ransoming from vain behavior (1 Pet. 1:19)
Conquering Satan (Rev. 12:9-11), the Wicked One (1 John 2:13-14), the world (1 John 5:4-8), and deceiving spirits of Counter-Messiah not confessing Messiah Jesus (1 John 4:1-6)
Loosing from sins (Rev. 1:5)
Buying for God (Rev. 5:9)
Whitening robes for a right to the Tree of Life and holy city, New Jerusalem (Rev. 7:14, 22:14)
Sacrificial blood is the authentic root metaphor for atonement—in fact, for salvation in every aspect—within the Bible. Hinting at the need for a soteriological subdiscipline of Hematology?
Sacrificial blood represents “[living] soul” (Lev. 17:11,14) or, by metonymy, simply “life,” particularly life-from-the-dead, vivification, or resurrection, including its power to atone, sanctify, consecrate, cleanse, forgive, heal, etc., yet never simply death per se.
The resurrectionary power of divine life touches whatever the blood “sprinkles.”
The diversity of salvation associated with sacrificial blood (virtually every category) should be understood as rooted in and ramifying from the power of Christ’s resurrected life.
Sacrificial blood is the Old Covenant ritual symbol of life-out-of-death, foreshadowing the raising of Christ from among the dead.
Under the Old Covenant administration there could be no remission of sins without shed blood (Heb. 9:18-22) for the simple reason that such blood was the temporary ritual token of Christ’s life-from-the-dead, i.e., his resurrected living soul…now a life-making Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), toward whom the whole Levitical economy looked for fulfillment as the true power source for removing sins wholesale under the then-future unconditional New Covenant.
The parallelism in Romans 5:8-10, rightly divided, expresses how the sinless blood of Christ bridged death and life—the transistor in the judicial circuit that amplified (by the power of God’s supercompensating justice) the output of the life criminally taken, thereupon paying a high-yield return to Christ—“Whom God raises, loosing the pangs of death, forasmuch as it was not possible [justly!] for him to get held by it” (Acts 2:24)—sufficient to justify life for all mankind. “Verily, verily, I am saying to you, if a kernel of grain, falling into the earth, should not be dying, it is remaining alone, yet if it should be dying, it is bringing forth much fruit” (John 12:24; cf. 1 Tim. 2:4-6).
The Levitical blood sacrifices were prophetic ritual rehearsals of Israel’s prime atrocity, culminating all its depravity in a single outrageous staging of human sacrifice as a once-and-for-all showdown that would unveil how God ventured to solve the agelong sin problem peaceably.
The reason God commanded some sacrificial blood to be splashed around the base of the altar is that, as a place of ritual wrongful death, the altar itself needed to be ritually atoned for, and only the blood (not the death itself) could do the job.
The Cross “really works” to condemn sin, conquer Satan, and abolish death, not because it was right in any sense (not even substitutionarily), but precisely because it was dead wrong.
Christ, in his sacrifice on the Cross, was not bearing punishment for sins others committed, but bearing sins committed against him, which themselves cried out for punishment.
The ancient ritual murders depicted by animal sacrifices only ceased with the Ultimate Murder in c. 30 A.D., when the shedding of Christ’s blood—not merely nominally “innocent” but perfectly sinless—would have defiled the whole land in extremis if God Himself had not intervened.
Jesus was bearing crime, not punishment—Israel’s unjust lethal assault by the hand of priestly representatives (at Satan’s bidding), which itself called upon God’s justice to avenge his innocent blood at their hands (Matt. 23:20-36, 27:4,24-25; Luke 11:50-51, 18:1-8, 21:20-23, 23:27-31; Acts 5:28, 18:6, 20:26; Rom. 12:19; 1 Thess. 2:14-16; 2 Thess. 1:4-10; Heb. 10:26-31; Rev. 6:10, 16:6, 17:6, 19:2), consequently, his sacrifice was not in the least penal on God’s part—in His eyes, intention, or reckoning.
The sacrificial blood from the slain Lion of Judah (Gen. 49:8-12; Rev. 5:5; Heb. 7:11-19) signifies life–from-the-dead, as does the honey that Samson drew from the carcass of the slain lion (Judg. 14), as well as the honey that revitalized the exhausted Jonathan (1 Sam. 14:23-30):
“Out of the eater came something to eat,
And out of the strong came something sweet.” (Judg. 14:14)
“What is sweeter than honey?
And what is stronger than a lion?” (14:18)
Aslan (C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Chap. 14) never suffered a moment of penal wrath from “the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea”—so does this mean the beloved noble feline could not possibly have saved Edmund and Narnia after all? Unimaginable.
God did not shed His beloved Son’s blood, nor did Jesus “shed his own blood,” as we sometimes say (but Scripture never does)—rather, others (no exception) shed his blood (Matt. 21:45-46, 22:15, 26:4; Mark 12:12-13, 14:1; Luke 11:53-54, 20:19-20; John 5:15-18, 7:1,19-25, 8:12-59, 11:53, 18:31; 1 Thess. 2:15), even as he himself prophesied they would (Matt. 16:21, 17:23; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34; Luke 9:22, 18:31-32), as they did to the prophets before him (Matt. 14:5, 21:33-44, 22:6, 23:33-39; Mark 6:19, 12:1-11; Luke 11:45-52, 13:31-34, 20:9-18; 1 Thess. 2:15), as he warned his disciples that they would do to them (Matt. 10:28, 24:9; Luke 12:4-12; John 12:10-11, 16:2), and as subsequently actually happened (Acts 12:1-4, 21:27-32, 23:12-15, 20-21, 26-27; Rev. 11:8):
- “…this One, given up in the specific counsel and foreknowledge of God, you, gibbeting by the hand of the lawless, assassinate” (Acts 2:23).
- “…this Jesus whom you crucify!” (2:36).
- “…Jesus, whom you, indeed, surrender and disown before the face of Pilate, when he decides to release him. Now you disown the holy and just One and request a man, a murderer, to be surrendered to you as a favor. Yet the Inaugurator of life you kill…” (3:13-15).
- “Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, whom you crucify…this is the Stone that is being scorned by you builders…” (4:10, 11).
- “…Jesus, on whom you lay hands, hanging him on a pole.” (5:30).
- “…the Just One, of whom now you became the traitors and murderers…” (7:52).
- “…whom they [the Jews] assassinate also, hanging him on a pole” (10:39).
- “…those dwelling in Jerusalem and their chiefs, being ignorant of him and of the voices of the prophets which are read on every Sabbath, fulfill them in judging him. And, finding not one cause of death, they request Pilate to have him despatched. Now as they accomplish all that which is written concerning him, taking him down from the pole…” (13:27-29).
The Old Covenant required victims to be overcompensated in order to satisfy justice (Ex. 21:34-22:15; Lev. 5:16, 6:5; Num. 5:7; 2 Sam. 12:6; Prov. 6:30-31; Is. 61:7; Zech. 9:12; cf. Isaiah 40:1-2, Luke 19:8, John 12:24, & 2 Cor. 8:9).
The vengefulness exhibited by Lamech: “Since avenging is seven times for Cain, for Lamech it shall be seventy-seven times [hebdomekontakis hepta]” (Gen. 4:23-24, LXX), was flipped by Jesus, who was evidently alluding to him in his charge: “I am not saying [to forgive] ‘Till seven times,’ but ‘Till seventy-seven times [hebdomekontakis hepta]’” (Matt. 18:22).
Christ’s “blood of sprinkling…is speaking better than [the righteous (dikaion)] Abel” (Heb. 11:4, 12:24; Matt. 23:35, cf. Luke 11:51) because it was perfectly righteous, hence his shed blood cried out for a more perfect avenging (ekdikesis) than Abel’s—an immediate and total reversal of death, plus life superabundant enough for all takers.
God’s avenging of that innocent blood on Christ’s own behalf (i.e., restoratively) is, more than coincidentally, what inaugurated the New Covenant in that blood (Matt. 26:27-28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25-32), by glorifying him and awarding him the restitution of abundant life in the Holy Spirit to pass along, out of love, to our mortal race (John 5:21-29, 6:47-63, 7:37-39; Gal. 2:29-6:18; Rom. 8; 2 Cor. 3:1-18, 13:4; 2 Tim. 1:1; 1 John 4:1-5:13).
The New Covenant was inaugurated by the power of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, not at his cross, and in that sense his blood may be said to “avail.”
The blood or cup of New Covenant blessings (1 Cor. 10:16-22) along with its varied powers, is appropriated by us when we simply drink it worthily, by faith, in the risen Lord’s Supper, for a recollection of him, announcing his wrongful (not penal) death until he comes (1 Cor. 11:26) by his blood getting shed criminally (not penally) (Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20-22), for the sake of many, for the pardon of sins.
Minimizing the seriousness of the crime of the Jews in crucifying their Messiah at Roman hands risks trivializing the magnitude of the response of God’s premial justice in raising him from the dead and showering him with gifts to enrich all nations in addition to Israel.
By “the righteousness of God,” as commonly but one-sidedly translated, the apostle Paul was referring not simply to a character quality but to an historic event—that of Christ’s resurrection, which singularly exhibited in public the character of God’s premial restorative justice.
Somewhat ironically, only the Roman Catholic Rheims Version of the New Testament (1582), translated basically from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, consistently renders dikaiosune/justitia as “justice,” which, although likewise one-sided (but the opposite side, reflecting Roman legal predilections), yet just so happens to yield a sounder sense in many of Paul’s key passages as well as elsewhere in the New Testament.
The “righteousness of God” (as Paul intends the phrase) fell on the Third Day as rightful justice for Jesus and has no reference to the Cross at all.
Paul’s famous phrase “the righteousness of God” refers to God’s public justice in action (dikaiosune includes both personal and social dimensions–—I suggest the composite rendering ‘justness’) revealed (Rom. 1:17), manifested (Rom. 3:21), and displayed (Rom. 3:25, 26) by His raising Jesus from the dead, executed on the Third Day as restorative justice for His Son.
“The justness of God” refers first of all to the Event that made it most famous: His Raising Christ from the dead.
Martin Luther would have been an order of magnitude more overjoyed to learn that “the righteousness of God” was full-on premial to Christ, and not in the least penal.
The following instances of dikaiosune probably refer to God’s justice as epitomized by Christ’s resurrection, encompassing the rightful damages He awarded to Christ: Rom. 1:17, 3:5,21,22,25,26, 5:17,21, 8:10, 10:3a,3c; 2 Cor. 3:9, 5:21, 9:9; Phil. 1:11, 3:9b.
Such phrases as “justness of/for faith” (Rom. 1:17, 4:11,13, 9:30,32, 10:4,5,10; Gal. 5:5), “faith accounted for justness” (Rom. [2:26,] 4:3,5,6,8,9,10,11,22,23,24, 9:8; [2 Cor. 5:19;] Gal. 3:6; Phil. 3:9; [Heb. 11:17-19]), the justness which accords with faith (Heb. 11:7), and justifying faith (Rom. 3:24,), etc., actually refer to Christ’s just-award, the Gift of the vital power of God’s resurrectionary public justice—the Holy Spirit—now graciously poured out upon us, encompassing every spiritual gift and blessing of the New Covenant, as promised by God “to/for [eis]” and “on [epi]” our own exertion of faith (Rom. 1:17, 3:22; Phil. 3:9).
The Gospel (euaggelion) concerning “the righteousness/justice of God,” from another perspective, is simply the proclamation of His righteous fulfillment of His ancient covenanted promises (epaggelia), first to Abraham regarding descendants and a Promised Land (Acts 7:5,17; Gal. 3:8, 14-29; Rom. 4:13-21, 9:4-9; Heb. 7:6, 11:9-19), then to David regarding Seed Royal who would save Israel (Acts 13:23,32-39, 26:6-8), and ultimately to everyone who has the faith of Abraham, concerning the Gift of the Holy Spirit of sonship, the down payment of an inheritance of everlasting life in the Messiah (Luke 24:49; John 5:21-29; Acts 1:4-5, 2:33,38-39; Gal. 4:23,28; Rom. 15:8-12; 2 Cor. 1:18-20, 6:14-7:1; Eph. 1:13-14, 2:11-13, 3:1-12; 2 Tim. 1:1; Tit. 1:2-3; Heb. 4:1-2, 6:11-20, 8:6-7, 9:15, 10:23,35-39, 11:39-40; 12:25-28; James 1:12, 2:5; 2 Pet. 3:4,9,13; 1 John 2:25), which all nations could now access by faith and immersion into Christ’s faithfulness and consequent divine favor (Rom. 5:1-2), divine power, indeed, even participation in divine nature (2 Pet. 1:1-4).
When we hunger and thirst for justice/justness (Matt. 5:6), like the Psalmists, we aren’t begging God for punishment (duh!) but for restoration of violated wealth, health, safety, reputation, peace of mind, etc. (or is this asking too much of a just Deity?).
Jesus never pled with God for mercy, but his sinless blood did cry out for justice.
The only thing that could really satisfy God’s justice was to welcome His Son alive and well back Home, restore his fortunes, exalt him over his enemies, and then reciprocate by kindly showing them mercy so they could repent and be saved…and even share his good fortune.
God’s justice actually only fell on the Third Day and not on a hill far away.
God’s justice was only “satisfied” by the Resurrection, not by the Cross, per se, at all, and therefore his resurrection was actually the paramount judicial act of God.
God’s justice was the outflow of His good pleasure with His Son’s remaining in character while enduring the Cross.
Paul never used such phrases as “Christ’s righteousness” or “the righteousness of Jesus/Christ,” etc. (nor, incidentally, does any other inspired penman), for the simple reason that he intends by “the righteousness of God” to pinpoint the Father’s restorative justice toward the Son (and through him dispensed to others of faith) in distinction from the Son’s obedience of faithfulness (Rom. 1:5, 16:26) toward the Father.
Paul’s famous reiteration of “the just shall live by faith” (Hab. 2:2-4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38), which so resonated with Martin Luther, refers in the first place to the Lord Jesus himself—the Just One (Acts 3:14, 7:52, 22:14; 1 John 2:1,29, 3:7; Matt. 27:19,24; Luke 23:47; 1 Pet. 3:18; Rev. 15:3), who, due to his own faithfulness to God (Rom. 3:22,25,26; Gal. 2:16,16,20, 3:22; Eph. 3:12; Phil. 3:9; Rev. 1:5, 3:14, 19:11), was raised to superabundant life (John 5:21-29, 10:10; 1 Cor. 15:45).
Paul’s strategically repeated phrase, “the faith[fulness] of Christ” (pistis christou—in the subjective genitive sense) refers to Jesus’ own covenantal response to God’s will and promises (Rom. 3:22,26; Gal. 2:16,16,20, 3:22; Eph. 3:12; Phil. 3:9), to which we should add “through (dia) [the] faithfulness” where it plausibly refers to Christ’s own (Gal. 2:16, 3:14,26; Rom. 3:22,30,31; Phil. 3:9; Eph. 2:8, 3:12,17; Col. 2:12; 2 Tim. 3:15), plus instances where the “faithfulness within (en) Christ” himself is in view (Gal. 3:26; 1 Tim. 3:13; 2 Tim. 3:15; Rom. 3:25, where it may be figured in his blood—as it were, the vital active ingredient), sometimes coupled with love (Eph. 1:15; Col. 1:4; 2 Tim. 1:13), but does not include our faith in Christ (objective genitive sense), which is denoted by a different preposition (eis, literally ‘into’) and occurs abundantly throughout the New Testament for a complementary purpose.
The exact wording of Gal. 3:26, “faithfulness in [inside of, within] Christ Jesus,” is also preserved in one of the three most ancient and complete uncial manuscripts (the Alexandrinus) at Rom. 3:22, anticipating Rom. 3:25, “a protective shelter through the faithfulness in his blood” (where the definite article would refer us back to “faithfulness of Christ”/”faithfulness in Christ” of 3:22) and which itself is synonymous with the “new covenant in (his) blood,” Luke 22:20, 1 Cor. 11:25, and should in turn be read in light of Heb. 13:20-21, “Now may the God of peace, who is leading up our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, from among the dead in the blood of the everlasting covenant…,” which brings us full circle back to a resurrectionary interpretation of the “protective shelter” in Rom. 3:25 (in sync with the larger context of 3:21-26). Such significant textual evidence strongly reinforces the argument for understanding the majority reading, ΠΙΣΤΕΩΣΙΕΗΣΟΥΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ (“faith[fulness] of Jesus Christ”), as a subjective genitive (i.e., a faith[fulness] exhibited by Christ himself). The alternative textual tradition of the Alexandrinus codex was either substituting a variant wording in order to foreclose more precisely on which of the two grammatically possible case meanings Paul seemed to be intending here, OR was actually simply preserving or restoring Paul’s original text.
Exclusive to the theology of the apostle Paul alone is the phraseology, “faithfulness in [inside of, within] Christ Jesus/the Lord Jesus,” where the Greek preposition “en,” which exclusively demands the dative case ending, is the unambiguous equivalent of the subjective genitive sense: Gal 3:26; Eph. 1:15; Col. 1:4; 1 Tim. 3:13; 2 Tim. 1:13, 3:15. On the other hand, the Greek preposition “eis,” found in the expression “belief/faith in [unto, into] the Lord/Jesus/Christ” (found abundantly throughout the New Testament), exclusively demands the accusative case ending and is, by the same token, functionally equivalent to the objective genitive sense in these connections.
The Latin Vulgate has retained each of the eight “faith of Christ” renderings intact, and the Aramaic Peshitta retains all except the two in Gal. 2:16.
Paul is framing “God’s justice” and “Christ’s faithfulness” as complementary covenantal correlates, in order to highlight and epitomize their respective, discrete mutual obligations in the integral process of our salvation.
In view of the fact that a truly Just Man had finally shown up in Israel, Yahweh could finally break with the long tradition of grim deserts and, instead of the routine curses, start unleashing wholesale the blessings He vowed to bequeath any perfect covenant-keeper (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).
In view of the perfect obedience of the Son, we may presume God to have been “indebted,” on account of Christ’s “work,” to (re)pay him what he deserved, whereas we sinners could only receive his resulting benefits as a favor for his sake, instead. However, any deserved Divine (re)payment to Christ was surely pre-empted and far eclipsed by the vastly greater prize awarded him due to his fulfilling the whole of the ancient inscripturated covenant, thereby unleashing wholesale God’s oath-bound promises; this is huge!
Jesus, by his covenant faithfulness, won all the promised blessings of the Old Covenant (so inaccessible to any mortal sinner) so that he could prudently give them away for free to repentant covenant-breakers on the gracious condition of mere faith alone, by having negotiated, via covenant renewal, a brand New Covenant no longer liable to default by human failure.
Paul’s expressions, “the faithfulness of God”—Rom. 3:3-5, where “our injustice” of crucifying the Lord is actually said to be “commending God’s justness” of raising him from the dead!—and “the faithfulness of the operation of God” (Col. 2:12) are connected to, and exhibited by, Christ’s resurrection.
The curiously profound truth of the Cross commending the Resurrection only really makes sense on the assumption of premial justice and elegantly accounts for those two puzzling passages (inexplicable on penal assumptions) where Paul denounces judgment against slanderers who alleged that he taught “We should be doing evil that good may be coming” (Rom. 3:8), similarly echoed in, “We may be persisting in sin that grace should be increasing” (Rom. 5:20-6:1), and whose germ of truth Paul himself reprised so memorably in Romans 8:28, “God is working all together for the good of those who are loving God…,” which itself is a reflection of Joseph’s declaration to his brothers in ancient Egypt, “You devised evil against me, yet God, He devised it for good in order to accomplish, as at this day, to preserve many people alive” (Gen. 50:19), as we would expect of the living God.
The cargo to be conveyed in salvation is Christ’s own personal just-award of damages from God, transferred through him as Sponsor (Heb. 7:22) and Mediator (Heb. 8:6-13, 9:15, 12:24) of this fresh, new, better, everlasting Covenant (Ps. 89:3-4; Isa. 35:3, 59:21; Jer. 31:31-34 [38:31-34, LXX], 32:40; Ezek. 16:60,62, 20:37, 34:25, 37:26; Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; Rom. 11:27; 1 Cor. 11:25; 2 Cor. 3:6; Gal. 4:21-5:1; Heb. 13:20), channeled to us as the stipulated beneficiaries, instead of our deserved punishment transferred to him (as postulated by not-quite-ancient-enough Protestant tradition).
The uniquely (even exclusively) Protestant expression, “the imputation of Christ’s righteousness” (in overreaction to the Augustinian Roman Catholic doctrine that the interior operation of the Holy Spirit makes us righteous pending justification at the Final Judgment), has served to obscure Paul’s teaching that the Gift of Holy Spirit constitutes the subjective contents of God’s justness (via Christ’s just-award distribution) within believers/saints (2 Cor. 3; Gal. 2:20-3:29; Rom. 5:5-21, 8:11-30, 14:17; 2 Cor. 9:8-15; 2 Pet. 3:13; John 16:7-11).
Once the doctrines of Atonement, Justification, (Re)Conciliation, Regeneration, Sanctification, etc., are all reestablished squarely upon premial instead of penal suppositions, the reflexive impulse and onus to avoid understanding the Holy Spirit as God’s justness in manifest earthly presence dissolves and can be retired to the museum of wayward theological overreactions (in this instance, contra. the Augustinian, Roman Catholic doctrine of justification).
Protestant “imputation” theology all comes down to artful accounting—“cooking the books.”
One person’s sin, guilt, or punishment cannot economically, legally, or morally be accounted, imputed, or transferred to another (Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29-30; Ez. 18:1-32, 14:14-20), yet one person’s reward, by contrast, obviously can be further distributed at that person’s discretion.
True justice requires redistributing wealth or property in order to restore peace (or hadn’t you noticed?), even as injustice entails redistributing wealth or property from a victim to an offender.
The forensic alternatives boil down to: either Christ’s sufferings were undeserved by him but borne as a substitute in the place of sinners who did deserve them, and thereupon diverticularly rationalized to benefit sinners somehow, OR Christ’s sufferings were undeserved by him and therefore deserved compensating justice from God to repay him with an extraordinary award of damages, which could be transferred to whosoever will accept them by faith.
Anyone who has the right to declare, “Your sins be forgiven you” (wholesale!) can only be the One against whom all sins are committed (Matt. 9:2-6; Mark 2:5-10; Luke 5:20-24, 7:49).
The “merits” of Christ were not transferred by imputation, but instead justly super-compensated with the Holy Spirit of life, which is then given away graciously for free to whoever believes.
Protestant doctrine perpetuates a vestige of medieval Roman Catholic penitential speculation about the separability, commodifiability, accumulation (“treasury”), and transferability of supererogatory “merits” of the innocent suffering of a “Saint” to another person, and accordingly, the transfer of Christ’s personal righteousness to a believing sinner.
Medieval “merit” doctrine—a kind of “commercialization”—led to the invention of indulgences, the abuses by Tetzel, the rationalizations of Eck, and the explosive protests of Luther that kicked off the Protestant Reformation with his “Ninety-Five Theses” on indulgences in the first place.
Protestant abuses of imputation (Augustine started it) also undermine the apostle Paul’s categorical declaration that our faulty human faith is imputed or accounted for justness precisely because it is not a work at all (much less a “supererogatory” work of a “Saint”), so accords fully with God’s graciousness (Rom. 4:4,16).
God chose faith as His condition for selecting sons and heirs because it is not a work at all, but a work-stoppage or Sabbath (Rom. 4:1-6; Heb. 3-4), hence it cannot render God indebted to sinners on account of their work, yet it does necessarily obligate Him on account of His own voluntary, oath-bound promise to Abraham (Gal. 3:15-29; Rom. 4:7-22; Heb. 6:13-20) to reward faith with the status of justness, and thereupon confer everlasting life gratuitously.
The stimulus that generates faith is the vital power of the Gospel narrative about God the Father raising up His Own wickedly sacrificed Son instead of—that is, “as a substitute for”—destroying the wicked, so that this true Story itself gets accorded the distinctive credit for conciliating God’s enemies peacefully, without violence from His side, thus turning them into friends (Heb. 4:12; 1 Pet. 1:23,25; James 1:21; 1 Cor. 1:18,23,24; John 6:44, 12:32; Rom. 10:9; Rom. 1:16-17, 10:17; 2 Tim. 1:7-10, 3:15; Tit. 1:1-3; Acts 20:32, cf. John 17:17-20, 1:1-5; 1 John 1:1-7).
The sin that kept Moses (and Aaron) out of the Promised Land (Deut. 1:37, 4:21: the Lord was “angered” [anaph] or “furious” [LXX ethumothe] with Moses over it; Deut. 3:23-27, “enraged” [evrah]), was precisely that he “struck [epataxe] the rock [petran] twice,” (Num. 20:11, LXX), i.e., in wrath (“Hear, I pray, you rebels! From this crag shall we bring forth water for you?” Num. 20:10; cf. Ps. 106:32-33, “provoked to wrath,” [katzaph; LXX parorgisan]), hence God said, “Because you did not believe in Me to sanctify Me before the eyes of the sons of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I will give to them,” Num. 20:12.
Paul writes, most significantly, “all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank of the spiritual Rock [petras] which followed; now the Rock [petra] was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4), thereby emphasizing, if rather severely, how unholy/unsanctified it would be to impute divine wrath to the striking of that antitypal Rock on Golgotha before the eyes of the children of Israel.
If God’s holiness was compromised because Moses represented God as wrathful when, in fact, He was not, then the doctrine that God poured out His wrath on His own sinless Son “in order to vindicate His holiness” likewise compromises that holiness and risks God’s indignation, whereas praying, “Hallowed be Your name,” would highlight the graciousness of His premial justice.
Yahweh distinguished carefully (Num. 35:20-24) between being guilty or not guilty of striking (nakah) in “enmity” (ehvah; LXX, echthran) or “hatred” (sinah; LXX, menin “rage”, associated with thumos “fury” in Gen. 49:7).
The featured enmity at the Cross was between Satan and Christ: “And enmity [ehvah; echthran, LXX] am I setting between you [the Serpent] and the woman [Eve], and between your seed and her Seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15; LXX: “He shall watch out for your head, and you shall watch out for His heel.”), and we are privileged to follow in the Lord’s footprints (Rom. 16:20, Phil. 1:29-30, 1 Peter 2:21-23).
God, by declaring, “I shall be striking [nakah; pataxo, LXX] the Shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered” (Zech. 13:7; Matt. 26:31; Mk. 14:27), no more behaved in enmity or wrath toward His beloved Son before raising (egeiro) him from death in the resurrection (anastasis), than the angel struck (pataxas) Peter in enmity or wrath before raising (egeiren) him from sleep to rescue him from prison, commanding, “Rise!” (anasta) (Acts 12:7).
Isaiah, in 53:4, “And we account him assaulted, struck [nakah] by God and humbled,” is faithfully prophesying Israel’s slipping into a baseless imputation of divine enmity and wrath toward His Servant, due to their forensic blindness to the untraceable ways of Wisdom.
God “desires [“plans,” bouletai (LXX)] to crush [daka]” (Is. 53:10) him whom He actually favored, on account of the extraordinary good results He planned to bring out of it, both to bless him and to benefit multitudes of others (Ps. 34:15-18-22, 44:9-19-26, 38:1-8-22, 143:1-3-12; Is. 57:13b-15-18—and if these outcomes apply to the sinful, then how much more to the Sinless!).
To tally up the “theology of the Cross” in the book of Acts, we find that of its eleven Gospel testimonies (five by Peter, one by Stephen, five by Paul), Peter mentions “hanging (him) on a pole [xulon, “tree” (LXX), intimating to his hearers that they had invoked the curse of Deut. 21:23 on their own Messiah!]” twice (5:30, 10:39), “crucify” twice (2:36, 4:10), “assassinate” twice (2:23, 10:29), “gibbeting” (2:13), “kill” (3:15); Stephen cites “murderers” (7:52); while four of Paul’s speeches use no equivalent for “cross” at all, while the others use “do away with” (13:28) and, in passing, “taking him down from the pole” (13:29); i.e. there is no theology there.
The word “cross” (stauros) is mentioned nowhere in the entire book of Acts.
By stark contrast to the no-show of “the Cross” in Acts, every one of the eleven Gospel elaboration episodes without fail emphasizes Christ’s resurrection, and most of them more than once: Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2:14-40) four times; Peter at the Porch of Solomon (3:12-26), three times; Peter to the rulers, chief priest, elders, and scribes (4:8-12); Peter to the Sanhedrin (5:29-32), twice; Stephen to the Sanhedrin (7:1-60), climaxing with his on-the-spot live eyewitness show-stopper of the heavens getting opened up to reveal the now-risen Son of Man standing (not sitting for this one!) at the right hand of God (Dan. 7:13-14); Peter to the household of Cornelius (10:34-43), twice; Paul in the synagogue in Antioch, Pisidia (13:16-41) five times; Paul in Athens (17:16-31), twice; Paul to the Jerusalem mob and Sanhedrin (21:40-21,30-23:11), where, having testified to a public encounter with the risen Jesus the Nazarene, yet rudely cut short by the mob from delivering his punch line, speedily recovers and cuts to the chase before the Sanhedrin with the explosive one-liner, “Concerning the expectation and resurrection of the dead am I being judged,” which brought the house down (21:40-21,30-23:11), twice; Paul’s defense before Felix (24:10-21,25), three times (including his testimony of personally encountering the risen Nazarene); Paul’s defense before Festus and Agrippa (26:2-23), twice; for a whopping grand total of twenty-seven references in only eleven speeches.
A chief function of Luke’s record in the Acts of the Apostles “whom [Jesus] chooses through Holy Spirit, to whom he presents himself alive also, after his suffering, with many tokens, during forty days, getting visualized to them and telling them that which concerns the kingdom of God” (1:3), building as it does on Luke’s Gospel (24:43), is to serve as a repository of public testimony (1:22) to the apostolic “teaching…and announcing, in Jesus, the resurrection from the dead” at the end of the age (4:1-2), which Jesus’ own resurrection confirms, for our assurance and consolation: “And with great power the apostles rendered testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Lord. Besides, great grace was on them all…” (4:33).
The Holy Spirit was commissioned to corroborate with augmented power of signs and miracles Christ’s own testimony about everlasting life (John 5:21-44, 8:12-18, 10:25, 15:26-27, 18:37) as well as the apostles’ testimony about his life from the dead (Luke 24:44-49; Acts 1:8, 2:30-33, 3:12-15, 4:33, 5:30-32, 10:38-48, 14:3, 15:7-9; 1 Cor. 1:6; 2 Tim. 1:6-14).
The centrality of Luke’s resurrection testimony is emphatically confirmed throughout the New Testament: John 5:39, 15:27, 21:24; 1 Cor. 1:6, 2:1-2, 15:15; 2 Thess. 1:10; 1 Tim. 2:5-7; 2 Tim. 1:8-10; Heb. 11:1-12:2; 1 Pet. 5:1; 1 John 1:1-2, 4:14, 5:5-13; Rev. 1:2,5,9, 2:13, 8:14, 6:9, 12:11,17, 17:6, 19:10, 20:4, 22:16-17.
The four Gospels stand as towering interdependent testimony to the incontrovertible resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from an officially certified execution.
There is no mention of the Cross or crucifixion (stauroo/stauros, xulon, prospegnumi) anywhere at all in the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans, his weighty landmark elaboration of the Gospel; it contains no theology of the Cross.
Words and expressions referring or alluding to resurrection (egeiro, anistemi/anastasis, haima, zoopoieo, zesetai/zoe (ek nekron/aionion), dikaiosune (tou theou), dikaioma, anakainoo/kainotes, sozo/soteria, apolutrosis, huiothesia, doxa/doxazo, elpis/elpizo, epaggellomai/ epaggelia) abound in nearly every chapter of Romans except the last: Rom. 1:4,16-17, 2:7,10, 3:24-25, 4:17,24-25, 5:9-10,15-18,21, 6:4-5,8-11,13,22-23, 7:4,6, 8:2,4,6,10-11,13,15,17-19,21,23-27,29-30,34, 9:23, 10:1,7,9-10,13,15, 11:11,14,26, 12:1-2; 13:11, 14:7-9 15:4,13) and constitute his inextricable centerpiece—Paul’s pervasive theology of the Resurrection.
The unique expression, “word (logos) of the Cross,” although launched already in 1 Corinthians 1:18, Paul strategically delayed elaborating until chapter 15 (“the Resurrection chapter”) so that in the meantime he could correct his spiritual offspring about crucial ethical matters without prejudice, for they had become ensnared by semi-gnostic, anti-somatic, anti-resurrection doctrines that Apollos learned from Philo in Alexandria and introduced to the church at Corinth with ruinous results.
Paul never wrote, “If Christ has not gotten crucified, vain is your faith—you are still in your sins!” but instead penned, “If Christ has not gotten raised, vain is your faith—you are still in your sins!” (1 Cor. 15:17); cleansing from sin is a function of rising from death.
The “word (logos) of the Cross” can be spelled: R E S U R R E C T I O N.
The Cross alone is never said to be the “power of God”—only “the word of the Cross” is so denominated.
The New Testament never attributes power to the Cross, but only to the resurrectionary “explanation of [reason for] the Cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), to the testimony, explanation, declaration, proclamation, or heralding of the risen “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23-24, 2:1-5), of the risen Christ (Acts 8:4-19, 10:36-47; Rom. 15:18-20), of the risen Jesus (Mark 16:6,14-20; Luke 24:44-49; Acts 4:1-14, 6:8-14; Rom. 1:2-4,16), of the risen Lord (Acts 19:10-13; 2 Cor. 4:3-15; 1 Tim. 1:8; Heb. 2:3-4), of the risen Son (1 Thess. 1:5-10; 2 Pet. 2:16-18), of the living God (Heb. 6:5, cf. 4:12), of the Kingdom of God and the name of the risen Messiah, Jesus (Acts 8:12-13; 1 Cor. 4:20), to faith in the living God (Heb. 11:11-12; 1 Pet. 1:5), or simply to God’s raising the Lord and us to life (1 Cor. 6:14, 15:42-43; 2 Cor. 13:3-4; Phil. 3:10; Heb. 7:15-17; 2 Pet. 1:3).
The Cross/crucifixion of Jesus is never depicted by Christians in their own earliest attested art (whether in catacombs, baptisteries, early house churches, etc.) before the era of Constantine, and even as a bare presumed symbol is referentially ambiguous. The motifs that predominate instead are the Good Shepherd, parables, miracles, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.
The New Testament taken in aggregate contains virtually no “theology of the Cross”; instead, its focus is riveted on Christ’s resurrection from the dead and its cosmic-wide significance.
In the New Testament the Cross is an event, most certainly; an ethic, without a doubt; yet never an emblem, and definitely not a theology.
The event of the Cross became merely a military emblem under Constantine, when it ceased from being an ethic, and thereafter became ripe for mutating into a grotesque speculative theology.
Death by the Cross is included in the Resurrection from the dead, not the other way around; the Gospel’s center of gravity is a Resurrection, not a Cross—it is not “crucicentric” or “cruciform.”
“The apostolic preaching of the Cross” is a full-grown oxymoron, fatted and due for sacrificing.
In the absence of a sound theology of Christ’s resurrection, Martin Luther’s doctrine of the Atonement fractured into a paradoxical, cheerless, comfortless theologia crucis on the one hand, and on the other hand deteriorated into reviling every “theology of glory,” by which was meant any fumbling attempt to rise above the variously approved “uses of the Law” in order to grasp a lifestyle of walking in the Spirit—the fruits and the gifts alike—drawing from the cornucopia of Christ’s awarded gifts and resurrection power.
The Cross is not self-explanatory (as the theologia crucis seems to presume) but demands an explanation or reason (logos) that accounts for its necessity—the most “necessary evil” of all!
The Cross was necessary in order to certify Christ’s real death, and so reinforce the authenticity of his absolutely unprecedented and uniquely efficacious resurrection from the dead.
The Cross was the fulcrum that leveraged the resurrection, because we cannot get behind proclaiming a credible resurrection without a successful public crucifixion preceding it.
By means of the Cross, the ancient Serpent bruised Christ in the heel, yet by his resurrection, Christ bruised that Great Dragon, called “Adversary” and “Satan,” in the head (Gen. 3:14-15; Rev. 12:9-11).
The cup Christ drank (Matt. 26:37-46, Mark 14:33-42, Luke 22:41-46), which so “disturbed” (John 12:27), “overawed,” and “depressed” him—“Sorrow-stricken is my soul to death” (Matt. 26:37-38; Mark 14:33-34)—was not God’s wrath, but the prophesied bitter cup of afflictions from Satan, as with Joseph in Egypt (Gen. 39:19-23; 50:19-21; Ps. 105:17-22) and especially Job, but with no holds barred this time around, so as to win a more extreme prize in his battlefield victory over Satan at the Cross, proving God is for the underdog who endures faithful.
The Cross was the arch-exhibit of Satan’s rage and fury (Rev. 12:12,17), whereas the resurrection was the landmark exhibition of God’s grace or favor, which, to be sure, was abundantly present at the Cross as well, to sustain the Lord in his trial (Heb. 2:9-18, 4:14-16, 5:7-14), but was strategically hidden there by God’s wisdom for our own consolation in trials.
Jesus stayed put for two days (John 11:6) before proceeding to raise Lazarus from a death he could have prevented (John 11:21-26,32,37); for the same reason his own Father waited two days before raising him from a death He could have prevented—for the greater credit of God, for Heaven’s sake (John 11:4,40, cf. 9:3-5, 12:23,28, 13:31-32, 17:1-5); and even as “Jesus wept” despite his impending reversal of Lazarus’ premature and preventable death, so did God Himself weep over the premature, preventable, and miserably unjust death of His own beloved Son.
The obedient Boy must be killed or the Father’s transcendent resurrectionary justice must lay dormant forever, along with all its ultra-compensating hope and redemption for the cosmos.
Scripture teaches that God’s wrath, anger, or indignation heats up at human stubbornness, incorrigibility, unrepentance, “hard hearts,” “stiff necks,” etc., but not simply against sin, per se.
God’s wrath against unrepentance is sufficiently revealed by His myriad punishments documented throughout history (particularly Israel’s), so that the Cross (at which Israel committed its greatest sin) was designed to show, by contrast, the very opposite: the Lord’s mercy in not calling more than twelve legions of angels (Matt. 26:53) to destroy those tormentors (merely Satan’s pawns, after all).
The Cross was violent (as usual!) because sinners “needed” to vent their enmity in order for God to leverage His readiness to forgive even such a wretched crime by showing His miraculous power to set matters right even after the fact; God was there playing to our human weakness.
God did not “choose so violent a means of reconciliation” as such; He simply chose a supreme world-class opportunity to premier His extraordinary conciliating touch, for Heaven’s sake, i.e., He needed suitable materials to backdrop and stage an historic rescue demonstration of monumental magnitude, and nothing less horrific could leverage “a salvation of such proportion” (Heb. 2:3).
God needed a paramount episode of official, public, fatally excruciating injustice in order to certify the wrongful death He was strategically poised to reverse long before sin ever defiled history.
God’s justice was revealed as life-raised-from-the-dead for the One who was “just by faith,” in fact, who was “the Inaugurator and Perfecter of faith,” who “for the joy lying before him endures a cross” (Heb. 12:2), a joy undimmed by God’s wrath, so often grimly revealed from Heaven.
At the Cross, there was no outpouring of God’s wrath, nor punishment, nor condemnation, nor penal judgment—in fact, no justice whatsoever, either from Deity or humanity.
Christ was wrath-proof due to his perfectly faithful obedience, most poignantly under extreme trial, so that whatever suffering he endured could only have been wrongfully inflicted; hence, he remained beloved, God’s delight (Matt. 3:17, 12:18, 17:5; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22; 2 Pet. 1:16-18; Col. 1:19), ever in His favor (Heb. 2:9; Eph. 1:5-6; Phil. 2:8-9, 1:29), all the way through his well-pleasing sacrifice (Eph. 4:32-5:2; Phil. 4:18; Rom. 12:1; Heb. 11:6, 12:1-2,28, 13:16,20-21), and all the more so when temptations to revile and threaten became more intense (1 Pet. 2:19-23; Ps. 105:17-22; Is. 53:7,9).
God was hyper-pleased with and copiously rewarded Jesus precisely because he did not return reviling for reviling, much less avenge himself (as he had every right to do), but instead bore it all and even made intercession for his foes (Is. 53:12, MT), dying without an unkind word on his lips; so, God brought him back for a curtain call—in his reward we get justified and our sins washed away, because of God’s justness in him “acted out” so graphically (2 Cor. 5:19; Gal. 3:1).
We are safe from God’s “eschatological” wrath, then, if we get baptized into, and stay in, Christ by staunch faith.
If we are called to “be drinking the cup” that Christ drank (Matt. 20:22-23; Mark 10:38-39) and “be baptized with the baptism” that Jesus underwent (Mark 10:38-39; Luke 12:50), then shouldn’t we likewise suffer God’s wrath as he is alleged to, or does this parallel fall apart?
If we who wish to follow Christ are called to bear our cross even as Jesus did, then are we similarly called to bear God’s wrath as he is so routinely said to have done, or does this analogy break down, and we somehow get off cheap?
The author of Hebrews stressed that Jesus “endures [hupemeinen] a cross, despising the shame [aischunes]” (Heb. 12:2), yet missed a golden opportunity to tout the more efficacious “wrath of God” he allegedly endured—something kinda’ crucial to some theologians!
James, the half-brother of Jesus, refers us to “the endurance [hupomonen] of Job” (James 5:11), to admonish us by his “example of suffering evil and patience” (5:10), along with the many “prophets who speak in the name of the Lord. Lo! We are counting those happy who endure” (5:11), yet neglects to mention the wrath of God they “must simultaneously” have endured.
All Job’s sufferings were unsuspected encounters with Satan, where in hindsight we can now see “the consummation of the Lord” in awarding Job over the top (Job 42:10-17) for his sterling, if flawed, endurance of undeserved trials by the Wicked One—“for very compassionate and pitiful is the Lord” (James 5:11), and “No trial has taken you except what is human. Now faithful is God, who will not be leaving you to be tried above what you are able, but together with the trial will be making a sequel also, to enable you to undergo it” (1 Cor. 10:13).
If Christ’s trial was not merely human but “more than” human—then would that “extra” consist in his additionally bearing God’s wrath, or instead in his undergoing Satan unleashed, since God had charged Satan, “only keep his soul [alive]” (Job 2:1-6) in the case of the all-too-human Job, who in the end confessed, “I recant and repent on soil and ashes” (Job 42:6), whereas Jesus declared that he had come from afar “to give his soul a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45) as a Good Shepherd for his sheep, for which the Father loves him and gives him the authority (John 10:10-18), since, after all, this is what a person does for friends (John 15:13) and family (1 John 3:16), and, moreover, this is how we conquer Satan (Rev. 12:11).
Both the ordeals of Job and of Jesus, in view of “the consummation of the Lord” (James 5:11), are meant to heighten our expectation that God will certainly come through for us if we similarly bear our own crosses in vivid view of the glorious outcome.
Unlike Job, whose benefit from undeserved suffering accrued to his own family (cf. also Ez. 14:14-20), and unlike Joseph, his distant relative, whose benefit from undeserved suffering in Egypt accrued to that nation and Israel, our Lord Jesus Christ suffered without breaking down into a sinful reaction or casting blame—for the benefit of the whole blamed world!
If Job’s “comforters” were compelled to offer up ascent offerings on their own behalf, “For you did not speak concerning Me what is rightly so as My servant Job has done” (Job 42:8), indeed, even presuming to “teach” Job that he was suffering the wrathful displeasure of God (Job 20:20-29, etc.) so that if Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were found guilty of false doctrine concerning wrath of God being poured out on His flawed servant, then how much more are theologians and ministers guilty of teaching that God’s wrath was poured out on His sinless, suffering Servant?
Christ tasted wrongful sufferings and death in the grace of God so as to mature his faith through hard discipline (paideia, Ps. 105:22 LXX; Is. 53:5 LXX; Heb. 2:9-18, 12:1-11; Rev. 3:19; significantly, in classical antiquity, preceding the translation of the Septuagint, paideia denoted strenuous training, intensive instruction, or education in Greek warfare, hunting, athletics, culture, music, dance, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, etc., not retributive or punitive chastising), which, however, would not exclude welts and bruises while learning and attaining mastery.
The “smoking stove and fiery torch” that appeared when the sun went down and a “darkening [flame, LXX] came,” and passed between the severed halves of the sacrificed animals during the cutting of the covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15:17), were not signs of God’s wrath but of His acceptance, as when fire would fall from heaven to consume well-pleasing sacrifices (even as with the tongues of fire at Pentecost, betokening cleansing for service as living sacrifices), plus divine graciousness in the midst of “the dread of looming darkness” (Gen. 15:12), prophetic of the 400 years of humbling slavery (Gen. 15:13), followed by analogous events at the Sinai covenant (Ex. 19:18, 20:18-21), for “afterward they shall come forth with a great many goods” and “you shall come to your fathers in peace” and be entombed “at a good gray-haired age” (Gen. 15:14-15)—all tokens of God’s favor.
The odd Levitical curse for getting hung on a tree (Deut. 21:22-23) was unjustly evoked (Gal. 3:13—atypically, not for sinful behavior), and was overturned by the more ancient precedent of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gal. 3:15-29), whose faith was accounted for justness (Gen. 15:6)—that his seed would outnumber stars and sand—thus pre-empting any lethal late-coming curse (much less any alleged accompanying wrath), even as Christ’s Melchizedekian status and standing outranked any Aaronic claims or pretensions (Heb. 5-7; Ps. 110; Is. 53:10-12).
Moses’ curses upon lawbreakers simply can’t hold a candle to God’s oath to Abraham (Gal. 3:5-19; Gen. 15, 50:24; Ps. 105:8-11,42; cf. 109:28-31).
The apostle Paul, by writing in Romans 4:25 that Christ “was given up on account of our transgressions and raised on account of our justification,” was building on the immediately preceding two verses, simply emphasizing that we too, just like Abraham did, will have justness credited to us likewise, on account of our faith. The apostle’s whole point in this verse was to include all other believers (including himself and the church at Rome) within Abraham’s justification blessing. The preposition “dia” is intentionally indefinite or ambiguous as to any other theological consideration and should not be over-processed theologically. Other Scriptures must be invoked to supply further information and specificity as to the relationship between Christ’s resurrection and our justification.
The conciliation “we now obtained” (Rom. 5:11) equates to the solid realization that in fact God, for His part, does not harbor hostility or enmity toward sinners, so does not need to be reconciled to us, but only desires to get us conciliated to Himself in grace and peace.
Scripture neither states nor implies that God needed to get reconciled/conciliated with sinners.
The notion of a bilateral “reconciliation of God and man” is only a hypothetical “necessity” of the economic-legal framing of penal substitution, but gains no support from apostolic Scripture.
The Gospel reveals a God who can reconcile because He can recreate, who can give in, even give up, because He can give back.
Conciliation toward God amounts to accepting the conciliatory terms and measures God initiated to placate our alienated race, namely, that His Son, “given up (ekdotos) in the specific counsel (boule; cf. Is. 53:10,11, LXX bouletai) and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23) “to do [His] will” (Heb. 10:9-10), God Himself surrendered (paradidomi) to the tender mercies of his foes (Rom. 4:25, 8:32; cf. Job 16:11/16:12 LXX, John 3:16), in concert with Christ’s willingness to surrender (paradidomi) himself into the hands of sinners for our sakes (Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5:2, 5:25), and give (didomi) his soul a ransom to redeem many from sin (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45; 1 Tim. 2:6; Tit. 2:14; Gal. 1:4)—yet without a hint of divine wrath toward them, and certainly none toward himself, in the process—becoming gravely impoverished in order (by the mechanics of God’s premially just restitution to him) to enrich us to become co-heirs along with himself (Rom. 8:32; 2 Cor. 8:9).
Quite a diverse group got in on the action of surrendering Jesus—not only the Father and the Son Themselves, but also the disciple Judas (Matt. 10:4, 17:22, 20:18-19, 26:2,15-48, 27:3-4; Mark 3:19, 9:31, 10:33, 14:10-44; Luke 9:44, 22:4-6,21-22,48, 24:7; John 6:64,71, 12:4, 13:2,11,21, 18:2-5,30-36, 21:20), the chief priests, elders, scribes, and Sanhedrin (Matt. 27:1-2,15-18; Mark 10:33, 15:1,9-11; Luke 18:32, 20:19-20, 24:20; John 19:11; Acts 3:13), plus the Roman Procurator Pilate (Mark 15:15; Luke 23:17-25; John 19:16).
The “grace and peace” from God and the Lord Jesus, with which Paul, Peter, and John almost invariably open their epistles, plus the “peace” of God with which they, along with Hebrews and Jude, usually close, instead of demanding a monumental display of God’s wrath and violence toward the Lord Jesus Christ, really only require a credible demonstration of grace and peace in order to prove them plausible to sinners.
Shalom is a Hebrew economic term for a state of harmonization, equilibrium, balance, or stasis of economic obligations and satisfactions featuring just, equitable resolutions without invoking intrusive interventions or even war to avenge imbalances and restore peaceful order.
Forgiveness did not have to wait until someone blamelessly innocent came along to suffer as a substitute, or other blessings of salvation should in that case likewise depend on substitutionary punishment in order to get deployed; to the contrary, God’s expression of grace was by no means dependent on His wrath getting exerted in order to satisfy His honor, holiness, or penal justice.
The active ingredients of the Atonement are not wrath and violence from God, in the least, but the diametric opposite, grace and peace from God, which were exuberantly on display following Christ’s resurrection, as the divine solution to all that Satanically inspired human wrath and violence at the Cross.
Grace and peace did not arrive courtesy of wrath and violence from God, for in that case the Gospel would harbor a preposterous absurdity to compromise and sabotage its inner consistency, integrity, and credibility.
In the actual historical denouement of Jesus’ prophetic parable of the vineyard owner (Matt. 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; Luke 20:9-20) God did not, after all, immediately destroy His Son’s murderers, but instead, in lieu of their well-deserved deaths, as a substitute for their timely destruction, “the God of peace” (Heb. 13:20) gently brought His precious Son back to life and declared a reprieve of one generation to give the killers time to repent before wreaking due wrathful vengeance upon the incorrigible by “surrendering” (paradidomi, Rom. 1:24,26,28) them to their self-invoked curse (Matt. 27:24-25; Acts 5:28) in a horror of unspeakable self-inflicted atrocities such as the nation has never experienced before or since (Matt. 3:7-12; Luke 3:7-9, 21:20-24, 23:26-31; 1 Thess. 2:14-16; 2 Thess. 1:4-10) in 70 A.D.; however, divine wrath against His Son—that has no conceivable utility, and no prophet ever announced such a travesty.
Death was inherited from our original progenitor Adam (through whom sin entered the world) by the ban from the Tree of Life, “whereupon [epho]” everyone now sins willy-nilly (Rom. 5:12); ergo: “original sin” is a phantom (a gnostic echo?), whereas the biblical facts point to “original death” (better: “original ban”) yielding bondage to sin’s universal reign by instilling fear of eventual, inescapable death (Rom. 5:21; Heb. 2:14-15).
Adam’s descendants are not bearing the penalty for Adam’s sin, but instead are suffering the radiating collateral evil effects of his sin, even as the children of an abusive parent may suffer many sinful assaults yet remain innocent, not guilty of the parent’s wickedness, regardless of agonizing delays until the long arm of the law finally catches up with the guilty parent (Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29-30; Ez. 18:1-19-31).
In the Old Testament, the voluntary “bearing [nasa]” of the iniquity/sin of another person equates to “forgiving/pardoning” that person, and is often so translated.
Bearing a sin entails suffering whatever collateral evil results or consequences it may bring.
The only two New Testament passages that ever use the common Old Testament expression, “bear sin” (Heb. 9:28 and 1 Pet. 2:24), should be interpreted as Christ (and God in Christ) pardoning the deplorable national sin that rendered the crucifixion a sin-offering, and, by that conciliating act of peacemaking, thereby “beseeching” the whole doomed world, for Christ’s sake, “Be conciliated to God!” (2 Cor. 5:20).
Aaron remained “holy unto the Lord” despite his duty to “bear the iniquity of the holy things” (Ex. 28:36-38; Lev. 10:17-18), because bearing the sins of others does not necessarily make a person guilty of sin for doing so—far from it!—it can be an act well pleasing to God (Ez. 4:4-6).
The scapegoat on the Day of Atonement was holy because it bore the iniquity of the people of Israel (Lev. 10:12-20, 16:20-22), even though the man chosen to lead the scapegoat out of the camp did, afterward, have to cleanse himself from uncleanness for driving out the goat (i.e., complicity in the ritual sin of banishing the innocent, flawless living-soul from their midst).
Christ remained holy while suffering the iniquitous assaults from Jews and Romans, so he could not possibly have “become sin,” but rather “became a sin-offering,” i.e., the One-Sinned-Against.
The damage sustained by “the first Adam’s” descendants cannot properly fall under the rubric of punishment for his disobedience, but rather of result or consequence; nevertheless, whatever benefits redound to sinners from “the second Adam” can equitably fall under the category of reward for his obedience, because he may graciously redistribute whatever becomes his by right.
Regarding Romans 5:15-21: to suppose both the first and second Adam to be punished breaks down the marvel of sustained antithetical parallelism and destroys the dialectic showcased in Paul’s sevenfold layering of logic, whereby in each of these seven verses he variously drills similar contrasting correspondences, epitomized by 5:19: “even as through the disobedience of the one person the many were constituted sinners, thus likewise through the obedience of the One, the many shall be constituted just,” with no implied parity of punishment whatsoever (which would heavy-handedly overrule heuristic exposition by dogmatic imposition).
“Christ is the end of the Law for justness” (Rom. 10:4) precisely because “the just-award of the Law” (Rom. 5:16,18, 8:3) that he alone could rightly claim for faithful obedience to God’s will (Rom. 5:16,18,19 8:3; Gal. 4:4-5; Phil. 2:8; Heb. 5:8-9, 10:5-14; John 4:34, 5:30, 6:38-40, 8:29, 9:31-33), and for which God’s justness duly super-compensated him (Rom. 5:17,21, 8:10), namely, the covenant-promised Gift of the vivifying Holy Spirit that raised him from the dead (Rom. 8:11; 2 Cor. 3:6; 1 Pet. 3:18-22), he turned right around and dispensed for free (2 Cor. 3:3-18) to his believing brethren, apart from “works of the Law” of Moses (Gal. 2:16-5:14; Rom. 3:21-24), in order to fill them (Rom. 8:3-17), so they could walk in that same Spirit of love (Rom. 5:5; Eph. 5:28-33) and so bear all the fruits of the Spirit, against which there can be no law (Gal. 5:14-6:2).
Since Christ fulfilled Isaiah 53:4a (“He our infirmities got, and the diseases he bears”) by miraculously expelling demonic spirits and curing illnesses (Matt. 8:16-17), then he similarly fulfilled Isaiah 53:5,6,11,12 (“…he was wounded from our transgressions and crushed from our depravities…Yahweh Himself causes to come upon him the depravity of us all…with their depravities he himself shall be burdened…he himself bears the sin of many…) by miraculously rising from the dead (Is. 53:10b-12a, 52:13), thereby abolishing and swallowing up death in victory and simultaneously condemning sin, which can only reign in death, and whose power is the Law, the just-award of which Christ had won hands down (Rom. 8:3, 5:21; 1 Cor. 15:21-26,54-57), and thereby both morbidity and mortality melt away miraculously.
In accord with the Patristic epitome that “What Christ does not assume, he does not heal” (Theodoret; Gregory Nazianzus, Epistle 110), so, by the logical law of conversion, what Christ does heal (consummately!) via his resurrection—namely, his Adamic mortality—he must have assumed, i.e., Adam’s “body of death” = “the flesh of sin” (Rom. 7:24, 8:3).
Sin was “condemned in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3) when Christ was “justified in Spirit” (1 Tim. 3:16) as the “life-making Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:43-45, 2 Cor. 3:3,6, 13:3-4) of the better, New Covenant (Heb. 7:11-28) at his resurrection, therefore God never “needed” to condemn the Savior in order to condemn sin.
The world (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, ostentation of livelihood) was conquered in Christ’s own mortal flesh by his perfect learning and mastery of obedience (1 John 1:7-9, 2:12-14, 4:4, 5:1-8; Rev. 3:21), priming him to defeat Satan at that final great showdown (1 Cor. 10:11-13) and expel him from earth (John 12:31) and heaven (Heb. 9:23; Rev. 12) by obedient endurance of the Cross (John 12:31-33; 1 Cor. 2:8; Heb. 2:9-18), which God swiftly repaid by resurrection and exaltation, thus swallowing up death decisively, including sin, which can only reign in death (Rom. 5:21; 1 Cor. 15:55-57).
Christ’s two-fold victory over Satan’s temptations—at the outset of his ministry, but most decisively at the appointed time of the Cross (Luke 4:13)—equates to his condemnation of sin (Rom. 8:3), the judging of the world, the expulsion of Satan (John 12:31), the erasing and nailing to the Cross of the handwriting of Jewish decrees—circumcision, sabbaths, festivals, diet, etc. (Col. 2:8-3:2), and the “killing the enmity” in his circumcised Jewish flesh (Eph. 2:15-22) that had perennially separated Jew from Gentile and fostered racist practices (Acts 10-11:21; Gal. 2:1-14).
At the Cross, in one fell swoop, Christ gained a decisive and total victory over Moses’ Law (with its curses), Satan the Tempter, along with the sovereignties and authorities in high places, plus Death and Sin—all by surrendering himself to be murdered by those he came to save and then waiting for God to justify him to new, immortal life and inheritance (with a generous surplus to throw a gigantic giveaway) and exalt him to a throne of sovereignty, authority, honor, glory, and majesty over all things—a compound conquest completed, however, only in the aftermath of his vindicating resurrection from the dead (Rom. 8:1-3; Eph. 2:13-18; Col. 2:8-3:5).
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is the prophetic enlargement upon the manifold unjust sufferings that the Servant of Yahweh willingly and nobly bore, simultaneously from/by and for his wayward people, which won him exuberant favor and ultra-compensation from God in return for all his troubles—enough to justify life forever for all sinners who would grasp this conciliatory gesture.
Two able compilations of ancient and medieval Christian commentators on Scripture by Thomas C. Oden (Isaiah 40-66, vol. XI, Mark W. Elliott, ed. [Inter-Varsity, 2007]), an evangelical Methodist and ardent penal substitution advocate, and by Robert Louis Wilken (translator and editor, with Angela Russell Christman and Michael J. Hollerich, Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators. The Church’s Bible, Robert Louis Wilken, gen. ed. [Eerdmans, 2007]), a Roman Catholic (former Lutheran), were scarcely able to come up with a single line of commentary on Isaiah 52:13-53:12 that could be construed as penal substitutionary except the words of Theodore of Heraclea (d. 319): “He bore the sum of human evils and every form of transgression as well as their recompense and punishment” (Elliott, p. 164) and of Augustine (354-430): “having paid for crimes against God committed by all humanity” (Elliott, p. 170), neither of which could boast the faintest basis in the “pattern of sound words” of the apostle Paul or any other Biblical writer.
Peter deliberately elaborates in 1 Peter 2, 3:8-4:2,12-5:12 on especially the crucial point of criminally unjust suffering of abuse in Isaiah’s most famous passage, rather than on penally substitutionary suffering of abuse (Is. 53:7; cf. Jer. 11:19).
The ceremonial death of the animal sacrifice was an anticipatory substitute for the criminal death of “the Lamb of God,” not a substitute for the penal death of the sinner (after all, we do all die anyway; God never revoked that consequence, no, not even for the sake of Christ’s sacrifice).
The ram in the thicket on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:13) was an animal substitute for Christ on Mount Calvary, not a substitute either for Abraham or for his son Isaac (who was himself but a sinful surrogate for God’s own Son—poignantly highlighting the emotional depths to which God was willing to go to save us), and whose human sacrifice would have constituted an abomination to God, as indeed Christ’s was (which helps account for the three-hour darkness shrouding that scene of horror: Matt. 27:45, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:44-45), only without the happy ending.
A “flawless animal” stands in for some other Being that possesses flawlessness, and that ain’t us! It is a prophetic allusion to God’s own “Lamb,” offered by God (!) on behalf of sinners.
Perfectly good animals (“living souls”), “flawless” and “without blemish” (physically), cannot accurately serve as typological substitutes for Abraham, Isaac, et al, because no human soul is perfectly good, i.e., blameless or sinless (morally)…well, okay, except for Jesus. Touché!
An apt equivalent symbol for a penal sacrifice would need to be flawed and blemished like a sinner, and only then slain, in order to equate suitably to Abraham, Isaac, et al. A ritually “sinless” (“flawless and unblemished”) sacrifice must refer to a prophesied future sacrifice whose victim was literally sinless. Thus, the equivalence must be strictly typological, and not literally substitutionary at all.
The offering was not a substitute for the offeror, but a prophetic foreshadowing of the ultimate Offering—the Lord Jesus Christ, who did fulfill all requisite conditions of covenant observance.
The Old Testament archetype was simply a makeshift stopgap—a prophetic substitute—for the New Covenant Antitype until he should finally appear in the flesh and mediate all the forfeited blessings of the perpetually violated ancient national covenant of Israel.
The Passover lamb, the daily sin-offerings, and the identical goats on the Day of Atonement were all temporary animal substitutes, prophetic stand-ins, for God’s own “Lamb,” who would really and truly take away sins, not partially (Ex. 34:7; Num. 14:18; Deut. 7:10; Acts 13:38-39), cheaply, or substitutionally, and would thus actually bring literal, wholesome life.
Simply because the ancient animal sacrifices were substitutes for the Lamb of God doesn’t mean Jesus was the “ultimate Substitute,” but rather the ultimate Sacrifice to end all substitutes.
It doesn’t take a passive “Substitute” to bring real salvation and life; it takes a proactive Savior.
The twin goats on the Day of Atonement denote the twin epicenters of the ritual drama—wrongful death by bloodshed and rightful resurrection to new, enlarged life, free from captivity (goats, unlike sheep, are renowned wilderness survivors), for being willing to bear the wrongful indignities and injuries of his people.
Only Christ, “the Lamb slain” (Rev. 5:6,8-9,12, 13:8), by dying and yet living to tell about it (Heb. 10:19-20; Rev. 1:18, 2:8), could fulfill the tandem functions of the twin goats on the Day of Atonement.
The Levitical ritual of “laying hands on the head” of the sacrificial animal (Ex. 29:10,15,17; Lev. 1:4, 3:2,8,13, 4:4,15,24,29,33, 8:14,18,22, 16:21, 24:14) was the prophetic type of the priests laying treasonous hands on their own Messiah (anointed Head) to surrender him (Matt. 17:22, 26:45; Mark 9:31, 14:41; Luke 9:44, 22:21,53, 24:7; John 10:39) and sacrifice him (Matt. 26:50; Mark 14:46; Luke 20:19; John 7:30,44, 11:47-53) in lieu of the entire guilty nation in aggregate.
Christ’s crucifixion was prefigured as, and appropriately termed, a sin-offering (chattath/ hamartia, LXX) precisely because it was a sin (chattath/hamartia, LXX)—in fact The Supreme Sin—demanding speedy divine super-compensation in order to rectify it (Luke 18:7-8).
The rectification of the unjust human (Satanic) guilty verdict and death sentence upon Christ soon showed up in the startling form of rightful resurrection—certainly a “sufficient satisfaction” of justice (premial) for the Victim (!), but simultaneously a “good-enough substitute” (penal) for rightful execution of the guilty offenders!
Christ’s resurrection may be regarded as a happily ironic substitution, in the sense that it was mercifully executed instead of and in lieu of destruction of his murderous foes, to morph them into friends, for Heaven’s premial sake!—in diametric mockery of penal substitution.
The stunning upset play of resurrectionary exchange, rather than the oft-alleged exchange of “our guilt for Christ’s righteousness,” was the authentically biblical “joyous exchange” (Luther’s famous “fröhliche Wechsel”) that so amazingly revealed God’s love and mercy to the world.
No rationally calculable exchange rate is conceivable or even necessary between “the degree of Christ’s sufferings” and “the number of sinners his redemption can buy”—an alien medieval notion incommensurable with the Biblical conceptual framework.
All the evil that was done to Jesus, culminating in his crucifixion, was a divine set-up so that God could work it all together for the incomparable good of all mankind come Pentecost and beyond (Rom. 8:28-39), recollecting Joseph’s hallowed flash of insight in Genesis 50:15-21.
Raising the murder Victim from the dead would, in effect, nullify any legal necessity of judicially avenging that Victim with the death of the capital offenders.
“The forbearance of God” in “passing over the penalties of sins which occurred before” Christ’s resurrection (Rom. 3:25), like the many other virtues with which forbearance/tolerance (anechomai/anoche) is associated—kindness, patience, amenableness, humility, love, peace, blessing of others, pitying and tender compassions, dealing graciously, enduring persecutions, not reviling in return, not threatening others, not avenging oneself (Rom. 2:3-6; 1 Cor. 4:12; Eph. 4:1-3; Col. 3:12-15; 2 Thess. 1:3-10; Rom. 12:17-21; Gal. 5:22-6:2; 1 Pet. 2:20-25, 3:8-18)—is of one piece with the justness (dikaiosune) displayed by God through Christ’s resurrection, although, to be sure, the latter overwhelmingly transcends all of the former in magnitude.
God had no need, by the Cross, to “pay back” or “hang in effigy” sinners from aforetime in order to “show His hatred for sin,” since He had devised a way to pay back the One Sinned-Against so as to swallow up any deserved wrath by an overwhelming graciousness—one exuberant enough to shield additionally the sins of “the current era” (Rom. 3:26) in the bargain—getting raised from the dead by God Himself is such sweet “revenge”!
Paul in Rom. 3:25-26 is unveiling God’s premial rationale: a resurrectionary act of justice that packs enough punch to fund all the historic forbearance of “passing over” past sins (all of which were committed not only against the Father, out of Whom all things derive, but equally against the Son, through whom all things were created—John 1:1-5; Rom. 11:33-36 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:15-20; Heb. 1:2-3, 2:10-11, 11:2; 1 John 1:1-9; Rev. 3:14), namely, by bestowing resurrectionary justice that duly awarded the divine Victim directly (instead of penal justice to punish sinners indirectly, via a mere substitute)—a rationale equally applicable “in the current era” and would render God most eminently just.
Integral distributive justice must encompass both penal and premial/restorative facets—in other words, it is double-edged or symmetrical, congruent (although not identical) with God’s curse/blessing sanctions in the Old Covenant.
In Romans 2:32, 5:16,18, and 8:4, dikaioma—whose ancient meaning has been very diversely rendered as “righteousness,” “act of righteousness,” “act of uprightness,” ”righteous act,” “righteous deed,” “establishment of righteousness,” “accomplished righteousness,” “recovery of righteousness,” “righteous result,” “righteous judgment,” “judgment,” “judicial decision,” “righteous sentence,” “sentence,” “sentence of absolution,” “verdict,” “justification,” “justifying,” “God’s approval,” “undeserved gift of ‘Not guilty’,” “acquittal,” “declaration of ‘Righteous’,” “right standing,” “establishment of right,” “establishing of right,” “re-establishing of the right,” “restoration of the right,” “amendment of a wrong,” “legal ordainment of the law,” “legal claim of the law,” “legal deed of right,” “plea of right,” “pleadings,” “document [in a suit],” “fulfilling of the law,” “legitimate claim,” “righteous award,” “righteous demands,” “righteous requirement,” “just requirement,” “duty,” “God’s standards,” “God’s law,” “ordinance,” “decree” (well, so much for consensus; I can’t make this stuff up!)—can felicitously be narrowed down by its cultural sitz im leben, along with these fuller contexts, to its forensic sense of the just due judicially decreed by law to recompense a defendant’s deed(s), whether a penalty or a reward, depending on the criminal deserts or legitimate claims of the individual defendant (hupodikos, Rom. 3:19), according to God’s judgment, such that Paul’s meaning here may most accurately be distilled as “just deserts,” which in Christ’s particular case (not being liable to lawful penalty) would equate to legal damages, i.e., a “just award,” conferred in his favor.
God’s integral covenant justice (comprehending both penal retribution and premial restitution) is designed to play out as punishments/curses for the sinners who deserve those, but also as rewards/blessings for the righteous/just who deserve those, as the case may be.
Instead of giving Christ “what sinners deserve,” at the Cross, God gave him what he personally deserved for his saving labors, at resurrection and beyond, thereby both reversing their fortunes and sharing his bounty.
God, with His Son’s uncoerced prior agreement, strategically authorized (John 10:17-18) him to suffer from Satan what he did not deserve, precisely so that He could unload His ultra-compensating premial justice on that single flawless covenant-keeper who ever lived.
God graciously includes us, the sinfully undeserving, in the covenant blessings that the covenant-keeping Savior exclusively deserved, by means of the graphic rite of water baptism.
Paul’s characteristically recurrent “in Christ” theme is baptismal imagery, referring to the entire creation-renovating contents of our salvation-of-such-proportions policy package (Heb. 2:5) into which we get immersed, namely, the Holy Spirit (Matt. 3:11, 28:19; Mark 1:7-8, 16:14-20; Luke 3:16; John 1:32-34; Acts 1:4-5, 2:38-39, 8:14-17, 9:17-19, 10:37-48, 11:15-18, 16:30-34, 19:2-6, 22:16; Gal. 3:26-29; Rom. 6:3-4; 1 Cor. 12:13; Eph. 4:3-5; Col. 2:9-13; 1 Pet. 3:18-22), God’s down payment of our future complete inheritance in Christ (Eph. 1:13-14); human destinies, therefore, reduce down to either live in Christ or die in Sin.
Jesus came to baptize in both the Holy Spirit (the just-award of premial justice) and also fire (the punishment of penal justice) because he was specified by God to be Judge of the living and the dead (Matt. 3:7-12; Luke 3:16-17; Acts 10:42, 17:31; John 5:21-24; Rom. 2:16; 2 Tim. 4:1,8; 1 Pet. 4:5-6), to which the Holy Spirit just so happens to testify independently (John 16:7-11).
Graciousness characterizes God’s premial justice, while wrath forebodes His penal justice.
Christ never got “punished in our place,” yet we do get rewarded in solidarity with him, as portrayed by baptismal inclusion in his wrongful death and compensating rightful resurrection.
Jesus, by receiving John’s baptism, although he had no sin to repent from or get forgiven for, was not identifying with our sin, but rather with our plight as sinners—our “body of death” (Rom. 7:24) or “flesh of sin” (Rom. 8:3), which, as a mortal, he certainly did share with us, thereby declaring, in effect, “I’m all in!” and thus graciously joining us in our deserved judgment ordeal, which for him was undeserved and would be super-compensated when God justified him by an overflow of life–making Spirit to immerse all his believing sister/brotherhood into equally.
Christ on the Cross was “identifying with” neither the “guilt” of sinners, nor their sin itself, nor even their “deserved punishment”; however, he now does indeed welcome all sinners to “identify with” his own undeserved death and well-deserved resurrection, by means of repentance, faith, and baptism.
The Bible’s account of the Atonement should not be characterized as “penal substitution,” but as “premial inclusion,” so aptly depicted by water baptism and realized in Spirit baptism.
Nor should New Covenant atonement be represented as “penal satisfaction,” but as “premial restitution,”—justly compensated reparations for injustices incurred by the sinless Son of God.
There was no need for any payment, at the Cross, to cancel sin’s debt, because there was more than ample repayment for its injuries via the resurrection, and that made all the difference.
The finite terrestrial crime of the Cross was repaid to Jesus at a super-compensatory rate in accord with the celestial appraisal of God’s more equitably restorative premial justice.
The New Testament teaches that Christ “bought” and paid for sinners with a “price” (Luke 1:68, 2:38, 24:20-21; Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 6:20, 7:23; 1 Tim. 2:6; 2 Tim. 2:20-21; Tit. 2:14; Heb. 9:12; 1 Pet. 1:18-19; 2 Pet. 2:1; Jude 4; Rev. 5:9, 6:10, 14:3-4), yet never that he “paid the penalty” or “satisfied the debt” of their sins, but much rather simply releases them from sins like his Father does (and like all God’s children who are maturing in love should be emulating).
God’s entire ethic of forgiveness is founded not on His Son’s paying Him back for his losses from infractions against His honor, rights, or property, but much rather on His own letting go of His honor, rights, and property…including surrendering even His own precious Son to the tender mercies of maliciously envious rivals, precisely so He could prove to the wondering universe His persistent tough love and genuine mercy despite the worst odds imaginable, and thereby even win the additional praise, love and loyalty of former bitter enemies.
The Gospel simultaneously teaches, exemplifies, and empowers Jesus’ comprehensive ethic.
It seems more in character for our Father in heaven to forgive without payment than to “forgive” after payment—He is by no means obliged by any postulated “moral order” to somehow, somewhere, somewhen, “get even” or recompensed before He can forgive “justly.”
God is “faithful and just that He may be pardoning us our sins and should be cleansing us from all injustice” (1 John 1:9-2:1; cf. Rom. 3:25-26)—so how exactly does that work on a penal reading of justice?
In Jesus’ parable of the king and the indebted slave (Matt. 18:23-35) the king, of course, behaved justly the first time, when he was merciful and forgave the slave who merely entreated him for patience to allow him to repay (although the king had graciously decided to absorb the cost personally and simply remit the loan in its entirety), or did the king have some near-of-kin who might indemnify, reimburse, or otherwise subsidize his losses to the slave, and yet (by some intra-trinitarian abara c’ dabara—Hebrew, “I create [ex nihilo] as I speak”) still allow him to claim extra credit for pardoning him as well?
The only wrath (orgistheis) in Matt. 18:34 is actually expressed by the king toward the debtor’s unmercifulness to other debtors, not toward indebtedness per se.
The only necessity urged in the parable of Matt. 18:23-35 is that “it was obligatory [edei, “binding”] to be merciful [eleesai]” to others if you have been shown mercy, even if to do so entails some loss to yourself, yet without any hint of some necessity to get paid back fully.
Being “not only loving but also holy” does not mean that we are bound to demand repayment or punishment for every debt or injury we may suffer, as we have been taught a “holy” God does, but that we are bound to show mercy to those who repent and entreat us to forgive them.
Jesus taught that to become perfect and holy like our Father in heaven is perfect and holy, we must learn to pardon outright those who ask our forgiveness rather than demanding them to pay us back for our loss first, because, after all, children of God are “not simply loving, but also holy” like our heavenly Father is holy, Who, accordingly, pardons in this undemanding manner.
It is morally incoherent to conceive that God’s holiness requires free forgiveness, yet in the same breath insist that God’s holiness requires that He somehow punish every last sin to the full extent of the law.
A penal atonement spoils the true spirit of Christian personal and social ethics, for it showcases a Savior who not only was not requited (komizo) with wages (misthos) or reward (misapodocia), nor recompensed (antapodidomi) or paid (apodidomi) by God for his superior service (Is. 53:11, LXX), but instead was consigned to a cross in order to suffer God’s wrath himself in order to pay back God the Creator (were such a thing even possible, Rom. 11:33-36) for the cosmic sin-debt incurred by human beings, so God gets off the hook without having (getting!) to forgive anything at all. Well shucks.
Downplaying the fact that the Lord Jesus himself was rewarded by God for doing good actually undermines our own human incentive to do the good works God intends us to abound in.
God—His entire Spiritual contents of grace and truth—was in Christ on the Cross (2 Cor. 5:19, cf. Col. 1:19-20), Himself absorbing the cost of releasing the world from debt, not accounting their offenses to them, self-sacrificially conciliating the universe—He simply “ate the loss” (to get all technical), so Christ wasn’t paying God to do it, he was demonstrating God doing it.
Since God can be two places at once, what if He was also outside of Christ, doling out wrath on…Them Both—you know, to pay for sin and all that? On second thought…
The Cross did not somehow “bring,” “effect,” “secure,” “achieve complete,” “enable final,” or “provide full” forgiveness of sins; these oft-used expressions are linguistic decoys, substitutes, red meat thrown around to distract us from all the clues pointing to the Cross as an actual bona fide revelation, manifestation, display, or demonstration of God actually forgiving His hardened enemies, and not merely a penal substitutionary mechanism, instrumentality, or expedient to “get there from here.”
Paul, by the “handwriting of the decrees against us, which was hostile to us” (Col. 2:14)—unlike God Himself, who was “getting all our offenses handled graciously” (Col. 2:13), “not accounting their offenses to them” (2 Cor. 5:19), “passing over…the penalties-of-sins which occurred before in the forbearance of God” (Rom. 3:25), “while we are still infirm, still in accord with the era…irreverent…still sinners” (Rom. 5:6,8)—was alluding to “the dispensation of death, by letters chiseled in stones,” “the dispensation of condemnation” (2 Cor. 3:7,9) of the Old Covenant economy, which had seen its better days, “growing old and decrepit…near its disappearance” (Heb. 8:13).
In context, “the handwriting of the decrees” refers to the decrees for Israel that regulated circumcision in particular (Col. 2:8-13; Eph. 2:11-22), but also sabbaths, festivals, diets, ceremonies, etc. (Col. 2:16-23), which had perpetuated enmity between Jew and Gentile as well as alienation of humanity from God, so can scarcely refer to some insinuated “bond” (RSV), “written bond of our sins” (Lamsa), “note” (Williams), “certificate of debt” (NAS), “unfavorable record of our debts” (GNFMM), or any conjectured “certificate of indebtedness” (New Geneva Study Bible/Reformation Study Bible, notes), record of debt, IOU, or, in the slanted elaboration of Thayer’s Lexicon, “metaph. applied in Col. ii. 14 [(where R.V. bond)] to the Mosaic law, which shews men to be chargeable with offences for which they must pay the penalty” (final italics added), which in any case God summarily “disappeared” from the record by raising and glorifying Christ, thereby more than restoring his losses from all their crimes and misdemeanors, thus obviating any alleged necessity, whether of direct repayment or substitutionary penalization.
The Old Covenant handwriting of decrees got disabled from “holding us in debt” who possess the “Spirit of the living God” sent to engrave an epistle of Christ on our hearts of flesh, in fulfillment of the New Covenant, in which God would impart His laws to our comprehensions, inscribe them on our hearts, shield our injustices, and under no circumstances still be reminded of our sins and lawlessnesses (2 Cor. 3:1-6; Heb. 8:8-13; Jer. 31:31-34; Ez. 11:19-20).
By “the circumcision of Christ” that transpired “in the stripping off (apekdusei) of the body of flesh” at the Cross (Col. 2:11), God was ipso facto “erasing the handwriting of the [Levitical/Mosaic] decrees” of circumcision, sabbaths, festivals, diet, ceremonies, etc., getting them all stripped off in that ultimate “circumcision”; moreover, as a strict corollary, God “makes a show of the [Jewish] sovereignties and authorities with boldness, triumphing over them in” that off-stripping (apekdusamenos) of Jewish decrees by the Cross (Col. 2:15), since they dared to line up against His Son and abuse their power in order to strip him of the last vestige of his humanity—his body of Jewish flesh—by grossly misusing those Jewish decrees-turned-hostile. God then graciously turned the tables by raising him back to life and conferring on him, in their place, universal, unending sovereignty, authority, power, etc. (Dan. 7:14), in a fair exchange and triumphant show of poetically premial justice—the authorities had no decrees left to enforce!
Because of the successful labors of Christ to inaugurate the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit got commissioned to dispense the very life and liberty that the Old Covenant curses pre-empted to covenant-breakers; thus, the Holy Spirit duly superseded and supplanted that Old Covenant’s merely parenthetical “in loco Parentis” authority as a pedagogue (2 Cor. 3:17-18; Rom. 8:21; Gal. 2:4, 4:21-5:1; 1 Cor. 10:29; Phm.; Heb. 7:11-19; 1 Pet, 2:16; James 1:25, 2:12).
Liberty was won not by Christ satisfying any debt of, or paying any penalty for, sins, but by God justly awarding him the superabundant endowment of life-giving Holy Spirit when he was glorified, on account of his willing obedience to endure even a hyper-undeserved crucifixion for the sake of an otherwise doomed humanity.
Our Savior died for our sins yet never paid so much as a denarius for them.
Since the Holy Spirit constituted contents of Christ’s just award from the Father, we should speak of the Spirit as “proceeding from the Father through the Son [per filium].”
The words, “pay”/“payment,” never occur among thirty-something Greek word families that the Holy Spirit specifically associated with sin in the New Testament to elaborate upon its remedy:
- “to be saving [zosei] his people from their sin” (Matt. 1:21)
- to be “taking away [airon] the sin of the world” (John 1:29; Heb. 10:4,11; 1 John 3:5)
- “for the erasure [exaleiphthenai] of your sins” (Acts 3:19)
- to “bathe off [apolousai] your sins” (Acts 22:16)
- to assure that “sins were covered over” [epekaluphthesan] (Rom. 4:7)
- “that the body of sin may be nullified” [katargethe] (Rom. 6:6)
- that we might “die to [apethan-] sin” (Rom. 6:2,10)
- that we might “be reckoning [logizesthe] ourselves to be dead [einai/ontas nekrous] to sin(s)” (Rom. 6:11; Eph. 2:1, not “in”), “to offenses” (Eph. 2:1,4, not “in”; Col. 2:13), “to lusts” (Eph. 2:4), and “to the foreskin of your flesh” (Col. 2:13)
- that we might get “justified [dikaio-] from sin” (Rom. 6:7)
- that we might “be freed [eleutherothentes] from sin” (Rom. 6:18,22)
- to “die for [apethanen huper] our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3)
- God “makes [epoiesan] him a sin-offering [hamartian] for our sakes” (2 Cor. 5:21)
- to “give himself [dontos eauton] for our sins so that he might extricate [exeletai] us out of the present wicked age” (Gal. 1:4)
- to “get a cleansing [katharismon] of sins made” (Heb. 1:3), even “from the penalties-of-sins [hamartematon] of old” (2 Pet. 1:9)
- “to get a protective cover made for [hilaskesthai] the sins of the people” (Heb. 2:17); to be “a protective shelter [hilasmon] around our sins, yet not around ours only, but around the whole world also” (1 John 2:1, 4:10)
- “for the repudiation [athetesin] of sin through his sacrifice [thusias]” (Heb. 9:26)
- to be “offering [prosenegkas] one sacrifice [thusian] for sins” (Heb. 10:12)
- to fulfill the New Covenant by “becoming obedient unto death, even a death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:8), so that “of [Israel’s] sins and their lawlessnesses [God] should under no circumstances still be reminded [oume mnestho eti]” (Heb. 8:12, 10:17)
- to be “offered [prosenechtheis] once for bearing [anenegkein] sins of many” (Heb. 9:28)
- “who himself carries up [anenegken] our sins in his body on the pole [xulon],
- that coming away from [apogenomenoi] sins, we should be living to justness,
- by whose welt [molopi] you were healed [iathete]” (1 Pet. 2:24)
- to “once suffer [epathen] concerning sins, the Just for the sake of the unjust, that he may be leading [prosagage] us to God” (1 Pet. 2:18)
- who “looses [lusanti] us from our sins” (Rev. 1:5)
- to “by no means be accounting [oume logisetai] sin” (Rom. 4:6), or “offenses” (2 Cor. 5:19) to us
- to “be protective [hileos] to their injustices” (Heb. 8:12/Jer. 31:34)
- to “be surrendered [paredothe] because of our offenses” (Rom. 4:25), “Surely He Who spares not His own Son, but surrenders [paredoken] him for us all, how shall He not, together with him, also, be graciously granting [charisetai] us all?” (Rom. 8:32)
- to “become kind to one another, tenderly compassionate, dealing graciously [charizomenoi] among yourselves, according as God also, in Christ, deals graciously [echarisato] with you. Become, then, imitators of God, as beloved children, and be walking in love, according as Christ also loves you, and surrenders [paredoken] himself for us, an approach present [prosphoran] and sacrifice [thusian] to God, for a fragrant odor [osmen euodias]” (Eph. 4:32-5:2)
- to be “dealing graciously [charisamenos] with all our offenses, erasing [exaleipsas] the handwriting of the decrees [of circumcision, etc.] against us, which was hostile to us, and has taken it away [erken] out of the midst, nailing [proselosas] it to the Cross, getting it stripped off [apekdusamenos]; thereby, in boldness he makes an example of the sovereignties and authorities, triumphing over [thriambeusas] them in” that off-stripping (Col. 2:14-15)
- to “forgive/pardon [aphiemi] sin(s)” (Matt. 9:2,5,6, 18:21; Mark 2:5,7,9,10, 3:28,29, 4:12; Luke 5:20,21,23,24, 7:47,47,48,49, 11:4,4, 17:3,4, 23:34, 20:23; James 5:16; 1 John 1:7, 2:12), “lawlessnesses” (Rom. 4:7), and “offenses” (Matt. 6:14,14,15,15; Mark 11:25,25,26,26; Eph. 1:7)—more mentions than all the above terms combined!
- but not to “pay [apodo-]” Not once. Ever. Did I say never? ’Cause I meant NEVER.
There is no Biblical warrant at all for sins “getting paid for” at the Cross or anywhere else; therefore, not only is it not “perfectly harmless to teach anyway,” but, much rather, such words are forbidden by what else the Bible does say.
The veil of the Temple was torn (Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45) in order to make way for the Son of God, the Forerunner, to pass into the Holy of Holies (Heb. 6:19-20; 10:19-20), or at least miraculously dramatize before human eyewitnesses on earth the heavenly scene soon to unfold, rather than primarily portraying that access for us who will follow later.
The opening of the tombs by the earthquake when Jesus’ expired on the Cross, followed by the raising of many saints from the dead after Jesus’ own rising (Matt. 27:52-53), alike highlight the overwhelming vivifying power released from on high by Jesus’ accomplishing in his final moments the final Old Covenant prophecies concerning the Messiah’s saving deeds on behalf of the whole world (Luke 22:37-38; John 4:34, 5:36, 17:4, 19:28-30).
The Atonement was not consummated on earth at the Cross (O.T.—“altar”), but before the throne of God (O.T.—”ark of the Covenant”) in the Holy of Holies within the tabernacle made without hands, in Heaven (Heb. 8-10), when His risen Son was brought before and presented to Him after his ascension (Dan. 7:13-14), to receive his covenanted inheritance of blessings.
Christ’s inheritance for his obedience through suffering includes also “the river of water of life…issuing out of the throne of God” (Rev. 22:1)—symbolized by the O.T. ark of the Covenant containing Moses’ miraculously written tables of The Law for life; Aaron’s rod that miraculously came to life and budded, which brought Israel miraculous rescue of life at the Red Sea, the Rock of refreshment, etc.; and the jar containing manna from heaven that miraculously sustained Israel’s life for forty years, all overseen by fearsome cherubim stationed to guard the way of life (Gen. 3:24, Ex. 37:6-9)—foreshadowing the miracle-working, life–making Holy Spirit.
Christ’s “inheritance of all” (Heb. 1:2-4; Rom. 8:17; Eph. 1:18; Matt. 21:38; Mark 12:7; Luke 20:14)—a Kingdom covenanted to him by the Father (Luke 22:29)—was founded squarely on the resurrectionary justice (dikaiosune) of avenging (ekdikesis) the sinless blood of the Lamb of God unjustly slain (Rev. 5:6,8,12, 13:8), as the covenanting Mediator (Heb. 9:15-16), so that his just-award (dikaioma), the promise of the everlasting inheritance, inclusive of every Covenant blessing, could now get released from on High—the power and fullness of the Holy Spirit poured out richly (Tit. 3:2-7)—and thus we come full circle from the declaration that in Christ’s blood (i.e., in his living soul) all the contents of Deity (Col. 1:13-19, 2:9) are dwelling: all the wealth of a salvation of such proportions, so that in the end God may be all and in all (2 Cor. 8:9; Col. 1:15-20, 3:11; Eph. 1:18-22, 4:4-10; Heb. 2:5-10; 1 Cor. 15:20-28; Ps. 110; Rom. 11:36).
We cannot do without a Lord, a Messiah, a High Priest, a Passover Lamb, a Mediator and Sponsor of a New Covenant, a Just One, a Holy One, a Forerunner into the Holy of Holies, a Protective Shelter, a Savior from sin, a Rescuer out of divine wrath, a Benefactor, a Teacher, an Example—so with all these genuine, full-on Realities, what need have we of a “Substitute”?
Simply because the ancient sacrificial animals were substitutes for Christ can hardly mean Christ himself was consequently the “Supreme Substitute” or “Ultimate Substitute,” any more than merely because a school occasionally may need to hire a substitute teacher to fill in for a while doesn’t mean that the originally contracted teacher, whenever she finally returns, is now the “final substitute,” the real, true substitute teacher.
SUMMARY SCENARIOS
Now, what if a highly decorated general asks for volunteers for an explicit suicide mission when, with their full understanding and cooperation, they will be placed strategically in harm’s way; is that military officer exhibiting personal, forensic, penal wrath toward them when they actually do get killed as foreseen, as if without his express wrath their final sacrifice would be in vain?
Or what if a king commissions his own son, with his full agreement, as a ransom in exchange for freeing a shipload of kidnapped loyal subjects held captive at cutlass point by wicked pirates? Is the king indulging personal, forensic, penal wrath against his own son by sending him to his certain death? Or would this be an act of compassionate, self-sacrificial heroism for which they would both be celebrated for generations by survivors and loved ones? Is that prince “satisfying” his father’s royal honor? Is he somehow paying with his own living-soul a penalty for his subjects’ wrongdoings? Or is he simply giving up (“paying”) himself to the pirates to satisfy their thirst for blood in a good-faith exchange for his people’s life and liberty? Moreover, if he should somehow survive walking the plank, would he need to press capital charges against the pirates, who, after all, were unsuccessful in their attempted regicide? Would the prince be compelled by some statutory or moral necessity to prosecute and execute those treacherous pirates, or could he, at his royal discretion, announce a pardon if the culprits repented, promised to change their ways, and maybe submitted to probation and counseling plus community service? Would they be grateful or what?
Finally, what if God Himself intended, carefully planned (bouletai, Is. 53:10,11, LXX; Acts 2:23), and even pre-announced a suicide mission for His Son, with his willing agreement and full cooperation (Ps. 40:6-8, LXX; Heb. 10:7), in order to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21), make known His power over Death (Is. 53:10-11; Rom. 8:31-39, 9:23,17) in a display of His restorative justice (Is. 53:10-12; Rom. 3:25-26), to reward His Son’s faithful, loyal service (Is. 53:11-12) against ferocious opposition from Satan (Rev. 12; John 12:31), with extraordinary spoils and a vast inheritance to freely give away to enrich His needy people (Is. 53:12); moreover, what if He expressed His extreme pleasure (Is. 53:10a) at His Son’s willing subjection to strenuous training (paideia, Is. 53:5 LXX) and agonizing trials in conjunction with his sterling execution of the excruciating lethal plan, which entailed extreme disgrace at false accusations and wrongful imputation of sin and guilt (Is. 53:4), including the wickedness of unjust fatal assaults by the very ones he came to save (Is. 53:5-9), in order to achieve success in peace-making negotiations with those at enmity with God, and also serve as a model for the behavior of those under the New Covenant that was coming (1 Pet. 2, 3:8-4:2,12-5:12)—then would this scenario necessarily—could it conceivably (!)—entail God’s personal, forensic, penal, eschatological wrath against His faithful Son and suffering Servant for all his suffering in submissive service?
INCONCLUSIONS
One of the greatest impediments to achieving the noblest goals of the Protestant Reformation is the “orthodox” doctrine of the Atonement itself—“Penal Satisfaction/Substitution,” which has historically evoked immense opposition, compromised intellectual integrity, perpetuated pernicious logic, spawned wearisome irresolvable theological difficulties that waste the precious time of God’s people, provoked divisive debates that have decimated the ranks, created ethical dilemmas, fostered scandalous behaviors and monstrous practices, brought on needless reproaches from unbelievers, aroused alienating misunderstandings that promote sectarianism, destroyed faith in the Bible, unsettled young believers, fostered arrogance, etc.—but otherwise, no harm done.
Penal substitution is like putting the emphásis on the wrong sylláble, only, uh…much worse.
Hymn writers have all too often been as guilty of obscuring the New Testament message as so many preachers and theologians have (see my “Penal Satisfaction/…in English Hymns”).
500 years is a disgracefully long time for God to be misrepresented by His loved ones, who have defamed his reputation by laboring vigorously to defend the indefensible instead of thinking through opponents’ conscientious objections with fairness—thinking outside the box.
Even the defamation of God’s character and justice that penal substitution has spread far, deep, and wide has been kindly indemnified by God’s authentically apostolic premial Atonement—yet will its stout champions admit confusion, repent of misrepresentations, jettison their toxic substitutes, switch loyalties, and humbly avail themselves of the genuine article?
The premial atonement turns out to contain no imponderable mystery, no existential dilemma, no dialectical tension, no economic duplicity, no financial cooking of books, no legal double-talk, no moral compromise, no ethical conundrum, no “cosmic child abuse.”
The premial explanation, unlike the penal, is not a theory at all but simply a rediscovery of the New Testament doctrine of salvation.
The Bible’s own explanatory system does make more rational sense than all our cherished theological systems put together (all the King’s horses—you can lead ‘em to water but you can’t make ‘em think—and all the King’s men couldn’t manage it, after all).
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the paramount theodicy of Biblical Christianity.
Neglecting to integrate Christ’s resurrection into the Atonement disintegrates the Gospel.
As Martin Luther protested, “I am neither so rash as to wish that my sole opinion should be preferred to that of all other men, nor so senseless as to be willing that the Word of God should be made to give place to fables, devised by human reason.”
God doesn’t expect us to hold our nose and swallow fables—fur, fins, feathers and all.
The wax nose of penal substitution is finally suffering meltdown from over-tweaking—shall we finally pull down this sagging substitute or dutifully keep on keeping up appearances?
It’s time to jettison the dead weight of penal substitution words and cling to the Word of life.
If after reading through these challenges to penal substitution assumptions and implications, you agree we’ve been colossally snookered for roughly 500 years—and the future looks even rougher if we don’t switch course soon—then who’re you gonna believe?
This is the season for judgment to begin from the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17-18; 1 Cor. 5:12-6:7, 11:29-34; Heb. 10:30).
It’s time for a resounding new Protest and a resolute fresh Reform. What now?
If we choose to accept this inconvenient truth, this mission impossible—what then?
This changes EVERYTHING.
And yet the earth does move. “Neither my thoughts nor the thoughts of all the doctors and priests that live now or ever have lived can the least alter facts. You have no right, I have no right, to determine what is. All our determinations must fall before the truth when that is discovered to us.” — Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
“The truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.” — Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
“Love The Light Forever” — Marie Roper
Aug. 24-25,27-31, Sept. 1-2,5-30, Oct. 1-21,24,26-27,29-31, Nov. 4-5,7,9-10,12,14-15,17,19-20,23-25,28-29, Dec. 2-4,13, 2017, March 4-6, 2019, March 28-April 2, Nov. 21-30, Dec. 2-8,10,13-14,16,20,23, 2021, Jan. 6, Feb. 5, April 22, Nov. 14, 2022.
The Premial Atonement 