Table of Contents

DEDICATION

ENDORSEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

1

MAKING CROOKED THINGS STRAIGHT

2

A REPUTATION RESTORED

3

GOD VERSUS GOD

4

THE VICTIM AND THE VICTOR

5

OBJECTS OF WRATH?

6

FORSAKEN AT 55 MILES PER HOUR

7

SALVATION BY SEPARATION?

8

OUTGROWING HELL

9

WHAT THE HECK DID JESUS TEACH ABOUT HELL?

10

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY

11

THE MYTH OF US AND THEM

12

AFRAID OF NOT BEING AFRAID

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ENDNOTES

SAINTS

IN THE ARMS OF A

HAPPY GOD

JEFF TURNER

Copyright © 2014 All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial profit.  The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged.  Permission will be granted upon request.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NCV) are from the New Century Version®. Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.”

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,

1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation

Used by permission.” (www.Lockman.org)

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version, Cambridge, 1769

Sound of Awakening Ministries

5409 Ponderosa

Clyde Twp., MI, 48049

This book and all other materials by Jeff Turner are available at www.jeff-turner.org.

For Worldwide Distribution

Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN-13: 978-0615897684

First Printing: 2014

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife, Diana, and our three children, Hannah, Samuel and Abigail.

To Diana – you have been by my side throughout nearly my entire spiritual journey.  You knew me and loved me when I was a hardnosed legalist, a burnt out “God-chaser”, a recovering religionist, and whatever it is I am now.  You’ve stood by my side through thick and thin, and have shown me a patience and a love that are nothing short of divine.  Your love for me and for our children exemplifies the character of the God whose image this book seeks to reclaim.  Thank you for your faithfulness to me and to our family.  Nothing in this world means more to me than our relationship with one another.  I love you with all of my heart, adore and cherish you, and look forward to having you by my side throughout the remainder of our journey.  You mean more to me than language will allow me to express.

To my children – you three are the greatest treasures that I have ever received.  Each of you are so unique and special, and it is precisely the love that I feel for each of you that has opened my eyes to the truth of who God is.  When I look at your faces and feel the love that is in my heart for you, I can’t help but imagine how much more immensely God must love the human race.  I love you more than words could ever express.

ENDORSEMENTS

I am often asked to recommend other teachers in the Body of Christ. Jeff Turner is on my short list. When he blogs, puts out a video or a podcast, my ears perk up. I consider him one of the most trustworthy young teachers of my generation and I am excited to see where the coming decades take him. I encourage you to dig into his material and let it impact your life as well.

-Jonathan Welton, Th.D. - Best Selling Author, Speaker, and Founding Professor of Welton Academy

At a time when serious students of the Bible are reevaluating some of the most important topics of authentic Christianity by comparing questionable contemporary views to what the Bible actually teaches, “Saints in the Arms of a Happy God” will be a treasure to those seekers of truth.

With clarity and candor, Jeff Turner tackles the lightning rod issues being discussed among so many right now. His voice is a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation about the details of the atonement, the paradoxical aspects of divine love and wrath, the nature of hell, and other subjects that have again come front and center in the church.

The contents of this book will help you think about, and perhaps even see some things in a new way. If you want to be challenged to think, to dig deep into your Bible and to know our loving Father more intimately, you will love this book. I highly recommend it and am confident that you will be glad you read it.

-Dr. Steve McVey Ph.D. – Author & Founder of Grace Walk Ministries, www.gracewalk.org

Jeff Turner is a voice in a fresh, grassroots awakening to the grace of the Gospel. Many are being surprised by joy as they awaken to the revelation that God has always been on our side, and that He saved us single-handedly. This book threatens to change some of your fundamental perspectives on the nature of God. He really is in a good mood. Many of our concepts of atonement - the very purpose of the cross - have been skewed because modern evangelicalism has not shown us the Trinity. Sure, it teaches Demon, Son and Holy Bible. But the true Trinity is a warm, happy, loving Father manifest through the Son in the power of a very real Holy Spirit. Let scandalous joy be your portion as Jeff rewires some of your basic theological foundations and escorts you on a path of gracious liberation.

-John Crowder – Author & Founder of Sons of Thunder Ministries and Publications, www.thenewmystics.com

The world has been waiting for thousands of years for us to tell them about a God that is actually good. They are tired of hearing about a god that is supposedly “good, all the time”, but really angry, “just” but really just kills at the drop of a hat, and “gracious” but has impossible requirements, all the while still somehow managing to wear a guise of goodness and love. Many have chosen to believe in no god at all rather than the seemingly bi-polar god that many of us naively proclaim like parrots. Many pre-believers, even atheists, have told me that they would rather hold out for a God that is truly good than to give themselves to a God that possesses both light and darkness. They reason that if there is a God, He is unwaveringly good and gracious beyond what we could ask, think, or imagine.

That is why there is a new reformation and a greater awakening at hand. Just as the Old Covenant is of lesser glory than the New, what we have seen in ages past will pale in comparison to what is dawning on the horizon.

The message that is rising is the grace and goodness of God. It is absolutely imperative in this hour, and Jeff is one of the few that has a firm grasp on it. The world is holding its breath for what is within this book. This message is what will cause nations to be saved in a day. I beg you; do not miss what is contained on these pages.”

-Tyler G. Johnson - DRT Director, Author and Speaker

There are few things as detrimental to the Christian life as a misunderstood vision of the nature of our Heavenly Father. From images of a blood-thirsty, sacrifice-demanding deity who would kill infants and women alike just to appease his lust, to the view of a God who hungers for the blood of His enemies, the vision of a violent God has pervaded and perverted the church for far too long.

Without correcting these errant visions, we will never see the true nature of a loving Father, the Father Jesus revealed to us as Abba, the one who will never let us go, and never ceases to love us, even to the depths of our own personal hell.

There is hope though. Jeff has accomplished quite the feat in “Saints in the Arms of a Happy God”. Just the title alone gives us such a better vision of the Abba of Jesus, the happy, ever loving, always holding on Father of all.

Not backing down from sacrosanct doctrines like atonement, adoption, and the all too common view of a violent God, Jeff is just as energetic, educated and transparent in his writing as he is in his teaching. His heart pours out in this wonderful work of ministry, love, devotion, and art. The church can take heart, the Father has raised up new voices to declare His love, and Jeff is positioned quite well as one of them.

-Caleb Miller – Recording Artist, Pastor and author of The Divine Reversal

Drawing from years of experiencing God and hours of study, Jeff Turner has crafted a thoughtful and passionate work on the grace of God.  It has been an important landmark in his own journey and I believe that it will help you in yours as well.  In “Saints in the arms of a Happy God” we are reminded that Grace is not a side show, it’s the main attraction.

-Nate Marialke – Worship Leader, Songwriter, and Recording Artist

Jeff Turner is a fresh voice for this generation. Saints in the Arms of a Happy God challenges several long-held sacred cows of religion and attempts to reveal the true heart of God, and with thought-provoking insights and brevity, it does a fine job doing it. If you’re looking to hear some good news, then this book is definitely a must read.

-Joshua Tongol, M.A. Talbot School of Theology – Speaker and author of So You Thought You Knew

It is my honor to endorse the man, the teacher, and author Jeff Turner, whom God is using to declare to this generation that God is kinder, and more gracious and loving than they’d ever dared to imagine.  Jeff’s heart and passion are to remove the wrong perceptions that men have had about God, and to show the world that He is not just a benevolent dictator, but a loving Abba Father who radically loves His creation.  This book will challenge your thinking, traditions, and theology, so buckle up and read expecting to be challenged and changed.

-Rev. Jamie Englehart, Bishop and overseer of Heritage International Ministries, a network of churches and ministries

God’s search for humanity and the inclusion of all humanity in that search is beautifully articulated in Jeff Turner’s Saints in the Arms of a Happy God. While not an explicit critique of the exclusionary soteriology of Calvinism, nevertheless, Turner has managed to restore hope to a Christocentric reading of the Bible as a narrative about a God who loves humanity and will do everything, climb any mountain, swim any sea, to seek and save every single last lost soul. I heartily embrace this vision and you will too!

-Michael Hardin, Executive Director, Preaching Peace and author of The Jesus Driven Life

FOREWORD

Jeff Turner’s powerful, happy voice is now also heard in the pages of this wonderful book!

In a time where the grace message is slandered as extreme, Jeff gives striking evidence to the extreme measures that Jesus went to in order to redeem the innocence of the human race. This is the core content and context of the gospel! The danger has never been to exaggerate the good news, but always to underestimate such a great salvation.

The mission of Jesus was not to add to the mystery of Deity but to bring absolute clarity regarding the person of God as the Father of the human race! “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Any idea that we could have had of God that is unlike Jesus would not be true about God! In Jesus, the forgotten Father of the human race introduces himself again as our only true Father

In Jeff’s words, “Jesus knows that our image of his Father determines everything about the way we live.”

Jeff diffuses all of the misconceptions, misunderstandings, and mythologies that religion sold us about an angry deity and overwhelms us with the resolve of God to love humanity back to Himself.

-Francois Du Toit, Speaker, Author, Bible Translator – The Mirror Bible

INTRODUCTION

This book is much more than a collection of haphazardly put together writings.

It is my heart.

My journey.

My life.

A decade ago, had I read the words that you are about to read in this book, I would have no doubt labelled their author a heretic, and dubbed his ideas as damnable.  I have no doubts that I would have sternly warned others against the ideas contained in this books pages, calling it names like “greasy grace” theology, or some other term of non-endearment.  I would have told you that its author presented God as being far too loving, kind, patient, compassionate, and merciful, and that he makes Him looks far too much like Jesus than the angry, OCD rule-master whom I bowed to.

I would have suggested that this “Jeff Turner character”, whoever he was, obviously had some secret sin issues he was seeking to find an excuse for indulging in, or that perhaps he was simply seeking popularity by adding artificial sweetener to the message of the Gospel.  I’d have no doubt counted him among what I perceived as being an emerging group of heretics who were paving the way for the “anti-Christ” with their despicable message of a God who was way too loving, and not nearly angry enough.

The reason?

I had never truly experienced the love of God for myself, and therefore had no grid for understanding it.  I lived in a constant state of condemnation and self-loathing.  I was burdened by a perpetual fear that I wasn’t doing enough or being enough, and always “just knew” that I was somehow falling short.  When a preacher would stand up and whip me for an hour plus with a man-centered message on sin, I’d feel like I’d “been to church”, and would come home licking my wounds and hatching plans on how to get “more holy”.  When he would speak a message of encouragement or preach on the simplicity of God’s love, however, I’d feel cheated.  I wanted someone to stand up and confirm my suspicions about myself; that I was no good and dirty.  I wanted someone who would agree with my own ungodly thoughts about myself.  When I heard God’s love preached and expounded upon I would sit numbly, watching the clock and longing for the talk to be over, because I simply had no grid for understanding such a thing.

I had no clue how to respond to a God of love.

When I was still in Bible College a preacher came through and presented a very simple message on living free from condemnation, and for some reason it hit my soul like rain drops on the dry, crusty desert sand.  I gulped and I drank, hardly giving any thought to what it was that I was hearing and taking in.  Something in my soul had snapped and I knew that this was truth and that the abusive preaching and mindset I’d grown accustomed to living with was not.  His words were so refreshing, so life giving, and so freeing.

I walked out feeling as free as a bird.

However, after returning home and mulling over what I had heard, I went to God in “prayer” and consciously renounced the preacher’s words.  Once I’d had time to sit and try rationalizing the love of my Father, I rejected it, simply because I could not believe that He was that good.  I had been so conditioned through angry, biting, condemning preaching that my brain literally could not process the thought of God being good and on my side.  After all, I knew the real Jeff Turner.  The one that no one else had ever seen, and could not believe for a moment that a holy God was truly and honestly for someone like me.

So I continued on in my religious desperation, praying an average of 5-12 hours a day, and often fasting (or at least attempting to fast) every other day or so.  I exhausted myself and anyone with a 100 mile radius of me with my religious exercises and legalism.  Everything and anything was banned in my house in the name of being “holy” and pleasing to the Lord.  There was literally almost nothing that we could participate in in the way of entertainment and recreation, for such things were carnal and “displeasing to the Lord”, and when I inevitably did allow myself to enjoy the simple pleasures of life (for who can ever truly avoid such enjoyments?) I’d fall under crushing condemnation and go for days feeling as though I’d sinned away the favor of God.

I’d pray and I’d pray and I’d pray.  I’d study and I’d study and I’d study.  I’d fast and I’d fast and I’d fast.  And to the casual, external observer, nobody was more on fire or on better terms with God than good old Jeff Turner, but I was dying on the inside, bleeding internally and gasping for breath.

Slowly but surely, in the midst of my desperate, broken and bankrupt religious condition, the Spirit began to do a subtle, but ultimately revolutionary work in my aching heart.  I began to encounter God in ways that were previously foreign to me and would experience His deep and ferocious love in ways that sometimes frightened me.  I would often shake these experiences off, and several times even believed them to be Satan’s attempts at deceiving and misleading me, but God, Who is relentless in His pursuit of our hearts, simply wouldn’t take my “no’s” for an answer.

And so He continued to pursue me.

Over the course of a decade plus, I found all of my cherished, but lethal beliefs being burned up like chaff by the blazing heat of the Father’s love.  Before there even was such a thing as a “Grace movement”, I began to encounter a God who was gracious, compassionate, kind and more loving than I’d ever dared to dream.  When the reality of His love met my angry God theology, something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be on His end.  It was a season of great upheaval and uprooting in my life.  The religious abuse and depression I’d become so accustomed to living with was slowly being chipped away at, and I simply could not exist that way any longer.  I had to learn a new way of living, and it wasn’t easy.  I cried many a tear and almost bled my soul dry.

But it was worth it.

Learning of God’s grace was not the fluffy, cotton candy-ish, rainbows and unicorns experience that many portray it as being.  It was quite painful.  Not because His love pained me, but because the process of unlearning and then relearning was beautifully traumatic.  It’s difficult to come face to face with the fact that you’ve had anything, let alone God, figured wrong, and especially so when you’ve spent a good portion of your time communicating your misunderstandings to others.  I’m all too well acquainted with the fact that, while lost in my own misunderstandings of God, I hurt, wounded and ostracized many people.  Seeing that it was all for nothing and that I’d brought such harm to innocent souls for no good reason was…well, painful to say the least.

In the midst of it all, however, I was experiencing the Father’s great love, and my heart was slowly but radically being healed.  Everything was changing and coming to life around me, and I began to experience a joy I had never known before.  However, I knew no one else who was teaching these things and in the midst of my own joy began to notice how lonely I was.  I felt that I had no one to talk to about the things God was doing in my heart, and I longed for a companion with whom I could talk through these issues with.  Some of my questions went way beyond what I was comfortable talking with a fellow believer or leader about, and so was oftentimes left alone with my thoughts and questions.  The more I began to learn of the love and grace of my Father, the more questions I had about hell, judgment, wrath, the violence of the Old Testament, etc…, and these are questions and issues you simply cannot bring up with most believers.  Yes, of course, God was there and leading me through the process, but having a listening ear, a sympathetic friend, and a heart that understands your journey is beyond important.

And so I wrote this book.

Why?

Because I know that I’m not alone in experiencing a joyful but lonely exodus out of the world of religious bondage, and I write so that others walking through the same experience will have someone to come alongside of them.  I write so that you can avoid the loneliness that so many face when coming to terms with the reality of the Gospel.  The questions we’ll explore are the questions I wrestled with in secret, and the hard issues we’ll tackle are the very ones that vexed my soul in earlier days.

Let me admit up front that I still have more questions than I have answers, and in truth, I think that those who are the most serious about understanding God would say the same thing.  That being said, while I’ll attempt to “answer” some hard questions, I may just end up giving you more hard questions to ask and seek answers for.  If that’s all that reading this book does for you – causes you to ask the hard questions –then it’ll have done its job.  So long as we remain stuck in an apathetic certainty we’ll continue to stagnate.  Some people are only one or two questions away from freedom, and had I been willing to think for myself and poke holes in the “holy”, I may have not spent so many years in a religious fog.  We’ll therefore not shy away from questions that others are too afraid to ask.  We’ll go “there”, because “going there” might just mean liberation for some.

In many ways this book is written to my younger self - a theologically curious soul who was sincere, but sincerely misled, and who was too scared to verbalize or even consciously consider the things that were rattling around in his subconscious mind.  This is the book that I wish someone would have put in my hands 14 years ago so that I could have been confronted with ideas that no one had dared confront me with at that point.  Ultimately, this books purpose is to help you think and feel your way through the more difficult questions that inevitably arise at some point in our grace journeys.  This is not an exhaustive theological work, but we will get theological.  For some it may be more than you’re used to, and for others, way less.  It’s also not an exclusively devotional book, but we will get devotional, and if you stick with me to the end I think you’ll find yourself arriving at some beautiful conclusions, or, at the very least, asking some beautiful (and important) questions.

Maybe you’re just beginning this journey, or maybe you’re a good deal into it.  Maybe you have no idea what I’m even talking about when I speak of a “grace journey”, or maybe you’ve been trekking this path for 80 years or more.  Whatever the case, I want to take your hand, and with the Spirit, embark on a journey of discovery with you.  Along the way we’ll have to ask some hard questions and probably lay aside some cherished ideas.  We’ll probably also encounter some rather new ideas which, while seeming exotic to us, are actually not new or strange at all.  We’ll most likely also face some areas of hurt and pain that manmade religion has inflicted on us, but, hopefully, we’ll also find radical healing for those hurts and pains.

Above everything else, however, my prayer is that we come face to face with the Abba revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.  What we behold in His countenance will, no doubt, cause many of our precious paradigms to tumble like a proverbial house of cards, but in their place we’ll hopefully discover a love that exceeds our wildest expectations.

So let’s join hands and begin a journey of unlearning and relearning; tearing down and building up.  Let’s leave behind the “gods” of religion that have abused, accused and misused us, and discover instead a Triune God of love and of grace.  For far too long the loving family that is the Godhead has been misrepresented, and portrayed as angry, violent, retributive, and rule obsessed, but it’s time to discover the truth - that God is love.

Period.

So let’s join hands, and discover together that we’re not sinners in the hands of an angry God, but Saints in the Arms of a Happy God!

1

MAKING CROOKED THINGS STRAIGHT

Abraham, Put Down Your Knife!

“Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God…such must take courage to forsake the false in any shape, to deny their old selves in the most seemingly sacred of prejudices, and follow Jesus, not as he is presented in the tradition of the elders, but as he is presented by himself, his apostles, and the spirit of truth.” 1

-George MacDonald (1824-1905)

I can only imagine the thoughts plaguing Abraham’s mind as he dutifully trudged up Mount Moriah, fully intent on slitting his son’s throat and burning his body in obedience to God’s will.

Of course the writer of Hebrews tells us that Abraham believed God had the power to raise his son back to life, but that’s quite an easy thing for the writer to say centuries after the event.  Especially when he’s not the one carrying the knife or the command to snuff out his child’s life.  What sort of deity must Abraham have been imagining his God to be?  At that point he was probably coming to the conclusion that he was one much like those from his homeland.  He came, after all, from the land of Ur; a city state rife with pagan gods, magical rites, and gruesome sacrificial rituals – many of which involved humans.  Abraham’s own father, Terah, is presented in Jewish tradition as having been a maker of idols, which if true suggests that Abraham would have been very familiar with the human sacrifice demanding gods of his homeland.  When his relatively newfound God demanded the life of his firstborn as a burnt offering, Abraham isn’t presented as stopping in order to question the morality of the demand, but instead as seeking to carry it out speedily.  Why?  Because, more than likely, such demands were not uncommon from the gods Abraham grew up worshipping.

Some would argue that Abraham was a righteous man and was therefore most definitely able to distinguish between His God and the gods of Ur, but we often overlook the fact that Abraham was not a “godly” man in the way that we would use the term today.  He had no book which spelled out God’s ways and character, but only a voice in the wind that told him to leave his father’s household.  Sure, this God had interacted with Abraham and intervened in his life from time to time, but His name and nature remained a mystery.  Abraham was a man of his era, and for all we know may have seen the God he called friend as being one from Ur’s pantheon Who, for some unknown reason, had taken a liking to him and so chose to reveal Himself.  And so when he was asked to do the unthinkable, and offer his son as a burnt offering, he didn’t hesitate.  It didn’t enter his mind to question whether or not this was a moral action or whether or not it was something that a loving God would demand.  This was simply the way that the gods of that era behaved, and though I’m sure it pained his heart to imagine carrying out the act, the fact that God demanded it didn’t seem to have come as much of a surprise.

The real tragedy here is that God, man’s benevolent, triune, familial Creator, was perceived as being on an equal level with the pagan gods of antiquity - selfish gods who had no problem with taking the life of your loved one in order to satisfy their own needs.  Abraham, while a Godly man, had yet to have his mind fully purged of the pagan notions that had been ingrained in him in his native Ur, and God, while patient with Abraham’s misunderstandings, was not content to let them go unchallenged.  So while testing his faithfulness, which the text suggests He was, He also began another installment in dismantling the pagan perceptions of the patriarch.

When Abraham and Isaac finally reached the place where the sacrifice was to occur, the no doubt distraught father secured his son to the altar upon which he intended to slay him.  He raised his knife to the sky and, with trembling hands, began guiding it in its collision course with Isaac’s flesh.  But at the very last moment the angel of the Lord stopped his hands and ordered him to not lay a finger upon the child.  Then something most remarkable began to unfold, for God, in a single action, uncoupled Himself from the box car of pagan thought to which Abraham, in his blindness, had fixed Him -

He gave!

Instead of taking away, this God actually…gave!

God said that Isaac would live and that instead of offering a human sacrifice, He would provide a ram which Abraham could offer.  In this moment Abraham not only passed a test, but found a new name for His God:  Yahweh Yireh, the LORD Who gives or provides (Genesis 22:14)!  In this act of rejecting human sacrifice and providing for Abraham and his son, God removed himself from the realm of pagan myth and began to redefine Himself as being a benevolent Father, who far from being interested in bringing harm to us, is actually interested in rescuing and ransoming us from harm.  The “gods” of Ur would have giddily and greedily accepted the blood of Abraham’s cherished child, but the Lord Who Provides was altogether different.  He set Himself apart from these bloodthirsty, mythological deities by giving and not taking.  Instead of taking away our laughter, which is what the name Isaac means, this God invites us to share in His.

In that moment, I imagine Abraham not only felt relieved but also profoundly horrified by the God concept he’d had in mind only moments prior.  When He saw the truth, that Yahweh gives, the image of a bloodthirsty deity who would demand a father murder his own child must have seemed utterly abhorrent.  When the true God came face to face with the illusory gods of Abraham’s fallen imagination, one of the two had to back down and give way the other, and I assure you, it wasn’t The LORD Who Gives who did the backing down!

That day the true and living God began to be redeemed in the mind of Abraham, the man whom God elected to be the conduit through which all nations would be blessed.  He discarded one image and embraced another.  This process, no doubt, would repeat itself numerous times throughout his life and the lives of those who would spring from his physical and spiritual his line.  God would never be content with being misrepresented and misunderstood, for these misrepresentations and misunderstandings are able to harm us in the most profound of ways, and can inspire us to act in ways altogether incongruent with God’s nature.  To redeem His image is to redeem us, and to save His reputation is to save us.

I believe this account from the life of Abraham serves as an example to us of how God has fought throughout the centuries for His reputation to remain pure in our eyes.  A God who is infinitely kind, merciful and loving, all too often gets miscommunicated as being a moral monster or a disgruntled dictator, who is really only concerned with what we are doing wrong and with how He can punish us accordingly.  He cares little about the pain and hardships we endure, but obsesses over being honored, glorified, worshipped and adored.  He turns a blind eye to the injustices committed by one man against another, but demands eternal torment for all men simply because Adam ate a piece of produce that a talking reptile suggested would make him godlike.  This “god” looks far more like Mt. Olympus than He does Mt. Zion, and is most certainly not one whom we’d be tempted to cozy up to in times of trouble.  If we turn to Him at all it is done in the name of fire insurance, but has nothing at all to do with reciprocating a preexisting love that has ravished and won our hearts.

The millennia’s long struggle of man has been to perceive God rightly, holding at bay personal and cultural influences that would fog up our lenses, and to then pass on a proper and untarnished understanding of Him to the next generation.  Men have fought, prayed, studied, and worshipped themselves delirious, testing out different means and methods of coming at the Divine in the name of learning Him aright.  Unfortunately, a virgin view of God is a notoriously difficult thing to acquire and an even harder thing to hold on to once found, and so we are typically handed nothing more than the former generations toxic misunderstanding which, in my opinion, always does far more damage than an ignorant atheism ever could.  We would oftentimes have been better off with no theology at all than with some of the nonsense that has been taught in the name of Christianity.

Tragically, these gruesome and harmful caricatures of God eventually become dogmatized and doctrinalized and, despite being nothing more than revivals and revisions of Abraham’s “gimme-God”, become cardinal teachings of the institution that calls herself the “church”.  Sadly, it is typically these gloomy portraits that become the standard understanding of God preached from most pulpits and printed in most publications and, consequently, many, just like Abraham, find themselves behaving in ways that would have seemed unthinkable had it not been for the influence of their imagined “god”.

Eventually whole structures arise that devote themselves to brewing and distributing these doctrinal distillations to eager-to-drink disciples.  Whole generations emerge from the wombs of these structures, fully possessed by and devoted to the false representations of God learned within their walls.  All of us have been influenced by such ideas in one way or another, but trick ourselves into thinking that we just happen to be the ones possessing a pristine and perfect knowledge of God’s character, and then become quite enamored with our “knowledge” and “revelatory insight”.  Like Abraham, however, many of us also eventually find ourselves in that moment where, as George MacDonald said, we stand horrified at the things we believed to be true of God.  We find the doctrines we once thought so angelic to be utterly demonic, and the beliefs we thought so pure to be rotten to the core.

Because God is jealous for His loving reputation, when we persist in beliefs that portray Him as angry, retributive and just plain old mean, we will inevitably hit a wall and realize that our concepts simply do not work.  While seeming so right initially, we find that they’ve left us crooked, bent in the wrong direction, disillusioned and desperately longing for reformation.  Ideas and doctrines that we think will lead us into spiritual enlightenment and freedom often lead us, instead, down a path of darkness, depression, and spiritual death.

As the scripture says,

25 There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.

-PROVERBS 16:25 (Emphasis mine)

This “way” that “appears to be right” does not necessarily refer to sin, immorality or general godlessness, but to any natural inclination of man towards God that is inaccurate and therefore leads to death.  On our own we tend to perceive Him in the context of our own sense of shame, fear and anxiety, and always in light of our religious upbringing.  No one is ever – no, not even those who fancy themselves theological giants - simply beholding an untouched, factory fresh portrait of God.  Though done in ignorance, we are almost always following the crooked trails blazed by those who preceded us.  As this process continues over time, we eventually end up believing in and serving a “God” who looks nothing like the true and living God who is the Father of all.

But it wasn’t always this way.

At one time we, as a species, knew this being called God quite well.  The first man and his wife, so we’re told, lived naked in His presence and felt no shame (Genesis 2:25).  It seems that God likewise lived “naked”, so to speak, and unveiled before man’s eyes, revealing to them constantly the actual truth of Who He is.  Theirs was an unfiltered knowledge of God that was not dependent upon second hand information or sacred texts.  They experienced a “naked”, uncovered relationship with the Holy in which nothing was hidden or held back.

All that God was and is laid naked and bare before the eyes of humankind.

In this state of possessing a pure knowledge of God humanity was lacking in any concept of good or evil, for this “knowledge” had not yet become a part of the human experience.  It had yet to enter into our lives which would seem to suggest that originally, man was not made to behold God as “holy” in a moral or behavioral sense, as God discouraged man from eating the fruit that would grant him this ability.  In man’s original mind there were no lines of distinction between good and bad, or sacred and secular.  God was all in all, and Adam and Eve enjoyed life in the context of His presence, without a consciousness or understanding of sin.  God was not the judge, the rule master or the dispenser of fines and penalties for moral infractions.  He was simply Father, and above all He was Love.

Unfortunately, this state of innocent bliss did not last forever, but came to a screeching and painful halt through the cosmic train wreck that we have come to refer to as “the fall”.  This fall occurred as a result of Adam and his wife eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but had nothing to do with them descending into twisted, vile immorality.  It concerned their acquiring of a particular brand of knowledge that would serve to tarnish their view of God, themselves, and the world around them.  The temptation that the first couple faced was very similar to the temptation we face from modern, Western Christianity – that we can attain true Godliness if we simply learn how to draw clear lines of distinction between good and evil.  The serpent said to Eve: “…God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5) The temptation to eat from this tree had nothing to do with the things we typically associate with sin, but rather with acquiring the ability to discern between good and evil.

Formerly man had seen only the declared “it is good” of God’s creation, but this fruit offered him the opportunity to see things differently.  By eating it he could become “like God”, possessing the ability to see evil in what was originally said to be good.  This tree’s fruit injected a literal “knowledge”, or way of thinking, into the stream of human consciousness that was not a part of the original creation.  Adam and Eve’s view of things suddenly became stained by a new and false reality, for everything began appearing in the context of good and evil, right and wrong, holy and unholy.  What God had once said was good took on dark and sinister tones, appearing as evil when it was as good as the day it was first created.

So drastic was the change that when God came to visit with Adam and Eve, which we assume was a regular occurrence, they ran and hid from Him among the trees of the Garden.  This reaction of fear was something altogether new and previously foreign to them and I’m sure they were shocked and taken aback by its sudden appearance in their lives.  All of a sudden God appeared as being anything but the loving Father they had seen Him as being mere moments before.

Their nakedness, something that God had declared to be good, and something formerly of no concern to them, suddenly became something about which they felt profound shame.  They believed it needed to be hidden from God’s sight, and so not only did they cover themselves but they did so with leaves from the Garden’s trees, the very things which they were appointed to work and take care of.  I believe that this is the very first instance of man attempting to shield his perceived uncleanness with the works of his hands.  For the first time humankind suspected that there was something wrong with them, believing that because of their faults God’s mood had changed.  Adam’s knee jerk reaction was to try to prove to his God that he was still good and of use, and he did so by proudly and prominently displaying the works of his hands.  Because of the knowledge of good and evil, the inherent goodness of Adam and Eve’s design now appeared evil to them, causing them to feel the need to improve upon it by adding to it their own accomplishments.

This is birthplace of the ubiquitous religious impulse resident within all human beings, to sacrifice and work in order to please and satisfy their “gods”.  Every system of religious appeasement finds its genesis here, in the polluted pool of human misunderstanding.  Man’s image of God had become crooked, and because of this He could no longer perceive either himself or the creation correctly.  He now saw evil in both himself and His heavenly Father, and felt compelled to hide from the one He should have been running out to meet.  In his shame and religious blindness, he hid from the One he should have been hiding in.  And just in case he was discovered he made sure to cover over his uncleanness with good works, hoping that his job-well-done would be enough to distract God from his inherent badness.

We can only imagine the brokenness and sorrow that filled God’s heart upon seeing His children reacting to His loving presence in such an absurd way!

DADDY’S ARRIVAL

Each and every day when I return home from work I have an incredible experience.  Upon realizing that daddy has returned home, one by one my children begin to scream “Daddy’s home” with sheer joy in their voices.  I then hear the thumping of six little feet bolting towards the door, as each one fights to be the first to shower me with hugs and kisses.  To them the sound of my car door shutting, my feet shuffling up the steps, and my keys jangling as I unlock the door is one that announces the arrival of their best friend and hero.  The sound of my arrival never strikes fear or terror into their hearts, because they know that I’m a good daddy and this knowledge of my goodness makes my arrival a thing worth celebrating.

However, let’s say that one day upon returning home, the sound of my arrival elicited no squeals of joy or eruptions of laughter.  Only silence.  I would quickly begin to wonder where my miniature welcoming committee had gone!  Perhaps they’re playing a joke on me and are planning to jump out and surprise me, I think.  However, upon opening the door I find the entry way vacant.  Perhaps they’re napping and didn’t hear me arrive!  However, after checking their rooms and finding them empty I begin to worry!  I check the backyard, but still, no sign of them.

I begin calling out their names, shouting, “Hannah, Samuel, Abigail...Where are you!?”  No reply.  Then, after several more minutes of frantic calling out, I hear a scared, sheepish little voice coming from the hall closet say, “Daddy, we heard you walking up the steps, and we were afraid...so we hid.”

Needless to say my heart would be absolutely crushed at the thought of my children being frightened of me.  After all, in all of my years as their daddy I’ve never given them any reason to be afraid of me.

After I finally coax them out of hiding, suppose I find them to be dressed in a most unusual way - covered from head to toe in various pieces of artwork that they have created, in addition to having wrapped themselves in award ribbons like little mummies.  They begin waddling towards me, frantically directing my attention to hand written lists they’ve made which document all of their accomplishments.  They attempt to assure me through their actions that, at the heart of it all, they’re good kids.  They continue pointing to their accomplishments in the hope that I, in my superior goodness, would come to see and acknowledge their own inferior, but nonetheless apparent, goodness.

As a good father who loves my children, this scenario would be rather disturbing to say the very least.

I’d no doubt ask them, “Why would you hide from Daddy?  Why did you feel that you needed to be afraid of me? And why would you feel as though you needed to prove yourselves to me in this way?  I love you and am proud of you!  You never need to seek Daddy’s love or approval by trying to be perfect.  Why have you come to believe that there is something wrong with you?”

If, in this imaginary scenario, they answered my question by saying that it was because they had colored on the walls, not put their toys away, or some other benign thing, I would smile and assure them that their behavior, though not exemplary, would never change daddy into someone from whom they needed to hide.  I may have to discipline them, but their actions would not and could not change my nature or disposition towards them.

However, let’s suppose that it was more than a fear of fatherly discipline that caused them to cower.  Let’s say that at some point during the day a friend from next door had sat down with them, dishing out all of the dirty details on just how different kids and parents were from one another.  Let’s say that this neighbor convinced my kids that children were inherently bad, and that parents were inherently good.  Because of this difference in character, so this neighbor told my children, a great gulf existed between parents and children - a gulf so wide and deep that nothing could ever really fill it.  My children were told that parents were vengeful and bloodthirsty creatures, needing to be constantly appeased and made happy through good deeds and required constant reminding that their children were worthy of existence.  They were then told tall tales of children who didn’t live up to their mommy and daddy’s expectations and who faced horrific punishments as a result.

At the end of a few hours of such nonsense talk my children actually began to question my character, as well as their own.  All of a sudden the mess that they had made in the basement just hours ago seemed like a slightly bigger deal than it did before.  And so they rushed home and began frantically cleaning up their messes, knowing that I’d be arriving soon.  Their hearts beat fearfully as they raced to undo their wrongs.  Then they hatched a plan, “We’ll trick daddy into not seeing our badness!  We’ll cover ourselves in our own accomplishments so that we can fool him into believing that we’re actually good kids!”  And so they covered themselves in award ribbons they had won, and wrapped themselves in school assignments on which they had received good grades.

In this imagined scenario, a fear of discipline was not what caused my children to hide at the sound of my arrival.  This “neighbor” had imparted a false knowledge to them which shaped me into a being that is the exact opposite of my true nature.  They had projected into my children’s minds the image of a frightening, vengeful, unapproachable monster, who needed to be appeased through good works and behavior.  My children’s thoughts about me became crooked and twisted, and they surmised that they’d had me figured all wrong the first time around.  Daddy isn’t really for us, he’s against us.  He’s not our friend after all, he’s our enemy, but if we live and behave a certain way, perhaps we can live together in peace.

And so on that day, when they heard me gently shut my car door, their minds heard it slamming in anger.  When they heard the sound of my feet shuffling up the walkway, their minds caused them to hear angry, thunderous stomps!  As my hands turned the door knob, their minds heard the sound of terrifying claws scratching at the door.  They hid themselves, fearing my wrath.  In the event that I did happen to find them, their only hope was that they could appease me with an impressive display of good works and merit.  Needless to say, as a Father, if such a silly scenario actually took place, it wouldn’t seem silly to me at all as I would be utterly devastated.  What could be more hurtful to a good father than for his children to think evil of him?  Undoubtedly, I would dedicate myself to showing them my true nature as their father, and would seek to assure them that they were safe, loved, and not in any way endangered by my presence.  I would not stop until the damage was undone and they once more believed that both I and they were good.

This false scenario is almost identical to what took place after man’s mind began thinking crooked thoughts about God.  We read of this sad digression in the following passage:

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

-GENESIS 3:8 (Emphasis mine)

A legend was born that day in the garden.  A volume of mythological ideas about God began to be written upon the twisted tablet of man’s soul.  The unveiled God of beauty, life and love became cloaked in the shadows of human fear.  It was this fear of the divine that spawned every one of the world’s false religions, along with their angry, bloodthirsty deities.  Mankind as a whole lost its grip on reality and began helplessly careening down the crooked and destructive path that results from false God concepts.

Generation after generation of humanity then began to follow the crooked and twisted myths handed to them by Adam.  The fear and the blindness that the knowledge of good and evil brought, like a line of genetic code, was passed down continually, until even in the midst of God’s covenant nation of Israel, twisted doctrines abounded.  Things got so crooked that when God Himself, in an attempt to clear away the smoke and reveal the truth, showed up in the person of Christ, they tortured and murdered Him.

One particular Biblical character, perhaps more than any other, seems to embody this crookedness.  In his blindness he not only persecuted the Church in word, but aided in the arrest and martyrdom of an untold number of first century believers.  You may have heard of him.  His name was Saul of Tarsus, the man who became the Apostle Paul and wrote the majority of the book we now call the New Testament.

Decades after his conversion to Christ, this Saul of Tarsus, also called Paul, penned the following words concerning his former way of life:

5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

-PHILIPPIANS 3:5-6 (Emphasis mine)

Paul says that as a devout, religious man he was so zealous for his “god”, that it prompted him to persecute the church.  This persecution involved far more than mere verbal assaults and character smears.  According to Paul’s own words he was a “blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man”.  His zeal moved him to hatred, to violence, and, according to the witness of the early church, murder (Acts 9:1).  From whence did this violent, murderous zeal arise?  Paul, speaking elsewhere of the rabidly anti-Christ structure to which he once belonged, stated:

2 For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.

-ROMANS 10:2 (Emphasis mine)

Paul tells us that the zeal that moved both himself and his peers to violence and murder was a zeal that was not based on knowledge.  What does this mean exactly?  I believe that this lack of knowledge refers to a deficiency in their revelation of the true nature of God.  Paul speaks again of this ignorance and lack of knowledge in His letter to Timothy:

13 Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.

-1 TIMOTHY 1:13-14 (Emphasis mine)

It was Paul’s ignorance and unbelief that caused him to do the evil things that he did.  Like his religious brethren, he had inherited a mythological portrait of a God who was a tyrannical dictator who stomped out and smothered everything he saw as being a threat to his being worshipped and glorified.  Therefore, new and unheard of belief systems, like Christianity, equaled threats to his god’s honor and so he required Paul’s violence in order to rid the earth of such sects.  Paul’s mind had become corrupted, and his religion twisted.  His false knowledge of God spawned a zeal within him that moved him to do the unthinkable.

I see Paul’s experience as being much more than just an isolated case, but a microcosm of the human race when it operates out of the knowledge of good and evil.  It breeds a passion within us, though not a passion that is towards God.  Rather, it creates in us a passion that is against things which we feel would offend Him.

In Acts 2:40, the Apostle Peter, speaking to a crowd of devoutly religious Jews, implores them to flee from what he calls an “untoward generation”:

40 …Save yourselves from this untoward generation…

-ACTS 2:40 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

Interestingly, the Greek word for “untoward” is the word skolios, which can literally be translated as crooked or twisted, and is the root of our English word scoliosis, a condition in which one’s spine is twisted or crooked.  In fact, the English Standard Version translates Peter’s word this way:

“Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”  (ESV, Emphasis mine)

Also, the generation being spoken of does not need to refer to a generation as in a period of time, but to the age of the Mosaic Law.  Peter, in my opinion, is referring to the Old Covenant era as one that had degenerated into being untoward.  What does this word “untoward” mean, exactly?  While it can simply refer to something that is inappropriate or immoral, a simple breaking down of the word suggests that it means to be the opposite of toward.  To be toward something is to be facing in its direction but to be untoward something is to be turned away from it.  Could it be that a religiously crooked understanding of God causes us to turn our hearts, not towards Him in love, (for who could ever really love such a monster in the first place?) but away from Him in fear?

You see, our crooked thoughts create fears within us that cause us to turn away from His face and become untoward.  In our desperate attempts to please him, however, we also turn away from everything we believe may be offensive or displeasing to him, and thus become a thoroughly untoward people.  We are not actually for anything at all, but begin to mainly identify ourselves as being against the world and all that we deem as unholy.  We are against much but for very little, if anything at all.  Just like Saul of Tarsus, we become professionals at hating things, but amateurs at loving the things that really matter.  Our actions soon become evil as, like the Pharisees, our belief in an angry, violent God causes us to become angry and violent towards our fellow man.  In the words of Blaise Pascal:  “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

Naturally, God, in his fervent love for the human race, could not and cannot allow such twisted ignorance to continue unchallenged.  These twisted understanding have in our day spawned a culture of angry preachers, bitter believers, and even more bitter unbelievers.  They have motivated more than a few to turn their backs on loved ones, and behave in atrocious ways towards those with differing beliefs and opinions.  We’ve stood on street corners shouting turn or burn, when a hurting world simply needs someone to love them and remind them that they’re worth something, and valuable enough to save.  We’ve pummeled and bullied Christians with more lenient convictions than our own, causing them to feel unworthy, unacceptable, and unloved, all in the name of pleasing our violent, perfection demanding God.  Long story short, we’ve become a crooked, twisted, and untoward people!

In the case of Paul, however, even as he was on his way to do more harm and to cause more pain, God, in his mercy, stopped him in his tracks in order to arrest his affections.  After being quite literally “knocked off of his high horse”, blinded, and divinely commissioned, God led Paul to a house on a street called Straight, and three days later sent a man named Ananias to lay hands on him and open his eyes.  God, seeing the twisted portrait of Himself that Paul had adopted, sought to straighten things out once and for all.  And so he sends him Ananias, a man whose name literally means God is Gracious, all while he was dwelling in a house on a street called Straight!  When Ananias, or, symbolically speaking, the Gospel of God’s Grace and Love, laid his hands upon Paul, we’re told that “something like scales” fell from his eyes.  God made the crooked things straight in Paul’s life by bringing him face to face with His grace, which caused the scaly lies of the Edenic serpent to fall from his eyes so that he could behold the truth about God.  From that day on the Father began to educate Paul on His true nature, and Paul went down in history as the greatest proclaimer of grace that the world has ever known!

My dear friends, it is time for the church universal to have her twisted beliefs straightened out and challenged by a true revelation of grace.  I believe we are living in an hour in which many Saul’s (men and women who have persecuted the Church, not by murdering her members or imprisoning her people, but by terrorizing their souls through the teaching of lies about God) are on the brink of having radical encounters on “Straight street”!  False, serpentine concepts are going to begin melting away as the sons and daughters of God come to grips with the truth about who God really is.  They’re going to see Him as He is – gracious and kind – and, both instantly and gradually, begin to see the world in a whole new light.  As MacDonald said, we will be horrified at the things that we’ve believed and will “…forsake the false in any shape…in the most seemingly sacred of prejudices, and follow Jesus, not as he is presented in the tradition of the elders, but as he is presented by himself, his apostles, and the spirit of truth.”

I remember my own “Straight street encounter” very well.  It was not a single experience, but a process that unfolded over many years (and which will continue to unfold until the day I take my last breath), but it had a very definite beginning.  I was a slightly younger man of about 20 years of age.  I had been staying up at a cabin with my wife, and had just finished listening to a sermon in which God was portrayed as being extremely distant, and accessible only to those who had enough spiritual hunger to warrant a visit from Him.  As the speaker’s message drew to a close, the obviously moved audience could be heard weeping, wailing, and crying out for God to touch them so loudly, that they literally drowned out the speaker’s voice.  I remember dashing out of the cabin with tears streaming down my face and walking the dark, dirt roads, crying to God from the deepest place in my being.  You see, for years I had been “pursuing God” in the exact manner described by the speaker.  In fact, I was far more radical than anything he had described, often praying up to twelve hours in concert, crying out to God in desperation to be real and to manifest Himself in my life.  On this particular night I felt exhausted.  I had prayed, fasted, cried out, and done every single other thing a man in pursuit of God could possibly do to get His attention, all seemingly to no avail.

I had rid my life of anything that could possibly offend, and lived so chastely that I would have moved the Puritans to jealousy, yet God still seemed so far away.  I had come to the conclusion that God must have been far more rigid and strict than I had formerly thought, and so adapted my lifestyle accordingly.  I was just about the most legalistic person on planet earth, and believed that my piety was a surefire way of getting God’s attention.  Yet, day after day, month after month, and year after year, I continued to feel like a failure, and a disappointment.  I was frustrated and far beyond at the end of my rope.

That night, as I walked alone in the dark with tears staining my face, I said something to God that I’m convinced began a process that changed everything.  I cried out, “God, I don’t care if I have you figured all wrong, I lay all of my theology and sacred doctrines down on the altar.  If you are someone completely different from whom I’ve thought you to be, reveal yourself to me, because what I have is not working!  If you reveal yourself to me as you are through the scriptures and by the Spirit, I’ll follow you.  I don’t care how much it offends me or how crazy it might seem when compared to what I believe right now – just show me the truth about yourself!”

I had no idea just how literally God would take my words, for over the next several years He began to shake everything that I thought I knew about who He was.  The angry, distant, disappointed God I had once believed in began to be replaced by the Father revealed through Jesus Christ.

Everything changed.

Slowly but surely I began to realize that my Father was not mad, nor was I, His son, bad.  The Holy Spirit, who for some reason has gotten the bum rap of being the nitpicky member of the Godhead, existing only to convict us of our sins, began to teach me to cry “Abba Father”, exactly as the scripture said He would.  In addition, He began to reveal to me just how deep my sonship went, and how pleasing I was to the Father simply by virtue of being His creation.  It almost amuses now to think of how shocking the Spirit’s workings were to me initially, as these are precisely the things the scripture tells us to expect from Him.  He does not come to rub our noses in past mistakes, nor to present us with an image of a God of wrath, retribution, hatred and violence.  He teaches us to see God as our Abba, our Daddy, and to see ourselves as His children.  Little by little, the scales began to fall from my eyes as the Spirit schooled me in the love of God on Straight Street.

SAINTS IN THE ARMS OF A HAPPY GOD

For years, the church has been enslaved by the idea that we are mere “sinners in the hands of an angry God”.  This phrase, which is the title of Jonathan Edwards’ famous 18th century address, represents much more to me than a single hellfire and brimstone sermon from yesteryear, but a mindset that has infected even the most devout among us.  We have seen ourselves as being putrid and unworthy sinners, and consequently, our God as being angry and hostile towards us and the world we live in.  I believe that we are in a history altering hour, however, in which men and women across the globe are either having, or are about to have, “Straight Street encounters” that will put the crooked, Adamic lies about God to rest once and for all.  I believe at the moment there is a worldwide discontent with the traditional portraits of God we’ve been handed.

Multitudes of preachers, teachers, sons, daughters, husbands and housewives are dying on the inside, longing to learn of a God of love and grace.  It’s not because they want permission to live sinful or licentious lifestyles, but because they, like the rest of us who are honest enough to admit the truth, have come to know just how deeply they need a God Who loves them in spite of their messes and mistakes.  They’ve grown tired, weary, and are downright burned out with trying to keep God’s anger and irritation in check through various religious exercises, and are panting for a place of rest in which they are free to do nothing more than be a son or daughter of their Father.  The nasty rumors of a violent, perfection demanding, and wrath wielding deity have taken their toll on the psyches of the religious, and many, like I was, are at the end of their ropes.

But things are changing.

Nearly seven years ago I felt the Holy Spirit speak to my heart that, “What your nation calls ‘the first great awakening’ is said to have been birthed by the message ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, but an awakening like nothing you’ve ever seen is coming, and it will be birthed by the message of Saints in the Arms of a Happy God!”  When I speak of an awakening, I’m not necessarily talking about the classical revival scenes that the word might call to mind, but an awakening of the heart to the truth about God and to the truth about ourselves.  I’m also most certainly not claiming that this book is the answer or fulfillment of that promise. Rather, this book is the fulfillment of my own personal awakening, in which God lifted me out of the depths of my own evangelical hell and into a place of rest and victory through a purer (though certainly not the purest) understanding of Who He is.  This is but one of many such works that are arising as a result of men and women waking up to the truth that we are Saints in the Arms of a Happy God.

There is a new breed of preacher arising in the earth today.  They’ve spit out the stale wafers of legalistic, angry-God Christianity, and have touched the burning heart of the One who has never changed His mind about them.  These are going from proclaiming a burning hell to proclaiming a God Who is all ablaze with love for His creation.  They are seeing the truth about God and turning once for all from the crooked lies of Eden.  With MacDonald, they’re learning to say:

I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring pigments, I turn with loathing. Not such a God is he concerning whom was the message John heard from Jesus, that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 2

My purpose in writing this book is not to attack the great theologian and spark of the first Great Awakening that was Jonathan Edwards.  Rather, it is to address a mindset that is encapsulated in the title of his most famous sermon.  Certainly, many of Edwards’ other works suggest that he did, in fact, believe in a God of love and grace.  However, this cancerous and diabolical idea that the Father sees us as being mere sinners and that He, by nature, is angry and vengeful, must be ground to powder and carried away by the winds of reformation, for it is the most toxic and damaging thing that can be adopted into a person’s belief system.

Nearly a century ago, the famed healing evangelist and Pentecostal pioneer, John G. Lake, felt the need for this shift, and spoke of it in his address, The Strong Man’s Way to God:

Think of Jonathan Edwards, who thundered the terrors of God and what hell was like until men grasped their seats and hung on to them, fearing they were falling into hell itself. Men were moved by fear to escape damnation. That was believed to be Christianity. Why, any coward wanted to keep out of hell. He might not have one idea in his soul of what was the real true earmark of Christianity. 3

Again, the purpose of this book is not to bash or belittle the ministry of Jonathan Edwards.  Without a doubt, the man did great things, and saw some incredible results.  However, the twisted lies of Eden lay hidden in the title of his most famous address, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, and the time has come for this mythology to be exposed to the light.  It’s time to set some things straight so that we may rise out of our untowardness, and become a people possessed by love for our God and His creation.  The time has come for a New Great Awakening, one in which men rediscover the greatest of all truths – that God is Love, and that they exist to be loved by Him.  It’s time for crooked things to be made straight; for “Abraham” to put down his knife, and see that the God who calls us to follow Him is not like the gods of Ur.  He does not demand perfection, violence, or appeasement.  He doesn’t inspire us to harm one another in the name of scratching His righteous itches.

He gives.

He restores.

He loves.

To all who you call themselves and the world “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, I say it’s time to awaken to the most glorious of truths - that we’re Saints in the Arms of a Happy God!

16…I will make…crooked places straight…

-ISAIAH 42:16 (Emphasis mine)

2

A REPUTATION RESTORED

Rediscovering the God Who Looks Like Jesus

“The awesome love of our invisible God has become both visible and audible in Jesus Christ, the glory of the only Son filled with enduring love.”4

-Brennan Manning (1934 -2013)

More than thirty years ago, a young man named Kenny Waters was accused of brutally murdering his 48 year old female neighbor.  Throughout the two plus years that passed before his formal sentencing, Waters maintained that he was innocent and that he could prove his whereabouts during the time period in question.  Despite the mounds of evidence that placed him elsewhere during the brutal robbery and attack, several witnesses came forward, claiming that Waters had made drunken confessions to them of his guilt.  As a result, in 1983, Kenny Waters was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Throughout the trauma of the initial arrest and the trial that followed, Kenny was not alone.  There with him through it all was his sister, Betty Anne.  There was no doubt in Betty Anne’s mind that Kenny had been a troublemaker, but she was unshakably certain that her brother was not capable of committing the gruesome act of which he was being accused.

Unlike the unfeeling officers, Betty Anne had grown up at his side.  She remembered their laughter, tears and friendship as children.  She knew him in a way that a judge, who knew him only according to the black and white evidence presented to him, never could, and so she determined that she would be the one to fight to prove his innocence.

Once, while speaking to her brother in prison, he stated that he simply could not live the rest of his life behind prison bars.  He had suicide on his mind and Betty Anne could not stomach the idea that her innocent brother, simply because someone misunderstood him, might end up taking his own life in such a cold and cruel environment.  And so on that day she made her brother a promise – a promise that she, a married, working mother of two, would put herself through law school and become a lawyer for the sole purpose of one day personally representing her brother in court.

Amazingly, she did just that.

Betty Anne Waters fought tooth and nail, losing her marriage and, for a short period, even her children in the process.  Almost two decades later Betty Anne, now a lawyer, stood representing her brother in court, presenting new DNA evidence which proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he was innocent.  Kenny Waters had been wrongly imprisoned for more than 18 years and his sister’s tireless persistence and devotion to his reputation revealed his innocence to the world.

Mission accomplished.

In the category of heroic tales of self-sacrifice, this one takes the cake.  A woman laid down nearly two decades of her life, all for the sake of redeeming her brother’s reputation and securing his freedom.  The rarity of such determination and devotion to a loved one is what makes this tale so remarkable.  Lesser folk would have grown weary with trying to convince the biased that their brother was something other than a murderous fiend, but Betty Anne simply wouldn’t quit.  She knew the truth about her brother and wouldn’t stop until the world shared in her knowledge.

When you collapse eighteen years of a woman’s life into a series of short paragraphs, it almost sounds easy, doesn’t it?  You can almost imagine it taking place rapidly, in a movie like montage, complete with a pumped up score playing in the background.  In doing so, however, you lose the reality of what actually took place.  It was a day by day process in which she continually gritted her teeth and did what she knew needed to be done.  She wasn’t swayed off course but clung unswervingly to the mission of clearing her brother’s name of the despicable accusations that were marring it.

She lost untold hours of “normal life”, relationships that were near and dear to her heart, and even her right to live a somewhat relaxed, adult existence.  To her, it was anything but a sped up montage but real, gritty, and tiresome work.  Time and again I’m sure she considered backing out and giving up, but there was a flame burning in her heart that would not let her stop or slow down.  She saw her innocent brother locked behind prison bars and a world on the outside that thought him a monster.

She simply could not live with that.

Now I want you to imagine that you are Jesus, the Father’s eternal Son - the one who knows His true heart and character more intimately than anyone else in the galaxy.  Would it not frustrate you listening to men, claiming to be your Father’s representatives, speaking of Him as though He were an angry, austere, and distant deity?  Would your heart not be gripped with a passion when you overheard men using your Father’s name and word to condemn, belittle, and marginalize the weak, and to browbeat the innocent and impressionable?  Would you not be moved with a burning zeal to see your Father’s reputation restored?  Would such lies and misrepresentations not move you to action?

Of course they would!

You would be consumed with a passion to tell the world that Your Father was not who they had been led to believe He was, and you wouldn’t stop until all shared in your knowledge of His heart!  This was, I believe, Christ’s chief passion in coming to us.  Like Betty Anne Waters, He knew the truth, and would not rest until it was made known to the cosmos.  He’d had enough with the lies, the whispers and the suspicions concerning His Daddy’s goodness.  He’d seen enough pain and misery caused by these misperceptions, and so came to set the record straight once and for all.

17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

-JOHN 1:17-18 (Emphasis mine)

When Jesus arrived on the scene He did so with a passion similar to Betty Anne Waters’, for He came not only to locate a lost humanity, but to redeem a lost reputation.  He simply could not have men speaking wrongly about His Father’s character and nature.  He could not tolerate the false ideas being promoted by clueless theologians who wielded complete control over the minds of the masses.  These men, who were seen as being experts in the Knowledge of God, actually knew very little about His Father and yet were considered authorities.  Jesus had heard their words concerning the One He knew most intimately, and He saw the pain that they created in the souls of those who really only wanted to know that they were loved.  And so He came to reveal to humanity the truth that their Heavenly Father was not the cold and unfeeling judge that some had made Him out to be.  He came to show that Yahweh was much more than a smug, Heavenly bookkeeper, keeping careful records of all of our wrongs, while snubbing our best attempts at serving Him.

Jesus, the eternal Son, came to give God a face.

The face that He revealed, however, stands in stark, stark contrast to the one so many of us are used to imagining, for what we see in Jesus is the face of a Father that it is smiling from ear to ear, but one that also weeps.  He smiles upon His children whom He loves unconditionally, but weeps over their pain, misery, and brokenness.  What Jesus came to reveal is that His Father is not oblivious to our pain and suffering, and is so much more than a judicial blob in the sky seeking to pay back into our laps that which we deserve.  He is Abba, Daddy, and the One who has never left or forsaken His creation.  He is moved by our plight, and is fully and eternally on our side.

As you can imagine, Jesus, like Betty Anne Waters, did not have an easy task lying in front of Him.  He was walking into a minefield of preconceived ideas, opinions, and traditions which were held to with ferocity.  To question the status quo and rock the boat might very well cost Him His life.  Nothing, however, was more important to the Godhead, and therefore to the Son of God, than for humanity to recognize the true face of its Father.  And so Jesus, with a flame burning brightly in His chest, walked among men, declaring His Father’s love and uprooting everything that stood in the way of us grasping it.

In order to understand the sort of culture in which Jesus taught and preached, we need to understand a bit more about the teachers who were responsible for Israel’s theology.  In Isaiah 29:13 we read some very interesting words concerning these teachers and, therefore, the religious climate of Jesus’ day:

13 …“These people come near to me with their mouth

and honor me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me.

Their worship of me

is based on merely human rules they have been taught.

-ISAIAH 29:13

The New King James Version puts it in slightly different terms.

13 …“Inasmuch as these people draw near with their mouths

And honor Me with their lips,

But have removed their hearts far from Me,

And their fear toward Me is taught by the commandment of men,

-ISAIAH 29:13 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

Notice that God says of the people in question that they “draw near with their mouths, and honor me with their lips”, meaning that, from an external perspective, they had it all together.  They seemed to be on fire and fervent in their service to God.  Surely, had these people lived in our day, we would have found them at each and every prayer meeting, worshipping with abandon at our church altars, and perhaps even at the forefront of many evangelical movements.  There was nothing external to indicate that these were anything less than righteous and God loving people.

It is also important that we identify exactly who these people were so that we can better understand what their external “drawing near” actually looked like.  Jesus, in Matthew chapter 15, finds himself face to face with a gaggle of Pharisees and teachers of the Law who happen to be very upset and bothered by the fact that His disciples did not bow down to their more stringent version of Judaism.  Jesus, upon seeing their fixation with external traditions but utter neglect of practical things, rebukes them accordingly.  Then, in verse 7, tells them point blank that it was they, and those of their ilk, whom Isaiah prophesied of in Isaiah 29:13:

7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you...

-MATTHEW 15:7 (Emphasis mine)

It was these Pharisees, these teachers of the Law, whom Isaiah said drew near with their mouths and honored God with their lips.  Externally they were beyond reproach, but inwardly something was lacking.  Understand then that the “drawing near” and “honoring” which Isaiah prophesied of was much more than empty lip service.  The devotion of the Pharisee was devotion in its most extreme form.  The Pharisees were a group of separatist Jews who were so intent on and obsessed with obeying every jot and tittle of the Law that they built their own law around the given Law.  They did this in order to make it extremely difficult to transgress the Law’s actual commandments since one would literally have to scale a hundred other manmade laws in order to even get to the Mosaic Laws.

For instance, plowing one’s field was forbidden on the Sabbath and so the Pharisees, seeking to make such a transgression nearly impossible, forbade even spitting on the ground on the Sabbath!  Why?  Because, so they feared, if one spat upon the ground they may unintentionally cause the dirt to move ever so slightly, and thereby be guilty of having “plowed”.  This was but one of hundreds of regulations which religious leaders subjected themselves and others to.  Can you imagine the pressure of living under such a system?  Not only did they have the Ten Commandments and the six hundred and thirteen other Mosaic Laws (Laws which dealt with everything from facial hair to fecal matter), they had also built laws around these Laws.  The pressure to perform and to be perfect must have been exhausting, as well as demoralizing.

What I want you to see here is that the Pharisees were not merely talkers, but extreme doers.  The “drawing near with their mouths” and “honoring with their lips” signified an external, but extreme form of devotion.  They subjected themselves to a very disciplined and difficult lifestyle of rule keeping that no one, including themselves, could ever really live up to.  However, as extreme and devoted as they appeared to be, Isaiah tells us that the external was as deep as their devotion went:

13 …these people draw near with their mouths and honor Me with their lips, But have removed their hearts far from Me…

-ISAIAH 29:13 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

Notice, while maintaining a regimented lifestyle of devotion, they had removed their hearts from the Lord.  It was not the Lord who had removed His heart from them, but they who had removed their hearts from Him.  There was no inward flame of love burning within them for God; they were unplugged and lifeless, yet, insane as it sounds, maintained and kept up a rigorous, legalistic lifestyle that must have been anything but enjoyable.

My obvious question is why?  Why, if you’ve removed your heart from the Lord, would you continue so hard trying to impress Him?  Why, if you’ve disconnected your emotions from Him, would you continue on in a crippling, impossible system of religious legalism in an attempt to make Him happy?  If you did not burn with Love for the God you were aiming to please, why even worry about pleasing Him?  Why not jump ship, and find something a bit less stressful with which to occupy your time?

I believe Isaiah answers the question for us:

13 Therefore the Lord said: “Inasmuch as these people draw near with their mouths And honor Me with their lips, But have removed their hearts far from Me, And their fear toward Me is taught by the commandment of men,

-ISAIAH 29:13 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

Somewhere along the way a mythology had developed - a belief system about God that kept these men bound in a destructive system of religion even though they did not truly love the God that they were “serving”.  They had a fear of God that was based upon human traditions and commandments.  This fear did not come through revelation, but began developing in the womb of man’s fallen imagination at the time of our acquiring the knowledge of good and evil.  These teachers had given birth to an image of God that looked nothing like their Creator, and it was this false image that kept them slaving away in service out of fear.  Though they’d long ago separated their hearts from His, they feared the consequences of turning away.  And so they dutifully studied their scrolls, dotted their i’s, crossed their t’s, and feverishly worked to ensure all of their moral ducks were in a row.

The “god” whose law they sought to improve upon more closely resembled Abraham’s inhaling, life taking “gods” than they did Adam’s exhaling, life giving Creator.  He was cold, unfeeling, and mechanical in His dealings.  Perhaps he resembled the portrait painted by Jonathan Edwards’ in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God – a distant and disinterested deity whose attention we really only capture when we messed up.  Perhaps this warped perception caused them to see themselves as little more than magnets towards whom His continued displeasure was drawn.  Perhaps their God, like Edwards’, had a cold and judgmental disposition towards the human race.  He was massive in scale, but small in heart, and cared little for the wellbeing of His creation.

Perhaps.

In Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards writes of God in these lifeless and disturbing terms:

We find it easy to tread on and crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth; so it is easy for us to cut or singe a slender thread that anything hangs by: thus easy is it for God, when he pleases, to cast his enemies down to hell.  What are we that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down? 5

Perhaps the God of the Pharisees looked something like the one described above - a king before whom we are like mere ants whom He, like a sadistic child, occasionally burns with his colossal magnifying glass of justice.  I believe it was this sort of unhealthy, fear inducing image of God that caused the Pharisees to hold on to the religion from which they had disconnected their hearts.  They clung to God for fear of what their rejection of Him would mean, but love did not figure into the equation.

BROKEN TELEPHONE

As a child, did you ever play the game broken telephone, or the whisper game?  Well if not, allow me give you a brief rundown on how it’s played - Basically, one person whispers an intelligible phrase into the ear of the person next to them.  Then, that person whispers what they heard into the ear of the person sitting next to them.  On and on it goes until there are no ears left to be whispered in, and the last person has to say aloud what they believe they heard.  It’s both amazing and amusing to hear how the original phrase gets lost, misunderstood, and then wrongly communicated by the time it reaches the final ear.  What started out as, “live life to the fullest”, can end up as, “Bananas give dolphins’ diarrhea”, or some other such nonsense that bears zero resemblance to the original phrase.  No doubt there are always some jokesters thrown into the mix who will misspeak the phrase purposely, and others who do so innocently, but what the simple game proves is that information being passed from one person to another quickly gets distorted.

This is sort of how things have gone down over the course of human history.  As we briefly discussed in Chapter 1, in the beginning it appears that God came to the human race and revealed Himself just as He was.  After eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, however, man so lost sight of God’s nature that he ended up seeking refuge from Him out of fear.  He ran from the One Whom he had always previously run towards.

Man misunderstood and misconstrued God’s original message to Him and then miscommunicated it to the next generation.  And the next generation passed on a further perverted view of God to their children, and on and on it went, until in the days of Jesus’ physical life, the very teachers of Israel were terrified of God, but maintained an external devotion to Him for fear of what leaving Him behind might mean for them.

Paul, in Colossians 1:22, gives us some insight into just how deeply this misunderstanding and mistrust of God had warped us:

21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.

-COLOSSIANS 1:21 (Emphasis mine)

Our thinking had become so backwards, and our understanding of God so skewed, that we saw ourselves as being His enemies.  Because of our evil behavior we could not possibly believe that we were good enough for God.  We lived in fear and terror, seeing ourselves as being engaged in an eternal battle with a God who only wanted to love us.  Other translations change “because of your evil behavior” to something like “as shown by your evil behavior”, which would suggest that the more one feels alienated and at enmity with God, the more likely they are to commit acts that are in disharmony with His nature.  A lie that gets preached over and over again is that if you proclaim God as being too merciful and compassionate it will lead people into immorality.  But this rendering of Colossians 1:21 suggests just the opposite.  When one sees God as being against them they are very likely to return the favor and live lives of immorality and Godlessness.  Regardless of how one interprets the text, its primary truth lies undisturbed - man perceived himself as being God’s enemy, but it wasn’t true.  It was all in His mind.

Timothy R. Jennings M.D., in his wonderfully informative book, The God-Shaped Brain, describes how living with an image of an angry God who is against us affects us on a neurological level:

…When we worship a God other than one of love - a being who is punitive, authoritarian, critical or distant – fear circuits are activated and, if not calmed, will result in chronic inflammation and damage to both brain and body.  As we bow before authoritarian Gods, our characters are slowly changed to be less like Jesus.  Truly, by beholding we are changed, not only in character, but our neural circuitry as well. 6

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

When we find ourselves in dangerous or life or death situations, our brain’s natural “fight or flight” response kicks in.  In that moment we become exclusively focused on surviving.  Our ability to experience feelings of compassion or altruism are hampered, as our brain cares only about self-preservation and survival.  The name “fight or flight” suggests that we will respond in one of two ways - we will either do everything in our power to flee from the situation, or we will fight against the object we perceive as being a threat with everything that we have.

Research has shown that this same response is stimulated and sustained in people who view God as being angry and vengeful.  When we perceive God this way our brains literally process Him as being a threat to our survival.  It feels the need to either fight against or flee from this “God”, whom our brains can only see as being an impediment to our continued wellbeing.  Quite literally we will either fight against or flee from God when we view Him as angry.  Some will simply turn from Him and attempt to run as far as they can, while others will live utterly immoral and Godless lives as an extension of the imaginary battle they believe themselves to be engaged in.  This is precisely what Paul tells us occurred.  Because of our evil behavior we saw ourselves as being God’s enemies, and quite literally fought against Him with our lifestyles, and though the war was only ever in our heads, it was frighteningly real to us.

In Romans 8:7, the same apostle writes:

7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.

-ROMANS 8:7 (Emphasis mine)

The mind that perceives God through the fog of the fall and only sees Him through the lens of sin literally becomes hostile against Him and will seek to fight Him with everything it has.  Others, however, opting for the flight method, choose to forego the fighting and simply attempt to run and flee.  Isaiah describes humanity in this state of “flight”:

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to our own way…

-ISAIAH 53:6 (Emphasis mine)

It was never God who went astray, but us.  We were the ones who fled and turned away.  Our false God concepts caused us to respond to Him in ways that would have been absolutely foreign prior to the fall.  Fear, worry, dread, and anxiety are all things stemming from the idea that God is angry, vengeful, and punitive.  This twisted logic had so worked its way into the stream of human consciousness that even those who were in positions of spiritual authority were beholden to an image of deity that caused them to remove their hearts from Him, all while living with a crippling fear of what displeasing or leaving him behind would mean for them.

Think about that for a moment! The very people who were supposed to be teaching others about God had removed their hearts from relationship with Him!  They simply served Him because they feared the consequences of not serving Him.  They did not love Him, nor did they fear Him in the positive sense of being in awe.  Theirs was a relationship based solely on a fear of punishment.  They were scared, and so sought to secure His favor through legalistic means while never feeling that such a thing was actually possible.  They were continually upping the ante in their aim for a more perfect morality, but were left with nothing but page after page of rules, and hearts that remained cold, dead, and emotionless.

I ask you, can such a thing rightly be called a relationship?  No, it’s slavery, not a relationship – though it bears a striking resemblance to what passes as a “relationship with God” in modern evangelicalism - and yet it was from this fear based, slave mindset that Israel’s teachers were instructing others.  The mythology of the fall had become more corrupt than ever, and was being whispered once more into the attentive ears of the next generation.

In the midst of all of this mess, however, came a message.  A “Word” arrived on the scene!  Jesus Christ, God’s perfect image and nature, wrapped in human flesh arrived on planet earth to clearly show forth the face of Father God.  In the midst of darkness, confusion, and misidentification came a light, whose life and ministry would be aimed at revealing the truth about God which sin had obscured and kept hidden.

GRACE AND TRUTH

In John 1:17, the Apostle writes:

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

-JOHN 1:17 (Emphasis mine)

This passage is often read as though John were drawing a distinction between grace and truth, setting them up as opposite but equally important facets of God.  Grace gets spoken of as though it were God’s lenient, merciful side, while truth is then reasoned to refer to His more hardnosed, dictatorial side.  Many have come to the faulty conclusion that grace and truth are things existing both in tension and tandem with one another, and say things like, “If we have only Grace we will fall into licentiousness, but if we have only truth we’ll fall into legalism.  That’s why we need both of them together.”

In this line of thought grace and truth are opposites; God’s inner good cop and bad cop.  There is no contrast being made between grace and truth in this passage, however.  The contrast is actually being made between the Law, which came through Moses, and grace and truth, a singular unit which came through Jesus Christ.  If truth were representative of God’s harsher side, or if it spoke of a rule loving, dictatorial bend in His nature, then it very well could have been said that Moses brought Law and truth, and that what was lacking was grace, which was later to be supplied through Christ.  We aren’t told, though, that Moses brought both the Law and the truth, only that he brought the Law.  This is because the “truth” does not concern a hard stance against sin, or a “turn or burn”, “repent or else” theology.   The Truth in question is the Truth about God Himself, not a method of delivery that majors on sin and judgment.  For some reason in today’s Christian culture the word “truth” always seems to carry a negative connotation.  We see grace as being God’s soft, grandfatherly side, and truth as his straight faced and straight laced, militaristic side.  This is simply not the case, and it’s certainly not what John had in mind.

What John is telling us is that the truth about who God really is did not come through the words of Moses.  The Law is not the truth about God, but the truth about the human race outside of Christ.  It reveals to us that we are mortal and unable to do anything but bring harm to ourselves and others outside of Jesus.  The Law is not the truth about God, but the truth about the fallen human condition.  It does not reveal God’s personality, His character, His heart, or His ways.  Those are truths revealed exclusively through the grace that comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ.  Grace and Truth are coupled together in John’s statement, simply because they are one and the same.  The grace that defines the life of Christ is also the truth that defines the character of God. This becomes even clearer when we look at John’s very next words:

18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

-JOHN 1:18 (Emphasis mine)

Until the incarnation of Christ no man had ever truly seen or known God.  No, not even Moses, David, Elijah, or even Jacob, who claimed to have wrestled with Him and seen His face.  They had caught glimpses of Him here and there, but none of them knew Him nearly or dearly enough to become a proper mouthpiece for declaring His nature.  There was One, however, who was qualified for the job, and it was the Son, who had lived in His embrace since before creation.

As John says, Jesus lived in “closest relationship with the Father” and was therefore qualified to make Him known.  Other translations say that Jesus lived in the “bosom of Father”, which is simply to say that He knows the Fathers loving embrace.  He knows what it is to lay His head upon His Papa’s chest and to hear His heartbeat.  There is nothing in the Father that is hidden from the Son.  He knows Him, and He knows Him perfectly and it is He alone, therefore, Who is qualified to reveal the truth about Him to the world.  No man had seen or known Him previously, but Christ knew every intimate detail about Him and so came to reveal Grace and Truth, the truth about His Abba, to a blind and helpless humanity.

THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

In Titus 2:11-12, the Apostle Paul shows us something very interesting about this “thing” called Grace.  He writes:

11 For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. 12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,

-TITUS 2:11-12 (Emphasis mine)

Notice that whatever grace is, it is not something that encourages us to go on in sin or to live in immorality as some claim.  On the contrary, it teaches us to say no to sinful behavioral patterns and ungodliness.  It not only saves us from sin, but empowers us to live free form its influence.  How exactly does grace accomplish this most extraordinary feat?

We know that in Christ we are not under the Law, and are therefore free from all threats of condemnation should we transgress one of its many commandments.  Its curses are nullified and therefore not a threat.  How then does grace empower us to live out truly Godly lives if it comes with no threat of condemnation or judgment attached?  How does grace motivate us to abstain from evil without threatening us with punishment?

According to Paul, grace accomplishes this simply by virtue of the fact that it appears.  Now, on a surface level, that sounds neither deep, nor revelatory, and certainly not revolutionary.  Upon closer examination, however, a beautiful picture begins to emerge.  The word translated into English as appeared is the Greek word epiphaino, which Strong’s defines as meaning “to shine upon…become visible or known”7.  Bible commentator Adam Clarke suggests that the richness of this Greek word is a thing often overlooked:

There is a beauty and energy in the word επεφανη, hath shined out, that is rarely noted; it seems to be a metaphor taken from the sun. As by his rising in the east and shining out, he enlightens, successively, the whole world; so the Lord Jesus, who is called the Sun of righteousness…arises on the whole human race with healing in his wings. 8

I find it interesting that Paul sees fit to use a word describing the rising, and illuminating power of the sun to define the function of God’s grace.  We are told that, like the sun, the Grace of God has given light to all men.  When the sun rises it causes things which were once lost and obscured by shadow to be brought to light and seen as they really are.  Grace, like the sun, has now risen, and has exposed, and brought into the light things which were once hidden and unknown.  No wonder Malachi calls Jesus “the sun of righteousness” who rises “with healing in His wings”!  (Malachi 4:2)

What exactly could it be, however, that the sunshine of Grace has revealed?  I believe it is no less than the Father’s true heart and nature.  Remember, Christ came revealing grace, which was the truth about God - a truth that no former generation had grasped or understood.  According to Paul, this illumination of the Father’s heart through the light of grace causes a supernatural response to spring forth from our hearts:

11 For the grace of God … 12 … teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,

-TITUS 2:11-12 (Emphasis mine)

Interestingly, man’s former revelation of God under Law could also produce a moral change in his life, but it left the heart untouched.  In fact, man’s revelation of God prior to Christ not only left man’s heart untouched, but caused him to retreat in fear while at the same time motivating him to erect an external façade of piety.  Look once more at what Isaiah had to say about this:

13 Therefore the Lord said: “Inasmuch as these people draw near with their mouths And honor Me with their lips, But have removed their hearts far from Me, And their fear toward Me is taught by the commandment of men,

-ISAIAH 29:13 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

As we’ve already discussed, in Matthew 15:7 Jesus tells us clearly that Isaiah was speaking of the Pharisees and teachers of the Mosaic Law - men who, according to Jesus and Isaiah, honored God with their lips, and came near with their mouths.  When thinking in 21st century evangelical lingo, it is easy for us to mistake this as meaning that the Pharisees were all talk and no action.  However, even the briefest examination of the Pharisaic way of life would reveal a different story entirely.

These were not men who were lax in their convictions or slow to obey the Law.  On the contrary, these were men of extreme devotion and discipline.  In the midst of these extremes, however, Isaiah tells us that they had removed their hearts from the Lord’s.  They were maintaining a radical lifestyle, all the while being utterly disconnected from the Lord on a heart level.  They did what they did, not out of a love for God, or as a response to their knowledge of His love for them, for Paul tells us in Romans 10:2 that, “…they [the Pharisees] are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.” (Emphasis mine).  They were lacking in a pure knowledge of the Father’s heart, and so acted out a “radical” lifestyle, based purely upon misunderstandings fostered by foolish, manmade doctrines.

This goes to show that a message cannot be called the Gospel simply because it creates a moral change, or because it encourages individuals to live “holy lives”.  A message can be utterly warped and manmade and yet still inspire men and women to live lives that, to the natural eye, seem to be very chaste and spiritual.

WEEPING AND GNASHING OF TEETH

Lest I come across as though I’m throwing stones from across the fence, let me assure you that I’ve lived in this place of sincere, but sincerely misguided legalism, and understand all too well the pure hell that such a lifestyle can be.  Jesus, in Matthew 8:12, describes the anguish of unbelieving Israel as she lived and existed outside of a full and abundant life in Christ.  In this state she trudged on, trying with all of her might to please the Lord by doing everything but simply resting by faith in His love for her.  This hellish existence is metaphorically described as being a place of “outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.  In Acts 7:54, we read of a crowd of unbelieving Jews who, after listening to soon-to-be-martyred Stephen’s clear and succinct Gospel message, become “furious, and gnashed their teeth at him”.  The word “gnashed” used in Acts 7:54, is the root of the Greek word used in Matthew 8:12.  The illustration of “gnashing” one’s teeth seems to be representative of the anguished, angry existence that one experiences when they refuse to simply rest in the work of Christ, and instead insist on doing things as dictated to them by their twisted, religious mythology.

This was the secret existence of the soul tortured Pharisee, and something with which I am very well acquainted.  In my early years as a believer I began to gobble up and digest teachings that painted God in a most unpleasant light.  As a teenager I would pump 4 to 5 hours-worth of sermons into my head a day, most of which portrayed God as being little more than a divine judge and lawmaker who was anxious and ready to condemn those who dared to step outside of His plan for their lives.  On a daily basis, at the request of those whose teachings I fed on, I would question whether or not I was even truly saved, believing that every careless glance or impure motive was enough to suck the Holy Ghost right out of my rib cage.  Each time I failed to obey, pray, or say “Jesus loves you” to an unbelieving passerby I would feel the displeased demeanor of my imagined deity frowning upon me.

I saw God, not as my loving and caring Father, but as one who was disappointed and irritated with me a good 99.9% of the time.  I was never praying enough, fasting enough, giving enough, witnessing enough, or reading the Bible enough.  I could never measure up to the impossible expectations of this “God” whom I was trying to serve.  I would exhaust myself, sometimes spending nearly half of my day in prayer and worship, all in an attempt to earn his attention and favor.  I would pray and pace the floor until I was exhausted and delirious from lack of sleep, and still feel no better off at the end than I did when I started.

My “God” was distant, aloof, and only showed interest in the weightier and more “spiritual” matters of life.  Because of this, I obsessively tried to stay in a “spiritual” state of mind, and when I inevitably careened off that path, I’d fall under crippling condemnation, often suffering panic attacks, dizziness, and difficulty breathing as a result.  It was hell - a place of deep darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth.  However, in my ignorance, I often mistook the “weeping” and the “gnashing of teeth” experience as being the work of the Holy Spirit in convicting me of hidden sin and impurity.  I did not realize that I was living beneath the horrendous weight that comes when one misunderstands the nature and character of God.  Over time, like a captive who, for some reason develops feelings of fondness for their captor, I became dependent upon, and addicted to this feeling of guilt and shame.  When I was not feeling it I believed that God had stopped dealing with me, or that I had somehow illegitimatized myself and lost my sonship.

In the midst of all of my religious striving, however, I can honestly say that, while I was extremely devoted to my concept of God, I was far from in love with Him.  Why then would I continue on serving in such an extreme manner if not for love?  Simple.  It was for the same reason that the Pharisees did - I feared Him.  And while there is a positive side to fearing God, my fear was a sense of dread and an anticipation of punishment were I to turn back, or show even the slightest sign of “backsliding”.  It was this sense of fear that kept me moving along, not love.  Like the Pharisees of old I had removed my heart from the Lord because my image of Him had become warped and twisted.  He was very hard to love but equally hard to abandon, for the same fear that sucked the love out of the relationship also prolonged it, and caused me to be terrified of the consequences of breaking it off.  As a result, I continued hobbling along in legalism with little more than the sight of divine disappointment and damnation to motivate me.

This is most certainly not the abundant life promised to us by Christ (John 10:10), and could never in a million years be mistaken as the “eternal life” which God intends for us to experience in the here and now (John 17:3).  This fear, or more accurately, terror of God that I experienced did not cause me to become lukewarm or apathetic in my lifestyle, but caused me to “burn” all the hotter.  On the outside, I’m sure that everyone looked at Jeff Turner and wished that their sons or daughters could be more like him, but they did not see the lethal disease that was eating me alive on the inside.

THE FEVER OF RELIGIOUS PERFORMANCE

I often liken this external passion to the fever that accompanies a sickness.  In Mark 1:30 we read of Peter’s mother in law who was sick with a high fever.  In that culture it would have been customary for a woman to have served and tended to the needs of her guests, but her sickness hindered her from doing so.  The name Peter literally means rock or stone, and in a strictly parabolic sense, I’d liken Peter unto the “ministry of condemnation engraved on stone” spoken of in 2 Corinthians 3:9.  While under the roof of Peter, who could symbolically represent the law, his mother in law contracted a sickness that manifested in a high fever.  The Greek word used in Mark 1:30 for fever, can be translated as “to be on fire”.

Anytime we bring ourselves beneath a ministry of condemnation with its misrepresentations of God, we will contract some sort of spiritual sickness.  This sickness, however, will typically manifest itself through a fever of some form or another.  On the outside, one burning with this fever will often be mistaken as “being on fire for God”, but inwardly they are dying and gasping for breath.  What looks like fervent devotion to the external observer can actually be the very thing keeping the believer from serving God in the manner that He desires - and it’s not stressed out, insanity inducing devotion that God desires, but simple rest and trust in His love and the efficacy of His finished work.

This is precisely what occurred in the lives of the Pharisees and what I experienced in my own life.  The debilitating sickness was my misunderstanding of the nature of God and this sickness caused me to withdraw my affections and withhold my love.  I kept the ring on my finger, however, and continued attempting to serve God the best I could simply because I feared the consequences of a spiritual divorce.  My fear (the sickness) caused me to burn all the hotter (the fever) in order to please and appease the God whom I had so grossly misunderstood.  I was burning up with sickness, though on the outside it simply appeared as though I was holy and fervent in my devotion.  But believe me, the fire that I burned with was anything but holy.

THE CURE

There is really only one remedy for this sickness, and it is to glimpse the true glory and nature of God that is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ!  It is truly only in the light of the “Sun of Righteousness” that we find healing:

2 …the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays…

-MALACHI 4:2 (Emphasis mine)

You see, He came to whisper back into our ears the truth about His Father - a truth that had become twisted and lost as it passed from one ear to another.  Jesus arrived on the scene to represent – literally, to present afresh - His Father, not merely with words or sermons, but with radical acts of love and compassion.  It is for this reason that Jesus Christ is declared to be the Word of God!  He is the Father’s spoken declaration to the human race about Himself.  Every action of Jesus becomes the Father’s own word to us concerning His nature:

2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…

-HEBREWS 1:2-3 (Emphasis mine)

Notice that the writer says God has “spoken to us by his Son”, and that the Son is the “radiance of God’s Glory and the exact representation of His being”.  Jesus and the Father are not two completely different entities with two completely different agendas.  No, Jesus and the Father are one, and Jesus’ actions and words are a direct representation of who God is.  This “radiance”, this “exact representation”, is One Who notoriously, time and again, demonstrated that He is far more interested in forgiveness and healing than He is in legalities and in micro managing men’s morality.  He is one who lets prostitutes wash His feet with their hair and delights in sharing meals with tax collectors – political traitors, and the lowest of the low in Jesus’ day.

Similarly, in John 17:6, Jesus is recorded as saying:

6 I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world...

-JOHN 17:6 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus plainly stated that an essential part of His earthly mission was to reveal the Father and to make the truth about Him known.  Eugene Peterson, in his Message Paraphrase of the Bible, renders Christ’s words thusly:

I spelled out your character in detail to the men and women you gave me. (MESSAGE)

What’s interesting about Jesus’ statement that He had “revealed” or, “spelled out” His Father’s “character in detail”, is that it follows a statement He makes about eternal life in verse 3:

3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

-JOHN 17:3 (Emphasis mine)

Notice that Jesus does not say “eternal life” is an endless existence that we step into after death.  No, He speaks of “eternal life” as though it were a certain quality of life that hinges upon our understanding of God’s nature.  This life, however, can be experienced only through a knowledge of Jesus Christ, since He is the Father’s exact representation.  When one beholds the beauty of the Father which the Son spells out in detail (verse 6), their life takes on an eternal quality.  There is rest, peace, joy and love.  There is freedom, forgiveness, security and hope.  Any life, however, taking place outside of Jesus’ knowledge of the Father is, unfortunately, little more than hell on earth.

The life, works and words of Jesus Christ truly are the Word of God - the Father’s spoken declaration about Himself to the human race which makes possible a quality of existence that was impossible to experience prior to His coming.  He wrapped this declaration in human flesh and caused Him to walk and live among us for over three decades, all in order that He might disseminate the most revolutionary truth in galaxy - God is love!  The mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion that Jesus demonstrated are a detailed spelling out of the Father’s character.  Make no mistake about it, Jesus is not the nice guy of the Trinity who seeks to balance out the harshness of the others, but is the exact representation of God!

Brennan Manning, in his book The Furious Longing of God, writes:

The awesome love of our invisible God has become both visible and audible in Jesus Christ, the glory of the only Son filled with enduring love. 9

Manning wasn’t the first to say such a thing.  The apostle Paul wrote:

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God…

-COLOSSIANS 1:15 (Emphasis mine)

What was formerly unknown, existing in the shadows, and, for all suits and purposes, invisible, has now been made perfectly and beautifully visible through the words, actions, and life of Jesus.  The Father is no longer a hidden phantom whose ways must be left to the imagination.  No, Christ is His heart and nature made flesh.  He is God defined:

Jesus said:

19 … “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.

-JOHN 5:19 (Emphasis mine)

The Word made flesh made it clear that He never acted independently, but mirrored the actions of His Abba.  We are not allowed to say “Jesus is like this, while the Father is like that”, for Jesus made it clear that His actions were never His own, but His Father’s.  So if sin could not separate men from Jesus then it couldn’t separate them from the Father.  If Jesus forgave without being asked, so does the Father.  If Jesus was concerned with the temporal things that vex us, so is the Father.  If Jesus loves the least and the weakest, so does the Father.  Jesus is not the happy side of God, He is the embodiment and mirror image of His nature.

As Jesus told Philip:

9 …Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

-JOHN 14:9 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus Christ’s life of others-centered love and forgiveness was meant to do much more than give us a goal to shoot for.  It was meant to unveil God.  The Grace extended to us is the Sun that rises, giving illumination to His character.  This revelation, according to Paul, does not elicit some sort of plastic, pseudo righteousness, nor does it cause us to burn ourselves out with the fever of religious performance.  Rather, it brings about true, lasting change in our hearts.  It motivates us to real Godly living, simply because in the light of Grace, God looks way too good to run away from, and far too friendly to fight against.  When we see Him in the light of Jesus Christ our fear, anxiety, terror, and trepidation all melt into pools, and we find ourselves wondering how we could have ever been afraid of such a beautiful Father.  Grace causes us to run from the tar pits of legalism and religious slavery, straight into the arms of a Father who, despite what we’ve been told, has never disdained or despised us.

We may not have the Pharisees, with their manmade additions to the Mosaic Law among us today, but we have many teachers and preachers who have rushed in to fill the vacuum left by their absence.  The same misconceptions of God abound today, though they look a little less Jewish, and a little more Evangelical.

The sad truth is that we have all inherited a portrait of God that looks far more like Mt. Olympus than Mt. Zion, and it’s an inheritance that most are too terrified to discard.  In our Western traditions God is often presented as being cold, austere, distant and judgmental.  We imagine Him surrounded by dark clouds, with a scowl sprawled across his angry mug.  He’s very eager to be pleased, but, unfortunately, extremely difficult to please.  He is a hermit that is notoriously difficult to coax out of hiding and even harder to keep around because the slightest scent of sin can send him bolting for the hills in a rage.  In fact, one of our imagined deity’s greatest weaknesses is His sin allergy.  Wherever there are humans behaving badly, you can be sure he’ll be absent.  Where there are broken people doing broken things with their broken lives, God will not be present, for in our mythology human sin works like Kryptonite against him, forcing Him to retreat and separate Himself from us.

He is mostly sad and mad, and rarely, perhaps when his enemies bite the dust, glad.  He is heartbroken over our lack of devotion and disinterest in prayer, but is himself quite disinterested in the everyday events of our lives.  He is a demented Santa Claus of sorts, who tightly clenches the naughty list - which we’ve all landed on, by the way - and dreams of filling our spiritual stockings with the burning coals of judgment.  When he looks at America, or any other nation, he doesn’t see individual people who desperately need love and mercy, but a widespread, faceless blob of darkness, deserving judgment.  He’s sickened by our lack of fervency, repulsed by our spotty church attendance records, and gets all up in arms when our summer vacation extends over a Sunday morning.

To put it simply, He’s angry.

The God that a large percentage of us imagine and pay homage to is disgruntled, disappointed, and disapproving.  While some may be fortunate enough to have imagined Him in His true state, my experience has been that 9 out of 10 people, myself included, do not see Him rightly.  We’ve been subjected to hours of teachings that have subtly sown into our minds the idea that He is primarily a legal deity concerned with rights and wrongs, and this subconscious programming is absolutely killing us.  I would even venture to say that it is the leading cause of anxiety, fear, discontentment, and depression among Christians.

In all of this fear, turmoil, and mythology, however, Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, still stands in our midst, combatting these false ideologies, and seeking to shine the light of Grace upon the face of His Daddy.

George MacDonald writes:

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities!  Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain.  They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this.  Brothers, have you found our king?  There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God.  There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well.  The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were—no, not a truer, for the other is false, but—a true type of our God beside the monstrosity of a monarch. 10

MacDonald saw that Christ, in His work of representing the Father, never chose the image of a dictator or a hardnosed military general as a fitting way to portray Him.  If Jesus is a perfect representation of the Father and the exact representation of His being, then we are given absolutely no reason to believe that He is the divine dementor that so many of us have grown up believing in.

Christ paints the Father in the most beautiful of hues!

According to Jesus, He is a God who is delighted at the sight of little children, goes out of His way to converse with the marginalized, turns water into wine to keep the party going, and who brushes aside religious laws in the name of showing mercy to sinners.  He pardons the adulterous without being asked, takes tax collectors as His disciples, and dines with scam artists and traitors.  He places His disciples’ wellbeing above the sacred nature of the Sabbath, brings healing to His nation’s foreign occupiers, and assures us that violence is never the way that God solves His problems.

To look at the face of Jesus is to see the face of the Father, and in the face of Jesus we see anything but the image of a Zeus or a Moloch.  On the contrary, we see love personified.  We see a disdain for manmade religion, and a love for simple expressions of love from humble hearts.  We see a God who values the worship and sacrifices of sexual deviants above the opinions and criticisms of future apostles.  We see a God who is not nearly as interested in us getting formulas right as He is in simple trust and faith.  We see a God who forgives without being asked, and who distinguishes Himself by healing temporary ailments that are really of no eternal consequence.

In Jesus we see a God who is not separate from His creation nor so offended by it that He flees from it.  We see a God who has made Himself one with us and happens to enjoy our company.  We see a God who is more compassionate and merciful than we could ever dream, and who does not demand that sinners jump through ten thousand hoops before being allowed entrance into His elite, “holy club”.  We see a God who is not interested in the sweaty works of the self-styled spiritual man, but would rather sit and tell stories to foul mouthed fishermen and share meals with the greedy.  We see a God who is more interested in the prostitute than piety, and, ultimately, what we see in the countenance of Christ is Love!

Jesus came to show us what the Father looks like and the way He chose to do so was by showing us what love looks like, for that is Father’s nature – Love.  He came to crush the rumors and the lies and to erase the ghastly caricatures that we’d dreamed up by reminding us that His Daddy’s primary nature was and is others-centeredness, compassion and love.  Jesus, the eternal Son, who has lived throughout the ages in His Father’s embrace, blew in with hurricane force to drive away the smoke and answer the “who is God” question once and for all.

This was not merely the goal of the earthly Christ, but even to this very day the ascended Jesus passionately shouts the truth about His Father to the ends of the earth:

12 He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly I will sing your praises.”

-HEBREWS 2:12 (Emphasis mine)

Even now, Jesus is fiercely protective of His Father’s reputation, and not because God is insecure or in need of a PR rep, but because He knows that our image of Him determines everything about the way we live and interact with the world around us.  And so even at this late moment in history, Jesus continues to speak through the Spirit, seeking to educate His brethren about their Father’s true nature.

Perhaps you’re one who has struggled under the weight of misconception, misunderstanding, and mythology.  Perhaps you, like me, have burned yourself out in your attempts at pleasing this “god” from your nightmares.  Perhaps the fever of manmade religion is a malady with which you are all too familiar, and the caricature of an angry God is something that you know like the back of your trembling hand.

I want you to stop, slow down, shove away the religious nonsense, and listen for the jealous voice of Jesus who is still giving articulation to God.  Let Him speak loudly, yet gently to your heart and show you the truth of all truths.  Feel the pulse of the Spirit of Christ within you as His passionate cry echoes throughout your soul, for day and night, He never stops speaking and seeking to bring your heart and mind into alignment with truth.  Even right now He shouts, “Anything you can’t imagine being true of Me cannot be true of my Father either!  Who I am is Who He is!”

He is the Sun of Righteousness and the Light of the World - the brilliant effulgence that pierces and pushes back the darkness of Adamic mythology.  He sees the brokenness and hurt that lingers in the hearts of men and women - men and women who have been abused and crushed by their imagined angry God, and His heart aches for them to know and encounter truth.  He desires that we’d cease in our attempts at turning God’s frown upside down just long enough to hear His voice.  For His voice reveals that the Father is not angry, disapproving, distant, or disappointed.  He’s lovesick for His children, and wants nothing more than to take us in His arms, put our anxious thoughts to rest, and sing His songs of love and grace over us.

It’s time for every anxious and fearful heart to hear the revolutionary Word that is Jesus, for His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Spirit are all screaming out one central and eternal truth:  God is love!

Turn down the white noise of religion, listen closely to the Word made flesh, and you might just discover this truth for yourself.  What is true of Jesus is true of the Father for He is His exact representation – the invisible made visible, and a reputation restored.

3

GOD VERSUS GOD

How Modern Atonement Doctrines Have Transformed God into Both Hero and Villain

“They say first, God must punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong…To lay the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice is simply monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice.” 11

-George MacDonald (1824-1905)

“I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent.  We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity.” 12

-Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist and author of The God Delusion

At the center of Christianity, and, therefore, at the center of all of history, lies the self-giving act of Jesus’ death.  The crucifixion of Christ stands out as the pivot point of human existence.  There is no event which is of greater significance to us or to the cosmos than this, in which the eternal dream of God became robed in flesh and actualized in the work of the eternal Son.

That being the case, it is extremely important that we have a firm grasp, not only on its significance, but also on its true purpose.  Regardless of how noble, powerful or universal His death was, if we misunderstand God’s intent in bringing it to pass, we will end up misinterpreting His posture towards humanity as well as His nature in general.  I’m afraid that for years, men and women have viewed the cross in light of retributive justice, causing their view of God to become warped, skewed, and tainted by frightening, and downright repulsive imagery.  What was meant to evoke love has, in many cases, evoked fear, misunderstanding, and unbelief.  It’s time to reexamine this all too important topic in light of the Father’s love revealed through Jesus Christ.  Therefore, throughout this and the next several chapters, we will look at the work of Christ’s sacrificial death, and attempt to make sense of all this blood and brutality in light of Jesus and the message of God’s undying love that He brings.

THE BLOOD SPEAKS

According to the writer of Hebrews:

24…the sprinkled blood… speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

-HEBREWS 12:24 (Emphasis mine)

I understand the analogy being made, and am well aware of the comparison being drawn between the judgment that befell Cain and the mercy revealed through Christ, however, I want to use this small and abbreviated passage to drive home a point.  That point being that Christ’s blood is communicating something to us.  It speaks to us, and, as we examined in the last chapter, in keeping with the mission of Jesus, is attempting to speak to us something about the Father’s nature.  Obviously, it seeks to reveal “better things” than those which we’ve believed.  “It” desires to show us that God is love, and that He is on our side.  However, if we listen to the words of “the blood” through the filter passed on to us from Adam, it’s message gets lost, and will sound as though it is saying something that is in disharmony with the passion and mission of Jesus.  For, if heard through a filter that believes God to be angry, vindictive, and retributive by nature, the blood will appear to reveal a violent God, seeking appeasement and bent on vengeance, as opposed to the loving Father revealed through the words and actions of Jesus.  The writer makes a clear distinction between Cain’s blood, which cried out for justice and revenge, and Christ’s blood, which reveals something altogether different.

DEAD TREES AND KILLER BEES

As a young boy growing up in the country, one of my chief pleasures was locating dead, rotting trees, and then toppling them with a mighty kick or shove.  Typically, the felling of rotten trees came with no collateral damage, but one day that all changed.

My friends and I were out and about, patrolling the woods, looking for new victims, when we spotted the golden goose!  It was a virtual sequoia when compared to our small, nine year old frames, but, in truth, probably stood only about teen feet tall.  Each of us longed to topple this ancient beast of a tree, but my friend Trevor won out.  As he pushed against it, it fell to the ground with a snap, and a roar.  Then something peculiar happened.  He began slapping himself wildly, leaving us to believe that the rush of power had driven him mad.  However, we soon saw what appeared to be a dark cloud surrounding our friend.  Unfortunately for Trevor, what looked like a dead tree to us was also the abode of the elusive yellow jacket, an insect known to dole out generous servings of pain to all who would dare disturb its domain.

We began running wildly back towards Trevor’s home, while he continued slapping himself, and screaming the way any 9 year old would while being attacked by an army of angry bees.  When we made it back to his home, he burst through the screen door like a one man SWAT team, leaving us standing in the front yard, our minds still reeling from the events we’d just witnessed.  Then, suddenly, we heard the deep, booming voice of our friend’s father, who was yelling and hollering indistinguishable words in the direction of our bee-victim of a buddy.  Then we began to hear the unmistakable sound of large human hands slapping human skin.  With each “SLAP”, our friend would bellow like a wounded animal, while we could only wait outside and wince sympathetically.

As we stood there listening, our childish minds went to work in trying to piece together what was happening inside of Trevor’s home.  The only thing we could think of was that our friend’s father was angry with him for bringing a flock of disgruntled yellow jackets into their home, and so commenced beating him as punishment.  Sure, in retrospect it was an absurd thought to have, but it was all that our immature brains could conjure up.  In that moment, our friend’s father, who was usually a warm and likeable guy, became a horrifying monster who was brutally abusing one of our closest friends.  He shifted from being a nice guy to a villain, just like that.  Our perception of his treatment of his distressed son began to inform our view of him as a person.  Apparently he wasn’t the guy we’d thought him to be, and we’d most likely be limiting our visits to Trevor’s home to times when his father was away.

It slowly began to dawn on us, however, that we’d read things wrongly.  His father hadn’t been abusing him, he’d been rescuing him!  He hadn’t been inflicting harm upon his son, but was attempting to remove from his son the things that were doing him harm.  His father, far from being a monster, actually displayed rather heroic qualities, for he himself, in his attempt at swatting away the bees from his son’s body, was stung multiple times.  He didn’t think about himself or the “house rules” of “don’t bring yellow jackets home for dinner” that his son was breaking.  All he could see was that his son was in danger, and in his fierce, fatherly love, would do anything to rescue him.  His actions didn’t speak of malevolence, but mercy.  Our childish imaginations, however, caused a father’s loving actions to appear as abuse, and our misperceptions of his actions caused us to misperceive him.

The Adamic mythology of an angry God has caused many of us to come to conclusions about God that are based completely on misunderstandings.  Just as my friend and I confused the heroic actions of a father for child abuse, so the fallen mind mistakes even the most heroic acts of God as being evil and abusive.  The knowledge of good and evil caused us to believe the lie that God saw sin as something so offensive that He required our deaths as payment.  Instead of a foreign and invasive enemy from which we needed to be rescued, our imagined God saw sin as something for which we deserved punishment.  Prior to Christ, man could only see God through paranoid lenses, causing him to fearfully wonder how much evil He had observed in our lives, and what sorts of punishments He was cooking up for us as a result.  Because of this, we avoided all forms of fellowship with him, fearing that any interaction with the divine would result in judgment.  Our relationship with Him devolved into nothing more than an acknowledgement of His existence, while we fled from and eventually forgot the concept of being His friends.

So when God came running to our aid, slapping away the “bees” of sin, death and corruption, our deluded and guilt stricken minds misinterpreted His intent.  The Cross, which was the ultimate act of divine love, came to speak to us of God’s malevolence instead of His mercy.  The message of the atonement, the high water mark of God’s reaching out to men in love, became refashioned into the idea that divine justice had been offended by men, and so, in righteousness, God demanded our deaths.  In a bizarre act of mercy, however, He became a human being, and crushed Himself beneath the weight of His own wrath, all in the name of satisfying Himself.  Try to wrap your heads around that last statement, and you’ll eventually see the absurdity of it.

Avowed and evangelistic atheist, Richard Dawkins, in his bestselling book, The God Delusion, writes of this skewed view of the atonement, also called the Penal Substitution Theory, as being one of his many reasons for rejecting and fighting against Christianity.  Dawkin’s writes:

I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent.  We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity.  If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment..?

...Progressive ethicists today find it hard to defend any kind of retributive theory of punishment, let alone the scapegoat theory - executing an innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty.  In any case (one can’t help wondering), who was God trying to impress?  Presumably himself - judge and jury as well as execution victim. 13

As much as I disagree with many of Dawkins’ ideas, I can’t help but say a hearty amen to his assessment of this particular atonement theory.  Unfortunately, it’s these views that have caused many, like Dawkins, to question the integrity of the God to whom we pledge allegiance.  To them, it makes our religion appear violent, brutal, and primitive.  Who can really blame them for thinking this way, when it appears as though our God is a bloodthirsty, human sacrifice receiving deity of violence and vengeance?  Our views on atonement end up looking like nothing more than leftovers from the sacrifice obsessed, pagan cultures of antiquity, which did all that they did in the name of appeasing the gods.  Such views have, unfortunately, made our Father look just like any number of ancient, tribal deities, and have consequently caused many progressives and atheists to see our faith as something that the civilized world should outgrow and discard.  Because of misunderstanding, an event intended to inspire awe and reciprocal love, has instead inspired ridicule, mockery, and rejection.  As MacDonald wrote, “No wonder unbelief is rampant.”

Where I disagree with Dawkins is with his labeling of the Penal Substitution theory of atonement as “the central doctrine of Christianity”.  It is actually just one view among many, and is most certainly not the most original, nor, in my opinion, is it the most scriptural.  The problem is that many know of no other view.  From infancy they are taught that God had to take the life of Jesus as payment for the debt that we owed.  We grow up singing songs about how in Christ “that wrath of God was satisfied”, and simply assimilate these ideas into our belief system without ever testing them to see whether or not they hold any water.  The ubiquity of this particular view, as Dawkins rightly states, has dulled our objectivity, and has caused us to accept as legitimate an idea that, upon examination, is really without scriptural backing.  Throughout this chapter and several that follow, we will examine the merits of the Penal Substitution theory, and explore alternatives that, in my opinion, are more harmonious with the nature of God and His Gospel.

THE SIN PROBLEM

At the heart of our understanding of atonement lies the problem of sin, and how it affected the relationship between God and man.  In Biblical studies there is something called the “law of first mention”.  This “law”, in essence, states that sometimes, in order to understand a particular scriptural idea, one must return to the first place in which the Biblical authors make mention of it.  Upon studying a particular idea’s origins, we can more fully understand what is being communicated when we read of it in subsequent passages.  Naturally then, in order to understand the nature of sacrifice and atonement (how Christ’s death deals with the problem of man’s sin and relationship with God), it is essential to return to the place where sin first entered, and to where the first faint whisperings of atonement are heard.  And so we must return to the very “beginning”, to the hours immediately following man’s initial “fall”.

A NEW WARDROBE

In Genesis 3:21, just after Adam and Eve ingested the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, God did something very strange.  He presumably killed an animal, possibly more than one, and proceeded to clothe Adam and Eve with its skin.  He removed the fig leaves (representing the works of their hands) which they had been covering themselves with, and replaced them with animal skin.  In the evangelical and protestant tradition, this is often taken as the first prophetic mention of Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sin.  Many interpret this to mean that God, in His justice, slew an animal in order to propitiate or turn aside His own anger against Adam and Eve’s offense.  His sense of justice had been aroused, and in order to redirect His anger away from Adam and Eve, He slew an innocent victim - in this case, an animal.

Then, so some claim, God clothed Adam and Eve in these skins so that when He looked upon them He would be reminded that justice had already been satisfied on their behalf.  Instead of seeing their sinfulness, He would see the victim of His justice and be satisfied.  These coverings of death would keep their sins hidden, and remind God that they had been paid for by another.  In the minds of many believers, these coverings represent God choosing to direct His anger away from Adam and Eve thereby ensuring a semi-restored relationship...that is, until they sinned again, at which time the whole procedure would need to be repeated.

Please don’t be offended at my over simplification of this view point, but sometimes our overly complicated theology needs to be broken down into almost offensively simple terms in order that we may see the idea naked, and unclothed by big words, and intellectual rhetoric.  After viewing an idea in such a light, we are often able to see either its inherent truthfulness, or its inherent silliness.

In the aforementioned scenario, God became the exactor of divine justice as well as the executioner of the guilty.  On one hand, He wanted a relationship with Adam and Eve, but on the other, He was flaming mad and craving justice.  From hence comes the oft quoted cliché, “God is love, but He is also just”.  In other words, there is a side of God that loves His creation, but there is another side of God that must punish His creation when they offend His justice.  He simultaneously loved and hated us.  As you can imagine, this love/hate dichotomy made things very difficult for God as his inner yin and yang “duked” it out in the moral dilemma of the ages.  Should He forgive or remain just?  Should He allow His hatred to boil over, or His love?  While trying to sort the whole mess out, God had an idea - a “light bulb moment”, if you will…

Sacrifice!

He would institute a system of substitutionary sacrifice in which the innocent died for the crimes of the guilty, thus absolving the guilty of their sins!  Through the shedding of innocent blood, God could keep both His love and His justice intact.  He would still find an outlet for His anger and wrath, while sparing the offender from personally experiencing it.  In this way, by shedding the blood of the innocent, God could be kept from shedding the blood of the guilty.  Both His love and His hatred could coexist without any human casualties.

The solution to the problem of sin, so we’re told, was simple:  when man sinned, he needed to kill an animal and God’s justice would be momentarily satisfied.

Seems legit, right?

IS SIN A GOD?

I have always found our faith in the power of sin amazing.  What do I mean by “our faith in the power of sin”, exactly?  In the theory which I grossly over simplified above, one act of human disobedience seems to have been enough to change God.  We are told that one mistake on man’s part altered the disposition of an eternal God, and threw a monkey wrench into His lofty idea of living peacefully in a Garden with His kids.

I must ask, do we really possess that kind of power?  Can a created being really alter its Creator’s disposition with so little effort?  Furthermore, can a foreigner and an invader like sin really alter the attitude of man’s eternal Papa?  Did God really transform from Father to furor; from Daddy to dictator, after just one offense on man’s part?

The answer to this question, I believe, is an ear splitting and emphatic “No!”

Man’s failure did not change God, for He, being God, is unchangeable.  What sin did change was the way that man perceived God!  Once sin entered the picture a lie leapt from the loins of man’s mind, and firmly fixed itself over the face of the Father.  Man had melted down the image of his God in the furnace of His mythology, and a being altogether different from His loving Creator emerged; a monstrosity that is still clinging to our doctrinal statements to this very day.

Allow me to ask a question:  if something, in this case, sin, has the power to change God, would it not stand to reason that this “something” must also be a God?  And would not this God, by necessity, need to be at least the equal of the God that it was able to change?  To take it a step further, if one God has the power to change another God, it would actually stand to reason that, beyond being His equal, the one with the ability to change the other would be the greater of the two.  If this be true, then sin would not only be a God (yes, with a capitol “G”), but a God greater than man’s creator!

Now, let’s follow this logic through a little bit more, shall we?

In 1 John 3:8, John tells us that sin is the “devil’s work”.  In other words, sin is the result of Satan’s (the adversary) meddling, and of his penetration into the heart of man.  When one “sins” they are simply mimicking the actions of the adversary.  Therefore, at least on a certain level, sin finds its genesis in the devil.  So, if the devil was able to “give birth” to something which was later able to change the heart and disposition of God towards man, would that not make Satan greater than God?  Certainly, we know what the real answer to this question is, but in following the logic that sin changed God through to its logical conclusion, the only reasonable answer would be that yes, Satan (in this false scenario) would be greater than God.

The mere thought of this causes our souls to cringe, as we are fully aware of the absurdity of the idea.  However, if one believes that sin, the work of the Devil, was able to change something in God’s character, there can be no question as to who the greater of the two would be.  Since we know this cannot and never will be true, the only conclusion we can draw is that sin did not, and cannot change God.

Period.

If sin didn’t change God, who did it change?  It changed us, the human race, and us alone.  We were the ones affected, not God.  He was the same after the fall as He’s been from eternity.

In light this, let me pose another question:  Since sin didn’t change God, who benefited from the animal skins with which He clothed Adam and Eve?

Did God suddenly become so offended by man’s nakedness that He needed to protect his eyes from the sight of it?  Did something that He once had no apparent problem with, something that He actually declared to be “good”, suddenly become abominable in His sight?

Of course not.

The animal skins were clearly not for God but for man.  When Adam and Eve misunderstood the Father’s posture towards them, God reached out and attempted to coax them out of their hiding places by giving them something to help them to feel secure in His presence.  Remember, it was man whose mind had become polluted by the “knowledge of good and evil”, and it was only after this pollution occurred that he began projecting the concept of evil onto himself, and of retribution onto the face of God.

Man felt unworthy and alienated and therefore saw God in the light of his own imaginings.  God, in His infinite compassion and understanding, however, stooped to man’s level and spoke to him in his new language.  The coverings, though not altering God’s stance one way or another, gave man the confidence to emerge from the foliage, and, perhaps, in this action we see precisely why sacrifice came to be practiced in the first place.  In man’s mind it became a link to God.  God, however, needed no blood, animal skins or breathless animals to convince Him to love us.

PUNISHMENT OR CONSEQUENCE?

Don’t get me wrong, there were curses incurred by man as a result of what he did.  I’m not saying that God simply batted His eye lashes and ignored man’s actions.  No, there are always consequences for submitting to satanic lies, and man had brought himself, and all of the old creation, beneath the curse that such submission brings.  The ground became cursed and man was cursed to work it.  Woman became cursed, and the process of child bearing became one of pain and suffering.  But were these the judgments of God, or were they the consequences of submitting to darkness?  Your answer to this question will determine a lot about your view of the Father.  It will color your view of the events of the Old Testament, and ultimately, it will define your view of what took place on Calvary.  I submit to you that the curses incurred by Adam and Eve were the results of submission to darkness, and not the vindictive actions of an angry God.

One has to ask themselves this very simple and fundamental question:  Did God know that man would fall before He created Him?  There is a school of thought that suggests He did not, because He had purposely limited His knowledge of men’s choices.  Proponents of this idea surmise that God puts limits on His knowledge of our actions in order to live with us in a more relational and less programmed way.  While I can certainly see the heart behind this view, and can even see how some scripture verses could be read and understood in this light, I simply cannot accept that God did not ultimately know that men would fall.  Omniscience (possessing all knowledge) just kind of comes with the job of being a Deity, and somehow, shutting off one’s foreknowledge of such a tragic event would seem rather irresponsible.

If God did in fact know that humanity would fall, some would argue that my last statement proves itself to be false, since it would be much more irresponsible to create man with prior knowledge of his fall and then consign him to an eternity in hell for doing what he was foreknown to do.  Bear in mind though that nowhere in the Genesis account of creation is anything said about hell.  God declared that man would “die” if he ate from the tree, not that he would experience some form of “spiritual death”, and be separated from Him forever in hell.  Our false assumption that the punishment for Adam’s sin was hell has also cast an extremely abusive light on our Creator.  Again, I say that nowhere in the Genesis account of creation were Adam and Eve warned of hell.  If God would have created men with the knowledge that they would sin and be damned to hell forever, but failed to warn them of this consequence, I would have a very difficult time worshipping Him.  Such neglect would prove Him to be heartless and cruel, in addition to being a very poor planner.

Even if the consequence for Adam’s sin wasn’t hell, why would God, Who knew of his future failure, punish and afflict him for a sin He already knew he would commit before creating them?  Why even create them if, in creating them, He would be forced to condemn them to lives of misery?  My opinionated answer to this question is that I do not believe the curses of Genesis 3 were the retributive punishments of God, but the results of what the apostle Paul called the “law of sin and death”.

I believe that there is a law in God’s universe, and it is that sin, or living in a manner that is contrary to our design, brings death, destruction and ruin to whatever chooses to host it.  By calling such a thing a “law”, I do not intend to say that God Himself has set up a system in which the failures of men bring about their death and destruction.  Nor am I suggesting that there is a law existing outside of God to which he is beholden.  What I’m speaking of is a “law”, as in a principle or consequence.

Gravity is a law.  If a man jumps from a one hundred story building, the law of gravity states that such a man will be condemned to death.  This “law” is not an edict decreed into being by an outside force or source, but a principle upon which nature functions.  There is no “gravitational courtroom”, with a black robed judge slamming down his gavel in condemnation against those who jump from high heights sans a parachute.  No, this law is a principle that has natural consequences if gone against.  In the same way, I believe that the “law of sin and death” is less of a judicial decree on God’s part, and more of a natural and spiritual consequence resulting from aligning one’s self with darkness.

Let me put it this way, sin is not native to man.  It never has been and it never will be.  Sin is an alien ailment which is wholly satanic in origin.  In 1 John 3:8, which we’ve already touched upon, John writes:

8  The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning…

-1 JOHN 3:8 (Emphasis mine)

In John 8:44, Jesus stated that the Pharisees, in their desire to murder Him, were “of their father the devil”, and that they wanted “to carry out [their] father’s desire”.  Some postulate that since Jesus called the Pharisees “children of the devil” it means that all are of the literal seed of Satan prior to conversion.  This postulation, however, betrays the text and reads into it what simply isn’t there.  His statement comes on the heels of the Pharisees’ questioning of Jesus concerning His own Father:

19 Then they asked him, “Where is your father?” “You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

-JOHN 8:44 (Emphasis mine)

Now surely we know that Jesus was the literal Son of God, but, at the same time He often uses the father/son relationships to reveal the source of one’s behavior and not necessarily to suggest that one is a literal child of so-and-so.  Take for instance the usage of sonship imagery by Jesus in Matthew chapter 5:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

-JOHN 5:43-47 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus said that acting in certain ways makes us “children of your Father in heaven”.  Now He’s certainly not suggesting that works can earn us a place of sonship, because in Jesus’ language here sonship is a metaphor for mirroring another’s actions and do not concern lineal descent.  When we reflect the Father’s image in forgiving and loving our enemies – for that is what He does – then we are truly His children, for we look like Him.

Similarly, back in John 8, Jesus says:

37 I know that you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38 I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you are doing what you have heard from your father.”

-JOHN 8:37-38 (Emphasis mine)

Again, Jesus uses sonship imagery as a metaphor for mirroring the actions of another.  He acknowledges that the Pharisees were Abraham’s physical descendants, but then suggests that their actions did not mirror Abrahams as they had it in mind to kill Him.  Jesus then suggested that He, on the other hand, was perfectly mirroring the actions of His heavenly Father, while they were mirroring those of someone other than Abraham.

The text continues:

39 “Abraham is our father,” they answered. “If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do what Abraham did. 40 As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. 41 You are doing the works of your own father.” “We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.”

-JOHN 8:39-41 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus further challenges their claim to being children of Abraham in stating that their murderous intents and actions are things which Abraham would never have done.  Clearly, the imagery is once more about mirroring behavior.  They protest all the more, finally stating that not only are they mirroring Abraham’s actions but God’s as well, for, so they claimed, He was their true Father.  Jesus finally replies:

42 …“If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!

-JOHN 8:42-44 (Emphasis mine)

Again, Jesus shows that, far from mirroring the actions of His Father, they were mirroring the actions of another.  The Father accepted and sent Him, yet they rejected Him.  They sought to murder Him, why?  Because Satan, so Jesus says, was a murderer from the beginning.  Their desire to kill Him was a result of His teaching of truth.  Why?  Because Satan is the father of lies and a hater of truth, and they were mirroring his actions in despising the truth brought forth by Christ.

It would seem that, according to Jesus’ take on things, the evils in which men engage find their genesis, not in their own blackened hearts, but in a mirroring of the actions of Satan.  He is the “father” and progenitor of all that is wicked and wrong in the world, be it murder or falsehood.  Those who sin are not merely acting upon latent desires, but carrying out the desires of sin’s father.  Yes, these desires can and do become firmly lodged in human hearts, but the origin of these desires is alien.  All evil results from Satan’s twisting and perverting of things originally created by God to function in the world of men.  He is sin’s father, and sin is his work.  Men who engage in sin are simply mirroring and carrying out the desires of its father.

With this in mind, think again of the fall of man and the activation of the law of sin and death.  The curses that came upon Adam, Eve and the whole of humanity are the results of Adam engaging an alien entity called sin.  He was not merely acting upon latent human desires, but was mirroring and carrying out the foreign desires of another.  Thus, the “sin” wasn’t so much the breaking of a command (though it was that), as much as it was a carrying out of Satan’s desires.

Martin Luther, in his work, Two Kinds of Righteousness, speaks of “original sin” (a concept this author is not a big fan of) as being something alien to human nature:

There are two kinds of Christian righteousness, just as man’s sin is of two kinds.  The first is alien righteousness that is the righteousness of another, instilled from without...this alien righteousness, instilled in us without our works by grace alone...is set opposite original sin, likewise alien, which we acquire without our works by birth alone. 14

While I disagree with much of the baggage that comes with the term “original sin”, I can agree with Luther that sin’s presence in the world is not natural.  It is not here by design, but is fully alien.  While, again, I’m not fully on board with the Augustinian idea of “original sin”, I can agree with the heart behind Luther’s words, which is that sin entered the world through men, but originated from without.

AN ALIEN INVASION

In the history of space travel there was speculation that bringing objects such as rocks or soil samples back to earth could have devastating effects.  What if some sort of “alien virus” were hidden in these objects?  Such a virus, one foreign to earth and against which we had no immunity, could cause a lethal pandemic.  We’ve seen such a principle at work in much less devastating ways when animals are introduced into regions of the earth to which they are not native.  Often these “alien animals” will devastate the ecosystems into which they’re introduced, destroying vegetation and driving out other indigenous species.

Or take for instance a less…natural example.  In the wonderful world of YouTube and online video sharing, humanity’s not-so-intelligent actions are more prominently displayed than ever.  Oftentimes, while not doing much to restore my faith in our species, these videos do cause me to chuckle.  In one such video a young man can be seen throwing a brick into an already running, front loading washing machine.  Amazingly, but not too surprisingly, within a matter of minutes the washing machines is on its side, literally tearing itself to pieces.  It took nothing more than the insertion of an alien object, in this case a brick, to literally destroy the washing machine from the inside out.

Likewise, the introduction of the alien species of sin activated the consequences of transgressing “the law of sin and death”, which, in turn, caused the human race to begin to decay, and, like a brick bearing washing machine, began tearing itself to pieces from the inside out.

DEATH’S REIGN

In Genesis 2:17, God tells the man and his wife that on “the day” that they eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil they would “surely die”, yet we do not read of Adam and Eve immediately dropping dead.  They actually lived on for quite some time after their initial act of sin.  However, on the very day that they ate of it death did began to “reign” in the earth and in the bodies of men. (Romans 5:14; 17)  We read of the beginning of death’s reign in Genesis 3:16-19:

16 To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;

with painful labor you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

and he will rule over you.”

17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it

all the days of your life.

18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your brow

you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

-GENESIS 3:16-19

The law of sin and death had been activated through the introduction of sin, and all that sin touched was now under the tyranny of death.  Since I’m taking a roundabout route to show that the curses of Genesis 3 are not the result of a vindictive God venting His fury upon men, I cannot over look verse 16, in which God stated that He would greatly increase the pain experienced by women in pregnancy and childbirth.  Certainly, this seems as though God himself is to blame for man’s misery.  I don’t deny that God played a part in the curse, after all, the universe, Satan, the tree, and the law of sin and death itself would not have existed had He not spoken them into being.  God Himself is, therefore, the indirect author of man’s misery, for He is his Creator.  This does not mean, however, that God is vindictively punishing the woman for no purpose other than to watch her squirm in pain, gasp for air, and scream four letter words at her husband in the delivery room.

Remember, what we are witnessing is the beginning of death’s reign, not God angrily spanking His disobedient kids.

With that in mind, read the following scripture carefully,

26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

-1 CORINTHIANS 15:26 (Emphasis mine)

Here the Apostle Paul seems to personify death as God’s enemy, not the evidence of His judgment against sin.  Death is a foreigner who rode in on the Trojan horse of sin, and we must, therefore, read God’s words to Eve, as well as every other reference to death, in light of this understanding.  Death is God’s enemy, and one whose defeat He will bring to completion through resurrection.  Death is not God’s disciplinary belt, nor the whip with which He lashes mankind, but a foreigner, and an enemy with which He declared Himself to be at war.  It is not that God is in heaven throwing the switch or pushing a bright red “wrath button”, but that He allows men to experience the playing out of the consequences of transgressing the law of sin and death.

If death is not a means of punishment or an expression of God’s justice, then why kill the animal?  Why introduce a system of sacrifice and blood and violence?   Again, if we retrace the steps of the doctrine of atonement all the way back to Eden, we find that the very first earthly sacrifice did not occur for the purpose of appeasing God, but so that man would have confidence in approaching God.  Adam and his wife hid from the presence of the Lord and had bedecked themselves in fig leaves.  However, in replacing their fig leaves with animal skins I believe God was saying to them, “I understand that you feel ashamed, I can deal with that.  So here, cover yourselves with these.  Turn in your fig leaves and know that you do not need to convince me that you’re good enough by publicly displaying your productivity.  I made you.  I know you.  I love you, and I want to be with you.  If this is what it takes to coax you out of hiding, then we’ll roll with it.”

DEATH AS MERCY

The Father allowed death, though an enemy, to be activated for a very specific purpose, and that purpose was mercy.  When we think of the death that accompanied sin, we almost always see it as being a death penalty of sorts, as we have been programmed to see the whole story as a court room drama.  While death was a consequence, and, yes, even a consequence allowed by God, it was also one that served His ultimate purpose of redemption and rebirth.

As I’m sure you already know, among the numerous other trees in Eden was one called the Tree of Life.  Now, we can see this as being literal or metaphorical, but either way, the Bible calls it a tree, and so for the sake of time, space, and continuity, we’ll use the scripture’s own language when discussing it.  Just as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil imparted an understanding of good and evil to the whole human race, so the Tree of Life would have imparted, I believe, a very literal eternal life to us.  Had Adam eaten from this tree after the fall, all who were yet to be born would have become infused with everlasting life, and thus been sealed and cemented into Adam’s post sin state.  We would have been born irredeemable, and doomed to have the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil churning in our bellies for the duration our endless existence.  The perceived alienation, as well as the literal death that man was now in the throes of, would have become a permanent fixture of the human experience.

God in His mercy, however, allowed the enemy of death to do its work.  Had Adam not been allowed to die he would have wandered the earth with his children forever, trapped in his fallen state.  Death, then, became the only means of escape from this prison.  When Adam, Eve, and the rest of those born in a fallen state died, they went to the place of the dead, which the Old Testament calls sheol, and which the New Testament calls Hades.  During the three days separating His death and resurrection, Jesus descended into these lower regions, and, according to the Apostle Peter, preached to the souls who had died prior to His advent.  The inference here seems to be that they had the glad tidings of Christ’s defeat of death proclaimed to them, as well as the hope to be seen through His then pending resurrection.  When Christ, who was very God Himself, and therefore an eternal being, thrust Himself into the hands of the enemy of death and threw off its shackles through resurrection, the power of death was broken, and those who had fallen asleep “in Adam” were raised with Christ into victory.

According to Ephesians 4:11, through Christ’s ascension we are told that he “led captives in His train”.  In some Christian traditions this is known as “the harrowing of hell”, and speaks of Christ emptying out the realm of the dead, and raising them to live in His Father’s presence.  Christ plundered the lower regions of sheol and Hades, and took with Him all who were held captive by the inactivity of death.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202 AD), an early church father, says of God using the enemy of death for His own purposes:

[God] ejected him [Adam] from Paradise...in compassion for him, that he might not remain forever a transgressor, and that the sin in which he was involved might not be everlasting, nor the evil interminable and incurable.  He prevented further transgression by the interposition of death, and by making sin to cease through the termination that He imposes on it by the dissolution of the flesh which takes place on this earth; that man ceasing to live to sin, and dying to it, might begin to live to God.

St. Ambrose wrote similarly:

Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; He prescribed it as a remedy. Human life was condemned because of sin to unremitting labor and unbearable sorrow and so began to experience the burden of wretchedness. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing. 15

Just as the wicked Hamon built gallows for the Jews, only to wind up dying upon them with his own family, so the enemy of death actually served to fulfill the plan of God in undoing the work of the fall.  Even the consequence of death served God’s purpose of revealing His mercy and grace!  Far from being a punishment, death was actually the merciful act of a gracious God!

Nowhere in the Genesis account of the fall do we catch a glimpse of an angry God requiring satisfaction for wrongs done against Him.  Nowhere is there a hint of the judicial juggernaut that so many worship and sing praises to.  On the contrary, we see a loving Father who, in His divine mercy and love, escorted man from Eden to keep him from making his situation worse.  He was still looking out for the wellbeing of His children even after having been wronged by them.  We do not see a God who needed to have His mind changed about His creation through violent appeasement, but a Father who remained Love from the first to the last.  God is shown as having never changed His mind about the sons and daughters He created.  This couldn’t be more important, because it has the potential to reorder our concept of God’s response to sin, and therefore, the purpose of the atonement.  If God’s original response to human sin was mercy, and not anger and rage, then our views of the atonement will have to evolve.

So why the blood, and why the sacrifices?

JESUS, THE BEGINNING AND THE END

I must make a confession.

Remember earlier on, when I told you that the Genesis account of God covering Adam and Eve with animal skins was the earliest mention of sacrifice given in scripture?  Well, I lied.  I know, I know, lying is bad, but I hope you’ll forgive me, at least this once.  Truth is, the earliest mention of sacrifice in the Bible is actually found in its very last book - the book of the Revelation.  As backwards as that may seem, please bear with me.

In Revelation 13:8, the aged apostle John cryptically refers to Christ as, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”.

The Weymouth Translation of scriptures words it this way,

“...the Lamb who has been offered in sacrifice ever since the creation of the world.”  (WEY)

This same Apostle John opens up his Gospel with the following words,

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

-JOHN 1:1 (Emphasis mine)

John, in introducing the story of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, essentially rewrites Genesis 1:1, which declares, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.”  John, it seems, is attempting to stress the power and importance of Christ’s work, showing us that it is as essential and game changing as the original creation of the cosmos, as He includes Jesus, the Word, in the “in the beginning” of Genesis 1:1.  John is telling us that in the beginning, before God ever spoke one single “let there be”, Jesus was! John seems to have been taken aback here by a revelation; the revelation that Jesus Christ and His work is not something located in the endnotes of God’s great story of redemption, but the eternal foreword; the “once upon a time” setting the tone for the rest of the story.  Jesus was in the beginning, and not just as a member of the Trinity, but as the “lamb slain” and the redeemer of mankind.

Remember, in Revelation 13:8, the Apostle John tells us that in some mysterious way, the sacrificial death of Christ predated the creation itself.  It predated Genesis 1:1 and the laying of earth’s foundations.  In Colossians 1:17, Paul writes that “He is before all things”.  You see, the Godhead does not exist in time as we experience it, but dwell, rather, in eternity.  Therefore, if God purposes for something to be, it is long before it actually is!  We who live on, and are subject to the rotation of the earth around the sun, simply experience the playing out of that which has always been in the mind of God in linear time.  Therefore, since the death of Christ was not a backup plan, but something preordained, it always was even before it manifested in the realm of time.  In the mind of the Godhead, therefore, Christ’s sacrifice predated even the fall of man and the entrance of sin.  The cure predated the curse, and the answers were given before the test was written up.

In truth, it would seem that Christ’s work is actually a part of the creation.  It did not truly occur 2,000 years ago, but in eternity.  Therefore, creation occurred in light of what Christ had already accomplished outside of time, which would later play out in the context of time.  The writer of Hebrews wrote that God’s work had been finished since creation (Hebrews 4:3), meaning that what we perceive as being a second work in Christ is really just a part of the original creation plan.  Adam, sin, and the fall simply played into God’s eternal purposes.  God’s work week didn’t pick back up when Christ came to earth to live, die, rise and ascend.  All of this was already accomplished in eternity, and was worked into the plan of creation.

It is Christ’s own death then, and not that of an animal, which is the first true mention of “sacrifice” in the Bible.  We therefore must not start in Eden and work our way towards Christ, but must start in Christ and work our way towards Eden.  When we start looking at the atonement in the light of Christ, instead of in the light of Adam, a whole new world begins to take shape!  The way that we have been presented with these ideas in the past has made it seem as though the sacrifices of the Old Testament were merely the appetizers keeping God’s justice at bay whilst the main course was being prepared.  Then, just as the Father was ready to storm the kitchen, demanding His meal in anger, Christ burst out of its doors and presented Him with the perfect sacrifice - and just in the nick of time, I might add.

Old Testament sacrifices, however, do not predate Christ’s.  His death was not simply a supersized version of that which took place on Passover or on the Day of Atonement.  No, on the contrary, Hebrews 10:1 tells us that it was something altogether different:

1 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.

-HEBREWS 10:1 (Emphasis mine)

The writer tells us that such sacrifices were merely the “shadow” of something greater which had yet to manifest in time.  Is it possible for something to have a shadow if it does not already exist?  I think not.  Therefore, if Christ’s sacrifice had a “shadow” it means that it had already occurred in the realm of eternity.  You see, even in Eden, when the first earthly sacrifice was offered, it was still only a shadow of that which already occurred.  It was the two dimensional, reverse projection of that which Christ had completed in eternity.  Therefore, in the Eden sacrifice, we do not have the offended justice of an angry God being satisfied, but the shadow of a plan of redemption that had been meticulously plotted and planned before man ever blinked his eyes or took his first breath.

Still though, what’s with all of the death and blood?  Why did Christ have to die in the first place?  Could not God have freely forgiven men of their transgressions without the shedding of blood, as Dawkins asks?  The obvious answer is yes, He could have, and, in fact, He did!  However, when dealing with sin, we are dealing with something much bigger than mere acts of disobedience.  We’re dealing with an entity of sorts; an alien force which men began to internalize through disobedience.  This internalized sin blinded man’s eyes and caused him to think terrible thoughts of himself and his God.

In Romans 8:7, Paul tells us,

7 …the carnal [sinful] mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.

-ROMANS 8:7 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

While under the dominion of sin (and by sin I mean the mirroring of Satan’s works and internalization of said works, which, it seems became something of an entity all its own), man could not possibly live in a way that was in line with God’s design for him.  His sinful mind was hostile and at war with God.  Centuries of living in such a state had caused him to become so alien and opposite to God that he was scarcely recognizable as the same creature that the Father had crafted in innocence.  If men hid from the Father’s presence just moments after the sin in the Garden, we can only imagine the devastating effect that several millennia’s worth of shame and guilt had had upon him!

In Colossians 1:21, Paul says,

21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.

-COLOSSIANS 1:21 (Emphasis mine)

After years of living under the oppression of sin and death, the Bible tells us that man was no longer merely hiding from God, but saw himself as being at war with Him.  Man had become an enemy in his mind because of his evil behavior.  His uncontrollable actions became the proof to him that he and God were no longer compatible.  He saw himself and God as being bitter exes, engaged in a drawn out and nasty dispute.

Paul tells us, however, that this battle was all in our minds.  It wasn’t real, and God most certainly was not fighting against us, but our evil behavior had convinced us otherwise.  There was no way that we could possibly have seen God as being on our side or in our corner, and so our spiritual fight or flight response kicked in.  We fled and we fought as He pursued us in love.  When the fire of love raged brightly, we saw the fire of enmity and hatred.  When His hands reached towards us in compassion, we saw the iron first of a dictator.  Nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in God’s dealings with Israel.

In AD 70, Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome.  Its temple was razed and leveled, its buildings were burned and destroyed, and thousands upon thousands of Jews lost their lives in the most savage and bestial of ways.  However, nearly forty years earlier, Christ had stood in the midst of this unbelieving city and warned them of its future demise:

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

-MATTHEW 23:37 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus was not merely declaring to Jerusalem the coming woe, but was revealing His Father’s heart to the wayward nation.  He stated that He had longed to keep Jerusalem from that terrible hour, sending her prophets and messengers, century after century, to call her to turn and receive her Messiah when He appeared.  He stated that each and every prophet he sent was a gentle and loving advance towards her, his wayward child.  He was coming to the apple of his eye, seeking to lovingly gather her beneath His wings, the same way that a mother hen would gather her chicks.  Israel, however, just could not see it.  Instead of rightly judging God’s intent in coming to rescue her, she saw Him as a threat, as an enemy.  And so she stoned His prophets and messengers.  She resisted his advances of love and kindness, and clung to her illusions of enmity and alienation.

It was this sense of enmity that God had to deal with through the death of Christ.  So long as man’s heart was corrupted by sin and bent towards disobedience, He would never be able to rightly perceive his God.  Therefore the whole structure of sin needed to be dealt with.  And it did not need to merely be covered over or have a legal band aid placed over top of it; it needed to be destroyed from the inside out.

Sin needed to die.

A NONVIOLENT GOD

Never was God interested in blood, death or violent appeasement.  These sometimes savage images were but shadows of what Christ would accomplish through His death when He destroyed the actual corrupting power of sin.  We must never make the mistake of seeing God as one who is pleased with death and violence in the same manner as pagan gods.  The idea that God is satisfied, or satiated by sacrificial blood is clearly a heathen idea, and God Himself, time and again, emphasizes His own disinterest in the ceremonial aspects of sacrifice.

Consider the following passages of scripture:

37 He will say: «Now where are their gods,

the rock they took refuge in,

38 the gods who ate the fat of their sacrifices

and drank the wine of their drink offerings?

Let them rise up to help you!

Let them give you shelter!

-DEUTORONOMY 32:37-38 (Emphasis mine)

Here, God distinguishes the pagan “gods” as those thought to eat, drink, or be appeased by the bloody sacrifices offered by their worshippers.  He, however, stands apart from them.

9 I have no need of a bull from your stall

or of goats from your pens,

10 for every animal of the forest is mine,

and the cattle on a thousand hills.

11 I know every bird in the mountains,

and the insects in the fields are mine.

12 If I were hungry I would not tell you,

for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats?

14 “Sacrifice thank offerings to God,

fulfill your vows to the Most High,

15 and call on me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”

-PSALMS 50:9-15 (Emphasis mine)

Here God instructs Israel to sacrifice out of a heart of thanksgiving, but to be careful not to see Him as a pagan deity needing to be satisfied by sacrificial blood.  Notice, the sacrifices were a means by which Israel could see themselves as drawing near to God in the order of the Eden sacrifice, which gave Adam and Eve their animal skin garments.  God clearly declares that He is not in need of animal blood.  If He were, He could easily drain the cattle on a thousand hills like a child would a juice box, but He wasn’t interested.  Sacrifices were not truly for God, but for man.

Isaiah tells us similarly:

11 “The multitude of your sacrifices--

what are they to me?” says the LORD.

“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,

of rams and the fat of fattened animals;

I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.

-ISAIAH 1:11 (Emphasis mine)

Through Isaiah, God clearly says that physical sacrifices are really meaningless to Him.  In the verses that follow He reveals the hypocritical nature of Israel’s worship, as their hearts were far from His, yet they continued to make their sacrifices and offerings.  What God was communicating to them was that He really takes no pleasure in, nor is He affected by the shedding of blood.  He would much rather a man or woman simply live a good life, and treat their fellowman with kindness and compassion.  One could sacrifice a whole zoo to the Lord and His heart would remain unmoved.  He is simply not a God who feasts on the flesh of sacrificed carcasses, but is a relational God who is much more interested in how we treat the world around us.

Along these same lines, the prophet Amos writes:

21 “I hate, I despise your religious feasts;

I cannot stand your assemblies.

22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

23 Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

24 But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!

-AMOS 5:21-24 (Emphasis mine)

Once more God tells Israel that He has zero regard for their sacrifices and offerings.  It was never blood or judicial satisfaction that He sought, but a people who loved Him and who, because of their love for Him, did what was right.  He was interested in them releasing a river of righteousness and justice to the world, not an endless sea of sacrificial blood.

We read something very similar in the Gospel of Mark:

32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

- MARK 12:32-34 (Emphasis mine)

After Jesus posed a question regarding which of the Mosaic commands were the most important, a teacher of the law rightly answered that it was the command to love God and to love our neighbors.  This teacher even went so far as to say that these things were much more important than presenting God with the blood of animal sacrifices or burnt offerings.  To this, Jesus replied, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”  Apparently, Christ agreed with the man’s statement, showing us that even under the Old Covenant, God was not interested in sacrifice nearly as much as He was interested in the condition of our hearts in relation to His.  In fact, David, in his oft quoted prayer of repentance in Psalms 51, wrote similarly of God’s stance on sacrifices and offerings:

16 For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it;

You do not delight in burnt offering.

17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,

A broken and a contrite heart—

These, O God, You will not despise.

-PSALMS 51:16-17 (Emphasis mine)

David, after having poured his heart out in repentance concerning his sin with Bathsheba, realized that the blood of sacrifices and the smoke of burnt offerings were not the things that God was interested in.  Rather, he was move by and interested in a heart that was broken, contrite, and sincere towards Him.  Over and again, the Old and New Testament scriptures testify to the fact that God is more interested in the hearts of His people than He is animal blood.  The pagan gods demanded blood, gore and violence, but the God of the scriptures is relational, and is interested in the condition of our hearts.

Jeremiah goes even further, writing:

21 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat meat.  22 For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.  23 But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be My people. And walk in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you.’

-JEREMIAH 7:21-23 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

Jeremiah makes the somewhat shocking claim that God never gave Israel commandments that concerned sacrifice, but only those that concerned them following His voice and living in harmony with Him.  He even went so far as to say that they’d may as well eat both their burnt offerings and sacrifices, the former of which they were strictly forbidden to eat.  Jeremiah is stressing the importance of the condition of the heart over the blood of sacrifices and ritual.  Jeremiah’s God is not some Babylonian deity who is interested in bloody appeasement.  He is, however, a God of community and relationship, who desires to live in harmony with His people while they live in harmony with one another.

The Old Testament principle of sacrifice seems to have not been something required by God in order to satiate His bloodlust, but rather a way for fallen man to express his heart and draw near to the God from whom he felt alienated.  God did not need these sacrifices, and when it came right down to it, He often seemed to speak of them with disdain.  He allowed them, however, perhaps because they had become a deeply ingrained part of man’s post fall inclinations when it came to worship.  The medieval rabbi and Torah exponent, Moses Maimonides, believed and taught that the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament were nothing more than a throwback to the pagan religions of Egypt and elsewhere.  It was his belief that God allowed man to continue on in the manner with which he was accustomed when it came to religious matters.  His contention was that such things were never the desire of God, but the desire of man, and that God, being gracious, allowed man to worship with the methods our fallen minds had grown accustomed to.  He writes:

It is impossible to go from one extreme to the other suddenly. Therefore man - according to his nature - is not capable of suddenly abandoning that to which he was deeply accustomed…As it was then the deeply ingrained and universal practice with which people were brought up to conduct religious worship with animal sacrifices in temples...G-d in His wisdom did not see fit to command us to completely reject all these practices - something that man could not conceive of accepting, according to human nature which inclines to habit...He therefore allowed these practices to continue but transformed them from idolatrous associations...that their purpose should be directed toward Him…In this way idolatry was blotted out and the great foundation of our faith - the existence and oneness of G-d - was established. This was accomplished without confusing people’s minds by prohibiting the worship they were accustomed to and with which alone they were familiar... 16

Maimonides, a devout, Torah observant Jew, saw the practice of animal sacrifice as being purely pagan, but allowed by God for a period because we would not have known what to do without it.  While I think that the concept of sacrifice goes back much further than the pagan cultures with which the Jews would have been familiar, tracing its origins back to Eden, I do agree at least in part with the heart of his explanation.  Sacrifice was never about pleasing or satisfying God, but was, for some reason, a thing which man believed God required.  Perhaps it was man’s attempt at scapegoating his sins away and seeing them as having been dealt with, or maybe something else entirely.  Whatever the case, I agree that sacrifice was not God’s ideal, but something that He tolerated in the name of accommodating a deeply confused human race.

The first physical sacrifice occurring in linear time had absolutely nothing to do with turning aside God’s wrath, and everything to do with God allowing humans to speak to Him in the only language they understood.  It was about giving Adam and Eve the wherewithal to step out from their hiding places by covering their nakedness.  Even throughout the bloody Old Testament, time and again God separates Himself from the pagan gods who needed to be appeased and satiated by blood.  Therefore, to believe that Christ’s death, the substance of which all other sacrifices were merely a shadow, was somehow the ultimate act of bloody appeasement, is to take a major step away from the nature of God revealed in the scriptures.

Once more, let me remind you of what the writer of Hebrews tells us about the Old Testament practice of sacrifice:

1 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming--not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.

-HEBREWS 10:1 (Emphasis mine)

The Mosaic Law, with its commandments regarding sacrifice, was merely a shadow of a preexisting reality that had not yet made its way into linear time.  The work of Christ was accomplished in the mind of the Godhead long before creation, and had as its shadow the Old Testament sacrificial practices.  Like any shadow, it was rather obscure and uninformative.  Shadows don’t speak, and are therefore unable to tell their own story.  One can’t really get a good grasp on the shape, color, gender, or anything else for that matter, of a shadow’s source, until they’ve actually seen the source.  Once the source has been observed, however, the shadow suddenly makes sense.  All of the possibilities collapse into one definitive reality, and what was once a two dimensional blob of darkness becomes living, three dimensional substance.  The substance then informs our view of the shadow, and we can look upon it with precise knowledge of what it is we’re beholding.

In the same way, the Old Testament idea of sacrifice must not be viewed as the original substance or plan of God.  It must be seen as the obscure and unexplained shadow of an eternal work which is only truly explained through understanding the work of Jesus Christ.  If we start with animal sacrifices and try to understand the work of Christ by looking at them we will end up severely confused and misguided.  However, if we start with Christ, the substance, and through Him seek to understand the shadow of animal sacrifice, we will gain understanding and revelation.

Far too often we are presented with a scenario in which God, who is hungry for sacrificial appeasement, has finally had enough of the animal sacrifices He had originally demanded.  We imagine Him wringing His hands, frustrated with the lack of perfection present in the animals being offered.  He, being a perfect God, needed a perfect sacrifice in order to be truly pleased, but none of the bulls, goats, or turtledoves offered by the Jews fit the bill.  Christ then opts to offer His own perfection to His Father - a perfection with which the Father is finally pleased and satisfied.  This scenario, however, is worlds away from anything that we find taught in the scriptures.

The Bible paints Christ’s sacrificial work as being the original and master plan of the Godhead.  God sees the fall of Adam long before beginning the work of creation, and together, the Father, Son, and Spirit make provisions for the problem to be remedied.  The fall happened exactly as it had been foreseen, and did not take God by surprise.  As we’ve said, since the problem was foreseen, the solution was also foreseen and prepared in advance.  In fact, the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ were as much a part of God’s plan of creation as was “let there be light”!  It happened before it happened.

God simply waited for the human race to come to a place of maturity in its understanding so that it could comprehend and understand what was going on when Substance finally met shadow.  I believe that God waited for us to reach a certain and crucial point in our development until He unveiled His eternal plan in Jesus Christ.  As a parent waits for their child to reach a responsible age before entrusting them with their inheritance, so the Father waited until our understanding of sin, death, and our own inability to save ourselves, was at a place where we could cognitively receive the meaning and heart behind the inheritance of salvation.

This salvation which we now enjoy is spoken of numerous times as being an inheritance:

32 «Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

- ACTS 20:32 (Emphasis mine)

Again:

30 But what does the Scripture say? «Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman›s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” 31 Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

-GALATIANS 4:30-31 (Emphasis mine)

And again:

12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.

- COLOSSIANS 1:12 (Emphasis mine)

Think of the preemptive planning that goes into a child receiving of an inheritance.  A parent does not begin laying aside money for their child while they lay on their deathbed, but oftentimes, years before the child is even born.  The parent is responsible enough to look into the future and anticipate their children’s needs before they arrive.  At a particular time in that child’s development, typically after the parent has died or after the child has married, the inheritance is released to them.  The inheritance itself, while given well after its initial creation, predates the child’s reception of it, oftentimes by many decades.

Salvation is pictured in a similar way.  It is an inheritance which was planned for and set aside long before the human race was brought into being.  The fall, which is resolved as a part of the inheritance, was seen and planned for long before it was realized in time.  The Godhead allowed sin to run its course, and enacted the Mosaic Law in order to exacerbate and expose the problem in order to magnify the beauty of the soon to be revealed inheritance:

13 Did that which is good [The Mosaic Law], then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

- ROMANS 7:13 (Emphasis mine)

Before our inheritance could be released, we needed to understand its necessity, for while God was fully aware of the problem of sin, mankind was not.  For, as we’ve discussed, sin is far more than an individual act of rebellion, but an internalized, alien ailment, and it was this entity from which we needed saving.  It brought death to our entire being and therefore needed to be destroyed.

Now understand that God, being God, could have saved us from this problem right under our noses.  He could have sorted the whole thing out without us ever being aware of it.  He could have snapped His fingers from the Heavens and caused sin to disappear forever.  Had He done so, however, we would have never learned something very important about His nature and character, and that is that He loves us deeply, and would go to any length to save us from the consequences of our own mistakes.  And so instead of saving us silently and secretly, God instituted the Mosaic Law, which magnetically drew the problem of sin to the surface, causing it to manifest through disobedience to said Law.  Through this, the human race got a real good look at the internalized structure of sin that was bringing ruin and misery to their lives.  The Law, then, was given for diagnostic purposes.  It revealed our mortality and that there was a problem living in our skin - a problem that no list of prohibitions had the power to domesticate.  The sacrifices prescribed by the Law were likewise given to diagnose us, for no matter how many we offered, our inability to live lives in harmony with God’s nature only became more pronounced.

Read carefully the following words from the Book of Hebrews:

1 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming--not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. 2 If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. 3 But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, 4 because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

-HEBREWS 10:1-4 (Emphasis mine)

The writer shows us that the purpose of sacrifice was never to appease God’s anger towards sin, but to take sin itself away once and for all.  The Old Covenant system of animal sacrifice could never accomplish this, rather, the very act of offering a sacrifice reminded the individual that sin was still a very present reality in their lives.  The only thing that the physical practice of sacrifice could accomplish was to make a person aware of their internal issues, as well as of their inability to do anything about them.

In short, the Law and its prescribed sacrifices bred a dependence upon God alone for salvation, for through them man became painfully aware of the fact that he could not save himself.  The Law strengthened his consciousness of sin, but offered nothing in the way of healing for his ailment.  Why would God do this?  Why would He allow this to take place if He simply could have snapped His fingers in Eden and made the problems go away?

The answer, I believe, is that God was not just interested in saving men from sin, but in revealing His love and nature to them.  He was interested in driving away the darkness of human guilt that had tarnished our understanding of Who He was.  Remember, man had become an enemy in his own mind and believed himself to be at war with God.  He saw God as displeased and distant.  When He drew near for fellowship, man misunderstood His intentions, believing that He had come to bring us pain and suffering instead.  This misunderstanding was not acceptable to God, however, and He waited patiently for mankind to come to a place where we would be able to understand His intent in saving us from the sin that was corrupting our minds and bodies.

Had God silently saved us without our knowledge we would not have come to understand the depth and ferocity of His love for us.  And so in a sense God waited for us to mature in our understanding of the problem so that when He released the inheritance and saved us from sin we would grasp the enormity of His actions.  God allowed the Law, sin, death, and even our dependence on sacrifice, to run their course for the express purpose of amplifying and magnifying the sight of His love when it appeared.  In this way, when the times reached their fulfillment and the inheritance was finally realized, men would see the unstoppable love and grace of God, and be overwhelmed.

In Romans 11:32, Paul explains the situation this way:

32 For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

-ROMANS 11:32 (Emphasis mine)

Once more we see that God allowed sin, death, and the Law to do their work so that at the end of it all He could release an inheritance of mercy that would reveal His extravagant love to us in a way that our minds could grasp.  The shadow of sacrifice, far from speaking of God’s need for appeasement, carries with it the idea of self-sacrifice, and self-giving love.  It speaks of the heroism of one man laying down his life for another, and in the case of Christ, it speaks of the incongruous act of one righteous man laying down His life for sinners.  This shadow was given so that in Christ’s dying to put sin to death, we would see a self-giving act of mercy and love.  An act that would capture our hearts, and enflame us with gratitude.

Paul writes:

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-ROMANS 5:6-8 (Emphasis mine)

Even though the inheritance already existed in eternity, we had to be matured in our understanding in order to receive it responsibly.  We needed to have imparted to us the reality that we were powerless to save ourselves.  Why?  So that when God stepped in, took our sins into His own flesh and put them to death through His own death, we would see it as the beautiful demonstration of love that it was.  Our struggle to sanctify and sacrifice our way into His good graces would only serve to bring us to a place of recognized weakness, in which we would fully embrace the fact that we could not save ourselves.  Upon having collectively reached the end of ourselves, Christ stepped in and saved us singlehandedly, bringing relief and peace to our fearful hearts.  God revealed Himself to be One who is abounding in mercy and love, and Who is more interested in saving us than He is in having His own judicial itches scratched.

The inheritance of eternal salvation was released to God’s sons and daughters only after He had allowed time to do its work of maturing us in our understanding of our need for it.  Sacrifice, then, was intended to show us that God Himself removes our sins in love, and not that God punishes Himself in order to save us from Himself.  Remember, these things were but shadows of an already present inheritance.  The way that the shadows transferred into our world were through the metaphoric picture of an animal experiencing a sacrificial death.  The death of Christ, which was the substance that produced the shadow, however, was not about the venting of God’s wrath upon an innocent victim, but the heroic act of God giving His life in order to destroy what was destroying us.  In our ignorance, however, we often mistake it for the former.  Like my younger self, who believed my friend’s father was punishing him when, in reality, he was saving him, so we often mistake the cross as being God’s vindictive actions against those who sin, instead of Him saving us from its presence.

THE LIVE GRENADE OF SIN

Imagine that you, your family, and a perfect stranger, all converged upon a certain path in the forest, only to find yourselves standing directly in front of a live grenade, which is ready to blow at any second (don’t ask me why it happened, I’m just making stuff up here).  There is no time to run and find shelter, as you have but seconds before it explodes.  Even if you were able to run a few yards away, you would still be pelted with shrapnel and suffer life threatening injuries.

Now, clearly, the problem in this scenario is the live grenade.  There is absolutely no way that anyone can save themselves individually, as running away will really only determine which parts of your body are injured first and worst.  It would seem as though there really is no hope for salvation here.

However, let’s say that the stranger, instead of running away, chooses to lay his own body down upon the grenade, thus absorbing the blast, and taking a death that was coming to you and your family into his own body instead.  His death would not represent the satisfaction of the grenades anger, but the absorption of its destructive powers into himself and away from you.  In the aftermath of such an event we would not be wowed by the “wrath” of the grenade, but by the compassion of the man who saved you from it.  His heroic act would not serve to exalt the destructive power of incendiary devices, but would cause you to marvel at the selflessness, and sacrificial love that he demonstrated.

In the same way, the Bible tells us that:

21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:21 (Emphasis mine)

In essence, God Himself, in and through Jesus Christ, jumped upon, and absorbed the problem of sin into His incarnate flesh.  Jesus fully absorbed and united Himself with the live grenade of human brokenness, along with its destructive consequences.  Having taken it upon Himself He carried it to the place of execution, where it met with a bitter end.  In love and compassion for the human race, He willingly gave up His Spirit while having become sin, causing His own death to become sin’s as well.  The Cross was not about Christ becoming a wrath magnet in order that we might become love magnets.  It was that He took our sins upon Himself, literally.  He laid upon the “grenade” of sin in order to rescue us from it.  Then, after having taken our sins upon and into Himself, what did He do?

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

-1 PETER 2:24 (Emphasis mine)

He commenced to go to Calvary and die.  When He dies, how does He die?  According to Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:21, He does so as “sin”.  Therefore, the death of Christ is about much more than an innocent victim dying in the place of a guilty and condemned man.  It is God Himself, absorbing our problem, and through His own death, putting it to death.  Christ’s death was sin’s death, and, according to Peter, something done so that “we might die to sins”, and, “live for righteousness”.  Christ had so identified Himself with our condition, and had so allowed Himself to become entangled in it, that His death had cosmic consequences.  The ancestral sin of Adam was nailed to the Cross, and put to death once and for all.  When Christ breathed His last, sin breathed its last.  When Christ’s heart flat lined, sin’s heart flat lined.  Long story short - When Christ died, sin died with Him.

In Romans 6:6, Paul puts it in even more explicit terms:

6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

-ROMANS 6:6 (Emphasis mine)

On Calvary, Christ consumed our problem into Himself and crushed both sin, and the death it results in.  It was not cosmic, capital punishment, but a vicarious death, in which, through the destruction of His own body, all that was destroying us was destroyed.  Christ’s crucifixion was primarily about rescue, not retribution.  This is why the shadow of Christ’s perfect work translated into time and space in the form of animal sacrifices.  It was not because God desired blood, and appeasement, but because ultimately, God knew He would come and destroy the power of sin by absorbing it into His own flesh, and drowning it beneath the waters of His love.

We saw the shadow of the animal sacrifices, however, mistook it for the substance, and have interpreted Christ’s work in light of this misunderstanding ever since.  The truth of the matter is that Christ’s self-giving act of heroism is the original substance of which animal sacrifices were a mere shadow.  If we are to understand the work of Christ correctly, we must start with Him, and then work our way towards Adam, Moses, and the Old Testament sacrificial system, not the other way around.

In the Gospel, sin and death are the aggressors, and God is the hero Who steps in to rescue us from them.  In the “gospel” of sacrificial appeasement, however, God becomes the aggressor, and death the means He uses to punish those who would dare to transgress His commandments.  The heroic and loving nature of God revealed in the Gospel is lost in such a narrative, as God is somehow playing the part of both the villain and the hero, which, in the end, simply doesn’t make sense.

Earlier on, I listed a number of Old and New Testament scriptures that dealt with God’s seeming disdain for sacrifices.  Almost each and every one of those passages finds God rebuking Israel for her sacrifices, as well as for her lack of love and compassion for the world around her.  It reveals Israel to have been a people of a very pagan mindset, who saw themselves as an elitist group who didn’t need to worry about feeding the poor or doing justly for others, so long as they spilled a little sacrificial blood to make God happy.  God, however, had very different ideas about the way things should be done.  He was much more interested in heroism, that is, in Israel doing good for others, than He was in slain animals.

Consider once more the words of God through Amos, the prophet:

22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

23 Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

24 But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!

-AMOS 5:21-24 (Emphasis mine)

God makes it clear, it was justice and doing right for others that He was interested in.  Sacrifice didn’t move Him, doing justly for others did.

In Psalms 50:9-15, which I also quoted earlier, God states that He is not one who drinks the blood of bulls and goats, nor one who, like pagan deities, got off on watching animals have their throats slit.  In verses 16-21, we get a better picture of the state of Israel at the time God said this:

16 But to the wicked person, God says:

“What right have you to recite my laws

or take my covenant on your lips?

17 You hate my instruction

and cast my words behind you.

18 When you see a thief, you join with him;

you throw in your lot with adulterers.

19 You use your mouth for evil

and harness your tongue to deceit.

20 You sit and testify against your brother

and slander your own mother’s son.

21 When you did these things and I kept silent,

you thought I was exactly like you.

But I now arraign you

and set my accusations before you.

-PSALMS 50:16-21 (Emphasis mine)

Again, we find that God does not show His disdain for sacrifice in a vacuum, but typically in the context of speaking to Israel about her unjust and unrighteous dealings with others.  They were bringing harm to people’s lives instead of healing, yet thought that God would be fine so long as there was a little animal blood on the altar.  Their mindsets were pagan, and wholly out of sync with God’s.

In Isaiah 1:11, which, again, we’ve already quoted, God declared to Israel that he took no pleasure whatsoever in the blood of bulls and goats, and called their sacrifices unacceptable.  Once more, we find that God said this to Israel at a very telling time in her history.  Look what the surrounding text reveals about the state of their hearts:

16 Wash and make yourselves clean.

Take your evil deeds out of my sight;

stop doing wrong.

17 Learn to do right; seek justice.

Defend the oppressed.

Take up the cause of the fatherless;

plead the case of the widow.

-ISAIAH 1:16-17 (Emphasis mine)

Israel’s sacrifices so repulsed God because, in the midst of offering them, they were against the widow, the fatherless and the oppressed.  They were not establishing justice in the earth, but, so it would seem, the opposite.  In verse 10, God is even harsher, referring to Israel in this state as “Sodom”, and “Gomorrah”.  Now, I know that in our 21st century, right winged narrative, we like to think that Sodom’s only sin was that of…well, Sodomy, but there’s more to the story than that.  In Ezekiel 16:49-50, God says of Sodom’s sins:

49 “‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did detestable things before me.

-EZEKIEL 16:49-50 (Emphasis mine)

In addition to being “haughty” and doing “detestable things”, God emphasized the lack of justice and love for others displayed by the Sodomites.  They were “overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy”.  This is the nation to which God compared Israel!  Homosexuality is never mentioned as being one of Israel’s big problems, but a lack of justice, care for the poor, needy and broken is.

My point in going back to these scriptures and contextualizing them is to show you that God, in addition to being turned off by physical sacrifices, usually expressed His disdain for them in the context of rebuking Israel for her lack of heroism in regards to helping others.  God’s heart was not into bloody appeasement, but self-sacrificing love!  This, I believe is at the heart of why God couples His rebukes of Israel along these lines together with statements regarding His view of their sacrifices.

According to God, I believe, sacrifice deals more with laying down one’s life to save, help or rescue another.  The pagan view, however, is that one must sacrifice something precious in order to secure an angry god’s blessing, but God always saw sacrifice as an act of laying down one’s life in the name of heroism and love for others.  Sacrifice was about doing justly for others and putting wrong things right.  Unfortunately, the word justice has become synonymous with an angry God mowing down those who don’t obey Him.  It’s seen as being justice for God to condemn the worldly man or woman to hell, or to destroy ungodly nations with fires, floods and famines.  Though, in a Biblical sense, justice deals with putting wrong things right and laying down one’s life for another’s benefit.  This concept of justice always finds itself connected to Israel’s misunderstanding of the concept of sacrifice, and I can’t help but think that the two are connected.  Could God be saying to us that justice does not look like an innocent, sacrificial victim being punished for the crimes of another?  And could He be saying that real justice looks like one man sacrificially laying down His life for another?

I think that this question is answered through the numerous prophecies that portray Christ’s sacrifice as an act of justice.  Of course, in our warped view of things, we take this to mean the satisfaction of an angry God’s vengeance, but, as we’ve seen, Biblically speaking, justice speaks to the righting of wrongs, and to the undoing of evil.  For instance, in Matthew 12:20, quoting from the prophecy of Isaiah, it is said of Jesus that, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he has brought justice through to victory.”  (MATTHEW 12:20, Emphasis mine)  Jesus is pictured here as the Savior of the weak (the bruised reed and the smoldering wick), for Whom He has come to establish justice!  When we connect the dots in this particular passage, the “justice” being done by Christ is the healing of various sick people, as mentioned in verse 15.  Clearly, God’s idea of justice concerns doing right for others, and is not about the bad guy getting his.

Similarly, Isaiah writes of Jesus:

4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy,

with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.

He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;

with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.

5 Righteousness will be his belt

and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

6 The wolf will live with the lamb,

the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

and a little child will lead them.

-ISAIAH 11:4-6 (Emphasis mine)

Again, Jesus is pictured as coming to establish justice in the earth, but it is not justice of a retributive kind, and it is most certainly not God satisfying His own justice by murdering His Son.  Justice and righteousness are here likened unto just rulings being given in favor of the poor and needy, and the doing away with of systems that oppress them.  Likewise, Isaiah goes on to describe Christ’s justice as looking like the establishment of peace, typified by carnivores and herbivores living together in mutual submission to one another.  God’s idea of the justice established by Christ seems to differ greatly from the brand taught in the penal substitution theory.

What I find so heartbreaking about the retributive view of the atonement is that it sucks the heroism and justice out of Christ’s work, and, while still speaking of justice, perverts the term to speak of God needing to kill someone in order to forgive others.  In this narrative, God is the aggressor who also tries to be the hero.  The formula just simply does not work, and can make for a very confusing theology.  God is the hero who saves us through the death of His Son, not the villain who comes to do us harm only to be thwarted by Himself in another form.  We simply cannot have it both ways.  The justice Christ established in the earth was that He did away with the power and presence of sin, thereby defeating death and corruption.  He rescued us from the foul entity that was destroying our lives and the world around us.  To ignore this justice, while connecting His sacrifice to the pagan idea of bloody appeasement, is to go against everything God ever sought to teach Israel about sacrifice.  Sacrificial justice is the laying down of one’s life for the betterment of another.  While physical sacrifice may have been a shadow of this reality, the substance is found in Jesus’ work.  When we deny this, and view His blood as appeasing God’s wrath, I believe we miss the point altogether, and leave our hearts wholly unaffected in the way that God intended for the Cross to affect us.

The writer of Hebrews says of Jesus’ mission and death:

5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:

“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,

but a body you prepared for me;

6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings

you were not pleased.

7 Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—

I have come to do your will, my God.’”

8 First he said, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them”—though they were offered in accordance with the law. 9 Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. 10 And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

-HEBREWS 10:5-10 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus plainly stated that His mission had nothing to do with offering God a blood sacrifice or burnt offering.  He disconnected the will of God from the idea of sacrifice when, in verses 5-6, He states, “sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me…then I said, ‘Here I am…I have come to do your will, my God.”  Notice, whatever it is that is accomplished through the body of Jesus, it is not related to sacrificial appeasement, as such things, according to Jesus, were of no interest to His Father.  Christ came to fulfill God’s will in saving us from the power of sin, and, according to verse 10, He accomplished this. We’re told that we’ve been, “made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”.  Notice how the type of sacrifice mentioned earlier on, that is, the type prescribed by the Law, was not the type that God desired, and therefore cannot be what Christ offered.  Jesus’ sacrifice was of a different quality.  It was an act of self-giving love, in which He saved us from the power and presence of sin, as opposed to the pagan notion that He appeased an angry God through blood.  Far from it, we’re actually told in verse 22 that the blood with which we’ve been “sprinkled” was for our own benefit, not God’s:

22 having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water

-HEBREWS 10:22 (Emphasis mine)

And even more explicitly in Hebrews 9:14, we’re told:

14 How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

-HEBREWS 9:14 (Emphasis mine)

Notice how in both passages the blood is not changing something in God’s mind, but something in ours!

The sight of the Godhead’s selfless and heroic act is intended to inflame the heart with love!  His gift of love was meant to reveal just how deeply that love went and that He has always been in our corner and working for our betterment.  But we misunderstood His intent.  Because we’ve so grossly distorted His image, His mind boggling gift of love has morphed into a doctrine that further solidifies the idea that He is an angry, justice demanding, Moral Moloch.  Like me, standing outside of my bee-stung friend’s home, confusing the love of a father for child abuse, so we’ve mistaken God’s justice in saving us for a violent, retributive bend in His nature, which has only served to fuel the flames of the fall.

God is love, and His aim in dying our death was to prove that there was no depth to which He would not dive in order to save us from our own blunders and mistakes.  God the Father did not require a cosmic punching bag in order to relieve Himself of the stress that sin brought to His life.  No, the human race needed a lifesaving operation, and our healing could only be realized through sin and death meeting their demise in the body of God’s blameless Son.  Our presentation of the Cross in a judicial light has not caused love to erupt from within the human spirit the way that God intended.  The idea of God needing to crush a sacrificial victim beneath the weight of His wrath and vengeance has not caused men to stand back and marvel at the love of the Father.  It has caused them to be impressed with the love and selflessness of Christ, but has had the terrible side effect of causing us to see the Father in a dismal light.  We’ve developed a soft spot for and an attachment to the suffering Jesus, but not for His Father, for He is presented as a justice demanding Jupiter, from whose sight Christ hides us.  This idea is counterproductive to the stated work of the Spirit, and, in my opinion, destroys rather than builds up.

You see, when we make the message of the Cross into a courtroom drama instead of a love story, the message becomes cold, lifeless, and mechanical.  A tale about a legal transaction does not have the power to move the heart and transform the person.  It does not cause the heart to swoon and be overwhelmed with wave after wave of rapturous love.  It simply causes us to become emotionally attached to one member of the Godhead, while becoming indifferent, and perhaps even repulsed, by the Father, who all the while has been passionately working for our salvation.

However, when we recapture the setting and the context in which the crucifixion occurs, and finally see it for what it is, our hearts swell and our emotions reach a boiling point!  When we see the Cross as an act of fiery love on the part of the entire Trinity, something in us will snap, and we’ll simply be unable to remain the same.

When we realize that there is no division between the members of the Godhead, and that Christ is not saving us from His Father, but with His Father, a supernatural sense of gratitude and familial love will swallow us up.  When we see love, as opposed to a deified version of Roman justice, as the motivation behind the Cross, we’ll simply be unable to remain silent, cold or disinterested.  When our hearts see the Cross as a white hot demonstration of God’s love for all of humanity, they will be supernaturally charged with a reciprocal love.

Thomas F. McCall, in his book, Forsaken, writes:

God is for us.  It is not part of God that is for us-as if some divine persons or some divine attributes were opposed to me while others are for me-it is just God who is, in the impassible simplicity of the Trinitarian life, radically for us.  The death of Jesus does not make it possible for God to love us.  The death of Jesus makes it possible for us truly to know God’s love, makes it possible for us to love God. 17

We have come to a point in time where we must recapture the heart of the Gospel!  There is nothing cold, clanking or mechanical about it.  It is a declaration that every nerve that makes up the Godhead is pulsating with passion and desire for the human race.  It is from out of this furnace of passion that Jesus came to save us, and not of His own volition, but at His Father’s request.  He ran to us, wrapped Himself in the problem of our brokenness, and put it to death through His own death.  In so doing, He destroyed the power of sin and banished our sense of alienation and isolation.  Now, having put sin to death, He seeks to reassure us that the enmity, hatred, and hostility have only ever been on our end, not His.  His death is a love note from the Trinity, declaring in bold and capital letters, “I LOVE YOU!”

This, my friends, is the Gospel:  Love itself came to rescue us, restore us and remind us of who we’ve always been in God’s sight.  We must never domesticate this Gospel by making it overly legal in nature, but must allow it to be the wild and crazed thing that it is, for it is love alone that can enflame the human heart.  We love, not because we see God’s hatred of us prior to Christ’s death, but “because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).  Any message of the Cross that starts with us as abhorred and hated vessels is not the Gospel, and simply will no longer do!  A Gospel that begins with love, and ends with love, however, just might be the real deal.

In conclusion, the death of Christ was not about God the Father needing to vent His rage and fury upon a sacrificial victim in order to appease Himself.  It was not about the Father needing to crush someone in the place of humanity so that, on the other side of the crushing He could be pleased with, and relational towards us.  It was not about a sacrificial system which God originally instituted, but later decided was incapable of satisfying His needs.

It was about the entire Trinity destroying and putting to death the alien entity of sin, the “devil’s work” (1 John 3:18), in order to save us from its corrupting influence.  It was done so that on the other side of the Cross, we would see and understand what man had lost sight of after partaking of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  It was to reveal to us that our God is not a cosmic Santa Claus who is making a list, checking it twice, and who will ultimately repay both the naughty and the nice.  Our God is Love, and has only ever been seeking to reveal that love to us.  He was never out to “get us”, but to rescue us from the consequences of our own decisions.  Sin did not change God, and the Cross was not the means by which He reset Himself back to His factory settings.  Sin changed us, and it therefore needed to be destroyed so that we could behold the unchangeable nature of our God of love.  The Cross was the ultimate, climactic demonstration of the Godhead’s love for the human race, not the crude display of a deified version of human justice.  It was Eternal Love Himself, stepping into our problem, absorbing it into Himself and dying in order to put it to death.  It was heroic, self-giving, sacrificial justice.

I pray you’re beginning to see the true motivation behind the death of Christ.  I hope you’re beginning to catch a glimpse of a God who was never angry with you, but was angry at the sin that was destroying you; that He was willing for harm to be done to Himself if that was what it took to rescue you from the “yellow jackets” of sin, violence and death.  It was the entire Godhead’s undignified, public display of affection towards mankind, and any presentation of the Gospel that does not leave you with this feeling ought to be – no, must be - questioned, and reexamined in the light of His love.

4

THE VICTIM AND THE VICTOR

How God Responds to Being Murdered

“The witness of the New Testament is not of a God who is some humongous Judge Judy, waiting to get us all.  The judge of the New Testament is, if anything, a gracious and merciful Judge who becomes judged by humanity, by you and me.  God is ‘the Judge Judged in our Place’ as Karl Barth puts it.” 18

-Michael Hardin

In the last chapter we began looking at the concept of the atonement.  We specifically asked and attempted to answer the question of whether Christ’s death occurred for the purpose of appeasing God’s wrath, or whether it was to heal the human race from the problem of sin.  The conclusion that we came to was that it was for the purpose of destroying sin and healing humanity.  We also concluded that it was a cosmic event which took place in eternity, and is not, therefore, defined by Old Testament types and shadows of sacrifice.  The Old Testament shadows are seen clearly only once we’ve beheld the eternal substance of Christ’s work, for shadows don’t define substance, substance defines shadows.  The Cross was not a brutal display of God’s justice against sin and wrongdoing, but a selfless act of love and rescue intended to show us just how deeply and passionately the Godhead loves the human race.  We saw that justice, according to God, is not punitive, nor is it about the bad guys getting what they deserve.  Justice, in God’s eyes, is about wrong things being made right and about injustices being undone.

Some will undoubtedly object to my conclusions, however, feeling that the subject of God’s wrath has not been properly dealt with and will see my assertions as being nothing more than an attempt to make the Gospel more appealing to the modern thinker.  And so in this chapter we will look at the subject of God’s wrath in a little bit more detail.  We will further examine the question of “who killed Jesus?” as well as whether or not Christ’s death served any sort of satisfactory role in the mind of God.

Let me begin with a little candid moment here, the book that you are holding in your hands right now was originally going to be something much, much different.  This book, which I started writing more than half a decade before its release, originally had as its basis the doctrine of atonement which we have been gently refuting.  I had intended to write a book concerning the Grace of God that resulted from God’s willingness to divert His wrath away from us and onto His Son.  The whole premise of the book was that God was no longer angry at us because His wrath had been dealt with through Jesus’ sacrifice.  I had preached and taught this particular doctrine of the atonement for many, many years, and was very familiar and comfortable with it.  However, in writing a book, your research tends to go a little bit deeper than it does for a 45 minute sermon or teaching.  As I scoured the scriptures, looking for references and proof texts that supported the idea of Jesus suffering the wrath of God in my stead, I found myself coming up curiously empty handed.

I was absolutely baffled, as I had preached and taught this particular view for years and had never had any problem in coming up with source material.  When I really began to compare scripture to scripture though, looking at the many passages relating to the Cross and not just those which fit with my theological views, I began to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I had gotten off track somewhere.  The majority of passages relating to Christ’s death seemed to highlight the fact that He died at the hands of sinful men and not beneath the weight of God’s wrath, and that the role the Father played was in raising Him back to life, not in taking His life away.  This simply did not fit with what I had been taught.

Honestly, this “discovery”, or conclusion that I was beginning to arrive at was greatly upsetting to me.  I had built my life, and a good chunk of my ministry, on the penal substitution view of the atonement, and having to suddenly come to grips with the fact that there was very little scriptural support for the idea was a bit unsettling.  I felt as though my basis for preaching and teaching had been pulled out from beneath me like a proverbial rug, and I was left on the floor, dazed, a bit confused, and with a very sore posterior.

As I sifted through the many and varied scriptures which I had once preached as though they pertained to Christ experiencing hell and judgment on our behalf, one particular metaphor comforted me and seemed to confirm my former view more than any other.  The metaphor to which I’m referring is that of the “cup of God‘s wrath”, which Jesus is said to have been presented with in Gethsemane and drank throughout the course of His suffering.  To me, this idea was paramount to an understanding of the Gospel, and so I dug in to prove its legitimacy.

Let me explain this idea just a little before continuing.  In my former view, I would go to great lengths to prove that Jesus drank the Old Testament cup of wrath mentioned by several of the prophets (Isaiah 51:22, Jeremiah 25:15), and also spoken of in the New Testament in the book of the Revelation (Revelation 14:10).  My contention had always been that this “cup” was a metaphor for the eternal tortures and torments of hell which occasionally spilled over into linear time in the form of national judgments.  In preaching, I would always bring the audience to the night that Jesus ate the Passover meal with His disciples (the “last” supper), and emphasize the fact that one of the four cups of wine used in the Seder was called the “cup of wrath”, and how before drinking from this cup the participants would lessen it by ten drops while reciting the ten plagues that befell Egypt.  Only after having “removed” these drops would the participants drink from the cup.  This represented the idea that Israel was not appointed to suffer the wrath of God as their Egyptian captors did.

I would then fast forward to Gethsemane, where, on the very same night, Jesus wrestled with His Father over whether or not He would drink “the cup”.  I would assert that the cup in question was the wrath portion of the cup represented in the Seder meal, and that Jesus was struggling with whether or not to submit Himself to the white hot anger of God in our stead.  I would preach this with passion and fury, and the room would grow absolutely still and silent as people’s imaginations began to reconstruct this most agonizing of scenes.  My heart was sincere in preaching it, and I truly meant it for the good of my hearers, but I believe that I was sincerely wrong.

I would often supplement my own teaching on the “cup of wrath” with quotes from preachers and theologians of old, such as this one, from F.W. Krummacher:

We know what was in the cup. All its contents would have been otherwise measured out to us by divine justice on account of sin. In the cup was the entire curse of the inviolable law, all the horrors of conscious guilt, all the terrors of Satan’s fiercest temptations, and all the sufferings which can befall both body and soul. It contained likewise the dreadful ingredients of abandonment by God, infernal agony, and a bloody death, to which the curse was attached--all which was to be endured while surrounded by the powers of darkness. 19

Jonathan Edwards, in a sermon entitled “Christ’s Agony”, speaks similarly of what he believed to be the cup of wrath:

The sorrow and distress which his soul then suffered, arose from that lively, and full, and immediate view which he had then given him of that cup of wrath; by which God the Father did as it were set the cup down before him, for him to take it and drink it…The thing that Christ’s mind was so full of at that time was, without doubt…was the dread which his feeble nature had of that dreadful cup, which was vastly more terrible than Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. He had then a near view of that furnace of wrath, into which he was to be cast; he was brought to the mouth of the furnace that he might look into it, and stand and view its raging flames, and see the glowings of its heat, that he might know where he was going and what he was about to suffer. This was the thing that filled his soul with sorrow and darkness, this terrible sight as it were overwhelmed him. For what was that human nature of Christ to such mighty wrath as this? It was in itself, without the supports of God, but a feeble worm of the dust, a thing that was crushed before the moth. None of God’s children ever had such a cup set before them, as this first being of every creature had. 20

You can imagine the feelings that such imagery would evoke in people’s hearts.  They would see Jesus overwhelmed with anguish at the prospect of having to drink this bitter concoction on their behalf, Who then lays aside His own will and chooses to submit Himself to the will and wrath of His Father, despite the agony that it would cause Him.  No doubt, a sincere believer’s heart would be overwhelmed with gratitude (to Jesus) upon believing this!

There is, however, something deeper, and I would even say sinister, going on inside the heart of a person who hears and believes such a message.  While being moved to sympathize with, and feel a great deal of gratitude towards Jesus, their hearts grow subconsciously cold toward the Father.  This happens, I believe, because in this theological paradigm, the “cup of wrath” was originally meant for mankind.  Our Creator had originally dreamed up this awful mixture of death, alienation, torture, and anguish as a just penalty for our sins.  Somewhere in his laboratory of justice He had found the perfect mixture with which to torment those who dared to violate His Law.  In His anger, He was prepared to serve this hellish beverage up to each and every one of us, but decided instead served it to His compassionate Son, who begged Him to spare the human race at the cost of His own life.

Not only does such an idea make the Father look rather sadistic and cruel, it makes Jesus out to be the hero, but the Father the villain.  Some modern proponents of this idea even go so far as to put in their books and teachings phrases similar to “Jesus saved us from God”.  This is an idea so twisted and nonsensical that it boggles the mind.  This view, I believe, causes us to subconsciously draw away from the Father, but near to Jesus.  If prolonged, such a thought could possibly even deaden our hearts toward the Father altogether, as Jesus is made to look like our savior, not from sin or its deadly effects, but from God Himself, Whom we are then expected to lovingly refer to as Abba.  This cup that was filled to the brim with the fermented fury of God, so were told, was originally our portion, but Christ, in compassion, swooped in like Tarzan, took it from our hands and saved us…from God.

How…heroic.

How…bizarre.

How…unbiblical.

Proponents of this doctrine expect us to believe that Christ saved us from the very God who was looking to…well, save us.  We are saved from this God’s white hot aggression, and then expected to look to Him in light of the cross and feel loved and cared for.  It does not take a seminary trained theologian to see the colossal problems that accompany this line of thought.

In my earlier years as a believer and preacher I was steeped in this particular understanding of the atonement.  I firmly believed and proclaimed that Jesus had to imbibe the wine of God’s anger against sin in order for us to be saved from it.  I would imagine and contemplate all of the ingredients mentioned by Krummacher and Edwards, as well as a few that I came up with on my own, sliding down the spiritual throat of the Son of God.  I would envision Him experiencing the anger and justice of an offended God on behalf of a damned humanity; His body ripped to ribbons, and His soul near exhaustion.  I imagined Jesus, roasting alive in an eternity’s worth of hell in a matter of mere hours as He endured the agony of separation from His Father and His vengeance against evil.  I would see the tortured Christ looking up at me in this state, made half mad by having drunk this bitter cup, and saying in barely intelligible words, “I love you, and I did this for you!”  Immediately, my heart would swell with gratefulness…to Jesus!

I remember, however, during one such moment of contemplation, thinking of the Father and wondering what sort of torment He must have experienced in being forced to actively torture His blameless Son in the name of saving a bunch of ungrateful humans.  I could not help but feel that the Father had to resent us for having to punish His Son in such a cruel way.  Try as I might, no matter how I looked at the Father in light of this view of the atonement, I simply could not see Him as loving me unconditionally and accepting me as a son.  There was always something that subconsciously repelled me from Him.  At the same time, however, I would feel greatly loved and accepted by Jesus.  After all, in this view, He is the one member of the Trinity who actually cared enough to save me!  The Father, on the other hand, had been stoking the fires of hell, waiting for me to breathe my last.

This view seemed to be working against the stated New Covenant goal of the Holy Spirit, which is to reveal God’s Fatherhood and cause us to cry out, “Abba!”, meaning Father, or Daddy.

15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

-ROMANS 8:15 (Emphasis mine)

And also:

6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”

-GALATIANS 4:6 (Emphasis mine)

So while the Spirit’s main agenda is to reveal our place as sons and Gods loving disposition towards us as Father, my view of the atonement was having the opposite effect.  Far from seeing God as Abba, I saw Him more as an abuser.  I was beginning to feel alienated and cold towards Him while profoundly grateful and close to Christ.  While it did seem to serve as something of a placebo in convincing me that God was not angry anymore (since I believed that Jesus experienced the pent up wrath of God against sin), it was also causing my heart to become cold towards the very God whom the Spirit was seeking to ignite me with love for.

Such a belief also begs the question of how God, who is by nature love, could have had such violent imaginations in His heart to begin with?  If He is light, and if in Him there is no darkness at all, how could He have authored the awful horrors of the crucifixion?  How could a God of infinite love and compassion possibly dream up such a dreadful and horrendous experience as the punitive version of the atonement?  It leaves one wondering whether or not God’s mood will suddenly change again, transforming Him from Abba to abuser upon seeing our shortcomings and failures.  It does not produce the restful peace that comes from knowing a God of love, but rather distrust, suspicion, and, in my case, subconscious revulsion.

Now, my belief that Christ had “drank” the cup of God’s wrath had been pivotal to my belief in a violent atonement.  Without it there was very little scriptural foundation left for my views to stand on, and after having ignored one verse in particular, which dealt with the cup that Jesus drank, I finally decided to face it head on, regardless of the damage it would do to my belief system.  After doing so, I found myself questioning my original assumptions, and could only watch as my theological house of cards fell to the ground.

Here’s that pesky passage that I had to come to terms with:

35 Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” 36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. 37 They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” 38 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” 39 “We can,” they answered.  Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with,

-MARK 10:35-39 (Emphasis mine)

It began to become abundantly clear to me that whatever this Gethsemane “cup” was, it could not have been the cup of God’s wrath against sin, for the disciples James and John were also destined to drink from it.  Now, unless we’re willing to say that James and John partook of the cup of wrath in a substitutionary fashion we must find another definition for what this “cup” was.  More than likely it was simply a metaphor for the persecution and martyr’s death which they were to experience.  Adam Clarke says of this passage,

According to the prediction of Christ, these brethren did partake of his afflictions: James was martyred by Herod, Acts 12:2; and John was banished to Patmos, for the testimony of Christ…21

Interestingly enough, in saying that they were to drink from His cup of suffering, Jesus put his disciples’ death and suffering on the same level as His own.  If Jesus’ death were the result of the white hot fury of an offended God, surely it would have been of a completely different order than His disciples’.  It would have been borderline blasphemy to have listed it alongside the death and persecution of mere human beings!  If it were actually a cosmic execution, in which God’s compounded wrath was poured out upon a single man it would seem highly irreverent for Christ to say that their sufferings came from the same cup as His!

This understanding inevitably led me to question the whole theory of penal substitutionary atonement, as Jesus’ supposed allusion to the Old Testament cup of wrath was the absolute closest thing that I could find in the scriptures to support the idea that He experienced God’s wrath in my place.

WHO DUNNIT?

It seems that everyone enjoys a good murder mystery.  Be it through novels, movies, or television dramas, everyone loves looking for the clues, piecing together the bits of evidence, and trying to come to a conclusion about “who dunnit?”  After having come to the uncomfortable conclusion that God the Father was not the active ingredient in Christ’s suffering, nor His murderer, I was forced to engage in some detective work of my own, and search the scriptures for the identity of Christ’s murderer.  If the Father was not responsible then who was, and what effect would that have on my view of the atonement?

Let’s take a look at several passages of scripture which, with surprising clarity, spell out the apostolic understanding of who was responsible for the crucifixion:

36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

-ACTS 2:36 (Emphasis mine)

I want you to notice the clear distinction that is drawn between what God did and what Israel did.  Israel, we’re told, crucified Him, but God is the One that made Him Lord (King), and Messiah.

14 You [Israel] disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. 15 You [Israel] killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.

-ACTS 3:14-15 (Emphasis mine)

Once more, Israel is clearly listed as the aggressor, while God is shown as Christ’s savior from death.

We read these similar words in Acts 4:10-11:

10 then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11 Jesus is “‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’

-ACTS 4:10-11 (Emphasis mine)

Again, notice the distinction made between what Israel did, and what God did.  Israel crucified Him, but God raised Him from the dead.  Israel rejected the “stone”, but God made Him the “cornerstone”.   If it was, in fact, God who killed Jesus, crushing Him beneath the weight of His wrath, and if this were such a pivotal doctrine to Christianity, then this would have been the perfect place to insert a statement about it.  Instead we read of rebellious men putting Christ to death, but God as the source of His resurrection and victory.  It is men who rejected Him, but God who resurrected Him and crowned Him King of kings, and Lord of lords.

In Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus gives what we’ve come to call the Parable of the Tenants.  In it, He tells the story of a landowner whose vineyard is ready to be harvested.  The landowner sends several companies of servants to his tenants in order to tell them that it was time to collect the fruit.  However, the tenants acted treacherously towards the servants, stoning, beating, and killing them.  As a last ditch effort, the landowner sent his own son to the tenants, thinking, “They will respect my son,” (verse 37).  However, Jesus tells us that instead, “they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” (verse 39)

There can be little doubt that Jesus was describing Israel and how she had killed and stoned the prophets sent to her, and had as her grand act of treason the murder God’s very own Son.  Jesus, in verses 42-46, confirms this in His interpretation of the parable, which He begins by quoting Psalms 118:22-23, which Peter also quoted in Acts 4:11:

22 The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;

23 the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

-PSALMS 118:22-23

His use of Psalms 118:22-23 makes a clear connection between the parable of the tenants, and Peter’s interpretation of the same passage - a passage that prophetically describes how national Israel would reject and crucify her Messiah, the “stone”, but how God would raise Him up, making Him the “Cornerstone”.  The second line, “the Lord has done this”, is an obvious reference to the establishment of Christ as the “Cornerstone”, which again, makes a clear and undeniable distinction between the work of rebellious Israel and the work of God.  Unbelieving Israel killed Christ, but God the Father raised Him up to life.

Time and again, the apostles are careful to note that it was not God who killed Jesus, but human beings.  The Cross was not God releasing His fury upon Jesus in our place, but a manifestation of men’s rejection of Him as their Messiah.  The Father, on the other hand, is always represented as the One Who gave Christ back His life through resurrection, as is again made clear in the following passage:

30 The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a cross. 31 God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might bring Israel to repentance and forgive their sins.

-ACTS 5:30-31 (Emphasis mine)

Once more, God is not the murderer of Christ, but His Savior from death.  Jesus did not die from imbibing some mystical “cup of wrath”, nor was He crushed beneath the fury of an angry God.  He died at Israel’s hands, but was raised by His Father’s.

In Acts 7:51-52, Stephen, in addressing the Sanhedrin, was just about as clear as one can be as to the identity of Christ’s murderer:

51 “You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit! 52 Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him—

-ACTS 7:51-52 (Emphasis mine)

That is not to say that the Father had no part to play in Christ’s death.  To say that we would also have to ignore several passages which are quite clear on the matter.

Consider the following words from Peter:

22 “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. 23 This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

-ACTS 2:22-24 (Emphasis mine)

See again the clear distinction between the actions of Israel and the actions of God.  We have Israel and her Roman colluders being referred to as “wicked men” who put Christ to death by nailing Him to the Cross.  However, as in the other passages we’ve looked at, we have the work of God the Father standing out as distinct from that of Israel and Rome.  For the Father is said to have accredited Jesus to Israel through miraculous signs and wonders, as well as by raising Him from the dead.  However, in this instance Peter gives us a glimpse into the Father’s role in the death of Christ by adding, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge” (verse 23).  However, the very next verse tells us that it was Israel, “with the help of wicked men”, who “put him to death by nailing him to the cross”.

HE HAS PUT HIM TO GRIEF

Here we finally see what the Father’s role was in the crucifixion:  He foreknew it, along with the rest of the Godhead, and handed Him over to be crucified.  It was not God’s wrath that crushed Jesus, however, but that of evil and unbelieving men.

This helps to define a passage of scripture out of Isaiah that is often put forth as definitive evidence that Christ suffered under the wrath of God:

10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him;

He has put Him to grief.

-ISAIAH 53:10 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

Many use Isaiah’s words as a rebuttal to the argument that Christ’s death was the work of men.  “See”, they say, “the Bible clearly says that the Lord bruised Him!”  What we neglect to see, however, is Isaiah’s use of parallelism in this passage.  Notice, he states that it pleased the Lord to bruise Him, but then follows up with “He has put Him to grief”, or, as the NIV puts it, “cause[d] Him to suffer”.

A parallelism is a common literary device found throughout the scriptures, in which a statement will be made which is then followed up with another statement that is not meant to stand alone, but is intended to give definition to the former statement.  They’re parallels, and mean the same thing.  Take for instance Psalms 24:3:

3 Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord?

Or who may stand in His holy place?

-PSALMS 24:3 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

While it may look as though the Psalmist is asking two separate questions we know He is actually just repeating the same question.  The “hill of the Lord” and “His holy place” are not two separate destinations in the heavens, but are one and the same.  He simply uses “His holy place” to define what He means by “hill of the Lord”.

I know that this is basic Bible 101, so forgive me, but understanding parallelisms is important in interpreting Isaiah 53:10.  When the prophet states that it “pleased the Lord to bruise Him”, he follows up with the parallel statement of, “He has put Him to grief”, or, “He has caused Him to suffer”.  This is important because, as we’ve already discussed, the apostolic witness is that, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” (Acts 2:23).  The testimony of the early church was that Jesus did not suffer beneath the wrath of God, but was handed over to suffer at the hands of men by His Father.  This is precisely what Isaiah is telling us!  The Father did not literally or actively crush His Son, but handed Him over, put Him to grief, and caused Him to suffer.  The Father was not flipping the switch in heaven, but handed Christ over in order to fulfill His plan of redemption.  The Father was not pouring wrath upon His Son but, in agreement with His Son, allowing men to pour their own wrath upon Him.  He caused Him to suffer, but He was not the cause of His suffering.

Just a few verses before declaring that the Father handed the Son over to suffer, Isaiah makes this statement:

4 Surely He has borne our griefs

And carried our sorrows;

Yet we esteemed Him stricken,

Smitten by God, and afflicted.

-ISAIAH 53:4 (Emphasis mine)

While Isaiah states that Christ suffered because He carried our sorrows and sin, humans, so he tells us, mistakenly looked in and assumed that He was being afflicted and punished by God.  The insinuation, however, is that He suffered willingly in order to heal our broken condition.  Verse 10 must be read in light of what Isaiah already said - that Christ did not suffer punishment from God!  That was a human misconception.  Therefore, when we read that “it pleased the Lord to bruise Him”, let us not forget that the bruising occurred when He “put Him to grief”, that is, when He handed Him over to suffer at the hands of men, not when God made Him to drink from the “cup of wrath”.

Clearly, Christ’s death was an act of murder and treason, but was also a part of the Godhead’s divine plan.  It did not take God by surprise, but was, as John the Revelator tells us, an event which took place in eternity, before the foundations of the world (Revelation 13:8).  For the death of the Son of God, while being that of a martyr, was also a cosmic event in which sin and its lethal consequences were destroyed once and for all.  This all took place under Israel’s noses, however, without them being aware of the full implications of their actions.  Satan put it into Judas’s heart to betray Jesus and hand Him over to be crucified (John 13:27), but that which the accuser planned for evil, God spun on its head and used for good.  The accuser wound up “hanging from his own gallows”, as Colossians 2:15 tells us:

15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

-COLOSSIANS 2:15 (Emphasis mine)

There can be very little doubt that the Father played a role in Christ’s death, but not in the way that Krummacher, Edwards, or others have suggested.  Christ physically died the death of a martyr, but His death was also a calculated and deliberate assault against the fall of man.  It was the assassin’s bullet that effectively shattered the accuser’s hold over the minds of men and brought forth a new and glorious creation.

This assertion is confirmed, perhaps, most beautifully in the following passage:

27 The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath. 28 Though they found no proper ground for a death sentence, they asked Pilate to have him executed. 29 When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb. 30 But God raised him from the dead,

-ACTS 13:27-30 (Emphasis mine)

Once more, and at the risk of being redundant, I say it was Israel, in collusion with the governmental authorities, whom the scriptures present as the aggressors.  They actively petitioned for Christ’s execution, and delighted in watching it be carried out.  They crucified Him and put Him to death, but had no clue that, in doing so, they were complicit in the eternal plan of God to save mankind from sin.  Verse 27 tells us that they had no idea who Jesus really was, and so condemned Him, yet their condemnation of Him served to fulfill the salvific prophecies spoken concerning Him.  While they believed themselves to be executing a criminal and a charlatan, they were actually participating in God’s plan to save the human race.  So the whole Godhead was involved in Christ’s suffering, but not as His active tormentor.  God was involved only in the sense that He used Israel’s evil actions to fulfill His eternal plan.

This leads us to several other passages that are often used to portray the Father as the violent agent behind the cross.  Take for instance Zechariah 13:7:

7 “Awake, sword, against my shepherd,

against the man who is close to me!”

declares the Lord Almighty.

“Strike the shepherd,

and the sheep will be scattered,

and I will turn my hand against the little ones.

-ZECHARIAH 13:7

It is pretty clear that the above passage refers to Jesus, as He quotes the latter part of the verse and applies it to His own betrayal and arrest in Matthew 26:31.  However, in the first half of the verse, which Jesus does not specifically quote, we have the “Lord Almighty”, presumably God the Father, calling for the “sword” to “awake...against my shepherd”.  There was a time when I viewed this as God calling for His own wrath to fall upon His Son.  However, no such thing is inferred in the text.  We simply have God calling for the sword, probably a parabolic designation for death, to rise up and strike the Christ, thus setting into motion and fulfilling the eternal plan of the Godhead.  Still, some may cling to the idea that this was God the Father sending the sword of His wrath against His Son.  However, we must remember that the New Testament scriptures have already spelled out for us what Israel’s actions were, and what God’s were - Israel was Christ’s betrayer and murderer, but God was His source of life and resurrection.

Also, if we rewind just one chapter, we have the same prophet Zechariah giving us a vivid prophecy concerning Christ.  In verse 10 of chapter 12, we read:

10 “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

-ZECHARIAH 12:10 (Emphasis mine)

Here we have Israel, who sees the reality of their sin in putting Christ to death.  The apostle John quotes this same passage in relation to the crucifixion in John 19:37.  However, I want to draw your attention to something very important here - when it is written, “they will look upon me, the one they have pierced”, we must identify who the “me” in question is.  If we return to verse one of the same chapter, Zechariah tells us clearly:

1 The word of the LORD concerning Israel.  The LORD...declares:

-ZECHARIAH 12:1 (Emphasis mine)

Anytime we come across the word “LORD”, in all capital letters, the Hebrew word is actually Yahweh, which is the Old Testament designation for God the Father.  From those opening lines onward, all of the “I” and “me” statements are being spoken directly by God the Father.  Therefore, the “me” who was “pierced” by unbelieving Israel was not merely the Son, but Yahweh Himself, who, through the person of Jesus, willingly subjected Himself to death and torture at the hands of His own creation.  The Cross was not an event in which Christ suffered apart from Yahweh, and most certainly not at the hands of Yahweh!  Instead the whole Godhead, through the incarnation of Jesus, subjected themselves to man’s hatred and experienced the worst that they could dish out.

We see this clearly, as Yahweh changes the personal “me” to “him” in Zachariah 12:10:

10 They will look on me (Yahweh), the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him (Christ) as one mourns for an only child…

-ZECHARIAH 12:10 (Emphasis mine)

This shows us that while it was Jesus and not the Father who was physically hanging on the Cross, Yahweh Himself partook of the agony of the experience.  If the Father’s wrath was the active ingredient in the crucifixion, are we to believe that He also poured it out upon Himself?  For if Yahweh suffers with Christ, but at the same time fuels the torturous experience with His own wrath, He would have to be actively torturing Himself.  Is it not utter nonsense to assume that the Father, in addition to pouring His wrath upon His Son, also poured it upon Himself?

Of course it is.

God handed Christ over to be crucified in order to fulfill His divine purposes.  He called for the sword of death to awake and strike the shepherd, but was Himself united to the Son throughout the whole ordeal.  We are never presented with a picture of God as hiding up in the Heavens while He pours wrath upon a Christ from Whom He has separated Himself.  What we see is a perfect union between Father and Son, who both suffer at the hands of men through the excruciating pain of the Cross.

As Paul beautifully says in 2 Corinthians 5:19:

19 God was in Christ, reconciling the World to Himself, not counting men’s sins against them.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:19 (Emphasis mine)

We are never left with a feeling of separation existing between Father and Son in the work of the Cross, but of a union and a togetherness, a co-suffering, and a joint venture into the depths of human violence.  God was not separate from Jesus, firing wrath rounds at Him from His heavenly sniper’s nest, but was perfectly united to Him, willfully experiencing the worst that men could dish out.  Yes, it was the plan of God for these events to unfold in order to destroy sin through Christ’s flesh, but it was not the Father’s wrath that Christ was enduring as He was clearly a participant in the experience, Himself.  This brings us to an interesting and crucial juncture in this whole idea of the atonement, for if the Cross was the Godhead collectively enduring the hatred of men through the incarnate Christ, what exactly was the point?  If it was not about an offended God having His juridical itches scratched, then why willfully suffer at men’s hands?  How could there be any redemptive value in such an act?

Let us remember that the human race had lost sight of the nature of God.  The knowledge of good and evil had caused man to see God in an improper light, and with the advent of humanistic religion, God had all but lost a proper representation in the earth.  Israel, who was intended to be His “light to the Gentiles”, had become a nation lost and buried beneath the rubble of Pharisaic rules and tradition, and the Judaism of Jesus’ day looked almost nothing like that which was given to Moses.  Adam’s innocent knowledge of a God who enjoyed taking walks in Gardens and delighted in allowing His children to share in the process of creation had been almost completely lost, and what the world was left with was an image of angry rule master who was impossible to please.

As we’ve already discussed, even the Pharisees, those whom the Jews perceived as being the most righteous of men, had secretly disconnected their hearts from the Lord’s, all while maintaining an external facade of religiosity.  Jesus, however, declared them to be little more than whitewashed tombs inhabited by dead men’s bones.  The very men who had assumed themselves to be Yahweh’s representatives had long ago died on the inside, having nothing left to feed to the masses but dust and decay.

Not only so, but it is also suggested that men had become “enemies in their minds because of evil behavior” (Col 1:22).  In Romans 8:7 Paul spoke of the “the sinful mind” that “is hostile to God”.  Humanity had become so warped, twisted, and corrupt in their thinking that God was seen as a hostile, enemy force.  The human race had barricaded themselves within the isolated fortresses of their own souls, seeking refuge from this God whom he hated.  Man saw himself at war with God, and as a result, had very little interest in seeking out a relationship with Him.

What was God to do to show such a deceived race how deeply He loved them?  How could He possibly convince such a hostile people that the war in which they were engaged was imagined, and one sided?  God’s solution was to become one with us!  It was to unite Himself to the human race and place Himself on our level.  As a man, He willingly laid aside His divine attributes and allowed us to arrest Him, shackle Him, and mercilessly beat Him as we would any other criminal or miscreant.  As we’ve seen, the Bible describes Christ suffering not at the hands of His Heavenly Father, but at the hands of mere men.  What is more, it is not only Christ that suffered, but Yahweh, His Father as well.

God, in the form a helpless man, a servant obedient unto death, allowed us, with all of our hatred and anger, to put Him on trial and do our worst to Him.  In light of this truth, the writer of Hebrews encourages us to behold the Cross, and look upon the evil treatment Christ received as an encouragement for us when we face similar things.  If His death were the result of God’s wrath then certainly it would not be put on the same level as persecution from ungodly people.  However, Christ’s death is written of in terms of a hostile death that occurred at the hands of mere human beings:

3 For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself...

-HEBREWS 12:3 (Emphasis mine)

I want you to stop for just a moment and read those words again.  Don’t rush through them, don’t try to hurry along.  Just stop, and read them again:

3 For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself...

-HEBREWS 12:3 (Emphasis mine)

Who exactly is the “Him” that we are to “consider” here?  It is not a mere human being, but God the Son and His eternal Father!  We are talking about Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, and the active agent behind the creation (Colossians 1:16); the One Who upholds all things by His Word (Hebrews 1:3).  We are talking about a God who can accidentally create galaxies through a casual exhalation, and yet here He is, enduring hostility from human beings whom He exhaled into existence!  He, the potter, is allowing the clay to put Him on trial and judge Him as a criminal.  The Creator endured the hostility and hatred of the creature, knowing that at any moment He could turn them, and anything existing in the same universe, into non matter with the mere batting of an eyelash.  The human race’s eternal Father, the God whose breath is their source of life, asphyxiates while under their watch.

What a sight, what a spectacle to behold!  Surely angels ceased all activity and stood silent, for God had climbed off of His throne, disrobed, and humbled Himself before the human race.  The Apostle Peter was shocked that such a One would stoop so low so as to wash his disciple’s feet, how shocked then must he have been when this same Jesus allowed Himself to be abused and bloodied by the hands of His own creation?  John the Baptist thought himself unworthy to loosen the straps of His sandals, and yet here was God in the flesh, being abused and manhandled in the most nightmarish of ways by those whose lives He’d dreamed into reality.

This is not just important, but literally crucial for us to understand, for when we see Christ’s work as being something demanded by the Father in which Jesus had little or no say, we miss the hugeness of God’s act of humbling Himself before us.  Remember, the Cross was the eternal plan of the Godhead, but Christ could have chosen the human path in Gethsemane and pushed aside the cup of death and suffering.  Instead, He chose it, for it was not the uncontrollable wrath of God against human disobedience He faced, but a decision to willfully suffer at our hands.

Consider the words of Jesus in John 10:18:

18 No one takes it [life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.

-JOHN 10:18 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus plainly stated that no one, including the Father, took His life.  He chose to lay it down.  Again and again in John 10, Jesus stressed the fact that He went to death willingly, not because a cosmic court demanded justice, but because He is a good shepherd Who cares for the lives of His sheep.  In truth, even though it is evil and depraved men who do Him violence, it is He who chose it in order to show us that He has the heart of a shepherd, and would not abandon His sheep to death under any circumstances.  The Father does not kill Jesus in our place, Jesus chose to place His life into the hands of men so that they might do Him harm.

Why?

That’s the all-important question, isn’t it?  Why?  Why would an all-powerful God let Himself be treated in such barbaric ways by His own creation?  What is the point of Him “laying His life down”?

Thankfully, He makes it no mystery:

13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

-JOHN 15:13 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus tells us that the greatest form of love, a form of love that we as humans can understand and relate to, is a love in which one friend lays down His life for another.  Were it demanded by the high court of Heaven it would cease to be an act of love, and would become a cold and clanking legality.  Were it nothing but retributive justice, it would not move our hearts.  But this sacrifice was justice as God saw it.  It was an innocent man laying down His life in defense and protection of another.  If this were nothing more than a sacrificial victim being forced to fulfill a legal obligation, the love story would be drained dry of emotion.  But when God, wrapped in warm, pulsating human flesh, chooses to call you a friend, and willingly lays down His life for you, it sends a message – He really loves and cherishes you, and does not simply express His love verbally, but takes it all the way, suffering in ways that would have been formerly foreign to Him as a spirit (John 4:24).  He willingly chose to possess nerve endings that would scream for relief in the hands of His human tormentors, simply so that He could show the full extent of His love for them.  He made His own murder a possibility, simply so that His love for us could be revealed.

The apostle John writes of Christ’s death:

16 This is how we know what real love is: Jesus gave his life for us...

-1 JOHN 3:16 (NCV, Emphasis mine)

Christ’s death occurred for the express purpose of revealing to us what love looks like.  We knew what heroism and sacrifice looked like, but it typically involved a good man dying for another good man.  That at least made a little bit of sense.  But a perfect man dying for sinners?  That was something unheard of and beyond remarkable.  But God takes it a step further, for in Christ we have a good God laying down His life for sinners.  That, in the fallen theology of man, would have been the absurdity of absurdities.  But God laid things out in such a way that when He died we would see the full ramifications of what was taking place and be absolutely awestruck at the sight of His self-giving love.

As Paul says in Romans 5:8:

8…God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-ROMANS 5:8 (Emphasis mine)

For what purpose did Christ die?  To reveal His angry Father’s wrath?  Or to reveal His passionate love?

As if there were any way to miss the message, let me say it loud and clear:  It was to reveal His Father’s passionate love!

But just how far was God willing to go in order to show His love?  Apparently He was willing to go as far as it took to convince us that He was not the monster we’d imagined Him to be.  He does not simply allow us to put Him to death, but allows Himself to suffer, be denied justice, and be tortured by us on the way to His execution.  He allows us to insult Him with tongues that He created, and with vocal chords that He fashioned:

23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.

-1 PETER 2:23 (Emphasis mine)

Peter tells us that we hurled insults in His direction and caused Him to suffer.  Think about that!  None of these things would have been possible had He not made them possible through His incarnation.  Had Christ not possessed the mind and nerve endings of a man, neither our insults nor our abuses would have brought Him harm, either physically or emotionally.  Yet He willfully took on the hardware required to experience emotional and physical pain, simply so that His suffering would be real and not imaginary.  So that when we denied Him justice, and caused Him unspeakable pain, the trauma would have been real enough that forgiveness would have been the last thing we would have expected.

However, after having experienced the worst of our hatred and venom, He chose the high road and offered the very opposite of what we are primed to expect.  Forgiveness!  When He just as easily could have, and probably should have, given us anything but forgiveness, it was the only response He even considered.  When the human race insulted Him and degraded Him, He chose not to retaliate.  When we caused Him to suffer immense pain and torture, He made no threats.  There were no promises of “one day you’ll be sorry”, He simply closed His mouth, and allowed us to do our worst.

If it were you or I being treated thusly for a crime we did not commit, certainly we’d raise quite a fuss.  We’d spit back at those who spat on us.  We would return their cursing with some choice curses of our own.  We would gnash our teeth at the angry crowd, imagining what violence we would inflict upon them if the tables were turned.  We would use our very last breath to release the foulest insults we could come up with in their direction.  The last thing on our minds would be forgiveness and mercy.  And yet our God humbly scanned the crowd with his bruised and bloodied eyes, and in words barely distinguishable as human breathed this heartbreaking, but healing prayer to His Father:

34 Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing...

-LUKE 23:34 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus and His Father had placed themselves right smack dab in the center of our world, submitting themselves to our anger and violence.  They allowed us to release upon them all of the hatred, all of the enmity, and all of the evil stored up in our hearts against them, and then, in the ultimate act of reconciliation, turned the tables on us and chose to audibly and publicly forgive us.  The last thing that man, who saw himself as God’s enemy, expected was for God to endure the worst treatment that we could dish out and then offer forgiveness to His persecutors.  A lost and terribly confused humanity was absolutely floored when Jesus, in essence, declared:

“Look, I’m not like you!  I don’t hate you, and I have not come to hurt you or to inflict pain upon you.  Even now, you are completely unaware of what you’re actually doing.  I take your ignorance into account, and understand.  I forgive you!  You’re innocent!  I’m not holding your sins against you!  Surely, if I were your enemy, this would be the time for me to flex my muscles, and confirm your suspicions.  But I’ve come to show you the opposite.  And so once more, hear me, and hear me clearly – I FORGIVE YOU!  I LOVE YOU!  THERE IS NO WAR!”

God the Father, in Jesus Christ, revealed to the world that He was not interested in playing our games of revenge and retribution.  He wasn’t interested in sinking anyone’s battleship or engaging us in hand to hand combat.  He’s not our enemy, and He never has been.  This is where the real work of reconciliation took place.  Not reconciliation in the sense that God had finally found a way to vent His anger through the death of His Son - that is a very warped view of what it means to be reconciled to God.  As George MacDonald wrote, “There is not one word in the New Testament about reconciling God to us; it is we that have to be reconciled to God.” 22

You see, the hatred, wrath, anger and enmity were all coming from our side of the fence, not God’s.  He did not need to be convinced that we were OK.  He loved us, and had been reaching for and pursuing us throughout the ages.  It was we who needed to be reconciled to Him by seeing that He was never our enemy to begin with, but had loved us all along.

My friends, through the cross, God has once and for all deflated the myth that He was against us.  He loves us, and to such a degree that He willingly endured our violence in order that, on the other side of it, He might reveal that He was not interested in revenge, but restored fellowship.

The Cross, in addition to being the destruction of sin and death, also serves as the ultimate demonstration of divine love extended towards a hostile humanity.  God found us when we hated Him and saw Him as our enemy, and proved that He was only ever interested in friendship and forgiveness.

The Cross was not about Christ consuming the Father’s cup of wrath, but about the Father and the Son enduring our wrath in order to show us that enmity, strife, and violence were the products of our fallen minds, and not things that God had in His heart for us.  His heart was for restored relationship, and so He humbled Himself in order to show us the folly of our hatred and the fury of His Love.  The only cup involved in the death of Christ is the cup of friendship, offered to us through His reconciling work.

The Cross is the place where God struck a peace treaty with us, assuring us that He was forever in our corner.  It was there that He reconciled the world to Himself by not counting the sins of men against them!  If when looking upon the Cross we are tempted to see the Father in an unfavorable light but Jesus in a favorable light, we’re seeing things incorrectly.  Jesus did not save us from the Father, but with the Father.  He not only saved us from sin but from the warped perception of reality that sin imparted to us.  He revealed His Father in a light that the world had all but lost.  He showed us once for all that God is not angry at us or needing to be appeased, but that He is fiercely loyal and devoted to His creation, and though we misunderstood and mistreated Him, He would stop at nothing to show us just how much He cares for us.

5

OBJECTS OF WRATH?

Were We Born to Burn?

“…God’s judgment is not retributive, vindictive, or cruel.  God’s judgment is not meant to ‘even the score’ or ‘restore his honor’ but to recall and reclaim his creation.  God’s judgment is God’s desperate attempt to demonstrate his love, address human sinfulness, and set the world right.  But God’s creatures remain free to choose against love and their own best interests.  Their choices lead inevitably to their judgment.”23

-John E. Phelan

“Until a person believes the Gospel and receives Christ, the wrath of God is magnetically drawn to their disobedient and godless life.”  Or…at least that was what I once taught.  Unbelievers were little more than “wrath magnets”; targets of God’s vengeance until conversion.  God was incapable of being anything but displeased with them, and they could, therefore, expect nothing but judgment from Him.  Anyone who’d yet to “repeat after me” and walk that long and lonely mile to the altar was subject to cruel treatment from Jesus’ daddy.  They were sinners in the hands of an angry God.

But thank God I was wrong.

We have been studying the atonement and death of Christ in the last two chapters, and have said repeatedly that the Cross was not about God venting His wrath upon His Son in our place.

Firstly, we established that the Cross was an eternal work that occurred outside of time, and worked its way toward us in history.  God’s purpose in bringing this event to pass was to do away with the alien entity of sin, destroying it completely in the death of His Son, as well as defeating death itself.

Then, secondly, we discussed the fact that the Bible does not describe the death of Christ as being an act of God, but an act of evil men which was predestined and used in order to accomplish His eternal purpose of saving the human race.  It is the unbelieving sector of national Israel, in collusion with Rome, who are labeled as being the murderers of Christ.  God on the other hand, is always credited with His resurrection and glorification.  The Cross, as we discussed in the last chapter, was God thrusting Himself into our hands, allowing us do to Him whatever we wished, and then, when we had vented all of our anger and rage upon Him, He looked back at us and, to our utter astonishment, forgave us!  Through His sacrificial death, He revealed to us the truth about Himself.  He showed that He was not a record keeping, rule master, but a God who forgives the worst of the worst, even when they’re ignorant of having committed any wrongs to begin with.  He is not a God seeking vengeance, but one Who is “hell-bent” on reconciliation.

The overreaching theme of the last two chapters has been that God was not punishing Christ in man’s place, as such an act was unnecessary in order for our salvation to be secured.  Salvation is not about being rescued from God, but being rescued from death, sin, and the self-imposed alienation brought on by sin.  The problem was never that God could not relate to man because of the abundance of His wrath against him.  The solution, then, was not that another needed to stand in for us, receiving God’s wrath in our place.  This perceived problem and its solution are nothing more than presumptions on the part of man, and are concepts that would have been one hundred percent foreign to both Christ’s and the apostle’s first century audience.

There are, however, still a number of New Testament passages that deal with the subject of God’s wrath, and in a book that attempts to tackle the sensitive subject of penal substitutionary atonement (the belief that Christ suffered under the wrath of God in our stead), such scriptures cannot be overlooked.  In the following paragraphs we will work our way through several of the main New Testament passages (minus those from the book of Revelation, as those will have to wait for another book) dealing with God’s wrath, and reexamine them in light of the non-retributive view of the atonement we’ve been discussing.  This will be very far from an exhaustive study on the subject of God’s wrath, and I won’t even presume to call it thorough, but we will, nonetheless, attempt to tackle several of the more difficult “wrath passages”, and try to make sense of them in light of the Father revealed in Jesus.

WHAT IS THE WRATH OF GOD?

Right up front, the main question that needs to be asked and addressed is what is the wrath of God, exactly?  And more specifically, what is the wrath that the New Testament writers had in mind when they wrote?  This is of utmost importance, because far too often we overlook the first century context of the New Testament scriptures, and mistakenly believe that their cultural and theological beliefs were the same as our own.  In many cases, I believe we have taken words meant for one generation, and have sought to apply them to all subsequent generations.  While certainly, the truth of the Gospel extends throughout all of history, there are certain ideas that were peculiar to the time period of the first century, as both Christ and the apostles indicate as much in their words and teachings.  Noted New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, says of the mindset of first century Jews and Christians:

They were not, in other words, understanding themselves as living in a narrative which said, ‘All humans are sinful and will go to hell; maybe God will be gracious and let us go to heaven instead and dwell with him; how will that come about?  Let’s look at our scriptures for advance clue.’ 24

In short, the first century Jewish and Christian mindset was almost entirely different from the modern, Western view.  They did not see themselves as living in a world in which the entire mass of humanity was doomed to burn in the flames of God’s wrath, unless, of course, God Himself intervened.  This was just simply not an idea that was native to their thinking.  There are no scriptures in the Old Testament showing that the Jews saw themselves as doomed to suffer under God’s wrath and that Messiah’s coming would be for the purpose of vicariously taking it upon Himself.  No, both the Old and New Testament scriptures concerning the Messiah deal with Him in a Kingly role, and yes, sometimes as a suffering servant (as in the case of Isaiah 53), but even these portraits never indicate that His suffering is the result of a vicarious bearing of bearing of the wrath of God.

These ideas developed slowly in the centuries that followed the apostolic age, and trace their origins back to ideas promulgated by St. Augustine of Hippo.  Much later, similar ideas were popularized by the 11-12th century bishop of Canterbury, Anselm, in his work Cur Deus Homo?, or, Why the God Man?  In it, he paints a picture of God as a king whose honor is offended through men’s sins, and so, in his kingly justice, requires satisfaction, which ultimately comes through the death of Christ.  His theory has come to be called the Satisfaction Theory.  Though Anselm does not present God as the drunk-on-his-own-wrath type spoken of by modern children of his theory, his ideas did serve as a springboard for the reformers, who amped things up a bit and gave us what are now the theological staples of evangelical Christianity.

Theologian Michael Hardin remarks on Anselm:

Anselm finished editing this essay while sitting with the Pope on the battlefields of the Crusade.  The Christian/Muslim conflict was in full swing.  Life was tenuous.  It is no wonder that Anselm wanted order and hoped that Jesus’ death somehow brought that order.  Anselm said that Jesus was a substitute for us.  He then leapt to the conclusion that Jesus’ death was necessary because we could not balance the scales of God’s justice.  Is this conclusion correct? ...From Anselm until the present, much discussion of Jesus’ death has been conducted with reference to the Janus-faced God.  This is precisely where medieval atonement theory breaks with the New Testament, for the apostolic church did not relate Jesus’ death to a wrathful deity.  They say the opposite… 25

The idea of an angry God requiring payment or satisfaction through the death of another is just simply not a Biblical one.  While such ideas may have been the main theological staples of your own Christian upbringing, they were most certainly not the main staples throughout Church history.  The Eastern Orthodox tradition (arguably the oldest of all Christian traditions), for instance, has never viewed the atonement as dealing with the wrath of God against man, but have always viewed it as a healing work in which man is restored to spiritual health and wholeness through Christ.  We simply cannot afford to make the mistake of believing that there is only one way to look at the concept of God’s wrath and the atonement, and that that one way just happens to be the one that we grew up believing.

Remember, the first century Jewish and Christian audience of the apostles and Jesus, did not see man’s main problem as being that he was under the wrath of God, and sliding down a greased pole to hell - barring divine intervention, of course.  The first century view was one that dealt with a concern for God to put wrong things right in regards to national Israel’s covenantal role, and for Him to establish His Kingdom on the earth in order to bless the nations, as promised to Abraham.  Sure, there was the problem of sin, which was something that the first century audience would have been very well acquainted with, but it was a view that would probably be shockingly different from the one most hold to today.  For the idea was not that God was universally offended and angry at man’s sin, and consequently obliged to serve them up one “hell” of an afterlife experience.  (Pun very much intended)  This view, however absent it was from the first century narrative, has unfortunately become embedded in our modern theology, and is rarely, if ever, questioned.  God is portrayed as being angry with the sins of mankind, beginning with Adam, and requiring payment.  The only solution is for Jesus to step in and pay the bill.  Then, voila, God goes from angry to happy, and we’re saved!  Such a view would have been very strange and foreign to the first century mind – the four Gospel’s, as well as the epistles’, original, target audience.  With these things in mind, let’s continue looking at the issue of God’s wrath.

THE WRATH OF GOD

God’s wrath often gets spoken of as though it were only one specific thing.  Our definition of it has become very narrow, and we tend to look at it as dealing with either an eternity in hell, or God’s angry responses to human sin via natural disasters or other calamities.  However, the two Greek words translated as wrath in the New Testament, orge and thymos, simply speak of displeasure or powerful emotion.  For this reason, whatever this thing called God’s wrath is, it is something that can be manifested in a variety of ways, and should not be viewed through the narrow lens of Western theology.  Wrath is not a euphemism for hell or for cataclysmic events that God conjures up in His anger, but describes a powerful emotion that sometimes arises as a result of displeasure, and can manifest in a variety of ways.

Take for instance the idea of God’s wrath presented by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:18:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

-ROMANS 1:18 (Emphasis mine)

The wrath in question is said to be being revealed from Heaven against the Godless behavior of people who “suppress the truth by their wickedness”.  What does wrath look like in this instance?  Paul writes:

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.

-ROMANS 1:24-30 (Emphasis mine)

Three separate times, the Apostle Paul tells us that God, in His wrath, gave these people over to ungodliness.  We are told specifically that He gave them over to 1.)  sinful desires, 2.) shameful lusts, and 3.) a depraved mind.  Undoubtedly, this is the wrath spoken of in verse 18, which he states was being revealed from Heaven.  In this case, God’s wrath looked less like lightning bolts or fiery furnaces, and more like Him allowing men to go their own way while sin ran its course in their lives.  Wrath, according to Paul, looked like a lifestyle that men lived in response to God allowing them to go their own way.  They became subject to their human desires, and this, according to Paul, is at least one aspect of “wrath”.

Stephen Travis, in his book Christ and the Judgment of God: The Limits of Divine Retribution in New Testament Thought, writes:

People abandon God; therefore he allows them to experience the consequences of their choices….People are given up to a condition which is not a freshly imposed judgment but already exists in the choices they have made. 26

This “giving up”; this allowing of people to “experience the consequences of their choices” is, in the theology of Paul, the wrath of God.  This “wrath”, however, is not without purpose.  It is not some arbitrary manifestation of God’s displeasure that serves no greater purpose than to punish.  No, everything that God does, even the expression of His wrath, is for the purpose of redemption or else He could not rightly be called love.

According to Paul in Romans 11:32:

32 …God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.  -ROMANS 11:33 (Emphasis mine)

You see, God’s wrath is never an end in itself.  There is always a redemptive endgame that He has in mind!  He allowed men to exhaust themselves beneath the weight of sin and follow the steady digression laid out in Romans 1, for the express purpose of showing them an incomprehensible mercy through the work of Jesus Christ.  Both Jew and Gentile are proven to be in the same boat prior to Christ, as both are under the power of sin, and in desperate need of deliverance.  Even the Jews, with their Torah, Temple, and sacrificial system, were bound to the power of sin and death and wholly unable to save themselves.  This, however, served in favor of God’s revealed righteousness, for He showed that sin is no obstacle to His plan of redemption.  In handing men over to their own devices, God successfully revealed the single handed nature of salvation.  We are shown to be powerless, and unable to lift ourselves out from beneath the weight of sin.  But Christ, in obedience to His Father’s loving plan, saved us from its presence, and through the manifestation of His wrath, revealed that salvation is all His work, not ours.  God’s handing over of all people to disobedience worked for the purpose of Him being able to have mercy on that same all.  Even in light of humanity’s horrendous crimes and sins, God had mercy!

Mercy and salvation were the endgame of God’s wrath.

C. Baxter Kruger writes:

Wrath is not the opposite of love.  Wrath is the love of God in action, in opposing action.  It is precisely because the Triune God has spoken an eternal Yes! To the human race, a Yes! To life and fullness and joy for us, that the Fall and its disaster is met with a stout and intolerable No!  ‘This is not acceptable.  I did not create you to perish in the darkness, not you.’ 27

Wrath then, in this sense anyways, occurred to position the human race to see their own profound need for salvation.  The purpose behind this positioning was to allow us to see the thing we needed saving from.  Wrath is God’s love for the human race in action.  It drew the problem of sin out into the light of day, and then, once it had a clear shot, took it out once and for all.  God’s love is the assassin’s bullet that undid the fall, but wrath was the means by which His target was drawn into the open for all to see.

Setting that aside for the moment, however, what I want for you to understand is that wrath does not always equal fire and brimstone.  Sometimes it simply speaks of God allowing a person go their own way so that sin can run its foul course in their lives.  Three times Paul ties the wrath of God to the idea of God handing someone over to their own desires.  Surely, this is not the only manner in which Paul speaks of wrath, but it is how the word is introduced in his epistle to the Romans.

This same Paul, upon seeing the abundance of pagan worship in Lystra, says of God and His dealings with men:

16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way.

-ACTS 14:16 (Emphasis mine)

Similarly, when commenting on the abundance of idolatry in the city of Athens, Paul says:

29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

-ACTS 17:29-30 (Emphasis mine)

I believe that Paul, in both passages above, is speaking of the same manifestation of wrath written of in Romans 1.  It was something that was expressed through the way that men and women lived their lives, through the worship of false gods, and a steady digression into sinful and immoral behaviors.  God, as an expression of His redemptive wrath, had allowed the nations to go their own way, while overlooking their ignorance.  In Christ, however, He reveals mercy to all men, and instead of allowing the nations to self-destruct, sends His prophets and messenger to them bearing Good News.

On this note, I want to address a certain designation that is often misused to describe people whom believers view as being in line for a cosmic whooping; individuals whom the scriptures describe as being “objects of wrath”.

OBJECTS OF WRATH

Does this term, objects of wrath, really mean that there are certain people upon whom the red laser-scope of God’s fury sits fixed?  Is everyone from the disinterested housewife, to the doubting preacher, to the atheistic astrophysicist really nothing more than an “object of wrath”?  Yes, we find the term used in certain Bible translations, but does it really mean that certain people are nothing more to God than wrath magnets?  We often talk negatively about the objectification of people, complaining that some men see women only as sex objects, etc…, but how much more can a person be objectified than to be stripped of their identity and referred to coldly as an “object of wrath”?

How degraded must nonbelievers feel when those claiming to be “God’s people” look right past their hurts, broken dreams, and struggles, and instead slap a label on them like “object of wrath”?  One of the problems with labels is that when we place one on an individual, they lose their individuality.  They cease to be a warm, living being with a heart and a soul, and get absorbed into what we perceive to be true about the group to which we’ve assigned them.  Everything that makes them a human being gets swept aside, and we are only able to see what the label we’ve placed upon them suggests.  A label like “objects of wrath” comes with a lot of baggage, and I personally can’t think of anything more hurtful than being stripped of my humanity and instead called an “object” at which God is angry, and is planning deep fry!  Surely, if God is love, He sees past outward actions and into the heart!  Yet, this label portrays God in the most horrible of ways, and suggests to the soul that He is capable of overlooking the deep, inner wounds of a person, and fixates only on punishing wrongs.

We just simply can’t afford to use such language any longer if, in fact, we’ve been using it wrong.  Let’s take a look at this term in light of Paul’s description of wrath in Romans 1, and see what conclusions we come to.

The first instance of the term “objects of wrath” appears in Romans 9:22, and is surrounded on either side by some of the most controversial passages in the Bible; passages which, fear not, we will not be able to dive in to this time around.

Paul writes:

22 What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

-ROMANS 9:22-24 (Emphasis mine)

In context, Paul is discussing God’s “using” of Esau and Pharaoh in order to accomplish His divine purposes.  The suggestion made by Paul is that both individuals were “objects of God’s wrath”, whose evil actions were used for the purpose of bringing His plans to pass.  Yes, we’re told that they were “prepared for destruction”, but this does not mean that God’s wrath was fixed on them like a heat seeking missile from the womb, nor does it have anything to do with “hell”, or wrath in that sense of the word.  The idea of eternal judgment or damnation is altogether absent from the context of the term’s usage here.  Most likely, it simply refers to the fact that God, in the mystery of His will, foresaw and, perhaps, ordained, the crooked paths that these men would follow, and chose to use their evil as a means through which His purposes would be fulfilled.  The “wrath” in question here is far closer to the wrath spoken of in Romans 1, which concerned God giving sinful men over to their own desires.  The “objects of wrath” spoken of by Paul in Romans 9 are likewise people whose sin was allowed to run wild while God secretly used it for His glory, similarly to how Christ’s Jewish and Roman betrayers’ evil was used to save the world!

For instance, in verse 12 it is suggested that God foresaw the paths that Esau, the firstborn in a set of twins, would take.  By virtue of being the firstborn, Esau was destined to inherit a larger portion of the estate, and to become the leader of his family following his father’s death.  However, in Genesis 25:23, God says to the boys’ mother, “The older will serve the younger”.  The full text takes it beyond mere servant hood, and shows that the difference between the two boys would have national implications:

23 …“Two nations are in your womb,

and two peoples from within you will be separated;

one people will be stronger than the other,

and the older will serve the younger.”

-GENESIS 25:23 (Emphasis mine)

In saying that the oldest (Esau), would serve the younger (Jacob), God was actually indicating that the nation which Jacob would become would be greater than the nation that Esau would become.  As we well know, Jacob’s name is later changed to Israel, and he is considered one of Israel’s patriarchs, or fathers.  In Romans 9:13 we see that Jacob’s influence would outweigh Esau’s due to the fact that God said “Jacob I have loved but Esau I have hated”.  Now, don’t get things mixed up here, obviously, God did not just arbitrarily choose to hate Esau for no good reason.  God most likely foresaw the Godless path that Esau would choose to trod, as indicated by the writer of Hebrews:

16 See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. 17 Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done.

-HEBREWS 12:16-17 (Emphasis mine)

God saw Esau’s future course, which was one of Godlessness, culminating in a disdain for his sacred birth right, and instead chose Jacob to carry on the Abrahamic mantle.  The “hatred” spoken of here refers to God choosing one over the other in order to fulfill His purposes, and not to Him playing favorites, or to possessing a literal hatred for one of His creations.  This, of course, shows the sovereignty of God in choosing Jacob over Esau, even when Esau was the most logical choice, being that he was the legal heir of the Abrahamic birthright.  However, God, in seeing the course of Esau’s life, and choosing to allow him to go his own way in disobedience, sovereignly chose the second born over the first.  The nature of the “wrath” in question here is summed up in verse 18:

18 Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.

-ROMANS 9:18 (Emphasis mine)

Remember, in verse 22 Paul speaks of “objects of wrath”, but in verse 23 he speaks of “objects of mercy”.  The mercy, in context, is the choosing of one for a noble purpose, while the wrath is the hardening of a person, which also serves the purposes of God, as in the case of Pharaoh, whom Paul speaks of in verse 17.  Wrath, in this passage, has absolutely nothing to do with damnation, fire, or brimstone, but is more closely connected with the wrath already spoken of in chapter 1; the wrath that looked like God turning a person over to their sins because of their rejection of Him.  Clearly, both Pharaoh and Esau turned from God in one way or another, and so He handed them over to hardening, or to their own ungodliness.  In turning them over, however, He used their actions to establish Israel, the nation through whom His eternal purposes would be fulfilled.  Paul’s point in telling these stories is to show that Israel, like Pharaoh and Esau, had experienced a hardening of the heart – wrath – for the purpose of bringing God’s eternal plan of saving the Gentiles to pass:

25 I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, 26 and in this way all Israel will be saved.

- ROMANS 11:25-26 (Emphasis mine)

He continues in verses 30-32:

30 Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, 31 so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. 32 For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

- ROMANS 11:30-32 (Emphasis mine)

Paul’s point, I believe, is that the Gentiles were once objects of wrath, that is, they were handed over to their sins while Israel was established as a nation.  Now, however, because of Israel’s disobedience and hardening, they, meaning the Gentiles, have received mercy.  God will once more turn things around though, and will use that same Gentile church, who was given mercy because of Israel’s becoming an “object of wrath”, to extend mercy back to Israel.  In this way, all who are of the true Israel, that is the Jew and Gentile new creation, will be saved!  The wrath in question, once more, was not hell or damnation, but a hardening of the heart and a handing over to sin and the consequences of said sin for a season, which God will use in order to bring about His eternal purposes.

So an object of wrath is not one to whom God’s wrath is magnetically drawn or some sort of “feeder fish” genus of man, who is bred for the sole purpose of being punished.  Rather, it’s an individual whose foreknown evil lifestyle is used of God to accomplish certain ends.

The second time the phrase objects of wrath appears in scripture is in Ephesians 2:3, in which Paul writes: “…Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.” (Emphasis mine), or, as some other translations put it, “we were by nature objects of wrath”.

This is the passage which most are familiar with when it comes to the term “objects of wrath”.  When isolated from its context, this text become very misleading, and used to promote an idea that Paul most likely never had in mind.  In order to understand the meaning behind the apostle’s usage of the term, we need to examine the context by beginning in verse 1, and working our way to verse 3:

1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.

-EPHESIANS 2:1-3 (Emphasis mine)

When examined closely, it becomes clear that Paul is describing the degenerate actions of the Gentile nations.  He is speaking to the Ephesian (Gentile) church about their former way of life; a life in which they “followed the ways of this world”, “gratifying the cravings” of their “flesh”, “following its desires and thoughts”.  The next words seem to be quite fitting, for the Apostle writes, “we were by nature deserving of wrath”, while other translations render it as “objects of wrath”.  The problem with this translation, is that it is simply not what the Greek text says.  While the English translation makes it seem as though it is the same term used in Romans 9:22, it’s actually a different term.  The Greek word teknon is translated in the NIV as “deserving”, while other translations render it as “objects”.  Teknon, however, literally means offspring, or children.  A more accurate reading then would be: “we were by nature children of wrath”.  This seems to paint a picture that is more in line with the Romans 1 understanding of wrath, which is that wrath, or orge, looks like God turning a person over to their own desires.  That seems to be the clear context in which Ephesians 2:3 was written, as Paul is describing the sensual lifestyles of the Gentile nations, and of their indulgence in carnal behaviors.

Many mistakenly read this text as saying that by our very natures, that is, by virtue of who we naturally were as people, God was hostile towards us.  This error arises from a mistranslation of the word flesh (sarx in Greek) as sinful nature in certain Bible translations.  Unfortunately, when people read translations that render this text as: “all of us lived…gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature…and were by nature objects of wrath”, they connect the words “sinful nature” with the words “by nature objects of wrath”.  In this reading, one becomes a target of God’s anger, simply because of the way that they were born, as their very natures attract His wrath and repel His mercy.  This is a very poor translation, however, as the words sarx and teknon are not related.  We sometimes forget that we are reading translations of the scripture, and not the scriptures as they were originally written.  Therefore, the danger that can sometimes arise in a word study is that we group ideas together that, while connected in the English language because of the way the translators rendered certain words, are not connected at all in the Hebrew or in the Greek.  This is a classic example of this error.  “Sinful nature” is a mistranslation of the Greek word sarx, which simply refers to bodily appetites or mortality, and not to a certain genus of persons in possession of a satanic nature.  We do not come out of our mother’s womb as pint sized wrath magnets or enemies of God.  Such a thought is simply absurd, as well as incredibly disturbing.

More than likely, Paul was once more referring to the type of wrath he wrote of in Romans chapter 1.  The Gentiles, who indulged in all sorts of unspeakable behaviors, were by nature children of wrath.  That is, they were those who had been turned over for a season to their own sinful desires, all for the purpose of concluding all men under sin so that God could have mercy on them all.  As Paul said elsewhere of the Gentile nations:

16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way.

-ACTS 14:16 (Emphasis mine)

God had allowed the nations to go their own way and sink into moral ruin.  Their sinful desires ran their lives and controlled their actions.  God preserved Israel as the nation through whom the promised seed would come to save the world, but allowed the Gentiles to follow their own ways.  They were, by nature, children of wrath, in the sense that they followed the sinful inclinations that came naturally to them.  This does not suggest in the least that human beings are born on the wrong side of God’s good graces, and must climb their way back onto the right side through walking an aisle and praying a prayer.

My understanding of this text in days gone by suggested that people were born with a sinful nature, causing them to be, by nature, “objects of wrath”.  I would say that God, in His mercy, caused Christ to take on our nature, which caused Him to become an object of wrath in my place.  All of God’s fury was then magnetically pulled towards Christ and I was let off the hook.  The only problem is that this idea is nowhere present in the text, and is an assumption based upon a preexisting theology.  Also, the idea that human beings are born as enemies of God, whom He is against and targeting as “objects of wrath”, is simply not in harmony with the apparent meaning of the text.  Paul seems to be speaking of the natural inclinations of the Gentiles, who had been handed over to their own desires, and lived sinful and debauched lives as a result.  The wrath being spoken of seems to be more in line with Paul’s description of wrath in Romans 1:18, which describes a lifestyle, not lightning bolts from on high.

This is the same concept

CHILDREN OF DISOBEDIENCE

There’s a second group of people spoken of in Ephesians 2 that are equally important in our discussion about the wrath of God.  In Ephesians 2:1-2, Paul writes:

1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.

-EPHESIANS 2:1-2 (Emphasis mine)

In Greek, the words “those who are disobedient”, are literally translated as “the children (huios) of disobedience”.  Rather than describing humanity as universally disobedient, Paul refers to one group of people in particular, “the children of disobedience”.  Now, many would say that this is naturally the same group referred to as “children of wrath” in verse 3, however, I would draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the Apostle uses two different Greek words for children when writing - huios and teknon, respectively.  While these words are sometimes interchangeable, it seems as though Paul is making a distinction between the Gentiles as “children of wrath”, and this other group as “children of disobedience”, as he states that the spirit which “in times past” (KJV) was once most prominently seen at work within the Gentiles, was now (in Paul’s day) at work in another group.  While I can see why some would see this as referent to the same group, or even to humanity in general, I believe the text suggests that Paul is alluding to a different group entirely.

So, who could Paul be referring to?  Who are these “children of disobedience”, and what exactly is the nature of their disobedience?  Is it a universal statement about mankind, from Adam to us?  Or is it more specific?  To get some answers, we turn to Paul’s warning of coming destruction in 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10

4 …we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that you endure, 5 which is manifest evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you also suffer; 6 since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, 7 and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, 8 in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, 10 when He comes, in that Day, to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe, because our testimony among you was believed.

-2 THESSALONIANS 1:3-10 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

This passage is often read as though it refers to a still-to-come appearance of Christ, in which He will repay the wicked for their sins.  However, I want you to remember that Paul was writing to an audience of his peers and contemporaries, and was addressing the persecution and hardships that they were enduring in their day.  He declares that they had been patient in their persecutions and tribulations, but what was it that they were patiently waiting for?  According to verses 6-9, it was the judgment of God against those who were troubling and persecuting them.  Knowing the timeline of when this was written, we know, of course, that the group in question was unbelieving Israel, who, in collusion with Rome, actively and violently oppressed and persecuted the Church.  Rome was something of the agent through which Israel accomplished her endgame, but their hatred for the new and “heretical” sect called Christianity, was what fueled the persecutory machine.  These individuals, according to Paul, would face destruction, not some 2,000 years in the future at a literal, visible appearing of Christ (though I’m not denying that such an event will occur), but within the lifetime of those to whom he was writing.  For God, Paul states in verse 6, in “judging” their persecutors, would bring rest, both to the Thessalonians and to the rest of the Churches that were facing the same troubles.

Even though we are dealing with apocalyptic imagery here, with talk of angels and everlasting destruction, the only event that truly fulfills Paul’s prophetic words, and remains faithful to the timeline he lays out, is the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.  As we’ll discuss more in Chapter 11, the motif of Christ coming in His Kingdom accompanied by angels is most likely used to describe an unobservable spiritual event that has physical repercussions, namely, the fall of the physical city of Jerusalem.

It is quite erroneous to think that Paul was referring to a yet future event, for it would make no sense to suggest that God would finally give rest to the persecuted Thessalonians 2,000 years in the future.  If Christ were to appear today and judge those living, it would not, in any way, relate to those who persecuted the church 2,000 years ago.  Clearly, he is speaking of an event that would bring the church relief from persecution, which came quite literally with the fall of the Jewish state.  Interestingly, Paul, in verse 8, refers to the early Church’s Jewish persecutors as “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  It was not their disobedience to the Law of Moses, but their deliberate and violent disobedience to the Gospel that Paul used to define them.  How exactly does one “obey the Gospel”?  Quite simply, to obey the Gospel is to believe it.  To acknowledge that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, and that His perfect work has saved the cosmos.  A majority of first century Jews, however, rejected this truth and sought to hamper the Gospel’s spread through a violent persecution campaign.

Now, lest my words be used to paint Jews in a universally unflattering light, let me point out that these are not statements about all Jews, universally, and throughout time.  This refers to a sect of Jews who disbelieved the Gospel and persecuted and murdered those who followed it.  Christ, His apostles, and much of the early church were Jews, so my statements here have nothing to do with Jews today, or even to those in the first century who took no part in the persecutions.  It refers to a group, not to all.  That being said, I do firmly believe that it was these Jews, who disobeyed the Gospel and persecuted the church, whom Paul referred to as the “sons of disobedience”.

We find this same idea of the Jews as being “disobedient to the Gospel” in 1 Peter 4:12-19:

12 Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; 13 but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. 14 If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. On their part He is blasphemed, but on your part He is glorified. 15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as a busybody in other people’s matters. 16 Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter. 17 For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 Now “If the righteous one is scarcely saved, Where will the ungodly and the sinner appear?” 19 Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator.

-1 PETER 4:12-19 (Emphasis mine)

Just as Paul spoke to the Thessalonians about their persecutions and sufferings, so Peter speaks to his audience of the fiery trial which they were enduring, which he likens unto partaking of “Christ’s sufferings”.  He states that their persecutors “blasphemed” Christ through their violent actions, but that those who patiently endured the persecution “glorified” Him.  Peter is clear that his readers are not suffering for their own personal sins in verses 15-16, but that they were enduring the hostility of blasphemous men against the truth of the Gospel.  Once more, knowing the timeline of when the epistle was written, coupled with the witness of history, we know that the main persecutors of the Church were the unbelieving Jews of the day in collusion with the Roman government.  Peter states that the events that were unfolding were God’s judgments, or, the putting right of injustices, which would begin at His own house.  This does not mean that God was judging his people in a vindictive sense, though.  God was not using the Jewish persecution to punish the church, as Peter had already told them that their suffering was admirable, for they were suffering for Christ, and not as sinners.  This passage has greatly confused many, as they see God as saying that He judges His church with hardships.  The meaning here, however, is quite different.  Adam Clarke says on this matter:

Our Lord had predicted that, previously to the destruction of Jerusalem, his own followers would have to endure various calamities; see Matthew 24:9, Matthew 24:21, Matthew 24:22; Mark 13:12, Mark 13:13; John 16:2, etc. Here his true disciples are called the house or family of God. That the converted Jews suffered much from their own brethren, the zealots, or factions into which the Jews were at that time divided, needs little proof…for it was a Jewish maxim that, when God was about to pour down some general judgment, he began with afflicting his own people in order to correct and amend them, that they might be prepared for the overflowing scourge. 28

Now, to many, the idea of God, as Clarke puts it, “afflicting his own people” sounds repugnant and out of harmony with the rest of this book’s contents.  However, the nature of this “afflicting” is not punitive, but parental.  Surely, the Bible tells us elsewhere that God uses difficult situations and tribulation as a means of correcting issues in our lives, solidifying our faith and resolve in Him, and proving it genuine (Hebrews 12:4-11).  Here, the same thing is occurring.  In verse 12, we find the church’s persecution referred to as a “fiery trial”, which is a reference to the testing of precious metals by fire in order to refine and improve their overall quality.  In Chapter 1, verses 6-7 of the same epistle, Peter writes:

6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

-1 PETER 1:6-7 (Emphasis mine)

The fiery trial we read of in 4:12 is the “grief in all kinds of trials” that proves “the genuineness” of their faith spoken of in 1:6-7.  According to Peter, the patient endurance of these persecutions would result in praise, glory and honor!  The judgment which began at the house of God was not one of punitive wrath, but the testing and refining of their faith.  However, the very ones doing the persecuting soon found the tables turned on them, which is why Peter refers to the difficulty the “unrighteous” will have in “being saved”.  This is not a reference to spiritual salvation as we speak of it today, but of salvation from the doomed city of Jerusalem, as Clarke also notes:

If it shall be with extreme difficulty that the Christians shall escape from Jerusalem, when the Roman armies shall come against it with the full commission to destroy it, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? … The Christians, though with difficulty, did escape, every man; but not one of the Jews escaped, whether found in Jerusalem or elsewhere. 29

What I really want to draw your attention to is the fact that in verse 17, Peter, similarly to Paul in 1 Thessalonians 1:8, refers to the Church’s Jewish persecutors as those who “do not obey the Gospel of God”.  Once more, we have the unbelieving Jews of the first century referred to as the disobedient, and are spoken of as those who would soon experience a terrifying cataclysm through the destruction of Jerusalem.  These individuals, I believe, are without a doubt the “children of disobedience” spoken of by Paul in Ephesians 2, and represent a select group of people to whom the issue of wrath is very pertinent.  In fact, I believe that a majority of the time, the “wrath of God” that is spoken of by the New Testament writers is speaking directly of that which would come upon the murderous, unbelieving Jews of the first century.  Now, of course, this is not an anti-Semitic statement in the least, as, again, all of the original disciples, and Christ Himself, were Jews!  It was a select group of religious Jews, who rejected Christ and sought to stomp out the movement He started, that are those called the sons of disobedience.  These were the men who would experience “judgment”, as their actions were unjust, and if not corrected, would stop the spread of the Gospel to the nations.  Christ had already made this inarguably clear:

34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation (2,000 years ago). 37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 38 Look, your house is left to you desolate.

-MATTHEW 23:34-38 (Emphasis mine)

Christ spoke of an impending judgment that would come upon first century Jerusalem (this generation), which was aimed specifically at those who murdered and persecuted His followers.  These would not be the actions of an angry, vengeful “thunder god”, but those of a God who protects His children from the violence and hatred of others.  This, without a doubt, is the wrath in question in most New Testament passages.

Also important to note is that this “wrath” was not something that poured from the heavens, directly from God’s hand, but came through the physical agent of Rome.  Was it used of God?  Yes, I believe it was.  But it was also something that Jesus Himself, in Matthew 23:37, said He wished to keep Israel from experiencing.  God did not desire Jerusalem’s destruction, but those trapped in that particular system refused to heed the warning given them.  What is interesting is that Christ, in making reference to the destruction of the Temple, quotes directly from Jeremiah 7 (Matthew 21:13, Jeremiah 7:11).  Having cleansed the Temple, Christ quotes the prophet’s apocalyptic words, in which he states that the house of God had become a den of robbers and thieves.  After quoting Jeremiah, Christ goes on to curse the fig tree, whose fruitlessness most certainly referred to the fruitlessness of Israel, and it’s withering up almost definitely refers to the destruction of its Temple.  He then goes on to give several parables that refer to Israel’s rejection of Him as their Messiah, as well as of their brutal murdering of Him.  By the time we get to chapters 23 and 24, Christ begins clearly speaking about the Temple’s within-a-generation demise:

1 Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

-MATTHEW 24:1-2 (Emphasis mine)

My point in bringing all of this out is that beginning with the Matthew 21 cleansing of the Temple, a long series of events begins to unfold in which Jesus vividly describes Jerusalem and it’s Temple’s soon coming fall.  However, before explicitly pronouncing these coming woes, He quotes from Jeremiah chapter 7, in which the prophet Jeremiah warns Israel of the soon coming invasion of Babylon in 586 BC, and warns them that many of their dead bodies will end up being thrown into a notorious, nearby valley called Gehenna.  It would seem to me that Jesus is locating Himself in the Jeremiah narrative, as they both were prophetic voices to a nation that was teetering on the edge of fiery demise, albeit at different times in the nation’s history.  Jeremiah warned of Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylon, and Jesus of its second destruction at the hands of Rome.  In warning of the AD 70 destruction by Rome, Jesus often uses Jeremiah’s words and imagery, seemingly as a reminder to them of what took place at the hands of the Babylonians.  What I want to really point out here, though, is that part of Jeremiah’s warning concerning the 586 BC destruction was that Israel and her armies were not to oppose the invading Babylonians.  Rather, they were to flee the city, surrender, and not put up a fight.  If they did, Jeremiah assured them that they would be wiped out and Jerusalem would be burned:

17 Then Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, “This is what the Lord God Almighty, the God of Israel, says: ‘If you surrender to the officers of the king of Babylon, your life will be spared and this city will not be burned down; you and your family will live. 18 But if you will not surrender to the officers of the king of Babylon, this city will be given into the hands of the Babylonians and they will burn it down; you yourself will not escape from them.’”

-JEREMIAH 38:17-18 (Emphasis mine)

Jeremiah urged them to go down peacefully, or it would be their undoing.  I believe that we see a similar, Jeremiah-like emphasis in the teachings of Jesus.  I’m not sure whether you’re aware of it or not, but the political climate of Jesus’ day was very tumultuous.  Israel was under the occupation of Rome, a foreign, pagan power, and most of Israel’s people had revolution on their minds.  And can we really blame them?  Imagine if the United States, or whatever your country of residence is, found itself under occupation from a nation like North Korea.  Imagine looking out your front window, or walking down your cities streets, only to see them being patrolled by armed, North Korean soldiers, who angrily barked orders at you, and told you what you could do, and when you could do it!  Imagine our constitution being shredded and usurped by a hostile, occupying power.  Imagine being taxed to death, until you literally had only pennies to your name, while said occupying power lived in the lap of luxury on your dime, and on land that once belonged to us.  Surely, we would be angry, and we would be dreaming of ways to overthrow and defeat those who forcefully took our nation as their own.

Things were very similar in Jesus’ day.  Armed Roman soldiers patrolled the streets.  Tax collectors bled the people dry, all in the name of supporting a government the Jews saw as being an abomination.  The mood was tense, and revolution was in the air.  In fact, many of Jesus’ teachings, including those found in Matthew 5:38-48 (part of the Sermon on the Mount), seem to be aimed at cooling these tensions.  The enemies whom Jesus told His Jewish audience to love, in addition to those to whom they were too offer the “other cheek”, were most likely the occupying, Roman powers.  Jesus, so it seems, was seeking to show them a better way.  A way of forgiveness, love and peace, as opposed to a violent, revolutionary uprising, that would only result in the destruction of the Jewish state.  Why would Jesus do this?  Was He happy with the occupation of the Jews by the Romans?  I can’t be sure how He felt about the occupation itself, but one thing we can know for sure is that Jesus warned that those who chose to live by the sword would also die by the sword.  He said as much to Peter when he sought to violently save Jesus from being arrested by the Jews:

52 “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”

-MATTHEW 26:54 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus’ point was that the one who sought to exert his will through violence, would himself suffer violence.  Death begets death, and any attempt at violent overthrow on Israel’s part would result in great, unfathomable collateral damage.  While, in this instance, Jesus is not referring to resistance against Rome, but the Jewish leaders, I think we see some of His core principles in action.  He was not in agreement with the idea of violent overthrow.  Why?  Because He knew that it would only bring about more bloodshed and destruction.

Look at Jeremiah’s warnings concerning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians:

8 “Furthermore, tell the people, ‘This is what the Lord says: See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death. 9 Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague. But whoever goes out and surrenders to the Babylonians who are besieging you will live; they will escape with their lives.

-JEREMIAH 21:8-9 (Emphasis mine)

Notice, God made a distinction between the “way of life” and the “way of death”.  The way of death simply meant that if Jerusalem refused God’s word, and stayed within the cities walls in an attempt to resist and fight the Babylonians, they would suffer and die in the most miserable of ways.  However, if they followed the “way of life”, presumably meaning nonviolence, and peacefully surrendered, they would live.  This seems to be a theme borrowed by Jesus when it came to the issue of Jerusalem’s occupation by Rome.  If they insisted on a violent revolution, they would die by the sword.  They would be choosing the “way of death” and violence, and having failed to learn the lesson left by Jeremiah, would wind up suffering and dying within the walls of their city, as did their ancestors.  Of course, history tells us that a great majority of the Jews warned by Christ did not heed His warnings, as in AD 70 Jerusalem was burned and destroyed by the Romans.  Christ’s desire to save them from this tragedy, no doubt, manifested in His attempts at getting them to pursue a way of peace and nonviolence, or, as Jeremiah called it, “the way of life”.

Even the Jewish leadership feared what would befall them if Rome caught wind of attempts at revolution.  This is actually one of the chief reasons they sought to take Christ’s life.  They feared that the burgeoning “Jesus movement” may strike Rome as being subversive in nature, and that they may suffer a violent humbling as a result:

47 Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

-JOHN 11:47-48 (Emphasis mine)

My point in presenting you with all of this information is to show that even when the fall of Jerusalem is spoken of as being the wrath of God, we must remember that, historically, its fall was due to the Roman’s suspicion of a brewing revolt.  Jesus, however, like Jeremiah, had warned them to choose the “way of life”, and to not resist the Romans.  First century Israel did not heed His warnings, however, and they paid the price as a result.  Even when the AD 70 invasion is referred to as wrath by Christ and the apostles, remember, it was something that God Himself attempted to keep them from.  They resisted His attempts at saving them from this most terrible of fates, however.  So please, do not see in Jerusalem’s fall, though it be called wrath, the punitive actions of a heavy handed, ticked off deity.  Rather, see a God who, in love, did everything in His power to keep Israel from pursuing violent means of reclaiming her land, for He knew that if they persisted in their revolutionary zeal, the greater of the two powers, Rome, would crush them and burn their city.

That being said, the New Testament writers do, in fact, refer to Jerusalem’s fall in terms of wrath. Unfortunately, when we read 2,000 year old scriptures through 21st century eyes, we are often asking questions that the biblical authors were not seeking to answer, but still insist on finding the answer we seek in their words.  We then make the unfortunate mistake of forcing their words to be the answers we seek, and come up with doctrines that they were not seeking to establish.  When we think of God’s wrath, our minds immediately focus on hell, or perhaps modern natural disasters.  In the first century, however, the wrath promised by Christ (as we’ll discuss more in a later chapter) dealt with Jerusalem’s fall.  Therefore, when they wrote of wrath, they had something entirely different in mind from what we have today.  Again, I say that it is my firm conviction that a great deal of New Testament passages that speak of God’s wrath are specifically referring to the then imminent fall of Jerusalem.

Take for instance the words of Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16:

14 …You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, 15 who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men 16 in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

-1 THESSALONIANS 2:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

In this instance, Paul specifically speaks of wrath as being something that was coming upon a violent, first century branch of Old Covenant Judaism that continually persecuted the church and hampered the spread of the Gospel.  Paul tells us that their continued harassment of the church and suppression of its message had caused their sins to be “heaped up to the limit”, and would ultimately result in the destruction of their city, Temple, and religious institution.

Just 14 verses prior, the apostle wrote to the same Thessalonian congregation “…Jesus…rescues us from the coming wrath.” (1 Thessalonians 1:10)  Directly after speaking of the “coming wrath”, Paul begins speaking of the intense persecution that the church had been experiencing (chapter 2), until finally speaking of the “wrath of God” coming upon their Jewish persecutors in 2:15.  This “coming wrath” is not something that still lays in our future, but was something that awaited the “children of disobedience” in the first century.  Therefore, to use such things as “salvation bait”, that is, in order to frighten or entice people to believe, is absolutely nonsensical, as this “coming wrath” is not still coming in our day, but is nearly 2,000 years passed.

In Hebrews 10:27, we are told of a “raging fire that will consume the enemies of God”.  The enemies in question are said to be those who rejected the Gospel, trampled the blood of Christ underfoot, and insulted the Spirit of Grace (verse 29).  To these charges against God’s enemies, the writer says:

30 For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

-HEBREWS 10:30 (Emphasis mine)

Who are these “enemies” of which the writer speaks?  It is important that we identify them for, according to the writer’s words, they will be consumed by raging fire in accordance with God’s justice.  For years this has been read and divulged as though it were talking about hell or eternal torment.  However, this is spoken in the context of persecution endured by the Church at the hands of those who rejected the Gospel, and trampled the message of Christ underfoot.  Then the writer encourages the “Hebrews” with the following words:

32 Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you endured in a great conflict full of suffering. 33 Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated. 34 You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions. 35 So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.

36 You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. 37 For,

“In just a little while,

he who is coming will come

and will not delay.”

38 And,

“But my righteous one will live by faith.

And I take no pleasure

in the one who shrinks back.”

39 But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.

-HEBREWS 10:32-39 (Emphasis mine)

After reminding his readers of their endurance against their persecutors in days gone by, he encouraged them to remain faithful in the midst of it once more.  Clearly, their persecution was coming from these individuals who rejected Christ, and trampled His work underfoot.  These can be none other than the unbelieving Jews of the day, whose city and kingdom would soon be shaken, destroyed, and burned up with a raging fire.  These “enemies of God” are the same group of unbelieving Jews spoken of by Paul in Romans 11:28:

28 As far as the gospel is concerned, they (the first century Jews) are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs,

- ROMANS 11:28 (Emphasis mine)

These are but two of many passages that seem to suggest that the wrath spoken of in the New Testament is often actually dealing with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.  This was the understanding of the Apostles who wrote of it, and it cannot be properly understood until we come to grips with this fact.  These unbelieving Jews, who murdered and persecuted Christ’s apostles and followers, were the sons of disobedience, the “enemies of the Gospel”, and the “children of the devil” (Matt 3:7, 12:34; John 8:31-47), likened unto Cain who rose up and murdered his brother Abel (Matt 23:31-36, 1 John 3:7-15).  These are not universal titles that apply to all who have yet to believe the Gospel message, but exclusively to those unbelieving Israelites who sought to murder their brothers, and stamp out the fire of the Gospel in the first century.

Unfortunately, due to our ignorance of these facts, we have assumed that God’s wrath is a force aimed universally at all men from birth, needing to be satisfied and appeased through the vicarious death of another.  However, in many instances throughout the New Testament, wrath is a reference to God allowing individuals to go their way and experience the outworking of their own sin, as well as to the literal destruction of the physical city of Jerusalem which occurred on the basis of the same principle.  Israel was “given over” into the hands of Rome because of her unwillingness to heed Jesus’ warnings against attempting to establish His Kingdom through violence.  While this tragic event is referred in terms of wrath, it is of the same order as the wrath spoken of in Romans 1:18, as it was not the direct action of God, but the outworking of Israel’s disobedient choices.  Yes, Paul does refer to a yet future wrath, which will apparently occur post mortem (after death), but the exact nature of this wrath is not clearly defined or spelled out.

Most importantly for our discussion, however, is the fact that nowhere in Paul’s, or any of the other apostle’s writings, are we told that Christ’s death saved us from the wrath of God.  If one wants to argue that this doctrine is taught in the New or Old Testaments, they must at least be honest enough to admit that it is implicit rather than explicit; meaning that, if they do in fact see this teaching in the Bible, it exists only in seed form, and the rest is read into the text because we come at it with a presupposition.  It is nowhere explicitly laid out by the apostles or the prophets, and it seems to me that a doctrine of such importance would have at least one or two paragraphs devoted to expounding it, and in very clear and explicit language.  However, the best that can be said is that very faint echoes of the teaching exist, and if one strings a few isolated references together they can arrive at that conclusion.  And still, it’s a conclusion that would be very difficult to arrive at if one did not already have the view in mind.

If the problem of salvation was that God’s wrath was universally aimed at all men, and that He was unable to have a relationship with or do anything but condemn us, and so judged Jesus in order to let us off the hook; somewhere, in some detail, this doctrine would be laid out, but it simply is not.  On the other hand, time and again we have explicit references to Christ’s death doing away with sin, the Law, the curse, the hostility between Jew and Gentile, and destroying the power of death and the devil.

The passage that most quote when attempting to prove the doctrine of penal substitution is Romans 5:9-10, in which Paul writes:

9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

-ROMANS 5:9-10 (Emphasis mine)

Many assert that this is Paul making a clear reference to what is now called the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.  They take Paul’s words to mean that the death of Christ saved us from the wrath of God.  However, I would point out that Paul said we were reconciled through Christ’s death, but that we “shall be saved”, not through His death, but through His life.  Justification and reconciliation are spoken of as things that have occurred, while the two references to salvation, one of which is a clear reference to salvation from wrath, are spoken of as unfolding, and future realities.  Why are reconciliation and justification spoken of in the past tense?  Because, according to Paul, they were accomplished through Christ’s death, an event that occurred once in history, and will never be repeated.  Why is salvation from wrath spoken of in the future tense?  Because it is accomplished, not through His onetime death, but through His eternal life!  This salvation from wrath has nothing to do with a vendetta against us which was settled through the death of a sacrificial victim.  No, it is something that occurs through the life of Jesus, not the death of Jesus.  If Paul were to have said that we were saved from wrath through Christ’s death then penal substitution proponents might actually be able to make a case from this scripture, but it says we’re saved by His life.  Quite literally, it is His resurrected and ascended existence that saves us from the wrath in question.

What then is the “wrath” in question?  Let’s take a closer look at the text:

10 …how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!

-ROMANS 5:10

Depending on the Bible translation that you use, you may find that the word “God’s” is written in italics.  Why is this?  For emphasis?  No.  The reason that certain words are written in italics in certain Bible translations is to indicate the fact that they do not appear in the Hebrew or Greek text.  An italicized word is a word that was added in an attempt to clarify what the author’s intent may have been.  In Greek, we are not told that we are saved from God’s wrath through Christ, rather, we’re told that we will be saved from wrath through Christ.  And remember, this wrath is not something we’re saved from because of Christ’s death, but because of His life.

So what could this “wrath” be?  I want you to recall the “type” of wrath that Paul opens up his epistle to the Romans talking about.  It wasn’t a wrath that concerned lightning bolts, pitch forks, or hellfire and brimstone.  Rather, it spoke of a degenerate lifestyle that one is handed over to.  Remember Paul’s words to the Gentile believers in Ephesians 2?  They were referred to as “children of wrath” because they naturally lived in ways that were out of sync with God’s nature.  Wrath, in these instances, deals with a lifestyle that resulted from God allowing one to go their own way.

Now, this wrath from which Paul says we’re saved is a thing we’re saved from because of Christ’s resurrected and ascended life!  What exactly does the Bible tell us is accomplished in our lives through the life of Jesus?  Consider this somewhat lengthy passage from Romans 6:

1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. 14 For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

-ROMANS 6:1-14 (Emphasis mine)

Paul begins by asking the question of whether or not we should continue living sinful lifestyles, simply because we’re under grace.  He answers with an emphatic “no”, going on to show that Christ’s death was our death to sin.  In Christ’s physical death the internalized entity of sin was put down once and for all, and is therefore no longer a ruling power to be obeyed.  However, we are not simply left in a state of being dead to sin.  No, we are also united to Christ in His resurrection life!  What does our union with His life accomplish?

4 …Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, [so that] we too may live a new life.

-ROMANS 6:4 (Emphasis mine)

Our union with Christ’s resurrection is what enables us to live new lives, free from the power of sin.  Paul makes it even clearer in verses 10-11:

10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.

-ROMANS 6:10-11 (Emphasis mine)

Paul states Christ’s resurrected life in one that is free from sin, and is lived devoted to His Father.  Paul then urges us, in verse 11, to, through our union with Him, consider ourselves as sharers in His resurrection life!  We are dead to sin, and alive to God.  His conclusion?  “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires”.  We are dead to sin through Jesus’ death, but alive to God through His resurrection.  Because He lives we are empowered to live new lives, free from sin’s influence, or the “wrath” which the Gentiles once found themselves under.  This is the “wrath” from which Paul declares us to be saved through Christ’s life.  It is not the flaming vengeance of an angry God, but a debased lifestyle which one walks out when allowed to go their own way.  In Jesus Christ, we’ve been united with, and saved by Christ’s resurrected life.  We no longer have to walk beneath the “wrath” of debauched immorality, for we’ve been “saved by His life”.

DOCTRINAL MIRAGES

Once more, the main text in question (Romans 5:9-10), appears to say something that is not in keeping with the heart of the Gospel.  When we come at texts like this with a presupposition about what Christ’s death accomplished, it is easy for us to be fooled by doctrinal mirages.  It bears repeating that we are often asking questions that Paul’s first century audience would not have been asking, and are therefore looking for answers that the apostles were not seeking to give.  The first century view was not that God was universally angry at all men and needed to have His wrath appeased in order to have a relationship with them.  These are conclusions we’ve come to because of our preconceived notions concerning salvation.  They’re also conclusions which I daresay we would never come to if we relied on what Christ and the apostles taught.

THE WRATH THAT REMAINS

I believe that this same idea of wrath as a lifestyle that is in disharmony with God is presented in John 3:36:

36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.

-JOHN 3:36 (Emphasis mine)

Just two verses prior Jesus said:

34 For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit.

-JOHN 3:34 (Emphasis mine)

The insinuation here seems to be that those who believe upon the Son receive and become partakers of the same Spirit Christ was endowed with, thus enabling them to also partake of eternal life.  Whether you see this life as being something beginning now and extending into the hereafter, or something reserved exclusively for the hereafter, we know undoubtedly that our experience of such depends upon our experience of the Spirit.  If we reject Christ and the Spirit who is given through His glorification, God’s wrath, which is, I believe, of the same quality as that mentioned in Romans 1:18, remains on us.  We will continue in the downward spiral that a life of self-imposed alienation inevitably leads to.  But if we embrace the Son, receive of His Spirit and resurrection life, we too are enabled to leave behind a Godless and wrathful existence and enjoy the Kingdom through the reality of the Spirit.

The “wrath” and the “punishment” are not the results of God pressing some big, red wrath button in the heavens, but are things inherent in the choices that we make when living lives that are in disharmony with His nature.  Regarding the Romans 1:18 brand of “wrath”, Paul said that people, “…received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” (Romans 1:27), which is to say that the “penalty” is contained within the choice to live in a disharmonious way.  The action itself becomes its own punishment.  God is not actively tormenting anyone, it is the choice of the individual that becomes the penalty.  The wrath that “remains” on the one who rejects Christ’s offer of eternal life is, I believe, precisely that.  They will continue to live a life in disharmony with the Spirit, and continue to reap the consequences of such a life, but it is not that God is angrily sending calamities and misfortune their way, and it most certainly isn’t that God is angry at them simply for being born with an evil nature.

HOSTILITY REMOVED

One of Paul’s main emphases throughout his epistles is the inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s original covenant with Abraham, not on the basis of faithfulness to the Mosaic Law, but on the basis of God’s faithfulness to His promise fulfilled through Jesus Christ.  The problem, as far as Paul saw it, was that the Gentiles found themselves “excluded” because of the presence of the Law, which had become a “dividing wall of hostility” between them and the Jews.  The Jews on the other hand had forgotten their role in God’s plan of redemption, and instead of seeing themselves as the vehicle through which salvation would come to the world, became prideful, thinking that they could be made right through a keeping of the Law.

The solution that Paul saw was in the death of Jesus, which satisfied, not God’s craving for justice, but the Law’s demand for perfect obedience.  Only through the faithfulness of Christ could the Law be done away with, which would thereby do away with the division between the races, and bring blessing and salvation to the world as promised to Abraham!

Paul writes:

4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.

- ROMANS 7:4 (Emphasis mine)

In Paul’s theology Christ’s death frees the Jew from their obligation to the Mosaic covenant precisely so that they can enter into a relationship with God on the basis of the eternal covenant between the Father and the Son.  Those formerly under the Law died to it through Christ’s death so that they could belong to something greater; something that extended beyond the borders of national Israel, and joined both Jew and Gentile together as one.  Yes, in fully carrying out and fulfilling the Law, Christ submitted Himself to death, but this is a very, very far cry from saying that Christ suffered the eternal wrath of God that was against all human beings.

Implicit in the belief that Christ suffered God’s wrath is the idea that God demanded all men to be eternally condemned to hell as a just recompense for them having broken the Law of Moses.  The only problem with this belief is that nowhere in the Law is either an eternity in hell or separation from God’s presence listed as a consequence for transgressing it.  Nowhere.  Rather, the farthest that the Law ever went was to demand the life of the one who broke it.  That being the case, consider these words from the writer of Hebrews:

2 For since the message spoken through angels (The Law) was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment,

-HEBREWS 2:2 (Emphasis mine)

The punishments written of in the Torah were considered to be just punishments!  That being said, the Law never prescribed anything more severe than physical death.  Therefore, it cannot rightly be argued that the eternal wrath of God was a just penalty for breaking the Law of Moses which only ever prescribed physical punishments.  We can attempt to read a “spiritual death” into the passage, but we would simply be doing just that – reading it into the passage.  The punishment for transgressing Moses’ Law was never spiritual but physical.  The oft elaborated upon scenario in which Jesus steps forward as a willing volunteer who will experience the wrath of God in place of men, is a scenario which is simply not present in scripture.  There was not a universal penalty of eternal separation from God attached to transgressing the Mosaic Law.  Sin’s presence in humanity brought consequences and death, sure, but the idea that the wrath of God was some sort of quantifiable, divine substance that had been steadily building up, only to be absorbed by Jesus, is a thing entirely mythical that we read into certain passages when it suits our needs.  The common interpretation of Romans 5:9-10 is a perfect example of this.  Our preconceptions cause such passages to take on meanings that their writers never intended.

The issue remains though, that national Israel was subject to the Mosaic Law, and not only to its blessings, but also to its curses, and the worst curse ever described in its writings was physical death.  Jesus then, not as a sacrificial victim, but as the Savior, in league with the Father and the Spirit, died in order to fulfill, and bring to an end, the Law.  This was not done to satisfy God’s offended sense of justice, but in order that the Law could be set aside, making way for a New Covenant to be established.  This is precisely what occurs in the death of Jesus.  He does not suffer the wrath of God against sin, but takes upon Himself the “curse” of physical death, in order to do away with the Mosaic system.

When it came to the Gentile nations, the problem was also not that of an angry God, but of a race excluded due to them having no covenant of their own.  Yes, all were guilty of committing evil acts, but all were not subject to eternal wrath for breaking the commandments.  The problem facing the Gentile nations was that of their lack of a covenant, and of the Law, which served as a “dividing wall of hostility” that separated between them and the Jews.  Paul speaks of the removal of this “dividing wall” in Ephesians 2:12-18:

12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

-EPHESIANS 2:12-18 (Emphasis mine)

The above passage is one we will deal with again in a later chapter, but I want you to see that as far as it concerned the Gentiles, the problem that the cross rectified was that of them being excluded from citizenship and covenant access to God through their lack of a covenant of their own.  In Christ, however, Paul tells us that God “sets aside” the Law, with all of its commandments and regulations, and creates one new humanity out of the two – Jews and Gentiles.  The Gentiles, who were far away in a covenantal sense, were brought near by the blood of a New Covenant, not because God required blood, but because His death marked the end of the Old, exclusionary system.  The issue was not that of an angry God needing a cosmic Zoloft, but of a divided humanity, who needed to be joined as one through the setting aside of the Old and the establishment of the New.  Christ’s death was the fulfillment of the Old, a system which stood opposed to the Gentiles, effectively barring their entrance to a covenant relationship with God.  Once the Old was fulfilled and set aside, the New could be established, and the Gentiles were welcomed in once and for all.

Also, note the fact that Paul was careful to say that the death of Christ removed the hostility that existed among human beings, not a hostility that existed between God and men.  It was not God’s hostility towards us that was dealt with, bur our hostility towards one another.  When the Law was removed there was no longer a barrier to divide humanity into two different sectors.

Paul makes this clear in Colossians 2:14.  The King James Version reads as follows:

14 Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;

-COLOSSIANS 2:14 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

The “handwriting of ordinances”, the Law, stood contrary to, and against the Gentiles.  It needed to be done away with through the death of Christ, and so it was.  It was nailed to the cross, and taken out of the way.  The issue facing the Gentiles, again, was not that of an angry God requiring a sacrificial victim, but a divided humanity who could only be rejoined through the “setting aside” of a covenant based upon ethnicity.  Through Christ’s death, both the satisfaction of the Old and the establishment of the New are realized.

CONCLUSION

This was far from an exhaustive study on the wrath of God, and there is much left needing to be said, but for now it will have to wait.  What I hope was brought to your attention through this short study, however, was that this issue of God’s wrath is one that gets greatly misunderstood, misinterpreted, and therefore, misapplied to our understanding of the Gospel.  The problem was never that God had lost His ability to love the human race, and so His solution was not that Jesus needed to die in order to change His mind about us.  Such a thought would have been utterly foreign to both the first century Jew and Christian alike.  Wrath just simply does not mean what we’ve often believed it to mean.  It is a concept very present in Scripture, and is something attributed to God on more than one occasion.  However, the idea that God is some sort of vindictive Deity, overflowing with lava like wrath towards all men, is simply not true, and not anything that you will find either Christ or the Apostles teaching.  Yes, there was wrath for the violent, first century religious system, which was brought about through their provocation of Rome, and yes, God’s wrath manifested in allowing the nations to go their own way, but the image of a lightning bolt wielding Zeus is absolutely not found in the scriptures.  The idea of God needing to abuse Himself in order to appease Himself is not only absurd, but absolutely lacking in any scriptural foundation.

My friends, God is love, and everything He does, including the execution of wrath, originates in love, and will always be worked out as a clear manifestation of His love for us.

6

FORSAKEN AT 55 MILES PER HOUR

Did Sin Separate Man From God?

“Man can certainly flee from God...but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.”

-Karl Barth (1886-1968)

Steve and Pam were a happily married couple of more than ten years.  After trying unsuccessfully to have children for the first few years of their marriage, their doctor confirmed their heart breaking suspicions that they were unable to do so.  And so, after some time had passed, they began looking into the option of adopting.  Several months of scouring through material, consulting with other adoptive parents, and talking amongst themselves passed, and they finally came to the conclusion that it was the right thing for them.

They’d decided that they would not adopt a baby, but an older child, out of foster care, and particularly, one who had been the victim of very rough circumstances.  They finally decided upon a young man named Adam, who was ten years old, and had formerly lived with his now deceased, drug addicted mother.  His father had never been a part of his life, and had left his mother sometime during her pregnancy.  Adam grew up in an environment that was rife with instability, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse.  Young Adam had also suffered all sorts of abuse at the hands of his mother and her various “house guests”, and had more than a few scars scraped into his vulnerable, young psyche.

Knowing Adam’s history, Steve and Pam, prior to the adoption, acknowledged the fact that there might come a day when Adam exhibited some extreme and rebellious behavior.  They went into the adoption knowing the severity of his former living situation, and preemptively discussed the problems and issues that might arise as a result.  In fact, they went into it not thinking that he might go through a rebellious phase, but as if it were a given.  However, they agreed to love him regardless, accept him as he was, and raise him as their own.

As anticipated, after having reached the hormonal age of thirteen, Adam began to rebel.  He frequently indulged in many of the very behaviors that had ended his mother’s life, and could be found hanging out in environments much like the one from which he had been rescued.  This is precisely what Steve and Pam had prepared themselves for, and they’d even preemptively planned on how they would bring loving discipline into young Adam’s life in these situations.  The last thing that they had wanted to do was to further scar the boy by heaping guilt and shame upon him.  However, when push came to shove, and Adam actually began to rebel and misbehave, it was as though the couple had forgotten all about their prior parenting plans.

Steve and Pam called a family meeting and sat Adam down to discuss the situation with him.  The boy sat feeling ashamed and expecting the worst.  After all, his past experiences of mental and physical abuse had trained him to expect the least and the worst from authority figures.  However, such loving, understanding parents as Steve and Pam would certainly not treat him in the harsh and abusive ways with which he had grown accustomed, right?

Steve looked down at an already distressed and disheartened Adam, and spoke to him sternly,

“You have brought shame and disgrace upon this family and have dishonored my name.  As a just and honorable man, I simply cannot continue calling you my son.  As of this day, I am stripping my name from you, and am taking away your inheritance.  Our family is no longer your family.  You see, Adam, I am just too good of a man to be the father of a misbehaving miscreant such as yourself.  Our natures are simply no longer compatible.”

“Not only am I stripping you of the privileges of sonship and our family’s name, I also forbid you from ever entering this home again.  You are no longer welcome here.  As an upright man, I simply cannot care or provide for such a wretch as you.”

Steve continued,

“In addition to this, I hereby strip you of the right to fellowship with either myself, or the woman that you once called mother.  You are not our son, and you may not speak to us as though you are.  You may refer to me as ‘sir’, and to my wife as ‘ma’am’.  For not only has the nature of our relationship changed, the relationship itself will, from this moment forth, cease to be.  But regardless of what you choose to call us in your depraved imagination, we’re not listening.”

“We have spoken to the courts, and have had a restraining order placed upon you.  At the conclusion of this conversation, you are forbidden to be within one thousand miles of us.  If you ever happen to find yourself within sight range of us, it will mean terrible things for you.  Our relationship is severed, over, and done with!  From this moment forth, we will speak to you no longer.  Your days as an orphaned, unloved wretch begin now, as we hereby separate ourselves from you!  Do you understand me, ‘orphan’?”

Could you imagine that broken, defeated young man, shuddering and weeping as he listened to all of this?  Can you see the anguished and pained look spread across his face?  How could this child ever possibly recover from such horrendous treatment by those whom he had once called father and mother?  Truth be told, he probably never would.  The memories of that moment would haunt his conscious and unconscious mind forever.  He’d never feel complete, loved or secure again.  Such an event would undoubtedly devastate him, possibly even irrevocably so.

What happened to good old, compassionate Steve and Pam?  What happened to those adoptive parents who’d had foresight enough to prepare to deal lovingly with Adam’s rebellion, long before it ever occurred?  What happened to their paternal and maternal instincts when faced with that which they had already foreseen?  The cold, irrational and schizophrenic behavior which they displayed in that cruelest of moments is enough to sicken even the worst of parents.

Now, if the tale of Steve and Pam sounds slightly fantastical, and a bit too-bad-to be-true, it’s because it is.  However, as ridiculous, cruel and irrational as Steve and Pam’s behavior was, many Christians would have us to believe that the eternal Godhead behaved in a very similar way in the wake of Adam’s fall.

There is a widespread, almost ubiquitous idea that has embedded itself into the very fabric of all things Evangelical, and it is the thought that sin brought separation between man and God.  We have an image in our minds of God being flabbergasted, and offended beyond words by Adam and Eve’s actions.  He had given them one simple prohibition, “don’t eat from that tree”, but for some reason, they couldn’t even obey that one simple command!  As a result, God became enraged, and in His righteous fury, banished man from His presence.  After all, God is holy, and now, because of his evil actions, man was not.  God and man became like oil and water, and just wouldn’t mix.

Right..?

SEPARATED FROM GOD?

The truth is that there was no grief greater than that which the Godhead experienced in the aftermath of man’s fall.  Man’s disobedience, though not a positive by any stretch of the imagination, was not so great that it could alter the plan of God and bring lasting separation between Him and His creation.  However, many, if not most in Evangelical Christianity, have come to the conclusion that man’s sin caused God to separate Himself from us, and that we remain in this separated state until we profess faith in Jesus Christ.

If this were true, however, would it not speak terribly of God’s character?  Would he not be just as guilty of schizophrenia and irrationality as the adoptive parents in the fictional story that we just read?  For God Himself, no doubt, also foresaw our failures and rebellion long before they ever manifested in time.  After all, omniscience – that is, the possession of all knowledge - just sort of comes with the duties of a deity!  That being the case, the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit must have figured our failures into their ultimate plan of creation and adoption, or else it suggest incompetence on their parts.

There can be no doubt that sin was a foreseen thing, as we’ve already discussed, Revelations 13:8 clearly refers to Jesus Christ as being the “Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”.  In other words, in eternity, and in the mind and heart of God, the problem of sin had been dealt with and rectified long before it ever arrived.  Before creation and the laying of earth’s foundations, the eyes of God saw into our future, anticipated our shortcomings, and made preemptive provisions for them.

Not only so, but in Ephesians 1:4, Paul tells us that God, “…chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight...”  (Emphasis mine)  Now, does this mean that God’s intention in creating us was simply for us to be “holy and blameless”, in the sense of living upright and moral lives?  Was God after squeaky clean sons and daughters, and therefore created us to suit that purpose?  No.  It means that God saw our future failures, which would result in un-holiness, and built the remedy into His plan of creation which would manifest in the fullness of time.  He was not blindsided by sin’s sudden arrival, but foresaw it, and planned accordingly.

Furthermore, in 2 Timothy 1:9-10, Paul writes:

9 He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, 10 but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

2 TIMOTHY 1:9-10 (Emphasis mine)

Again, what can this mean, but that God foresaw the problems that would arise and had already figured them into the plan of creation and adoption!  The grace that saves us was extended to us long before it was even necessary, for it was given “before the beginning of time”.  Through the work of Jesus Christ, what God had already accomplished in eternity was made visible, or, “brought to light”, in linear time.  That being said, man’s fall did not catch God off guard, and it most certainly did not send Him flying into a holy rage.  He’d planned on it, and He’d prepared for it.

WHAT IF WE’VE GOT IT WRONG?

Even though we can plainly see that God preempted the problem of sin, figuring it into the equation of creation, if we’re to believe what many call the Gospel, when push came to shove, God forgot about His plans, flew off the handle, and decided to condemn men to live lives of anguished separation from His presence, both now and in the life to come.  Like Steve and Pam, He coldly and mechanically excommunicated us.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong?

The typical starting point for those trying to proof-text what I call “abandonment theology”, is man’s banishment from Eden by God.  We usually assume that banishment from the garden equaled banishment from God’s presence.  We envision Adam and Eve being escorted from Eden by a couple of scowling angels, while an angry Yahweh stands with arms followed and brow furrowed in the distance.  He looks upon them with disdain and displeasure, declaring, in King James English, of course, “Never again shalt thou enjoy the bounty and pleasures of Eden, and never again shalt thou draw near to me for fellowship!  My glory and My power are too great for thy wicked hearts, and If thou shalt presume to draw near to me, my holiness will spell destruction for you!  Thy nature hath become corrupted, and is no longer compatible with my Glory and Holiness!”

In this scenario, God not only drives away His children for whom He is eternally responsible, but also turns them over to pain, misery, disease and destruction - all things crafted by His own vengeful hands.

But what if God was not punishing man, but looking out for Him?  What if He actually had man’s wellbeing in mind in all of his judgments and decisions, including His decision to remove them from Eden?  What is God’s actions never speak of malevolence, and always of mercy?  Though this is a rather “inconvenient truth” for modern Evangelicalism, it is, in fact factual that Adam’s banishment from Eden was in his best interest, as well as that of mankind.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with retributive justice, and everything to do with mercy and grace.

Understand that the same “fruit”, be it physical or metaphorical, that corrupted Adam’s mind and understanding, also corrupted our minds and our understanding.  The post fall state, typified by death, was a thing given entry into the veins of humanity through the singular action of one man.  It wasn’t that God was imputing the guilt of Adam to all subsequent generations, but that the disease of sin and its symptoms had passed on to all those of the old creation.  As Paul wrote:

12…sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—

-ROMANS 5:12 (Emphasis mine)

The scriptures are clear, sin and death entered the world through Adam’s action.  Now, if Adam’s eating of one piece of “fruit” resulted in physical death and sin for all of humanity, can you imagine what would have happened had Adam eaten from the tree of life, which was also in Eden?  Just in case you aren’t able to imagine it, God made sure to spell it out for us:

22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

- GENESIS 3:22-24 (Emphasis mine)

Genesis 3:22 states that man would have lived forever had he eaten from the Tree of Life!  Not only would he have lived forever, he would have lived forever in the fallen, broken state which resulted from his disobedience.  Now, we can only assume that this “fruit” would have affected all of humanity, even as the fruit of the first tree had.  This means that had Adam eaten of the tree of life, all of humanity would have been cursed to live forever in a state of sin and death.  Every subsequent human being would have been sealed into a fallen existence, and trapped beneath the tyranny of death.

POST MORTEM HOPE

The Scriptures seem to teach that men who experienced death prior to the advent of Christ were actually given a post mortem (after death) opportunity to believe the Gospel and experience resurrection life.  This most likely took place during the three days in which Christ was physically dead and buried.  Though His body lay inactive in the borrowed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, His Spirit was alive and active, preaching the Gospel in the lower regions of the earth. I know this is something of a radical concept for the Western Christian mind to grasp, but it is a concept present in the scripture nonetheless.  Twice, the Apostle Peter hints at such an occurrence.  Read carefully his words in 1 Peter 4:6:

6 …the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.

-1 PETER 4:6 (Emphasis mine)

Peter declared that even those who died before Christ had an opportunity to believe upon Him in order that they might “live according to God in regard to the spirit”.  It would hardly seem fitting for a just God to sentence to an eternal hell, men who had had never even had an opportunity to receive His Gospel.  Some might argue that it was only those men and women who were, by faith, looking forward to His coming, that were given such an opportunity.  However, words spoken by Peter just one chapter earlier, demolish this idea:

19 After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits— 20 to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water

-1 PETER 3:19-20 (Emphasis mine)

Peter wrote that Christ preached to the dead souls which were imprisoned in the underworld.  Specifically, he says that Christ preached to men and women who disobeyed the words and warnings spoken by Noah thousands of years before.  This means that even those whom we’re told were so evil and violent that God had to remove them from the earth through the flood, had the Gospel preached to them after death, and were given resurrection life through Christ.

What does this mean?  Quite simply it means that physical death was the only hope of salvation from sin and death for those born prior to Christ.  The deaths of those prior to Christ acted as their ticket for a front row seat to one of history’s greatest “revivals”, as Christ preached the Gospel in the belly of sheol.  These men and women, many of whom died without the hope of salvation, separated from the commonwealth of Israel, and isolated from the news of Yahweh, the one true God, were given opportunity to be freed from death and sin’s curse on the other side of their final heartbeat.  How great must God’s love be for the human race!

Now, I want you to imagine how differently things would have played out had God allowed Adam to remain in Eden, where he would have eventually eaten from the tree of life.  All of humanity would have been born as immortal and indestructible beings, meaning that no man would have been able to taste death, and would therefore have been bound to an eternal existence of sin and self-imposed alienation from God.  He would have been utterly irredeemable, his sentence final, and his hope nonexistent.  Had God not ousted Adam and Eve from Eden, all of humanity would have fallen under a curse more horrific than the mind can conceive.

I remind you of the words of St. Irenaeus, which I shared in chapter 3:

[God] ejected him [Adam] from Paradise...in compassion for him, that he might not remain forever a transgressor, and that the sin in which he was involved might not be everlasting, nor the evil interminable and incurable.  He prevented further transgression by the interposition of death…

God’s posture towards humanity, even after the fall, was one of love and compassion.  He had redemption on His mind before Adam had even taken his first breath, and even the alien ailment of death was figured into God’s plan of redemption, for He would use it to save from sin and death those who died beneath their tyrannical reign.  The tradition that God ousted Adam and Eve from His presence because He was too pure to fellowship with them is but a “legend of the fall”, and a complete and utter fabrication perpetuated by men who think more like a fallen Adam than a risen Jesus.  The banishment from Eden was not about punishment and excommunication, but a means through which God protected and eventually reconciled the old creation to Himself.

“But still,” some might argue, “God did banish Adam and Eve from Eden, which was where His presence dwelt, right?  Would this not mean that they did indeed become separated from His presence?”  My answer would be that we are not told that God remained within Eden’s borders, but that He came with the first family as they exited it.  In fact, in Genesis chapter 4, we read of Adam and Eve’s children, Cain and Abel, and are immediately introduced to the fact that they still had regular and personal contact with God.  Cain and Abel are depicted as bringing sacrifices and offerings to the Lord, and God is depicted as speaking directly to the two young men without the use of a mediator.  The lines of communication do not seem to have been affected by the fall in any way.

Actually, the first mention of “separation from God” in scripture comes many decades after the fall, when Cain rises up against, and murders his brother Abel.  We’re told that the Lord punished him by causing him to wander the earth.  In Genesis 4:16, we read: “So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”  Even then, however, God, in compassion, vowed to protect Cain’s life, and placed a mark upon him to ensure his safety and survival (Genesis 4:15).

Some might say, “Well see, Cain’s sin caused him to be separated from the Lord’s presence.”  My answer?  No, actually, it didn’t.  It caused him to be separated from the immediate, localized manifestation of God, which he had apparently grown up with, as the words of the text seem to suggest that Adam, Eve and their children lived in something of a community with one another, in the visible presence of God.  When Cain goes out from the “Lord’s presence”, he is most likely leaving this place in which he and his family lived together with the Lord.  However, Psalms 139:7-10 assures us that there is no place that man can go which is void of the presence of God.  Verse 8 even goes so far as to state that God is in Sheol, the Old Testament abode of both the wicked and righteous dead.  So yes, Cain was separated from the presence of God as experienced in his family’s communal setting, but only from that particular manifestation.  The mark of protection which God placed upon him is a testimony to His continued, though, perhaps, invisible hand upon Cain’s life.  If God went with Cain in the form of a mark of protection, it is clear that He was not so offended as to cut off all communication and interaction with Cain, but was looking out for the welfare and safety of those with whom Cain lived.  Cain’s banishment most likely was not due to God’s inability to live with a murderer, but with the threat he might pose to those in his community.  So even in this moment of discipline, God was looking out for Cain’s and his family’s wellbeing.

The tale of Cain and his “separation” from God actually proves a point much more glorious than the idea that “sin separates from God”.  What it proves is that God did not separate Himself from Adam, or the human race, in the first place.  This scenario took place possibly decades after Adam’s initial fall, and yet, God was still walking among humans, talking with them face to face and interacting with them just as He always had.  There was no separation.  God never shook humanity off of his arm like a bothersome child, nor did He cast them away like an object of shame.  Was there discipline and natural consequences that resulted from Adam’s actions?  Of course, but was there a moment in which God turned His back on the whole of humanity, only to become favorably disposed towards us once Christ came and changed His mind about us?  No, that idea is simply a myth; a legend of the fall.

So where exactly does this idea of “separation from God” come from?

TINY DADDY

As I’m writing this, my son is sitting next to me, holding a pair of binoculars up to his eyes.  In an impish little voice, he said, “Daddy, you look so tiny!”  When I looked over at him, I found him to be looking at me through the wrong end of the binoculars.  The result of his “backwards point of view” was that I appeared “tiny” and far away.

This is precisely where the idea of alienation and separation from God originates.  Man’s mind had become corrupted by the knowledge of good and evil, and it was as though his soul’s binoculars were turned backwards.  Nothing looked right anymore.  He couldn’t perceive reality rightly.  Everything that he experienced was now filtered through his corrupted mindset.

Daddy looked tiny, distant, and a long, long ways away.

Over the years we’ve developed a concept of a God who exists on one side of a great chasm, and we on its opposite side.  Man, so we’ve said, was and is incapable of experiencing any real communion with this God prior to Christ, and can merely shout across the distance, hoping in vain for a response from the aloof deity living on the other side.  We see this often illustrated in tracts and Christian literature, making it appear as though when Christ came, the Cross formed something of a bridge between two estranged parties, enabling the little stick figures dwelling in “man” land, to migrate over into “God” land.  The equation seems to work out nicely, and makes for a great illustration.  However, in the context of this theory, the conclusion that one must draw about God is that He is no better than our fictional, derelict parents, Steve and Pam.  Never mind the fact that this idea is never presented in the scriptures.

What we’d be left with in this point of view is a “God” who is much more concerned with His own offended sensibilities than He is with His responsibilities as a parent.  We’re left with a stone cold God who views our weaknesses through a judicial lens, instead of a parent who loves us unconditionally, and runs to rescue us upon hearing our cries for help.  What the popular view offers us is a lawgiver instead of a lover; a policeman instead of a parent, and an abuser instead of an Abba.

This, however, is far from the case.  As we’ve already seen, God made preemptive preparations for the entrance of sin, and did not fly off the handle in shock when Adam fell.  The behaviors we attribute to God would never be accepted from physical parents, and yet, we’re somehow to believe that when coming from the Godhead, such behaviors must be regarded as “holy”.  We must bypass all logic and reason, and completely overlook the benevolent nature of our God of love in order to arrive at such erroneous conclusions.  We must also assume that we are better parents than God, and that somehow He can get away with things that we’re not allowed to even think about.

So many of us have thoughts and ideas playing in the background of our minds; thoughts that we are not even aware of.  If there are stressful situations in your life, even when you’re not directly thinking about them, they are playing in your subconscious mind, and bleeding outward, affecting every other part of your life.  In the same way, as believers, there are numerous false concepts about God that are playing on a continuous loop in our subconscious minds.  We may not even realize we are thinking them, but they are always playing beneath the surface.  These thoughts have a direct affect upon our anxiety level, our ability to be content and satisfied in life, and above all, our ability to rightly relate to the God whose acceptance we so desperately long for.

We carry these backwards ideas into our relationship with Him, and end up living very dysfunctional lives.  As a younger man, I was haunted by the idea of becoming “separated” from God.  Throughout the years I had been conditioned to believe that God was extremely weak stomached when it came to my sins.  I truly believed that each and every time I sinned I became cut off from the presence of God.  As a result, I became obsessive in my desire to remain in a state of “purity”.  I would often fall prey to panic attacks, as I frantically tried to recall and repent of any purposeful or accidental sins that I may have committed.  To leave even one unconfessed, was to risk severance from the God whose presence I longed for.

FORSAKEN AT 55 MILES PER HOUR

There was one instance in particular that aided in bringing me to this place of spiritual paranoia.  In my very early days of walking with the Lord, I remember listening to a preacher tell a story that deeply impacted me, albeit it in a very negative way.  He told us of how he was once driving down the interstate, exceeding the speed limit by at least ten miles per hour.  Then, much to his dismay, he noticed a squad car lying in wait a short distance ahead of him.  Knowing that he was in violation of the traffic laws, and that he would most assuredly be pulled over and ticketed, he quickly prayed that God would protect him, conceal him from the officer’s eyes, and get him off the hook.

But at that moment, so the preacher said, he had an epiphany: God was not listening!  He was on his own now.  He had chosen to break the law, and God, in His holiness, had to back away from Him, leaving him to suffer whatever consequence might befall him.

Now, I’m sure the preacher had the best of intentions in telling us that story.  Unfortunately for me, however, that story burrowed its way deep down into my belief system, and I could never quite shake the influence that it had over me.  If I would exceed the speed limit by even a hair while driving, I would quickly repent, decelerate to about five miles under, turn on the cruise control, and begin frantically asking the Holy Spirit to “return” to me.  If I was walking down the street and failed to pick up a piece of litter, condemnation would overtake me, sending me into a tailspin of repentance, and frantic pleading for God’s presence to remain.  It seemed to me that God’s presence was one of the most difficult “things” to keep around, as the smallest of mistakes on my end seemed to have the power to spook Him away.

I know that I may have been an extreme case, but I’d venture to say that thousands, perhaps millions, of believers worldwide struggle with similar mindsets.  Regardless of the degree to which one is affected by such thoughts, they all have their origins in the same faulty and mythological notion that sin has the power to separate us from God.  Such an idea vexes the soul, and destroys the human spirit.  It suggests to an already struggling humanity, that God is so repulsed by our struggles that He abandons us in the midst of them.  In our greatest moments of weakness, vulnerability and distress, He simply abandons us on legal grounds, or because His sin allergy will not let Him stick around.  No matter how much He “loves” us, He is just too holy to look at us in our sins.

Such ideas suck the love story right out of the Gospel, drain it of its color, and present us instead with a dreary, black and white portrait of a Puritanical deity, who is fickle, distant, and very snobbish regarding the company he keeps.  This caricature of God does not create a longing to know Him, and it most certainly does not elicit a response of love from us.  Instead, it creates hurt and confusion, and wounds us in the deepest and most profound ways possible.  Instead of engaging Him because of our love for Him, our relationship with God - if it could even really be called that - becomes nothing but an attempt on our part to bring Him back to us, and convince Him that we’re worth hanging out with.

Is it really any wonder that the world is repulsed by the “gospel” that we present them with?  Is it any wonder that they despise the Jesus we preach to them, when our message, essentially, tells them that an all knowing God created them with the foreknowledge that they would sin, but separated Himself from them once they lived up to His expectations, and then damns them to an eternity in hell for merely following the script?  That is, of course, unless they’re willing to walk that “green mile” to the altar, “pray a short prayer”, and “repeat after me”.  No wonder our message falls on deaf ears, and creates more disgust than it does disciples!

This “God” who separates Himself from a struggling humanity, may have the power to captivate their emotions, playing off of their fears of the unknown for a few fleeting moments, but he does not have the power to move their hearts or elicit a response of passionate, undying love from them.  This “God” may gain a few feeble and fearful followers, but He most certainly will not ravish the hearts of the masses, causing them to fall swooning in lovesickness before Him.  And that is simply because this “God” is not real.  He is a product of man’s backwards vision.  He is but a caricature of the real God as He appears when viewed through the backwards binoculars of Adam’s brokenness.  He is no more real than the man in the moon, and can therefore do nothing but affect men on an emotional, human level, as He is nothing more than an emotional, human construct.

Who then is the real God?  And what is His response to the foreknown problem of human sin?  How did He react, and how did He view the human race while in its “fallen state”?

Read the following scripture very carefully, and then, read it again:

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

-ROMANS 5:6 (Emphasis mine)

I’m not sure if that socks you in the gut quite the way it does me, but I simply cannot read those words without experiencing a profound flurry of emotions.  To think of God, the One whom we’ve been taught to see as distant, uncaring and cold towards sinners, as being full of compassion and love for us; not seeing us as filthy lawbreakers and reprobates, but as weak, lost, broken and confused children, in need on His loving rescue, is, well, revolutionary to say the least!  To think that God was not viewing sinful humanity through the lens of law, but instead through the lens of fervent love, is almost too much for me to take in.  While the myth states that God is repulsed by sin, and unable to so much as look upon us in such a state, the Gospel declares that sin, far from causing God to flee, actually caused Him to draw close.

The idea that God could not, and cannot look upon us when we behave badly arises mostly from a misreading of Habakkuk 1:13, in which the prophet says of God:

13 Your eyes are too pure to look on evil…

-HABAKKUK 1:13 (Emphasis mine)

From this isolated verse, many have arrived at the conclusion that God is unable to look upon sinful men.  So, according to this logic, from the time of Adam’s fall, up until the time of Christ’s death, God was unable to fellowship with humanity because He was just “too pure” to look upon evil.  Though a surface level reading of Habakkuk’s words do seem to suggest such an idea, when read in context it becomes quite apparent that the prophet was not, in any way, speaking of an inability on the part of God to fellowship with weak and sinful humans:

13 Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;

you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.

Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?

Why are you silent while the wicked

swallow up those more righteous than themselves?

-HABAKKUK 1:13 (Emphasis mine)

Habakkuk is not making a definitive statement about God’s inability to fellowship with the broken, but rather is making a statement about God’s sense of justice.  God is not the type who can sit idly by while injustices occur.  Rather, His justice demands He get involved.  In the verse in question, the prophet was frustrated with the fact that God did not seem to be acting quickly enough in the particular matters of injustice that he was beholding.  The main point of Habakkuk’s statement is not that God is too pure to look upon evil in the sense that He must hide His face in disgust.  The point is that God is just too pure and noble to look upon evil without jumping into the middle of the situation and rectifying it.

Have you ever seen a horrific accident on the freeway, where no ambulances or emergency vehicles had yet arrived?  As a good and noble person, could you simply drive by and hope for the best?  No, you would stop your car, get out, and see if there was anything that you could do to help.  At the very least, you would call the police and alert them to the situation.  This is precisely what the prophet seems to be stating about the nature of God, and His words actually serve to declare the very opposite of what many of us have been taught.  Sin is not a force which can keep God from us, but was something of a horrific accident; a collision between His children and evil that, far from eliciting an apathetic aloofness, actually caused Him to passionately draw near to us!  Sin was not a force that drove God away, but the very thing that brought Him near in Jesus Christ.  It was an injustice, and Christ came to put wrong things right.  Just as Habakkuk suggests about God’s character, He’s too pure to watch this unjust scene unfold without getting involved!

Consider once more the words of Paul, in Romans 5:6,

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

-ROMANS 5:6 (Emphasis mine)

God saw humanity struggling and suffocating in sin, and His noble character demanded that He intervene.  He could not simply close His eyes to our plight, and seek solace for His offended soul.  No, when we were weakened and sapped of all strength, God, through Christ, drew near to us, pulled his vehicle over, and jumped into the midst of our chaos.

Before His birth, the angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph about Jesus, declaring to him:

21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

-MATTHEW 1:21 (Emphasis mine)

Again we see that it was precisely our sin that brought God close to us.  He looked upon the broken human condition with compassion and pity, and He, being too pure to simply look upon evil, jumped into the ring to save us from that which was harassing and destroying us.

20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

-ROMANS 5:20-21 (Emphasis mine)

Paul tells us that the Law of Moses was given for the express purpose of causing sin to increase.  In other words, the Law was given so that people would not be able to keep it and so that sin would flourish.  Peter, in Acts 15:10 declared that no one in all of Israel’s history had ever been able to bear up under the burden of the Law.  It was impossible to keep, and that was they very reason that it was given.  Now, as silly and as counterproductive as that may sound, God did have a purpose in this.

The Law was given so that there would be a standard to break in the first place, and man, becoming convinced of his inability to lead a righteous life, would be convinced of a deeper problem.  His eyes would be opened to the harsh realities of the fall, and of his own internalization of sin.  Then, at just the right moment, when he was fully convinced of his powerlessness against the corruption of sin, Jesus Christ, being too pure and noble to simply watch this evil unfold, exploded onto the scene as savior, giving Grace to all.  The Law gave us a grid for understanding what we needed saving from, and Christ’s coming revealed the amazing depth of God’s love in saving us from it.

What God is communicating is that there was nothing that could keep Him away from us.  He would accept us as His own, regardless of our sin and brokenness.  He would come and take away all that offended and caused us to recoil and hide.  He would destroy the power of sin itself, which offended Him in that it corrupted the creation He loved so dearly.  He would brutally put these to death through His own death, and in so doing, reveal to all men that our offenses never drove Him away, but drove Him to our aid.

THE CHASM

Now, this is a very tough pill for many modern believers to swallow, simply because it goes against so much of what we have grown up believing.  We simply assume that the Bible is chock full of verses declaring that sin separated man from God, and that until Christ came, we were on the other side of some great and un-crossable chasm.  It would shock most believers to know that there is not one single scripture in the entire Bible that says sin caused all men to be separated from God.

Many would be quick to quote Isaiah 59:1-2:

1 Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,

nor his ear too dull to hear.

2 But your iniquities have separated

you from your God;

your sins have hidden his face from you,

so that he will not hear.

-ISAIAH 59:1-2 (Emphasis mine)

What we often forget is that this passage was written to Israel at a very specific time in her history, and is not a blanket statement about all of humanity.  Nowhere is it suggested that this is a diagnosis of all who were born prior to Christ.  Such a view of this verse is a gross misinterpretation, and ignores its historical context.  It is a convenient mutilation of the author’s intent that is used in order to prove our presuppositions, but it misses the point entirely.  This verse speaks nothing of original, inherited sin, but of the specific sins of Israel at a specific time in her history.  It’s a prophecy about God getting Israel’s attention at a time of great apostasy and crookedness.  It has nothing at all to do with the condition of the human race.

Further reading of Isaiah 59 reveals Israel as being in a state of deep, dark iniquity, participating in and turning a blind eye to murder, and improper treatment of others (verses 3-4, 7).  Israel, the prophet tells us, was constantly hatching evil and despicable plans and neglected the weaker members of society (verses 4-5, 8).  We read of a nation in which men were quick to rush into sin and to shed innocent blood (verse 7), and we’re even told that those who would dare to shun the corruption of the day became prey for those indulging in it (verse 55).  Clearly, we are reading of a very sick and backwards society here.

In the midst of all of this crookedness, however, they maintained a facade of religiosity (verse 6), carrying on with their traditions, prayers, and sacrifices.  Though when they cried out to God, they felt as if He was not coming through for them, and Isaiah depicts the nation as bringing accusations against God, asking questions such as, “What’s wrong with you?  Is your arm too short?  Have you grown hard of hearing?  Why aren’t you helping us?”  To such brazen accusations, God replies that the problem was on their end, and His silence did not suggest impotence on His part.

Furthermore, the chapter is written in a typical prophetic style, using types and allegories in order to drive the point home.  We ought not to assume that an omnipresent, never distant God literally became separated from Israel, or that He became literally deaf to their cries.  Rather, we are most likely reading of Israel crying out for help in certain distressful situations, and God not directly intervening.  Upon closer examination of the chapter, it actually seems that any perceived lack of God’s presence was actually a result of Israel’s blindness, and their inability to perceive God among them:

9 So justice is far from us,

and righteousness does not reach us.

We look for light, but all is darkness;

for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows.

10 Like the blind we grope along the wall,

feeling our way like people without eyes.

At midday we stumble as if it were twilight;

among the strong, we are like the dead.

11 We all growl like bears;

we moan mournfully like doves.

We look for justice, but find none;

for deliverance, but it is far away.

12 For our offenses are many in your sight,

and our sins testify against us.

Our offenses are ever with us,

and we acknowledge our iniquities:

13 rebellion and treachery against the Lord,

turning our backs on our God…

- ISAIAH 59:9-12 (Emphasis mine)

Why did justice seem far, and why was the light like darkness to them?  They themselves declare that it was due to their own blindness and inability to see the light, even at midday.  They moaned mournfully, longing for God and for justice, but their perceived lack resulted not from God having turned His back on them, but from them having turned their backs on Him!

No matter what way we look at it, it must be kept in mind that the “separation” in question was not something aimed at the entire human race.  It dealt with one nation at one very specific time in her history.  It dealt with God allowing certain things to occur to national Israel in order to bring her to a place of dependence upon Him.  It had nothing to do with Him being allergic to sin and being forced to retreat into hiding until they cleaned up their acts.

We must always be careful when reading words written to Old Testament Israel, for we are often tempted to believe that we are free to apply scriptures pertaining to them to ourselves.  Our situation, however, could not be more different from theirs, as Israel was under an inferior covenant that came with both rewards for obedience, and reprisals for disobedience.  So even though there may be Old Testament scriptures seeming to suggest that sin separates us from God, we must keep in mind that these scriptures were written and addressed to national Israel, and not to the whole of humanity.  We must also keep in mind that the “separation” we read of in such passages usually has nothing to do with a separation from God’s presence in a relational sense, but is speaking of God apparently allowing certain things to occur to them, and consequently appearing as though He is ignoring their prayers.  The separation is not about a lack of warm fuzzies in our personal prayer time, but deals with God not seeming to act when Israel called to Him.  It could manifest as Him no longer fighting Israel’s battles for her, or any number of similar things, but has nothing whatsoever to do with how God responds to human sin.

This issue of Old and New Covenants is a very, very big deal, and cannot simply be brushed aside with statements such as, “the whole Bible is God’s word, not just the New Testament!”  The truth is that while, yes, the whole Bible is God’s written word, one cannot reach into it as though it were some sort of divine goody bag, pull out any sentence they desire, and apply it to their lives.  The Old Testament is primarily written to one nation - Israel.  Now, we can certainly learn things from its words, and come to see and know the person of God through the things revealed about Him therein, but the ways in which He deals with Israel is peculiar to His relationship with that nation at that particular time in history.

At the giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai, God promised Israel that if they would keep the whole of the Law then, “…out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine,” (Exodus 19:5).  It is clear that, in regard to the Mosaic covenant, God had one nation in mind, not many.  That one nation, chosen out of many, would be the matrix through which salvation would come to all, but throughout the Old Testament period, God was dealing almost exclusively with that single nation.  Therefore, we can be sure that when we read the word “Israel”, in an Old Covenant context, it does not include Gentile nations or modern day Christians.

However, in Jeremiah 31:31, the prophet declared that a day was coming in which God would make a New Covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.  Since we know that, in this instance, we are reading about the New Covenant era, we are allowed to read into the word “Israel” what we are not allowed to read into it in an Old Covenant context.  For Paul, in Romans 9:6, tells us that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.”  And again, in verse 8, he states, “…it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.” (Emphasis mine)

Who then are the “children of promise”, and the “Israel” to whom Paul makes reference?  It is not one singular nation, but the “one new humanity” spoken of Ephesians 2:15; a divine family made up of Jews and Gentiles, who have received and believed the truth of the Gospel through faith in Jesus Christ.  These are referred to by Paul as “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16).

We know, therefore, that the “Israel” and “House of Judah” with which God stated He would establish a New Covenant, does not speak exclusively of national Israel, as was the case at Mt. Sinai, and is strictly the case throughout the bulk of the Old Testament.  Why?  Because the Old Covenant was exclusive to the physical nation of Israel, as Gentiles are said to have been “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise”. (Ephesians 2:12)  The New Covenant, however, according to Paul, is a covenant which includes both Jews and Gentiles.

Therefore, when we read Old Testament verses that seem to suggest that God left Israel when she was in a state of rebellion, we must remember that such words were spoken under an inferior covenant, and dealt exclusively with a single nation.  Furthermore, talk of God turning away from Israel typically deals, not with a literal abandonment, but with God allowing their enemies to prevail over them for a season for the purpose of bringing them back to Himself.  Though, even under the Old Covenant, God promised Israel that He would: “…never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6) Even when we read of an apparent separation between Israel and God, we’re reading of something covenantal in nature, and not relational, for while He may have allowed their enemies to prevail against them, He promised to never leave or forsake them.  Old Testament mentions of separation also most certainly have nothing to do with God being unable to stomach the sight of sin.  That is just a silly, and unscriptural notion.

This idea of Old and New Covenants, covenantal separation, and the understanding that Gentiles were not included in on the blessings and promises of the Old also sheds light on several New Testament verses that seem to suggest a separation from God as it concerned the Gentile nations.  Take for instance the words of Paul, in Ephesians 2:

12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

- EPHESIANS 2:12-13 (Emphasis mine)

A surface reading of this text would suggest to some that everyone who has yet to believe the Gospel, or that all born prior to Christ, are/were separated from the presence of God.  However, when we examine the context, it becomes clear that this is a covenantal passage, dealing, not with God’s disposition towards unconverted humanity in general, but with covenant, for this address is aimed specifically at Gentile believers.  We know this, as Paul opens up by saying:

11 Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth…

-EPHESIANS 2:11 (Emphasis mine)

Verses 12 and 13 were addressed, not to all men universally, but to the Gentiles who were formerly a people without a covenant or revelation of God.  It was exclusively Israel to whom God chose to reveal Himself, and that in the context of covenant.  The Gentile nations were in the dark concerning God, and were therefore separate and considered foreigners regarding to the ways of Yahweh.  However, through Christ’s blood, and through the establishment of a New Covenant, these Gentile nations were given entrance into a way of life in which they too could learn, and then walk out, the truth of God.  Their former separation was not literal, in the sense that God was absent from them, but covenantal, in the sense that they were not in covenantal relationship with God, and therefore lacked the direct revelation that was given to Israel.

We know that the Gentiles were not literally separated from the presence of God, for Paul, in Acts 17:27, asserts even of the pagan Athenians that God was “…not far from any one of us”.  He also goes on to state, using the words of their own poets, “…in Him [God] we [both Paul and the Athenians] live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  Then, he makes the even more scandalous declaration that both himself and the Athenian idol worshippers were, “His [God’s] offspring” (Acts 17:28, Emphasis mine).

It cannot rightly be said that the Gentiles were literally separated from God’s presence or influence, since Paul insists that he was both active and present in their lives.  Rather, they were separated in the covenantal sense of the word.  They had no knowledge or revelation of Yahweh, and, as a nation, lacked a covenant that joined their lives to His.  Through Christ’s blood, however, a New Covenant was established that was not based upon lineage or race.  In a covenantal sense, the formerly “separated” Gentiles have now been brought near in Jesus!  This is strictly covenantal language, and has nothing to do with the unscriptural notion that God is allergic to sinners and their sins.

Another problem with translating this verse as meaning that the Gentiles were literally separated from God is that it would suggest that the Jews, prior to Christ, were not separated.  The separation problem would appear to be an exclusively Gentile problem, while the Jews apparently had it all under control.  I’d venture to say that no proponent of the belief that man is born separated from God would say that Jews are born with a free pass, and emerge from the womb already in a relationship with God.  No, they would assert that all men, regardless of race, are born separated from God, and that no man receives a free pass based upon merit or ethnicity.  One simply cannot use this verse to justify the doctrine of universal separation from God while remaining faithful to the doctrine itself.  You see, Ephesians 2:12 only works as a proof text for universal separation if we are prepared to teach that Jews get a free pass.  Otherwise, the whole notion of universal separation breaks down.  Clearly, this passage is referring to covenant relationship and revelation.

Two chapters later, in Ephesians 4:18, Paul also writes:

18 They [the Gentiles] are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

- EPHESIANS 4:18 (Emphasis mine)

This is another proof text that is often used to show that man is inherently separated from God.  However, Paul is not saying that the Gentiles are separated from the “presence of God”, but that they are separated from the “life of God”.  These two ideas are not the same.  The “life of God” in question does not speak of God’s essence, or “life force”, but a lifestyle that accompanies a relationship with Him.

Consider these alternative translations:

18 They do not understand, and they know nothing, because they refuse to listen. So they cannot have the life that God gives.

-Ephesians 4:18 (NCV, Emphasis mine)

18 with darkened understandings, having by reason of the ignorance which is deep-seated in them and the insensibility of their moral nature, no share in the Life which God gives.  -Ephesians 4:18 (Wey, Emphasis mine)

18…They are excluded from the life that God approves of because of their ignorance and stubbornness.

-Ephesians 4:18 (GWT, Emphasis mine)

These three translations seem to have caught Paul’s original intent, in that he was not describing exclusion from God’s presence, but a separation from a lifestyle that is in harmony with God’s character, and can only be walked out in the context of a relationship with Him.  They did not know His ways or His holiness, and therefore continued on in the godless ways of their ancestors.  This is confirmed by the surrounding context:

17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.

-EPHESIANS 4:17 (Emphasis mine)

Before ever suggesting that unbelieving Gentiles are separated from the life of God, Paul makes it clear that the “life” in question is, in fact, a lifestyle, for he instructs the Gentile believers to no longer live as the Gentiles do.  Their thinking is futile, corrupted and darkened, and, as a result, so is the way that they conduct themselves.  Verses 19-24 make the Apostle’s intent even more clear:

19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. 20 That, however, is not the way of life you learned  21 when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

-EPHESIANS 4:19-24 (Emphasis mine)

The “life of God”, from which the unbelieving Gentiles were said to be separated, is a lifestyle that only comes from the knowledge that the old self was crucified, and that one has been given new life in Christ.  The “life of God” is an upright way of life that arises in response to us knowing our true identity.  It is not a synonym for presence, but describes a walk that one cannot fully embrace outside of a revelation of the truth of the Gospel.

The glorious truth is that the Bible does not teach that all men are separated and cut off from God because of sin.  It is a mythical conclusion, arrived at by men philosophizing in accordance with the fallen mind; men who, in their scramble for proof texts, read their preconceived ideas into passages that are irrelevant to their argument.  What the Bible actually teaches is that it was us who separated ourselves from God.  The guilt, shame and fear that accompanied sin caused us to run and hide, but God was right where He’d always been.

Remember, man’s mind had become corrupted by the knowledge of good and evil, rendering him incapable of perceiving God rightly.  Over the years, people born with this same inability began viewing their loving Father as someone to be terrified of.  Seconds after biting into forbidden fruit, the human race began a centuries’ long migration away from the face of the One who loved them.  A wound was inflicted upon the hearts and minds of man that caused a great malfunction to take place in his nature.  Fellowshipping with the Living God, something which was once man’s chief pleasure, became something that He dreaded and fled from.  The wound cut deeply, and affected every part of his nature, leaving him in desperate need of healing.

In the latter half of Isaiah 53:5 we read of God’s initiative in healing this wound:

5... the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

-ISAIAH 53:5 (Emphasis mine)

Isaiah states that Christ underwent a punishment in order that we might receive peace.  This was not a punishment that was intended for us, but was instead absorbed by Christ.  Isaiah is simply stating that God used the punishment and death that Christ experienced unjustly and at the hands of men, to accomplish a healing work within us.  We are told that through His death we attained peace. Many have gone to great lengths to show that the peace mentioned here speaks of a mutual peace between us and God.  They view God as angry, and vengeful towards humanity, but after smiting Christ in our place, His rage is quelled and He declares a truce.  Isaiah, however, does not state that God was given peace through Christ’s death, but that we were given peace through Christ’s death.

The next words to fall off of the prophet’s pen are even more telling, for he states that by Christ’s wounds, we are healed!  While I certainly believe that this verse can carry implications concerning physical healing, the immediate context seems to be about something deeper.  The theme in verse five is that Christ’s death deals with the problem of our sin.  In the first half of the verse, we are told that He was “pierced for our transgressions”, and then “crushed for our iniquities”.  Since Isaiah speaks of us receiving “peace”, and being “healed” in the very same sentence, we can safely assume that the issue of human sin is still what he has in mind when He refers to our healing.

The problem of sin is likened unto a wound, or a sickness, that steals peace from our lives and requires urgent care and healing.  What exactly is the nature of this peace, and how does a lack of it manifest in our lives?

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way…

-ISAIAH 53:6 (Emphasis mine)

Through Isaiah’s words we glimpse the true corrupting power of sin at work.  It caused us to turn, go astray, and flee from the lover of our souls.  Never does he state that sin was a problem for God, nor are we told that sin caused Him to go astray or to abandon us.  Rather, we are told that it was a sickness that robbed us of the sense of peace and security which we once felt in the Father’s presence.  That isn’t to say that God was “A OK” with sinful behavior, for we know that isn’t the case at all.  What I’m saying is that sin’s power to separate had nothing to do with it causing God to separate from us.  Rather, it created feelings of shame, guilt, and fear within us, which caused us to separate from Him.

We no longer felt safe or at peace before God.  We felt dirty, ashamed, and worthy of abandonment.  Our consciences smote us again and again, convincing us that we were unclean, and unfit for fellowship, and so we fled from God, turned to our own ways, and left behind the One who loves us and calls us His own.  You see, it was we, who, because of our lack of peace, went astray like sheep, separating ourselves from our Father, not the other way around!

It was not God who went astray, but us!

There was only one solution, and one cure for this malady:

5 We all, like sheep, have gone astray...the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

-ISAIAH 53:5 (Emphasis mine)

When our hearts wandered and alienated themselves from the Lord, there was but one solution:  The Father’s eternal Son would jump into the middle of our mess and confusion, and take upon Himself the iniquity that drained us of our peace, and caused us to wander.  The LORD would lay upon the Son the sin of us all, and the Son would then submit Himself to death.  Then, through His death, Christ would destroy the disease of sin.

In 1 Peter 2, The Apostle offers his own unique commentary on these verses from Isaiah:

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

-1 PETER 2:24 (Emphasis mine)

Peter tells us that Christ bore our sins in His body.  Isaiah said it in slightly different words, but the same basic idea is present: God laid the iniquity, or sin, of all mankind upon the body of Jesus Christ.  In 2 Corinthians 5:21, the Apostle Paul tells us that “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us...”  Simply put, Christ willingly identified with the sin of all humanity, taking it upon His own flesh, and, in a cosmic sense, represented all humanity.  By assuming our malady, he became us.  He did not represent us in some cold, legal sense, but in a cosmic and vicarious sense, He literally became us as we were in Adam.  Then, at the hands of His Roman torturers, His physical body was wounded beyond recognition and put to death.  Since Christ was bearing our sins in His body, when His body was put to death, the sin that He bore was put to death along with Him.  This, I believe, is precisely what Peter means when he states that through Christ’s bearing of our sins we “die to sins…” (1 Peter 2:24).

After clearly showing Christ’s death to be the death of sin and the old creation, Peter quotes Isaiah 53:5 directly, “by His wounds you have been healed”, and his point could not be any clearer - Christ’s death cured the problem of sin!  The disease was healed, and the cancer extracted.  The disease itself was sin, but the horrifying result of this disease was that man had wandered like sheep from the Father.  Since we have been healed, however, the symptoms of self-imposed separation begin to disappear as well, and Peter tells us that this is precisely what takes place, in verse 25:

25 For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

-1 PETER 2:25 (Emphasis mine)

We, who were like sheep going astray, have now been enabled to return to the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls!  Our sin disease was extracted, and with it the crippling fear of God that its presence created.  The beauty in all of this is the fact that it was not the Shepherd who fled from the diseased sheep, but the diseased sheep that fled from the Shepherd.  The Shepherd, being a kind, benevolent and loving Shepherd, far from abandoning His sheep, pursued them down through the ages, and eventually, provided the cure for their malady.  In taking away that which caused us to wander, we are now empowered to return to Him.

In Jesus Christ, the guilt, the shame, and the fear created through the ingestion of the knowledge of good and evil has been obliterated.  The stronghold of condemnation crumbles when we recognize the perfect work of Christ in putting sin to death.  When we behold our healed state, and come to grips with our utter perfection in Christ, we are released from the terror that caused us to flee, and are instead sent running wildly towards the house of the God whom we now realize has always been on our side.  By his wounds we are healed, and given the grace to return to His loving embrace!

SALVATION BY SEPARATION?

Still, there are many who would insist that the idea of separation from God is not only Biblical, but central to an understanding of salvation.  The idea of justice lies at the core of their understanding of the mechanics of Christ’s death and atonement, and, as a result, they simply cannot comprehend a “just” God not separating Himself from sinners.  In their minds, the separation was part of the punishment for sin.  It was a means by which God communicated to us His hatred of wickedness and His love for “holiness”.

Now, this all sounds orthodox enough, but there is a slight problem - The Bible doesn’t teach this!  Nowhere in the scriptures are we taught that God had to separate Himself from man as punishment for their sins.  It’s simply not there.  Now again, there are a few verses that people will argue seem to suggest this idea.  In most each and every case, however, these are scriptures either referring to national Israel, a nation under an inferior and conditional covenant at a particular time in her history, or, they are references to Gentile nations who were without a covenant and separated from the knowledge of God, in the sense that they had no revelation of Him.  However, there is not one single text in the entire Bible suggesting that God separated Himself from the whole of humanity because of Adam’s sin.

Not only is there no internal evidence in the written word that the broken human condition separated us from God, the Living Word, Jesus Christ Himself, is the eternal evidence of this astounding truth.  For more than three decades, Jesus, who was much more than just a man representing God, but very God Himself, walked among, talked and shared meals with the most “vile” of sinners.  He chose as His inner circle everyone from political zealots, to foulmouthed fishermen, to con artists and tax collectors.  Prostitutes washed his feet, and the ceremonially unclean touched him.  Time after time, Jesus Christ, the very truth about Father God, showed us that sin, far from separating men from God, actually brought Him nearer.  He did not see the Adamic sickness and cringe, but was moved with compassion, and ran straight towards it in order to heal it.  Not only did He fellowship with sinful humanity, but, according to Paul, was incarnated into the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 7:3)!  Not only did Christ fellowship with those affected by the sin of Adam, He took on a body which had been touched by it as well!  If God were unable to be close to sinners and their sins, the incarnation would not have even been a possibility!

You see, abandonment is not in the vocabulary of God, and is a concept that is utterly foreign to the Godhead.  By nature, God is Triune, and unity is therefore at the center of His being.  Nothing springing from His Tri-unity could ever be treated in a manner that is discordant with His nature.  There is nothing in all of creation that is strong enough or repulsive enough to keep Him from us.  He loves us, and His love will pursue us, even though we flee, run, and demand that He leave us alone.  No, not even “free will” is strong enough to stop His love!

His love never stops!

It is a steady, white hot flame that burns in spite of human rejection and dismissals.  It is an unstoppable force that may seem take “no” for an answer for a season, but is always pursuing us, even when we’re not aware of it.

As Karl Barth wrote:

Man can certainly flee from God... but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.

You see, even when you “hit fifty five” in a fifty mile per hour zone, the Father is still with you.  He is not squeamish, or allergic to sin, but fiercely loyal and devoted to His creation, though they sin.  To think that He is easily spooked away and forced to abandon us is to insult His goodness and nature.  Sin cannot, does not, and will not, ever separate a man or a woman from God.  However, a mind that allows itself to be polluted by the knowledge of good and evil can create the illusion of separation, and this illusion is one that a majority of believers are living in the midst of.

MacDonald writes:

Let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God.  God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him, making life a good thing to him.  God gives him Himself, though the man knows it not. 30

In addition to being unscriptural, this illusion of separation is also extremely hurtful.  Some, and in reality, all, struggle with some issue of sin.  Be it unforgiveness, pornography addiction, anger issues, substance abuse, or any other number of issues, both bestial and banal, will likely remain with some of us for the remainder of our lives.  How terrible and disheartening it would be to think that in our greatest moments of weakness, vulnerability, and brokenness, our God would choose to abandon us!  How terrible and detrimental to our emotional and spiritual health would such a thought be!  From a well of experience, I can tell you just how terrible it is.  I’ve been there, done that, and have the t-shirt, scars, and straight jacket to prove it!  It is pure, undiluted hell.  It increases the pain and anguish that sin creates on its own, and far from discouraging further participation in sin, actually exacerbates the problem.  One is tempted to think that behaving well enough to keep God around is just too hard, and then often opts for indulging in sinful pleasures in order to numb the pain of feeling like garbage.  The New Testament authors seemed to have understood this, and instead of using threats of abandonment by God to get their followers to believe, actually used their union with Christ as a means to encourage them to live uprightly:

4 Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. 5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,

“Never will I leave you;

never will I forsake you.”

-HEBREWS 13:4-6 (Emphasis mine)

While the writer does including a warning about the judgment that adultery brings, his reasoning behind why we should live uprightly is that God has promised to never leave or forsake us!

15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.”

-1 CORINTHIANS 6:15-16 (Emphasis mine)

Paul, in discouraging the rather licentious Corinthians from frequenting prostitutes, uses their union with Christ as a discouragement against ungodly behavior.  He reminds them that their body parts (members) are members of Christ, and suggests that joining one’s members with a prostitute is tantamount to joining Christ’s members with a prostitute.  He does not suggest that one ceases to be a member of Christ’s body upon joining themselves with a prostitute, but that they remain members of His body, and so they should abstain from such evil behavior.  Their inseparable union with Christ is intended to serve as the thing that discourages them from living ungodly lives!

30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

-EPHESIANS 4:30

Paul, in encouraging the Ephesian church to not engage in activities that “grieve the Holy Spirit”, reminds them that they have been “sealed”, or permanently marked with His presence.  He does not threaten them with abandonment should they grieve Him, but essentially tells them that they’re stuck with Him, so they’d better learn to get along with Him.

What I think the apostles understood was that our hearts are only truly healed from pain and addictions through relationship.  If we constantly feel abandoned each time we sin, will it not crush us?  Where is the healing in that?  It is only in the context of relationship with a Father whose presence is steadfast and reliable that we will ever truly find deliverance from certain behaviors.  On the other hand, some may struggle with issues all of their lives, never finding true “freedom” this side of eternity.  And yet, we can rest assured that such a one will never find themselves cut off or separated from God, for He loves them enough to stick around, regardless of their behaviors, good or bad.  The Good News is not that Jesus periodically abandons us, but if we’d pray certain prayers, fast certain days, and perform perfectly, we can draw Him back to ourselves.  No, the Good News is that Jesus Christ has joined Himself to the frail human condition, and is now permanently identified as one of us.  If our humanity was enough to separate us from God, then God would have had to separate from Himself in the incarnation. The incarnation, however, is God’s booming declaration that nothing can or will ever separate Him from the creation He loves!

It’s time that we abandoned the toxic notion of abandonment by God, and realized the beautiful truth revealed in the face of Christ.  It’s time for old paradigms to be smashed, and for illusions to be driven away.  It is passed time for the church to grasp the truth that our Father is good, and extremely loyal to His children.  When He sees danger approaching and then attacking His little ones, it never enters His mind to run in the opposite direction.  As a holy, just and righteous Father, He runs directly into the heat of battle, and wages war against that waging war against us.  Sin, far from creating division, actually acts as a spark that deepens our union.  Sin can never separate us from God, for if it could, God would never have been able to separate sin from us.  No, the alien entity of sin brought our Father close in order to secure a sure and final victory over it.  And guess what?  That victory has been accomplished once for all, and will never need to be repeated.  Separation is an idea that was birthed through Adam’s fallen imagination, and needs to be allowed to die and be laid to rest.  The myth of separation has had its day, and now, through the work of the Holy Spirit, the final reeking remnants of its presence are being scraped from the hull of Christendom.

It is time that we separated ourselves from every lie seeking to convince us that we’re separated from our Father!  We must instead separate ourselves unto the truth that nothing in all of creation can separate us from His love!

7

SALVATION BY SEPARATION?

Did Sin Separate Jesus from God?

“Cut the bond in being between Jesus Christ and God, and the Gospel message becomes an empty mockery.” 31

-Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007)

In Chapter 2 of this book, A Reputation Restored, we discussed how one main aspect of Christ’s earthly mission was to redeem the Father’s lost reputation.  He came to blow away all of the layers of Adamic dust that kept us from seeing the truth.  In the book of Hebrews 2:11-12, we find that Christ is still, at present, working to accomplish this goal:

11 Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. 12 He says,“I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly I will sing your praises.”                                              -HEBREWS 2:11-12 (Emphasis mine)

As a side note, consider the implications of verse 11, which states that both Christ (the One Who makes men holy) and mankind (those who are made holy) are of the same family.  You trace your lineage to the same Father as Jesus, and share spiritual DNA with Him.  What He is, is what you are (1 John 4:17).  If that concept does not blow your mind, I would encourage you to promptly seek medical attention.  In the same verse (11), the writer declares that Jesus Christ is not ashamed to call us His brethren.  So not only are we the blood relatives of Christ, He is also anything but ashamed of us.  He is proud to be our sibling, and pleased to have us at His side.  We are not so different from Him that He avoids us and lies to others about His relation to us.  No, He’s proud to be our big brother.

When we get to verse 12, we’ve already established the fact that Christ is our brother, and that He is not ashamed of us.  As a good and dutiful elder brother, however, Christ also has some things that He desires to teach us.  We are told that He is eager to declare His Father’s name to us, and also to sing His Father’s praises in our midst.  It seems that Christ’s mission to redeem His Father’s name is still active, and He still actively seeks to rid the family of the foul and toxic lies that we’ve believed about Him.

In order to get a fuller understanding of what Christ is talking about here, we need to realize that verse 12, in which Christ speaks of His desire to declare His Father’s name to us, was not penned by the writer of Hebrews, but is actually a direct quotation from Psalms 22:22.  This is most interesting, as Psalms 22 is a Messianic prophecy, as well as a clear and gut wrenching prediction of the suffering and crucifixion of Christ.  In order to fully understand just what Christ is attempting to declare to the Church, His brethren, (in verse 22) we must start at the beginning of the Psalm, and travel with Christ through the events which lead to verse 22, in which He initially speaks of His desire to teach us the truth about His and our Father.

WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

Psalm 22 opens up with blistering words, which are uttered centuries later by Christ from the Cross:

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?

-PSALMS 22:1

As we’ve already stated, these are not merely the words of the Psalmist, but of Jesus Himself, for in Mark 15:33-34 we read Christ repeating, verbatim, the words of the Psalmist.

The cry of forsakenness emitted by Christ is referred to by some theologians as “the cry of dereliction”.  For years, many, including myself, taught that Christ was abandoned by the Father while bearing the sins of the world, and uttered this horrendous cry in response to his estrangement.  It is said that since Christ became sin, God, who is too pure to look upon evil (which we know to be an incorrect interpretation of Habakkuk 1:13), was forced to turn His face away from His beloved Son.  We are told that in this moment, the separation and abandonment deserved by all men was experienced by Christ in our place.

Many cling to this idea, and use it as a theological anchor for their hope that God will never abandon them since Christ was abandoned for them.  If, however, Christ truly became separated from His Father while carrying our sins, then everything written in the previous chapter is proven false, as Christ’s abandonment would suggest that the presence of sin demanded that the Father turn away from Him.  If these were actually our sins that He was carrying, it would also suggest that humanity’s pre-cross relation to God was one of separation.

The idea that Christ was forsaken by God arises from the preconception that sin has the power to universally separate men from God.  It then fits nicely into the popular view that on the Cross, Christ experienced everything the Father’s justice demanded He do to us, and this in order that He could bless and love us instead of cursing and abandoning us.  What would it say of the Father’s character though, if He had to abandon Christ in our stead?  It would say that God’s anger towards human sin was so great and ferocious that He not only desired to see us bloodied, beaten, and tortured to death, but that He would abandon and hide His face from us while our grisly punishments unfolded.  If Christ were abandoned, it would suggest that our Father had originally desired to abandon us, but changed His mind in response to Christ’s voluntary, vicarious sacrifice.

Exactly what type of monstrous being is portrayed through this view?  Is this a being that you would be comfortable calling “father”?  Does such a deity really sound like the God of Mt. Zion, or does he more closely resemble the gods of Mt. Olympus?  If God abandoned Christ while He was carrying our sins, then it most certainly would confirm the popular evangelical notion that sin and human weakness caused, and continue to cause, God to separate Himself from men.  It behooves us then, as responsible disciples, to discover whether or not Christ truly was abandoned on Calvary, for our view on this subject determines a lot about our view of God.

GOD FORSAKEN?

If Christ was truly our substitute, if He truly represented the human race before His Father (Hebrews 5:1-6), and if He truly “became sin” on our behalf (2 Corinthians 5:21), then the Father’s response to Jesus on the Cross would essentially represent His response to sinful men.  So, if God abandoned Christ, then it would stand to reason that He had also abandoned the human race prior to the Cross.  It would also suggest that He continues to do so when we knowingly sin against Him, especially when we do so in light of the Cross.

So let’s look to the scriptures to see whether or not there is any Biblical evidence to back up the claim that Christ was forsaken by God.

HE HAS NOT LEFT ME ALONE

In John 8, while speaking to a group of religious Jews concerning His death, Jesus said:

28 …“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.

-JOHN 8:28 (Emphasis mine)

Since Jesus is speaking of His approaching death, we can safely assume that His reference to them “lifting up the Son of Man”, can speak only of His crucifixion.

He continues,

29 And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him

-JOHN 8:29 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus states that the One who had sent Him, whom we know to be His Father (John 6:57; 20:21), would not leave Him when He was lifted up and crucified.  Christ was telling some of the very men who would soon call for His death that even when they felt certain that God had abandoned Him, He was with Him.  Even when it looked as though He was under the judgment of God and suffering beneath the full weight of His wrath, the Father was actually pleased and present with Him, just as He’d always been.  He had not turned His back, nor hidden His face from His Son.

Similarly, in John 16:32, Jesus tells His disciples:

32 “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.

-JOHN 16:32 (Emphasis mine)

Here again, speaking of the time both before and during His crucifixion, Jesus states that even though His own disciples would abandon Him, His Father would never leave Him.

While in neither of the above passages is Jesus directly addressing the issue of whether or not He would be forsaken for the sins of men, He is addressing the faithfulness of His Father to Him.  While the unbelieving Jews in John 8 would have most certainly seen Christ’s “lifting up”, or execution, as being evidence of God’s abandonment of Him, Jesus assured them that His Father was always close, even in the hour of His death.  Even when His own disciples and best friends turned their backs on Him, Jesus assured them that His Father’s faithfulness to Him would not waver, as He would remain at His side through it all.  To read these verses concerning the Father’s faithfulness to His Son, and then turn around and claim that Christ was abandoned on the Cross, seems more than a bit ludicrous, and absolutely out of sync with the character of God that Jesus was revealing.

Of the Father’s presence in Christ’s work, Paul writes:

19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:19 (Emphasis mine)

As we learned in a former Chapter, God was not absent from Christ during the excruciating ordeal of the cross, but, as Zachariah prophesied, was mysteriously joined to Christ through it all.  So joined to Christ was the Father that Zachariah even speaks of Yahweh, the Father, as bearing the marks and scars of crucifixion.  As Paul so beautifully states in the above scripture, far from being absent, the Father was present in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.  Jesus was never alone during His suffering, but was in the constant company and companionship of His Father.

If this is the case, and Jesus plainly states that it is, where did we ever get the idea that He was abandoned?  In truth, the only passages that even suggest any abandonment or forsakenness by God are Psalms 22:1, and Mark 15:33-34, which speak of the same instance in which Christ cried out, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”  These verses, coupled with the presupposition that sin universally separated all men from God, spawned the notion that Christ was forsaken by the Father.  When we look at the full scope of things through the lens of scripture, however, we find that there is truly no basis for this idea.

Since Psalms 22:1 is essentially the birthplace of this doctrine, we will examine it, as well as the rest of the Psalm, in order to get a fuller picture of what is being communicated.

In Psalms 22:1, we find Christ crying out in agony, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Yet, we have the prophetic words of Christ from John 8:29, which ensure us that God will never abandon or forsake Him.  So what exactly is taking place here?  To gain more insight, we’ll turn our attention to another Old Testament prophecy describing the crucifixion and suffering of Christ, Isaiah 53.

Isaiah 53 is one of the most detailed, and accurate prophecies of the sufferings of Christ in the whole of the Old Testament.  In verse 3, we’re told that Christ would be:

3…a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

-ISAIAH 53:3 (Emphasis mine)

We are told that Christ, both in life and at the time of His death, was a “man of suffering”, and one who was familiar with pain.  On the Cross He experienced a tumult of emotions, as He suffered not only physically, but mentally.

In the very next verse (4), Isaiah reveals to us the nature and source of Christ’s suffering:

4 Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering…

-ISAIAH 53:4 (Emphasis mine)

Whose pain and suffering did Christ carry and experience?  Were they His own?  Or did they belong to another?  Isaiah tells us they belonged to another, and that “other” was us.  Christ took upon Himself the collective sorrow of the human race.  We know that while on the Cross, Jesus, who “knew no sin” was made to be “sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21).  So, in a sense, He was not merely suffering as a single individual, but was carrying the sins of the entire human race in His body (1 Peter 2:24), and therefore experiencing the collective sorrow of all men.  While in this place of fully identifying with the weight of man’s sin, He also experienced the full weight of sorrow that came with it.

On the Cross, Jesus did more than simply represent us in a legal proceeding.  He literally carried our sins, and felt the sorrows that we felt while bound in them.  In this way, He came to know what it was to suffer as one of Adam’s fallen sons.  Through His suffering, He came to know by experience what it was to have His spiritual vision blurred and distorted by sin’s presence, and therefore knew what it was to try to behold His Father’s face while looking through the cataract laced eyes of Eden.

It was because of His willingness to fully identify with our condition that Christ felt the same imagined abandonment that we felt.  He brought Himself beneath our burden, and truly felt as though God had left Him in His greatest moment of need.

Surely, He carried our sorrows!

Isaiah continues:

4 Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

stricken by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

-ISAIAH 53:4-5 (Emphasis mine)

I believe we see here the true source of the doctrine of universal abandonment.  Isaiah tells us that while beholding Christ in this tortured state—having seen Him carrying the sorrows of the world, and feeling them so deeply that He cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”— we considered Him to be stricken and punished by God!  We believed that God was to blame for the sorrows that Christ was experiencing, for we saw Him as having left His Son in His greatest hour of trial.  However, Isaiah quickly rebuffs our misconceptions:

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

-ISAIAH 53:5 (Emphasis mine)

Though we looked at Christ carrying our sorrows, and misunderstood it to mean that God had abandoned His son, it was actually the presence of our sins that caused Him such anguish.  It wasn’t that the Father had turned His face away from Him, but that our sorrows had obscured His spiritual vision, causing the Father to appear distant.  He felt the collective pain of the human race, and it was this that caused Him to cry our cry!  He felt our perceived alienation, and cried out in response to it.  However, no matter what it may have felt like, we have Christ’s assurance that He was never once left alone by His Father.  When He was “made to be sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) He carried the sorrows that resulted from sin (Isaiah 53:4).  This means that He was experiencing the horrors of the Cross the way that we would have, while lost in the fog of our once fallen minds.

A MERCIFUL HIGH PRIEST

This is an area of Christ’s work which is rarely spoken of, but is of utmost importance.  We are told by the writer of Hebrews that Christ had to become like us, feeling what we felt in every imaginable scenario, and He did this for a very specific purpose.

In Hebrews 2:17, we read:

17 For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

-HEBREWS 2:17 (Emphasis mine)

The Apostle tells us that Christ had to be made like us in every single way.  He had to see and experience life in the very same way that we experienced it.  We are told that God chose to do things this way in order that Christ, while serving His Father and making atonement for our sins, might do so as a merciful High Priest.  There was something about Him becoming like us in every way that enabled Him to provide atonement with mercy.  It isn’t that He wasn’t merciful before the incarnation, for the very act of the incarnation is the result of God’s mercy and love.  However, there was something about His experience of life through our eyes that enabled Him to become sympathetic to our plight, and to therefore act mercifully as our high priest.

Israel’s earthly high priests were mere human beings, and their understanding of the struggles men faced against sin worked to make their priesthood more effective.  Hebrews 5:2 says of the earthly high priests:

2 He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.

-HEBREWS 5:2 (Emphasis mine)

The High Priest was not harsh or judgmental towards those he served, simply because he too was subject to weakness and temptation.  He knew what it was to doubt, and to question God’s goodness and faithfulness.  He knew what it was to fall flat on his face and fail.  He knew what it was to struggle secretly with sin and darkness, doubting that God could possibly approve of him or be near him.  As a result of his association and solidarity with the nation, he was able to deal gently and mercifully with those he served.

In the same way, Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest, chose to subject Himself to every form of weakness and temptation imaginable, all so that He could deal gently and mercifully with the human race.  Pause for a moment and think about that - God the Son, who never knew weakness or temptation, purposely wrapped our brokenness around Himself in order that He might deal mercifully with us.

Hebrews 5:7-10 speaks beautifully of this truth:

7 During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8 Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him 10 and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

-HEBREWS 5:7-10 (Emphasis mine)

Christ, so the writer says, had to be made perfect prior to becoming the source of eternal salvation, and being appointed as High Priest (verses 9-10).  The word “perfection” does not mean morally blameless, for surely Christ was already perfect in that sense of the word.  It is the Greek word teleioō, which can mean to be accomplished, or complete.  What the writer seems to be inferring is that Christ fully and completely identified with us, and suffered the complete range of emotions that all men experience (verse 8) and that this somehow qualified him to be our great high priest.

You see, the Father did not desire to simply provide a remedy for our sins in some sort of mechanical, or perfunctory way.  Christ did not desire to simply make atonement for our sins in obedience to His Father, but desired to do so mercifully, as a result of having lived our lives, and having felt our pain.  The Godhead wanted to transcend Their own omniscience, and actually burrow down into the very core of human suffering, until they’d drank down every last, bitter drop.  They did not wish to merely shout from a place of perfection, “We know your pain”, but wanted to be intimately acquainted with it through personal experience.  That way, when Christ was on the Cross, fighting for our salvation, He could do so as a man who had walked in our shoes, and was familiar with our fears.  He was fully on our side, for He had just lived 33 years in our skin, and was burning with empathy and compassion for us.

Now, becoming like us in every way means that at some point in His life, Christ faced the same temptation of doubting the Father’s presence that we face.  In our greatest moments of trial and pain, most every human being will look to the sky and scream, “Where are you, God?”  If Christ was to be made like us in every way, He could not be exempt from this temptation.  In Hebrews 2:18 we read:

18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.                                                                                                                                              –HEBREWS 2:18 (Emphasis mine)

Part of Christ’s High Priestly work was to experience life through our eyes.  While suffering on the Cross, He was “made to be sin”, and experienced the ordeal as a man in union with Adam would have experienced it.  He carried our sorrows in order that, having been tempted in the same ways we were, He would be able to sympathize with, and help us when we faced similar temptations.

In order to accomplish this work, He did not merely allow Himself to be tempted with greed, power, or lust, but descended into the most terrifying place of human suffering - the place of feeling abandoned by God. Taking our sins upon Himself, He experienced the alienation that we feel when we believe that we’ve failed God.  He felt the full burden of every secret sin we’ve ever committed or struggled with, and looked to His Father in the midst of this suffering, and, for the first time in His eternal existence, was unable to find Him.  And so He cried in horror, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

Psalms 22:1 begins on this note, with Christ struggling to find His Father’s face in the midst of carrying our sorrows.  Remember, we began examining Psalms 22 because it is the origin of the idea that Christ was separated from the Father while on the Cross, and also because Jesus, as quoted by the writer of Hebrews, in verse 22 of the Psalm, speaks of His desire to reveal the nature of God to His brethren.  We began with verse 1, reading of Christ’s cry of forsakenness, in order to work our way towards discovering what it is about the Father that He is seeking to make known to us.

As the chapter continues unfolding, we read of the various aspects of Christ’s suffering, from the piercing of his hands and feet (verse 16), to the results of the flagellation (verse 17), to the dividing of His garments (verse 18).  Then, we once more catch a glimpse of Christ struggling to find His Father’s face in anguish, and in verses 19-21, He cries:

19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me.

You are my strength; come quickly to help me.

20 Deliver me from the sword,

my precious life from the power of the dogs.

21 Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;

save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

-PSALMS 22:19-21 (Emphasis mine)

In these three verses Christ cries out for His Father to be close, and then pleads for deliverance, rescue and salvation.  It seems very apparent that Christ is still seeing things through the lenses of our sorrows, and is feeling as though His Father is absent.  You can almost imagine His tortured face turned heavenward, as He scans the skies through bloodied and battered eyes for signs of His nearness.  He is trying to keep His head straight, for He knows that the Father is never distant or absent, but the weight of men’s sins, and the false perceptions of reality that it creates, is causing His vision to become obscured.  He cannot seem to find His Father anywhere, and yet His enemies, the dogs, lions and wild oxen, abound, and seem inescapable.

Suddenly, though, in the midst of this dismal scenario, we find ourselves back where we started, with the very passage quoted by the writer in the Hebrews 2:12:

22 I will declare your name to my people;

in the assembly I will praise you.

-PSALMS 22:22 (Emphasis mine)

Could it be that the thing Christ is trying to convey to us is that the Father abandons those whose lives are marked by sin?  Absolutely not!  It is not the horrors spoken of in the previous verses that He wishes to make known to His brethren, but the glorious truths to be revealed in the next two verses:

23 You who fear the Lord, praise him!

All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!

Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!

24 For he has not despised or scorned

the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

but has listened to his cry for help.

-PSALMS 22:23-24 (Emphasis mine)

The Psalm suddenly takes on a tone of victory, and instead of speaking and seeing through the filter of the fall, Christ begins to see clearly through the eyes of the eternal Son!  He declares to us in verse 24 that, though He cried out “Why have you forsaken me?”, the Father had done no such thing!  At no point during His suffering had the Father turned away or deafened His ears to Christ’s cries.  Rather, He listened to His cry for help, and answered.

The final words of Jesus on the cross make it even clearer that He did not suffer a literal abandonment, for, as a Son who perfectly trusts His Daddy, Jesus prayed:

46 …“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

-LUKE 23:46 (Emphasis mine)

Thomas H. McCall writes:

There is no hint here of a severed or even strained relationship. There is no sense here of a Father who has rejected his Son or who has turned his back on him. In fact, it is hard to see how such a view could even be compatible with the last words of Jesus. To the contrary, Jesus prefaces his last words with a sense of deep relational intimacy: Jesus addresses his “Father.” And they are words of complete trust; what we see here is an expression of the closest imaginable spiritual communion. “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” 32

You see, Jesus trusted His Father with the care of His Spirit, and far from speaking in the language of an orphan, He spoke to Him in a language of intimacy.

Far from fleeing from His frantic Son, the Father stayed by His side, enduring the hell of human misery with Him.  The prophetic words spoken by Christ prove themselves to be true, for even when He was lifted up and murdered by men who hated Him, the Father was with Him and was utterly pleased with Him.

What then is the lesson that Christ, our elder brother, is seeking to teach us in Psalms 22:22?  What is the truth that He stands to declare in the midst of His brethren, and what are the contents of the praises He desires to teach us to sing?  It is the eternal truth that, though our hearts and minds were darkened by sin, and though we perceived God as being at a distance, He had never left us, and had never deafened His ears to our cries.  Our fallen imaginations caused it to seem as though He had, but it was all a result of us seeing God wrongly, through the lenses of sin’s sorrows.  Jesus, however, as our compassionate and merciful High Priest, dove down into the depths of our sorrows and tested their validity.  He experienced the most horrifying tortures that man could dream up, all while bearing the load of man’s sin.  He allowed for His eyes to be glazed over by Adam’s deception, and even temporarily saw His Father as having left Him.  However, after having consumed the bitter cup of human delusion, He found the conclusions we’d arrived at to be lies, and so punched a hole through the blackness, and allowed the light of truth to stream in.  For in the midst of sin and suffering, He realized that the Father was still there, looking at Him with pleasure, and smiling upon Him in approval!  He had not lost His Father, He had only lost track of Him.  His message to us, on the other side of His suffering, is that our folktales about a God who creates sons and daughters, and then abandons them when they sin, are wholly untrue, and look nothing like the Triune family of which He is a part.  His message to us is that God is, by nature, unity and familial love, and that He never abandons those He created.

LIGHT SHINES IN THE DARKNESS

Many throughout the ages have looked upon the transcendent radiance of our God who “is light”, and in Whom “there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), and have wrongly assumed that to struggle with areas of darkness is to be excluded from a relationship with Him.  For how can light and dark coexist?  While such an idea is inferred in the scriptures, and yes, even in the verse that follows the above quoted verse, never are such statements made to suggest that struggling individuals will find themselves separated from God.  They simply suggest that if one claims to live in the light of Christ, and yet continues to purposely live an evil, violent, or immoral life, they are clearly not getting the point.  However, we must have at the forefront of our minds the amazing truth that, though God is light, and though there is no darkness in Him, He is not frightened by the darkness in our lives.  John says of Jesus:

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome [understood] it.

-JOHN 1:4-5 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus was and is the light of all mankind, and that light stands blazing right in the middle of human darkness.  He was then, and continues now, to be missed and overlooked by those in darkness, but still, He shines in their midst.  The Light does not flee at the sight of darkness, but shines all the brighter.  It is not intimidated or extinguished by human ignorance or sin, but remains brilliant and effulgent, even when in the presence of the worst that we as humans can dish out.

David saw a similar truth, and wrote of its beauty:

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

-PSALMS 139:11-12 (Emphasis mine)

David suggests that even if he sought refuge from God in the blackest darkness of human sin, the darkness would become like the day to God.  The darkness, so David says, is as light to God.  My friends, there is no place of refuge from the love of God!  You can hide in the seediest of brothels, the dingiest of crack houses, or even the most religious of Churches, and still, His love will illuminate the darkness around you!  Your sin is not a strong enough opponent to keep God’s love at bay.  It cannot be extinguished or snuffed out, and we can certainly do nothing to alter His eternal nature.  Truly, nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of our Father!

Perhaps even more astonishing than all of this, is that through Jesus’ suffering of our self-made hell, our Great High Priest and elder brother reveals Himself to be something much greater than an unsympathetic, unfeeling Creator.  He lived out our agony in order to help and reassure us when we find ourselves awash in guilt, shame and temptation.  The ultimate temptation that one can face is to doubt the goodness and nearness of the Father in the midst of suffering.  Jesus, however, once for all broke through this lie, and offers us eternal wisdom on the other side of the ordeal, for He assures us, “Even in your deepest darkness, whether self-imposed or imposed by others, your Father is with you.  He will never leave you, for even when I embodied sin itself, He looked upon me with love!  If that was His disposition towards Me while I bore your sins, you can be sure it’s His disposition towards you as well!”

I once attempted to find comfort in the theological notion that Christ experienced a separation from the Father, as I presumed that all the bad that was intended for me had to fall upon Him, and felt secure that I was now safe from the sufferings Christ experienced.  While such thoughts comforted me, and served as a doctrinal placebo for the pain and uncertainty I felt before God, they did nothing to heal the massive wound that sin inflicted when it marred God’s visage, and caused Him to appear as an unsympathetic, moral monster.  For if God had to abandon Christ in my stead, all that I was left with was a God who was once repulsed by me, but was talked into giving me a second chance through the intervention of His Son.  Such a view, while perhaps temporarily alleviating our sense of abandonment, cannot heal our hearts, as our “God” remains a justice demanding computer, who cannot function normally until certain lines of code have been entered into His system.  Once justice is satisfied, and once somebody has paid the penalty of separation from Him, He can act kindly towards the rest of His creation.

This is the “God” that many believers, worldwide, pledge allegiance to.  This view, however, does not eliminate the possibility of displeasing Him and becoming separated from Him once again.  If anything, it ladles steroids into the once medium sized fear, turning it into something much larger and more menacing.  For now, if we fail, we have to do so in light of the tortures Christ underwent on the Cross, and if our sins prior to Calvary were enough to cause God to turn away, we can’t even imagine how He would treat us if we sinned in light of His sacrifice!

Thankfully, such ideas are absolutely foreign to the Gospel and therefore to the life lived in its light.  Abandonment and separation ought never to be concepts that go through our minds when we ponder the nature of God.  Such words do not exist in the vocabulary of heaven, and are things we need not live in fear of, for the Apostle Paul assures us:

38…neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

-ROMANS 8:38-39 (Emphasis mine)

If you think that your sins have separated you from the love, grace, and acceptance of your Father, think again.  Jesus Christ, our elder brother and compassionate High Priest, stands in our midst even now, declaring the truth about His Papa, and ours:  Nothing in all of creation can separate us from His presence and love!

8

OUTGROWING HELL

Is it Time to Retire the Hellfire & Brimstone?

“There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it.”  33

-John G. Lake (1870-1935)

THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN

On December 28, 1895, the first ever motion picture, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, had its initial, public exhibition.  The simple film consisted of less than a minute of footage showing a train arriving at a station, followed by scenes of people exiting the train.  Really, there’s nothing dynamic, eye catching or awe inspiring about it in the least.  In fact, today’s media soaked, 3D, HD, iPad generation, may find themselves dozing off by the end of its mere fifty second duration.  I’ve seen the clip several times myself, and can testify that it induced neither chills nor thrills.

According to history, however, the film’s first screening was anything but a yawn fest.  As legend tells it the audience fled from the scene, screaming and fearing that they were about to experience that rare phenomenon, known in the scientific community as “death by train”.  The truth is that they had nothing to fear, but their ignorance concerning the nature of motion pictures led to panic, as they truly believed that a massive locomotive was about to plow through the silver screen and flatten them like pancakes.  In our day, due to the prominence and normalcy of movies and television, such a film would barely elicit straight faced boredom if shown in a theater.  Few would even pay attention to the grainy, black and white footage, but to an audience over 100 years ago, it was the most thrilling and adrenaline fueled moment of their lives!

It’s amazing the effect that the passage of time can have upon what defines our fears.  It would seem that something’s aren’t inherently terrifying, but require a certain amount of ignorance and gullibility in order to really “work”.  The filmmaker, the playwright, and the stage magician, all rely on a certain level of human ignorance in order to ensure that their production packs a punch, and delivers “wow” moments throughout.  I’m sure there are movies you remember watching as a kid in which the special effects seemed so real, but upon watching the same movie decades later you laughed at the cheesiness of it all.  The green screen effects were obvious, the costumes looked like things used in your church’s Christmas play, and the acting was downright appalling.  However, as a child, the movie thrilled you to the bone, and a century ago, it would have given audiences a heart attack.  Once an audience outgrows the techniques used in order to inspire awe, though, a production, be it a stage play, a magic act, or a special effects monstrosity, must update its methods or become an irrelevant relic of the past.

Over the years I’ve read hundreds of books on church history, and more specifically on the history of religious revivals.  Something that always struck me was the way that centuries old congregations would react when being presented with a message of hellfire, brimstone and damnation.  Men would lose all of their dignity, getting down on all fours and groveling like animals in the dust.  The normally prim and proper women of the era would turn into tearful messes, lying prostrate on the floor and forsaking decorum in their frenzied search for forgiveness and peace with God.  Little children would shriek and scream in unison together, believing themselves to be tiptoeing on the edge of a sulfuric, Christ-less eternity, and would behave in ways that children typically only do after arriving at the conclusion that the boogie man has, in fact, taken up residence beneath their beds.

One cannot talk of such scenes without speaking of Jonathan Edwards’ famous, 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  It is said that during this now famous address men literally grabbed hold of the pillars of the church, fearing that the earth would open up beneath them and swallow them alive into hell.  Shrieks and screams filled the room and all “hell” broke loose in the minds of Edwards’ listeners.  It was even reported that hysteria so gripped the people that Edwards was unable to finish the sermon due to the volume and velocity at which his audience sought forgiveness.

Edwards painted terrifying images of men being weighed down by sin and, under such weight, being magnetically pulled towards hell and eternal wrath.  The message highlighted the lack of surety and security that unbelievers, and even so-called believers have, because, as Edwards put it: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”, and then he adds this reassuring bit, “And that of an angry God.”

Edwards was also a staunch Calvinist, meaning that his sermon did not conclude with the bittersweet relief of an altar call.  Rather, his hearers were left dangling as it were, hoping that somehow, someway, they were the elect of God, and would therefore be able to escape this terrifying torture chamber which their spiritual leader had just so eloquently described.

As you can imagine, the members of his impressionable, religiously inclined congregation’s minds were aflame with gut wrenching pictures and terrifying images.  Even the most righteous among them was not safe from the terrible wrath of this angry God!  Children screamed, women shrieked, and grown men moaned like wounded animals at the sight of the lightning bolt wielding Zeus that Edwards proclaimed.  I’m sure that many recalled scenes from artists’ depictions of Dante Alighieri’s version of hell, as described in his 14th century poem, The Divine Comedy.  The medieval images of demon’s violating and torturing sinners in the most gruesome of ways were most assuredly exploding in their brains, filling them with terror and anxiety beyond anything human words could describe.

Yes friends, it most certainly appeared as though that train were about to pop out of the screen and mow the faithful down beneath the weight of its heavy and hellish wheels.

As a younger man who burned with a passion for revival, I often wondered, after reading such accounts, why similar displays of penitence didn’t follow my preaching.  I mean, if I were honest, in my early days as a preacher I delivered messages that made Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God look like that syrupy sweet, piano laced moment at the end of an episode of Full House.  And yet, with all of my terrifying sermonizing, and gruesome descriptions of eternal torment, I never saw the results that Edwards saw.

Nevertheless, I continued to burn with a zeal for revival and continued to search out why my preaching did not carry the prophetic, panic-producing punch that revivalists of old, like Jonathan Edwards’ did.  I prayed more.  I fasted more.  I “cried out”, “pressed in” and lost untold hours of sleep and peace of mind, all in a desperate attempt to unlock the secret of preaching in a way that produced feelings of deep “conviction” in the hearts of my listeners.  I wanted people to feel the flames of hell when I spoke and to run to the altar in tearful repentance.  I wanted what Edwards had and longed to see people moved as he saw them moved.  Surely, I thought, if hell is preached hot and frighteningly enough, it will cause “sinners” to be terrified into salvation, right?

AN INCONVENIENT CONCLUSION

Over time, through much prayer and study, however, I began coming to the rather inconvenient conclusion that preaching of this nature was a thing almost entirely foreign to the New Testament.  Furthermore, the reactions of people who were overwhelmed with raw, wide eyed terror, were also completely foreign to its pages.  Now surely we read of people in the book of Acts who were “cut to the heart”, and overwhelmed with their need for Christ, but we do not read of the Apostles preaching terrifyingly descriptive messages about hell in the hopes that their hearers would “make their way to the front”, and “pray a prayer”.  We never hear the gruesome and graphic descriptions of worms eternally gorging themselves on people’s innards, or of demons laughing in our ears throughout eternity, reminding us of every altar call that we white knuckled our way through.  These types of ideas are simply never presented by Christ or the Apostles.

There are several instances in which crowds or individuals felt an overwhelming need to believe on Christ and cried out for help in response, but the panic and hysteria that attended messages like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is something that is completely absent from the book of Acts.

For instance:

37 When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

- ACTS 2:37 (Emphasis mine)

This “cut to the heart” experience was not in response to a vivid description of torment and hell, but to Peter’s words in verse 36 that his listeners were responsible for crucifying their Messiah.  It was sorrow over their actions, and not a fear of punishment that cut them to their hearts.

In Acts 24:24-26, we read of the Roman Procurator of Judea, Cladius Felix, who, along with his Jewish wife, Drusilla, came to listen to the words of the Apostle Paul while he was imprisoned:

24 Several days later Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. He sent for Paul and listened to him as he spoke about faith in Christ Jesus. 25 As Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you.” 26 At the same time he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe, so he sent for him frequently and talked with him.

-ACTS 24:24-26 (Emphasis mine)

This passage is often used as justification for preaching a fear based message of judgment, as it appears that this is what Paul preached to Felix.  Notice, after specifically speaking to Felix about righteousness and self-control, he goes on to warn him of coming judgment.  Now, in all of his dealings with the Gentiles, how often does Paul begin by addressing issues of self-control and temperance?  Not very often at all, I’m afraid.  Why then would he speak of such things to this Roman ruler?

For starters, Felix was a notoriously licentious and immoral individual, whose actions were marked by greed and a love of money.  This is clear even in the text itself, as Felix, after being frightened by Paul’s words on judgment, continued hoping that Paul would offer him a monetary bribe.

Adam Clarke says the following about Paul’s words to Felix:

This discourse of St. Paul was most solemnly and pointedly adapted to the state of the person to whom it was addressed. Felix was tyrannous and oppressive in his government; lived under the power of avarice and unbridled appetites; 34

Paul addresses the issues of immorality and a lack of temperance in Felix, mainly because he was a governmental leader, whose actions affected the lives of thousands living beneath his rule.

Clarke goes on to say of Felix:

…his incontinence, intemperance, and injustice, appear fully in depriving the king of Emesa of his wife, and in his conduct towards St. Paul, and the motives by which that conduct was regulated. And as to Drusilla, who had forsaken the husband of her youth, and forgotten the covenant of her God, and become the willing companion of this bad man, she was worthy of the strongest reprehension; and Paul’s reasoning on righteousness, temperance, and judgment, was not less applicable to her than to her unprincipled paramour. 35

Not only was Felix a greedy and licentious man, he also apparently had very little respect for the institute and sanctity of marriage.  His then wife, a Jewish woman named Drusilla, had left her former husband in order to marry Felix.  Bishop Zachary Pearce (1690-1774), a Bible commentator, sees Felix’s fear as having less to do with a terror of hell, and more with a fear that his Jewish wife would see the error of her ways and abandon their unsanctioned marriage:

The reason of Felix’s fear seems to have been, lest Drusilla, who was a Jewess, and knew that what she had done was against the law of Moses, might be influenced by Paul’s discourse, and Felix’s happiness with her disturbed. What is said of Felix, Acts 24:26, seems to show that he had no remorse of conscience for what he had done. 36

There is no way to prove Pearce’s claims, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless.  Regardless of whether or not his fear concerned losing his wife, Pearce’s claim that Felix apparently felt little guilt concerning his wrongs, and experienced no genuine change of heart seems indisputable, for even after experiencing “fear” in response to Paul’s warnings he keeps him imprisoned in an attempt to coerce him to offer a bribe.

Regardless of the nature of Paul’s warnings, it seems obvious that he was not warning him of the medieval, Dante-esque view of hell that many of us imagine today and the fear that Felix felt did not produce any genuine change in his heart.  No matter how we slice up this passage, there is no possible way that it can be used as a precedent for preaching fear laced messages of hellfire and brimstone, for Paul was speaking to one specific individual at a specific point in time.

If we were to be brutally honest, we would have to admit there is absolutely no record of the apostles ever preaching hell to their hearers in order to frighten them to Christ.

Thomas B. Thayer writes:

The Book of Acts contains the record of the apostolic preaching, and the history of the first planting of the Church among the Jews and Gentiles, and embraces a period of thirty years from the ascension of Christ. In all this history, in all this preaching of the disciples and apostles of Jesus, there is no mention of Gehenna [hell]. In thirty years of missionary effort, these men of God, addressing people of all characters and nations, never, under any circumstances, threaten them with the torments of Gehenna [hell], or allude to it in the most distant manner!  37

Since this type of message is completely foreign to the New Testament, I dare say it ought to foreign to us as well.  There is absolutely zero apostolic precedent for the type of sermon that Edwards preached, and there is also zero apostolic precedent for the reaction of his audience.  The work of the Holy Spirit is never portrayed in such a way.  If this be the case, though, how do we explain the reactions of the people in Edwards’ meetings, and countless other revival gatherings throughout the history of the church?

Are you willing to consider that maybe, just maybe, the results that Edwards and other historic revivalists saw, instead of being the work of the Holy Spirit, were nothing more than byproducts of the imaginations of sensory deprived Christians?  I know that’s borderline blasphemy, but please, hear me out.  Perhaps instead of being “conviction”, the people’s reactions resulted from a horrifically graphic message being delivered to minds that were very sensitive to frightening imagery.  Perhaps in an era where otherwise decent people could be convinced that their neighbors were evil witches and would call for their savage deaths, as in the case of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, they could also be moved to moan and wail when presented with a grim message on hell and judgment.

Perhaps such sermons bear so little fruit today, not because the messenger is void of the “convicting power of the Holy Spirit”, but because the message being delivered isn’t even really the Gospel.  After all, you will never–not once in the whole of scripture–find either Christ or His apostle’s going into graphic and gruesome detail about the horrors of hell.  Sure, you’ll hear Christ talk about coming judgment, but it is never for the purpose of winning over the hurting and the broken.  Contextually, He is almost always directing His words at self-righteous men, who fancy themselves as other men’s judges.  And sure, Christ had harsh words for those who lusted after His position as judge, after all, it was He who warned us with the following words:

1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

-MATTHEW 7:1-2

To the lost, to the broken, and to the hurting; to the prostitute, to the scam artist and to the drunk, however, Christ had nothing but words of acceptance, comfort and forgiveness.  We will not find Him playing upon their primitive imaginations, attempting to induce mass hysteria through His preaching. Never once, in the whole ministry of Christ or the Apostles, do we find men hysterically responding to a fear based message laced with raw, haunted house style scare tactics.

Why?

It’s quite simple, really - such messages have nothing at all to do with the Gospel, and are therefore noticeably absent from the teachings of those most familiar with it.

Nowadays, Edwards’ sermon is read and taught as a part of American history, as it is considered one of the most famous religious addresses ever given and is credited with initiating the First Great Awakening, a significant turning point in our nation’s history.  Even the most liberal of High Schools hold this message in their history books.  Now remember, this disturbing sermon, read aloud by Edwards in a monotonic voice, had his hearers screaming and holding on to their pews for dear life!  Yet when is the last time that you read of a classroom filled with adolescents erupting into salvific chaos, as student after student took turns reading Edwards’ words aloud?

Never?

Me neither.

Why does this message not have the same effect today that it had then?  Could it be because this message is not the Gospel and is therefore not a universal, any-era-will-do declaration?  Could it be because such messages will only work at certain periods in history; periods in which men are accustomed to cowering before such frightening thoughts?

I think so.

John G. Lake put it this way, ‎

There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it. 38

You see, the black and white film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, would no longer send men and women screaming in panic from a theater, simply because, as a society, we’ve outgrown it.  We can look back and appreciate the artistry and innovation of the pioneering film makers who created it, but it no longer strikes a chord of terror in our hearts because we know that the image is a mere projection of light onto a screen.

In the same way, today’s generation no longer wails and weeps at the sound of hell fire and brimstone, mostly because they see it for what it is - a mere projection of the fear and anxiety plaguing the preacher’s unsettled heart.  Oh, I’m sure a few impressionable souls would still squirm in their seats, but unless one has been raised in a religious atmosphere, such preaching no longer packs the punch it once did.  It is mocked, ridiculed, laughed at, and parodied in sitcoms, and standup comedy acts every other minute.  It is not taken seriously, and certainly does not inspire real, heart level change.

Now please don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not saying that the Gospel ought to change with the culture, or that we should only preach things that our present generation responds to.  I’m actually saying just the opposite!  We ought to preach what the apostles preached, but, interestingly enough, not one of them ever used the word Gehenna or Hades in order to bring about a conversion.  Sure, there is judgment that is spoken of, but we must remember that a very imminent and this-worldly judgment was looming on the horizon in the form of the destruction of Jerusalem.  While I’m not insinuating that there is no final judgment or punishment in the afterlife, I am saying that creating a fear of it was not the Apostle’s or Christ’s modus operandi.  For that reason, I say that not emphasizing judgment isn’t tantamount to bowing to cultural pressure and changing the message.  Rather, it is a return to a more apostolic version of the Gospel - a version that has the power to stir the soul to response, regardless of the era in which it is preached.

The real Gospel of Jesus Christ has no expiration date!  It cannot be “outgrown” or moved past, because the Gospel is a love story, not a ghost story.  What scares one generation might not scare the next, but love is universal and undated.

Perhaps “revival” is still “tarrying” after all these years because we are trying to bring it about through archaic, emotional means that never really were of God in the first place.  Perhaps the models we’ve studied and held up as being the standard for revival preaching actually need to be discarded and forgotten.  Maybe we need to spend more time studying the life and ministry of Jesus and His disciples than the events surrounding the lives of revivalists and preachers of yesteryear.  And perhaps if we did these things, our message would once more be an attractant instead of a repellant.

Perhaps.

Are you willing to be open minded enough with me to consider that maybe even in Edwards’ day, such preaching really did not have the long term effect that we’ve believed it to have had?

Consider the following quote by Edwards, given in a later [1747] sermon on the subject of hell and judgment, entitled, Yield to God’s Word, or Be Broken by His Hand:

Indeed, when I went about preparing this discourse, it was with considerable discouragement...So many [sermons along these lines] had been offered with so little apparent effect that I thought with myself, I know not what to say further. 39 (Brackets and italics mine.)

In this sermon, preached about six years after Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards almost seemed disillusioned about the effect that preaching on hell had had upon his hearers.  He states that “so many” sermons of the turn or burn genre had been preached throughout the years, but with “so little apparent effect” upon the lives of their hearers.  Now this is coming from the man who basically initiated, and then lived through and defended the first Great Awakening.  Could it be that even in the midst of all of the fervent emotion, very little real change took place in people’s hearts?  It seems that an eyewitness such as Edwards would be one to know.  I have no trouble believing this to be true as I’ve witnessed the impotency of the message of hell to bring about change in both my listeners hearts, as well as my own.  It is only the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and not the message of a burning hell, that is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16).

Now certainly, one obscure quote from Edwards is not enough to negate some of the positive effects of the first Great Awakening.  There was much good fruit that came of it, and, even though the message was skewed, I believe God was mysteriously at work among His people.  In this quote, Edwards is specifically commenting on the effect that judgment based preaching has upon the soul, and not on the fruits of the Great Awakening.  So please don’t misunderstand me as saying that hearts and lives were not changed during the revival.  I’m simply saying that Edwards himself noted that the “effect” of such preaching was quite “little”.

A rarely mentioned fact about the Great Awakening is that there was a brief period within it that came to be called “the suicide craze”.  It is unclear exactly how many suicides occurred, but there are at least two which are recorded, one of which was carried out by Jonathan Edwards’ own uncle.  The suicides are said to have been the result of the compounded guilt, shame, fear, and hopelessness that followed the continued emphasis on judgment.  This, coupled with belief in the “God” of hyper Calvinism, who arbitrarily decides who can and can’t be saved, no doubt greatly vexed the souls of those who sat under this message.  The pressure and fear was simply too much for some to bear up under, and they made the tragic decision to take their own lives as a means of escape.  Can such destructive fruit really be the result of the Good News?

I think not.

Of course there are plenty of testimonies that, if recounted, would seem to dwarf and make insignificant the “rotten fruit” of the suicide craze.  As is the case in any spiritual movement, there is good fruit, bad fruit, and extremes.  The leaders of these movements, as well as their messages, cannot always be faulted for the extreme behavior of their devotees.  There can be little doubt, however, that the types of ideas being thrown around during the Great Awakening, which many are still throwing around today, do much more harm than good.

I believe that we see two very critical facts on display here:

1.) A constant emphasis on hell and eternal judgment does very little to motivate true change in a person’s heart, and

2.) A constant emphasis on judgment elicits a deep and paralyzing sense of anxiety that drains us emotionally, and cripples us spiritually.

Is it any wonder then that congregations who emphasize the enormity of sin, and the terrors of God’s judgment the loudest, are typically populated by folks who secretly struggle with all sorts of sins, about which they are too terrified to speak with anyone?  If it is surprising to us, it most certainly should not be, for such preaching creates fear, and fear causes us to detach our hearts and pull away.  When one is a part of a community that constantly emphasizes judgment, they are typically too afraid to ask for help, since an emphasis on judgment usually gives birth to judgmental attitudes in people.  As a result, these individuals are left to silently struggle in secret while their addictions go deeper, and their hearts grow colder.

I certainly do not mean to make sweeping statements, suggesting that all who emphasize hell are actually secret sin bingers.  However, I have personally seen that individuals and congregations who are constantly bombarded by such threats never seem to mature spiritually, and most certainly do not appear to be in a place of spiritual health.  If shame and guilt be the methods of conversion, how comfortable would one be with confessing their secret faults to another believer?  Not very comfortable at all, I’m afraid.  What other option is there then, but for them to suffer in secret, living in a constant cycle of failure - failure, which, by the way, is almost always followed by feelings of condemnation, coupled with a fear of punishment.

I’ve seen people attempt to live such lifestyles, and inevitably they crack under the pressure, either temporarily losing their minds or abandoning Christianity altogether.  It’s a life that is completely unsustainable and is most certainly not the abundant life promised to us by Christ (John 10:10).  It also could hardly be called “revival”, as the very word indicates that one is being brought back from death and into life, and such a message, far from bringing life, seems to have the opposite effect.

John the apostle was very clear on the matter when he told us that a fear of punishment is not a healthy thing, nor is it an earmark of true, mature Christianity:

16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.

17 In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

-1 JOHN 4:16-18 (Emphasis mine)

John’s point could not have been clearer - God desires for us to live out of a revelation of His love for us, and it is this revelation of love that causes us to be made perfect, or mature.  In verse 16 he states that it is God’s love that we are to rely on.  In other words, our everyday “walk” is to be sustained by knowing the love of our Father.  He also tells us in verse 17 that this love brings us to a place of maturity in which we no longer fear the “day of judgment”, as we understand that we have been made one with Christ and are exactly what He is.  We become convinced that He has shared His life and relationship with the Father with us, and that we’re therefore not in line for punishment.  The one still fearing punishment, then, is one who has an imperfect or immature understanding of the love of God, as John states in verse 18.

How often have we heard preachers and teachers attempt to motivate Christians to pray more, fast more, give more, or evangelize more, all against the backdrop of threats of eternal judgment?  How often have we been motivated and “sustained” in our Christian lives by thoughts of what lies on the other side of our last breath?  If it is not the fear of hell which is used to motivate us, at the very least, it’s the fear of a loss of rewards in Heaven, and yet this seems to be the exact opposite of how the Apostle John was encouraging us to live.

John tells us that we are to rely on and be sustained by the Father’s love for us.  Once we come to a mature understanding of that love we will be delivered from the fear of what will take place on judgment day, as we will be unshakably confident in our oneness with Christ.  Yet, year after year, preacher after preacher and evangelist after evangelist continue in their attempts to motivate people to action and holy living through messages of fear.  The idea of there being a day of judgment ought not to terrify the believer, but should be something that we joyfully anticipate, as we know with certainty that we have been made one with the Godhead.

Not only does an emphasis on judgment do nothing to promote health and spiritual maturity amongst believers, it also does far more damage to an unbelieving world than good.  According to the writer of Hebrews, it is the Gospel that removes a fear of death from our lives. If one believed the message that is passed off as the Gospel today, however, they would think that its purpose was to reemphasize, rather than remove this fear.  Many, not all mind you, but many, live everyday of their lives with a paralyzing fear of death, and what they do not need is for one claiming to be Christ’s representative to come along and confirm that which they already fear to be true.

Consider these words from the book of Hebrews:

14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

-HEBREWS 2:14-15 (Emphasis mine)

When a message or a messenger seeks to capitalize upon a person’s fear of death in order to turn that person toward Christ, they are unwittingly tapping into an utterly satanic mechanism.  The writer of Hebrews tells us that Christ destroyed the power of the devil, and in so doing set men free from their latent fear of death.  When we, in the name of evangelism, use the fear of death as conversion bait we are behaving in a very devilish manner, for it is the accuser who used man’s fear of death to control him.  When we behave similarly, even if the control we seek to exert is intended for people’s good, we are using a system which Christ came to abolish and destroy.  It re-instills the very fear that Christ came to take away, and puts people back in bondage to the very thing that Christ sets them free from.

Our problem is that we are far too concerned with getting responses and reactions from people, and we very rarely take a moment to consider the traumatic and demonic after effects of the message that we present.

We often measure our correctness by our ability to guilt men into “praying a prayer”, or filling out a decision card, but don’t realize that we are leaving them with the very fear that the finished work of Christ removes.  In that way we become unwitting conspirators in a plan to undermine the work of Jesus and re-enroll men into a system of slavery to fear, death and sin.  While such methods may be the evangelistic norms in the modern Church, Jesus Christ, our great example, never employed such methods in drawing the masses to Himself.  In fact, those who loudly and brazenly claim to represent Christ to the world often end up looking like the men that He opposed the most loudly and brazenly!

THE HARVEST IS PLENTIFUL

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

-MATTHEW 9:35-38 (Emphasis mine)

Unless you’ve never darkened the door of a church in your life, the above scripture is one you’ve heard expounded upon a million and one times.  It is often used to stir up missionary zeal and encourage people to get out and “win the lost”, for, as the verse states, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  We picture Jesus looking upon the throngs of humanity that are cascading into a fiery chasm of eternal punishment, and then turning to His disciples and urging them to go forth and reap a harvest for the Lord!  The only problem is that nowhere is hell or judgment mentioned in this passage.  Jesus is not commanding His disciples to pray for the raising up of Gospel laborers so that they can warn men of hell, but because “he saw the crowds…had compassion on them…because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”.  When Jesus looked upon the crowds He saw their pain, misery, and confusion, and longed to see them impacted by the Good News of the Kingdom.  This Good News included healing the sick, and telling men of the love and Grace of His Father.

What is my point?  My point is that Christ’s primary concern was not for us to go into the world and warn them of a burning hell, but for us to take Good News, coupled with hope and healing, to a harassed and helpless humanity.  The backbone of our message is not fear and terror, but freedom, hope, and healing.  To miss this is to miss the Gospel.  Jesus did not run about the countryside in a sandwich board, screaming “turn or burn” at every passerby.  He went about “doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38).  It was these very things that He saw the world as being in need of, and it can be assumed, therefore, that these are the works He desires for His “laborers” to carry out.  The world does not need a red faced, angry preacher scolding them for their secret sins.  They need a compassionate shepherd who will help to lead them out of the fog of confusion and pain that they live in constantly.  Jesus saw this, and the compassion that propelled His ministry arose from His knowledge of humanity’s pain.  His message was Good News, and it brought hope, healing, comfort and clarity to those who believed it.

Such a message is universal and never expires!  Humanity has spoken the language of love from day one, and will never cease to understand it.  Messages of fear, judgment, and a retributive god, however, are things that the world has outgrown and humanity is no longer moved by their mention.  The world has wised up, and they see the flawed nature of the message we’ve peddled.  We must change or become irrelevant relics of the past.  It is not that we must tailor ourselves to our culture and compromise the Gospel.  No, we must return to the real Gospel - to the Gospel that Jesus and the apostles preached.  It may look quite different from Mr. Edwards’ terrifying tour through God’s “little shop of horrors”, but it may also actually work and set people free to live as God intended.

It’s time to recapture the true essence and heart of the Gospel, which is much more about spiritual health than it is separation and hell.  The world is ready for such a message, but they, along with Jesus, have very little time for the message of an angry God who callously dangles those who would dare to defy Him over a molten pool of eternal damnation.  As the movie The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat no longer moves crowds to panic, so Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God no longer moves the world to conversion.  If our message has an expiration date, it simply can’t be perfect, and if it isn’t perfect it can’t be the Gospel.

9

WHAT THE HECK DID JESUS TEACH ABOUT HELL?

Gehenna, Hades, & Other “Hot” Topics

“Jesus simply didn’t say very much about the future life…he was not concerned to give any fresh instruction on postmortem judgment apart from the strange hints that it was going to be dramatically and horribly anticipated in one particular way, in space-time history, within a generation.” 40

-N.T. Wright

I’m going to hell.

Or at least that was what my imagination would have had me to believe.

AN UNSETTLING NIGHTMARE

Of all the frightening nightmares I had as a child, none was more traumatic than one I had when I was about 11 years old.  In this dream, I found myself, along with a group comprised of pretty much everyone in my circle of friends, walking up to a scene much like those I had seen illustrated in tracts and depicted in Christian media – a massive throne occupied by a colossal, stadium sized Jesus, before whom we all looked like ants.  As we would approach this intimidating figure, He would silently point to either his left or to his right, and the one standing before him would then be forced to walk into either a dark or brightly lit tunnel.  Obviously, the scenario being created by my brain was one of standing before the “judgment seat”, and of being sentenced to either heaven or hell.

Of course, having grown up as a Pastor’s kid, a regular church attendee, a frequent pray-er of all forms of the “sinner’s prayer”, and an all-around good kid, I was very confident that I would be headed to the right – to heaven.  Much to my dismay, however, the stone cold, giant Jesus directed me, along with my best friend’s little brother, who couldn’t have been more than 9 years old, to the left – to hell!  I was beyond horrified, and began screaming and crying in terror, hoping that I could elicit some kind of emotion from the looming, stoic figure who was now fading to my right.  No matter how hard I cried and pleaded with him, I continued to be forced away from his face and into what I knew would be a place that made my worst fears look like a walk in the park.

I was going to hell!

I remember the utter hopelessness and dread that swept over me.  More than anything though, I remember how cold, lifeless, and mechanical “Jesus” was.  Here I was, Jeff Turner, just a kid really; a kid who had lived his whole life avoiding any serious trouble, and had done his best to pray, read his bible, and be a decent Christian, and I was on my way to hell.  Despite my relatively spotless rap sheet, however, upon seeing me, this Jesus figure coldly, without any feeling at all, waved me to his left.  There was no debating with him, and no convincing him to give me another shot.  I had apparently done something that had not sat too well with Him, and thus sealed my eternal fate.  I, in the company of a nine year old kid, was on my way to a place of eternal anguish, burning, and torment, and “giant Jesus” had just cavalierly and carelessly sentenced me there.

This nightmare disturbed me beyond words, and it stayed with me throughout my childhood and teenage years.  The numbness that defined the “Jesus” that I encountered almost sapped me of any hope that I would ever measure up or be good enough to enter His presence, and it filled me with an anxiety that was literally crippling.

I constantly imagined the despair I’d feel standing before God and having Him look at me with those cold, lifeless, uncaring eyes, and without any struggle at all, waving me away as though I were some bothersome pest that he was glad to be rid of.  I would contemplate the terror I’d feel in realizing that every second I had lived would have been all for naught, for even the smallest of forgotten, unconfessed sins, would be enough to bar me from entering the presence of this “Jesus”.

This fear of judgment concerning the afterlife is as old as time, and plays a key role in most of the world’s religions.  In Christian circles it is constantly emphasized in order to induce conversion, or as a means of convincing people to live in a certain manner.  As the years have ticked by, it seems to have become increasingly easier to wind up in hell, with preachers declaring that everything from the watching of sitcoms, the occasional sip of wine, to even something as harmless as missing the occasional Sunday morning service can land one in hell.

Over the years I’ve listened to numerous testimonies of Christians who have apparently died, and experienced a near death experience (NDE).  In most NDE’s, the person describes the atypical tunnel of light, leading to a gathering of departed loved ones, and then eventually to Jesus.  Others, however, have described more frightening experiences in which, to their utter shock, they awoke in hell, being told by Jesus that they had neglected to tell their spouse that they were sorry for arguing with them, or that there was some specific sin that they’d forgotten to confess, and thus were condemned to burn forever.

Such stories, like a drill bit, burrowed deep down into my brain, took up residence within my subconscious, and caused me untold hours of anguish.  I, like most other youth group attendees, was also frequently faced with a question that typically caps off the night at any big youth rally or event: “Young person, if you were to die in a car accident on the way home from this service tonight, would you be ushered into heaven, or dragged, kicking and screaming, into hell?”

These constant thoughts, far from creating within me a love for God, created instead an unhealthy fear of Him.  It did not cause me to burn with love for Him, but with a feverish desire to do make Him happy so as to avoid the fate of an eternity in hell.  My greatest fear was that I would find myself face to face with Jesus, truly believing that all was well, only to hear Him say, “Depart from me, I never knew you”.

DEPART FROM ME

I’ve often heard these frightful words from Matthew 7 repeated by preachers attempting to show that salvation is not nearly as secure a thing as some have wished it to be.  Using the “judgment day” scenario outlined in Matthew 7:21-23, they paint a frightful picture of a Jesus, much like the one from my nightmare, whom you could fully believe yourself to be “right with”, only to find that He was never even close to being pleased with you.  On occasions too numerous to recount, I’ve heard this passage used to convince people that only a tiny sliver of the human race would make it to heaven, while something like 98-99% of us would find ourselves locked out forever from the presence of God, consigned instead to an eternity of misery.

Thoughts like these torment the soul, and bring great fear and unrest to believers worldwide.  Can we really trust this Jesus?  Is He so cold and unfeeling that He’ll allow us to go through life believing that all is well, only to drop the greatest shocker of all on us – that we were wrong, and will actually burn in hell forever?  Will He stand there callously as demonic minions drag us away to our eternal doom?

Naturally, in a book called Saints in the Arms of a Happy God, questions concerning judgment of this nature must be addressed, but before we do that, let me make something clear, I’m not denying the existence of “hell”.  I’m not going the way of dogmatically claiming that there’s no such thing as post mortem judgment.  I’m also not claiming to know exactly what that judgment is or what it looks like, though before you throw this book across the room (if you haven’t already), let me assure that I’m not making any dogmatic claims about the nature of the afterlife.  I’ll leave that to people with more letters following their name.  This chapter is devoted to examining the words of Christ typically thought to be describing hell, and deciphering whether or not we’ve rightly interpreted these passages, not giving dogmatic answers about the nature of heaven and hell.  So please don’t read into my words what isn’t there.

That being said, let’s take a look at the text of Matthew 7, and find out whether or not the popular interpretation is really in line with the heart of the Gospel.

Let’s look at what Jesus said:

21 «Not everyone who says to me, ‹Lord, Lord,› will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‹Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‹I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!›

-MATTHEW 7:21-23 (Emphasis mine)

Now for the time being, we will set aside the possibility that Jesus is discussing anything other than post mortem judgment here.  There is debate on the meaning of the “Day of Judgment”, and whether it speaks of the then very relevant, and very imminent destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 (which we will discuss a bit more in this chapter), or if it speaks of something that lay in the future for all of mankind.  There is also debate on whether the Kingdom of Heaven, which according to Christ, some will be denied access to, is speaking of a post mortem heaven, or of the New Covenant reign of God upon the earth.  For the sake of space and clarity, however, we will simply set that debate aside, and look at this portion of scripture in its modern, popular light; that is, we will read it as though it is speaking of a still future judgment.

As you well know, whenever reading an isolated string of scripture verses we must always rewind and then fast forward a bit, finding the verse’s original context so that we can get a complete understanding of what is and what is not being said.  The passage in question is no exception.  It was spoken in a larger context, and can only be fully understood when viewed in its light.

In verse 1 of the same chapter, Jesus said:

1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

-MATTHEW 7:1 (Emphasis mine)

Since just sentences before He gives us the judgment day scenario, Jesus tells us that men will be judged by the same standards they use to judge others, we must surmise that the two are connected.  Let’s look again at the words spoken by the men who are denied access to the Kingdom, as they make their case for their worthiness:  “Did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and perform many miracles?”

As these men stand before the Lord, the first thing that they do is begin presenting their own works as evidence of their worthiness to enter the Kingdom.  Look at all that we’ve done for the Lord! They’ve cast out demons, prophesied, and worked many other wonderful works.  Surely, this is more than enough to have earned them entrance…right?

After listening to these men seeking justification through their works, Jesus tells them plainly, “I do not know you”.  The Greek word translated here as know is ginosko, and is sometimes translated as approved.  That being the case, it seems that Jesus is telling these men that he never approved of the manner in which they sought after righteousness, for no man can work, or “righteous” his way into the Kingdom.  Christ does not know or approve of us according to what we have done, as it never has, and never will be about the works of our hands.  It is about the perfect and finished work of Jesus Christ, and that alone.  What does the apostle John tell us that our confidence should be in on the “day of judgment”?  Our own Works?  Our own righteousness?  The number of souls we’ve won to Christ?  How many demons we’ve cast out, or how accurate our prophetic words were?

No, John tells us plainly that our confidence should lie in one thing and one thing alone, our union with Christ:

17 In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.”

-1 JOHN 4:17 (Emphasis mine)

On the Day of Judgment, our confidence must be in the fact that, in His love, God has made us to be exactly what Jesus is.  In 1 Corinthians 1:30, Paul tells us that Christ has become for us “righteousness, holiness, and redemption”.  I have no righteousness or holiness of my own to offer.  On my own, with nothing but religion to hide behind, I’m nothing.  I have only that which is given to me through Christ.  Therefore, to stand before the Lord, claiming my own works as evidence of my worthiness to enter the Kingdom is to spit on the work of Christ, and to say that I could have done it all on my own.  God does not recognize, approve of, or know such self-confident religion.

Now remember, the audience Jesus was directly addressing was 100% Jewish, and they clearly saw their righteousness as being derived from their works.  Consider the words of Moses in Deutoronomy 6:25:

25 And if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.

-DEUTORONOMY 6:25 (Emphasis mine)

Under the Old Covenant, which Jesus’ listeners were still subject to, righteousness was thought to be determined by one’s ability to keep the Law.  This, of course, was impossible, and at the end of the day, that really was the point.  No man could live righteously 100% of the time, and the Law simply served as the means through which we arrive at that conclusion.  It revealed to us that prior to Christ, the problem was much deeper than men transgressing commandments.  There was an alien force at work within the human race – sin – and it was eating us alive, manifesting in our violence, hatred, and inability to live upright lives. In His great love for us, the Father makes us to be His very own righteousness, freely, as a gift (2 Corinthians 5:21)!  He destroys sin and unites us to Himself, declaring us to be “without spot or blemish” (Ephesians 5:27, NKJV).  Because of the “gift nature” of our rightness with God, no man has anything to boast of.  All we can really do is throw up our hands and say “Thank You, Jesus”:

29 …no one may boast before him. 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God--that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is written: «Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.”

-1 CORINTHIANS 1:29-31 (Emphasis mine)

The individuals in the Matthew 7 account, however, approach Christ and commence boasting in their own works.  Remember, Matthew 7 opens with Christ declaring that men will be judged by the same standard that they use to judge others.  If these men were gauging their righteousness by their own works, it’s safe to assume that this is the same standard by which they judged others.  Perhaps, then, these were Jewish converts to Christ, who were still finding their identity and righteousness in the Law, or just the prototypical religious man or woman, and held others to this same standard.  When they stood before the Lord on the “day of judgment”, He judged them by the same standard they used to judge themselves and others.  Since the Lord does not approve of a works based system of righteousness, these men are told that they were never known, or approved of by Christ.

It is also vitally important to note that in Matthew 7:15-20, before Jesus ever begins discussing this judgment day scenario, He warns us of false prophets, who would come claiming to be sent of God.  These are almost undeniably the same people being spoken of in verses 21-23:

These were not simply believers who had lived their whole lives serving Christ, only to be shocked to find that they had left something somewhere undone, and would therefore spend an eternity in hell.  This verse does not insinuate in the least that we should approach the day of judgment with terror and fear.  This is not a passage relating to your average church attendee, but false prophets, who put their confidence in the works of their own hands, instead of in the work of Christ.

Make no mistake, Matthew 7:21-23 is not a passage that ought to terrify us.  It’s been grossly misunderstood and misused for far too long.  It should not be used to browbeat and frighten people into believing that they could spend their whole lives thinking that they were “right with God”, only to find out that they’d been hoodwinked.  It is telling us that there will be false prophets who find their righteousness in what they have done, and judge others by this same standard.  These are individuals who do not understand the Gospel, and falsely teach and preach in Christ’s name.  They disguise themselves as lambs, though inwardly are “ravenous wolves”.  They were willfully deceived, and willfully deceiving others.  Matthew 7:21-23, is not written to cause us to feel insecure in our salvation, it is warning us to not believe everyone who claims to speak in “Jesus’ name”.  Also, bear in mind that entering “the Kingdom of Heaven” is not exclusively about “going to Heaven when we die”.  Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven as a present tense reality that would continue to grow and expand.  The Kingdom of Heaven has its benefits, which many would never experience because of their Godlessness and inability to trust in Christ.  We are most likely not reading about post mortem judgment here, but a metaphoric reference to people who would not be able to “enter” and come to experientially know the bliss of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Unfortunately, the Matthew 7 account is not the only place where Christ’s words get misinterpreted and wrongly used as a license to preach a fear based “gospel”.  How often I’ve heard preachers say things like, “Jesus preached twice as much about hell as He did about heaven!”  If this were actually true, then the happy hellfire proponents would be justified in what they say, but what if they’re wrong?  What if in all of these passages where Christ is supposedly talking about hell as we’ve come to believe in it, He’s actually talking about a cataclysmic event that was relative specifically to His first century audience?  And what if these “twice as many” warnings about judgment actually only consist of a handful of events as retold by the different Gospel writers?  Personally, I believe that a more careful and literal reading of Christ’s words show just that; that we have mistakenly taken passages speaking to Israel, at a specific time in her history, and made them into frightening promises of judgment for the afterlife, applying to all.

Let me make myself clear once more before we proceed:  I believe in judgment in the afterlife!  Yes, I said it.  I do, in fact, believe that there is post mortem judgment.  There are many scriptures that seem to suggest it, and for me to deny or brush them aside would be irresponsible.  However, I believe that a majority of the scriptures which we think are talking about this judgment are, in fact, talking about something entirely different.  There are those verses that speak of post mortem judgment, but they are much rarer and more ambiguous than we’ve come to believe.  The nature of this judgment is not expounded on or made nearly as clear as we’d like to think, and for that reason I am cautious about being too dogmatic on what it is and isn’t.  That being the case, I will not launch into a systematic breakdown of what the afterlife does and does not look like.  What I will do, however, is attempt to deconstruct some of the teachings of Christ that we’ve traditionally been taught pertain to hell, and offer an alternative explanation.  If you are looking for a detailed journey into the netherworld, this chapter may disappoint you, but if you’re looking to question some things you’ve believed about Christ’s preaching ministry, than it may be for you.

I am not writing this because I have a bone to pick, or because I desire to make the Gospel more palatable by removing its less pleasant attributes.  I do my best to be an avid student of the word, and take preaching, teaching, and writing very seriously.  Typically, if I begin to see something in the scriptures that I haven’t seen before, I will wait at least one year before speaking of it publicly.  This is because I realize the power of a ministry platform to influence people’s thoughts, actions and lives.  That being the case, I want to be sure that my words are correct, and that they are rooted in the teachings of Jesus, and not merely in my own opinions.

All that said, I’ve never been one to simply listen and then repeat what others say.  I’ve always had a drive to discover truth for myself.  Upon examining this most tricky subject of hell for myself, I was shocked to find that many of my “beloved” hell passages were not hell passages at all.  They were true statements, but spoke of events other than those I believed them to be speaking of.  Again, I am not writing this chapter because I have a bone to pick, because I don’t believe in hell, or to stir the pot and cause controversy.  No, I maintain that there is judgment in the afterlife, but I simply have come to the conclusion that a number of passages we use to define hell have been used incorrectly.  Since most of these passages come from Jesus’ teachings, our misunderstandings cause Him to appear as though He is the ultimate hellfire and brimstone preacher, and serves as a template for our hoarse voiced, sign holding brethren to pattern themselves after.  Upon closer inspection, however, I believe an entirely different picture of what Jesus taught emerges.

JESUS, THE HELLFIRE PREACHER?

I was once discussing the issue of hell with some folks, and made a statement that was something akin to, “I believe in judgment in the afterlife, but I do not buy into many of the exaggerated caricatures of hell that we have today.”  To this statement, another gentleman replied, “It is Jesus Christ, Himself who gave us the ‘caricatures’ of which you speak.”

I realized, of course, that what this man said was true.  It is Jesus, more than any other figure, whose words have been used to justify preaching a fear based message of judgment.  The problem, I believe, is that we’ve read these passages in light of our present understandings, instead of reading them in the context in which they were first written.  This is of utmost importance, for it is acknowledged on almost all fronts that the Jewish Old Testament is one hundred percent lacking in any reference to our modern concept of hell.  Rather, the dwelling place of both the righteous and wicked dead is called by the Hebrew word sheol, and this is where we will begin our discussion on the Biblical images of “hell” and the language Jesus was drawing on when supposedly speaking of it.

SHEOL

Sheol is never described as being a place of fire and brimstone that was void of God’s presence in the Old Testament scriptures, but rather as a place where both the good and the bad went after death.  The idea that both the righteous and the wicked went to essentially the same place can be seen in the words of Samuel to Saul:

19 The Lord will deliver both Israel and you into the hands of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons will be with me. The Lord will also give the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines.”

-1 SAMUEL 28:19 (Emphasis mine)

This was not the living and active prophet Samuel speaking here, but the spirit of Samuel summoned by the witch of Endor.  Saul was clearly not a man of God, clearly demonstrated by his seeking the help of a witch, and yet the righteous Samuel states that Saul’s departed spirit will rest in the same location as his own.

Sheol is also clearly described as being a place where the presence of God dwelt (Psalms 139:8), which does not gel at all with the teaching that hell is a place of eternal separation from God’s presence.  Those who preach hell as being a place of separation must either face this fact and reinterpret sheol correctly, or conclude that the presence of God dwells in hell.  Either way, it’s a great inconvenience to their theology.

Strong’s Concordance defines sheol as “the world of the dead”, but the word can also simply mean to be hidden or unseen.  When departed souls were said to be in sheol it was often euphemistic for the fact that such were now unseen and hidden away from our view.  It did not by any stretch of the imagination, however, speak of a fiery chasm in which the souls of the wicked dead were tormented day and night.  It was seen as being a place of inactivity which both good and evil were said to occupy and seems to have served as a metaphor for the fact that the dead, who were buried, decaying, and awaiting resurrection, had become hidden or unseen.

In the years prior to Christ’s advent, both during and after the Babylonian exile, many traditions about the idea of “hell” began to be formulated and passed around.  Some extra-biblical works, such as 1 Enoch, began to appear that described a “hell” altogether different from the afterlife concepts found in the Old Testament - and in some pretty terrifying terms, I might add.  The concept of gehenna (which we’ll discuss later in this chapter) as being a place of postmortem torment, for instance, first appears in the book of Enoch, which, of course, was not actually written by the Biblical figure of Enoch, as it was written centuries after his departure.

The books of Enoch, like the book of the Revelation, were written in what was then a very popular literary style, an apocalypse, in which the writers would use exaggerated, and almost cartoonish imagery in order to describe events often much less dramatic than the imagery would suggest.  Therefore, even the books of Enoch with their fiery descriptions of gehenna, do not necessarily need to be seen as describing what the metaphors suggest, for the literary style determines how we interpret the words contained within the work, and so it could have very well been an earthly cataclysm that “Enoch” sought to speak of, albeit in mythic and mystical language.  Regardless, the descriptions of gehenna given in 1 Enoch came to be seen as describing a place of afterlife torment, reserved for the enemies of God.

The Old Testament, however, remains strangely silent on matters concerning the afterlife.  Some Jews even see this as being a mark of distinction between the worship of the true God and the practices of the pagan nations.  The surrounding nations, including Egypt, in whose idolatrous culture ancient Israel was once steeped, were obsessed with the concept of the afterlife and had some very detailed beliefs on how it worked.  The Egyptian Book of the Dead, for instance, is an elaborate collection of magical spells said to aid the departed soul in its journey to the netherworld.  These concepts were not peripheral parts of Egyptian culture, but hallmarks of it.  Just look at the vast array of earthly treasures the Pharaohs were buried with!  Their worshippers and subjects believed that such things could aid them in the next life, and so entombed them alongside of their decaying owners.

Though once neck deep in the culture of ancient Egypt, the religion of the Jews was almost entirely lacking in any sort of fixation with the post mortem state.  Instead they seemed to be peculiarly interested in the present life, and with the consequences and rewards of following God in the here and now.  Though ideas about the afterlife would have been commonplace during their 400 plus year stint as slaves in Egypt, Israel did not carry any of them into her worship of Yahweh.  In Acts 7:22, we’re told that, “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians…”, and his education on all-things-Egyptian would have certainly included their understandings and opinions on life after death.  Yet after encountering the “I Am”, Moses says nothing of such things!

This is important, because we often read Jesus’ words through the filter of what Christianity has come to believe over two millennia, however, we must remember that most of our ideas would have been foreign to a first century Jew.  Since the Hebrew Scriptures are relatively silent on the afterlife, Christ’s words on this subject must be read with the understanding that there was not a systematic theology of hell that all Jews universally agreed upon.  We often forget that when we come at the issue of hell we’re doing so with many preconceived ideas, and so when we read Christ’s words about a place of fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, we assume He’s talking about the “hell” we grew up hearing about in Sunday school.  Remember though, this concept is not present in Old Testament scriptures.  Therefore, when Jesus speaks of “hell” we must hear Him with the understanding that our present views were not the standard views of 2,000 years ago.  And so when He spoke His audience was hearing Him say something completely different from what we hear when we read His words today.

For instance, if I stood up in front an audience of teenagers today and asked if they’d seen the “Batman movies”, most all of them would say “yes”, and would have in mind Batman’s most recent incarnation in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.  However, if I went back just a few decades and asked a group of teens the same question, they would most likely also answer “yes”, but would have in mind the much more cartoonish incarnation of Batman as portrayed by Adam West.  If I fast forwarded a bit, to the early 1990’s, and asked the same question, I’d get the same response, but the audience would be thinking of Michael Keaton’s portrayal of Batman.  You see, the same exact word, Batman, brings to mind similar, but very different ideas depending on which decade we’re in.  In the same way, were we to stand up in a congregation today and mention the word “hell”, a very particular concept would pop into the audience’s mind, whereas if you went back 2,000 years and mentioned the same word, or it’s Hebrew or Greek equivalent, a very different concept might come to the listener’s mind.

N.T. Wright, writing on the effect that the passage of time has had on our views of hell, says:

…once Christians readers had been sufficiently distanced from the original meaning of the words, alternative images would come to mind, generated not by Jesus or the New Testament but by the stock of images, some of them extremely lurid, supplied by ancient and medieval folklore and imagination. 41

Now as I stated before, there were some ideas and oral traditions about hell that sprang up during the period dividing the Old and New Testaments.  Most of these traditions are aspects of what is called Second Temple Judaism, in which, long story short, the commentaries of various Rabbis were seen as being on par with scripture.  The ideas drawn from the teachings of these Rabbis, who rarely ever agreed with one another, are sometimes referred to as the “traditions of the elders”, traditions which Christ often broke, and made some pretty harsh statements against (Mark 7:1-13).  Paul mostly likely had these same traditions in mind when he wrote in Titus 1:14 that believers ought to, “...pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the merely human commands of those who reject the truth.”  This is almost assuredly a reference to the teachings and traditions of the Rabbis, and to the superstitious beliefs present in Second Temple Judaism.  In 1 Timothy 1:4, Paul similarly urged Timothy to teach men to avoid devoting themselves to “myths”, which again is likely a reference to this pagan influenced brand of Judaism and the commentaries of Rabbis.

As mentioned earlier, many of these traditions began to spring up during the Babylonian exile, which began in 586 B.C., when Jerusalem was overthrown, and many Jews became slaves and citizens of pagan Babylon.   It is universally agreed upon that while exiled, the Jews adopted many of the beliefs of their idolatrous neighbors, making them their own.  The Babylonian Talmud, or, the Babylonian Gemara, is a collection of rabbinic writings which was completed around AD 500.  Its contents, however, come directly out of Israel’s time spent in Babylon, and though the book itself was not compiled until sometime later, is comprised of teachings which were birthed during this period of time.  It is only at this very late point in Israel’s history that we finally begin reading of various, highly pagan inspired ideas about the afterlife; ideas that are noticeably absent from the writings of Moses and the prophets.  Likewise, during what is called the intertestimental period, that is the four hundred years dividing Malachi and Matthew, the Jews continued to welcome in and elaborate on pagan philosophy, and a very unique version of Moses’ monotheistic religion emerged.  Much of what was being taught and believed by the rabbis in this period of time would have been absolutely unrecognizable to those who’d exited Egypt, and some of it could have gotten them stoned for idolatry.

Thomas B. Thayer, in his classic work, The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment, says the following concerning the influence that pagan thought had on Israel’s afterlife theology:

The truth is, that in the four hundred years of their intercourse with the heathen, during which they were without any divine teacher or message, Pagan philosophy and superstition had, so far as regarded the future state, completely pushed aside the Law of Moses and the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and set up in place of them their own extravagant inventions and fables respecting the invisible world. 42

It seems rather clear why the scriptures urge us to avoid the oral traditions of the Rabbis.  These were pagan ideas that God had not revealed to Israel, but had been impressed upon them through the influence of a pagan culture.  Jesus said that such traditions rendered the word of God ineffective and Paul encouraged his readers to avoid them.  In light of this I think it’s very safe to say that when Jesus speaks of “hell”, He is not drawing upon the uninspired traditions of the elders and we, therefore, ought to be very careful to not filter His words through their views, except of course when He purposely speaks their language in order to drive home a point.

BACK TO SHEOL

Getting back to sheol, the Old Testament concept of the afterlife, it is clear through many Old Testament scriptures, that the word was never used to describe something resembling our modern concept of hell, but of the intermediate state of all departed souls, prior to Christ.  We could speculate on whether or not sheol contained separate compartments, dividing the righteous from the wicked, but since that too is an idea that arose from external tradition, we will leave it out of our discussion for now.  As we have already seen, the Jews were originally altogether lacking in a “hell” concept as we have it today.  The tradition grew progressively, and many of our present understandings are undeniably derived from pagan, as well as apocryphal sources.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

One of the biggest sources of confusion on this matter comes from mistranslations of the word sheol in the King James Version of the Bible.  Unfortunately, the translators rendered the word as “hell” numerous times when it seemed to fit with their worldview, but in instances where that interpretation did not gel with their beliefs it would be rightly translated as “the grave”.

For instance:

17 The wicked shall be turned into hell (sheol), and all the nations that forget God.

-PSALMS 9:17 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

Here the translators saw fit to render sheol as “hell” primarily because of the context in which it is used.  In this instance the word is referring to the future home of the wicked, the “nations that forget God”, and so “hell” seemed much more fitting to the translators than “the grave”.  One must remember though, that at the time that the Psalms were written the Jews still had no concrete doctrine of hell.  Since the concept developed much later in Israel’s history it cannot be what David had in mind.  Contextually, David is speaking of the ungodly nations that opposed him.  He was simply stating that though these individuals might experience momentary victories, in the end they would die like all others and go down to the grave, sheol, or the intermediate abode of departed spirits.  The intent of the Psalm is perhaps best seen in its closing line:

20 Put them in fear, O LORD: that the nations may know themselves to be but men. Selah.

-PSALMS 9:20 (Emphasis mine)

David’s intent in declaring that the “wicked” and “all the nations that forget God” would go down to sheol, was to remind them that they were mere mortals, all of whom would eventually taste death.  Though they opposed David, and perhaps even appeared to triumph over him, ultimately they would die and go to where the souls of all mortals were thought to go – sheol.  For some unfortunate reason, however, the King James Bible translates sheol as “hell” and absolutely misconstrues the heart of the text by introducing concepts that were then quite foreign to the Hebrew mind.

We’ll now turn our attention to another passage in which the same translators saw fit to render sheol in a very different way simply because it too fit with their worldview:

9 The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he had been sick, and was recovered of his sickness: 10 I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave (sheol): I am deprived of the residue of my years.

- ISAIAH 38:9-10 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

Now notice that we are reading the words of the righteous Hezekiah.  He, just like the wicked nations who forget God spoken of by David, is said to have sheol as his future destination.  However, in the case of Hezekiah sheol is not translated as “hell”, but as the “grave”.  Why is this?  Because it fit with the translator’s worldview that bad guys go to hell and good guys go to heaven.  Certainly, righteous Hezekiah would not be heading for the same postmortem destination as David’s enemies, right?  According to the original language the answer is yes, he was!  Both were on their way to sheol but the meaning of the word was changed to fit with the translator’s understanding of the afterlife.

The New King James version rightly translates Isaiah 38:10 thusly:

10 I said, «In the prime of my life I shall go to the gates of Sheol; I am deprived of the remainder of my years.”

-ISAIAH 38:10 (NKJV, Emphasis mine)

And the New International Version clarifies:

10 I said, “In the prime of my life must I go through the gates of death and be robbed of the rest of my years?”

-ISAIAH 38:10 (Emphasis mine)

This same error in translating sheol as hell is repeated numerous times throughout the King James Bible, but has been rightly corrected in many newer translations.  Unfortunately though, the damage has been done and many Old Testament verses are now taken to mean something which their original writers never intended for them to mean.  The reason why this is so important is that wrongly translating sheol as hell gives people the false impression that the bible, Old Testament included, is chock full of verses that refer to and describe it.  Rarely is it ever noted during a Sunday morning sermon, however, that the Old Testament writers would not have even recognized our modern portrayals of hell because such portrayals would have been foreign to their belief system, and therefore could not have been what they had in mind when writing.  Again, it would be like reading a publication from the 1960’s that referred to Batman, and then assuming that it was referring to his 21st century incarnations.  It is intellectually dishonest, and downright dangerous to twist the scriptures this way in order to make them conform to modern understandings.

Have a look at the following prophecy regarding Christ’s death and resurrection as it appears in the King James Version:

10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell (sheol); neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

-PSALMS 16:10 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

In the New Testament, in Acts 2:25-27, the apostle Peter applies this same prophecy to Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection:

25 For David speaketh concerning him [Jesus], I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved: 26 Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope: 27 Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

-ACTS 2:25-27 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

Through Peter’s application of Psalms 16:10 it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever this place called sheol was, Jesus Himself went there after death.  Now, because of the mistranslation of the word sheol, there has arisen, in more recent years, the erroneous idea that Jesus descended into a physical hell and had to be tortured by demons and the devil until all of our intended punishment was fully vented upon him.  This idea is not only foreign to scripture, it’s also built upon a very thin and weak foundation, as the word sheol clearly was not intended to mean “hell” as we now know it, but the place where all departed spirits were thought to go under the Old Covenant.

Adam Clarke has this say on the rendering of sheol as “hell” in Psalms 16:10:

As to leaving the soul In hell, it can only mean permitting the life of the Messiah to continue under the power of death; for ‏שאול‎  sheol signifies a pit, a ditch, the grave, or state of the dead. 43

We know full well that Christ did not experience torment or physical suffering in “hell”, but rather preached to the departed souls who had long ago taken up residence in sheol, as the apostle Peter twice states:

19 through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison 20 who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water,

-1 PETER 3:19 (Emphasis mine)

And,

6 For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to men in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.

-1 PETER 4:6 (Emphasis mine)

Now we know that Peter is likely speaking of the same group of departed spirits in both passages, as they are written in the same epistle and are situated only sentences apart from one another.  Peter’s initial statement was that Christ preached to those who had died in the Genesis flood, but it is very possible that he broadens Christ’s audience in chapter 4:6 to all of those who had died prior to His advent.  Either way, we know that Christ was not suffering in hell, but preaching to the spirits in sheol.  In stating that His soul would not be left in sheol He was making a statement about His resurrection, and the fact that He would not remain in the grave but would rise and ascend to His Father’s right hand as King of Kings and Lord of Lords!

HADES

This brings us to another New Testament word that often gets translated as “hell”, Hades.  Peter, in translating the Hebrew Psalm into Greek, replaced the word sheol with the Greek word Hades.  Hades is, in fact, the Greek, New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament word sheol, as Old Testament verses which reference sheol, when quoted in the New Testament have sheol replaced with Hades.  Most scholars are in agreement that the words are in fact describing the same place.  The reason it is important for us to have a proper understanding of the Old Testament concept of sheol is because the New Testament word Hades means the exact same thing, and so our understanding of sheol will help us to better understand what Christ means when He speaks of Hades.

Thayer quotes Dr. George Campbell, who says regarding the translation of the Greek word “hades as hell:

In my judgment, it ought never in Scripture to be rendered hell, at least in the sense wherein that word is universally understood by Christians.  In the Old Testament the corresponding word is Sheol, which signifies the state of the dead in general, without regard to the goodness or badness of the persons, their happiness or misery.  It is very plain that neither in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, nor in the New, does the word hades convey the meaning which the present English word hell, in the Christian usage, always conveys to our minds.  The attempt to illustrate this would be unnecessary, as it is hardly now pretended by any critic that this is the acceptation of the term in the Old Testament. 44

In several instances the word Hades is used to describe, not the state of the dead, but complete and utter physical destruction.  For instance, in Matthew 11:23, Jesus, as He is declaring that the cities whose residents had largely rejected Him would experience destructive judgments during the later Jewish wars, says:

23 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell (Hades): for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

-MATTHEW 11:23 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

Now no one truly believes that this entire city, buildings and all, went down into the underworld to experience torment.  What we do know, however, is that these cities denounced by Christ were utterly destroyed some years later during the later wars between the Jews and Rome.  Also, Christ compares the fate of Capernaum to that of Sodom, which was not literally dragged into a fiery underworld but rather physically destroyed and leveled.

Adam Clark notes on this passage:

Perhaps not meaning, here, the place of torment, but rather a state of desolation. The original word is Hades…the invisible receptacle or mansion of the dead …The word hell, used in the common translation, conveys now an improper meaning of the original word…Here it means a state of the utmost woe, and ruin, and desolation, to which these impenitent cities should be reduced. This prediction of our Lord was literally fulfilled; for, in the wars between the Romans and the Jews, these cities were totally destroyed, so that no traces are now found of Bethsaida, Chorazin, or Capernaum. 45

It’s crucial for us to understand that Hades, at least in some instances, refers to complete destruction through some sort of catastrophic event and not to eternal punishment in the hereafter.  These are not trivial, but extremely important, distinctions to make.  If we remain unaware of the way that the Biblical authors use some of these terms it will be very easy for us to read over them, come to faulty conclusions about the content of Jesus’ message, and then seek to emulate what we believe Him to be saying.

THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS

The Biblical passage that has, perhaps, informed more Christian’s view of hell than any other is Luke 16:19-31, in which Jesus gives us the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.  This particular passage has been used over and again to promote the idea that Jesus was a dyed in the wool, hellfire and brimstone preacher, and has also served as a blueprint for those who have ventured to map out the intricacies of the underworld.

Here’s the passage in its fullness:

19 «There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man›s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 «The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham›s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In hell (Hades), where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‹Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.› 25 «But Abraham replied, ‹Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.› 27 «He answered, ‹Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father›s house, 28 for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.› 29 «Abraham replied, ‹They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.› 30 «›No, father Abraham,› he said, ‹but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.› 31 «He said to him, ‹If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.›»

-LUKE 16:19-31 (Emphasis mine)

As I have already stated, this parable in particular has been a foundation stone upon which many believer’s concepts of hell have been built.  Additionally, it is presented as being a “proof” that Christ frequently preached on the terrors of hell in order to frighten men into the Kingdom, but I want you to remember one very important fact - this is a parable!  We are told in the Gospel of Matthew that whenever Jesus spoke to the crowds He always spoke to them in parables:

34 Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. 35 So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet:  «I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.”

-MATTHEW 13:34-35 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus never addressed a crowd without employing the use of parables.  Here, in Luke 16:19-31, Jesus was simply teaching as He’d always taught, through the use of parables.  Now, some have argued that since He used a proper name, in this case Lazarus, He was speaking of an actual event.  This thought, however, is unfounded and completely subjective.  I do believe that Christ’s usage of the name Lazarus has parabolic significance, and we will cover that in a bit more detail later, but the usage of a proper name in no way suggests the retelling an actual event.

Remember, the rich man’s name goes unmentioned, and were this a true story, I would think it odd for Christ to name only one of its characters.  I don’t believe that we should view Lazarus and the rich man as being any more real than the parabolic ten virgins of Matthew 25, or the prodigal son of Luke 15.

In verse 19, Jesus begins the parable with the words, “there was a rich man…”  In verse 1 of the very same chapter He begins what we call “the parable of the shrewd manager” with these very similar words, “there was a rich man…”  Now we do not find it difficult to suppose that the characters in the first parable were fictional and created by Jesus to help convey a certain point, why is it then that when the same parabolic language is used just a few sentences later, we insist on the tale being literal?

Clearly, this was a parable.

Matthew has already informed us that Jesus never addressed the crowds without using parables, and the fact that He names one of the characters in this particular one Lazarus, does not prove in any way, shape, or form that this is a retelling of actual events.  Remember, in the Old Testament scriptures the name Jacob is symbolically used to describe the nation of Israel, and Old Testaments characters like Ephraim, Mannaseh, and many others are often used to describe things other than the people themselves, and it therefore ought not to seem unusual to us for a proper name to be used in a parabolic sense.

Consider the words of Balaam in Numbers 23:7:

7 And he [Balaam] took up his parable, and said, Balak the king of Moab hath brought me from Aram, out of the mountains of the east, saying, Come, curse me Jacob, and come, defy Israel.

-NUMBERS 23:7 (Emphasis mine)

According to the text Balaam was speaking a parable, but used the proper name of Jacob to describe the whole nation of Israel.  Scripturally speaking, the use of a proper name does not always indicate literalism or rule out the notion that we’re reading parabolic speech.  The context of any scripture must interpret the scripture itself, and since we know that Jesus always used parables when addressing crowds, we can only assume that he is doing the same when he speaks of Lazarus and the rich man.

N.T. Wright, speaking of this very parable states that it does not contain:

…actual descriptions of the afterlife.  They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as “Abraham’s bosom,” not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within their present life…to take the scene of Abraham, the Rich Man, and Lazarus literally is about as sensible as trying to find out the name of the Prodigal Son. 46

According to Wright, there are no actual theological descriptions of the post mortem state give to us in this parable.  Rather, we’re reading a morality tale that borrows “stock imagery” from the Jews own mythological understandings.  To take the tale as being a literal retelling of events, according to Wright, is foolish, and would demand that we take all of Jesus’ parables as literal, regardless of the use of a proper name.

To dig even deeper, a brutally honest reading of the parable shows that the description of Hades given by Christ actually has much more in common with pagan notions of the underworld than it does with anything that was ever taught in the Hebrew Scriptures.  As we’ve said, many pagan beliefs regarding the underworld were adopted by first century Jews and the teachings of the Pharisees were especially pockmarked by their presence.  Jesus, in seeking to communicate a message to these very individuals used what Wright calls “stock imagery” from their own mythology.  In other words, he was speaking a language that they could understand, flawed though it was.

On this subject, Thayer, quoting from Dr. Macknight, a Scotch Presbyterian minister, writes:

It must be acknowledged that our Lord’s descriptions [in this parable] are not drawn from the writings of the Old Testament, but have a remarkable affinity to the descriptions which the Grecian poets have given…If from these resemblances it is thought the parable is formed on the Grecian mythology, it will not at all follow that our Lord approved of what the common people thought or spake concerning those matters, agreeably to the notions of the Greeks. In parabolical discourses, provided the doctrines inculcated are strictly true, the terms in which they are inculcated may be such as are most familiar to the ears of the vulgar, and the images made use of such as they are best acquainted with. 47

CARRIED BY ANGELS?

In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man we read that angels carried the departed soul of Lazarus to Abraham’s side.  Once more, this is a concept that is not originally Jewish, but has its origins in pagan mythology.  It is important to note that in the Babylonian Talmud, the angel who is in charge of the souls of the dead is named Dumah, a being who also appears in the Kaballah (Jewish mysticism) as the angel of silence or death.  The Babylonian Talmud is not Dumah’s literary debut, however, as he appears in pagan literature long before he appears in Jewish tradition.  In one of the most famous myths surrounding the Babylonian fertility goddess, Ishtar, entitled, Descent of the goddess Ishtar into the Lower World, we read the mythological account of Ishtar’s journey into the underworld, in which she encounters the angel Dumah, a guardian of the underworld’s fictional 14th gate.  Since these myths were written somewhere between 1900 and 3500 BC, we can be sure that the idea of Dumah being an escort into the underworld did not originate in Jewish thought, but was borrowed from the Babylonians.  Clearly, Dumah is not a Jewish invention, but a borrowed piece of mythology.

I mention this fact simply because it was traditionally Dumah who was said have been in charge of the departed souls who were carried into Hades.  When Jesus spoke of angels escorting Lazarus into Abraham’s bosom, keep in mind that nothing along these lines was ever taught in the Torah or the prophets.  The idea that the dead were escorted by angels into the underworld does not come from Old Testament teachings, but from pagan legends which were assimilated into Jewish thought from external sources.  When Jesus spoke this parable to His exclusively Jewish audience, they no doubt heard His words in the context of their pagan inspired beliefs.  Do you really believe that Jesus was agreeing with the Jewish superstition that the angel of death, Dumah, or perhaps one of the many other named angels in Jewish mythology, transported men’s souls into a special compartment of the underworld called “Abraham’s Bosom”?  Now, I could be off in saying that Christ was referring to one of these specific, mythological angels, but the fact remains that Jesus’ exclusively Jewish audience would have heard His words in the context of their superstitious beliefs.  Why then would Jesus use their pagan inspired imagery in His parables?  Because He knew their language, and was attempting to speak to them in the manner they were accustomed to hearing.

Now some would call it way off base to suggest that Christ was using pagan mythology to prove a point.  However, I would direct their attention to the words of Jesus in Luke 16:9, just ten verses before He begins the parable of Lazarus and rich man.  For here He uses the word Mammon to personify wealth and greed, a reference to a false deity of wealth and riches.  Are we to believe that Jesus actually acknowledged the existence of a deity called Mammon?  Or are we to recognize that He is employing metaphor as a means of more dramatically making His point that the Pharisees had made a “god” out of their riches?  The answer is obvious - He was waxing metaphoric, revealing to the Pharisees that their love of wealth had become a “god” to them.  His use of mythology does not take away from His point, nor does it prove to be irreverent or idolatrous.  It simply shows that He knew how to speak the language of the people to whom He was ministering.

These aren’t the only instances in which Jesus uses pagan terminology, for several times in the Gospels He refers to Satan by the name Beelzebub, meaning Lord of the Flies.  Beelzebub is not a Jewish name for Satan, but an image borrowed from Babylonian mythology.  Beelzebub is literally a reference to Ba’al, a clearly false god whom Jesus obviously did not believe in.  And yet He used mythology to describe the function of evil.  Likewise, His use of Babylonian inspired, Talmudic mythology does not prove that He actually believed these things to be true, but that as a master storyteller He knew how to speak His audience’s language.

ABRAHAM’S BOSOM

Here’s another interesting factoid for you to ponder: Did you know that the idea of Abraham’s Bosom is itself a concept completely foreign to the Old Testament?  Did you know that the parable in question is the only place in scripture where it is even mentioned?  We’ve had nearly 2,000 years to work these ideas into our language and understanding, so when we hear them they don’t seem foreign to us in the least.  However, had you taken these same ideas back to the period before the Babylonian captivity and presented them to a Torah observing Jew, he would have had no idea what you were talking about.  These were ideas that were borrowed from pagan cultures, and altered to fit within a Jewish framework.  They did not, however, exist in Judaism prior to the exile.

Today we’re taught to think of Abraham’s Bosom as being another part of the underworld where Jesus preached during the three days between His death and resurrection, but it is only mentioned once in the whole Bible.  From the way some talk of it you would think that it was clearly laid out and described in detail by Christ and the apostles, yet it’s mentioned only this one time.  That means that Abraham’s bosom is mentioned just as many times as the concept of baptism for the dead (1 Corinthians 15:29), and I’ve yet to hear one, single, solitary message on baptism for the dead.  Why?  Because most will simply say that there is not enough Biblical teaching on the subject to understand it, and so it’s best to leave it alone.  It’s brushed aside and labeled as being a non-essential belief and had God wanted us to know about it, He would have included more about it in scripture.  When it comes to Abraham’s bosom, however, these same rules conveniently don’t apply.  I have even seen elaborate and colorful charts about the different chambers of the underworld, and Abraham’s bosom always features prominently.

The term “Abraham’s bosom”, however, does not speak of a special compartment for the righteous in the underworld, but is a way of saying that the parabolic figure of Lazarus would receive a seat among the patriarchs, namely Abraham, in the Kingdom of God.  In John 1:18, Jesus is said to live in the Father’s bosom.  Likewise, in John 13:23, John the beloved is said to have reclined on the bosom of Jesus during the Passover Seder.  In both instances, John is alluding to an Asiatic custom prominent in the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry.

At a banquet, those in attendance would lean upon their left elbow while their right hand remained free.  The men’s heads, therefore, would be near the bosom of the person to their left, and they were thus said to “lie in the bosom”.  This signaled a closeness and friendship with the one on whose bosom the other laid.  When Lazarus was said to have been carried to “Abraham’s bosom” we are reading a parabolic statement in which Christ alludes to Lazarus reclining at a banquet with Abraham.

The bosom never spoke of a “compartment” in the spirit world, but of intimacy, nearness, and a special place of honor.  Being carried to “Abraham’s bosom” signifies having a place of honor and prestige in the Kingdom of God.  Now “the Kingdom” was something that the Jews had been eagerly awaiting as they lived beneath the tyranny of Rome, longing for the Messianic Kingdom to come and be established upon the earth.  The nature of the Kingdom was grossly misunderstood by them, however, as they imagined a literal, physical monarchy being established, in which they, as a people and an ethnic group would be exalted and glorified.  The true nature of the Kingdom, however, was spiritual, and was missed by a great number of the Jews in Jesus’ day.

Paul tells us that the Kingdom of God does not consist in natural things but in “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).  In other words, the Kingdom of God is about the invisible reign of God upon the earth through the Holy Spirit.  It is not about land, lineage, or a piece of real estate.  It is about God taking up residence within the heart of His new creation and extending His rule of righteousness, peace, and joy through them.  First century Israel, however, had much different Messianic expectations, and were looking for something much more political and physical.  As a result, it slipped in right under some of their noses and many found themselves on the outside, in regard to experience, of a Kingdom which they had originally thought belonged exclusively to them.  Meanwhile, Gentiles, sinners, and those deemed unclean by the Jews were taking their places in the Kingdom by relying solely upon the work of Jesus Christ.

TO THE JEW FIRST

Jesus Himself often likened this spiritual Kingdom unto a great banquet.  Take for instance His teachings in Luke 13:24-29 and Luke 14:16-23.  In both instances He talks of the Kingdom of God, which He likens unto a great banquet.  Also in both accounts, those who were invited first found themselves on the outside looking in.  Those invited first are most likely representative of those who were of the natural stock of Israel, that is, those tracing their lineage back to Abraham who were the first to have the Gospel preached to them.

In Romans 1:16 Paul tells us that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation for all who believe”, and then he adds, “to the Jew first”.  Also, in Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the disciples that their witness to His resurrection was to begin in Jerusalem, then Judea, and then Samaria - all regions of the Jews – and only afterwards would it work its way outward to the Gentile world.  In Acts 13:46, while speaking to a crowd of Jews who refused the Gospel message, Barnabas and Paul are recording as saying:

46 We had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.

-ACTS 13:46 (Emphasis mine)

Clearly, the apostles felt a certain indebtedness to take the Gospel to the Jews first.  In fact, prior to the events of Peter’s vision and the outpouring of the Spirit at Cornelius’s home, the church did not even have an understanding that Gentiles were included in the Gospel.  Therefore, when we read Jesus’ parables concerning the great banquet and the Kingdom of God, and He speaks of those who were invited first, we can know with assurance that He is speaking of the first century Jews, many of whom would come to reject the Gospel.  Just as in the parables, many of them, to their shock, found themselves experientially on the outside of the feast to which they were the first ones invited.

In Luke 14:21, after the original invitees rejected the offer to dine in the Kingdom, the master of the banquet is recorded as saying:

21…Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.

-LUKE 14:21

When those originally invited rejected the offer to dine, the “undesirables” of society were chosen in their place.  Then, in verse 24, the master of the banquet takes things a step further, saying:

24…I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.

-LUKE 14:24 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus is speaking prophetically of first century Israel finding herself on the outside of the banquet, or Kingdom that she had been anticipating, while the undesirables - the Gentiles - were invited in their place!

One chapter earlier, when describing this very same idea, Jesus says:

28 «There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. 29 People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. 30 Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”

- LUKE 13:28-30 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus is again describing first century Israel finding herself on the outside of the very banquet to which she was originally invited, while “unclean” Gentiles come from all directions to take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God.  Notice, Jesus tells his Jewish audience that the Gentiles would take their place in the feast with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of the Jewish prophets, while the unbelieving Jews of the first century would watch from the outside in a state of misery and spiritual anguish.

Jesus likened the Kingdom of God unto a banquet in which men and women, believers from all nations, would take their place next to Abraham and the patriarchs.  Now remember, the custom of the day was for those in attendance at a banquet to recline “in the bosom” of the one to their left.  Therefore, these Gentiles found themselves leaning on the “bosom” of Abraham, while the Jewish nation could only look from afar in anguish as Gentile believers accessed and reveled in the inheritance which the Jews were originally invited to take hold of!

Again, Thayer writes:

The sum of the matter is, that Christ takes up a parable or story current among the Jews, and, without approving the heathen opinions on which it was founded, uses it to show that the Gentiles (Lazarus) would be received into the Gospel kingdom with Abraham and Isaac, while the Jews (the rich man) would be thrust out into darkness and desolation. And this judgment he represents by the figure of casting into hell, as He had described the destruction of Capernaum by saying it would be “thrust down to hell.” 48

Does this not make the parable of Lazarus and the rich man make much more sense?  Jesus was not threatening the wealth loving Pharisees of his day with hellfire and damnation, but was warning them that the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame – the Lazarus’s of the world - were going to recline on the bosom of Abraham in the feast in the Kingdom of God, while they, who worshipped their wealth, positions and possessions, would find themselves on the outside.  As Jesus said in Matthew 21:43:

43 Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.

-MATTHEW 21:43 (Emphasis mine)

LAZARUS AND ELIEZER

Interestingly enough, the parabolic name given to the poor man in Jesus’ parable, Lazarus, is actually a shortened form of the name Eliezer.  If you are familiar with the Genesis account of Abraham’s life you will probably immediately begin seeing the significance of Jesus’ usage of the name Eliezer.  Prior to the birth of Isaac, Abraham cried out in frustration after being promised a great inheritance by the Lord:

2 …“Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.” 4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.”

-GENESIS 15:2-4 (Emphasis mine)

Abraham believed that he would die childless, and that all God had blessed him with would be left to his slave, a man named Eliezer of Damascus, who was more than likely a Gentile.  God assured Abraham, however, that He would give him a son, and that through this son all nations of the world would be blessed.  The Jews of Jesus’ day prided themselves on being the natural descendants of Abraham, and saw their salvation as lying in their lineage.  However, John the Baptist was careful to point out that lineal descent did not figure into the equation of salvation.  One was not an heir of the Kingdom simply because they were related to the man, Abraham:

9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.

-MATTHEW 3:9 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus portrayal of the wealth loving Pharisees as the “rich man” who ended up suffering, and a poor, cripple named Eliezer as being one who found himself leaning on Abraham’s bosom in the feast in the Kingdom of God was just a tad bit offensive, to say the least.  Jesus was making a dramatic point that the Pharisees lineage and wealth could not buy them entrance into the Kingdom, and that they would therefore not inherit the treasures which were promised to come through Abraham’s lineage.  Rather, a poor beggar named Eliezer would!

Jesus was speaking of a great role reversal which was soon to take place.  The Pharisees, who believed that their physical lineage would gain them access to the Kingdom banquet, would instead find themselves suffering and gnashing their teeth on the outside.  They would have to watch as Gentile “sinners” sat next to “Abraham”, reclining on his “bosom” and partaking of an inheritance that was not originally promised to them.  This, I believe is the true meaning behind the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.  Jesus was not preaching a message of hellfire and damnation, but warning the Pharisees to not put their hopes in physical riches or lineage, for such things did not secure a position for them in the Kingdom of God, which does not speak exclusively of a post mortem heaven, but the experience of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”.

GEHENNA

A chapter on the subject of hell would not be complete if we neglected to cover the subject of Gehenna, a Greek word translated as hell twelve times in the New Testament.  Eleven of these twelve accounts are found in the teachings and sayings of Jesus, and one is found in the epistle of James (James 3:6).  It is these passages that most people undoubtedly have in mind when they refer to Jesus’ teachings on hell.  Some of the most frightening hell imagery in all of Scripture is derived from Christ’s talks on Gehenna.

I believe that if we are to have a good handle on much of what Jesus taught it is absolutely essential that we take a second look at these passages, and perhaps reconsider the purpose behind His use of this word.  It is beyond important that we rethink what event Jesus may have actually been alluding to when He used the word Gehenna, for our understanding of this subject greatly effects the way that we present the Gospel.

Now before we go any further, I want to again make it very clear that I am not discounting or dismissing the idea of judgment in the afterlife.  There are several passages that we have not touched upon in this chapter, and since this is only a chapter and not a whole book on the subject, we will have to refrain from covering everything that the Bible says about it.  At the risk of being redundant, I do want to make sure that it is understood that I am not denying the reality of judgment.  What I’m attempting to do is to get us to stop for a moment, shelf our preconceived ideas on the subject of hell, and simply read the words and teachings of Jesus as they lay in their historical context, for I am convinced that many instances in which we believe Christ to be speaking about hell He is actually speaking of something entirely different.

Since it has been Jesus’ words that have been so often used to validate the preaching of fear as a means to conversion, I am simply asking that we reexamine them, consider them from a slightly different historical angle, and see what conclusions we come to.  For if Christ truly did not preach twice as much about hell as He did about Heaven – as many often claim – then our reasons for making it a paramount issue in our preaching begin to shrink and disappear.  I simply want for us to recapture the Apostolic message and to wrap our minds and hearts around the God re-presented to us through the person and work of Jesus.

GEHENNA DEFINED

It is necessary that we first define what the word Gehenna means, and where it comes from before we go any further.  Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon gives us the following definition:

’Gehenna,’ the name of a valley on the south and east of Jerusalem…which was so called from the cries of the little children who were thrown into the fiery arms of Moloch, i.e. of an idol having the form of a bull. The Jews so abhorred the place after these horrible sacrifices had been abolished by King Josiah (2 Kings 23:10), that they cast into it not only all manner of refuse, but even the dead bodies of animals and of unburied criminals who had been executed. And since fires were always needed to consume the dead bodies, that the air might not become tainted by the putrefaction… 49

Gehenna was a very real location that was well known to Jesus’ contemporaries.  When He spoke of it they knew exactly where it was located and what it contained.  It was as literal a place as Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria, and can still be seen and visited today.  Essentially, it was a valley, or a ravine, spoken of in Nehemiah 11:30 that in former years had served as a place of pagan sacrifice and worship.  The Jews despised the location and so desecrated it, so says Thayer, by throwing into it all that was considered to be unclean and wretched.  The word Gehenna is a compound of the words Ge, or valley, and Hinnom, the much abhorred location of pagan child sacrifice from Israel’s history.  Adam Clarke defines Gehenna thusly:

This place was near Jerusalem, and had been formerly used for those abominable sacrifices, in which the idolatrous Jews had caused their children to pass through the fire to Molech. A particular place in this valley was called Tophet, from ‏תפת‎  tophet, the fire stove, in which some supposed they burnt their children alive to the above idol. 50

It is also supposed that fires were kept burning continuously in Gehenna in order to burn up and clear away the constant accumulation of garbage and filth.  Easton’s Illustrated Dictionary describes Gehenna as:

…a deep, narrow glen to the south of Jerusalem, where the idolatrous Jews offered their children in sacrifice to Molech.  This valley afterwards became the common receptacle for all the refuse of the city. Here the dead bodies of animals and of criminals, and all kinds of filth, were cast and consumed by fire kept always burning. 51

It seems that the idea of Gehenna brought to the Jews’ minds the image of fire, desolation and desecration.  Whether it was the fire of child sacrifice from Israel’s past, or the fires that continually burned up the refuse and garbage in Jesus’ day, the valley had a notorious connection to fire.

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND THE BAPTISM OF FIRE

Now, before continuing on into Jesus’ teachings on the subject, I think it necessary that we rewind back to the days of John the Baptist’s prophetic ministry in order to gain some perspective on Jesus’ usage of fiery, Gehenna imagery. For I believe it is in John’s prophetic message that we find the seed of Jesus’ own message.

In Matthew 3:1-12, we are given our first glimpse into the unique ministry of this even more unique figure, John the Baptist.  In verse 1 we read what I believe to be the thesis statement of John’s entire ministry and the motivating force behind everything else that he taught:

1 In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea 2 and saying, «Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

-MATTHEW 3:1 (Emphasis mine)

Essentially, John’s prophetic message was one that called Israel to repentance because the long prophesied Kingdom of God was no longer on the distant horizon, but was literally “near”, or “at hand”.

In verses 5-6, we read:

5 People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. 6 Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

-MATTHEW 3:5-6 (Emphasis mine)

I want you to notice that John the Baptist did not simply set up a tent in the middle of Jerusalem in order to hold evangelistic meetings, nor was he renting out a massive convention center somewhere in the heart of Judea.  Rather he was preaching and prophesying in the middle of the desert, and those desiring to hear him had to turn their backs on the cities in which they lived and make their way out to the desert.  Literally, in order to hear John preach one had to leave the comforts of civilization, as well as the religious centerpieces of Judaism, which were Jerusalem and its temple.

In verses 7-10 we are told that it was not only the spiritually hungry pilgrims who were coming out to hear his message, but also the hard hearted religious leaders of the day.  The Pharisees and Sadducees were also making the long trek into the desert, most likely to scope John out and find a reason as to why he should be rejected.  However, upon seeing them, John had some choice words to offer them, and it is in this somewhat scathing rebuke that we begin to get our first glimpses at the apostolic concept of God’s wrath, and what I believe Jesus used Gehenna as a symbolic representation of:

7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‹We have Abraham as our father.› I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

-MATTHEW 3:7-10 (Emphasis mine)

Remember that John the Baptist was a prophet, and according to Jesus he was the greatest of all of the Old Testament prophets (Luke 7:28).  His question to the religious leaders in verse 7 is much more than a question, but a prophetic statement.  When he asks them, “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” he was not just being dramatic but was making a very poignant prophetic remark concerning Israel’s future.  In modern Christendom this verse is often looked at as requiring a future fulfillment.  However, John’s words carried a sense of imminence and suggested that whatever this “wrath” was, it was looming on the horizon, for he says in verse 10 that the ax was already – 2,000 years ago – at the root of the trees, and was preparing to remove all trees that were fruitless so that they could be thrown into the fire.

Having seen the religious leaders making their way away from the cities and into the wilderness, he made a cryptic declaration that in so doing they had fled from the coming wrath.  Obviously this is a prophetic statement, as no such exhortations to “flee” had yet been made, and the Pharisees and Sadducees were merely coming to check out what I’m sure they assumed was just another nut job prophet in the wilderness.  However, John, seeing that they had left the city in order to listen to him, took the opportunity to issue a prophetic warning concerning what would prove to be a very fast approaching, fiery cataclysm.  In leaving behind the populated regions, John says that they had fled the “coming wrath”.  This, no doubt, is connected to the prophetic warning of Jesus in Matthew 24:15-18:

15 «So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel--let the reader understand-- 16 then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 17 Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. 18 Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak.

-MATTHEW 24:15-18 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus tells his listeners that upon seeing Daniel’s prophesied “abomination that causes desolation”, those who were in Judea were to flee to the mountains.  What exactly is this “abomination that causes desolation”?  Whatever it is, Jesus says that upon seeing it, His listeners were to flee from the cities and make their way into hiding.

Many have taken this to be a prophecy concerning a future event, and see this “abomination” as being some sort of anti-Christ figure.  Thankfully, however, we have a parallel passage for Matthew 24 in Luke 21, which helps us to better understand what Jesus meant, as Luke uses slightly different wording which helps us to complete the picture.

Remember, Luke 21 and Matthew 24 are parallel passages, meaning that they describe the exact same event, but since they are written by different authors, differ slightly in how they are worded:

20 «When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. 21 Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city. 22 For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written.

-LUKE 21:20 (Emphasis mine)

Notice the slight alterations to Matthew’s words by Luke - the “abomination that causes desolation” referred to in Matthew 24 is changed into armies that will surround Jerusalem in order to bring about its desolation!  Also, Luke amplifies Jesus’ call to flee a bit more than Matthew does, as He warns the listeners to flee the city, and also to refrain from entering it if they are outside of it when the invasion occurs.

Why were they to flee?  Because in AD 70, as history clearly records, Jerusalem was burned and destroyed by the Romans, exactly in the manner that Jesus described in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.  Was this simply an invasion by a foreign power, having nothing to do with Israel, or her relationship with her God?  Verse 22 makes it abundantly clear what this destruction would be:

22 For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written.

-LUKE 21:22 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus says that this would be more than a random occurrence of Rome flexing its military muscles.  It would literally be a time of punishment in accordance with what was written in the Mosaic Law.  Because Israel’s religious structure rejected their King and Messiah, handing Him over to be murdered, and refused to heed His warning concerning the coming fall of their beloved city, the system itself would come to a fiery end.  The Old Covenant would come to a close and Jerusalem would quite literally be destroyed.  As John had said, the fruitless tree would be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Now I know in a book whose title bears the words “Happy God”, such an event seems a bit contradictory.  Nonetheless, it is an event clearly mapped out in scripture and cannot be ignored.  What I want for you to remember is that Jesus’ ministry, as we discussed in chapter 5, seems to have been patterned, at least in part, after that of Jeremiah.  If you recall, Jeremiah warned the people in his day to not resist the advancing Babylonian army or else Jerusalem would be destroyed, and her people slaughtered.  The “judgment” that befell the city had more to do with the people’s unwillingness to listen to the words of the prophet than it did with God pressing a bright red wrath button in the sky and raining destruction down upon their heads.  While it can rightly be called a judgment, it may not be proper for us to see it in the light of retributive justice, since, as we’ve already discussed, Jesus stated that He longed to keep them from it (Matthew 23:37).  When we talk about the judgment that befell Jerusalem, I want for you to remember that this was something that was outside of the will of God that Israel brought upon herself by disobeying Jesus’ continued warnings against violence and attempts at establishing God’s Kingdom through physical force.

In both passages documenting the Olivet Discourse, Jesus clearly warned His hearers to flee the cities when they saw Jerusalem being surrounded by foreign armies; armies who would serve as the source of their judgment.  If we rewind back to the words of John the Baptist in Matthew 3:7, their prophetic meaning suddenly becomes clear:  In leaving the cities to come out to hear him, the religious leaders had ignorantly participated in a prophetic act depicting men and women fleeing Judea and Jerusalem at the sight of the city being surrounded by armies!  And so, John asks them, “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

Again, what was the coming wrath?  It was the destruction of Jerusalem, prophesied by Christ!  It was not a universal judgment of all people to occur at the end of history, but a localized judgment of national Israel and her apostate religious structure.

Bishop Zachary Pierce, in commenting on John’s words in Matthew 3:7 says:  “The wrath to come; i. e. the punishment to come in the destruction of the Jewish state.”

Interestingly enough, John, before posing his prophetic question, called the Pharisees and Sadducees a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7), a term borrowed by Jesus in Matthew 23:33, which He used just before telling Israel’s religious leaders that within a generation (40 years) all of the righteous blood they had spilled would come back upon them.  This is, undoubtedly, a reference to the same event spoken of by John the Baptist.

If you recall, the backbone of John’s message was “the Kingdom is near”.  What He was calling Israel to do was to shift her focus from the physical Kingdom and the religious structure that she was used to, and to instead put her hope fully in the soon to be revealed Messiah and the spiritual Kingdom that His reign would usher in.  John’s message of the Kingdom carried with it the idea that the old physical kingdom would be judged, and that a new spiritual Kingdom would be revealed and established in its place.

Interestingly, directly following our introduction to John and his prophetic words concerning Jerusalem’s fall, we read of his imprisonment and then of the very beginnings of Jesus’ ministry.

12 When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. 13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali-- 14 to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:

15 «Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,

the way to the sea, along the Jordan,

Galilee of the Gentiles--

16 the people living in darkness

have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of the shadow of death

a light has dawned.»

17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

-MATTHEW 4:12-17 (Emphasis mine)

Upon hearing that John had been imprisoned, and his message therefore silenced, Jesus began His ministry.  What was the message that Jesus began preaching?  Verse 17 tells us that it was, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.”  What was John’s message?  “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.”!

Once John’s voice had gone silent, Jesus picked up right where he had left off, preaching the same message that he had been preaching.  What did that message entail?  The fall of the old kingdom (natural Israel), and the coming of a new, spiritual Kingdom.  It was about Jerusalem’s within-a-generation judgment, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God through the Church.  It described the old system as a fruitless tree that would be hewn down and thrown into the fire.  In fact, in Matthew 3:11-12, right after prophesying about Jerusalem’s soon to come fiery demise, John tacks on a bit more fire imagery for good measure:

11 «I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

-MATTHEW 3:11-12 (Emphasis mine)

John speaks of a day in which those who make the transition into the Kingdom and stand firm beneath the New Covenant would be baptized in the Holy Spirit and gathered into the Lord’s “barn” like a crop of wheat.  However, those who would reject this Kingdom and its King are promised a baptism of fire as opposed to a baptism in the Spirit.  This does not have anything to do with a positive spiritual fire, but was a reference to Jerusalem’s soon coming judgment.  Those who refused the words of Jesus and His warnings against attempting to advance the Kingdom through the sword would experience utter devastation at the hands of Rome, or a baptism of fire.

If Jesus picked up John’s message, and John’s understanding of God’s wrath concerned the fall of Jerusalem more than it did a literal hell, we can only assume that this understanding was endorsed and continued in the preaching of Jesus.  We see this clearly revealed in Luke 21 as well as Matthew 23 and 24 (passages we’ve already looked at briefly).  Jesus’ understanding of the “coming wrath” (which is laid out in Luke 21 and Matthew 23 & 24) is that it would be a localized event in which physical Jerusalem would be destroyed.  It was not a worldwide, universal event, nor an afterlife in hell that he spoke of.  It would be an occurrence contained within Israel’s borders and would come to those who rejected Him as Messiah, continued murdering and persecuting His apostles and prophets, and refused to heed His warnings against trying to establish the Kingdom through force.

This same idea runs throughout the New Testament scriptures.  Take, for instance, Paul’s words to the Thessalonians:

14 …You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, 15 who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men 16 in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

-1 THESSALONIANS 2:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

In this instance Paul speaks of wrath as being something that was getting ready to come upon the Old Covenant system of Judaism, a system that continually persecuted the Church and hampered the spread of the Gospel.  This is, of course, not true of all Jews universally, but of these specific individuals who were responsible for the murder and imprisonment of an untold number of Christians.  Paul tells us that their continued persecution of the church and suppression of the Gospel had caused their sins to be heaped up to the limit, and would result in the destruction of their city, Temple, and religious institution.  These Jews would, as we discussed in chapter 5, be turned over the destructive consequences of the choices they had made.

In his address to Jerusalem’s religious leaders in Matthew 23, Jesus makes a similar statement about Jerusalem’s sins being “heaped to the limit”, or “filled up to their full measure”:

31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!

-MATTHEW 23:31-32 (Emphasis mine)

What would occur when apostate Israel had “filled up” the measure of her forefather’s sins of murder and violence?  Jesus continues in the very next verses, beginning by borrowing the term “brood of vipers” from John the Baptist:

33 «You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell (Gehenna)? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation.

-MATTHEW 23:33-36 (Emphasis mine)

When these apostate religious leaders had filled up the full measure of their sins they would, according to Jesus, find themselves “condemned to hell”.  The word hell here is the word Gehenna.  Jesus connects the fiery Gehenna judgments in question to the “wrath to come”, i.e. the fall of Jerusalem mentioned by John the Baptist, by giving these leaders the same designation that John gave them – brood of vipers.

After telling them that they would find themselves condemned to Gehenna, Jesus describes what that would entail.  They would be judged for all of the righteous blood that they and their ancestors had spilled.  Literally, Jesus says, it would all come down upon one single generation.  In other words, the violence that they had doled out and had insisted on using as a mechanism for establishing what they believed to be God’s Kingdom, would revisit them.  They had chosen to live by the sword, and would therefore die by the same.  We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was fulfilled in AD 70 when Rome invaded Jerusalem and burned it to the ground.  In this instance Jesus is clearly not using Gehenna to describe an afterlife in hell, but to describe a very earthly judgment described by John as a “baptism of fire”.  This can be nothing other than the Roman invasion as Jesus stated that it would occur within a generation.  The religious institution would continue in their violent ways until they finally came back to bite them and they found themselves on the other end of the persecution.  They would literally be “condemned to hell”, or Gehenna, within a generation!

N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, says the following about Christ’s usage of the word Gehenna:

The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not, as a general rule, telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one.  As with God’s kingdom, so with its opposite:  it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else.  His message to his contemporaries was stark and (as we would say today) political.  Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God’s kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy, and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries (not least in the Middle East) whose resources they covet or whose strategic location they are anxious to guard.  Rome would turn Jerusalem into a hideous, stinking extension of its own smoldering rubbish heap.  When Jesus said, ‘Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,’ that is the primary meaning he had in mind. 52

In speaking of the fires of Gehenna Jesus was not referring to punishment in the afterlife, but to the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.  This parallel between Jerusalem’s physical demise and the valley of Gehenna has its origins, not in the preaching of Jesus or John the Baptist, but in the prophetic message of Jeremiah in the days prior to Jerusalem’s fall at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BC.  As we’ve already discussed, Jesus seemed to locate Himself in the narrative of Jeremiah, and used his ministry as a pattern for His own as it pertained to His warnings to the religious establishment.

In Jeremiah 19:5-9, we read:

5 They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal--something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. 6 So beware, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom (Gehenna), but the Valley of Slaughter. 7 «›In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. 8 I will devastate this city and make it an object of scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. 9 I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another›s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.’

-JEREMIAH 19:5-9 (Emphasis mine)

Centuries before Jerusalem fell to Rome, it fell to Babylon.  The Temple was similarly destroyed, and her people were either carried away as slaves or brutally killed.  It is from this invasion and the enslavement of the Jews by the Babylonians that we get the stories contained in the book of Daniel.  The prophet Ezekiel was also among those carried away to Babylon during this time period.  Prior to the Babylonian invasion and destruction of Jerusalem, however, God said to Israel that a day was coming in which the valley of Gehenna would become known by a new name - the valley of slaughter.  These same warnings were issued in Jeremiah 7:30-34 as well.  Adam Clarke says this of the prophetic term, valley of slaughter:

The place where the slaughtered thousands of this rebellious people shall be cast, in order to their being burnt, or becoming food for the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air... 53

Essentially what God was saying to Israel was that after the Babylonian invasion the valley of Gehenna would no longer be primarily remembered as the place where pagan sacrifices were offered to pagan gods, but as the place where the bodies of thousands of Jews were thrown in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction.  It was to serve as a reminder to the Jews of their beloved city’s demise.  When Jesus used this same Gehenna metaphor to describe the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem, we can only assume that He was drawing on this prophecy of Jeremiah for inspiration.

To Jesus, the word seemed to have much less to do with the afterlife, and much more to do with His own generation.  It described a time of fiery devastation in which, just as in the case of the Babylonian invasion, Jerusalem would be destroyed and the bodies of her inhabitants thrown into the surrounding valleys, including the loathsome valley of Gehenna.  Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who was alive during the AD 70 invasion of Jerusalem, and who was an eyewitness to its fall, writes of the bodies of the city’s inhabitants being thrown into the surrounding valleys, which, no doubt, included Gehenna:

Now the seditious at first gave orders that the dead should be buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath. 54 (Italics mine)

I am confident that this is specifically what Jesus always had in mind when He spoke of Gehenna.  He was prophesying of the fall of the Old system and of its utter desolation both symbolized by, and realized in the valley of Gehenna.  It is my opinion that all other uses of this word by Christ need to be seen in light of its connection to Jerusalem’s fall as heralded by John the Baptist even prior to Christ’s ministry.

OTHER USES OF GEHENNA

In Matthew 5:22 we have the very first instance in which Christ is recorded as using the word:

21 «You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‹Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.› 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‹Raca, ‹ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell (Gehenna).

-MATTHEW 5:21-22 (Emphasis mine)

Now unless one is prepared to believe that a mere insult is enough to damn one to an eternity in hell, it is safe to say that Christ is again using Gehenna in its parabolic sense here, pointing to the future fate of the rebellious religious system.  Notice how calling one “raca”, a term of contempt, causes one to become answerable to the Sanhedrin, but calling one a “fool” suddenly warrants an eternity in hell.  If this were the true meaning behind Jesus’ teaching, then the judgment would be anything but just.  Clearly, Jesus is speaking metaphorically and is very likely referring to the coming fall of Jerusalem and describing the devastation and destruction that is soon to come upon its inhabitants.

Just seven verses later in the same address, He uses the word Gehenna yet again:

29 If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell (Gehenna). 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell (Gehenna).

-MATTHEW 5:29-30 (Emphasis mine)

Again, the parabolic sense in which the word is being used is quite obvious.  Do we really expect amputees and victims of accidents in which one of their limbs is severed to live forever in Heaven, still maimed?  Do we really believe that physical injuries incurred upon the earth will be carried with us into the next life?  What hope is there in resurrection if all of my earthly flaws and injuries will be retained forever?  Jesus is using Gehenna in a parabolic sense here, stating that it would be better for us to experience Kingdom life maimed then to enter into the days of the Roman invasion with our bodies intact.

This same warning is reissued in Matthew 18:8-9, with some slight differences in the wording:

8 If your hand or your foot causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell (Gehenna).

-MATTHEW 18:8-9 (Emphasis mine)

Notice, in repeating this same warning, Jesus, in verse 8, adds the words “eternal fire”.  Now for some that could be a deal breaker, as we have come to see eternity as being descriptive of an endless time line of sorts.  However, eternal is also used by Christ as an adjective to describe a thing’s quality as opposed to its duration.  For instance, in John 17:3 we read:

3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

-JOHN 17:3 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus describes eternal life as being something which we can and ought to experience in the here and now!  The eternal nature of the life in question has nothing to do with its duration, but its source.  It is a life of an eternal quality.

To be fair, the word eternal, or aionios in Greek, can sometimes mean perpetual or unending.  This does not necessarily mean that Jesus was using Gehenna to describe judgment in the afterlife, however.  For the fires in the valley of Gehenna were indeed kept burning perpetually, thus its fires could be said to be eternal, or perpetual in that sense of the word.

Another possibility could be that “eternal”, in this instance, speaks of a permanent destruction that is never to be recovered from as opposed to a literal, endless, spiritual burning.  Take for instance the Old Testament example of Edom’s judgment, spoken of by Isaiah:

9 Edom›s streams will be turned into pitch,

her dust into burning sulfur;

her land will become blazing pitch!

10 It will not be quenched night and day;

its smoke will rise forever.

From generation to generation it will lie desolate;

no one will ever pass through it again.

-ISAIAH 34:9-10 (Emphasis mine)

Despite the fact that this event occurred millennia ago, Isaiah prophesied that Edom would be consumed with fire that would never be quenched night or day.  He also prophesied that smoke would rise from this doomed city forever.  However, we must admit that there isn’t a pile of eternally burning rubble existing somewhere in the Middle East today.  The everlasting nature of this fire was not literal but figurative.  Isaiah stated that its fire would never be quenched as a poetic way of saying that “From generation to generation it will lie desolate; no one will ever pass through it again.” (verse 10)  Edom’s destruction would be final, and something from which it would never recover.  The eternal burning was simply a metaphor for total destruction.

Likewise, when Jesus speaks of the “eternal fire” of Gehenna, we must remember that He uses the word to represent the destruction of Jerusalem.  Therefore, its eternal fire most likely has less to do with the longevity of its burning and more with the totality of its destruction.  And once more, remember that the individuals who are being threatened with eternal fire are also being told that dismemberment would carry over into the next age.  Clearly we are reading highly symbolic language here which must be understood in light of the numerous metaphors used by the Biblical authors.

One other possibility is that the Greek word aionios simply refers to an undetermined period of time.  For instance, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament (which was the “Bible” that a majority of first century Jews and Christians would have read, and that the apostles almost exclusively quoted from), this same Greek word, aionios, is used in Jonah 2:6 to describe his mere three day stay in the belly of a great fish.  In Exodus 40:15, the Aaronic priesthood is described as being “eternal” or “everlasting”, and the Septuagint uses the word aionios to describe this apparently unending priesthood.  The only problem is that the Aaronic priesthood was anything but eternal in the sense of unending, for the book of Hebrews makes it very plain that it has come to an end.

What we see here is that the Greek word aionios does not always describe eternity, as we’ve come to understand the word.  It can, and often does, simply speak of an undetermined period of time that can range from three days, to millennia.  There is no reason to assume that Jesus is using the word to describe an eternal burning when the word Gehenna is so clearly used as a reference to the fall of Jerusalem, a tragic, but temporal event.

Jesus repeats this metaphoric warning about removing offensive members and Gehenna, once more, in Mark 9:43-48:

43 If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell (Gehenna), where the fire never goes out. 45 And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell (Gehenna). 47 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell (Gehenna), 48 where “’their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’ Everyone will be salted with fire.

-MARK 9:43-48 (Emphasis mine)

In this instance we are given even clearer insight into the nature of the Gehenna in question, as Jesus quotes directly from Isaiah 66:24, in which the prophet says:

24 «And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”

-ISAIAH 66:24 (Emphasis mine)

Thayer says of Isaiah’s prophecy:

Here the unquenchable fire and the undying worm of Gehenna, or hell, are used as figures of judgment to happen on the earth, where there are carcasses, new moons, Sabbaths…Gehenna, with its accompaniments, was an object of utmost loathing to the Jew, and came to be employed as a symbol of any great judgment or woe. 55

Isaiah’s description of Gehenna, with its unquenchable fire and undying worms, was not referring to an afterlife scenario, but to an earthly judgment.  It is physical bodies in a state of decay that are being spoken of, not tortured souls.  This is a very earthly prophecy concerning physical bodies burning in physical flames while physically decomposing and being physically eaten by physical worms.

Let us also remember that while this Gehenna account appears three times in the scriptures it is actually speaking of only two separate events, as two of the occurrences appearing in Matthew and Mark’s gospels are parallel accounts of the same story.

BODY AND SOUL DESTROYED

In Matthew 10:28, Jesus speaks again of Gehenna:

28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Gehenna).

-MATTHEW 10:28 (Emphasis mine)

It would seem clear to most that Jesus must, in fact, be describing the place of eternal torment here, for he speaks not only of the body being destroyed but the soul as well.

In Luke 12:4-5, we find the parallel account of this exact same warning:

4 «I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. 5 But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell (Gehenna). Yes, I tell you, fear him.

-LUKE 12:4-5 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus is telling us here that God is able to destroy both the body and soul in the fires of Gehenna.  It would seem like there is no other option here but to assume that He is talking about hell.  However, in verse 49 of Luke 12, which is all one singular address, I believe Christ reveals where this fire of Gehenna will be manifested:

49 «I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

-LUKE 12:49 (Emphasis mine)

The fires of Gehenna, which are capable of destroying both body and soul, were not contained in the fiery chasms of the netherworld.  Rather, these were flames that were coming to the earth!  The Greek word translated here as earth is the word ge, which does not mean earth, in the sense of planet earth, but land, and is commonly used to describe the land of Israel.  Commenting on Matthew’s account of these same words (Matthew 10:34), Adam Clarke writes:

The import of our Lord’s teaching here is this, Do not imagine, as the Jews in general vainly do, that I am come to send forth, (βαλλειν), by forcing out the Roman power, that temporal prosperity which they long for; I am not come for this purpose, but to send forth (βαλλειν) the Roman sword, to cut off a disobedient and rebellious nation, the cup of whose iniquity is already full, and whose crimes cry aloud for speedy vengeance. 56

Clearly, Jesus had an earthly judgment in mind when He spoke of God’s ability to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.  This still seems to pose a problem, however, for how can an immaterial soul be destroyed in an earthly cataclysm?

I want for you to very carefully read the following passages:

35 and they took it (The city of Eglon) on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword; and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day,

-JOSHUA 10:35 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

39 and he took it (the city of Debir), and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein;

- JOSHUA 10:39 (KJV, Emphasis mine)

11 And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there was none left that breathed: and he burnt Hazor with fire.

-JOSHUA 11:11 (Emphasis mine)

In all three passages above we read of ancient Israel’s conquest of very real, and very physical cities.  The worst punishment inflicted upon those city’s inhabitants was physical death, and yet three separate times they are said to have destroyed, not merely their physical bodies, but their souls.  The soul is the seat of human emotion as the Bible declares that Adam became a living soul after God had breathed Spirit into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7).  This suggests that man became a conscious, feeling, sentient being upon being quickened by the breath of God.  However, when the body dies and the spirit departs, the consciousness that results from the joining of body and spirit (soul) ceases to be.  Nowhere in scripture is the soul of man said to be an eternal thing.  It speaks of his feelings and emotions.  When the body dies and the spirit leaves the body, the soul life ceases to exist.  Therefore, the destruction of body and soul in Gehenna very likely speaks of a complete destruction of the person through physical death.

Leviticus 23:30, speaking of those who transgressed the Sabbath law under the Old Covenant, says:

30 And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any manner of work in that same day, that soul will I destroy from among his people.

-LEVITICUS 23:30 (Emphasis mine)

Surely, God is not suggesting that Sabbath breaking could earn one a spot in hell.  The greatest penalty that the Law could enforce was physical death or banishment, and the preceding verse (29) seems to suggest that banishment was what the Lord had in mind in this instance.  However, it is referred to as the destruction of a soul, showing us that such language does not necessarily have to mean that the literal soul of man will be destroyed in the fires of hell.  So, metaphorically speaking, when first century Jerusalem was destroyed the Gehenna flames it killed not just the body, but also the souls of all those caught in them.

It is also vitally important to note that Christ did not say that God would destroy anyone’s body or soul in Gehenna.  Rather, He was simply reminding His disciples that between their persecutors and God, God was the greater party.  If they were going to take one of these two parties’ opinions seriously, it should be God’s.

The final usage of the word Gehenna by Christ is found in Matthew 23:15:

15 «Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell (Gehenna) as you are.

-MATTHEW 23:15 (Emphasis mine)

If you recall, Matthew 23 is the same passage of scripture in which Christ declare that the rebellious, murderous religionists of His day would face the fires of Gehenna within a generation (Matthew 23:33).  We have already established that the Gehenna spoken of by Christ did not refer to a place of torment in the afterlife, but of the very real, and very imminent destruction of Jerusalem.  Only sentences before telling the Pharisees that they would face this fate within a generation, he referred to this hypocritical bunch as sons of Gehenna, and declared their disciples to be the heirs of a double portion of this designation.

Since this is set against the backdrop of Christ’s apocalyptic prediction of Jerusalem’s demise, it is safe to assume that the words sons of Gehenna speak to the fact that the apostate religious system was destined for destruction unless they changed their ways, believed on Christ’s words, and ceased attempting to overthrow the Roman government through carnal, human means.  They were sons of Gehenna in the sense that they were headed towards, and rapidly approaching a very sad and loathsome end.

Believe it or not, we have just looked at every single instance in which Christ used the word Gehenna.  Although we’ve been told that Christ spoke of hell twice as much as He spoke of Heaven, if you take all of the Gehenna passages we’ve just looked at and combine all of the parallel passages into one instance, we are left with only 4, and at the most 5, different occasions where He spoke on the subject of Gehenna, and if our study was correct these instances did not even refer to hell, but to a then soon to come, physical cataclysm.  While some would point to other instances in which Christ referred to hell, these would fall under the category of Hades references, which we’ve already established spoke of something completely different from the Gehenna motif.

Many have claimed that Christ is the original prototype for the hellfire and brimstone preacher, and have found justification for preaching messages based on fear in His words.  Upon closer examination, however, it seems clear to me that Christ did not spend His time strong arming the unbeliever into submission by terrifying them with tales of torment.  Rather, He was lovingly warning the religious establishment of His day that they were on the brink of destruction unlike anything they had ever seen before.  If they did not abandon their devotion to a physical location, and their disdain for their own King and Messiah, when Jerusalem fell they would fall with it, and would find themselves awash in the filthy flames of a very physical Gehenna.

This was a message pertinent to His generation but it is not pertinent to ours.  When we take the words of Christ regarding a 2,000 year old judgment and attempt to fit them into our modern presentation of the Gospel, we end up presenting something that is absolutely irrelevant to our time.  When we seek to make Christ’s words mean something other than what they originally meant, we end up transmitting to our generation, a false and frightening view of God that, far from causing them to run to Him, actually causes them to run as fast as they can in the opposite direction.

As John G. Lake said, “There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it.”  Even as that grainy footage of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat no longer sends movie patrons fleeing from the theater in fear, so the message of hellfire and brimstone no longer causes the world to beat our doors down in order to seek refuge from wrath in our stained glass safe houses.  They have outgrown the concept of an angry God seeking to do them harm, and therefore reject what they perceive to be the primitive, and infantile religion of Christianity.

The real Gospel, however, does not depend upon human ignorance, fear, or gullibility in order to touch the heart.  Unbound by time, culture, fashion or innovation, the real Gospel works the same in any era.  It is always relevant and always effective.  We may present it and illustrate it differently based upon the era in which we live, but the story stays the same.  It is the message of a God who, in His extravagant love for humanity, saved us from the menace of sin, death and destruction.  It is a tale of romance and redemption; the story of a Father’s love and sacrifice.  Such themes transcend time and have the power to melt a 21st century heart as much as a 2nd century heart.

What’s my point?

My point is simple and yes, even offensively simple - We are not called to preach hell, we are called to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ!

We are not called to give men bad news, but Good News!  Many argue that the Good News doesn’t look good until it is seen against the backdrop of the bad, but Good News is still good, even when there is no bad news with which to compare it.  People already know how miserable and broken they are, and they do not need to have their faces continually rubbed in it as a reminder.  People don’t need more fear and anxiety, they need to know of a God who loves them unconditionally, and Who singlehandedly saved them from themselves.

We are called to preach Christ and Him crucified, risen and ascended!  We are called to tell people of a love so strong that it sought them out, regardless of their rejection of, or indifference to it.  We are to tell men of the fire of God’s passion for them, not the fire of His contempt towards them.

At the end of the day, if our message, like the film described in the opening paragraph of the last chapter, can lose its punch with the passage of time, we must rethink whether or not our message truly is the Gospel.  If its efficacy is short lived, and native only to certain slots in time, chances are we’ve lost something along the way.  The Gospel is steadfast, relevant at all times and to all people.  If we must continuously “up the ante” in order to scare people into obedience, then we’ve missed it.  This Gospel we’ve been given is the message of reconciliation!  It’s the message of a passionate Father who has sought out His wayward sons and daughters, bringing them into His embrace at great cost to Himself.

Let us never lose the simplicity and the beauty of our message, which is not hell, but Christ!

10

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY

The Car Seat Clicks

“…He caused man (human nature) to cleave to and to become, one with God…For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and humanity, by His relationship to both, to bring both to friendship and concord, and present humanity to God, while He revealed God to humanity. For, in what way could we be partaken of the adoption of children, unless we had received from Him through the Son that fellowship which refers to Himself, unless His Word, having been made flesh, had entered into communion with us? Wherefore also He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God.”57

-St. Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202)

I will never forget the day that we brought our youngest daughter, Abigail, home from the hospital.

She had been born just two days earlier, and due to hospital regulations, my two older children had not yet been able to see her.  She was born during the swine flu scare of 2009, and only two visitors per patient were allowed into the hospital.  I, being the husband and father, obviously qualified for one of those spots, and my mother-in-law filled the other.  Because of these temporary restrictions, our now five member family had to be apart from one another for two days.  We had been eagerly waiting for nine long months to welcome our fifth member, little Abigail, into the world, and now that she was here we were very eager for our two older children to meet her, and to have the whole family together.

When it finally came time to bring her home, I remember pulling our minivan up to the rear exit of the hospital, where my wife and Abigail were waiting for us.  As a veteran father, I strapped the base of her car seat into position like an old pro, and made my way to escort the newest member of our family to our vehicle, where she would meet her older brother and sister for the first time.

I lifted her car seat up into its base, and heard it click as it locked into place.  At that moment, something…almost magical occurred.  One by one, beginning with our oldest daughter (who would have been six at the time), we all began to cry.  When Abi’s car seat clicked into its base, it was like something clicked in all of our souls as well.  We were all finally together.  There was no more division, and there would be no more delay.  We were a family, and we were together!

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY

In Isaiah chapter 6, the prophet finds himself caught up in a most extraordinary vision.  His eyes behold the Glory of God and a host of six winged Seraphim encircling His throne, declaring His praises and adoring His beauty.  This text has always fascinated me!  As I would read the Seraphic song of praise, my imagination would begin to dance.  Surely, these angelic creatures were doing more than just parroting the lyrics to heaven’s favorite worship tune!  I had always known that there was something deep and mysterious in what they were observing and declaring, and I hungered to know what it was.

Let’s take a look at the text:

1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

- ISAIAH 6:1-3 (Emphasis mine)

NO CIGARS OR ‘RATED-R’S’

Now, in my late teens and early 20’s, the word “holy”, to me, was referent to a sort of ultimate morality.  My understanding of “holy” was that it was something akin to Puritanism on steroids.  It spoke of rules of conduct and Godly living.  Holiness, in my mind, dealt with what we watched on television, what we put into our bodies, and how we spent our time on Sunday mornings, particularly between the hours of 8 AM and Noon.

If one abstained from alcohol and tobacco, this was “holy” living.  If one shunned cigars and “rated-R’s” they were “holy”, and if one checked the box marked “R” (for republican) on voting day, that was “holiness”.  If one lived up to certain qualifications, prayed enough, witnessed enough, and did enough “stuff” for God, they were “holy”.

“Holiness” was also a way of distinguishing between the good and the bad.  Some activities were holy, while others were unholy.  It also served as a way to distinguish between individuals claiming to be Christians.  If they went to the movies and listened to secular music, they were unholy.  However, if they occupied themselves with the more noble practices of prayer and evangelism, then they were candidates for “holiness”.  If they missed a Sunday morning service in order to catch up on family time, they were unholy, but if they faithfully dented the pew and added mass to the bag, I’d consider nominating them for a holiness award.

Now, this was merely my concept of what human holiness looked like.  If we were to talk about the holiness of God, however, well, that was another animal entirely.  God’s holiness was like a supercharged, electric fence of perfection that kept all who were impure and sinful far, far away.  Even the most benign of unconfessed sins could keep you from my version of God, for He was “holy”, and nothing that smacked of compromise could stand before Him.  Surely, if a sinner were to enter His presence, the electric power of His holiness would leave them sizzling like bacon on a hot griddle.  God’s holiness, to me, was the most unattainable, and unapproachable force in the galaxy.  This definition, however, caused God to appear very distant, very hard to relate to, and certainly not one whom I was all that eager to meet up with while in a perceived state of sinfulness.

BIBLICAL HOLINESS

The Biblical definition of “holy”, however, carries a very different meaning from the one that I just presented.  The Old Testament Hebrew word for “holy” is the word kodesh, which essentially means dedicated.  This dedication is very literal.  It does not speak of dedicated in the sense of a man being dedicated to performing a certain task, but of one thing belonging to, and therefore being dedicated unto another.

For instance, in Genesis 2:3, God declared the Sabbath day to be “holy”.  Is the day holy because it abstains from immorality?  Or perhaps because it has never been unfaithful to its spouse?  Of course not!  It’s a day of the week, and therefore does not “behave”, as it is a thing and not a person.  The Sabbath is called “holy” because God declared it to be a day dedicated unto rest.  Therefore, this day was not for common purposes, as it was dedicated unto the Lord.  The Sabbath was treated differently, not to make it holy, but because it already was holy, or dedicated.  The Sabbath’s holiness was derived from its dedication unto, and relationship with, God.  If people violated the Sabbath and treated it as common, its holiness remained intact.  The actions of others could not alter the fact that God had declared it to be a holy and dedicated thing, and the reason it was to be honored was that it was already holy by virtue of its relationship to God.

Similarly, the instruments and utensils used in the Temple were declared to be “holy”, and therefore not to be used for common purposes.  Again, “holy”, in this context has nothing to do with behavior, but with belonging.  The Sabbath is to be honored in a certain fashion because it is dedicated unto and belongs to the Lord.  Likewise, the temple, along with its furnishings and instruments belonged to the Lord, and were therefore not for common, everyday use.

In a very real sense, holiness is a “belonging” word, describing one object or person’s relationship with another object or person.  It is not a title that one receives like a merit badge for good behavior, but a state of belonging that precedes, but also affects, behavior.  I would technically be considered “holy” unto my wife because I belong to her, and vice versa.  Our holiness unto one another is not a title given because of our faithfulness to one another, but our faithfulness to one another stems from the fact that we are already holy unto one another.  Our holiness stems from our relationship with, and our dedication to, one another.  Holiness, I believe, describes relationship much more than it does moral blamelessness.

As with all things in their pure state, holiness does not originate with Sabbaths, Temples, or marital relationships, but with God.  And in Isaiah 6:3, we find the Seraph’s peering into the very heart of God, and singing of this pure and eternal holiness.  When I would read this text in years gone by, it would make perfect sense to me, as the God I believed in was something like an untouchable, cosmic bug zapper, blinking far away in the heavens.  If some insect of a man happened to venture to close – ZAP – “another one bites the dust”, in the immortal words of Freddy Mercury.  However, when we begin to see holiness as dealing with relationship, as opposed to moral perfection, we begin to acquire a more beautiful understanding of why the Seraph’s used the word “holy” to describe God.

One thing I want you to see is that if God is holy, it means that He has always been holy.  His holiness did not spring into being once sin became an issue.  His holiness is eternal, and existed long before sin entered the picture.  God does not require sin as a backdrop in order to define Himself.  His holiness is self-existent, and prior to all evil or darkness.  Holiness, therefore, does not describe a lack of sin, for God was holy before sin was.  Holiness is a relational word, which suggests mutual submission, community, and belonging.

Now, the question that is begging to be asked here is how is God Holy, if the word describes relationship, and belonging?  Who exactly does God belong to?  Is He not a solitary being, who exists independently of anyone or anything else?  Is He not prior to all things?  How then can God be eternally joined in relationship to anything, if His existence precedes everything?

Perhaps before we answer that question we need to define who the God being described in Isaiah 6 truly is.  For our understanding of God ultimately determines our understanding of holiness, and since God’s “holiness” is something which we are called to share in (Hebrews 12:10), it obviously determines how we perceive ourselves and our role in His universe.

THE FATHER

Firstly, in Isaiah 6:3, the words of the seraphic song specifically tell us that present in Isaiah’s vision was “the LORD almighty”.  Notice that the word LORD is written in all capital letters.  This signifies that, in Hebrew, the word is actually Yahweh, the sacred Tetragrammaton, or proper Old Testament designation for God the Father.  Out of reverence for His name, the Jews would remove the vowels from the word, leaving the letters YHVH, or, in English, YHWH.  This name was so sacred to the Jews that it was only spoken once a year by the High Priest on Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement.  All these details aside, however, what is important for this particular study is that the name Yahweh was not descriptive of Jesus the Son, or of the Holy Spirit, but God the Father.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we can say that God the Father was present in the Isaiah 6 vision.

THE SON

In John 12:41, the apostle writes:

41 Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about him.

-JOHN 12:41 (Emphasis mine)

What was it exactly that John said in response to seeing Jesus’ glory?  In the preceding verse (John 12:40), he quotes from Isaiah 6:10, in which the God of the Seraph’s song speaks with Isaiah.  However, this time John tells us that it was not exclusively Yahweh, or God the Father, whom Isaiah saw and spoke with, but Jesus Christ, the eternal Son!

Therefore, we see that God the Father was not alone as a singular being, but that He was in the company of God the Son, Jesus Christ.

THE SPIRIT

In Acts 28:25, the apostle Paul says:

25  “The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when he said through Isaiah the prophet:

-ACTS 28:25 (Emphasis mine)

After speaking these words, Paul goes on to quote Isaiah 6:9-10, verse 10 of which was also quoted by the Apostle John and attributed to Jesus.  Here, however, in Acts 28:25, the Apostle Paul attributes these words, not to God the Father, nor to God the Son, but to God the Holy Spirit!

It is no wonder then, that in Isaiah 6:8, the God of the Seraph’s song asks, concerning Himself:

8 … “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

-ISAIAH 6:8 (Emphasis mine)

The one true and living God speaks, and refers to Himself as an “I”, but then, changes tenses, and speaks of Himself in the plural.  The “I” becomes an “us”!

THE TRINITARIAN FAMILY

As we study Isaiah 6, a dazzling picture begins to emerge, for in it we catch a glimpse of a God who is far more than an all-powerful, all knowing three-letter-word.  Rather, we see a God who is a loving and dedicated three-person-family.  He is far more than G-O-D, He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!  He is an eternal community and a family of persons who have always existed in the context of relationship.  He has never been alone, and He has never been singular.  He has always been a cohesive and relational family unit.

The answer, then, to the question of: “Who is God holy unto?” and, “Who could God possibly belong to?”, is that He is holy unto and belongs to Himself.  But contained within Himself and His divine essence are three distinct persons - Father, Son, and Spirit!  Even the very name Elohim, the most prominent Old Testament designation for God, speaks not of a singular being, but of a plurality of persons.  At the risk of sounding redundant, I say again, our God is not a three-letter-word, but a three-person-family!

This idea of the Trinity should not shock us, and it is most certainly anything but new.  However, for far too long the idea has been relegated to the realm of dusty theology books that line our top shelves and rarely, if ever, find themselves cracked.  To most believers, it is simply a banal doctrine that has little to no influence on how they live their daily lives.  The problem with our indifference towards this subject is that we are talking about the very nature of the God we claim to be in relationship with, and this understanding of Him existing as a family unit, as opposed to a singular being, is really a game changer in how we see and interact with Him.

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY

I want you to pay very close attention to the lyrics of the Seraph’s song in Isaiah’s vision:

“Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD almighty…”

I believe that these angelic beings were catching a glimpse of this very truth concerning the Triune nature of God, and their lungs could not help but explode in praise!  They do not merely cry “Holy”, or “Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy”.  Rather, their cry is very specific, “Holy, Holy, Holy”!  Three times, they declare the holiness of God.

Why could this be?

What these beings beheld, I believe, was the familial unity and relationship that exists between the members of the Trinitarian family.  They saw that the Father was holy unto the Son, and that the Son was Holy unto the Spirit, and that the Spirit was holy unto the Father, and on and on and on.  They peered back into ages past, and saw the love and unity that has always existed within this divine community of persons, and cried out in response to what they beheld.

You see, this concept of the Trinity is anything but dry and dusty theology.  It is vibrant, and full of life, electricity, sound and color!  We are talking about a family here.  A family that shares secrets, plays together, and creates together.

In John 1:1, the apostle writes:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

-JOHN 1:1 (Emphasis mine)

John tells us that Jesus Christ, the Word, was with God in the beginning.  The word “with” used by John is the Greek word pros, which does not simply mean “to be with” in a generic sense, but literally, to be toward, or forward.  It suggests that Jesus, the Word, was forward facing, towards God, and, in essence, face to face with Him.  What John is telling us here is that from the very beginning, even before creation, the Father and the Son have lived face to face in intimate communion with One Another.  Jesus, in John 1:18, states that He exists in the “bosom of the Father”, which quite literally suggests being seated around a table in fellowship with another.  The picture we have of the relationship between the Father and the Son is one of deep, relational unity.

In Proverbs 8:30, we read of the Holy Spirit, who, in this instance, is typified as Wisdom, as Isaiah 11:2 tells us that one of the Spirit’s names is “the spirit of wisdom”.  Here, the Spirit says some most peculiar things about Himself:

30 Then I was the craftsman at his side.

I was filled with delight day after day,

rejoicing always in his presence,

31 rejoicing in his whole world

and delighting in mankind.

-PROVERBS 8:30 (Emphasis mine)

Of course we are reading of the Spirit’s role in creation here.  The Spirit Himself states that He was “at his [the Father’s] side” during the process of creation.  This suggests closeness, and speaks of a camaraderie existing between the Spirit and the Father.  He lived at the Father’s side as a trusted friend, family member, and companion.

He also says that He was “filled with delight day after day”.  The New American Standard Bible translates these words a little bit differently, causing them to read as follows:

“And I was daily His delight,” (NASB)

The Spirit declares to us that He was literally the delight of God the Father!  The word delight, in Hebrew, is the word sha‘ashu‘îm, which speaks of something from which one draws pleasure.  Once more we see the interconnectedness and union between the members of the Godhead - The Father takes great pleasure in having the Spirit as His companion.

The next statement the Spirit makes is even more amazing, for now, in addition to stating that the Father took pleasure in His company, He says that He (the Spirit) was “rejoicing always in His [the Father’s] presence”!  The Hebrew word translated as “rejoicing”, is the word śāḥaq, which literally means to laugh, to play, and to make merry.

This is beyond mind blowing to me, as we are given an amazing picture of a God who looks like anything but a smug, rule obsessed, dictator, and more like a happy, loving, functional family unit!  We have the Father and the Son living in face to face union with one another, and the Spirit who is laughing, dancing, playing and rejoicing at the Father’s side.  This thing called “the Trinity” is anything but a boring, yawn inducing scrap of theology.  It is a glimpse into the heart of the Family of God – a family that laughs, plays, dances, creates, and cares for one another!

Another amazing concept to consider is that twice in the epistle of 1 John, the apostle tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16).  Now, to state that God is something is to suggest that this is an eternal quality of God, just like His holiness.  His love does not depend upon our presence in the universe, but predates it.  We are not told that God became love once you and I appeared on the scene, but that He is love, meaning that this is a truth that existed long before we were exhaled into existence.  Love is not something that God became, but is the eternal definition of His character.

Now, ask yourself, can love exist in a vacuum?  Can love exist in isolation?  If you were the only human being alive, and were born into nothing but a colorless, odorless, tasteless, fragrance-less, sensation-less void, having no concept of family, community, or even of what another person was, would it be possible for you to experience love?  Obviously, no, it would be impossible to experience love in such an isolated environment.  Love is something that can only exist when two or more parties are present, and if God is, and always has been love, what are we to assume, but that God has never been alone!  He has always been family, and He has always been love.

This is not merely a doctrinal novelty, but is absolutely crucial and foundational to our understanding of God, and our relationship to Him.  For if God has never been alone, and if God has never lacked for fellowship, why were we even created?

THE COSMIC CASTAWAY?

Growing up, I had always assumed that God was something like the character Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks in the 2000 movie, Cast Away.  In the film, Hanks’ character is a FedEx employee who becomes stranded on a deserted island after his plane crashes.  Since his plane was carrying freight for FedEx, several unopened packages wash up on shore, one of which contains a Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball, which he throws in anger after badly injuring his hand.  Later on, once loneliness and desperation sets in, he draws a face on the volleyball over top of the bloody hand print which he’d left when he threw it.  In a moment of creative genius, he named the ball…wait for it…Wilson, and began talking to, and relating to it as though it were a friend.

I once viewed the creation account in a much similar way.  God, in my thinking, was the solitary, cosmic castaway, wandering all alone throughout a vast galaxy, with no one to commune with.  Out of desperation and loneliness, He stooped low and exhaled into a humanoid sculpture of dust, which twitched to life, and became the first man, Adam.  God now had His “Wilson”; a playmate who, from there on out, would be responsible for feeding His ego, and scratching His relational itches.  Adam, along with the children that came from his line, would be born with a responsibility to have and maintain a relationship with God, in order to fulfill the lonely longings of His heart.

In this belief system, we exist for the purpose of relating to God in order to fulfill His desire for relationship.  However, a problem arises once we begin to examine the nature and character of God.  We are told by the apostle John that, “God is love”, and then by the apostle Paul that “love…is not selfish” (1 Corinthians 13:5), or, that love does not seek out its own well-being.  Yet, in the creation scenario I just described, God created man for self-serving purposes.  God, who is said to be unselfish love, must, by necessity, be incapable of creating or doing anything out of selfish ambition, and yet, the popularly held to creation story paints God as having created us for the purpose of having His relational itches scratched.

This just doesn’t work.

In Acts 17:25-26, the Apostle Paul tells us something amazing about God:

25 and human hands can’t serve his needs—for He has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need.26 From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth.

-ACTS 17:25-26 (Emphasis mine)

Paul is careful to tell his pagan, Athenian audience, an audience who was obsessed with the notion of pleasing, appeasing, and serving the “gods”, that the true God has no needs, and therefore did not require the service of human hands.  Then Paul tells them that this God, far from needing anything from us, distinguishes Himself by giving to us instead of taking from us.  He is the one responsible for the serving and for the giving, not us.  It is out of this place of selflessness, generosity, and a desire to share, that God “created all the nations throughout the whole earth” (verse 26).

You see, if God is love, and has always existed in a state of familial love, then He did not create the human race because He needed something from us.  On the contrary, He had everything He needed, and was satisfied.  He lived in a state of shared communion, and “Holy, Holy, Holy”.  God, being love, however, is also by nature extraordinarily generous and selfless, and longs to share His surplus with others.  It is out of the overflow of His generous nature and desire to share that Paul tells us He created the world, along with its inhabitants.

This understanding is truly revolutionary, for it is from the belief that we exist for the purpose of satisfying God that all forms of legalistic human religion spring.  The God of these religions, both Christian and pagan, is lonely, insecure and offended, needing our presence, praise, and penance in order to feel complete.  Life becomes about doing all that we can to ensure that we’re “right with God”, and we inevitably become like Martha, the dutiful hostess, who sought to serve Christ as opposed to sitting at His feet and learning from Him (Luke 10:38-42).  Jesus assured Martha, however, that her frantic efforts to please Him were not necessary, and that He would rather she join her sister Mary in simply receiving from Him, instead of seeking to serve Him.  The real Jesus lives to serve and to give, not to take and to receive.

When we believe that we exist for the purpose of serving God, our lives often take on a frantic pace.  We fret over whether or not we are serving him passionately enough, or even if we’re really serving Him at all.  However, as we talked about in chapter 2, Christ’s coming to the earth served the purpose of showing mankind what the Father truly looked like.  Amazingly enough, in Matthew 20:28, Jesus says:

28 “…the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

-MATTHEW 20:28 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus Christ, the “exact representation” of the Father, revealed to us that God is not primarily interested in being served, but in serving.  Christ came not to receive from men, but to give His life for them.  The God revealed through Jesus lives for the well-being and benefit of others, not for Himself.  This is the God of creation, and the Father who brought us all into being.  The purpose behind our existence is revealed, therefore, in light of His generosity, which springs forth from the eternal community that is the Trinity.

If God is selfless love, has no needs, and does not create out of selfish ambition, why did the “Holy, Holy, Holy” stoop to create humanity?  The answer, I believe, is once more revealed in the song of the Seraphs:

“Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD almighty, the whole earth is filled with His glory”

The Godhead, in their desire to fill the whole earth with this familial glory, created the human race for the express purpose of sharing their union with us. Creation did not occur so that God could finally become a family, but so that we could become a part of a preexisting family.  To simplify, you and I were not created for God’s benefit, but for our benefit.  God created us, not so that we could serve His needs and satisfy His every desire, but so that He could share Their surplus of love, laughter, and life - the “Holy, Holy, Holy” - with us throughout the ages.  In this way, the “whole earth is filled with His glory”.

Paul speaks of this great mystery in what is perhaps my favorite passage in the Bible:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—

6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

-EPHESIANS 1:3-6 (Emphasis mine)

First off, notice that Paul does not begin by speaking of God, the singular entity who floats solitarily through space seeking companionship.  He speaks of a family: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”  We begin on the topic of family, fatherhood and sonship.

It is in verse 4 that Paul begins unpacking the great mystery and the logic behind creation.  He tells us that we were chosen in Christ before the creation of the world for the purpose of being “holy and blameless in His sight”.  Now, at first glance, this would sound as though God created us so that we could live a blameless and upright life in His sight.  However, I want you to consider the alternative definition of holiness that we have been exploring.  Holiness, you remember, is not primarily about behaving, but belonging.  It is not about perfect behavior, but familial unity.  The “Holy, Holy, Holy” of Isaiah 6, does not find its origins in pristine performance, but in a shared love and community that predates creation.

God, in His selfless love, dreamed a dream for what our lives would be, and this dream was that we would join the “Holy, Holy, Holy”.  He created us in order to usher us into the family; so that we could take on the family name and nature - Holy.  Paul also states that He chose us to be blameless, which could persuade some to believe that the “holiness” in question has less to do with family, and more to do with morality.  However, I want you to consider the fact that God is presenting us with His pre-fall plan for our existence, thousands of years after the fact.  By this time in history, man had come to grips with the reality of sin, and with the necessity of its removal.  God is simply telling us that His eternal plan has always been that we would be just as He is.  Therefore, He would remove the effects of the fall, freeing us from sins influence, causing us to be family in more than just a legal sense, but in the deepest parts of our beings.  He has so made us one with Himself that we are now carriers of the family DNA – blamelessness, and innocence.

I want to redirect your attention back to verse 3, in which Paul tells us that every spiritual blessing existing in the heavenly realms has already been bequeathed to us.  We have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the Heavens!  This means that God’s plan to make us blameless, as well as to make us sharers in the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, has already come to pass.  These are blessings with which we have already been blessed.  So regardless of what “blameless” means in this instance, it is something that is already true of us in Jesus Christ.

If we return to verse 4, Paul tells us that we were chosen in Christ, prior to creation, to be “holy and blameless in His sight”.  For some, the words “in his sight” seem to suggest a sort of legal holiness that is imputed to us through the work of Christ.  Phrases like “in his sight” get grossly taken out of context and we are told that our holiness and blamelessness are things that aren’t really true, but are simply true in God’s sight.  In other words, God has chosen to play a cosmic joke on Himself, voluntarily believing that something is true about us when, in fact, it isn’t.

The words “in his sight” are actually one single Greek word, katenōpion, which literally means to be in front of, or in the presence of.  God’s dream was to cause us to share in His divine nature, bringing us directly into His presence, thus joining us to the eternal family that is “Holy, Holy, Holy”.  You and I have already been blessed with this blessing, meaning that we have been ushered directly in front of very God Himself, and are now a part of the most functional family unit in the cosmos.

Now, in order to ensure that we didn’t misunderstand the motivation behind creation, Paul makes it as plain as day in verse 6:

5 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will

-EPHESIANS 1:6 (Emphasis mine)

There we have it in black and white!  God’s eternal purpose for us is that we would be adopted into His family; a family that is defined by selfless love and generosity.  We were predestined for adoption, and not because God needed kids to mow the lawn, wash the windows, or wax the car.  We weren’t created in order to do something for God!  We were created to be something with God – Holy, Holy, Holy!

As C. Baxter Kruger has written:

The stunning truth is that this Triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the Trinitarian life with others. This is the one, eternal and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us and planned to bring us to share and know and experience the Trinitarian life itself. Unto this end the cosmos was called into being, and the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son himself, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.

Before creation, it was decided that the Son would cross every chasm between the Triune God and humanity and establish a real and abiding relationship with us—union. Jesus was predestined to be the mediator, the one in and through whom the very life of the Triune God would enter human existence, and human existence would be lifted up to share in the Trinitarian life. 58

BEFORE CREATION

Before we move any further, and look at how God accomplished our adoption through Jesus, I think it’s important to direct our attention to the when of our adoption.  In verse 4, Paul tells us that we were chosen to be adopted, ushered into the family, and made sharers in the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, before creation ever occurred.  This means that, in the mind of God, our adoption in Christ has always been a reality.  In eternity it was always true, but in linear time it had to play out and be accomplished through certain interventions by God.  This is, I believe, why the Greek word huiothesia is used to describe our adoption.  While the word does speak of adoption in the sense that we’re used to hearing it, it was also used in Roman culture to describe a male child coming of age and becoming a legal heir of whatever was promised him.  It does not suggest that the child in question was not a son prior to his huiothesia, but that he came to a place of maturity in which he could legally lay hold of the benefits of being a son.

In the same way, we’re told that we were chosen to occupy a place in the “Holy, Holy, Holy” long before creation.  However, through the work of Christ we are brought into a place of spiritual maturity, where the things promised to us, and the things which have always been true of us become accessible in the here and now.  When we talk of adoption, don’t think that we were not God’s children prior to the work of Christ.  No, our adoption is an eternal work that occurred behind the curtain of time.  However, in the realm of time, this eternal event had to play out and become actualized through the work of Christ.

HOW?

I want to look now at how this adoption was accomplished in time, and how “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms” came to be ours.  The answer, really, is quite simple, for Paul tells us that we have been blessed with the spiritual blessings of blamelessness, holiness and adoption - in Christ.  It is precisely the work of Christ that has secured our place in the family.

So how exactly was this accomplished?

THE LAST ADAM

Jesus Christ is called by many names – King of Kings, Immanuel, etc… - however, there is one scriptural designation that Jesus is given which seems to get less press than it deserves.  In 1 Corinthians 15:45, the Apostle Paul confers upon Jesus the title of “the last Adam”.  This title carries with it mind blowing implications that, if rightly understood, could revolutionize everything we thought we knew about the Christian life.

The first Adam is the physical father of the human race, but he is also much more than that.  He is also the father of the fall, and the progenitor of a race of men who became blinded by sin, and a backwards understanding of God.  His fall into blindness was not limited to the borders of his own soul, but invaded the skin of every man that was born prior to Christ.  Adam was more than just the first man, he was also the elected head of the human race.  Whatever men born prior to Christ would become would be determined by the actions of this one man.

We see this play out very clearly in Genesis 3:6-7:

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

-GENESIS 3:6-7 (Emphasis mine)

Notice that when Eve eats from the tree, her eyes apparently did not open, for she offers some fruit to Adam to eat directly afterwards.  Had her eyes been opened, and had she realized the implications of eating from that forbidden tree, surely, she would not have wanted her husband to join her.  However, after Adam eats from the tree, both of their eyes opened, and they realized that they were naked.  You see, Eve’s actions did not cause her eyes to open, nor did they trigger the “fall” - Adam’s did.  He was the elected head of the human race, and what he did spread to the rest of us.  His fall was man’s fall.  We had no choice or say in the matter.  Rather, simply by virtue of the fact that Adam fell, all born prior to Christ fell with him.

In some mysterious way, a yet to be born humanity was connected to, and wrapped up in the person of Adam.  Just as Levi was said to have tithed to Melchizedek because he, though yet to be born, was in the body of his ancestor, Abraham (Hebrews 7:9-10), so the human race was in the body of Adam when he ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.  Our involvement was not necessary.  Like an unborn child who is affected by both the positive and negative actions of its mother, so we, through no participation of our own, were in Adam, and therefore the recipients of his fall.

Thankfully, this is not the end of the story, for Adam is not given the final say (nor the first, for that matter), and for this reason, Jesus Christ is called the last Adam!

In Romans 5:14, Paul writes:

14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

-ROMANS 5:14 (Emphasis mine)

Paul explains that Adam’s failure opened the door for the alien entities of sin and death to enter and wreak havoc upon the human race.  It was Adam alone whose work is blamed, though Eve technically ate first.  Paul seems to be laying out Adam’s role as the head of the human race, the gateway through which death and sin passed to the subsequent generations.  However, after establishing this truth, Paul turns the tables, telling us that Adam was merely a pattern of a greater One who was to come – Jesus, the last Adam!

This word, pattern, is the Greek word typos, which can be translated as “an example”, or a “for instance”.  You see, Adam was not plan a., but merely an example.  Jesus is, was, and always will be the eternal plan a.!  Adam served the eternal purpose of educating the human race on how Christ’s work of redemption would function.  Just as the work of one man, Adam, affected the whole, so it would be with Jesus.  Adam is given the title of first, but Jesus is given the title of last!  He is not merely called the “second Adam”, but the “last Adam”.  This means that whatever Christ accomplishes on our behalf will be final.  It will never be undone, and serves as the period, capping off and sealing God’s declaration concerning redemption.

EVERLASTING FATHER

Interestingly enough, in Isaiah 9:6, we are told that Jesus, the Son, will one day be called “everlasting Father”.  Now certainly, Jesus is not God the Father, and that is not what Isaiah is inferring.  What then could this mean?  I believe that it ties in with Jesus’ role as the last Adam.  Even as the first Adam was the father of the fall and of all born in sin, so Christ would redeem the human race, and become the progenitor of a whole new creation.  His work would be as broad and widespread as Adam’s, for the first man only served as a pattern for what Christ would accomplish.  Even as Adam’s children were bound up in him when he fell, so Jesus, the everlasting Father of a new creation, would carry us within Himself, implicating us in everything that He accomplished.

In John 1:17, we are told that Jesus, the Word of God, became flesh.  Simply put, Jesus wrapped the human race around His divinity, and carried us in Himself.  His incarnation is much more significant than many of us may think.  St. Athanasius, in his work On the Incarnation of the Word of God, says:

He became what we are so that he might make us what he is. 59

In joining Himself to the human race and becoming what we are, He created a link through which all that He is and does could be transmitted to us.  As Paul writes in Ephesians 5:30:

30 For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.

-EPHESIANS 5:30

The incarnation literally fuses man to God, and God to man.  God and man are no longer separate entities, but collide and coalesce in the person of Jesus.  In 1 Timothy 2:5, Paul writes:

5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,

-1 TIMOTHY 2:5 (Emphasis mine)

Here, Paul makes a distinction between God and the human race.  However, he also says that there is now a mediator, one who joins these two worlds and serves as the source of their cohesion – Jesus Christ!  Notice that He does not refer to Christ as “the great God of the universe”, or some other lofty term.  Rather, He calls Him “the man Christ Jesus”.  In calling Him “Christ Jesus”, He is saying something very important about Him – He is God!  Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and very God Himself.  However, Paul does not merely acknowledge His divinity, but purposely declares His humanity.  He is “the man Christ Jesus”.  He is both God and the human race in a single being.  He is the place where heaven and earth join hands, and dance the dance of union.  He is the mediator!  In Jesus, a member of the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, while retaining His Divinity, has become an eternal man.  According to Paul in Ephesians 5:30, we are members of the physical body of Christ.  His incarnation is more than just God putting on skin so that He can blend in with the natives.  No, He inserted Himself into humanity so that what He does and what He has can become ours.  He is the mediator, a gateway through which His actions and works can flow to humanity, without any aid from humanity.

The overall message that I want to convey here is that just as Adam was a gateway that served as the point of entry for sin and death, so Christ is the ultimate and final gateway, and His work ushers in life and redemption.  In taking on flesh, God makes it so that whatever Christ accomplishes, we accomplish.  Just as Eve’s eyes were opened through the actions of Adam, so the work of Christ is spread abroad with no work being required on the part of man.

His death would not merely be His own, but ours (Romans 6:6).  His resurrection would likewise not be His own, but ours (1 Peter 1:3).  His death became the death of a fallen creation, and His resurrection the birth of a new creation; and even as the Law made man aware of the reality of Adam’s work, causing it to spring to life and bring death (Romans 7:9), so the Gospel opens our eyes to the Work of Christ, causing it’s benefits to spring to life within us!

Christ’s work was not complete in the resurrection, however, for He still had to ascend to His Father.  When He ascended, He did not do so as a disembodied spirit, but as “the man Christ Jesus”; that is, as humanity wrapped in divinity.  Therefore, His ascension to the Father’s right hand is not His ascension alone, but ours.  We are eternally in Him through the incarnation, and when He was exalted, we were exalted and glorified with Him.

DON’T CLING TO ME

On the morning of resurrection, Mary found herself weeping outside of the empty tomb of Jesus, fearing that His body had been carried away.  The resurrected Jesus, however, saw her in her distress and began to engage her:

15 Jesus said to her, «Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?» She, supposing Him to be the gardener, said to Him, “Sir, if You have carried Him away, tell me where You have laid Him, and I will take Him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, «Mary!» She turned and said to Him, «Rabboni!» (which is to say, Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, «Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’”

-JOHN 20:15-17 (Emphasis mine)

Notice, on the morning of His resurrection, Jesus was mistaken for a gardener.  Now, I know that He was in a garden, and so some would chalk this case of mistaken identity up to a mere coincidence.  However, I think it very likely that God is sending us a message here.  Even as the first Adam was a gardener, so Jesus, the Last Adam, on the morning of His resurrection, is mistaken as being a gardener!  Why?  Because He is plundering the fall, and setting all things straight.  He is the Last Adam, redeeming and restoring us to our rightful place.

Mary, upon recognizing Him, grabbed hold of Him in His resurrected form, just as many of us have, thinking that resurrection life, or being born again, is the apex of the Christian experience.  However, Jesus tells her that she must stop clinging to Him in this form, for there is more that He must accomplish.  It is not enough for Him to put sin to death, and to raise us into new life.  No, now He must also ascend to the Father!

Far too many today are simply content with the idea of being freed from sin, and freed from the Law.  They are happy to know that they are born again and that they have their “bus ticket to heaven”.  They are clinging to Jesus in resurrected form, but there is so much more to this thing called Christianity than having prayed a prayer and filled out a decision card!

Jesus tells Mary:

“…say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.”

When Christ ascends, He tells us that something startling will occur!  His Father becomes our Father, and His God becomes our God!  Now, it isn’t that we were separated from God, or that we did not belong to Him prior to Christ.  But through His incarnation and High Priestly work, humanity is joined to divinity, and the work of Christ collides with flesh and blood.  When He ascends, He carries us with Him, and when He sits at His Daddy’s right hand, we sit at our Daddy’s right hand.  A new “Holy” joins the family, and the circle is complete!

As Paul writes:

20 … he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,

-EPHESIANS 1:20 (Emphasis mine)

We all know and believe this to be true.  Jesus Christ ascended, and took His seat at the Father’s right hand in the Heavens.

However, that is not where the story ends:

6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,

-EPHESIANS 2:6 (Emphasis mine)

How did God raise us up?  With Christ!  His ascension was our ascension.  How are we seated at the Father’s right hand?  In Christ!  His place is our place.

And why did He raise us up with Christ?  Paul answers:

7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

-EPHESIANS 2:7 (Emphasis mine)

When Christ ascended, we were in Him through the incarnation.  We were raised up in Him, and are now seated as near the Father as He is.  This was accomplished for one purpose, so that God, throughout all of the ages, could share with us the love, life and laughter that has always existed in the “Holy, Holy, Holy”.  You see, what the Seraph’s have been singing about for all of eternity has now come to pass.  The “Holy, Holy, Holy” existing in the Heavenly Realms, is now something that we have been blessed with and included in.  Truly, “the whole earth is filled with this Glory”.  Christ’s humanity is also our humanity, and therefore, His place in the family structure, the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, is ours as well.

Again, C. Baxter Kruger writes:

The gospel confronts us with the amazing news that in Jesus Christ we have been cleansed, reconciled and glorified.  In Him we have been taken into the very life and glory of God…He is, at-one, utterly and completely at-one, with the Father in the Spirit.  And He is at-one with the Father as the vicarious man.  His existence is the very reality of our at-onement with God…He is our glorification and adoption.

We have not yet heard the gospel until we hear this.  We have not yet seen the glory of Jesus Christ until we see His existence with the Father as the glorious truth about our existence.  For in and as Jesus Christ, God laid hold of you and me and the world, did away with our false existence, and recreated us in union with Himself.  That is what the vicarious humanity of the Son of God means:  He is our union with God. 60

THE CARSEAT CLICKS

When Christ took His seat next to His Father, carrying the human race within Him, I like to think that the scene played out in a similar way to what happened when I heard my youngest daughter’s car seat snap into its base.  Just as my family began to weep with joy at the sight of another Turner having joined the clan, so I believe the entire Godhead wept for joy, as another “Holy” was ushered into the family.  Humanity and divinity had joined in the person of Jesus Christ, and the whole family was back together.  Our adoption was sealed and realized, and our place in the family was forever secured.  The eternal plan of God collided with time, and what God had always seen as being true became actualized and physicalized in the work of Christ.

This is the reason that you were created.  It wasn’t so that you could stress your way through life as you try to please some angry, disapproving God.  You weren’t breathed into existence so that you could spend your days doing everything in your power to avoid hell and judgment.  Nor were you placed here so that you could spend every waking moment trying to discover how to properly “serve God”.  No, you were created because the most loving family in the universe, the Trinity, longed to share their perfect love with another.  Even as a married couple eventually decides that it’s time to bring children into their preexisting relationship, so the Godhead decided that it was time to bring children into theirs.

We were created to be loved, and to share in the familial unity of the Godhead.  We were fashioned for adoption, so that we might be embraced by divinity.  We exist so that “He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus”.  This is why we live and breathe!  Not so that we can be servile to an angry God with unrealistic expectations and demands, but so that we can experience inclusion and immersion into the communal life of the Triune God!

Perhaps this is why in the “Great Commission” Christ commands us to baptize disciples, not in His name alone, but in the name of the “Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”:

19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

-MATTHEW 28:19 (Emphasis mine)

Conversion is not about clinging onto the life raft of Jesus in order to escape the waves of God’s wrath.  It is about being baptized, immersed and included in a family structure.  It is about the whole earth being filled with the Glory of the “Holy, Holy, Holy”!

REALIZE

The Holy Spirit Himself, according to Jesus, comes to us for the express purpose of making us aware of this inclusion in the Trinitarian family:

17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

-JOHN 14:17-21 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus tells us that the Father would send the Spirit of Truth, and on the day of His coming to us we would realize something!  To realize means to be made aware.  Therefore, the coming of the Spirit does not make this truth a reality, He simply reveals what God has already made true in Christ.  The truth that the Spirit causes us to realize is that we have not been left as orphans!  We belong to a family!  For Jesus tells us that we will realize that He, as the Son, is in the Father, and that we, as His brethren, are safe and secure in Him, and that He, through the person of the Spirit, lives within us.  This leaves us existing in God, while He also exists in us.  We are surrounded on all sides by the Trinity.  We are not orphans, for we have been exalted into the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, and made to fellowship in the familial life of the Godhead.

This is the purpose behind our existence.  We were not brought forth so that we could serve a self-centered, narcissistic God, but so that a generous, loving God could serve us.  We were not created in order that God could take from us, but so that He could give and share with us that which was His.  We were not breathed into being so that we could be servants in the hands of a greedy God, and most certainly not to be sinners in the hands of an angry God.

We were created to be Saints in the Arms of a Happy God!

6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

-EPHESIANS 2:6 (Emphasis mine)

You’re included in the family of God.

11

THE MYTH OF US AND THEM

Fossils or Feces?

“On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of every human being, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in that knowledge. If he does not know it yet, or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him.” 61

-Karl Barth (1886-1968)

Not too long ago, my wife, three kids and I took a stroll along a local beach.  On the opposite side of the water sit scores of factories that unfortunately mar the appearance of this otherwise beautiful piece of land.  Because of the abundance of factories, at times this particular beach gets shut down due to high levels of pollution.  This fact, coupled with the abundance of goose droppings lining the shore that night, had my parental sensors on high alert.

Don’t touch that!

Be careful!

Don’t put it in your mouth!

No…seriously, DON’T put that in your mouth!

I’m sure I said similar words at least ten thousand times that evening.  My son, however, was not thinking about the possible pollution or the offerings left for us by the local goose population, but was intently scanning the shoreline for rocks that peaked his interest.  I smiled as I watched his inquisitive little mind at work, while continuing my parental duties of making sure everyone stayed relatively clean, while also having a reasonably good time.

Later that night, after everyone was asleep and in bed, I happened upon the little collection of rocks that my son had gathered.  As I examined them, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his keen eye, for each and every rock contained some sort of fossil.  As I examined his findings, I beheld the fossilized remains of everything from little worms to some sort of snail like creature, and couldn’t help but tear up at the thought of my son’s wonder at the world around him.

To be sure, my son’s archeological findings weren’t anything that would have captured the attention of the Smithsonian, but they most certainly had mine.  I thought back to our time at the beach, and how all that I could think of was the uncleanness and possible bacteria lurking in each and every grain of sand, but all the while my son had his eyes fixed on another dimension.  He lacked the parental knowledge that I had, and so his eyes were primed to see only that which was beautiful, while mine could see only the grime and potential dangers.  He saw what I could not see because, while looking at the same piece of earth, he was doing so through an entirely different set of lenses.

To make it real simple, my son saw fossils where I saw feces.

This story makes me think back to Isaiah chapter 6, which we examined in the last chapter.  In it we find the prophet beholding the relationship between the members of the Triune Godhead (the “Holy, Holy, Holy”), and their desire to fill the whole earth with the Glory of their union.  In response to seeing this, the six winged Seraphim cried:

3 …“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

-ISAIAH 6:3 (Emphasis mine)

Seeing the truth that the Godhead would share their relationship with the world, the angels declared the earth as being “full of His glory”.  Isaiah, however, did not have the eyes to see what the angels saw.  The sight of the “Holy, Holy, Holy” did not make him see the earth as being invited and exalted into the Trinitarian circle of fellowship, on the contrary, He cried:

5 Woe to me…I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

-ISAIAH 6:5 (Emphasis mine)

Isaiah was unable to see from the prophetic perspective of the Seraph’s, for his view of the world was tainted by his view of Himself.  He perceived himself as being a “man of unclean lips” and so projected what he believed about himself onto the world around him: “and I live among a people of unclean lips”.

To remedy this situation, one of the angels, who saw things correctly, came to Isaiah with a live coal taken from the fiery altar, and touched it to his “unclean lips”.  In the language of visions and ecstatic experiences, this symbolized that Isaiah’s “unclean” lips had been cleansed and purged.  Shortly after this cleansing, in verses 8-9, Isaiah received and responded to a divine commissioning to take a prophetic word to the people of Israel.  However, before being commissioned, he had to undergo a change of heart regarding his own sense of uncleanness and, consequently, regarding the people to whom he was being sent.  Once his own sense of guilt and shame had been taken away, I believe his spiritual vision became clear enough that he would not be projecting his thoughts of himself onto those whom he was called to preach to.  The word he received was not a light or fluffy one, and it was therefore necessary that his own frustrations with himself and the world did not come into play, for they would darken and water down the message.  He had to see himself and the nation to whom he was sent as they really were in order to minister to them properly.  This started with a proper understanding of himself, but then spread to his understanding of others.  Had God not dealt with Isaiah’s personal and nationwide sense of uncleanness, the prophet may have found himself preaching to himself while preaching to others.  In other words, his frustrations with himself would be mingled together with his declarations to the nation, and God’s original message would have gotten misconstrued, and possibly lost.

I believe that for years, the Church of the West, like Isaiah, has perceived herself improperly, and has consequently seen the world in light of her disdain for herself.  We have seen evil in ourselves, and have projected these same evils onto the people around us.  However, since we are believers the evil is seen as being slightly less evil than it is in when present in those who have yet to respond to the Gospel.  We look at the outside world with disdain and disgust, hating their corruption and licentious lifestyles.  We preach a message to them that we call “the Gospel”, but nine times out of ten we do so simply to bring a sense of relief to our own hearts.  “We don’t truly love these people, but at least we’ve done our duty, and no longer have their blood on our hands”, some think.

In my personal journey, I found that once my heart started to become purged and cleansed from a sin consciousness – once the coal was touched to my lips, so to speak - something amazing and truly unforeseen began to take place: I began to see God!  I don’t mean that I began to see Him walking down the street in physical form, wearing a track suit, and taking the four living creatures for walks, but I began to perceive Him in places, people and situations that, when sin consciousness ruled my life, I would have thought Him unable to occupy.

Like Isaiah, when sin consciousness dominated my life and my thoughts, and when my primary thought of myself was “I’m a man of unclean lips”, I was wholly unable to see the truth that the Seraphs were proclaiming, that the whole earth, and yes, even those places that offended my sometimes weak Christian constitution, was filled with God’s glory.  My ideas on where God hung out, and of whom He was willing to hang out with, were very limited, as my God was only allowed to operate within the strict confines of my religious worldview.  Certain places and people were untouchable, while others were prime candidates for His presence.  Once I ceased viewing the world through the lenses of my own perceived brokenness, and instead began seeing it through the work of Christ, I began to see and experience God in places and in people that I would have formerly thought were off limits to Him.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us an incredible promise:

8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

-MATTHEW 5:8 (Emphasis mine)

For years I simply thought that this was one more promise given to those who spent hours at the altar, weeping, wailing, and crying out for cleanliness of heart and soul.  I believed it to mean that if I could get my heart clean enough I could attract a visitation from God; that I would see Him if I’d just get holy.  The truth of the Gospel, however, is that in Jesus Christ, a pure heart is a present tense, already realized reality.  It is not something that we attain, but something that Christ attained and then freely gave to us:

26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

-EZEKIEL 36:26 (Emphasis mine)

A pure heart is something that we are already in full possession of, and not a thing that we can attain through penance, prayer or piety.  If this is true - and it is – then, according to Jesus, our change of heart ought to also result in a change of sight.  Whereas before, we could see things only in the context of our own perceived sinfulness, now, we are enabled to perceive God in places where we once saw only evil.

Have you ever purchased a new car?  Have you then noticed how everywhere you go people seem to be driving that same make and model?  I’ve heard people say, “You know, ever since I got this car I’ve been seeing them all over the place!”  The truth is that there were just as many of those cars on the road after your purchase as there were before.  The difference is that now that you are in possession of one yourself, you are more apt to recognize another like it when you see it.

The same thing happens when we truly grasp our purity in Jesus.  Suddenly, we begin to recognize in others what we’ve come to know by experience in ourselves.  Christ begins to become the definition of our lives, and the point of reference through which we view all other things.  Therefore, when we are in the presence of one of His attributes, we immediately recognize it, even when it is manifesting through a person or in a place where we were once primed to see only uncleanness.

When the Lord first began taking me on this journey and revealing these things to my heart, it was like I was looking at the world through a new pair of eyes.  I remember one day in particular when I wound up standing frozen in the protein bar aisle of the grocery store, weeping profusely as I watched a middle aged woman helping her elderly mother pick up heavy items and place them into her shopping cart.  Why?  Because upon seeing her care and love for her mother, it was like I was beholding Jesus Christ Himself manifesting through her actions.  The clincher to this story is that this woman was openly advertising her participation in a way of life that Christians typically see as being the very definition of satanic.  What I beheld in this woman was not a justification for any type of lifestyle that she may have been living, but showed me that God was present, even if in a hidden way, in people and in places that I would formerly have thought Him allergic to.

As I continued on this journey, I would often find myself overwhelmed with emotion when I saw “unbelievers” performing acts of kindness and love for others.  For years I had been programmed to see them as sinful and depraved outsiders, but suddenly I was recognizing the God Whom I knew through experience as being very present with them, and working through them as well.  Once upon a time I would have looked upon selfless acts performed by the “unsaved” as being little more than make up on a corpse.  It was meaningless, and really did nothing to improve their status.  They were dead, rotting, and a stench in the nostrils of God.  However, as my understanding of my own pure heart and of God’s heart of love for mankind grew, it became increasingly clear to me that such views were simply not true.  Like my son who could see past the dirty beach front, and behold all sorts of beautiful, fossilized treasures, so my eyes were beginning to see past exteriors, and into the real truth about people.

Consider Cornelius, of whom we read in Acts 10, is said to have been a devout, God fearing man, who prayed regularly, though he had yet to hear the Gospel, believe on Christ, or receive the Holy Spirit.  So, while perhaps being a devout and religious man, he was by no means a “Christian” man.  Now, to most in Western Christianity, such a man would be considered utterly sinful and depraved until the moment when he prays the “sinner’s prayer”, or makes a personal decision for Christ.  While we may acknowledge him as being an externally “good man”, we would insist that, at the core of his being, he was rotten, and that any good or upright actions he’d performed were mere filthy rags before God.  Yet, at least in the case of Cornelius, God saw things differently.

In addition to being a religious man, we’re also told that Cornelius:

2 … gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly.

-ACTS 10:2 (Emphasis mine)

According to popular religious sentiments, such prayers and good works would not have moved God’s heart one iota.  Until he believed the Gospel, many would say that he remained in a state of separation in which God could neither listen to his prayers, nor receive his good works.  Yet, look at what God thought of this “unbelievers” prayers and works:

3 One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” 4 Cornelius stared at him in fear. “What is it, Lord?” he asked. The angel answered, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God.”

-ACTS 10:3-4 (Emphasis mine)

This unbelieving Gentile’s prayers were not only heard, but his gifts to the poor, so said the angel, had “come up as a memorial offering before God”!  That is a far cry from the view I once held, in which the “good works” of unbelievers rose like toxic smoke that irritated God’s sensitive eyes, and burned His nostrils.  God apparently saw something in this man that modern religion would not have been able to see.  Several verses later, God commissioned the Apostle Peter to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, beginning with Cornelius and his family, and He commissions him by symbolically instructing him to eat foods deemed unclean under Old Covenant law.  While the language of Peter’s vision was symbolic, God was clearly speaking to him about people, and not about un-kosher foods.  In the eyes of a first century Jew, associating with a Gentile like Cornelius would have been just as reprehensible as eating pork chops, and so Peter cried out:

14 “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

-ACTS 10:14 (Emphasis mine)

To Peter’s defiant words the Lord replied:

15 …“Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

-ACTS 10:15 (Emphasis mine)

This Gentile, whom Peter could initially see no good in, God considered clean!  He had no problem accepting his prayers, and praised him for his good works!  It was not until several days later, though, that Cornelius even heard the Gospel.  The man was clearly an unbeliever, yet God not only saw good in Him, but received his prayers, and said that his works had risen up to Him like a memorial offering.  It is in verses like these that we begin to catch a glimpse at how God sees the human race.  There are no clear, black and white lines of demarcation separating believer from unbeliever like many of us have thought.  Sure, there are those who are hostile and violently opposed to the message of Christ, and yes, occasionally, such individuals are remarked about in some pretty unflattering terms.  There does not, however, seem to have been a consensus among the early Church, nor among the Godhead, that all men were depraved, ignorant, savage, sinful wrath magnets, simply because they’d had the misfortune of being born in to a family who neglected to lead them in the sinner’s prayer at birth.

Sadly, over the years, the church has adopted the idea that the human race is separated into categories of “us and them”.  We have the dirty sinners on the outside, and the righteous, white-as-snow believers on the inside.  While I absolutely believe that faith in Christ is essential, and that there is a difference in the sense of who has received the truth of the Gospel and who hasn’t, the difference is not that one side is separated from the presence of God and void of anything good, while the other is accepted, ushered in, and can do no wrong.  The difference is that one group has received and understood the truth of what Christ has accomplished, and the other hasn’t.  Does this constitute a difference?  Sure it does, but the difference is not that one group is loved of God and holy, while the other are nothing more than loathsome sinners.  One has simply responded to the Good News that God has objectively (factually and actually) saved, made alive, and cleansed the human race, and, as a result, have experienced the subjective (experiential and personal) benefits of this truth.

You see, days before Cornelius and his Gentile family and friends had believed the message of Christ, God had already declared to Peter that they were clean.  In Acts 15:10, however, while retelling the story of Cornelius’ and co.’s conversion, Peter says that God, “purified their hearts by faith.”  They were declared clean prior to conversion, but their faith in the message of the Gospel enabled them to subjectively (experientially) apprehend that which was already objectively (factually and actually) true of them.  They were clean because of the work of Jesus that predated their faith, or acceptance of the message, but were able to experience the benefits provided only once their eyes were opened to the truth of what Christ had already done for them.  Their cleanness predated their faith, and was real because of what Christ had done, but faith made their cleanness real and tangible to them.

Paul says in Ephesians 2:4-5:

4 …because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.

-EPHESIANS 2:4-5 (Emphasis mine)

Our salvation is based solely upon the love and mercy of God!  Even while humanity was dead in transgressions, God made us alive with Christ.  Salvation had to occur when we were at our weakest, and were most incapable to help ourselves in order to magnify and exalt the Grace of God, by which He saved us singlehandedly.  God did not wait until we were smart or responsible enough to make the right decision on our own, but exerted His power and Grace and saved us, even when we were dead because of the presence of sin.  This means that the human race was saved when Christ was resurrected, not when they made a personal decision to follow Christ.  We were made alive when Christ was made alive!  This is an objective truth that is true regardless of personal faith or experience, but must be apprehended by the faith God freely gives as a gift.  Faith is not the one work required by God, but, like Grace, is a gift freely provided in order that we might apprehend the objective truth of our salvation, thus bringing it into the realm of the subjective:

8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

9 not by works, so that no one can boast.

- EPHESIANS 2:8-9 (Emphasis mine)

You see, the salvation of man occurred while we were still dead in transgressions, and we were made alive at the point of Christ’s resurrection.  As Peter writes:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

(1 Peter 1:3, Emphasis mine)

Notice that Peter said we were given new birth through the resurrection of Christ from the dead!  This means that the new birth occurred before anyone holding this book would have ever been born, thus nullifying any right to boast on our part.  T.F. Torrance writes similarly:

Our resurrection has already taken place and is fully tied with the resurrection of Christ, and therefore proceeds from it more by way of manifestation of what has already taken place than as new effect resulting from it. 62

These objective truths of salvation and new birth, however, become subjective, or experienced, only through the faith that Christ sows into our hearts as a gift.  This faith is not a work of man towards God, but a gift through which we perceive and lay hold of what Christ has already done.  The objective and subjective nature of our salvation can be seen in passage like the following:

10 That is why we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.

-1 TIMOTHY 4:10 (Emphasis mine)

God, so Paul tells us, has saved all men, objectively speaking.  He is the Savior, not of some people, but of all people!  However, the Apostle goes on to tell us that while this is true of all, it is especially true of those who believe.  Those who have yet to believe have still been objectively saved by God, for salvation does not depend upon human effort as it occurred when we were still dead in transgressions.  However, this salvation becomes especially true for those who believe, because the faith God gives brings the objective truth into the realm of the subjective, or the experiential.

As Paul says elsewhere:

19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:19 (Emphasis mine)

Paul says that in Christ God reconciled, not a part of the world to Himself, but the world – all of it!  Yet, he also states that because of this God initiated reconciliation, he’d been entrusted with a message.  What was it?

20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:20 (Emphasis mine)

What was Paul’s message to an already reconciled world?  Be reconciled to God!  But I thought the world already was reconciled in Christ?  It was and it is, objectively, and Paul’s message to the world was for them to be something that they already were.  His message was one that gave rise to supernatural faith, and empowered an already reconciled world to believe the Gospel and to experience what God had already made true of them.

As Barth wrote:

…we have to think of every human being, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father…If he does not know it yet, or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him. 63

We see this truth at work in the case of Cornelius and his household, for their cleanliness, objectively speaking, predated their conversion.  Faith, however, made the objective truth subjective, so Peter could rightly say that their hearts were “purified by faith”, even though God had already declared their hearts pure.  Upon believing and trusting in the Gospel, Cornelius, his friends and family, received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, and the objective truth of salvation became a tangible, experienced reality for them.

Watchman Nee, in his classic, The Normal Christian Life writes:

The Lord has been crucified, therefore our sins have been forgiven; the Lord has been glorified, therefore the Spirit has been poured out upon us. Is it possible that the Son of God shed His Blood and that your sins, dear child of God, have not been forgiven? Never! ...Some of you may say: I agree with all this, but I have no experience of it. Am I to sit down smugly and say I have everything, when I know perfectly well I have nothing? No, we must never rest content with objective facts alone. We need subjective experience also; but that experience will come as we rest upon divine facts. God’s facts are the basis of our experience.  Go back again to the question of justification. How were you justified? Not by doing anything at all, but by accepting the fact that the Lord had done everything. 64

I bring this up to highlight an important point, and that’s that the difference between a believer and an unbeliever is simply that – one has believed, and the other has not.  There are not two divergent species of humanity on the planet.  Some have simply yet to hear of and believe this truth, while others have.  Your unbelieving neighbor or brother-in-law is not a half demon, half human hybrid, but a man, objectively saved by God who has simply yet to subjectively experience what Christ has made true of him.

The problem is that we’ve put far too large of an emphasis on the subjective experience of salvation than the objective work of salvation accomplished on our behalf.  Because of this imbalance we see only those having experienced the subjective side of salvation as being loved, accepted and included, but that is simply because we’ve exalted human experience over the work of the One with Whom we’ve had an experience.  As James B. Torrance writes:

More important than our experience of Christ is the Christ of our experience. 65

Unfortunately, we humans delight in categorizing people.  We divide and fight over the smallest, and most trivial of things.  Next door neighbors will engage in decades long feuds over how the other trims their hedges, or how high the blade is set on their lawn mower.  Siblings will squabble throughout their childhood and into their adult lives, over who received the most attention from dad.  Parents fight over whose kid is better at tee-ball or football, often hurling insults at one another from their opposing sets of bleachers.  Because of the knowledge of good and evil, we are naturally predisposed to lump people into us versus them categories.  They’re on the bad team, and we’re on the good team.  They’re from a bad neighborhood, and we’re from a good neighborhood.  They’re from that weird church, and we’re from a bible based church.  We’re believers, and they’re unbelievers.  We’re in, they’re out.  Whatever way you slice it, the result is the same: us and them, good and evil.  We’re in and they’re out.

This was precisely the struggle Peter faced when God asked him to take the Gospel to the heathen Gentiles.  For nowhere was the “us and them” mentality stronger than in the Jewish world of Peter’s day.  They were God’s one and only people, the Jews, while all others, regardless of their country of origin, were simply referred to as Gentiles.  One word was enough to describe them all.  Never mind that they were from Athens, Corinth, or Galatia, they weren’t given any special designations, but were flatly dubbed Gentiles, or people of the nations, and were seen as unclean and unacceptable to God.

Imagine Peter’s shock then, when He was asked by God to bring the Gospel to these unclean people of the nations, for even he, a member of Jesus’ inner circle, had yet to grasp that the Godhead was intent on including all nations, not just one, in this New Covenant of Grace.  What seems like a no brainer for us today, was, in fact, quite a shock to the first century system.

One of the key portions of scripture that people often use to legitimize their belief in an “us and them” caste system is Jesus’ parable concerning the sheep and the goats, which, I believe, is actually speaking of something very different.  Far from being a divine endorsement on the human tendency to categorize people, it is actually a scathing rebuke to the first century religious system that denied the Gentile nations a place in the eternal plan of God, for they failed to recognize that, in Jesus, God had chosen all men and nations, not just one.

DECODING THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS

We find the parable in Matthew 25, and in it, Jesus seems to divide the human race right down the middle and into two separate categories, with the goats (typically identified as unbelievers) on one side, and the sheep (typically identified as believers) on the other.  However, what I want to point out to you of is that Jesus gives this parable directly on the heels of Matthew 23 and 24, and is a part of the Olivet discourse, in which Jesus described the then very near (within 40 years) destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.  Since Matthew 25 is an extension of the Olivet discourse, it ought not to be read outside of the context of the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the establishment of God’s reign upon the earth.

Now, in Matthew 24 specifically, Jesus describes Jerusalem’s fall in very symbolic, prophetic language, which, when read through 21st century, Western lenses can be very easily misunderstood.  There can be very little doubt, however, that it was the fall of Jerusalem that Jesus had in mind, and most biblical scholars, including eager eschatologists, now agree, almost unanimously, that this was, in fact, the case.

The sheep and goats parable directly follows two other parables, which are both supplemental prophetic pictures of Jerusalem’s fall.  In both of these parables, (the ten virgins and the talents) there are distinctions drawn between two groups of people – the wise and foolish virgins, and servants who stewarded their master’s money well, and those who did not.  In both stories, the sudden nature of Jerusalem’s fall is illustrated by two other sudden events – in the case of the ten virgins it’s the sudden cry of the bridegroom, and in the case of the talents it’s the sudden return of the master.  Both of the sudden occurrences seem to be illustrations for the sudden attack that the city would experience.  In these two parables, however, Jesus is specifically referring to what the new Kingdom would look like when it came to overtake and replace the old Kingdom.  In both the case of the virgins and the servants, no one was rewarded on the basis of nationality, nepotism or favoritism.  Rather, those who were ready and prepared for the shift that was coming (the cry of the bridegroom, and the return of the master) reaped the benefits of their readiness.  The wise virgins were ready to follow the bridegroom into the wedding feast, and the good servants who had invested wisely, were joyful at the master’s return.  In both parables, those who were rewarded were those who were prepared.  Neither their virginity nor their positions as servants bought them any favors.  They simply had to be ready for the master’s return, which could symbolically mean that Israel needed to be ready to shift from the old physical Kingdom into the new spiritual Kingdom at a moment’s notice.

It is directly on the heels of these two parables that Jesus narrows things down even more, giving us the parable of the sheep and the goats.  Obviously, as with all parables, the language is symbolic, and the scenarios fictitious.  While the tale is predictive of a true event, the manner in which it is told is fictitious, filled with symbolic imagery, and should be taken about as literally as Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare.  No one is expecting for human beings to be transformed into different species of farm animals based upon their actions or acceptance of the Gospel – i.e. sheep and goats.  No, we are well aware that Jesus, in order to drive His point home, is simply using the qualities of certain animals to illustrate certain people’s attitudes.  The sheep are those who are led by the shepherd and respond to His voice, while the goats are a wild and rebellious bunch that will not submit to the Gospel, or enter into the new, spiritual Kingdom of God when it arrives.

Knowing this, we must assume that Jesus’ words in verse 31 should also be read as symbolic and parabolic:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.

-MATTHEW 25:31 (Emphasis mine)

Some who read this passage without the understanding that Jesus was speaking in a parable, believe that He was suggesting a literal, visible coming, in which a host of angels would be literally seen with Him.  Jesus spoke elsewhere of this same event in words that give us more insight into the true nature of this “coming”:

26 Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. 27 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

-LUKE 9:26-27 (Emphasis mine)

When Jesus referred to His coming in “the glory of the Father” with “all of the holy angels”, He was referring to the coming of “the Kingdom of God”, for He makes reference to it in the very next verse.  This is important, because Jesus stated that some of those standing there that day, 2,000 years ago, would not taste death until they witnessed this occurrence.  Yet, where do we read in the history books of Jesus literally, physically descending from the sky with thousands upon thousands of angels, in the first century?

Nowhere!

Does that make Christ a false prophet?  If one insists on a hyper literal reading of the text, then yes, it would.  However, if we’d realize the parabolic nature of Christ’s words, then we’d understand that He was speaking of the coming of the Kingdom of God that, in the spiritual world, would be exactly as He stated, but in the natural world would look quite different.  That is to say, in the invisible realm of the Spirit, He truly would come with His angels and establish His Kingdom, but in the natural world this event would be hidden, as the Kingdom is, time and again, compared to small and barely visible things, like leaven and mustard seeds, which, while miniscule, eventually grow into something much larger.  This same Kingdom (the coming of which included the appearance of Christ and the holy angels) that Christ predicted His first century audience would see, is also spoken of in a much less dramatic way in Luke 17:20-25:

20 Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, 21 nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”22 Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. 23 People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them. 24 For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. 25 But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

- LUKE 17:20-25 (Emphasis mine)

The Pharisees were anticipating the arrival of the Kingdom, but believed it would be something more along the lines of a military coup, in which God would initiate the overthrow of the occupying Roman power.  When they asked Jesus when this event would occur, however, He told them plainly that, despite the popular view of the day, the coming of the Kingdom was not something that would be physically observable.  Rather, the Kingdom was something that would be in their midst, or, as other translations put it, “within you”.  The implication here is that the Kingdom of God would have nothing to do with military coups, but would be something silently established in men’s hearts through the Holy Spirit.  It would be an unseen, unobservable, internal reality, as opposed to a noisome, external spectacle.

Later, in the same account, Jesus tells his disciples that His “coming” would be like lightning which lights up the sky from one end to the other.  Many have used this as justification for the belief that the coming of the Kingdom will, despite Christ’s words to the contrary, be a visible occurrence.  Jesus Himself stated that it would not be observable through the senses, however.  It would be an internal reality, established in human hearts by the Holy Spirit.  When He spoke of lightning flashing and lighting up the sky from one end to the other, He was responding to His own prediction that many would come claiming that God’s Kingdom had been set up in one particular geographic location:

23 People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is! Do not go running off after them. 24 For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.’

-LUKE 17:23-24 (Emphasis mine)

His point was not that the coming of the Kingdom would be visible, like a flash of lightning, but that it wouldn’t be contained to one physical location.  Even as lighting flashes from one end of the sky to the other, so His Kingdom would be a universal reality that would not be tied down to any one earthly address.  Jesus described the coming of the Kingdom as something that would occur silently, right under the noses of many who had been intently looking for it.

I bring this up because Christ predicted that within the lifetime of His first century listeners’, He would appear, and that He would do so with many angels attending Him.  This “appearing”, according to Christ, would signal the arrival of the Kingdom of God.  Yet, no such event occurred physically in history.  Elsewhere, Jesus told us that the Kingdom’s coming would not be physically observable, but would be a silent reality, established within men’s hearts by the Holy Spirit.  Therefore, we may assume that Christ’s coming in His Kingdom with the angels did, in fact, occur in the realm of the Spirit, but did not appear as such in the natural.  With this in mind, let’s return to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, and try to gain a better understanding of what Christ was predicting:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.

-MATTHEW 25:31 (Emphasis mine)

Here we have Jesus depicted as sitting on His throne, (a clear reference to the arrival of the Kingdom) and as being accompanied by a host of angels.  This is the same imagery used in Luke 9:26-27 concerning an event that Jesus said would take place within the lifetime of His original listeners.  It is probable, then, that what we are reading is a parable describing this same glorious, but unseen event, and, therefore, not something that lies in our future, but something that occurred in the past.

Jesus continues:

32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. 34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.

-MATTHEW 25:32-34 (Emphasis mine)

Since we know that we are reading of the invisible coming of the Kingdom, we do not need to read a hyper literal meaning into these words.  When Jesus spoke of there being a division between the sheep and the goats, once more, I remind you that we are dealing with people, not animals, and so we know that we are reading symbolic language.  Jesus said that when this invisible event occurred, all nations would be gathered before Him.  The Greek word rendered nations here is ethnos, which is the same word that is translated as Gentiles throughout the New Testament.  In addition to being a reference to the Gentiles, this word can also simply mean ethnic groups, and so it’s possible that the Jews are included in this “all nations” gathering.  What would have been shocking to the system of a first century Israelite, however, is the fact that Gentiles nations are gathered before the Lord, not exclusively for punishment, but in order to be given entrance into the Kingdom!  To the first century Jew, the Gentile had no place in the Kingdom of God whatsoever, and yet Jesus says that God would gather all ethnos, including the idolatrous Gentiles, before Him, and some of them would receive entrance into the experience of the Kingdom of God.

You see, the first century Israelite would have seen the distinction between sheep and goats as being a pretty clear one:  the Jews = sheep, Gentiles = goats.  Pretty simple.  Throughout the Old Testament, the shepherd and sheep motif is used over and again to describe Yahweh’s relationship with national Israel (Psalms 78:52, 119:176, Isaiah 53:6, Jeremiah 50:6).  Jesus Himself stated that His earthly ministry was aimed, not at all of humanity, but exclusively at “the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 10:5-6, 15:24).  Sure, He had several dealings with Gentiles in the course of His earthly ministry, but a good 98% of the time He was dealing exclusively with physical Jews.  Though predicted by the prophets, the idea of God’s Kingdom and covenant being opened up to all nations was an absolutely foreign idea to the first century Jew.  So when Jesus speaks of the Gentiles being gathered before Him at the coming of His Kingdom, and God dividing between the sheep and the goats, naturally, His Jewish audience would have seen the sheep as referring to themselves, and the goats as referring to the rebellious, unclean Gentiles.  “Surely”, some of them must have thought, “a relation to Abraham will be what determines who receives an inheritance in the Kingdom and who doesn’t!  We’re the sheep, they’re the goats.  We’re in, and they’re out.”

Jesus, however, quickly turned the tables, revealing that being able to trace one’s lineage back to Abraham has nothing to do with having an inheritance in the Kingdom.  What mattered was one’s ability to recognize the person and work of Christ as being present in the “least of these”, for, to the “righteous”, or the sheep, Jesus said:

35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed

me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

-MATTHEW 23:35-36

When asked by the righteous when they had invited Him into their homes, clothed Him, cared for Him when He was sick, or visited Him in prison (verses 37-39), Jesus said:

40 …‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

-MATTHEW 23:40 (Emphasis mine)

To the goats, however, He said:

41 …Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

-MATTHEW 25:41-43

(Without digressing into a discussion about the nature of eternal fire, and what Jesus may have meant by these words, I would refer the reader back to our chapters on hell, in which we discussed Jesus’ teachings on “hell”, and their connection to the AD 70 fall of Jerusalem.)

When pressed by the goats as to when they had neglected to care for the Lord in these particular circumstances (verse 44), Jesus replied:

45 … ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

-MATTHEW 25:45 (Emphasis mine)

What I want you to see is that Jesus, in speaking of the invisible arrival of the Kingdom and of those who would inherit its blessings, paints a picture of two different types of people, typified by sheep and goats.  The physical Israelites, no doubt, saw themselves as being the sheep, and the sole heirs of this Kingdom.  Jesus said, however, that all nations and ethnicities (Gentiles) would be included.  The dividing line, according to Jesus, was not whether or not one was a physical relative of Abraham, or whether or not one had been circumcised according to the Law.  It dealt with one’s willingness to recognize and respond to Jesus Christ as present in “the least of these”.  Many Israelites were horrified at the thought that they, the assumed sheepfold of God, might be considered goats and miss out on their inheritance, while the unclean and idolatrous Gentiles would be called sheep, and be given a share in what they believed was exclusively theirs.

Jesus had already made it quite clear that, while His earthly ministry was to the lost sheep of Israel, His post ascension ministry would extend to other sheep that were not of physical Israel, namely, the Gentiles:

14 “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

-JOHN 10:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

Jesus was telling us that He would gather the sheep from the Gentile nations, merge them together with the sheep from the house of Israel, and make out of the two, one united flock beneath the rule of one shepherd.  This same thought, though spoken in slightly different words, is echoed by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:11-14:

11 Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh--who are called the Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands-- 12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation,

-EPHESIANS 2:11-14 (Emphasis mine)

I believe that the essence of the parable of the sheep and the goats is that, in Christ Jesus, every barrier dividing Jew from Gentile has been removed.  That barrier, or, “wall of hostility”, as Paul puts it, was the Mosaic Law, which served as a line of demarcation between God’s people and the Gentiles.  In removing the Law through Christ’s death, God’s intention was to put to death the hostility, the “us and them” mindset that had developed among the Jews.  They had forgotten that their original purpose, as given to Abraham, was to be the nation through whom the single seed, Christ, would come in order to bless and save all nations.  The Law, which was intended to sequester Israel off from the rest of civilization for a season, in order to preserve the Abrahamic line, had come to be seen as a sign of superiority over other nations.  They saw their justification as being in the Law, and the Gentiles’ uncleanness as resulting from their not having the Law.  The Law, then, became a dividing wall of hostility that kept the Jews from seeing that God loved and accepted all nations into His family that needed to be done away with through the death of Christ:

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

-EPHESIANS 2:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

Paul tells us that Christ put the Law to death in His flesh in order to create “one new humanity”; a new creation that was not divided between an in group and an out group because of the Law’s presence.  In His death, Jesus reconciled both groups to God, in order to potentially put the hostility that existed between the two groups to death. For when the Law was taken away, the dividing wall was erased. In Jesus’ death, the division was done away with in order to reveal that all men are in and accepted, not just those who were of the physical stock of Abraham.  Remember, prior to going into the issues surrounding the sheep and the goats, Christ said He would come in power, and be seated upon His glorious throne.  This is, of course, a reference to the coming of His Kingdom; a Kingdom which, according to the prophets, would fulfill God’s promises to David that a man from His line would forever occupy the throne of Israel (Jeremiah 33:17).  Once filtered through a New Covenant lens, we understand that the ”Israel” in question is not the physical nation alone, but the Israel of God spoken of by Paul; a new creation consisting of both Jews and Gentiles:

15 Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. 16 Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to the Israel of God.

-GALATIANS 6:15 (Emphasis mine)

The “Israel of God” is the “one new humanity” spoken of in Ephesians 2, the Jew and Gentile new creation!  It is over this “Israel of God” that one from David’s line will rule forever; that “One” being Jesus Christ Himself.  The Apostle, likewise, recognized Christ as being the fulfilment of God’s promises to David, and spoke of it in Acts 15 while discussing whether or not Gentiles were included in the New Covenant:

15 The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

16 “‘After this I will return

and rebuild David’s fallen tent.

Its ruins I will rebuild,

and I will restore it,

17 that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,

even all the Gentiles who bear my name,

says the Lord, who does these things’—

18     things known from long ago.

-ACTS 15:15-18 (Emphasis mine)

Notice how Amos’s prophecy is quoted (Amos 9:11-12) concerning the restoration of David’s tabernacle and kingdom, in connection with the inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s family!  The scriptures taught that at the coming of Christ’s Kingdom, the dividing line between human beings, the Law, would be removed, revealing that all were welcomed and included.  The coming of this Kingdom precedes the rest of the events surrounding the sheep and goats parable, cluing us in to the fact that it was most likely this issue that Jesus was dealing with.

What Christ’s words actually suggest is that many who believed themselves to be heirs of the Kingdom by birth, would find themselves lacking in regards to this inward experience, while many deemed unclean and unworthy of a share in it, would find themselves ushered into the fold, called clean and considered sheep.  This parable does not give us the right to divide humanity into “us and them” categories, as it was almost without a doubt, a statement to first century Jews about the fact that many of them, who believed themselves to be in line for an inheritance, would find themselves swept up into the horrors of the Roman invasion.  Many Gentiles, however, who were formerly thought to be worthy only of wrath, would find themselves as heirs and participants in the Kingdom.

I think it important to note here that the goats lacking an inheritance in the Kingdom of God does not mean that they became “separated from God”, but that they did not enter into the experience of the Kingdom of God, which is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).  This is the same imagery used by Jesus in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31), and echoed in His words to the disciples in Matthew 8:10-12.  Many physical Jews of the first century found themselves shocked at the demise of their city, as they believed it to be the place where God’s physical Kingdom would be established, while many Gentiles (and Jews) happily experienced the bliss of the invisible, spiritual Kingdom of God.  The goats are not literally separated, in the sense of being cut off, but instead of experiencing the eternal quality of life that God intends for us to live in the here and how (John 17:3), they would live in a state of misery, some of them even literally perishing within the walls of their doomed city.

The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, far from providing a template for an “us and them” brand of theology, actually provides us with the opposite.  For the goats found themselves peering into the windows of the Kingdom from the outside, precisely because of their devotion to this “us and them” mindset.  They did not perceive Christ in the poor, wandering stranger, or in the condemned man locked behind prison bars!  They could not perceive His presence in the least of the least, and it was this inability that landed them on the “goat list”.  They could not believe that Christ had “other sheep” from a Gentile flock, and so treated them with contempt and hostility.

Many have assumed Christ to be referring exclusively to believers when He speaks of “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine” (Matthew 25:40), but Jesus Himself says no such thing.  He did not say that only those in prison for preaching the Gospel were His brothers and sisters, but simply spoke of those in prison.  Are prisons typically inhabited by only the pious?  Or are there usually some unsavory characters mixed in there as well?  Of course, we know the answer, and yet Jesus stated that in visiting thieves, robbers, zealots, and yes, even the occasional imprisoned believer, the “sheep” visited Him.  He says the same of those who care for the needs of the sick, and provide shelter for the homeless and the stranger.  In some mysterious way, Christ is present in His creation, and, much to the shock of the religious, even in those we would deem as being unfit carriers of His presence.

You see, in our attempts at dividing between sheep and goats, we often end up looking and acting more like goats than sheep.

This was the very issue that Christ was addressing.  Through His finished work, He did away with the Law that declared the Gentiles unclean and separate, though many of the Jews of his day would not receive them, nor perceive Christ as present in them.  According to Peter’s revelation, Cornelius and his whole Gentile household were declared clean by God long before they had even responded to the Gospel:

28 He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean. –

-ACTS 15:28 (Emphasis mine)

Peter spoke these words before ever having preached the Gospel to his Gentile audience.  They were still unbelievers, and yet God saw them as clean and acceptable in Messiah.  Yes, Peter went on to preach the Gospel to them in order that they might subjectively (experientially) receive what was already objectively true of them, but God declared them to be clean even before they had believed or responded.  This is why Cornelius’s prayers and alms to the poor were pleasing to God.  The unbeliever is not a separate class of human, incapable of doing anything good because they are polluted by sin.  No, God declared them clean, and in Amos’s prophecy concerning Messiah’s Kingdom, He even said that they bore His name!  Apparently, they weren’t as lost, dirty, or “second class” as the Jews had imagined.

Many of us who call ourselves believers have become very good at seeing the bad in people, and very bad at seeing the good in people.  We do not perceive Christ as being present in the strung out prostitute, who, despite her habitual “turning of tricks”, desperately needs a helping hand.  We imagine all of the filthy things she’s done, see her as unclean, and immediately relegate her to the “them” category of human beings.  We look at the homosexual activist, and can see only a threat to our way of life, and so dub them as being enemies of God, and most certainly a “them”.  Jesus, however, tells us that sheep-likeness comes from an ability to peer beyond externals, and see the real truth about a person in Jesus Christ.

The pure in heart see God.

This point is driven home by a story told by early 20th century missionary to the Philippines, Frank C. Laubach:

Everywhere people are beautiful-or at least they have a beautiful side.  On the boat from Manila last week was a painted woman (a prostitute), alone.  I spoke to her because she was lonesome…I told her I was looking for God.  As naturally as a preacher she replied, ‘God is everywhere around us and in us if we only open our eyes.  All the world is beautiful if we have eyes to see the beauty, for the world is packed with God.’  ‘Thank you for that,’ I said, ‘I love it!’…When the dinner bell rang I said, ‘I am going about the world trying to find wonderful hours, and I shall remember this as one of them.’ 66

Listen to what this same missionary wrote in the very same account, mere sentences before recounting the above story:

I have tasted a thrill in fellowship with God which has made anything discordant with God disgusting…the thrill of filth repels me… 67

This was a man who had come to know a constant, conscious experience of God that, according to his own words, caused anything ungodly to disgust and repel him.  Yet, in almost the very next breath, he tells of meeting a prostitute and seeing God in her eyes, and hearing Him in her voice.  This would sound absolutely absurd to many a modern believer, but Laubach, who had trained His senses to perceive God in all things, was able to see His presence even in this most unlikely of persons.

This is no mere 20th century phenomena, springing up from a more liberal form of Christianity.  No, even the great Apostle Paul spoke similarly of the people of this world:

14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

The furnace fueling Paul’s passion for preaching the Gospel, so he tells us, was the astonishing truth that “one died for all, and therefore all died”.  He did not see Christ’s death as being His alone, but as encompassing and including the entire human race.  Paul’s atonement theology went far beyond the idea of Christ dying for a select, chosen few - often mistakenly called the elect - but saw Christ’s death as reaching into the lives of those who had yet to even hear or believe the Gospel.  The work of the Cross was not a caged thing that only touched those having had the privilege of hearing and responding to it, but was a cosmic event that, like lightning streaking across the sky, spread to all men in all nations.  Literally, all died to the old creation in Christ, and are now invited to believe and step into a whole new reality.

Having seen this staggering truth, Paul became incapable of knowing anyone from a “worldly point of view”.  The Weymouth Translation of scripture says it this way:  “Therefore for the future we know no one simply as a man…” (Emphasis mine)  Paul literally became incapable of seeing people as mere human beings, and most assuredly did not see them as being unclean objects of God’s displeasure.  This apostle, who had once murdered and imprisoned those he disagreed with theologically, upon seeing God’s willingness to include the world in His sacrificial death, experienced a radical and dramatic change in his thinking.  Suddenly, the savage and idolatrous Gentiles looked to him like men and women beloved and chosen of God!  Even his own overzealous, but ignorant Jewish brethren, some of whom now sought his life, he saw as being beautiful treasures worth dying for (Romans 9:1-3)!  He could no longer see or know people according to their human faults and frailties…

He saw God!

We can witness this truth at work at various times throughout Paul’s ministry.  In Acts 14:8-10, for instance, we read of his ministry in Lystra, in which a man born crippled in his feet is recorded as having been instantaneously and miraculously healed.  Upon witnessing this miracle, the people of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for their pagan gods, whom they believed had come down to them in human form:

12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them.

-ACTS 14:12-13 (Emphasis mine)

So steeped in idolatry were the people that they literally began to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, even going so far as attempting to offer animal sacrifices to them.  Instead of angrily rebuking them for their blindness and bondage to sin, however, Paul makes a most beautiful statement:

15 “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. 16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way. 17 Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.”

-ACTS 14:15-17 (Emphasis mine)

In addressing this obviously ungodly crowd, he states that both he and Barnabas were humans, just like them.  Now, obviously Paul was rebuffing their notions that he and Barnabas were gods, but he still puts both he and Barnabas on the same level as the people of Lystra; people who were prepared to offer animal sacrifices to human beings.  He does not draw a distinction between himself and his audience as though they were two different species, but puts both himself and them on the same plain.  He then goes on to describe God’s dealings with them, stating that even though He had once let them go their own way, He had been present in their lives all along.  He blessed them with rain from heaven, with crops and food, and even filled their hearts with joy.  This is a far cry from today’s “turn or burn”, “all-sinners-are-separated-from-God” style of preaching.  Paul saw God as present even with the pagan men and women of Lystra.  They did not understand or acknowledge Him in any way, yet, he worked behind the scenes, seeing to it that they were provided for, and that their hearts were filled with joy.  Paul was able to see past their idolatry, and see the presence of His God at work among them.

In an even more astonishing account, we find Paul in Athens, a literal hub of idolatry in the ancient world.  Upon seeing their vast array of idols and altars, we’re told that the apostle was “greatly distressed” (Acts 17:16).  Clearly, Paul was not in the Bible belt of the southern United States here! In verse 22 he begins speaking to the people of Athens, delivering one of the most potent messages of Grace contained within the pages of scripture:

22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

-ACTS 17:22-23 (Emphasis mine)

Paul located an altar bearing an inscription that read, “to an unknown God”, and declared to the Athenians the unseen presence of a God whose name they’d not known, but whom they’d worshipped in ignorance.  Paul’s stated purpose in preaching to them was to reveal the identity of this previously “unknown God”.

He continues:

24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.

-ACTS 17:24-27 (Emphasis mine)

Here, Paul stated that this “unknown God” whom they’d worshipped in ignorance, was, in fact, the God of all creation.  Unlike their idols, He was not merely Lord over one or two small sectors of creation, but was the Lord over all!  Paul went on to say that, despite the vast temples the Athenians had built as houses for their gods, the true God did not live in such manmade structures, but, as “the Lord of heaven and earth”, dwelt in and revealed Himself through that over which He is Lord – the whole of creation.  Human shrines and monuments are not houses in which He lives or the vessels through which He reveals Himself.  Rather, His own handiwork, heaven and earth, the creation itself, serves this purpose.

Paul continues:

25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.

-ACTS 17:25-27

Here Paul began unpacking to the Athenians the method through which they’ve worshipped the true, but unseen God in ignorance.  He startled them with his assertion that God is not served by human hands, for, so concludes Paul, He does not require service to begin with.  Rather, as the Lord of heaven and earth, He is the one who gives to and serves His creation.  As a part of this service, He has marked out the specific locations that different tribes of humanity would inhabit, as well as the slots that they would occupy in linear time.  What Paul was revealing was that simply by living and existing in His predetermined plan, unknowingly partaking of His unseen service to humanity, the Athenians worshipped Him! Most, however, never emerge from their ignorance, and thus never know the name of the One at whose table they are being fed.

The apostle goes on to say that God’s purpose in blessing and serving the human race in this way was to capture their attention, in the hopes that they would begin to seek out the unseen and unnamed life force that they’ve felt present in every aspect of their lives.  These Athenians were one group among many who had simply yet to discover His name and nature, and Paul had arrived to remedy their problem of ignorance through the Gospel.

In verse 27, Paul makes another shocking declaration, for he says that this unknown God is not far from “each of us”.  Notice that he does not differentiate between himself and the Athenians by saying. “He is not far from each of you”, but includes himself among those from whom God is not distant by using the word “us”.  Paul places himself squarely on the same level as the Athenians, suggesting that both he and they were equally close to God.  Paul is not above them, nor is he seated on a higher platform of spirituality.  He simply knows what is true of himself in Christ, while the Athenians had yet to be informed.  Both the idolaters and the apostles, however, were on equal footing when it came to their proximity to God.

He continues:

28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.

-ACTS 17:28-29 (Emphasis mine)

Paul continues with his shocking declarations by quoting from two pagan poets, Cleanthus and Aratus.  He does this, not in order to tear down their philosophies, or to show the people of Athens how misled they were, but to reveal to them Gospel truths which were hidden in their own poet’s words.  Instead of pulling from Old Testament literature, he pulls directly from the pagan authors with whom the Athenians were familiar, claiming that their words revealed truths about God and His relationship to His creation.

He first states that these so-called prophet of Zeus were correct in declaring that men, even unbelieving idolaters, live, move and have their being in the true God.  Amazingly, even idolatrous philosophers had somehow penned divine truth under the unseen influence of Athens’ “unknown God”.  So important was this truth that it remains etched in the New Testament forever!  As suggested in the preceding verses, the Athenians were not distant and cut off from a God who was repulsed by their paganism, but were close to Him; so close, in fact, that they lived, moved, and had their beings in Him.  They were surrounded by Him on all sides, even if they’d yet to recognize His presence or call Him by name.

The Apostle then quotes from another of their poets, “we are His [God’s] offspring”.  With this statement, Paul apparently agrees, and has no problem being included in the “we”, which was also descriptive of idol worshipping “Gentiles”.  Again, Paul puts himself on the same level as them, suggesting that they were as much the offspring of God as He was, and vice versa.  Now of course, Paul had entered into, and embraced the reality of the new birth through Christ’s resurrection, but this did not make him something more than they were, he was simply aware of a truth which they had yet to encounter, and he had come to give them the Good News.

The Apostle does indeed go on to warn of a coming judgment, and calls them to turn from their idolatry, but his reasoning behind calling them out of idolatry was that he saw their true origin as being in God; a God who was alive, vibrant and full of color and creativity, while they were becoming less and less like the One they had sprang off of as they worshipped God’s made by their own hands.  Their worship of idols had caused them to lose sight of the truth that they were the offspring of God, and they were losing themselves altogether as a consequence.  Paul arrived to show them that the real God was not one hiding away in manmade temples, but One who lives and reveals Himself in the midst of our everyday lives.  The Athenians lived, moved, had their beings in, and worshipped this God, but did so in ignorance, as their gods were those who could only be found on mountains or in massive marble monoliths.  The truth that Paul knew, however, was that the living God was at work within and among His creation, and his Gospel revealed this amazing truth.

Through Paul’s Athenian address, we can clearly see the effect that His 2 Corinthians 5:14-16 revelation had upon his ministry:

14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.

-2 CORINTHIANS 5:14-16 (Emphasis mine)

He saw no man, not those from Lystra, nor the Athenians; neither Cleanthus nor Aratus, from a worldly point of view.  He saw right past the evil, and saw God.  Like my son on the beach that night, he saw past the “contamination” and saw the inherent beauty of God’s creation.  Of course, he called them to turn from their sin of idolatry, for they were so much more than the offspring of stone carvings made by their own hands!  They were the offspring of God!  And if they had nerve endings and lived lives filled with laughter and play, then certainly their Father was more than a chiseled block!  Paul called them back to their true source and identity in Jesus, for they were shortchanging themselves, and degenerating into lifestyles that were out of sync with their design, as well as with their Designer.  Paul’s ability to see past the evils of idolatry, and to see their true worth, made his ministry one motivated by compassion and love for the people he was sent to, not by a disgust for their habits and mannerisms or from a desire to make them more religious.  He did not begin by revealing to people their depravity, and then promising them divine life if they responded to his message.  Rather, he started with the divine nature of the lives they were already leading, and revealed that since the design was beautiful, the Designer must be unimaginably beautiful, and certainly greater than the rocks they were accustomed to bowing before.

You see, prior to Paul’s revelation of this truth, as a Jew, he would have never even given the Gentiles a second thought, let alone been able see the hidden work of God in their paganism.  He would have seen them as unclean, sinful dogs, who weren’t worth the breath it would take to tell them so.  To even associate with them would have been to defile and lower himself.  However, in Jesus, Paul saw that the “dividing wall of hostility” that existed between him and his Gentile brothers, namely the Law of Moses, had been torn down and destroyed.  He saw both himself and the Gentiles as being on equal levels, as both were reconciled to God through Christ’s death.  The Jew was just as much in need of saving as was the Gentile, and the religious fantasy of “we’re better than you because we keep the rules” was proved false, once and for all.  If salvation from sin could have come through the Law, then Christ would not have died for the Jews, but would have left them on the path they were trekking.  However, Paul saw himself and the Gentiles as on the same page in Christ.  Both had been lost in Adam’s darkness, and both needed to have the old, Adamic mindset uprooted by the Gospel:

16… in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross…put to death their hostility.

-EPHESIANS 2:16 (Emphasis mine)

In other words, God did not put to death His own hostility towards men on the Cross, but man’s hostility towards man.  He pulled both “us and them” into Himself, and presented both to the Father afresh, and in so doing, leveled the playing field, putting all people on equal terms.  In the Gospel, every notion of “us and them” is destroyed, and the truth about the human race is revealed!  “Us” is “them”, and “them” is “us”.  There is only one race, some simply know who they are, while others have yet to hear.  As Isaiah prophesied:

4     he [Jesus] will not falter or be discouraged

till he establishes justice on earth.

In his teaching the islands will put their hope.”

-ISAIAH 42:4 (Emphasis mine)

The King James Version renders the last sentence as, “the isles shall wait for his law.”  The thought being communicated is that Christ would not falter or fail until His work of dealing with sin and setting wrong things right was accomplished.  In the aftermath of His finished work, we’re told that the islands, or the Gentile nations, would wait to receive instruction concerning the things He had done.  In other words, the work of securing their place in the family had already been accomplished, and what was lacking was only for them to hear, respond, and take hold of the abundant and eternal quality of life now freely given through Jesus.  These “islanders” are not the “them” to our “us”, they are as in as we are.  In Christ, truly, the valleys have been exalted, and the mountains and hills made low (Isaiah 40:4), meaning that those once thought to be the religious elites and favorites of God have been put right alongside the “valleys”, those who were once made to feel low, but who have now been exalted in Christ.

The ground is now level.

No upper and lower class.

No caste system.

No us and them.

THE SINFUL NATURE

Still, many sincere Christians believe that there are two divergent streams of humanity; one that is included in Christ and free from the influence of a “sinful nature”, and another that is thoroughly unclean and displeasing to God.  In this school of thought, God’s original creation was good and pleasing, but, through the entrance of sin, became unclean and unacceptable.  Nowhere in either the Old or New Testament scriptures, however, is such an idea ever even hinted at.  On the contrary, the perfection of God’s original design is affirmed time and time again.  The problem that arises when we begin to view certain segments of humanity as being unclean, and separated from God, is that our message becomes one in which humanity has no value until God gives them value by dying for them.  In stark contrast to this idea, the scriptures paint a picture of God as seeing the inherent worth and value of the human race, and purchasing them back from the power of sin and death, precisely because of their value, worth, and beautiful design.  In other words, He did not save us because we lacked worth, but because we had worth.

Unfortunately, many stubbornly persist in the idea that only the believer bears the image of God, while the unbeliever bears the image of the “devil”.  As has always been the case, you can justify any twisted belief system you desire through the use of scripture.  This subject is no exception, and many delight in quoting passages like Genesis 5:3 to “prove” that mankind “lost” the image and likeness of God through the fall:

3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth.

-GENESIS 5:3 (Emphasis mine)

This passage is often used to say that while man originally bore the likeness and image of God, eventually, after the fall, he began to reproduce and pass on his own fallen image and likeness to his offspring.  In this school of thought, every child born post fall was, and is, born corrupt to the core and lacking in God’s likeness.

Seth, however, was not Adam’s first child after the fall.  Cain and Abel, according to Genesis 4, were born prior to Seth, and would therefore also need to fall beneath the heading of those born in Adam’s likeness.  However, no such thing is ever said of Cain or Abel.  If the author’s intent was to inform us of the deplorable state of things in the post-fall world, then Cain would have been a prime example.  However, no such “born-in-Adam’s-likeness” statements are made by the author of Genesis concerning Cain.  Also, upon Cain’s banishment after murdering his brother, God placed a mark upon him to protect him from others who would do him harm, and we’re also told that Cain found a wife during his wanderings.  What can this mean but that Cain and Abel weren’t the first children of Adam and Eve’s, as, at least in a limited way, the earth had already begun to be populated by their earlier born, children?  Why are we not told that these others, who would perhaps do Cain harm, were violent and dangerous because they were born in the fallen image of Adam?  Is it possible that the writer was not attempting to make a theological statement concerning the change that occurred in man’s nature?

Of course.

The reason behind telling us that Seth was a bearer of Adam’s image is found in Genesis 4:25:

25 Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.”

-GENESIS 4:25 (Emphasis mine)

Seth was seen as being something of a “replacement” for the son that Adam and Eve lost in Abel’s death.  In stating that he bore his father’s image, the author is not intending to communicate something negative about Seth, but was making a positive statement about Adam’s lineage living on through Seth.  Even though he had lost his son, Abel, through murder, and Cain, through banishment, God gave him Seth, who would also bear his image, and pass on his name.  Remember, Adam was made in God’s image and likeness, and for him to pass on what was given to him to his children is not in any way intended to be negative.  The image and likeness of God firstly given to Adam, was passed on to his children.  Also, note the positive tone that surrounds the generations born both after and through Seth, the one said to bear his father’s likeness:

26 Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh.  At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.

-GENESIS 4:26 (Emphasis mine)

The author was not intending to show how the passing on of a fallen seed caused man to become abased and immoral, but made the point that these subsequent generations were a people who called upon the Lord and desired to know Him.  Those born after Seth, in Adam’s likeness, are actually spoken of favorably.  Now, certainly, by the time we come to Noah in Genesis 6, things have degenerated, but it was not because of Adam passing on his fallen likeness to his offspring.  It was because the sons of God (perhaps either spirit beings, or those from the “righteous line of Seth”) began to intermingle with the daughters of men, which apparently corrupted the gene pool and, therefore, the creation itself.  Noah, however, was said to be a man “blameless in his generations” (Genesis 6:9, KJV), which is possibly a reference to Noah and his family having been untouched, genetically speaking, by the pollution resulting from these “sons of God” procreating with women.  How could Noah have been “blameless in his generations”, if, through Adam, he was the bearer of a satanic nature?  If Adam had already acquired, and then passed on, some sort of satanic seed, what would have been so bad about some fallen angels adding a little bit to the mix?

Noah was considered pure in his generations because God did not see His original creation as having been broken or lost, and He was passionate about preserving it and rescuing it from ruin.  He found a man whose design had not been corrupted through procreation with these “sons of God”, and preserved His pure image in the earth through him.  Sin had entered the equation and needed to be dealt with, but man still bore the image of his Creator.  The problem of the fall was never that God and humans became incompatible because of opposing natures, but that sin had opened the door for sin, death, murder, and darkness.

The notion that man was no longer a bearer of God’s image would have been absolutely foreign to the Hebrew understanding of man, and ought to also, therefore, be foreign to the way that we think of men prior to their encountering Jesus.  Genesis 5, in which we read of man, specifically Seth, being born in Adam’s image, is simply the beginning of a long genealogical record that is aimed at showing us Adam’s lineage, and Seth as having “taken the place” of Abel.  We can be sure that the author never intended for us to use his words as justification for the belief that mankind lost the image and likeness of God.  While sin and death had certainly entered the human equation, and while there were both curses and consequences to be had, God’s original design had not failed.  Yes, through the intervention of Christ, God healed the human race of the effects of the fall, but never is it so much as intimated that these affects dealt with man becoming less than an image bearer of his Heavenly Father.

While we’re on the subject of Noah, take note of the commandment given to him, as well as to his family, after their emergence from the ark:

6 “Whoever sheds human blood,

by humans shall their blood be shed;

for in the image of God

has God made mankind.

-GENESIS 9:6 (Emphasis mine)

God, in expressing his hatred for the crime of murder, reveals why it is such an abominable act.  Human beings, and yes, even post Adamic-fall human beings, are still carriers and bearers of His image and likeness!  Murder is such a horrendous crime because it destroys the image of God present within men.  Even after having lamented creating the human race because of widespread corruption and unnatural sexual activity, God saw His likeness still burning within us, and therefore declared it unjust for anyone to snuff out that flame through murder.  The inherent value of the human race, then, is found in the image that they bear.  It is for precisely this reason that God ransomed us from death with His own blood.  As His creation, we are valuable, and deserving of life by virtue of the image that we bear.

Consider these scriptures from the New Testament:

9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness.

-JAMES 3:9 (Emphasis mine)

James clearly had the creation account in mind when he wrote of “human beings who have been made in God’s likeness”.  The apostle penned these words millennia after the Genesis account, and yet, he asserts that human beings still bear the image and likeness of their Maker as given to us through creation.

Consider the words of Paul:

7 A man…is the image and glory of God…

-1 CORINTHIANS 11:7 (Emphasis mine)

Paul likewise had the creation account in mind when he wrote of man as being the image and glory of God.  Granted, Paul is specifically speaking of believers here, but still he quotes from the Genesis account in which “believer vs. unbeliever” was not even an issue.  Man was made in God’s likeness, and was considered to be His Glory – the crown of His creation.  Paul asserts that even after Adam’s fall, this remained true.  Now, those three periods, or, ellipsis points, in between the words “man” and “is”, in the above quoted scripture, indicate that I’ve purposely removed a portion of the passage.  The full passage reads thusly:

7 A man…is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.

-1 CORINTHIANS 11:7 (Emphasis mine)

We already know that man (Adam) was created first and therefore said to be the “image and glory of God”, as his design was not based upon a preexisting human template.  Woman, however, was taken from out of man, and was therefore said to be “the glory of man”.  Now, this may initially sound offensive to some women; to think that they are not the image and glory of God, but that man is.  These words, though, are not intended to be read in a way that is derogatory to women.  Rather, we are being told that Adam was the first being created, and his likeness was not based upon any natural thing that preexisted him, for he came directly from his creator.  There were no other human being’s whose likeness Adam’s was based upon.  He was the original man, came directly from God, and was, in essence, God’s self-portrait.  Woman, however, was taken from out of the already existing man, making her still the image and glory of God, but because she was taken from the man who was directly fashioned in God’s image.

My point is simply that “unfallen” womankind was said to be a bearer of Adam’s image, and this was said positively, long before sin even entered the picture.  Eve, even before the entrance of sin, was said to be the image and glory of Adam.  This was not an insult, nor was it intended to suggest that she was tainted, or less than a bearer of God’s image.  It meant that she was taken from the prototype that was Adam.  Even in Paul’s time, millennia after the creation, man is said to be the image and glory of God, and woman is said to be the glory of man.  Both are said in a positive sense, and speak of man’s original design; a design that, in spite of Adam’s fall, they still retained.  The passing on of Adam’s likeness is something that actually predated the entry of sin, for Eve was said to be a bearer of it long before sin arrived.  Our reading of Seth as being born with his father Adam’s likeness must be read in light of this.

Jesus Himself hinted at the truth that man retained God’s likeness in Matthew 22:

20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” 21 “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

-MATTHEW 22:20-21 (Emphasis mine)

In the above passage the Pharisees were attempting to trap Jesus in His words, by asking Him if Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar.  In a brilliant response to their question, Jesus asked them whose image was imprinted upon the coin used for paying the tax.  When they speak the obvious, that it was Caesar’s image, He tells them that since it bore Caesar’s image, it belonged to Him, and should therefore be given back to Him.  Then, in a moment of divine inspiration, no doubt, Jesus stated that while the coin ought to be given to Caesar based upon the fact that it bore His image, human beings ought to similarly give back to God that which belongs to Him.  What is the determining factor in whether or not a person belongs to God?  In the context of Jesus’ own words, it’s determined by the image that we bear.  Since Jesus was clearly speaking of human beings when He spoke of giving to God what is His, we must conclude that Jesus saw the human race – not just the converted, as such a thing would not yet have been possible – as bearing His Father’s image!  Jesus could not have been talking to those deemed righteous under the Law, for He is encouraging those who have yet to fully give themselves to God to do so.  Surely, at least in our Western minds, one who had yet to consciously give himself to God would not have be on the “righteous” side of the fence.  Therefore, Jesus encouraged even the unbelieving to turn to God, not so that they could receive His image, but because they already had it!

Manmade religion, in its desire to divide the human race into two camps of people, will stop at nothing to scrape the image of the Creator from the countenance of the created.  Jesus and the apostles, however, always seemed to reinforce the idea that the human race had never lost the likeness in which it was created, but that God, through the finished work of Jesus, had redeemed from sin and death a creation whose original design remained intact.  The problem was that this beautiful creation was slipping into decay and death, not that it ceased to be beautiful.  Is there an aspect of redemption that is lacking in regards to our physical bodies?  It seems so, as our physical frames still weaken, die and decay.  This does not mean, however, that a person carries a fallen, satanic seed within them until they believes the Gospel.  That would be a mighty large conclusion to jump to, considering that there is so little Biblical evidence to support it.

This does not mean that man wasn’t in need of salvation, or that all was well.  No, sin had brought with it death, meaning that God’s design would eventually be corrupted and destroyed through decay.  It was sin and death that we required salvation from, not a faulty design.  As we saw in Genesis 9:6, man’s value lay in the fact that He bore the image of His maker, and it is precisely this image that God redeems in us through His death.  His death became death’s death, and His resurrection becomes our resurrection.  He raised up His original creation in a state that was free from the power of sin and death, with resurrection written into its genetic code.  His image will now never be lost, for He has saved us from the power of sin, and the curse of death.  His image in man is now ensured to live on forever through the resurrection!

As St. Athanasius wrote:

Naturally also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all people were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of humanity is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all. You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against humanity have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death. 68

THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

Unfortunately, many are not functioning out of the Pauline revelation, and still see the world and creation through the fallen lenses of the knowledge of good and evil.  Prior to Adam’s sin, man was only capable of seeing the good in creation; not a good that was only identifiable against the backdrop of evil, but a good that was revealed through God’s pleasure in what He had made.  After the entrance of the knowledge of good and evil, however, the opportunity arose for man to see evil in that which God had declared to be good.  This was why man saw himself as unclean and unfit for fellowship with God, and hid from Him among the trees.  It is also why we feel the tendency to categorize people.  The idea that there is a “good” and an “evil” has our brains always scanning our environments, trying to decide which category a person fits into, and once we’ve identified that category, we can see the individual only in light of what we believe to be true about the category.  The person loses their individuality, and simply becomes a part of a larger group, whom we have already prejudged and made up our minds about.

As far as human beings go, typically anything that disturbs or disrupts our concept of good (i.e. our comfortable existence) we label as being evil.  We may not directly call it evil, perhaps just annoying, stupid, or bothersome.  Regardless of what we call it, though, it causes us to see people as inhibitors to what we’ve come to know as good.

Let’s say, for instance, that you had a neighbor who commenced to play his music as loud as the volume knob would allow after you’d risen early to enjoy a quiet sunrise with some coffee.  Initially, you’d set out to enjoy a relaxing moment by yourself, but were interrupted by the nuisance of an insensitive neighbor.  In that moment of annoyance, the disruption of your “good” becomes an “evil” to you, and produces feelings of anger and irritation towards your noisy neighbor.  You imagine telling them off, or worse, as a diluted form of hatred for them begins burning in your heart.

But let’s say that later that day, a massive tornado swept through your neighborhood, leveling nearly every home in its path.  Everywhere you looked was death, destruction and devastation.  Your comfortable suburban life, a thing that was formerly your “good”, changed forms before your very eyes, and became an evil.

As you stand atop the rubble that was the comfortable little porch where you used to perform your morning coffee ritual, you begin to hear something.  It is a very quiet, and muted moan coming from the mangled mess that, just hours earlier, would have been identifiable as the home of your noisy neighbor.  He’s trapped beneath the weight of the rubble, and is crying out for help!

In such a moment, would you ever consider just walking away and leaving him to die because he had disrupted your “good”?  Of course not!  You would jump into the rubble and do everything in your power to save this man; a man whom you once saw as being a nuisance, and had maybe even daydreamed about hurting.

Why the change of heart?  Why does this neighbor suddenly seem like someone worth saving?  The answer is simple, when your “good” became “evil”, your “evil” became “good”.  In other words, when the thing you perceived as good - that is, the comfortable, suburban life you once enjoyed - suddenly changed shapes and became dominated by death and darkness, you were able to see the inherent goodness of the thing you once saw as an evil.  It took a change of scenery in order to bring out the truth concerning your neighbor’s goodness and worthiness of life.

This is a manifestation of the knowledge of good and evil at work, and it’s something that we operate in all the time.  Someone may have a disdain for a certain nationality of persons, but if they saw someone of that same nationality being harassed or harmed in some way, some gut instinct would kick in, and propel them to rush to their aid.  Why?  Because when a disliked person or thing is seen against the backdrop of actual evil, we suddenly gain the ability to see good in the thing we once only saw evil in.

In this paradigm, good gives definition to evil and evil gives definition to good.  When functioning in this mindset, you will always need one of these “entities” to be present in order to discern it’s opposite.  As a black backdrop brings out the sheen and sparkle of the already dazzling diamond, so the evils of this world force us to see the inherent good in people and things that, in the normal course of life, we’d be tempted to see evil in.  This same phenomenon occurs when we compare people to people.  Next to Adolf Hitler, the alcoholic might look like Mother Theresa, but next to Mother Theresa, the alcoholic might look like Adolf Hitler.  But even Mother Theresa, when compared to Jesus Christ, looks like the alcoholic, who looks like Hitler, who looks like the ultimate evil.  This lumping together of individuals into groups defined by good or evil causes us to view them inaccurately, for when our brains assign a person to a certain category, that person, instead of appearing to us as they really are, appears in the light of the group to which we’ve assigned them.  Once Mother Theresa, the alcoholic and Hitler all end up assigned to the same category, there is no longer a distinction between which one is worse and which one is better.  We can no longer pick out the good that we once saw buried beneath the rubble, for they’ve now all taken on the identity of the category to which they’ve been assigned.

You see, as long as we are functioning out of a legal view of holiness, a view in which all men are filthy, despicable worms before God, every person will, inevitably, fall into the evil category.  Then, even the good things done by someone within the group get tainted by the nature of the group to which they’re assigned.  And so a person can be the most noble of humanitarians, but because they fall short when compared to God, they’re only seen as being evil.  This “knowledge of good and evil” belief system robs us of the ability to see the “it is good” that God saw, and still sees, in the works of His hands.  We inevitably end up seeing everyone that is not God as evil, and, like Adam and Eve, end up hiding ourselves from the One we should be hiding in.  We end up viewing people, regardless of their hearts of love and compassion, as being inherently evil and wicked at the core of their beings.  We see no good in ourselves or the world around us, for when we finally find someone who looks worse than us we always look up and remember that we’re much worse than God.  Thus, we are eternally doomed to the “evil” category, along with the rest of humanity, and our prayers, worship, preaching and evangelism all inevitably become tainted by this fallen “knowledge”.  We will speak of ourselves and those around us as being unworthy and undeserving of life, love or salvation, since we can see only evil in ourselves.  Oh yes, like schoolyard bullies we will continue to put down those who appear worse than us in order to feel a little bit better about ourselves, but you can be sure that when such a person looks to the monster of a god they’ve created in their minds, they will be quickly reminded of the category to which they belong.

The Apostle Paul was not a man who functioned out of this mindset.  He did not need to be conscious of evil in order to see the inherent goodness of a person.  Rather, he saw men in the light of God’s goodness in sending Christ to die for them, and therefore saw their worthiness of life and salvation.  God’s goodness in saving men revealed to Paul the “it is good” of Genesis as it pertained to the human race.  He saw that God had never retracted His statement about the goodness of His creation (1 Timothy 4:4), which did away with and demolished the “us and them” paradigm, which sprang from the knowledge of good and evil.

He could look at centuries’ old pagan poetry and, instead of seeing evil, see prophetic words!  He could look at animal sacrificing idolaters, and instead of seeing pagan savages, see people whom God had loved enough to fill their hearts with joy!  He could look at licentious and immoral Athenians, and instead of seeing the worst of the worst, see men who worshipped the true God, albeit in ignorance!  Like Frank Laubach, who looked at the prostitute and heard a preacher, or my son, who looked at a potentially polluted beachfront and saw the beauty of creation, so the Apostle Paul, through his revelation of the Gospel, could look at the most externally vile of men, and see their true worth and value to God.

He did not see original sin, but original glory!

The more we imbibe the goodness of God in saving us, the more the knowledge of good and evil loses its hold on our minds.  Eventually, our tendency to categorize begins to dissipate, and we begin to see the human race as it truly is.  Instead of seeing humanity as one massive lump of evil, we begin to see God.  The patience of the elderly fast food worker, who is subjected to insults because of cold French fries, makes us weep, for in her patience we see a heart that could only be animated by divine life.  The burly father, who lovingly and tenderly cares for his special needs child, touches us in the deepest place of our beings, for we see more than paternal instinct at work, but the eternal love of our heavenly father radiating through his actions.

The passion of the painter, the creativity of the musician, and the conviction of the activist, instead of appearing as mere human talent and emotion, begin to appear as the glow of the Godhead, releasing color, sound and justice into the earth through clay vessels.  Some of these vessels, like Caiaphas, the High Priest in Jesus’ day, (a man who sought to murder and take the life of His Messiah) prophesy in ignorance, not knowing that it is the Spirit’s breath that moves them along.  They don’t know that even their ordinary, everyday lives smack of divinity.  No one has ever told them that they live and move and have their beings in a God whom they’ve simply yet to encounter.  All they’ve ever heard is that they’re dirty, distant, and detestable to God.  When we begin to see through the lenses of a pure heart, however, everything begins to appear in sacred hues.  We see more than just people, and we certainly see more than sinful, unacceptable wretches.

We see God!

Our communication to the world then becomes purified, and our message, instead of releasing the stench of death, releases the fragrance of life.

My friends, the God to Whom we pledge our allegiance is not one who has divided the human race into separate categories.  On the contrary, it is the one called the devil, the accuser of the brethren, who is given that designation.  The Greek word for accuser, a word used to describe the devil (Revelation 12:9-10) and the Edenic serpent, is the word kategoros, which can be translated as “one who categorizes”.  The God and Father of Jesus Christ, however, “makes no distinction between us and them”.  He is not a categorizer, but has called all men clean, and is not holding the sins of the world against them (2 Corinthians 5:19).  He is not the builder of barriers, but the destroyer of them!  He is not in the dividing, or categorizing business, but the unifying business!

In light of this understanding, we must reexamine the manner in which we preach and present the Gospel.  We ought never to shove certain ones onto the outside so that we can sell them scalped spiritual tickets of admission.  Instead, our Gospel ought to put all men on an equal level, and declare, “He’s not far from each one of us”, for, “in him we live and move and have our being”!  It ought to scream to a broken and hurting world, “He’s called you clean, and welcomed you with open arms, you need only to recognize the truth, and believe what He believes about you!”

Like Isaiah, whose consciousness of sin was taken away, and who was given a revelation of God’s glory filling the earth before being commissioned to carry God’s prophetic word, so we must experience a “cleansing” in regard to our message.  For years we’ve pointed fingers and declared a message of separation - and a lot of good it’s done us – when all around us are hurting people, who, instead of having our own angst and self-loathing redirected upon them, simply need to know of a God who loves them, and has never been anything but on their side.  They, like the Athenians, need to hear of the God who has taken up residence within their humanity, and who, far from being on the other side of a great chasm, is connected to them, and manifesting His life through them at every turn.  The Gospel does not reveal a God who is allergic to us, but One who is in love with us, and who, even when we’re ignorant, walks with us.

God is not the angry, disapproving categorizer of legend, who has included some, but excluded others.  Like my son, He overlooks the pollution and fixes His eyes on the treasure that others have failed to see.  In His love, He desires to exalt from the dust, the beautiful creation that others have failed to see!  The lifestyles of sin and immorality that so many live are contrary to their true design, and only bring ruin and destruction to their lives.  God, however, sees and knows what’s true of humanity, and knows our inherent value.  Through the cross and resurrection, He’s saved us from the power of sin and the curse of death, and now seeks to rescue us from the dusty practices that we’ve come to identify with.  Like the citizens of Athens, many who are His offspring have identified with things that warp and distort their perception of themselves, and thus cause them to behave in ways that contradict their design.  In the Gospel, we have not only the Good News that everything contrary to our design is crucified, but that an invitation to live a life that is in harmony with said design stands open to us!

And so, like my rock collecting son, God scours the polluted beaches of humanity, bringing out the treasure and ignoring the pollution.  Where others see a mess, He sees a masterpiece worth pocketing and carrying home.  Where others see garbage, He sees glory!  What some have categorized, lumped together and called evil, God has joined Himself to, revealing that He’s not only unafraid of what we are, He’s attracted to it!  Not only does He see the treasure that is the professing Christian, but also the treasure that is the unbelieving world.  He sees past their behaviors and lifestyles that contradict their true purpose.  He does not see a “them”, but an “us”.  He calls them from darkness and into light because He sees His image in them.  However, until they turn from darkness, they have no clue who they are, and so long as the Church preaches a message of separation, they will continue wandering aimlessly in the dark.

May we come to realize that the myth of “us and them” is just that - a myth!  May we see that an unbeliever is no less “in” or accepted than we are, they’ve simply yet to believe and experience the truth.  May our relatives, friends, and even annoying neighbors, appear to us the way that they appear to our Father.  May we see treasure amidst the pollution, and realize that “us” is “them”, and “them” is “us”.  May we have the eyes of my son that see fossils instead of feces, and treasure instead of trash, for the world we’ve come to hate is the very thing to which God has joined Himself.  Therefore, the “Us” that is God in His transcendent holiness includes us as well.  May our eyes be opened to this mystery of mysteries, and may we, like the sheep in Christ’s parable, see Jesus in every one we encounter.

There is no “us” and “them”.  There is Us, and only Us.

12

AFRAID OF NOT BEING AFRAID

Letting Go of the God of the Gadarenes

“As he is now made a partaker of his Spirit, and carries a sense of the Divine approbation in his conscience, he has nothing of that fear that produces terror or brings torment. The perfect love - that fullness of love, which he has received, casteth out fear - removes all terror relative to this day of judgment…And as it is inconsistent with the gracious design of God to have his followers miserable, and as he cannot be unhappy whose heart is full of the love of his God, this love must necessarily exclude this fear or terror; because that brings torment, and hence is inconsistent with that happiness which a man must have who continually enjoys the approbation of his God.” 69

-Adam Clarke (1776-1995)

If you’ve made it to this point in the book you probably either love me or hate me.

We’ve covered some rather sensitive topics that I’m sure have made some people a tad too nervous to continue reading.  I’m sure that some people hit the eject button around the time we started talking about the atonement, and if we didn’t lose them there, we most certainly lost them by the time we got to hell.  Like brave and determined explorers, however, you’ve pushed through the discomfort of having your beliefs challenged, and have hung with me until this, the final chapter.

I commend you, and if I could, I’d give you a medal…or a cookie, whichever you’d prefer.

Still, though, I’m sure that some of you are feeling a bit…unsettled, as perhaps some of your most cherished and beloved foundations have been removed, or, at the very least, challenged.  I understand the extreme discomfort that can cause.  After all, if you’ve grown up believing in an angry God who had to be convinced, through sacrifice, to love the human race again, but still refuses to love them all equally and so divides them into categories marked adored and abhorred, then certainly the things we’ve explored thus far could cause one to feel a bit uncomfortable.  If you’ve been trained to believe that Jesus’ main message to humanity was that His Father was a raging wrath-aholic, who had it in mind to barbecue and torture every man, woman and child on the planet unless, of course, He (Jesus) allowed the Father to give Him a cosmic beating, then the God presented afresh in this book’s pages could strike one as unfamiliar, and quite difficult to come to terms with.  If all of your life you’ve seen God as one with a divine sin allergy that kept Him separate and sequestered off from the human race, then a God who comes to us in the midst of our own bankrupted condition and fellowships with us in spite of it could be a tad bit difficult to wrap one’s head around.

To simplify, if one has grown accustomed to seeing themselves as a sinner in the hands of an angry God, coming to terms with the truth that they’re actually a saint in the arms of a happy God could prove to be rather difficult.

The difficulty we face, undoubtedly, is fear.  The fear of, what if I’m wrong?  What if all of these beautiful depictions of a God of love and grace are just fantasies?  What if they’re nothing more than man’s attempt at making God a bit more pleasing to the postmodern palate?  What if, in truth, God really is the frightening, unpredictable and irate monster of legend?  What if in simply asking questions about His nature we’re upsetting Him?  What if in even considering these ideas, that He’s a God of love and grace, we’re tiptoeing towards heresy, and therefore stirring up His anger and wrath?

What if?  What if?  What if?

Fear.  Fear.  Fear.

While perhaps a bit exaggerated, all of these questions, and more, eventually go zooming through the head of one on this journey of rediscovering the loving, familial God revealed in Christ.  The root of all of these questions is fear, though it’s a fear that rises from a most peculiar place – and that’s from the realization that we’re no longer afraid.

Strangely, in a “religion” whose sacred text’s most oft repeated command is to “fear not”, Christianity has come to rely almost wholly upon fear in order to keep the pews warm and the faithful, well…faithful.  Fear of hell, deception, the end times, missing the “rapture”, disappointing God, losing one’s salvation, having God’s hand of protection lifted, etc…, are all ideas regularly used to keep believers walking the straight and narrow, and ensuring that “King James’s” thin and crinkly pages keep ‘a turnin’.

It seems everywhere you look in Christianity you find fear.  It’s what brings us into the fold, and typically what keeps us there.  We’re told that we need to come to Christ in order to have our fear of death lifted, but once we join the club we’re presented with a shiny new list of phobias to assimilate into our psyches.  While they’re terrifying, unhealthy, and, oftentimes, irrational, we somehow learn to live with them, and, in manifesting a sort of spiritual Stockholm syndrome, we actually learn to love them.  They torment us, but we grow so accustomed to them that we begin to enjoy their company.

BEGGING JESUS TO LEAVE

In Jesus’ day, the citizens of Gadara had long been tormented by the presence of a demoniac (or perhaps two if we read Matthew’s account) possessed by a host of unclean spirits.  In Marks account of the story we’re told that this man (Mark 5:5) lived among the tombs and regularly cut and injured his own body, and that the spirits inhabiting the man identified themselves as “Legion” (verse 9), which was the name for a troupe of several thousand Roman soldiers.  In Matthew’s version (Matthew 8:28) we’re told that the man (or men) was so violent that no one could pass near the place where he lived.  Clearly, he was not a pleasant fellow, and was most certainly not the pride of Gadara.  Yet strangely, when Jesus restored this self-abusing, militantly violent demoniac to his right mind the people became afraid, and begged for Jesus, not the reformed demoniac, to leave their region:

15 When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 16 Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well. 17 Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.

-LUKE 8:15-17 (Emphasis mine)

I understand contextually that the people were most likely afraid of the miraculous powers that Jesus wielded, and not that a man was restored to sanity, but for the sake of making a point, allow me to wax illustrative.  Much like the demoniac of Gadara, the God of Western Christianity has been presented as one of violence, self-harm (violent atonement), and one who is Legion-esque in His dealings, in that He is a God who, like the Legions of Rome, is the enemy of the oppressed, and a servant of the oppressors.  He is an “us versus them” God who fights against the broken and the hurting, and sides with the elites who fancy themselves holy and righteous.  He cannot simply let go of His violent, unforgiving tendencies, though, and so must torture His own incarnate self in order to live with us peaceably.  He lives among the tombs, as His religion is one that is built upon the foundation of the fear of death and mortality, and everywhere we turn in His religion we’re reminded of this.

To put it simply, He’s terrifying.

Then Jesus comes along and presents us with a God who is altogether different from the terrifying god of the Gadarenes whom we’ve grown accustomed to worshipping.  Through His life of altruistic love and grace, Jesus presents the Father to us afresh.  He dispels all of the terrifying legends we’ve come to see His Father in light of, and instead shows us a God who is relational, Triune, loving, compassionate, and anything but angry.

In His incarnation He manifests a God who is not allergic to our humanity, but attracted to it.  In His saving death He reveals a God who forgives the worst of the worst, and yes, even those too ignorant to know that they need forgiving.  In His resurrection He reveals a Father who will not leave a broken and oppressed humanity under the power of death, but, in His justice, raises the victims of sin’s tyranny back to life!  He’s not the God of the grudge, nor a Heavenly bookkeeper intent on finding something to punish us for.  No, He’s the friend of the downtrodden, a forgiver of offenders, and the rescuer of the condemned.  He’s unquenchable, unoffend-able, and unstoppable love.

Like the Gadarene demoniac, Jesus heals our demonic visions of God, and presents us instead with a vision of a loving Father, a compassionate Son, and an affirming Holy Spirit.  Yet somehow, people find this safer, more loving vision of God terrifying, and often seek to chase away the Living Word, with His warm smile and open arms, and long for the terrifying comfort of normalcy.  I believe we react this way because we have grown afraid of not being afraid.  Fear has become such a common component in our “relationship” with God that we simply don’t know how to function without it.  When we cannot feel its presence, we panic, and assume we must be on a greased pole to heresy land, as, so we’re taught, being afraid of God is essential to being a Christian.

THROWING JESUS OFF A CLIFF

In Luke 4 we find Jesus returning to His hometown.  As was His custom, He enters the synagogue, unfurls the scroll of Isaiah, and begins reading from chapter 61:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

19     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

-LUKE 4:18-19 (Emphasis mine)

Much to the disliking of His Jewish audience, Christ omits a rather important part of Isaiah 61.  I suppose you could say that the Son of God was “cherry picking” the scriptures here.  Although verse 22 of Luke’s account seems to suggest that the people either didn’t notice the omission, or that they were pleased by it - “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips” - theologian Michael Hardin has a slightly different take:

All translation is interpretation.  In this case, the Greek text simply has three words [which translate as] …“all bore witness to Him”.  The question is what kind of witness are they bearing?  Are they bearing positive witness, “all spoke well of Him”, or are they bearing negative witness, “all spoke against Him”?...Basically, translators have to go, “Oh, did the crowd bear witness positively or negatively?”, Well, translators love the Lord Jesus, and they don’t want Him to have a bad first sermon, so they say, “all spoke well of Him”…it could just as easily be translated, and contextually makes more sense to say, “all spoke against Him”.  70

If Hardin’s take is correct, one has to wonder why the crowd would have been angry at Christ’s simple reading of a scriptural text?  To understand this, it might help to know which part of Isaiah 61 Christ omitted.  Here’s the text straight from Isaiah:

1 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor

and the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all who mourn,

-ISAIAH 61:1-2 (Emphasis mine)

Now compare it with Jesus’ “cherry picked” version:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

19     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

-LUKE 4:18-19 (Emphasis mine)

Did you catch the omission?  Where Isaiah has a comma, Christ puts a period!  Directly following Isaiah’s proclamation concerning the year of the Lord’s favor, he adds a comma, and then continues on, adding a statement about the day of God’s vengeance.  Yet both the comma and the vengeance are missing from Christ’s version, and we’re left instead with a glaring lack of vengeance and a period to close off the debate.  Hardin remarks:

What’s missing?  That’s right, vengeance!  That God is some testosterone fueled, bloodthirsty, can’t-wait-to-get-the-sinners-and-hold-them-over-the-fires-of-hell [type of God].  That’s missing from Jesus’ message! …The crowd in the synagogue that day was not pleased.  They were saying, “…who does He think He is, taking away our vengeance?” 71

Why was the omission of God’s vengeance such a big deal to Christ’s audience?  Remember, we’re talking about a nation that was being horribly oppressed by Rome, taxed to death, and who felt as though their occupier’s presence in their land was defiling that which was holy.  For years they had been aching and itching to see God act on their behalf and destroy their pagan oppressors.  Passages like Isaiah 61 were rays of hope in their otherwise bleak world.  Hardin points out that Isaiah 61 was something of a first century John 3:16, in that it was quoted and spoken of ubiquitously.  This was a Jubilee passage that spoke of God’s deliverance of His people from bondage and slavery!  Of equal importance to their Jubilee theology, however, was not only that God would liberate them, but that He would stick it to their enemies.  They longed to see the bad guys “get theirs”.  Jesus, in His compassion and brilliance, however, omitted the vengeance bit altogether.

In verse 23, Jesus alludes to their unspoken expectation that He do some sort of miracle in order to prove that He had the authority to make such a glaring omission, and then speaks of their lack of acceptance of Him in verse 24.  All of this adds to the weight of Michael Hardin’s argument that the crowd was sorely displeased with Jesus, and were doing anything but speaking well of Him.  They were amazed at the “gracious word” coming from His mouth, not because they comforted them, but because they were an offense, for they did not want to hear gracious words spoken about their oppressors!  They wanted a God with bloodshot eyes, a furrowed brow, snarling lips, and a bazooka.  They wanted a God who would kick down the doors of their oppressors, torture and torment them in the most violent of ways, and then execute them publicly, for the world to see, but Christ’s rejection of this violent image led to their rejection of Him.

In response to their rejection, Christ, in verses 25-27, speaks of the mercy and grace shown to Israel’s enemies in the past, pointing his audience towards the idea that God did not consider people as His enemies simply because Israel did.  God loved the Gentiles as much as the Jews, and Jesus, therefore, had not come to reveal a God who was in agreement with the vengeful desires of their hearts, but One who was for all nations, and not choosy concerning the company He kept.  He was not an angry, vengeful, warrior from Mt. Olympus, but a God of mercy, love and true restorative justice.

Apparently this was more than His listeners could take, for in the very next verses we’re told:

28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

-LUKE 4:28-30 (Emphasis mine)

In a matter of moments the people went from casual, synagogue attenders to attempted murderers!  Christ’s removal of their concept of an angry, vengeful God left them so unsettled that all they could think to do was to snuff out and murder the One who did the removal.  This reveals something very important about what holding onto an angry image of God does to us as humans-it gives us a license to act like the God we worship!  Since their God was one of vengeance, anyone who tried to remove said vengeance needed to suffer exactly that, vengeance!  They became like the God they were worshipping, and when their beliefs about him were threatened, they responded as he would.

Think about that for just a moment longer: these were faithful synagogue attenders, “God fearing” people around whom Jesus had grown up.  In their own words they reveal that they knew Him to be “Joseph’s son”, meaning that they had most likely known Him as a child and were familiar with his father, mother and siblings.  To them Jesus was another “church” kid.  Heck, maybe even some of them had taught Him in “Sunday school”!  Now, obviously, I’m kidding, but you get the point.  Jesus wasn’t a stranger to them, He’d grown up in their midst!  And yet, because He challenged their doctrine of an angry God who violently punishes His enemies, they turned on and sought to murder Him.

You see, I don’t think we’re aware of the damage that living with an angry God concept does to us.  It percolates in our subconscious, and, though we’re unaware of it, slowly and subtly changes us.  It rewires us to believe that since God, who is ultimate good, in His ultimate goodness, is justified in injuring and tormenting sinners, it’s more than justifiable for us to, at the very least, treat them callously and inflict emotional pain on them, and, when it’s what the rest of the group is doing, even go so far as to harm them physically.  These faithful, squeaky clean, holy-on-the-outside, synagogue attenders did not just suddenly snap.  No, their vengeful God theology had slowly but surely transformed them, and while on most days they were able to mask the change, and maybe even live unaware of it themselves, when challenged, they found themselves aligning with the God they worshipped, and doing the unspeakable.

The idea that they could have had God figured wrongly, and were therefore not justified in being angry and hateful towards their oppressors, threw them for a dizzying loop.  Their entire theological paradigm was threatening to crumble in light of Jesus’ words (or lack thereof), and they simply wouldn’t hear it, for the implications of God not being violent and retributive were just too damaging to consider.

Their solution?

Throw Jesus off a cliff.

Rational, right?

As crazy as their actions may seem, many of us are tempted to do the very same things to messengers who come to us proclaiming a God of mercy and grace today.  It’s completely irrational, but, then again, human religion rarely is.  I’m sure within just a few weeks of its publishing, the very book you are reading will have been thrown across many a room, and, if it’s lucky enough to be in company with Jesus, perhaps even off a cliff or two.  The bottom line, I believe, is that we are afraid of not being afraid.  When we’re left without a maniacal God of vengeance, who hates and does men harm, we simply freak out.  We can live with fear, but not with love.  It makes no sense!  It’s as crazy as begging Jesus to leave after he’s restored peace to your region, or trying to throw Him off a cliff when He assures you that His Father loves all men!  It’s wholly irrational, but for some odd reason, we’re afraid of not being afraid.

We don’t know how to deal with a God of love.

Many, like Jesus’ synagogue audience, are so disturbed by the concept of a completely loving, non-violent God, that when one dares to suggest that He is something other than what they believe Him to be, they have no problem with throwing that person off of a proverbial cliff, labelling them a heretic, or even publicly outing them as a “messenger of satan preaching doctrines of demons”.  Sadly, I’ve seen many of the Godliest people I know labeled, written off, and thrown to the scrap heap, and all because they dared to preach about a God who looks like Jesus and not like Jupiter.  Such reactions are simply the fearful responses of people afraid of not being afraid.

Perhaps they fear that a removal of fear will send them, or other believers, spiraling back into a sinful lifestyle.  The New Testament writers, however, seem to have seen things differently:

14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

-HEBREWS 2:14-15 (Emphasis mine)

The writer of Hebrews tells us that a fear of death actually put people in satanic bondage.  One of the purposes of Christ’s death was to free humanity from slavery to the devil, which resulted from a fear of death.  How did this slavery to the devil play out in an individual’s life?

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

-1 CORINTHIANS 15:56 (Emphasis mine)

According to Paul, the sting that death inflicts upon us in life is sin.  Fear concerning the brevity of life and mortality leads to slavery to sin!  It is fear then, as opposed to a lack of it that is the root of sinful behaviors.  The removal of fear, far from encouraging it, actually cures it.  Fear puts us into survival mode and inhibits us from thinking of anyone but ourselves.  Adam, for instance, whom we assume was devoted to protecting and guarding His wife, can be found throwing her under the bus in order to protect his own reputation mere moments after fear entered the picture:

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

-GENESIS 3:10-12 (Emphasis mine)

The addition of fear instantly brought about accusation and finger pointing.  Adam’s devotion to being his wife’s protector and defender was thrown out the window, and he instead became her accuser and condemner.  Fear breeds sin, and sin destroys.  I have witnessed firsthand the destructive power of a fear based message, for it creates the problems of sin that it claims the power to cure, and thus frustrates the terrified soul to the point of near insanity.  There is never a moment of peace for the fearful believer, for they seek to please God through a holy lifestyle, but find such a lifestyle impossible to live due to the sin inducing power of fear.  They live chained to a miserable merry-go-round of trying to please God, failing to live up to His imagined expectations, crashing and burning, and then determining to try harder next time.

There is no peace, rest, or assurance for one caught up in such a lifestyle.  It’s agonizing and bitter, but, like a drug, addictive!

Contrary to popular evangelical belief, there can be no true change of heart when fear rules the roost.

The Apostle Paul, however, seemed to have found the real key to change:

4 …God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance…

-ROMANS 2:4 (Emphasis mine)

The only real change that can occur in the human heart is one that is born of a revelation of the love of God.  While fear leads to sin, love leads to repentance.

As John writes:

19 We love because he first loved us.

-1 JOHN 4:19

A revelation of the love of the Godhead enflames the heart with a reciprocating love, and where this love rules, fear cannot remain.  The same John wrote just a verses earlier:

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

-1 JOHN 4:18 (Emphasis mine)

Many have taught that we must hold a concept of a loving God and a fearful God in tension in our souls; that we are to believe Him to be both tender and terrifying, wrathful and relational at the same time.  John’s theology on God’s love stands in stark contrast to these ideas, however, for he tells us that the two concepts cannot coexist.  When a person has been made perfect, or mature, in their understanding of God’s love, it will cause fear to be expelled from their life.

Fear and love are not two opposite but equally important revelations of God which are both needed in order to balance things out.  No, they’re oil and water, and never have and never will mix.  Love has always existed, was the context in which we were created, and is the substance in which we were designed to function.  Fear, however, is a byproduct of the fall and is a foreign invader.  It is the most unnatural of emotions, and is one that we were not designed to function in the context of, for it destroys and brings death to all that it touches.

From the earliest age, however, we’re trained to live with fear, and come to see it as a necessary evil, when in truth it’s wholly unnecessary, and just plain evil.  We use it in order to keep ourselves living up to certain moral standards, and almost always use it to begin a conversation aimed at conversion, but we are using a mechanism that is foreign to the human design and can only do harm.  Some would say, “what about the Biblical command to fear God?  What about ‘the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom’?”

What we must keep in mind is that Old Testament commands to “fear God” deal with possessing a sense of reverence and awe, not of being terrified of Him.  Remember, the Apostle John’s words couldn’t be any clearer, perfect love drives out fear, and, specifically, fear that concerns God’s wrath and judgment.  It’s fine to be in awe, in fact, it’s the only proper response to God’s love!  Terror and fear, however, have no place in a life lived in the light of God’s love.

Sure, Paul said to “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), but the Greek phrase for “fear and trembling” is used elsewhere by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 2:3 for instance, where it speaks, not of fear in the sense of terror, but in that of having no confidence in oneself.  Similarly, in Philippians 2:12, it would appear that Paul was encouraging the believers to “work out” of themselves that which God had already “worked in” them (verse 13).  How were they to do this?  With fear and trembling!  That is, with no confidence in themselves or in their own ability to perform, but in God’s ability to perform in and through them!

Sure, in 2 Corinthians 5:11 Paul says that he seeks to persuade men since he knows “what it is to fear the Lord”, but let’s not forget that fear often simply speaks of awe, not of bone chilling terror.  Paul’s main motivation in seeking to persuade men was not fear of that order, for in verse 14 he tells us that it is “Christ’s love” that compels him!  What was it, then, that Paul was in “fear” or awe of? The love of God revealed in Christ!

You see, God does not encourage us to be fearful of Him, but longs that we stand in awe of His work in us and of His love for us!  While we’ve been trained to think we’re closest to God when we feel afraid, the truth is that the closer we are to knowing Him aright, the more fear should begin to disappear.  In fact, God seems downright determined to let no one remain fearful in His presence!  As I said earlier on, the most oft repeated command in the Bible is, “do not be afraid”.

Perfect love does not play nice with fear, it evicts it.  It doesn’t balance it out, it obliterates it.

For years we’ve sought to power the empire of Christianity through fear, building our structures and steeples on the backs of superstition.  But our methods have grown old and many outside the church are no longer frightened by our ghost stories of a lightning bolt wielding God, and so dismiss us as “barking mad”, to quote Richard Dawkins.  Those within the church, however, are afraid of letting go of the unbiblical and antiquated methods of fire and brimstone, for they simply cannot imagine Christianity without them, but there is a reformation taking place!

We are discovering that Christ came not to prop up our God-phobias, but to burn them to ash.  He didn’t come to agree with us that His Father was terrifying and to be feared, but to show us that He was untamable and unstoppable Love.  If we persist in our backwards ways of fear and terror, we will find ourselves becoming increasingly irrelevant, and will eventually become a religion taken about as seriously as those of ancient Egypt or Greece.  We will face a profound crisis, which we’re already in the midst of, that will be our undoing if we do not allow ourselves to be caught up by the winds of a fresh awakening that calls us to rediscover the nature of the Abba of Jesus Christ.

What if we truly let go of our fears?  What if, for once, we became a force powered not by terror and anxiety, but by laughter and joy?  What if we became a whole and healthy people because we discovered that we were the creations of a whole and healthy God?  What would a church look like who was powered by joy instead of by fear?

What would a church look like who understood herself to be Saints in the Arms of a Happy God instead of sinners in the hands of an angry God?

We would fill the earth with the knowledge of a loving, smiling, happy Father, who has the power to heal the deepest wounds in men’s hearts and restore them to sanity.  We would cover the globe with the knowledge of a Jesus who unites Himself with the human race, and forgives us when we’re at our worst.  We’d paint the planet with the knowledge of a Holy Spirit who, far from being obsessed with reminding us of past mistakes, seeks to educate us on our oneness with the Father, and with teaching us to cry “Abba”!

It’s time to let go of the fear, and yes, even the fear of not being afraid.  Don’t beg Jesus to leave, and don’t throw Him off of a cliff, but behold and embrace the beauty of the Father He is seeking to reveal.  Listen to the heartbeat of the Spirit and let joy, instead of fear, become the motivating force in your life.  Don’t use fear or the lack thereof as your gauge for whether or not something is true.  Terror and truth our not counterparts, but mutually exclusive entities.  When the truth of the Gospel is proclaimed fear naturally dissipates.  So let go of the God of vengeance, and embrace the God of favor.  Wave goodbye to the violent, militaristic “god of the Gadarenes”, and embrace the One presented to us by the Son, for He is perfect love, and perfect love drives out fear!

So fear not, you are a Saint in the Arms of a Happy God!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Turner is a teacher and preacher whose passion is to awaken the church from her boredom and religious slumber by proclaiming the message of God’s love and grace and His inclusion of us into the Trinitarian life.  His constant emphasis is the finished work of Jesus Christ, which reveals the true heart of the Father for the human race, and which awakens within us a deep, supernatural response of love for God.  He is a popular speaker and regularly travels throughout the United States preaching and teaching in local churches, Bible Colleges as well as in conference settings, declaring the Good News of God’s grace.  He resides in Port Huron, Michigan, with his wife and three children.

For more information about Jeff Turner and Sound of Awakening Ministries, visit us online at www.jeff-turner.org.  You can also follow Jeff on Twitter at www.twitter.com/JeffTurnersoa, and connect with him on Facebook at:

www.facebook.com/SoundofAwakeningMin.

ENDNOTES

1  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

2  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

3  [] John G. Lake, The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings, (Laguna Hills, CA: Albury Publishing, 1999)

4  [] Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God (Colorado Springs, CO, David C. Cook Publishing, 2009)

5  [] Sinners in the Hands

6  []Timothy R. Jennings, M.D., The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 2013)

7  Strong’s Concordance

8  [] Adam Clarke Commentary

9  [] Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God (Colorado Springs, CO, David C. Cook Publishing, 2009)

10  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

11  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

12  [] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Great Britain, Bantam Press, 2006)

13  [] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Great Britain, Bantam Press, 2006)

14  []  http://www.mcm.edu/~eppleyd/luther.html

15  []  http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/fathers/view.cfm?recnum=2087

16  []  Moses Maimonides, Translated From the Original Arabic Text by M. Friedlander, PHD, The Guide for the Perplexed (Kindle Edition published by Evinity Publishing Inc., 2009)

17  [] Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 2012)

18  [] Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life (Lancaster, PA, JDL Press, 2013)

19  [] F.W. Krummacher, The Suffering Savior (Grand Rapids, MI, Kregel Publications, 1947)

20  [] Jonathan Edwards, “Christ’s Agony”, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh, Banner of Truth Trust, 1995)

21  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

22  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

23  [] John E. Phelan, Compassionate Eschatology: The Future as Friend, edited by Ted Grimsrud and Michael Hardin (Eugene, OR, Cascade Books, 2011)

24  []  N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

25  []  Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life (Lancaster, PA, JDL Press, 2013)

26  [] Stephen H. Travis, Christ and the Judgment of God: The Limits of Divine Retribution In New Testament Thought (Peabody, MA, Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2009)

27  [] C. Baxter Kruger, Jesus and the Undoing of Adam (Jackson, MS, Perichoresis Press, 2001)

28  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

29  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

30  [] George MacDonald, The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Kindle Edition by O’Connor, 2010)

31  [] Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988)

32  [] Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 2012)

33  [] John G. Lake, The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings, (Laguna Hills, CA: Albury Publishing, 1999)

34  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

35  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

36  [] Quoted by Adam Clarke concerning Acts 24:25, Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

37  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

38  [] John G. Lake, The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings, (Laguna Hills, CA: Albury Publishing, 1999)

39  [] Jonathan Edwards, “Yield to God’s Word or Be Broken By His Hand”, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh, Banner of Truth Trust, 1995)

40  [] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

41  [] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

42  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

43  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

44  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

45  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

46  [] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

47  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

48  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

49  [] Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Hendrickson Publications, 1996)

50  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

51  [] M.G. Easton, M.A., D.D., Easton’s Bible Dictionary (Thomas Nelson, 1897)

52  [] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

53  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

54  [] Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem

55  [] Thomas B. Thayer, The Origin & History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, (Boston, MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1855)

56  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

57  [] St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Exerpted from: Apostolic Fathers Volume 1, Edited by Paul A. Boer, Sr. (Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2012)

58  [] C. Baxter Kruger, PH.D., The Shack Revisited (New York, NY: FaithWords, 2012)

59  [] St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (New Century Kindle Format)

60  [] C. Baxter Kruger, PH.D., God Is For Us (Jackson, MS: Perichoresis Press, 2000)

61  [] Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960)

62  [] Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2000)

63  [] Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960)

64  [] Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 1977)

65  [] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996)

66  [] Frank C. Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic (Colorado Springs, CO: Purposeful Design Publications, 2007)

67  [] Frank C. Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic (Colorado Springs, CO: Purposeful Design Publications, 2007)

68  [] St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (New Century Kindle Format)

69  [] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the New Testament (Titus Books, 2013)

70  [] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXhXeBNVpDk

71  [] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXhXeBNVpDk