It's Time To Set Jesus Free
Last week, we took a closer at the Biblical Satan. We followed the conceptual evolution of this character throughout scripture and debunked some common misunderstandings.
Today, we are going to take those insights, connect them to the revelation of God we see in Jesus, and demonstrate how they should fundamentally change our view of God’s “Wrath”.
Let’s get started.
The Bible shows a progression of thought concerning the divine. Coming out of the pagan cultures of the Earth, Israel’s faith evolved from polytheism, or henotheism, to monotheism. Just as with many concepts within the Bible – through its different authors and writings spanning thousands of years – we see a plurality of views wrestling with each other and evolving into new ways of thinking concerning the nature of the divine.
Many Christians today seem to think that there is a unanimous voice in scripture concerning the nature of the metaphysical concepts that it describes. However, in dealing with metaphysical concepts, we must admit that it is a “through a glass darkly.” Metaphor, analogy, anthropomorphism, parable, poetry, and myth are constantly employed by the writers of the Bible. There is not always consistency with language when trying to grasp existential and metaphysical realities.
When we actually read and study the Bible and its history and culture, we find that the concepts within the Bible are very much evolving and progressing with new voices being added to the discussion. The Bible, after all, was written not by one person, but by dozens of people over the course of thousands of years. The story of human existence and culture and awareness is one of learning and growing and evolving into new understandings, and religion is not exempt from this process.
The multivocal and progressive nature of the Bible, instead of being seen as a threat (shaking the self-certain evangelical insistence of inerrancy), should be viewed as a beautiful testament to this faithful universal Presence that is drawing us up and forward into truth, relating to us where we are at, and summoning history towards himself. God is with us in the process.
With the generations that unfold from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we see a progressive nature to the way people see God, and this was all leading up to Jesus, as discussed in a previous article. But there are other metaphysical ideas that are evolving in the scriptures too, such as what we normally see as the antithesis to God, the character that we call “Satan.”
Who killed Jesus? Was it God the Father? Did God send himself to kill himself in order to appease himself?
As we discussed previously, the penal substitution model of atonement is built on a retributive idea of justice. It casts God as the vindictive herald of retribution and validates a pagan understanding of the gods and their constant need for sacrifice.
The key to understanding atonement is to understand the God revealed in Jesus. In the ministry and teaching of Jesus – in his solidarity and non-condemning posture towards humanity, his ability to freely forgive, and his view of sin as a sickness that needed to be healed – we do not find the kind of God who demands retribution and blood in order to forgive. If you think about it, that’s actually not forgiveness at all. A penal understanding of justice is a human construct and the lowest form of justice. The justice of Heaven is restoration. It looks like healing for the broken rather than the eye-for-an-eye model Christ rejected.
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One mark of great intelligence is that a person can solve a number of problems with a single stroke. I believe this is why Paul spoke of the ‘rich variety’ of God’s secret and hidden wisdom in having his Son become incarnate and die on Calvary (Eph 3:10; 1 Cor 1:30, 2:7). Through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the infinitely wise God solved a number of problems. Among other things, through Christ God defeated the devil and his cohorts (Heb 2:14; 1 Jn 3:8); revealed the definitive truth about himself (Rom 5:8; Jn 14:7-10); reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20-22); forgave us our sins (Acts 13:38; Eph 1:7); healed us from our sin-diseased nature (1Pet 2:24); poured his Spirit on us and empowered us to live in relation to himself (Rom 8:2-16); and gave us an example to follow (Eph 5:1-2; 1 Pet 2:21). God’s wisdom is displayed in a ‘rich variety’ indeed! – Gregory Boyd, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views
Since the beginnings of Christian theology, people have recognized the tension between some of the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament versus the revelation of God in Christ.
We like to pretend that these views are not contradictory. We’ve created a dance of fancy theological footwork to merge the image of violence with the image of peace. We try to say it’s not “contradiction”, and use words like “paradox” and “mystery” instead. We say things like “God’s ways are higher than our ways.”
All the while, we know it doesn’t add up. The reality is that we see two opposing portraits of God in the scriptures: a violent God of wrath slaughtering his enemies and commanding his people to do the same, and Jesus… saying his Father is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, saying he loves his enemies and commanding us to do the same.
While I can’t claim to perfectly resolve this dilemma, my goal today is to provide a compelling case for why Jesus is, as Paul describes, “the image of the invisible God,” and THE standard by which all other images of God must be held accountable.
“God is too holy to look upon sin.”
If you grew up in the Evangelical church, or are otherwise familiar with mainstream Evangelical theology, you have probably heard this statement at one point or another.
It is plucked from the book of Habakkuk and often excluded from its context, typically with the goal of instilling in people a sense of distance from God – as if he is too good to even look at them.
“God is too holy to be around sinners,” they say.
The idea is that God’s holiness entails a powerful disgust and anger with humanity and a general inability to corrupt his pure eyes by even looking upon us, so vile are we! He must avoid us like the plague.
It’s as if God in his perfect Heaven hasn’t built up an immunity to a fallen world. He can’t even be around that stuff! It could contaminate or corrupt him! If you are God, you just can’t be around a fallen world!