Kingdom Ready Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about atonement. And I’m certainly not done, though I only anticipate two parts to this one (I’ve been wrong before)

There is one large question; how does the death of the Messiah relate to what he has been preaching – the Kingdom of God, and how he has been living/acting with his miracles and statements against certain Pharisees?  But I’ll let you stew on that one a bit.  For now, I want to talk about what is considered the traditional view of atonement.

The day that Jesus of Nazareth entered Jerusalem on a donkey with crowds shouting Hosanna and calling out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord” was a high point for the disciples. The next days were filled will the demonstration in the temple, woes to the Scribes and Pharisees, the answering of difficult questions, and confronting parables. Jesus was confronting the religious leaders of the people head on, publicly, and he was getting away with it. He was outsmarting their maliciously crafted questions and was even telling very pointed parables to reprove his opponents. The disciples must have been in awe of what their master was doing. Then comes the teaching about the end on the Mount of Olives followed by the Last Supper. Next, Jesus and his disciples went up to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives to pray. Suddenly Judas appeared with the civil authorities and arrested Jesus. What did the disciples do? They fled and all escaped. The next hours were filled with trial after trial in which Jesus was dragged from place to place and accused. Finally, the religious establishment succeeded in boxing Pilate in to deliver Jesus up for crucifixion. This took the disciples completely by surprise even though Jesus had warned them repeatedly that this was going to happen.

In order to start talking about the cross we must go back in time before rappers starting wearing cross necklaces, before contemporary songs about the cross became popular on Christian radio, before the great hymns about the blood were composed, before the crusaders used it as a standard in their “holy wars,” before the churches began to see it as a symbol God’s love towards humanity, back to the time of Jesus when the cross already had a meaning attached to it. “As everyone in the Roman world knew well, the cross already had a clear symbolic meaning; it meant that Caesar ruled the world, with cruel death as his ultimate, and regular, weapon” (Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans, by NT Wright).

From…

To many, many Christians, and especially to those who only know the faith from a fair distance, it looks as if the Cross is to be understood as part of a mechanism of injured and restored right. It is the form, so it seems, in which the infinitely offended righteousness of God was propitiated again by means of an infinite expiation. It thus appears to people as the expression of an attitude that insists on a precise balance between debit and credit; at the same time one gets the feeling that this balance is based, nevertheless, on a fiction. One gives first secretly with the left hand what one takes back again ceremonially with the right. The “infinite expiation” on which God seems to insist thus moves into a doubly sinister light. Many devotional texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the Cross imagines a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son, and one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.

Oxygen is critical. We don’t think about that often though. We live and breathe and don’t think about breathing in and out oxygen. It fuels our cells and blood and body. It is so needed. Yet it is most often ignored. Until the day that you get your head held underwater. You fear drowning. You don’t know what to do. You feel scared and helpless. You run out of the oxygen that you stored up in your lungs after a deep breath and can only now breathe in water. And this doesn’t work. Water can’t do what the oxygen does. At last the hand holding your head down in the water releases and you come up to breathe. The experience however changes you. It changes your perspective. You suddenly realize how important oxygen is. You can’t live without it. You never want to put yourself in a situation like that again where you cannot partake of this precious thing – the oxygen that will keep you alive.

When we say that Christ was crucified – we say that the King of Israel, the one who will rule the world was crucified. When he comes back he is coming with a sword to judge the earth. He didn’t die while you were his citizen, but rather his enemy. Rather than meeting you on the field of battle, he sacrificed himself for you – so that you could be one of his citizens. This is the tenor of the death of Jesus Christ when the Kingdom of God has it’s proper place as the center of the Gospel message.

The majority church insists that,
a) in order to die for our sins, Jesus had to be ‘God’ and that
b) if he were anyone other than a divine person in the godhead, then God’s sacrifice is in some way diminished.

What follows are a couple of my views on these 2 points:

What do you think?  Did Jesus become sin on the cross?

2 Corinthians 5:21 states “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Yet there are so many verses that state Jesus was innocent and sinless (Mt, 27:4; Luke 23:47; John 8:46; 1Peter 1:19; 2:22).  How could he become sin?