Conciliation through satisfaction?? (II)

Originally posted on May 20, 2006 – by Andre Piet

On the Bible youth forum I’ve taken part in a discussion over the past few days in response to my previous weblog. Below is a compilation of some contributions:

The offering of Christ concerns His resurrection. First, He was slain (Golgotha), and then exalted in His resurrection. That is a fragrant aroma to God. His death, on the other hand, was a curse.

Jesus bore our sins in His body on the wood (1 Pet. 2:24). What does that mean? The same verse gives the answer. It refers to the stripes and blows He endured. Those stripes were our sins, and He suffered in His body the weight of them.

That God has indignation over His creatures does not make Him their enemy. On the contrary! It is always His love that seeks the welfare of His creations. They are His own creations…

God does not forgive because of the cross, but IN SPITE OF the cross. The cross proves how far God goes in forgiveness.

Because of our transgressions and iniquities He was pierced and crushed- that is, everything that was done to Him was full of transgression and iniquity.

The idea behind Golgotha as a ransom (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:6) is this:
we humans are in slavery to death (and thus to sin), and in order to be freed from it (> resurrection), a price had to be paid (death). The ransom is not paid TO God, for the simple reason that it was not God who held us captive.

The idea behind Golgotha as debt payment (atonement through satisfaction) is this:
we humans have a debt, and God cannot simply forgive (!) and demands repayment. Jesus, in His painful death, paid the price that we humans supposedly owed to God. God found satisfaction in Jesus’ suffering and death.

The more I reflect on this latter view, the more repulsive it becomes to me. It is a complete distortion of the Biblical truth of conciliation. For it assumes…

• that God had to be conciliated, instead of mankind;
• that God found satisfaction in Golgotha, instead of it being a curse to Him;
• that on Golgotha the debt was settled, instead of the debt reaching its climax.

God had the “problem” of a hostile world. Conciliation (the word Paul uses) is not about sin(s), but about enmity. It is enemies who need to be conciliated (see also Rom. 5:10 and Col. 1:21).

How do you make someone give up their enmity? Romans 12:20 gives the answer: by feeding him when he is hungry (Rom. 12:20). That is what Joseph did in Egypt. He had been sold there in hostility, and now his brothers came to him in hunger. And what did he do? He gave them food! Without reproach! He did not reckon their transgressions to them (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19). More than that: he told them that it was not THEY who had sent him to Egypt, but GOD (Gen. 45:7,8; cf. Acts 2:23). To give them life! A beautiful ‘picture’ of conciliation.

God does not reckon it to the world that they killed His Son, because it is precisely in this way that He will give them Life. In doing so, He not only gives them Life, but also wins their hearts!

The cross of Christ is God’s means to conciliate the world to Himself. The cross is the convincing proof of God’s love. As soon as this penetrates, we have peace with God and the enmity is over. God HAS not yet conciliated the world to Himself but is in the process of doing so. “God was in Christ conciliating the world to Himself…” As long as there are still enemies, the conciliation is not complete. That part lies in the future.

Delen: