Frankly, Christianity can be confusing.
Why did Jesus have to get tortured to death?
The typical answer is 'God has to stay Just.' Oh really? He has to? Says who?!
What even is Justice, and what's so great about hurting people because they hurt others?
Preventative Justice is one thing- using punishment to deter criminals, by making an example of the ones we catch. But that kind of Justice doesn't imply 'Jesus has to get tortured to death for our sins!'
How exactly does Jesus' suffering erase our sins? That has nothing do with Justice!
If there has to be an equal amount of Sin and Punishment- why Jesus? Jesus is a great dude, it's not fair at all!
Heck, why didn't God go down and beat the tar out of Satan for a while? It would be kinda killing two birds with one stone, no?
The typical answer is that the victim had to be someone blameless, but why? Who made this rule?
Finally, why does Jesus' method fail unless people undergo a very specific process of confession, belief and baptism? How does that fall under the whole Justice imperative?
God's moral code just gets more and more complicated and random, neither of which are good things for a theory.
As always, let's look at what the Bible says.
“God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Okay, so apparently our sins are somehow transferred onto Christ, but we have no explanation as to why or how that worked. It's not Justice at all, so there's obviously something else at work here.
"He poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.”
Now, when I looked at this word 'intercession' in Strong's Concordance, I found that it was not as passive as it seems.
The word (יַפְגִּֽיעַ׃) is elsewhere translated 'attacked' (1 Samuel 22:17, 22:18, 22:18), 'cut down' (2 Samuel 1:15), or 'strike' (Job 36:32).
The majority of times, this word is translated 'fall' (as in 'fell upon him with the sword so that he died').* The rest are 'came upon' or 'met,' often in the context of meeting executioners, bears and the like, or 'reached out,' 'touched,' and once even 'kill.'
When the 'interceding' translation does occur, it does not seem to imply gently asking or begging.
In Ruth 1:16, Ruth says "do not urge me to leave you." Now, Naomi was not begging or asking nicely- the 'urging' was more like a rude and curtly delivered command!
Ruth 1:15 : "Look... your sister in law already went back to her people and her gods, go and follow her home."
The God's Word translation even translated 'urge' here as 'force!'
So why on earth is it translated as such a passive thing in the context of Jesus?
*Isaiah 53:6, 1 Kings 2:46, 1 Kings 2:34, 1 Kings 2:32, 1 Kings 2:31, 1 Kings 2:29, 1 Kings 2:25, Ruth 2:22, Judges 18:25, Judges 8:21, Exodus 5:3
I think this tells us that something is fundamentally flawed with our vision of Christ's sacrifice. In fact, I think we would be very amiss to deny that the entire Messianic narrative is at its heart one of military conquest.
Of course, Jesus clarified that this was not conquest over the kingdoms of the earth. But that's not what I mean. I'm talking about a different, lower kingdom.
Ephesians 6:12 : For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms!
Looking through the Bible, we see that the very first Messiah passage speaks explicitly in terms of battle against Satan!
It doesn't say 'yeah so God had to sacrifice himself to himself to remain Just.' It says 'he will crush your head and you will strike his heel' (Genesis 3:15) and the exact words are used when God crushes Satan-Leviathan's heads in the primordial war of Chaoskampf (Psalm 74:14).
Jesus wasn't appeasing God's Justice, but subverting Satan's.
I believe that Satan was the one who acted against Jesus via his Roman servants. When he did that, he thought he finally got rid of Jesus. But remember- Jesus was chosen for the mission specifically because he was perfect and sinless, a spotless sacrificial Lamb.
Perhaps, by harming someone without sin, Satan had inadvertently destroyed his own mission, or violated his own standards in such a way that Christ was able to break down the gates of the Underworld (Matthew 16:18).
If we look into the Old Testament, the sacrificial Goat which is sent into the wilderness to die in symbolic punishment for Israel's sins (Leviticus 16:8) is sent not to God, but to Azazel- a title of Satan in Judaism, ruler of the Satyr-like Seirim demons of the desert!
When asked about Satan's motivation in the Bible, most aren't really sure what to say. The absolute nonsense about him being 'fallen Lucifer' so pervades popular imagination that most simply think he's a resentful prick who wants to kill people and God out of nothing but random spite.
I don't think this holds up, or makes much inherent sense.
See, Satan's very name implies his function- he's 'the Accuser!' As Revelation 12:10 puts it, "the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accused them before our God day and night." Most Christians think this is just a trick Satan pulls in idiotic attempts to get God to inadvertently help him.
Not only is this silly, it's outright unbiblical!
If you have a character named 'the Accuser,' and all he does in the entire Bible is accuse people and try to arrange justice (e.g. the entire Book of Job), only the most dense of literary critics wouldn't piece together that this is a force of pure, cruel, merciless Justice, not unlike Javert from Les Miserables.
Now, many may object that I'm ignoring vast swaths of Biblical material in which God does exactly what I fault Satan for doing- enacting Justice.
That's a fair point.
But as explained earlier, there are two very different kinds of Justice- retributive and preventative. I believe it is a very defensible position to argue that God acts only in the second category, punishing evil both to prevent its continuation and to show others where that path leads, to "make a stench before the nations" in the typical phrase.
I'd say it's a much more Biblical position than a God who simply gets really mad at people and chucks rocks at them, which is not only disrespectful but reduces God to the level of Zeus throwing a hissy fit at Polyphemus.
One of the biggest criticisms of Christianity stems directly from this error. 'God is mean and hateful,' they say. God sees people screw up, turns red and floods the earth, or burns down Sodom, or throws people into Hell.
That's the popular image of the Old Testament God, and it does not fit at all with a God who would commit ritual suicide to save the world he loves so much.
God is not a jerk. He is strict and effective in destroying and making an example of evil, but revenge in the modern sense is not his thing.
"Vengeance is mine" (Romans 12:19) is the most prominent counterexample, but the word 'ekdikésis' needn't be understood as pointless harm and revenge.
The OT context from which this quote comes is Deuteronomy 32:35, which indeed states "Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly."
But this is followed directly by the reason for these actions:
So we see that his vengeance is ultimately an act of love for his people, not hatred for his enemies- at least not in the emotional human sense.
Like any Biblical doctrine, there will always be seeming contradictions about God's stance on revenge.
But just like we do with salvation by faith (not by works) and such topics, we take the whole Bible together, use reason and logic, and allow small leaps of faith to cover up possible inconsistencies with minor reinterpretation.
Similar verses give the same message.
Proverbs 24:29:
Do not say, "I will do to him as he has done to me; I will repay the man according to his work."
Proverbs 20:22:
Do not say, "I will avenge this evil!" Wait on Yahweh, and He will save you.
God does not say "I will avenge," but "I will save."
Praise the Lord.
Comments