In the last three newsletters we have seen that no matter how broken a person is, he is justified by God, as he believes in Christ, his substitute. This is the foundation and the edifice of all Christian life. It is the hope of all true believers for eternal salvation. It is the sword by which we slay the goliaths of our immorality. And it is the means of staying sane in a world that has gone catastrophically wrong.
But to believe it is impossible. The human mind, so narrowed by the atrophying bitterness of guilt and shame does not find broad enough grounds within itself for such self-applied mercy. Without tremendous undergirdings of support, the mind, attempting to assure itself of its alien innocence in Christ, while still in the process of subjugating the enemy within, is finally swamped by irresistible currents of inward recrimination, and resorts to the barricades of self-justification or despair.
God knows this; He understands the human mind. He is our Defender against its tyrannies (“Even if our conscience condemns us, God is greater than our conscience and knows all,” 1 John 3:20 NEB). And He unveiled, at the epicenter of Time, a shocking Divine Contradiction that reveals how God made justification possible. Only when this surprise act of God is regularly placed at the forefront of the mind does the sin-scarred believer have the certitude to believe that God, no longer a Prosecutor, is on his side as a Defender.
The stunning act of God that makes justification possible is described in the Bible by the word propitiation. “Whom [referring to Christ] God set forth as a propitiatory sacrifice [margin, NASB] through faith in His blood” (Rom. 3:25). That Paul should use this word to describe God’s solution to the sin problem is staggering. It means to appease wrath by sacrifice. The common understanding was that if disasters occurred, like earthquakes or famines, the gods were expressing their punishing wrath which could be appeased (propitiated) by the offering of sacrifices (sometimes animal, sometimes human) after which the disasters would cease.
Many theologians have found the use of this word by Paul (Greek: hilasterion) so repugnant that they have found highly implausible alternative interpretations of it. (SEE NOTE 1.) The fact of the matter is, though, that the meaning of propitiation as the appeasing of the wrath of God by sacrifice was the idea conveyed by this word to every Gentile and Jewish reader of Paul’s day, since that was its meaning in common usage.
Yet, the meaning of propitiation is lost on millions of ordinary Christians today because of our ego-centric, “what’s-in-it-for-me?” psychologizing that must at any cost (even the cost of truth) see the primary purpose of the Cross as an attempt to create a change in man (conversion) by which he can then be accepted by God. The result of this thinking is that people tend to confuse conversion for the Gospel itself, and thus determine their security with God by their inner states of heart. That can only lead a person struggling with homosexuality or sexual addiction into spiritual and emotional disaster, for it gives his courage no other reference point than the risings and fallings of his own progress.
But propitiation is infinitely different. Since the meaning of the word is to appease God’s wrath, then its primary purpose is not to effect a change in man, but to effect a change in God.
The idea that the Gospel denotes primarily a change in God is shocking to most Christians because it is thought childishly to mean that the death of Jesus causes God to change from hating us to loving us. Propitiation is therefore rejected (no matter how biblical!) as a heresy, a vestige of horrific paganism.
But that Christ is a propitiatory sacrifice is the most central truth of the New Testament, and that the sacrificial system of the Old Testament was the core of religious worship and a type of the coming Christ is universally acknowledged by all Christians. Furthermore, that sacrifices were meant to appease God as well as wipe out man’s guilt is universally recognized by all ancient cultures.
The truth of Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice, when properly understood, provides the foundation by which a sinner can know that he is innocent before God and freed from the powers of addiction. So how are we to properly understand propitiation?
“The earth is full of [God’s] riches” (Ps. 104:24). He “visits the earth and gives it abundance” (Ps. 65:9). This is our loving God, the fingerprints of Whose hand appear on all that is beautiful in the world, in the carpeted green of earth, the exotic sensuousness of Spring, the gold embrace of warm light and lovers, yet Whose same hand runs with the blood of Death over the agony of mankind.
This, our God, Who is the Love of which all other loves speak (1 John 4:7, 8), Who lightens the weary heart (Matt. 11:28–30) and brings light and life and joy to man (John 1:4), human beings have suppressed from their universal consciousness (Rom. 1:18) and followed a path of endless, mutual cruelty, destruction and death (Gen. 6:5).
None can grasp with even the slightest proportion of magnitude, the grief, the sorrow, the indignation and anger that man’s lost opportunity for Divine love and joy has produced in the heart of God. He is “full of indignation” (Isa. 30:27) in proportion, surely, to His omnipresent capacity to see all the murderous madness of man at one eternal Glance. The pain of this indignation and wrath must be inversely proportional to His heart of peace and love.
Hints of this appear in the heart of Jesus. Jesus, “meek and lowly in heart” (Matt. 11:29), nevertheless churns with “anger and distress” over the cruelty of man to man (Mark 3:5). Perhaps no passage in the New Testament is so poignant with Jesus’ grief and pain over man’s hardness towards Him as Matthew 23:37, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that murders the prophets and stones the messengers sent to her! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings; but you would not let me” (NEB).
How can our loving God possibly continue with this Divine Contradiction within Himself?
He cannot. (SEE NOTE 2.)
Either He, Whose “throne is built upon righteousness and justice” (Ps. 89:14), will appease His wrath which has long been held back (Rom. 3:25b) by bringing an end to a world that has aborted the opportunity to fill the earth with divine joy and instead spawned its misery to every corner, or…
“How can I give you up…how surrender you…?…My heart is changed within Me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy…for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst and I will not come to destroy” (Hos. 11:8, 9).
…in His passionate, grieving, loving wrath, He will do a scandalous thing: He will become the God-man, taking the place of man, and pour the fullness of punishing wrath and judgment upon Himself as the Man representing all men (2 Cor. 5:14).
And so Jesus went to the Cross. He went to it. It was not an unforeseen accident. He walked to Jerusalem a free man, not as a prisoner. He told His disciples, “The Son of Man is to be given up into the power of men, and they will kill Him” (Matt. 17:22 NEB).
But it was not the crucifying that finally took Him. If it were, He would have remained alive on the cross three to five days, His life slowly seeping out of Him as lockjaw, hallucinations, dehydration and asphyxiation finally took away His last whimpering breath.
But He died after six hours on the cross, not because it was anything less than crucifixion, but because of something infinitely more horrendous. The words in the Greek for his agony in the garden are so strong as to suggest He would have died there, if the angels had not sustained Him for the further agony of the cross. “Horror and dismay came over Him, and He said to them, ‘My heart is ready to break with grief’ ” (Mark 14:33, 34 NEB). Finally, on the cross, Jesus cried that eternal wail of sorrow, “My God, My God, Why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46).
JESUS DIED FROM THE GRIEF OF ABANDONMENT BY HIS FATHER.
We must not sidestep this in order to protect our feelings or the Father’s reputation. Jesus did not merely feel abandoned. He was abandoned. The exercise of God’s wrath is the “giving over”, the abandoning (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28) to the swirling whirlpool of evil.
“The Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; if He would render Himself as a guilt offering…” (Isa. 53:10 NASB). But there is one more truth to this awesome picture.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus, the Word, was One with God (John 10:30), “the stamp of God’s very being” (Heb. 1:3 NEB).
Therefore, God abandoned God. There was some mysterious, unfathomable split in the Trinity, and it broke the human heart of God, as the Man for all men.
GOD-AS-MAN DIED OF THE GRIEF OF SELF-ABANDONMENT.
“The Lord was pleased to crush Him”self, as a “guilt offering” for the human race.
This was the propitiatory sacrifice, the sacrifice that appeased God’s wrath over the abortion of the World’s eternal Spring, and that effected a change in God towards mankind.
The propitiatory sacrifice did not cause God to love us, for this was not a pagan sacrifice given by men to God, to appease Him. This was the only true propitiatory sacrifice, given by God to men to appease Himself. “God so loved the world that He gave” (John 3:16). “I have given [the blood on the altar] to you” (Lev. 17:11). God effected His own change towards us, not from hate to love (for “God is love” 1 John 4:8), but from the judgment of man, to a judgment of Himself. He treated Himself as we deserve, in order to free Himself to treat us as He deserves.
This, then, is the foundation for knowing that God treats you as a righteous child, even while you are wicked. This is possible because God, who is the Source of all sense of justice and the Originator of all emotions that flow from injustice, dealt with that justice and injustice in Himself instead of you. He is now appeased.
You may begin to fight back against the fear of your mind that tells you that God is never pleased with you. Once you know God’s propitiation by faith, you boldly do battle with doubts and fears. You bounce back after failure, until you bounce failure itself, because nothing can stop the man or woman who knows that God is appeased and is now His Defender.
NOTE 1: The Greek word used by Paul for our word propitiation, is hilasterion, which is mostly translated expiation in modern bibles. Expiation means to wipe out sin and emphasizes the effect of Christ’s sacrifice on sin (to wipe it out) rather than its effect on God (to appease, which is what the word propitiation does). The translators justify the translation of hilasterion as expiation by the following reasoning: When Greek Jews translated the Hebrew Old Testament (the Septuagint), two hundred years before Christ, they used the word hilasterion as a translation of the Hebrew word for the flat, gold plate that rested on top of and covered the ark of the covenant, where the High Priest sprinkled the blood of sacrifices on the Day of Atonement. The Hebrew noun properly means a cover, but since the verb from which it comes literally means to cover and metaphorically to atone for, or propitiate, then the Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible incorrectly translated the noun for the gold plate, a propitiation. So modern translators conclude that propitiation must mean cover or wipe out (expiate), a meaning it never has in Hebrew.
Charles Hodge points out that the word hilasterion must mean to appease wrath because, first, that was its universal meaning for Paul’s readers and a principle rule of biblical interpretation is to understand the language of the writer in the sense in which he knew it would be understood by those he wrote to. And, second, the context must mean to appease wrath, because Paul spent three chapters revealing the nature of God’s wrath upon the world, and the revelation of Christ as the propitiation is now a display of how that wrath is removed.
NOTE 2: Greek philosophers of the Stoic and Platonic schools believed God was beyond all passion; otherwise He would be influenced by forces to which He would thereby be subject, and therefore, not absolute God. Scripture reveals God to know all passions associated with pure, absolute love, not subject to them, but directing them. When we speak of what God can and cannot do, we understand by this the limitations God has subjected Himself to out of love for the finite creation.