http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Reasons-Why-Jesus-Came/dp/158134788X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213053555&sr=8-2

Now, I am not a Piper follower, though I am a Piper enthusiast. But my point in posting this book is not to put the attention on “oh, look what PIPER said.” The point is rather the title of his book -

FIFTY ONE reasons ….

Was the cross meant as cure? You bet it was. Yeah, that was one of the fifty one reasons.

But “as often as you meet, do this in remembrance of me,” HE said. Do what? Remember the body, yes, but also remember the blood. Why anyone would want to remove discussing or singing about the blood from a gathering of believes seems to me to reflect a lack of understanding of something that was on the Lord’s heart at His last meal - as often as you meet together, do something to cause you to remember blood, in remembrance of Me.

For most of my christian life, I had no real appreciation of the cross. It was a fact, a theological construct, but songs about “the nails in your hands” just made me yawn. Until one day I was in desperate need and I won’t go into the details, but there was a day when all the sudden the blood meant something it never meant to me before. From that point forward, there is a richness there for me and a point of connection with His love that when I hear people trying to explain this away as not sitting right with them, it just makes me feel like they haven’t really gotten it yet.

Those who have touched this in their spirits are resonating with me as they read this - those who haven’t probably just think the statement to be arrogant. Someone had told this to me once and I had thought they were nuts - but the Lord compelled me to ask Him one day, “Lord, show me what I’m missing…”

Anyway, it’s hard to escape that idea that God DOES have wrath! Once it is recognized that God does have a significant wrathful side to be accounted for in our theories of Him, it is not that much further of a step to think that maybe the wrath of God WAS somehow involved in the crucifixion - after all, once it is established that God can be quite wrathful towards us, well, we better find a place of escape somewhere!

We can theorize all day long, but let’s at least have some verses to theorize ourselves around:

“Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” –Romans 5:9-10

“to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. . . For God shows no partiality.” –Romans 2:5-11

http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/P8

Sacrificing an animal to help cleanse someone from leprosy might or might not be a good symbol for what Jesus did on the Cross, but I doubt it’s what John the Baptist had in mind.

But the main point I’ve been trying to make is that we are talking metaphors and symbols here, not literal meanings. I can’t make sense of viewing Jesus as a literal sacrifice made to God for the atonement of sin, in the same way that an animal was sacrificed on the altar. Maybe for the first-century Jews who wrote the NT, rooted in world of the Torah and the Temple, that kind of image sprang to mind when they reflected on Jesus’ death.

But that was far from being the only way they looked at it. There are lots of other metaphors used in the NT writings, not just those of animal sacrifice (such as ransom/redemption from bondage). And even within the Hebrew religious tradition, there were significant voices (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos) who flatly opposed the notion that God required blood sacrifice rather than or as well as repentance and righteous living. Daniel’s advice to Nebuchadnezzar was : “Redeem your sins by doing righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the poor” (Dan 4:27).

We have to be careful about getting hooked on a single metaphor, and making it into the entire, literal truth of what happened on the Cross. Unfortunately, since Anselm, some kind of substitutionary theory of atonement has almost become a badge of Christian ‘orthodoxy’ and those of us who find it unsatisfactory (and even sometimes bizarre or disturbing) have been made to feel as if we have somehow devalued what Jesus did for us when we are trying to find a better way of understanding it and explaining it.

Brian

I may no longer be capable of articulating a comprehensive version of atonement theory, as I probably was during my theologically more active days….But I DID promise to pray about how to say what I do know about this (by experience? by the Spirit? by revelation?) and here is what has come of that:

I believe in God’s progressive revelation of Himself through history. By this I do not mean the naive progressivism of the privileged West of a century ago, assuming that things were always going to get better, or the new age Aquarian thinking of 40 years ago which placed us on the verge of harmony and understanding abounding for all people. Rather, I mean a ‘biblical’ (to use a much-discussed word in this conversation!) view that God has determined to reveal Himself progressively, increasingly, through time; that the New Testament undeniably provides us with a closer, more intimate look at the heart of the Father than the Old Testament did.

Not only that, but I believe in a certain DIRECTION of that progressive revelation: He is working to reveal Himself on the INSIDE, to write His laws and His judgments in our hearts, to free us from dependence on outer forms and rules and to empower us (by His Spirit) to INTERNALIZE the content of what He wants to convey to us, to fulfull His ultimate passion (as in the book by Frank Viola that Mike sent to me, or as in Gene Edwards) to purify a bride for Himself.

In this view, when mankind (= we) sinned, we became broken: we broke our communion with God the source of our life; we broke our own integrity, our goodness, own personal identity and health and wholeness; we became fragmented and alienated from one another and from our very selves as a consequence of our broken communion with God.

But God by His nature could never be content with this state of affairs. As has been eloquently shared by several of you, the Cross happened because WE required it: God in compassion for us entered into our brokenness and experienced it so that we could be made whole. As Apostle Paul says, he who was rich became poor for us, he who was Righteousness became sin for us, so that we could become the righteousness of God in him.

Jesus identified with our INTERNAL condition of lost-ness and alienation, with all of its pain, so that we could become whole in Him–from the inside out. As has also been eloquently stated in this discussion, this killed Him, but He was raised from the dead by the Spirit of Holiness and became the source for all our life and hope and wholeness: the good news of the Gospel.

Sorry to say that I can’t put one of Mike’s labels on this–I don’t know which of those it may seem closest to, and I don’t even have a label for it other than to call it “The Broken God Theory.” I know that God chose not to remain aloof from our alienation but to identify with it and become our sin so we can be healed. In Isaiah 61 he says he came to bind up the brokenhearted. The idea of brokenness covers both the sin itself (Jesus died to forgive us) and it consequences in our bodies and souls (Jesus came to heal us).

I want to express my appreciation for the efforts of the universalists in this conversation (notably Brian D. Smith) to make sense of the death of Jesus for us without the harshness of judgmentalism that Calvinists and other traditionalists favor. I see you as striving mightily to retain a view that is highly honrong to the reputation of God. The centrality of the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world and seated on the throne, the power of the endless life of the Melchizedek priest, stands without question, and the voice of those who have admitted that we may never arrive at complete (or even functionally satisfying) understanding of how this works needs to be heeded. Yet I would proclaim that the search is valid (as long as we refuse to take our half-formed conclusions too seriously!) and that our inquiring minds (as those of Mike and his friend Johnny) need the liberty to explore the depths and heights of this.

Thank you for the privilege of sharing, and for your willingness to hear me.

Peter

You said “Just to set the record straight…
Johnny quoted Leviticus 14:12-13 where indeed a lamb was to be sacrificed. But the passage starts by saying that “this shall be the ritual for the leprous person at the time of his cleansing” (14:1), which is quite different from the sin offering described in Leviticus 4&5 for which the appropriate sacrifice is a goat or a sheep and not a lamb.”

But doesn’t that make sense, though? I mean, when you look at Jesus’ crucification as simply atonement for my sins [which are many and are actions that I take ] but for the fact that I am a sinful person. That I am unclean. That there is something about me that is fundamentally flawed. In Jesus’ time lepars were considered unclean, and dirty and filthy. They were truly the untouchables of their era. This is a physical metaphor for who we are as people. The Lord knew that the issue was not sin(s) i.e. the things we do, but the issue was our state of being. We were unclean, dirty, filthy, disgusting, flawed, fallen, sinful, unacceptableintheeyesofGod race. So yes, you are absolutely right, a goat or sheep sacrifice would not have been nearly enough to cover who we were, because that would have only covered our actions. We needed a sacrifice to deal with who we were, not what we did.

Also, since you are getting completely hung up on semantics, lambs are sheep.