Thought about Jesus: March 2011

by Jeff Treder

Many Christians, and just about all thinking Christians, have wondered why Jesus had to be crucified. Why does the Bible say that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb.9:22)? Shouldn’t it be possible for God to forgive repentant sinners without bloodshed? If not, why not? How can blood be a cleansing or purifying agent (as in 1John 1:7)? Why, in fact, is the Bible so bloodsoaked? These questions, which may puzzle Christians, are often cited by non-Christians as a reason for rejecting faith in Christ.

This issue, I think, needs to be approached from two directions, in order to find out where, if anywhere, they meet. The starting points are forgiveness and self-sacrifice.

Forgiveness

To begin understanding forgiveness, we must note that it is a transaction between persons. Trees don’t forgive lightning bolts, and cats don’t forgive dogs. This might seem too obvious to mention, but it isn’t, because it raises an essential point: forgiveness is a transaction between persons. A person is a self-aware being with the ability to reason, and reasoning includes the ability to make choices and to act on them, thereby affecting the course of events in the natural world. Persons, that is, have “free will,” and their will is not only free but is causative. If you deny this by asserting a rigorous determinism—philosophical, naturalistic, or religious—then you are denying that there are, in any meaningful sense, persons (except possibly God). If you believe that human beings have free will as just defined, however—if you believe, for instance, that it meant something when your spouse agreed to marry you—then you believe there can be meaningful transactions between people, as persons. Forgiveness is one such transaction.

Forgiveness presupposes an offense to be forgiven. Experience teaches us that a person can take offense when little or nothing in the way of offense has actually been given. Nevertheless, people really can offend one another, and the reason they can is that, as well as cognitive beings, we are moral beings; and the reason we are moral beings is that we were created “in the image of God.” (Gen.1:27) If human beings were merely a result of purposeless natural evolution, our moral concepts and convictions would be as illusory as the fundamental illusion that we are persons at all.

God is a moral being, and so are we, having been made in his image. But what does it mean to be “moral”? To some it suggests being obsessed with behavioral rules, for myself and, especially, for others. Or being pharisaically self-righteous and hypocritical. Or being joylessly prudish about sensuality in general and sex in particular. Or all of the above. These ideas, however, misrepresent what morality really is; and the misunderstanding can be shared equally by the prude and the playboy.

To be “moral” is simply (and profoundly) to be in relationship with another person or other persons. The canons of morality measure the quality of the relationship, either at a given moment or as measured over time. God is a moral being precisely because he exists eternally in three Persons. The relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is revealed in Scripture to be perfect in such moral categories as love, grace, goodness, loyalty, generosity, justice, and mercy. This revealed perfection is not just a matter of a divine “because I say so,” but it is revealed in God’s actions toward fallen humanity, culminating in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

God’s motive in creating Adam and Eve in his own image, clearly, was to extend the sphere of loving, joyous moral relationships. Being omniscient, knowing the end from the beginning (Isa.46:10, Rev.22:13), God knew from the outset how this project would play out, and he decided that the ultimate gain would be worth all the cost. He knew that Adam and Eve would fall into sin. But “fall into sin,” or just “the Fall” and “sin,” have become Christian buzzwords with only a vague meaning for most Christians and no meaning for most non-Christians. Nevertheless, our progenitors’ fall into sin has tremendous relevance to all of us, because it started our whole tormented history of moral offenses. Sin may be an obscure term, but it’s a devastating reality.

Our experience of moral offenses centers around our own personal relationships. It’s safe to say that you weren’t very old when you first felt offended, or when the objection “It’s not fair!” first blurted from your angry little mouth. As we mature, we give and receive all sorts of offenses: insults, snubs, ridicule, gossip, slander, betrayal, belligerence, and so forth. As our relationships spread into human society, these offenses expand into ethnic and racial conflict, oppression of the weak by the strong, slavery, warfare, sexual abuse, child abuse, and many other forms of personal, moral abuse. Offenses abound.

The trouble with all these offenses is not that they break some rule but that they tear the moral fabric of our interpersonal relationships. They break the bonds of love and trust. They divide us one from another. Most of us find this condition of social brokenness and hostility so distressing that we search for remedies. This search has been going on as long as there have been offenses, and in all that time only one remedy has been found that really works: forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness is associated more closely with Jesus Christ than with any other moral teacher. Jesus taught his followers that they must forgive everyone who offends them. This obligation covers both actual offenses and merely perceived ones (“I think she was slighting me ...”); either way, we must forgive. The sanction, the reason why we must forgive, is sobering: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matt.6:14-15) Clear enough?

To forgive someone is to pardon them, to release them from any penalty or obligation under which their offense may have placed them. It is the rejection of any desire to retaliate or get even, and the surrender of any supposed right to retaliate or get even. Thus understood, forgiveness always includes an element of sacrifice. When I forgive someone, I give up, or sacrifice, the possibility of evening the score. With minor offenses the sacrifice may seem insignificant, but when the offense is serious, the sacrificial element in forgiveness becomes more palpable.

Extreme Forgiveness

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch woman and devout Christian whose family hid many Jews from the Nazis in their home during World War II. When that “hiding place” was discovered (her well-known memoir of these events is called The Hiding Place), she and her family were arrested and sent to the death camps, where most of them perished; Corrie survived by what she called a “clerical error.” In a later book, Tramp for the Lord (1974), she told of an incident in postwar Germany that tested whether she could live what she taught.

She was teaching a class on Christian love and forgiveness. After the class a big man came up to her and told her how much he appreciated her teaching, since he had recently become a Christian. He evidently didn’t recognize her, but she recognized him. He had been one of the cruelest guards at Ravensbrück, the camp where she and her sister Betsie had been imprisoned and where Betsie died from starvation and disease. Now he was holding out his hand to her.

Corrie recounts how torn she was inside. She knew she should forgive him. Could she disobey the teaching of Christ that she herself had just taught? She knew she must forgive him. But she thought of Betsie, and she couldn’t bring herself either to feel forgiveness or to give it. She prayed to God to help her, to enable her. Then, as she relates, she took his hand. “For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.”

Extreme forgiveness, as in this instance, involves extreme pain. It is emotional pain, and since our emotions are woven into our physical bodies, it is a kind of physical pain. It is also unquestionably a kind of sacrifice; Corrie had to sacrifice—to surrender, renounce, release—her wholly human desire for justice or vengeance to be done. (However we label this desire, it is real and potent.) And yet, even in extreme forgiveness, with all its pain and sacrifice, no sure ground for forgiveness has been established. Nor has the body of the forgiver been pierced or violated. No blood has been shed.

But why should blood be shed? How would that establish any grounds for forgiveness? What is the connection between bloodshed and forgiveness?

Self-Sacrifice

Now let’s come at the subject from the other direction, that of self-sacrifice. Jesus, the Bible tells us, voluntarily sacrificed his life so that those who entrust themselves to him as their Lord and Savior might be released from the penalty of death and be able to enjoy eternal life with him. That sentence compresses a lot of theology, and we will unpack it as we go along, but let’s begin with a more down-to-earth and easily understandable instance of self-sacrifice: a soldier throwing himself over a live grenade in order to save his comrades’ lives. In this case the sacrifice is bodily, bloody, and absolute, and it gives life to others, at least in the sense of protecting and preserving their lives. The soldier’s action is universally recognized as noble and heroic, without the cynical sneer with which those terms are often regarded. Although his buddies’ lives have been preserved, however, we must also recognize that their deliverance is partial and limited. They are still subject to death—and in battle, that may come at any time.

Already, though, we can glimpse the link between forgiveness and self-sacrifice. If extreme forgiveness involves extreme pain as well as a form of personal sacrifice, and if life can be preserved through self-sacrificial death, might these two apparently disparate things turn out to be the same thing, in the ultimate case? Forgiveness, remember, is the remedy for breaches in our personal relationships, and our ultimate personal relationship, as creatures of God, is our relationship with him. Our relationship with God has been broken by the sin of Adam and Eve, in which sin we all have continued to live ever since. Theologically this condition is known as “original sin,” a concept that has been maligned by some and misunderstood by many.

“You Only”

Perhaps the most direct approach to original sin is through Psalm 51. In this psalm, David is seeking forgiveness from God for his sin against Bathsheba and Uriah—that is, for taking advantage of his position as king and commander-in-chief to seduce Bathsheba and arrange for the murder of her husband Uriah. Here, plainly, we are talking about serious personal offenses. In one of the more startling statements in the Bible, though, David says to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” (Ps.51:4) We have plenty of evidence that David wasn’t an idiot, and therefore we can’t just take at face value his statement that he has sinned “only” against God—and not, by implication, against Bathsheba and Uriah.

In fact, the statement reveals the profundity of David’s understanding of his situation. If God were not in the picture, sin would not be sin. If we are not God’s creatures, we are merely very clever animals, with no more moral obligation than a baboon or a crocodile. If our moral values are merely something we have invented, then they are something we can change at our convenience. But David knew better than that. He knew that moral standards exist, and are what they are, because our Creator is a moral God, “altogether righteous.” (Ps.19:9) God defines good and evil simply by virtue of who he is. David certainly knew he had committed serious offenses against Bathsheba and Uriah, but those offenses constitute “sin” only because every moral offense is primarily an offense against God. God is always primary.

The next point is extremely important and sometimes overlooked. If sin is always an offense against God, just what is the nature of the offense? “How have I offended God?” Joe Average might wonder, “I hardly ever even give him a thought.” But there are two essential matters that Joe ignores. First, God is our Creator, and his purpose in creating us “in his image” was so that we might have a relationship with him—give him a thought, to start with. He is, after all, the one and only source of our life and of all the things that we enjoy in this world. Second, God is good. This assertion is so simple and familiar, trite almost, that we can easily miss its tremendous import. Given that God is sovereign and almighty, his goodness is the best possible news. And God is good not in our ordinary sense of the word—“better than average”—God is thoroughly good, absolutely good, supremely good. His nature is entirely good: benevolent, generous, kind, loving, compassionate.

That being so, our neglect of him is not inconsequential, it is in itself an offense. It is ingratitude. And, in reality, all of us have offended against God in more ways than neglect. According to the Bible, we have turned away from him and embraced the whole conglomerate of selfishness: self-centeredness, self-righteousness, self-esteem, self-justification, self-satisfaction. If this self-enterprise works for us, we become proud—complacent, smug, arrogant, egocentric. If it fails to work for us, we become depressed, bitter, angry and envious. In our natural condition, most of us are some mixture of these. Insofar as we are proud, our contempt extends not only to other people but, even more, to God. Insofar as we are bitter and angry, God is the ultimate target of our blame.

No matter how much we neglect God or despise or revile him or explain him away, his goodness as our Creator—and, in Jesus Christ, as our Redeemer—remains constant. That is why human sin is “exceedingly sinful” (Rom.7:13, where the Greek is a phrase that could be translated “super-exceedingly sinful”). God’s goodness (again, as fully revealed in Jesus Christ) is immeasurable; therefore our denial and rejection of him is immeasurably bad. Our separation from him, even eternal separation—death—is not only the direct result of our rejecting him, it is what our actions and attitudes deserve. It is our just punishment.

What, after all, is justice? It means an appropriate correlation between a moral offense and its punishment. As well as being perfectly good, God is perfectly just; and most of us regard justice as a genuine moral value. If a moral offense is not punished appropriately, justice is not served. What if a human judge, out of the “goodness of his heart,” pardoned (forgave) a serial rapist and set him free with no punishment? We may not be comfortable with the idea of punishment; we may think it is too often excessive or prejudiced; but few of us see it as expendable.

God is morally perfect. His heart’s desire has always been to forgive the humans who have rejected him. He knew that such forgiveness must involve sacrifice, and he had no problem with that. Being also perfectly just, however, he has always known that moral rejection both produces and deserves moral separation, which for his creatures means death, since he is the only source of life. God’s goal and desire is eternal life for his human creatures, but their freely chosen rebellion frustrated both his goal and his desire. How could he cut through this knot and, in one mighty act, solve both his problem and ours?

The Death that Brings Life

Nothing about human sin, human selfishness, or human history has ever taken God by surprise. Before he created Adam and Eve, he—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—made an “eternal covenant” (Heb.13:20) with himself, through which he would solve forever the problem of human sin. Because our sinful separation from God was freely chosen, it was not a problem that he could solve simply by decree, from the outside, without violating human freedom. On the other hand, because what our sin had violated was God’s infinite goodness, his holiness, nothing we might do (even supposing, contrary to fact, that we were willing to do so) could repair the breach either. Only God and humanity united in one Person, in the incarnation of the Son, Jesus Christ, could solve the problem. Only God and humanity thus united together could simultaneously, in one freely chosen act on the cross at Calvary, make the sacrifice-of-forgiveness (as God) and suffer the just punishment for sin (as man). Furthermore, the man suffering the punishment for human sin had himself to be sinless, morally perfect, in order that his sacrifice—not needed for himself—could cover the need of all those people who trust in him as their Substitute. In Christ, finally and forever, the forgiver has not only suffered the emotional pain of extreme forgiveness, he also has shed his blood and given his life in self-sacrifice. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” (2Cor.5:19 KJV) The soldier who throws himself on the grenade is the perfect God-man whose sacrifice provides both complete forgiveness of sin and eternal life for his comrades in the foxhole. Deals don’t get any better than that.

There is more to the deal, however. It gets even better, yet at the same time, for us (I can’t speak for God), it gets more all-consuming. How can death become a source of life? Alluding to his own impending death, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) The answer to how death can become a source of life, of course, is through resurrection. But there is a difficulty here. The seeds we plant produce new physical life; the dead human bodies we bury don’t normally do so. That requires a divine miracle; and the miracle of Christ’s resurrection was a unique, one-of-a-kind event, even a unique miracle. He rose in a “glorified,” perfected human body (see 1Cor.15), and his resurrection and ascension back to heaven (Acts 1:9-11) proclaim the Father’s acceptance of his Son’s sacrifice. That accepted sacrifice became the ground of all forgiveness, both God’s forgiveness of our sin and our forgiveness of all offenses against us.

This brings us back to the question of how we can forgive, our capacity to forgive, especially when the offense is extreme. How was Corrie ten Boom able to forgive the former Nazi torturer? Her testimony is that it was only through the grace and power of God‘s love for her and for all sinners, as manifested in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. She had been born again through faith in Christ; through Christ her spirit had been raised from the dead into a new life; through her faith in Christ she had entered into the New Covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20).

The New Covenant in Christ’s blood is the final outworking of the “eternal covenant” spoken of in Heb.13:20, where it says that God, “through the blood of the eternal covenant,” has “brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus.” This eternal covenant has been worked out in stages through the course of human history, in separate but linked covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the nation of Israel (mediated by Moses), David, and finally with all the people of God—those who entrust their lives to him—through Jesus Christ. As God promised through Jeremiah, “I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.” (Jer.32:40) And again through Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezek.36:26)

We enter the New Covenant and receive all its benefits by surrending our old, independent, self-centered life. Paul’s confession is the confession of every born-again believer: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal.2:20) Only through the embrace of my own death, in this sense, can I enter the new life of the New Covenant. Now Jesus is my King and my God, and I am his willing, loyal subject, his obedient servant. Now my only life is my life in him. Now his joy is my joy. As for forgiving, it is the new spiritual heart that God gave me when I was born again which enables me to forgive from the heart, wholeheartedly. But the new heart presupposes both Christ’s death and my own, which is why the whole Bible is so soaked in blood. The “blood of Christ” refers specifically to his blood as shed on the cross; it is a graphic way of referring to his sacrificial death on behalf of sinners. The blood of all those sacrificial animals under the Old Covenant, splattered all over the altar and the sinners (see, for instance, Ex.24:4-8), prefigured the shed blood of Jesus. His blood cleanses because his death enables forgiveness.

And so we have come full circle, back to the summing-up observation in the book of Hebrews that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (9:22) The only way to life is through death, in Christ. Without forgiveness, our life remains crippled and blighted by guilt, anger, resentment, self-pity, and division. In her ministry among victims of Nazi brutality, Corrie ten Boom noted that those who were able to forgive were best able to rebuild their lives. Jesus Christ has made that possible.

Thought about Jesus

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Winteredge

Monday, March 7, 2011

Why Must There Be Sacrifice?