IT’S
THE GOSPEL TRUTH!
—the
atonement remixed—
April 20 (Passover/Orthodox
Palm Sunday)—April 27 (Pascha/Easter), 2008.
Meditation on the Columbine
(‘dovelike’) bloodshed of innocents.
In remembrance of Cassie
René Bernall and Rachel Joy
Scott.
The proclamation of God’s
Kingdom is communicated in the historical narratives about Jesus of
Nazareth—his conception, birth, baptism, temptation, teaching, deeds,
trial, death, resurrection, ascension, sending of Holy Spirit, and promised
return to earth in judgment—in accord with a host of ancient prophecies,
fulfilled as noted by his disciples in the written testimonies of the
New Testament, and further validated by the ensuing course of performance
recorded without collusion by a host of leaders and varied witnesses
from the early churches scattered across the far-flung Roman Empire
for the next few centuries.
These documents establish
that Jesus was no ordinary mortal. His birth was a human impossibility.
His immersion by John the Baptist was accompanied by a dove and voice
from the sky. His teaching was utterly astonishing, such as no
human has ever communicated. His personal claims went beyond audacious.
His deeds were extraordinary and wonderfully beneficial. Although
his behavior aroused intense envy and hatred from the leaders and scholars
of his own Jewish race, he remained serene and non-retaliatory amid
all opposition, even when this turned predictably lethal. Yet
their plot only advanced God’s plot line.
Jesus was conceived without
a human father, claiming God as his Father who had commissioned him
to save his own people from their sins. He taught the way of righteousness
by clarifying the meaning of the commandments bequeathed in the Law
of Moses and by authoritatively issuing new, more thoroughgoing directives.
He claimed not to demolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them.
Accordingly, he claimed to be without sin. He declared that the
official custodians of those Writings, to the contrary, had corrupted
them in violation of God’s desire, had descended to the level of oppressing
and destroying people, had become too self important and hardhearted
to change their minds, and were therefore in succession to experience
his Father’s angry condemnation. Their response to such public
denunciation was that he must be destroyed, and, in sync with God’s
secret plan for extreme rescue, he must.
The condemnation of Jesus
by Jewish sacred hierarchy and civic establishment, in cooperation with
Roman authorities, along with the howling complicity of the general
population who had benefited profoundly from his teaching and countless
miraculous healings for over three years of public ministry, was a lawless
spectacle of jealous, conceited, and cowardly human beings under the
inspiration of Satan. According to plan, God cut their leashes
in order to exhibit the extreme sinfulness of sin. After training
a corps of students to replicate his actions and explanations, and eventually
act in his stead, Jesus surrendered to arrest by his bullying foes,
letting them do as they pleased, yet remained uncorrupted and unvindictive
despite all assaults, in accord with the real thrust of Scripture.
This he accomplished solely by the power of the Holy Spirit he received
at immersion, even while undergoing the inexpressible agony of betrayal
and abandonment by close friends, trumped-up charges, false witnesses,
judicial misbehavior, adverse sentencing, unprovoked abuses, and excruciating
torture accompanied by tormenting taunts of mocking spectators.
No one on earth stood up for him.
So it went with Joseph,
Job, Jeremiah, and more. But in addition, due to a curse of the
Mosaic Law invoked not for any personal sin but for being trussed up
onto a piece of timber by his executioners, Jesus even suffered the
respectful averting of his dear Father’s eyes, who had entrusted that
Law into the hands of angels and humans, capable of misappropriating
it to such degrading, unviewable ends.
By such unlawful procedures,
perpetrated by respectable officials, in the strategic sufferance of
God, Jesus was made a sin
offering, i.e., what happened at his cross was a heinous
sin of fiendish magnitude—an official, public
atrocity against God alone! The offering to God of animals,
slaughtered via Levitical procedures, had all along been ritually depicting
this ominous, future human sacrifice of Jesus by the whole nation of
Israel. Flawless cattle, lambs, doves, etc., most notably in the
once-per-year Day of Atonement, were but shadowy representatives, inferior
substitutes, for the once-for-all sacrifice of God’s sinless Son.
By shedding and even daring to invoke the blood of this Lamb of God,
the people were calling down curse and condemnation upon themselves
and their children alike, unless and until they should open their eyes,
see who Jesus really was, make an about face in faith, and be saved
from God’s mounting wrath against the incorrigible.
At death, Jesus descended
into the wilderness of the unseen, like the ancient ritual scapegoat,
bearing the depravity of the many who laid hands on him to put him to
death rather than calling legions of angels to avenge his assassination
and make them bear the weight of their own crime instead, which, like
a millstone, sunk him to Hades. Yet even there he heralded the
news of his imminent conquest of death to spirits in captivity, in order
that he should head up and complete the liberation of all things in
heaven, on earth, and under the earth.
Due to his courageous obedience to his Father’s desire, faithful even to tasting death on a Roman cross, Jesus ever remained in God’s favor and graciousness. Accordingly, God did not leave his existence in the unseen but justified him in a cosmic coup—an unparalleled overthrow of injustice!—by raising him on the third day, thereby totally reversing his condemnation at the hands of the wicked and in effect condemning the real sin instead. By this utterly unheard-of judicial action—raising up the murder victim instead of summarily dispatching the murderers for their punishing blows—God could both remain righteous and also show overwhelming graciousness to outright criminals who deserved only termination. Hence God’s own personal righteousness is most arrestingly and unequivocally revealed from heaven in his resurrecting Jesus from the dead.
Equally significant is
the fact that no divine justice whatever, penal or otherwise, was manifest
at his cross. None. The people of Israel, blind of heart,
mistakenly attributed the fate of Jesus to God’s condemnation
and his humiliation to God’s anger; this seemed clear to them.
Much rather, his wounds were their offenses; his getting strung
up was their doing, their crime. His lynching was
their fault! In his mortal weakness, he was still learning
obedience to his Father by such grueling discipline—suffering wrongful
abuse and severe trials from Satan, not from God!—the better
to sympathize with human weaknesses, help those similarly tempted, and
moderate with the ignorant and straying. By enduring and passing
this divine test of painful discipline he ushers in sustainable peace
between a conciliatory heaven and an estranged planet, one offender
at a time.
Messiah’s accepting
the burden of assault relieved his assailants of the wrong. By
this superior service to many, Jesus achieved the justification
of all who trust him. For by absorbing the mortal weight
of his unjust cross, the One against whom every sin is ultimately committed
decisively renounced his Messianic entitlement to condemn them, then
and there, but absolved them at the cost of his own life instead—a
bittersweet exchange—for he came to save, not to damn. By not
saving himself from their fatal piercings, he prepared the way for his
Father to act on appeal, from heaven, in supervening justice instead!
This is the righteousness of God that could only become historically
visible by the peerless faithfulness of this Man of Sorrows; this was
the heavenly Father’s covenantal response to the deadly plight of
his trustworthy earthly partner in covenant—his suffering Servant.
And it spelled RESURRECTION! This inaugurated the celestial
reward of the Just One. By his titanic labors throughout his entire
life, he procured the inheritance of the whole universe and the pre-eminent
title, ‘Lord of All’! This is why we should gain from his
reward. His plight justified our right!
In accord with the divine
justice spelled out in the Law, Prophets, and Psalms, the Victim was
overcompensated for his suffering of abuse and received the Victor’s
wreath—a transcendent reward of glory that far outweighs his anguish.
Thus Jesus became a ransom in exchange for many. Satan, in his
perennial folly, thirsted for the blood of his rival for the kingdoms
of earth, and God, in his agelong wisdom, paid him his price.
Accordingly, although by one offence of one person—Adam, who yielded
to Satan’s ploy—the whole human race was banned from the Tree of
Life and ineluctably dies; yet by the obedience of one person—the
Second Adam, who yielded to Satan’s play—the one just award of immortal
life was made available to Adam’s descendants in the overflowing gift
of the Holy Spirit.
Thus the Father and the Son, in a fair battle (also of wits), outflanked the Adversary and conferred their Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy on all who trust this message, commencing the steady overturn of Satan’s predatory regime. The towering enormity of evil that one nation invested to pierce their own King paid massive dividends of good for all nations without discrimination. What the Jewish hierarchy meant for evil to one man, God meant for good to all mankind. The imperial plan of the Deity more than routed the imperious plot of the Devil, whose cup of affliction Messiah drank amenably, valiantly, to the dregs.
By the Lord strategizing
the lifting of his Shepherd Boy on a cross—indirectly, benignly striking
him a coup de grâce that scattered his flock; and by his innocent Servant
lifting the load imposed by the many who committed the felony of taking
his life; and, further, by God coming to his rescue via the supreme
justice of lifting him in turn from among the dead, all humanity is
now being drawn back to God through Jesus, the Messiah of Israel
now become Lord of All! This weighty story is itself invested
with the gravitational force to draw people back to God in love and
loyalty. Its inherent light and power are not, however, coercive.
Those whose activities are vicious may resist this Sun by their own
inherent power as satellites reflecting God’s image, exerting their
residual gravity to deflect his inviting rays and court disastrous collision
and outer darkness. The energizing explanation about Christ’s
resurrection from death-by-crucifixion is necessary but not sufficient
to benefit us, for it must first be blended with our faith in order
to operate redemptively, in accord with the wisdom of God’s benign
desire that everyone be salvaged and realize the truth, but without
being overpowered.
That is why God regards
faith as righteousness and why it is flatly impossible to please him
without it, for we must believe that he becomes a rewarder of those
seeking him out, as this history verifies in spades. He alone
is the knower of hearts, so he exclusively is qualified to attribute
righteousness publicly to those with faithful hearts. Yet this
trust is not a human action but a product of hearing the credible testimony
the Holy Spirit gathered into Holy Scripture, exhaled from heaven into
terrestrial substance.
This explanation is God’s dynamo of salvation
because it generates a trust that pays him high honor for who he is,
what he says, and what he did at inconceivable personal cost.
God chose the lowly switch of faith to actuate the relaying of his gift
of Holy Spirit into his denatured creation, for that alone pays him
due credit. No activity of any sinner has the capability of evoking
such favor from God. In the wisdom of love, he selected a non-act—the
spark of faith induced by the magnetic ‘Crossurrection’ event—to
precipitate his downpour of undeserved graciousness, the just deserts
of the heroic labors of Christ alone. Thus we
partake in our Champion’s triumph!
That nuclear moment contained the potency to conciliate the whole world to God, for it proved dramatically that, when push came to shove, God laid aside his sole, supreme right to account their sins to the many who conspired to nail up his precious Son. That is why we can officially urge every person to be conciliated to God! The attested fact that Jesus—who was demonstrated to be God’s chosen Messiah by his authoritative teaching, extraordinary powers, innocent conduct under appalling affliction, and ultimately rising up from the grave itself—in spite of affronts and insults, still refused to avenge himself and destroy those who were thereby proved to be in the wrong all along, poignantly reveals that God had never nurtured hostility toward the wayward, but was ever ready, in fact eager, to pardon and accept his alienated creatures back into irenic, loving relationship. However, by the logic of traditional justice under the sun, the conspirators of their Messiah’s crucifixion had nothing better to expect than their own frightful execution for treachery and treason. They were not clement; could God be?
Yet against all odds,
flying in the face of vengeful traditions, this history of a cross in
indissoluble connection with a resurrection depicts graphically the
authentic path for seeking peace, for it unveils what it took God to
win back a race whose perceptions of him were debased in gross, seemingly
irremediable ignorance. Astonishingly, God in effect appeased,
placated, and pacified our belligerent species, movingly showing he
was more than willing—passionate!—to sacrifice his own due
honor and sovereign prerogatives as the Lawmaker, holding nothing
back, even to the extent of covering strings of sins for multiplied
generations, if it meant drawing his deluded yet beloved creatures out
of the webs of Satan—a liar, thief, defiler, and murderer from the
start, bent only on devouring them and defaming their Maker’s
reputation—and so demonstrating himself to be far more: the
Lifemaker! This cross was God’s olive branch; he buried
the hatchet.
To this end, the invisible
One, out of love, sent his own Son—whom he reproduced after his own
kind before the ages of time, and through whom he created the visible
universe—to be born of human flesh and bone and to learn, through
suffering abuse from the very creatures he was commissioned to save,
how to faithfully obey his Father’s voice and yearning heart.
Jesus was the visible image and likeness of his Father in heaven and
his audible explanation on earth—the ideal characterization of what
we should assume as the persona of the one true God in order to serve
and worship him devoutly in spirit and truth. The Lord masterfully
modeled what the Father desires all his offspring to imitate.
These empirical cross
and resurrection events, based on the surviving apostolic testimony,
show unambiguously that Father and Son were operating in tandem from
identical motives—the visible Son rendering a sterling portrayal of
the core character of his imperceptible Father. Teamwork to
perfection! We see awe-inspiring solidarity between the Son’s
graciousness toward his many assailants and the Father’s graciousness
both in reprieving the offenders and in repaying the Son for his faithful
representation, holding nothing back, even to the supreme sacrifice.
Only the magnitude was different. In return for the strenuous
labors of his withering soul, Jesus reaped a gigantic overcompensation
that beggars description. As spoils of his victory he received
vastly in excess even of his own investment as the only-born Son of
Deity. Indeed, he had emptied his very self, the full contents
of his identity—love, graciousness, truth—out of his native divine
form and was deposited essentially into the form of a virtual slave,
in human fashion, the firstborn son of a virgin of David’s royal lineage.
Yet his reward can scarcely be regarded as earnings or payment for all
that; it can be described fairly only as booty, winnings, an
incomparable prize! For here we must factor the quantum of
the Father’s own magnanimity in the formula of salvation: E=MC²
where Saving Energy is the product of Messiah and Crucifixion
taken to the next Higher Power—the universal ‘Messiah-Energy
equation’ for human conversion!
We are converted by hearing
of the Father’s public restorative justice that raised his Son from
the humiliated estate decreed by vicious men who, happily, were not
given the last word. The authentic judicial decree of Heaven’s
supreme court in answer to this malfeasance was graciousness and
peace, not wrath and war. Satan squandered his energies on
torturing his rival to a bloody pulp, flaunting shamelessly his imagined
triumph. In starkest possible contrast, the prodigal Son, in consummate
emulation of his Father, spent his all with lavish munificence on turning
enemies into friends. That blood red cross was God’s white flag
and peace offering to draw us near his awesomely wholesome self, without
reprisal.
To be sure, it was God
himself who had purposed Messiah Jesus to be a protective shelter around
the sins of the whole world through the faithfulness of his upright
existence, figured in his blood. In fact, it was precisely this
superlative innocence of impassioned obedience that rendered his Son’s
outrageously shed blood so precious in his Father’s sight that it
moved him to erupt in utterly unprecedented public justice, not only
to raise him up again from the dead, now immortal, but also to raise
him higher yet, even to his own right hand of sovereignty, authority,
honor, glory, might, and more! Such an act has no equal in history
or in heaven, before or since. His blood spoke better than that
of upright Abel; he pled forgiveness for the mob that surrounded
him with misery, reproach, and sanguinary liquidation. Thus our
protection from God’s emergent anger comes via our emancipation from
its cause; this is participatory atonement.
Most momentous for our
present experience, the Holy Spirit is the divine active agent that
tears down our string of sins. The wrongful pouring out of the
blood of the Anointed One was more than atoned for by the rightful outpouring
of God’s anointing Spirit in extravagant repayment. When Jesus
as Chief Priest sat down on the throne of his Father in heaven, his
affectionate protective covering of our spiraling strings of sin was
complete, the circuit of God’s rectifying plan was closed, and fresh
power started surging back into his ailing creation to graciously transmit
revitalizing healing and wholesomeness to a failing humanity.
The blood loss of God’s Son was the inestimable gain of Adam’s children,
not because it was right in any sense, but precisely because it was
dead wrong! This is the lasting legacy of Messiah’s ordeal of
abuse for us, dying for our sins and getting requited superabundantly
by a superior justice that reversed his voluntarily accepted doom.
Thanks be to God for this indescribable
gift of Spirit he promised! The inner spirit of the Law was
graciousness and truth. This, justice demands; this alone satisfies
God. This, only Jesus offered, even to the dread cross; by
this sign he conquered! The obedient Boy must be killed
or the Father’s transcendent resurrectionary justice must lay
dormant forever, along with all its overcompensating redemption for
the cosmos. The secret is out!
But that’s not all.
God’s holiness, that is, his lifemaking wholesomeness that
stems the tide of death-dealing decadence, was also defined in that
resplendent event of restored fortunes. That’s because Christ’s
rightful award entailed this gift of the Holy Spirit. This vivifying
power from on high was poured out on the day of Pentecost as a security
deposit to confirm our own inheritance of allotments on the future new
earth. We have a right to become children of God only because
his Son had a right to have seed royal; so when he was cut off peremptorily
from the land of the living, God overcompensated him…royally!
It’s all about him! All who join his body by faith are born
above as naturalized citizens of the New Jerusalem (‘inherit-shalom’)
being readied for those who love him. Even now, his Spirit of
wholesomeness brings miraculous creation-restoring power and other benefits
of sonhood in the wake of Christ’s self-sacrifice, therein substantively
defining holiness by its manifold expressions through us. However,
the ultimate measure of a salvation of such proportions is our getting
to become participants of the divine nature, partaking of God’s own
virtues and destiny—heirs with Christ forever to freely enjoy the
vernal aurora of a repristinated world!
To reiterate this gripping
Logic of how sin gets vanquished: Jesus, the Messiah of one small
nation, literally took on the burden of its many crimes against him.
Yet God’s Son was also unimpeachably sinless, so when they literally
took him down in disgrace, God himself literally took him up
in grace from the grave again and decisively acquitted him, awarding
him rightful damages. Yet astoundingly, he was vindicated without
vindictiveness or damage to that guilty assault team! Rather,
by means of breaking open the treasuries of the celestial order—even
God’s own uncreated nature!—he put unheard-of graciousness on
public display by way of open-hearted invitation to all comers.
This modus operandi—amazing grace!—achieved
the breakthrough that succeeded in conciliating not merely the nation
of Israel, for that would have represented far too small a return on
Christ’s career investment in the form of a humble, humiliated slave.
All nations—in fact the whole inhabited world, its human culture,
plus the marred creation order itself!—were lovingly swept up when
God threw his arms around his mangled Child in regenerating embrace.
Jesus’ faithful obedience—the force; his cross—the Archimedean
point; God’s public justice—the lever; Messiah’s death—the trigger;
his resurrection—the outburst of vindication that exalted him to the
highest heavens; Pentecost—the celestial rebound of the Spirit of
sonship, lifting the earth in a rising tide of liberation out of the
entwining bonds of slavery.
Still, that’s not the whole story. The indignation of God’s avenging judgment was mercifully delayed till the very last moment for that callous generation of Jews to whom God kindly decreed this Proclamation be heralded first, as a top priority. For forty crucial years—30 to 70 A.D.—God’s preferential favor to the sons of Jacob was liberally extended. A diverse multitude did change their minds about God and became loyal to their real Messiah whom they had horribly mistreated in a sin offering to end all sin offerings—a sin to end all sins! Yet not everyone fell for this divinely happy solution to Adam’s fall. Some held out in gross violence against these non-retaliating, peacemaking followers of the despised Nazarene and kept imputing sin and failure to their Lord and Savior. Their comeuppance was the ghastly internecine warfare of Jewish sects which gruesomely savaged one another in the horror of desolation that tragically cleansed Jerusalem of its self-accursed population before the Roman legions could even manage to breach the inner gates. This apocalypse was the paradigm and warning preview of God’s Bowles of Judgment on all nations to whom this announcement of his Kingdom of justice, graciousness, mercy, peace, and joy would be heralded.
To summarize the pattern:
1) initial communication of this divine Proclamation, 2) oppression
and persecution by its vicious as well as merely ignorant enemies, 3)
explosive publicity, sympathy, and broader acceptance, even by bitter
foes, 4) the Lord’s presence in wholesome anger to cleanse
the land of all who still reject his terms of peace and personal purification
but pollute the earth with terror and corruption. So with eyes
opened to the true meaning of the Messianic climax, we can now retrofit
the paradigm of overcompensating
restorative justice to the old covenant Scriptures and, lo!
They reveal Jesus throughout! In retrospect, this is why the
truth had to remain a secret, hidden for an age, until God himself should
turn the key, open the door, switch on the power, and light up the transforming
vision of integral, full-orbed redemption, in communion with the Holy
Spirit—capable of counteracting the unscrupulous, perverted, horrifying,
brutal outrages of Satan’s tyrannical empire. Things are not
the way they seem.
Not surprisingly, even
the complex spectrum of the one God’s own plural nature, which he
kept strategically veiled to effect Satan’s unmasking and overthrow
and mankind’s restoration, is most vividly refracted through this
tri-faceted historical prism of Cross-Resurrection-Pentecost,
casting unique glory, by turns, on the respective roles of the Son,
the Father, and the Holy Spirit, within a wholesome love triangle of
gracious, lifesaving exchanges that unleashed a shock wave of miraculous
empowering to renew the disfigured face of the earth by propagating
a chain reaction of compassion, kindness, conciliation, and cleansing
revival. This Messianic denouement remains the surpassingly definitive
exposition of the name of Jehovah, the one true God, to whom be credit
for the ages of the ages!
Furthermore, this bedrock
historic-narration-plus
In conclusion, we find
but two ultimate destinies: either divine adoption with all the
blessings of fatherly graciousness appertaining thereto, enjoyed forever
in a virgin creation, primal as a thornless rose; or final extermination
under God’s indignation in a lake of consuming fire, following the
inconceivable torment of coming to realize too late what actually might
have been. It’s not a hard choice; if you haven’t already,
you can make peace with the Lifemaker now, this very moment. Just
say yes. Then live for Jesus whatever it takes, whatever the cost.
Welcome back to the apostolic
start! Welcome you tired, poor, oppressed, sick, abused, betrayed,
defamed! You, without hope, welcome home!
Let the thirsty come! Let whoever wants take the water
of life freely! Cheer up and welcome
The Gospel Truth—He rose! Welcome Wholesome Spirit!
Then hold on tight.
ODE TO THE
VICTOR
Together we stand or fall,
God is our all in all,
We have no other help beside.
Whether we win or lose,
You’ll not our hope confuse;
Jesus, our Victor, You abide!
You reign o’er heav’n and earth,
Over their depth and girth;
Nothing redemption’s pow’r can stay.
The new humanity
We shall forever be
And o’er creation’s wealth hold sway.
We who by staunch belief
Will heav’n and earth receive,
Henceforth no condemnation know,
For by Your own shed blood
We have the Spirit’s flood
To will and work until we go.
Your reign will never cease
Till all Your enemies,
And death, under Your feet be placed.
God will be all in all;
At last, since mankind’s fall,
Sin’s curse shall finally be erased!
Berkeley, 1972
Composed: March
20 (Purim/Maundy Thursday/spring), 21 (Good Friday) – 23 (Easter Sunday)
– April 20 (9th Anniversary of
Columbine/Passover/Orthodox Palm Sunday) – 24 (Orthodox Maundy
Thursday) – 25 (Orthodox Good Friday) – 27 (Orthodox Pascha/Easter)
– May 1 (May Day/International Labor Day) – 5 (Cinco de Mayo) –
11 (Pentecost/Mother’s Day). © 2008 by Ronald Lee Roper.
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