series on the atonement – 3

We covered yesterday completely the first of God’s four problems that He faced in reconciling the God-Man relationship. That was the governmental problem, the problem of balancing justice and mercy. How do you uphold the law, show your hatred for sin, set the man you love free without giving license to others to sin? I think most of you have been able to grasp fully the dilemma that God faced governmentally as the righteous, moral governor of the universe.

And then we began to talk about his second problem which we said was the problem out of the four that most Christians, that have trouble understanding the Atonement or who have misunderstood the Atonement, find difficulty is with the second problem, the personal problem. We have been away from God, relationally for so long, speaking when I say we, of the human race, subsequent to the fall that we have lost all concept of who God really is. It started with Adam’s sense that because he had changed that God’s heart had also changed. You would think that his relationship with God to that point would have been such, would have been close enough, that he would have known that God would not have changed and that God could not have changed. And the reason that he was confused and the reason that he began to hide along with Eve really illustrates the profound alteration that really took place in his soul as a result of his, for the first time in his existence, for the first time in the history of the world, taking on a knowledge of good and evil. Moving from a place where he was getting understanding and revelation, you might say, by the drip- feed method, God not wanting to increase his revelations and his understanding faster than there was an increase in character, for obvious reasons. And suddenly this drip-feed method is transformed into a raging waterfall and there’s just knowledge everywhere. And his whole outlook, Adam’s whole outlook on everything, changed, profoundly. And we said that this sudden feeling or sense that perhaps God who yesterday had walked with him in intimate fellowship in the cool of the day was now stalking him with vindictiveness in his heart and this sort of understanding, this warped understanding of the character of God was then passed down through the ages into many, many different societies who did all kinds of things to themselves, cutting themselves, offering all kinds of gifts of appeasement to God in hope that God’s anger might be diminished at least slightly so that when He slugged them in the jaw as the result of His anger over their sin at least it wouldn’t be quite so hard.

And how this concept of God moved right into our theology concerning the Atonement itself. Concerning the act that Jesus performed on Calvary. Suffering and shedding His blood for us, for our sins, that the reason Jesus did that was to appease the angry heart of the Father and that once God’s heart was soothed and was appeased by the suffering and blood which He saw that He would be willing at that point to look at man and extend forgiveness. We also mentioned one thing at the very end yesterday illustrating that God does not have a vindictive urge. That God never wants to judge if He can possibly help it. He doesn’t want to see suffering. He doesn’t want to see calamity. He doesn’t want to see pain. The only time those things are visited upon men by God is when He comes to the point that He has absolutely no other choice and that if He doesn’t visit that judgement upon man then greater pain would result. So He’s, in taking these actions of judgement, not increasing but reducing the amount of pain and suffering in the universe. Along these lines God thought to Himself, the sin of man, there had to be some kind suffering or some kind of action, some kind of demonstration, that was unpleasant that would reveal to humanity the degree to which God hated sin and the degree to which sin was an abomination, a dangerous thing. But without visiting suffering and judgement on a lot of people, on sinners, because then we’d all be in grave danger of being the recipients of whatever God decided to do.

He decided that He Himself would bear that suffering. And in that act God profoundly reduced the amount of suffering the universe would contain by containing it within His own body, being, as far as He could. We stated that, if we refuse to respond to God’s offer to us to come and reason together, then there would come a time when God was regretfully conscious that the means at His disposal to secure man’s obedience had been exhausted. We went on to say, that it was at that moment that God’s grief would reach a climax because He realized at that point that He had to send judgement. Then I read to you the words of that song in the children’s album about the flood in Noah’s day.

I remember also in 1975-76 somewhere around there attending a scriptural leadership conference in central California at which Lauren Cunningham joined us and Campbell McAlpine was speaking. In the middle of this conference, Campbell McAlpine delivered a powerful, powerful sermon on Moses, just one of those that leaves you sort of sitting in your seat after the speaker’s finished, just not wanting to say anything but just think and contemplate what you’ve heard. But at the end of his sermon, Campbell went directly into a prophetic utterance. I’m assuming that most of you believe that that’s something God can do today if He so chooses. I think God can do anything He wants to do, including speak through human agency to a larger group of people, if it’s scriptural. I’ve seen it in operation, I’ve seen it abused. But in this particular case, it wasn’t abused. Campbell began to speak with the voice of God to us and within I would say the next thirty to sixty seconds that entire auditorium of people were either on their knees or on their faces on the ground including Campbell himself up on the platform lying there prostrate. Rarely seen anything like it. Delivering a very hard word, a word, a warning of judgement, absolutely sobbing and weeping as the message was delivered.

My mind flashes back to people like Jeremiah, who was known as the weeping prophet. And so many others in the Bible. When it came time for God to deliver the hard word, the word of warning, the word of judgement it always came through sobbing and weeping. God never enjoys that.

We often hear the statement God is a God of love but He is also a God of justice. What is there about that statement that is wrong? What is wrong with that statement? They way that most people deliver it? How many of you like this word? Give you a warm feeling? Non-threatening. Happy word. Happy word. How many of you sometimes find this word just a little bit scary?

Sometimes it’s good, I mean, if you’re the victim, this is what you want. David was crying out to God to bring justice to him all the time because of what his enemies were doing. Sometimes we look at this word and we think, “oh, no thank you.” This is a nice, cute word. God is a God of love. He’s happy, warm and nice. But He’s also a God of justice. Cold and calculating and stern and ready to pummel his enemies. When people make that statement, they are, consciously or unconsciously equating justice, God’s justice, with everything that it negative. As the opposite or the inverse of God’s love. But God’s justice, on the contrary, is the product or an attribute of His love. If God were not a God of justice; He would not be a God of love. People who have suffered; people who’ve been victimized really are the ones that understand this better than anyone else. They know they can ultimately turn to God to balance the scales, to be just to them, to be fair to them. God’s justice is not and will never be in anyway separate or divorced from His benevolence or His determination to will our highest good.

We also alluded to the fact yesterday, although not in any great deal detail, that the primary function of law is to secure the happiness and the well-being of society. The primary, the first function, purpose of law is to secure the happiness and well-being of any given society.

Laws are never intended to be ends in themselves. We don’t have law for the sake of having law. But laws are rather a means to an end which is the happiness and well-being of society. So laws, when we look at them in that light, are important, but they are not all important. They are not as important and should never be made as important as the end which they are meant to uphold or maintain. Laws can be replaced or dispensed with, only if, in so doing, the end which they uphold is not damaged in any way. So, if what we really want, our ultimate objective is the happiness and well-being of society and there is some way we can obtain that and dispense with some law, that’s okay. The law is not the ultimate, it’s a means to an end. It’s only something that we use to help preserve that which we really find important which is the happiness and well-being of society. But if in removing that law or dispensing with that law, our ultimate objective, the happiness and well-being of society, is damaged or threatened in any way then we cannot dispense with that law, we have to keep it. And an effectual substitute, a worthy substitute, a working substitute, for the normal execution of the penalty for lawbreaking is what King Darius labored earnestly, but failed to find. God, on the other hand, was able to find and provide an adequate substitute for the normal execution of the penalty and satisfy the demands of public justice. Which I’ll describe to you in a minute. And so, in God’s case, an exception would be made to the normal execution to the penalty. A pardon would be, could be granted. The biblical word for this substitution, finding something else to replace the normal sanction or the normal execution of the penalty, the biblical word for that is Atonement. So, God’s solution to His “lion’s den” problem was the governmental substitution of the sufferings of Christ for the punishment of sinners.

No, we’re not going back here to discuss the governmental problem we’re still on the personal problem and you’ll understand in a minute how this relates to that. Won’t you just for a minute, for those of you who don’t have this definition already in your notes perhaps from a previous lecture, I’m going to give you the difference in the definition of retributive justice and public justice.

Retributive justice is when the person or persons who are responsible for executing the penalty of the law look calculatingly at every individual situation and then exact strictly in accordance with the deed. In other words, they will look at what you have done and they will select a penalty or sanction that fits the deed exactly. In other words, if you put out somebody else’s eye then the penalty for that will be that your eye will also be put out. But if somebody in putting out your eye, also chops off your nose, then you will have the right to go and chop of their nose so that everything is equal. That’s retributive justice. There is no mercy and no pardon shown where retributive justice is concerned. We should also say that most of the time retributive justice can never be fully or exactly satisfied.

For example, there are all kinds of ways that people can hurt us that are non-physical. Things that people can say to us or do to us that hurt us inside, not outside, and it is very hard to find a way under retributive justice to deal with that kind of a situation. How do you know if in dispensing the penalty for what they have done to you or to someone else that that penalty will be less than what they have done to you or more than what they have done to you? How can you monitor the degree of hurt or punishment or suffering that they are going to feel compared to what they had doled out earlier? Very difficult. And how would it ever be possible for God to punish you and I, physically, for what we have done to God and His kingdom morally? And this is something that I think a lot of Christians and a lot of theologians and pastors really need to think about. It’s a very fundamental point. How in the world is God going to get satisfaction for all the moral, emotional feelings, the hurt that sin has caused Him by simply eliminating one or more physical lives? They don’t match, it’s like comparing apples and oranges.

And if God were satisfied on a personal level by somebody dying and suffering, what does that say about what kind of person He is? If I am able, when somebody wrongs me, to put that hurt aside, to absorb it, and to say, “Hey, listen, I forgive you. You don’t owe me anything. I forgive you.”. If I can do that, how come God can’t? If I don’t have to be paid back, how come God does?” If God is requiring some personal satisfaction for the hurt that sin has caused Him and the way He gets satisfaction is by watching suffering and death and blood. Then I have to say that my own moral sensibilities are more virtuous than His are because I don’t always require that. Sometimes I think I’d like to see that but there have been times in my life when I’ve been able to absorb hurt and I’m sure many of you, probably most of you, have been able to do the same – say, “Look, you hurt me but I forgive you, it’s over, it never happened”. Under retributive justice forgiveness is impossible. Forgiveness can never be granted. There must be an exact response, an exacting of a penalty that is equal to the violation. The emphasis in retributive justice is not on the end but on the law.

Public justice, however, is basically concerned with the overall interests of the public or society as a whole. Public justice is basically concerned with the overall interests of the public or society as a whole and justice is administered with the highest good of those involved as its end. Even those who are being punished. Penalties under public justice are executed the same way they are under retributive justice unless something else is done that will be equally effective in securing the public’s interests. So there is no difference really between retributive justice and public justice except the one focuses on the means to the end and the other emphasizes the end itself. And the one, public justice, that focuses on the end itself is not always that all concerned with the means to the end. The person who is administrating public justices doesn’t care particularly how the happiness and well-being of society is being preserved, only that it is. Therefore, unlike retributive justice, public justice will allow the normal penalty for a crime to be replaced with a substitute if that substitute will be equally effective in upholding or securing the public’s interests. So public justice regards the spirit of the law instead of the letter of the law. Under public justice, forgiveness is permissible if, and its a very, very important if, that forgiveness, that doing away with the normal execution of the penalty, is administered wisely.

It is critical to our discussion of reconciliation that we don’t confuse these two types of justice because if we do confuse these two types of justice it will really, really confound and confuse our understanding of one very, very important subject and that subject is namely forgiveness. Which is what we want to talk about and define right now. We’re still talking about this second problem, this second area, God’s personal problem. And we’re describing, we’re trying to describe how God really is and how many men, including religious men, including Christians think He is.

Have you ever heard the phrase, or the concept, that Jesus paid for our sins? Anybody that hasn’t? Let’s look into this assertion, this phrase, and let’s try to understand what that really means and what it doesn’t mean. I believe that this flat out assertion, that Jesus has paid for our sins, has been delivered too glibly, and it’s caused a great deal of confusion within the body of Christ as to the true nature of Jesus’s actions in the Atonement. It’s pretty well accepted today that what took place on Calvary, that our salvation itself, hinges somehow, someway, on a legal transfer of some sort between two members of the Trinity, between Jesus the Son and God the Father. When we ask the question, following the assertion that Jesus has paid for our sins, when we ask the question, whom did He pay? The answer that we receive, more often than not, is that He paid the Father. Jesus, the second person of the Godhead, the second person of the Trinity, paid the first person of the Trinity for sin. Now there’s a couple of observations we want to make if that truly is the case.

If Jesus, indeed, paid the Father for sin, then it was retributive justice that was served and not public justice. We should remember here, at this point, that under retributive justice, no forgiveness was permissible. There had to be…the penalty had to be executed. This is what most Christians think that Jesus did. God demanded that there be a penalty; there had to be this penalty; there had to be a repayment and then forgiveness could come. There is an element of accuracy in this and there is an element of error. That is why it’s been so confusing.

Let me give you a definition of forgiveness. A real simple definition for forgiveness. Forgiveness correctly defined is “the relaxation of a legitimate claim”. Does that definition make sense to you? Does that go along with your sort of intuitive understanding of what forgiveness really is? Haven’t you always thought to yourself that forgiveness was something that you offered without necessarily being paid back for something that was done to you? See, God has put things inside of us. He’s made us in many ways like Himself. His truth is deep within us and it will take our own basic understanding of what God is like and what His principles are like. And then we’ll go into the Word of God and really search the scriptures, we’re going to come up with concepts that are different than what are normally taught today in theological circles. According to this definition of forgiveness, that it is the relaxation of a legitimate claim, then it would impossible for God to have, as one hymn put it, “paid the debt and forgave me all my sins”.

To illustrate this again, for some of you this will be a repeat, some of you it will be new, but I think at this point it is so critical to our understanding accurately the nature of forgiveness that its good to go over it several times. Let’s suppose that I borrowed from you $100.00 on the condition that it be paid back. You will give me the money. You will transfer it from your possession to my possession, on the condition, that I will when I’ve finished spending it I’ll give it back to you. No. On the condition that I am able after a certain amount of time to give you that $100.00 back. Now, after I’ve borrowed that $100.00 – now a gift is something totally different, you have to realize that, it’s something totally different, it’s when you’re giving something and you never expect it back, you don’t care what they do with it – but when you’re borrowing something, especially $100.00 on the condition that it will be repaid generally speaking people are remembering that you have that $100.00 and are counting the days until they get it back. Now, if I’ve borrowed $100.00 from you on the condition that it be repaid, you have then a legitimate claim against me. Right? Now what happens then after two weeks when I come back to you and I put $100.00 in your hand. How many of you would say, “Thank you, George. I forgive you.” And how would I respond to that statement, “Why? What for? What did I do?” When that money is returned to you, your claim has not been relaxed, it has been fulfilled. No forgiveness takes place whatsoever. There’s no place or room for forgiveness. Now taking this illustration one step further, let’s assume that after borrowing that $100.00 from you, I find that for one reason or another I am unable to repay that money that you have loaned me. But, someone else, a good friend of mine maybe or a good friend of yours, comes to you and says, “Here is a $100.00” and you take that $100 bill and put it in your pocket. What would you say then? Would you then say to me, “I forgive you.”? No. Why would that be inappropriate to say that you forgave me? The claim was satisfied. The claim was fulfilled. You got your $100.00 back. You’re out nothing, you lost nothing. The claim was fulfilled. It was not relaxed. And again no forgiveness whatsoever takes place.

Now the Bible gives some teaching on this very illustration that I’m giving you in the book of Matthew the 18th chapter. And I’m going to read to you a certain passage out of the New American Standard Bible and you can just follow along and listen very carefully to this sequence of events. If you don’t have the American Standard Bible it might be better not to follow along because the word differences might be confusing.

“…For this reason, the kingdom of heaven may be compared”. What does that tell us right there. This story, this illustrated principle, that I am going to give you is the way that I operate. This is the way heaven operates. “The kingdom of heaven”…the way God does things, “may be compared to a certain king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. And when he had begun to settle them, there was brought to him, one who owed him 10,000 talents”. That was a great deal of money, in the millions. “But since he did not have the means to repay, the lord commanded him to be sold along with his wife and children and all that he had and repayment to be made”. If the story ends there, what kind of justice are we talking about? Retributive repayment. And again, if this certain king, or nobleman, had done this to the slave, if he had sold him and all his family and all that he had to get repayment could he have then gone to the slave as he was being carried off and said, “I forgive you.” Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if I was that slave and the king had come up to me at that point after he’d sold everything that I had, my wife and kids and me, and said “I forgive you”, I would have said “Thanks a lot”. Those words, given that set of circumstances, appear utterly ridiculous, preposterous. Obviously, there’s no forgiveness. But after the king had decided that this is what he was going to do, at that point, the slave, therefore, falling down, prostrated himself before him saying, “Have patience with me and I will repay you everything”. No way. He’d maxed out on his VISA and Master Charge, there was no way he was going to ever be able to repay that debt. He was going to the poor man’s house. When the lord of that slave heard that, he felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt. What do you think this parable is trying to teach? What principle? What’s it teaching us about forgiveness? The true nature of forgiveness. The way that God and the way that heaven look at forgiveness and the way they operate concerning forgiveness. And what’s it saying further? It’s the way we ought to operate. The sole reason for the slave’s release in this parable, was what? Compassion. It was the only reason given for the slave’s release was the fact that the master felt compassion. Forgiveness in this parable is certainly the relaxation of a legitimate claim. No third party intervened. No bargain was made. The debtor was simply released from his debt.

I’m going to make a statement here. Something that you should write into your memories, not just onto your notes. It is possible to receive payment on a claim and it is possible to forgive a claim, to release a claim, but you cannot do both. You can have your choice but you cannot do both. And the Bible portrays a God who’s completely desirous and willing to forgive sin without receiving any payment to satisfy a vindictive urge. A 19th century theologian by the name of Dr. Nathan Beaman put it this way, “The existence of the attribute of mercy was, like God Himself, eternal, and no new and super added motive was necessary in order to elicit this attribute in action. The Atonement was operated not as a bribe or reward or original cause influencing the Divine feelings nor as a moral persuasive to the exercise of compassion hitherto unfelt, but it opened a channel in which existing affections might freely flow, and at the same time it rendered the pardon and the salvation of the sinner consistent with every principle of the Divine government and every attribute of the Divine nature. In one word, the Atonement was not the procuring tithe of mercy but it was the mode in which mercy was defined for itself in illustrious expression in the system of the Gospel.”

Now one school of thought, theological school of thought that is, states that the Atonement satisfied retributive justice and it’s called the satisfaction doctrine. The Atonement consisted in a complete and full satisfaction of retributive justice – the satisfaction doctrine. In other words, every drop of Jesus’s blood that was shed on the cross paid for ‘X’ number of sins that were committed. And, of course, since it was Divine blood we’re told that it counted for more and all this weird abstract business.

So there’s a little pool of blood down underneath Jesus’s cross and that represents payment for say, 13,500,000,000 sins; the blood up on the crossbeam, there wasn’t that much there so it only paid for 3,000,000,000 sins; the blood on Jesus’s arms, there was quite a bit there so that paid for maybe 4,500,000,00 sins; the suffering of Jesus, that paid for some sins. And God added up all the sins that were ever committed or that ever would be committed and somehow that was factored into all the blood that Jesus shed and all the suffering that He went through. And that suffering, and that blood, and that pain paid God back for this large debt of sin that mankind owed Him. It’s called the satisfaction doctrine.

Now, if this doctrine is true, if this is really the case, then we face the very interesting prospect of having a divided Trinity; where the second person in the Trinity is more loving that the first. And even Augustine, who I think sort of veered out over the ozone layer in his theology in his later years, at least had some concern over this same point. In his book, “Christus Victor”, biblical scholar, Gustaf Aulen shares Augustine’s early concern over this concept of a divided Trinity. “He seems to intend (Augustine) a pointed rejection of any such idea. He denies that God the Father can in anyway be placated by the Son’s death for in that case there would be a difference of some kind, even a conflict, between the Father and the Son, but that is unthinkable, for between the Father and the Son there has been the most perfect harmony”. So again we’re saying, the death and the sufferings of Christ were not meant to buy God over to mercy and forgiveness but were rather an expression of mercy and forgiveness. There’s another implication of this total satisfaction or payment theory, that’s even more scary, if it’s true. If God demands repayment for what sin has done to Him; if He requires full vindictive satisfaction before releasing His claim, then we find ourselves facing the conclusion that there is no truly loving, moral being in the universe, as far as agape love is concerned. There is no being who loves with no strings attached. Whose love is really unconditional. So if the payment theory; if the satisfaction theory as it relates to God’s personal feelings is true, then He is not what He says He is. This fortunately is not the case.

The Bible explains clearly God’s purposes in the death of Christ. Yes, God desired that Christ should suffer and die but not so that He personally might be paid back for sin in some way. We are told in the book of Romans, that being justified is a gift, by His grace, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed. From the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. In other words, what God needed was some kind of public demonstration, some substitute for the normal execution of the law, or the penalty, that would cause God, or that would make God just and wise in forgiving man. This death, the shed blood of Christ, was to demonstrate His righteousness, His rightness because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed. In other words, the Old Testament sacrificial system is what he’s talking about. Men sinned and instead of “the soul that sinneth, it shall surely die”, an animal was put to death instead. There was a forbearance that God demonstrated, He passed over all the sins, before Calvary, that had been committed. Now, how can God justify that when He said “the soul that sinneth, it shall surely die?” The sufferings and the death of Christ on the cross was exactly what God needed to allow Him to do what He wanted to do all along, which was to release the claim, forgive man, show mercy. God wanted to show mercy, just like Darius did, He just needed to find a good way to do it.

The right way. And He did basically what Darius couldn’t do. He went into the lion’s den Himself. As I said a moment ago, Jesus’s death was a public demonstration. He was displayed, as it says in Romans 3:24-26, He was displayed publicly.

This type of public demonstration was the substitute that God needed to satisfy public justice. Since public justice did allow for pardon, this public demonstration of the sufferings of Christ solved God’s governmental problem by revealing the Lawgiver as just and wise in dispensing with the penalty and at the same time it allowed Him to do what His heart really wanted to do all along.

Okay, we’re going on a little bit here and talk about virtuous love. Virtuous love could also be described how? What’s another word we could use for virtuous love? Agape love. We struggle to gain an understanding of this kind of love. A couple of you were in here last night during the lecture when we were discussing pride and we were discussing one particular gentleman by the name of Robert Ringer who has written this book “Looking Out For Number 1” and some other books whose attitudes… He gives in his book some good advise on how to be a truly giving person. He says “Simple reasoning tells you that you must regard the interest of others in order to obtain your objectives. Fellow human beings represent potential values to you, in business or personal relationships, and the rational individual understands that to harvest those values, you must be willing to fill certain needs of others. In this way, the most rationally selfish individual is also the most giving person.” Then he goes on to say, “don’t do something for the reason that it’s ‘the right thing to do’, if there is no benefit to be derived from it”. Now, we say to ourselves, “Yeah, that’s Robert Ringer, he’s a jerk. He’s selfish. He likes selfishness. I don’t like selfishness, I’m a Christian. I never use circumstances, or other people, for my own benefit or for my own interests. I never give to anybody else in order that I might receive.” Well, I can think of a few times that I have. And when God begins to reveal our hearts to us as He sees them suddenly we realize that we do that a lot more often than we think we do. Oh boy, that’s where the tears come or should come. After God has shown us what we are really like. How we’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that we are so virtuous and that we’ve blessed so many people just because we wanted to bless them.

Do we sometimes still feel a little tinge of resentment when we do something really nice, go out of our way for somebody who doesn’t even say thank you? Does it bug you when you let somebody cut in front of you on the freeway and they don’t wave their hand or say thank you? It bugs me. The ungrateful jerk. I’ve said that a few times. Here I am stopping. I let somebody pull out of the side street in front of me. They don’t even look at me, don’t acknowledge me, don’t say thank you, as if it were their right. How dare they? We still have a lot to learn about virtuous love and about agape love. Our whole misconception about what true love really is carries over into our attitudes and understanding of the teacher of Christianity. And today, we’re taught from the very, very beginning that Christianity is really something that is supposed to be for our benefit and to serve us ultimately. Healing, salvation, blessings, revelation – all for us. So many evangelists today, pastors and other Christian workers are highlighting in their messages everything that appeals to man’s self interests when they’re presenting their messages. God is presented to us as our servant. He’ll do this for you, He’ll do this for you, He’ll do this for you… When you add up all the benefits there are to becoming a Christian, you’ve got to be crazy for not to become one. He’s going to take care of your grades, your business, provide this for you, healing for your body, salvation, peace…don’t we all want those things? All that appeals to our self-interest is highlighted so that our reaction to salvation becomes merely in effect nothing less than a purely selfish exercise. Nothing less than a humanistic invasion of Christianity. So when all of our thoughts of salvation center on the question, “How do I come out? What’s in it for me?” is it surprising that we view God’s attitudes and intentions and actions in the same light? Here is God in the Atonement thinking to Himself, ” How do I come out? What will I get out of this?”. This is where this whole attitude of repayment comes in. We take our concepts and we apply them to the character of God and we make God in our own image.

You see God was never worried about receiving some personal satisfaction for the hurt that people’s sin caused Him. He was never worried about it. He was grieved, He was hurt but He was never worried about receiving some personal satisfaction. God’s love is purely virtuous. Pure agape love, giving, unselfish. And it’s out of this mysterious love that God’s only concern flowed. How will they come out? What can I do to save them, to help them, to transform them, to cleanse them, to keep them from destroying themselves? How will they come out?.

Now we understand how God needed to reveal to human beings what His heart was really like. God looks down from heaven. You know, several decades or centuries after Eden, and man’s heart, well it got to the point where during Noah’s day when there wasn’t anybody who was righteous, who was obeying Him except for Noah and his family. The only ones on the face of the earth, think about it, one family. And man had drifted so far away from God that God had to write down man’s obligations and responsibilities. That’s how far the heart, remembrance or understanding of God had been erased, had been changed. Men didn’t know what God was like anymore. You go out the door of this church and start walking through the streets of Tacoma and you’ll find how far mankind has drifted from and understanding of what God is really like. These people don’t have the slightest understanding of what God is really like anymore. They don’t know Him. They don’t know Him. And God looked down from heaven and He saw all these people cutting themselves and bringing these gifts to idols and doing all of these things. God was grieved by this. God needed through the plan of salvation to slowly and progressively reveal to man what He was really like and who He really was; what His heart was like. And show man that there was no vindictiveness in Him at all; that He was not a God who was this stern, meany up in the sky. But a loving God who wanted to be intimate and personal; who wanted to forgive; abundant in loving kindness; one who relents concerning calamity. Somehow through the Atonement, besides solving God’s governmental problems, God had to show man once and for all ultimately who He really was and what His attitudes really were. That was the second problem because if God and man are going to be restored, relationally, intimacy, then man had to really see God for who He really was. He had to really know Him. So that understanding had to be restored with the Atonement to bring that ruptured relationship back together.

The third problem is the hypocritical problem. God needed to deal with man’s pride; with his superficial opinions of himself; God needed to find a way to…again, God’s ultimate objective in the Atonement was not rescuing lost souls from hell. Almost always when we present the Atonement in our witnessing dialog, we tell people that they were lost but that Jesus died for their sins so that now they are no longer lost and they are now able to go to heaven and have eternal life because Jesus died for their sins. It’s the by-product again. It’s true but the real ultimate objective in the Atonement was not rescuing souls from hell but the restoration of a ruptured relationship, love relationship, between God and man. Jesus came to this earth to seek and save that which was lost. What was lost? The intimate God- Man relationship. That’s what was lost from Eden on. It’s kind of wide scale. From what were we lost? We were lost from the truth of God. We were lost in a world of abstract theorizing, misconception, misunderstanding. All of us like sheep have gone astray and each of us is turned to his own way. Humanity has left God and in the process become vain in his imaginations or empty or superficial in his imaginations about life and about God and about themselves. And apart from God men lose all sense of proportion about their own importance. Their opinions about themselves become subjective and they become superficial and they become grossly inflated. But this isn’t any profound revelation. As I said earlier any of us could walk out of this building, begin to walk around the streets of this community and we can see this arrogance and this vanity and this conceit and egotism everywhere.

Go to the nearest drugstore or market and pick up some of these popular magazines, ‘People’, the movie magazines and look at the pictures in those magazines. Look at the expressions on the faces of these people in these magazines. Go to a movie, some new movie, and look at the faces of the people standing in line, talking to each other or at some little drive-in, fast-food place with guys sitting on the hoods of their cars – look at their faces, or in shopping malls or in health spas. People exuding arrogance on every hand, in every conceivable setting and what does this all of this look like from heaven’s perspective? I was, maybe you have had this experience too some of you, I was flying to Minnesota, Minneapolis last week to speak to a group of pastors and I was flying over the state of Montana. We were really high, I think something like 38,000 feet or maybe it was 40,000 feet – really high. I looked down and I had a window seat and it was high enough so you could just begin to see the earth’s curvature and you could see, what if you were on the ground, were these huge deep valleys, and they just seemed like tiny threads. You know the contours of the earth topography, and then sometimes you would catch this little glint of a little city or town or community and it looked so small. And the roads, you could just barely make them out these little threads.

You could go out even further, take an even more wide angled look at the whole planet earth. Pretty soon you go further, further back in the galaxy and you don’t even see earth at all anymore. Oh, we are so small. We are so small. We are all the same too, by the way. We are all the same. Nothing special about us. We’re all alike. We have the same feelings inside. Our bodies function the same way. Anything that’s special or unique about us, comes and flows out of our relationship with the God of the universe, with our souls. And cut off from God, all of this arrogance and all of this conceit is so ridiculous. And I believe that our planet stands out in contrast to the rest of God’s greater universe in conspicuous absurdity as the Angels look at this planet. At the attitudes – little puny human beings that live on it. Why does God love us? Why does God love humanity? A bunch of these tiny, little, ant-like jerks running around making a mess of things. If you were an advisor to God what would you suggest to Him that He do with humanity? Of course, get rid of them – start over. The universe is a clean place except for that idiotic place – Earth. Start over. You need them like you need a hole in the head. God has fallen in love with us – the great and powerful creator – God of the universe.

How can God relate to man in intimate fellowship when man thinks he’s something more than he is? Can reconciliation occur while man is preoccupied with the false opinions that he has created? The answer is obvious. I saw a movie, a TV movie, probably about a year ago. I don’t remember what the name of it was. I don’t remember who starred in it or anything. I just remember the story, the plot. There was a married couple. The husband in this case was, oh I didn’t like him from the very beginning at all, he had one of those real smug expressions, it just, he’s a good actor, to me you just hate him from the very beginning of the program – just thought he was hot stuff. Again, the kind of guy you want to go up to the wife and say “dump city – move on”. And he cheated on her. He treated her like dirt – I don’t mean he slapped her around or anything like that – he just thought he was too good for her or for anybody. Everything revolved – he just couldn’t stop thinking about himself – of course, you can’t have a relationship with somebody like that. So he was going to go out and pursue what he wanted to do and if there was some benefit to having her a part of it she would be, if not she wasn’t. Finally he left altogether, sickening-sweet, you know, he’d come back and tell her how much he loved her and all of this and you knew he was lying through his teeth that he would say what he needed to say to get what he wanted. Finally, he left. And then this woman on her own, forced to be on her own, started to become successful. Making money, becoming well-known. So he comes back and turns on all of his charm and wants a relationship again now with her. And this happens repeatedly. Several times he would come back. First time she gives in – she takes him back. Then it’s the same old pattern, he splits again.

Ultimately though, she comes to the realization that unless he fundamentally changes there’s no way they’re ever going to have a relationship. There’s no way. He has a relationship with himself and there’s no way they can enter into a mutually, happy, loving, intimate relationship while he has these false opinions of himself.

Of course, this is the way God views our situation. He loves us. He wants us back. We’ve left – He didn’t leave us, He didn’t walk out on us – we walked out on Him – never forget that. People blaming God for their situation today – you know; “well, God if you really loved me you wouldn’t let this happen or that happen”; hey, you walked out of the house and slammed the door. Don’t blame it on God – you made your own bed. God wants us back. He’s doing everything He can to win us back but God is not going to enter into an intimate, love relationship with us until we come to the point where we acknowledge who we are, until we’re confronted with our own moral bankruptcy and we see ourselves as real heels. And no matter how rotten we’ve been in our past, that doesn’t matter to God so much. What matters to Him is that somehow we see what we were, we acknowledge what we are, and we come back into relationship with Him as real people. All God wants us to be is real and He’ll take care of the rest.

He’ll overlook the past. We’ve been committing spiritual adultery, been involved with all kinds of other idols in our lives. God can handle that, He can overlook that, He can forgive that as long as now we will be real. So, if God and man are going to get together again then something must humble man so that he’s willing to dispense with his hypocritical facades. Before reconciliation can occur, we must come to the place where we see ourselves for what we really are.

Paul admonishes us in Romans 12:3, “I say to every man among you, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to have sound judgement”. Be real. Align your thought processes with reality. Don’t think less of yourself. Don’t think more of yourself. Think of yourself as you are. And His blessings have the tendency of increasing our concept of our own importance, things like salvation, various gifts, various ministries. And God wants to give us blessings but God in order that He not add to our moral delinquency must humble us before He can bless us. He must reveal us to ourselves. This is the third problem that God faced. He needed to show man to himself before intimate, personal love relationship could be restored.

The last problem – the motivational problem. The Bible tells us that as long as we are estranged from God – separated from God – that we are totally and completely corrupt. It’s not a matter when we do want to come to God cleaning up this sin or that one. Our whole personality, everything that we are is enslaved, we’ve become involved in a life of total and absolute bondage. Romans 8:7 says, “Because the minds set on the flesh, he is hostile toward God”, the minds set on the flesh, ruled by the flesh, is hostile toward God. It does not subject itself to the law of God for it is not even able to do so. Back to the tree parable; good tree cannot produce corrupt fruit; neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit. Everything about our lives, all of our actions, everything is corrupt, as long as our supreme or ultimate intention in life is to live supremely for ourselves. Everything that we do then grows off of or flows out of that root. That’s what we are; “our righteous is as filthy rags before salvation”. How do we deal with a lifetime of learned selfishness with it’s myriad manifestations. How do we deal with it? How can we maintain? How can God maintain a relationship, a new one, against the magnetism of former inflamed appetites and habits? How can He keep the new relationship from reverting to what it used to be? The key is the mind. A total, absolute change of mind is the necessary objective to be achieved in the process of reconciliation.

A transformation has to take place in our thinking. As I read to you yesterday in the beginning of our session, a quote from C. S. Lewis, “God became a man in order to turn creatures into sons. For mere improvement is no redemption.” He is not wanting just to improve us but to totally transform us. We think totally differently. And do not be conformed in this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds that you might prove what the will of God is that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Somehow, we chafe at the idea that prior to salvation there was nothing good about us. We think to ourselves, “Hey, wait a minute, alright, I was bad but not that bad. I had a few aces up my sleeve, there were a few clean spots on my suit.”

There’s a story in the Old Testament which gives us a glimpse at the amazing role that God played in the process of reconciliation. It’s the account of the prophet, Hosea. I’m going to read to you part of that passage from the book of Hosea and then we’ll talk a little bit about it. The Lord said to Hosea, go and take yourself a wife of harlotry. So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. And the Lord said to him, name him Jezreel. And she conceived again and when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, a daughter, she conceived and gave birth to another son, and the Lord said, name him Lo-Ammi.

And later, in a tragic and heart-rending conversation with his first son, Jezreel, Hosea offered this lament. “Say ye to your brethren, Ammi and to your sister Ruhamah, plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife; neither am I her husband. Let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight and her adulteries from between her breasts for their mother hath played the harlot. She that conceived them hath done shamefully for she said I will go after my lover’s that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. Therefore behold I will hedge up thy way with thorns and I will make a wall that she shall not find her paths.”

Sounds like a mean thing to do. Why did he do it? “And she shall follow after her lovers but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them but she will not find them. Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband for then it was better with me than now. And then the Lord said to me,’ go again and love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the sons of Israel though they turn to other Gods. So I bought her for myself, for fifteen shekels of silver, and a homer and a half of barley. And then I said to her, you shall stay with me for many days; you shall not play the harlot; nor shall you have a man; and so will I also be toward you.” Now here’s a woman who has left her husband and gone out as a harlot. She didn’t even charge money for what she did. All she got was enough substance, various things to live on. Clothes, to eat, to sleep. Wasn’t even greedy. You can imagine how you might feel if you were placed in a position like this. Where your mate left you and started living with everybody else in town. Not even for money, just for room and board. And then the Lord comes and says, go take her back. Come to the point where, and this was the case, and still is to this very day, unfortunately in some middle eastern countries, they had an auction of women who would be sold as prostitutes or harlots. And here her husband goes and he buys his own wife back. So Gomer comes back home. And they sit down in the living room and there’s Hosea and there’s his wife. What do you say? What do you start talking about after this has happened? What kind of conversation are you going to have? Now, if reconciliation is going to take place between the two, doesn’t it seem logical to you that Gomer, the adulteress, would seek the favor of the husband she has wounded. That she would fall at his feet, wrap her arms around his ankles and weep and say, “Forgive me. I’m so sorry.” Doesn’t it seem right or logical that the guilty party ought to seek the forgiveness of the innocent?

Sadly, the Bible again reveals to us the fact that no man is seeking God. No man is initiating reconciliation with his God. As it is written, there is none righteous, not even one, there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become useless; there is none who does good; there is none who want. We, like the adulteress, we come before God, we have nothing but our shame. We have no aces up our sleeves, nothing to attract God to us. The Bible again clearly reveals that as long as our ultimate intention is bent on the pursuit of selfishness then all of our righteousness is as filthy rags. Even the best things we do, we do for rotten motives. It’s like this man in this movie I was telling you about earlier. He comes back to this woman that he’s left with a new diamond necklace or a new mink stole or something like that. Well, that righteousness is as filthy rags; its not real, nothing behind it the motive’s wrong. If only there were some virtues, at least a few alluring qualities in our lives prior to salvation that would make it easier for God to overlook our liabilities. You know what I’m saying? It’s easy to be reconciled to people who have something about them that’s nice. Not a lot but just something – some place to start. But there wasn’t anything about us that would have attracted God or would have allured Him. There’s nothing clean about us. Not only that, but we weren’t even paying any attention to Him. We weren’t coming knocking on His door, dirty as we were, we were dirty and rotten and we were going in the opposite direction. We were ugly. We stunk. We were covered in our own filth. And it wasn’t just the nice guy who started pursuing us, it was the God of the universe.

She forgot me declares the Lord; she forgot me. Therefore behold, I will allure her. Bring her into the wilderness and speak kindly to her. Hosea 2:13&14. So this is quite an amazing display of love and of grace and of mercy isn’t it. Ever seen anything, know of any story that matches this. The powerful God of the universe forms the earth, gathers a handful of newly created soil, forms a man and falls in love with him. That’s incredible to contemplate. Over and over and over again but the magnificence of the whole story of the God-Man relationship is that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us and while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Saying, “I will call them my people, which were not my people and I will call her beloved, which was not beloved.” God came a long way to bring us to Himself. The Gospel story makes no logical sense. I don’t understand the love of God; I don’t know why God pursued us like He did; I can’t fathom in my mind and I can’t explain it to you. But of course, as Andre Croats would say, “Oh, but I’m glad, I’m so glad He did”. This afternoon, we’ll begin to talk about how God solved some of these problems that He faced in reconciling man to Himself through redemption.

Lets pray. This afternoon, reaffirm our great love for you. We thank you Lord for one another, we thank you for the body of Christ. For the privilege of being part of it. We thank you Lord for the tremendous transformation that you’ve brought into our hearts and our lives. Father, I pray this afternoon that you will better help us to understand all that’s behind those transformations that are taking place. Father, as we begin to turn our attention now to redemption. Oh Father, we just are so grateful that you have redeemed us – that we belong to you – that you have in fact a solution to these monumental, cosmic problems and that solution has the potential of working its way into our everyday lives and changing the way we think, the way we act, the way we chose. We bless you Lord. I pray that you would give us a very, very productive time this afternoon.. In Jesus name.

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