How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.

We have a man who is set for the atonement of the sin of the world.

Some of this is a repeat of what has already been said, but I need to put it only in this context.

Christ does not atone for the sins of the Word by the Cross before he is on it. It’s after he dies and resurrects. From the time he comes into the world to the Cross he is in the progressive act of fulfilling the whole of God’s Word concerning him. You know, what the prophets said should come, that which Paul said was the only thing he ever preached? He finishes it with the seal of God’s approval. After he fulfills all. But how is a man set for the atonement of the sin of the world? You will never, never know until you know what this sin is…exactly.

This is not entirely answered before we discuss the Cross, but I hope you can see where I’m going.

Atonement is an atonement for the forgiveness of sin. As I said, sin is internal, and so sin can’t be dealt with externally, and however it’s done, it’s done by supernatural means in the spirit. Does this mean only a supernatural act by God, like him waving his hand over you, or some rite performed in Heaven on your behalf? Or does “supernatural means in the spirit” refer to your active belief in a supernatural act by God that he performed for the whole world to know him? One is just a religious notion. The other is you engaging with a kind of knowledge about who God is by what he has done which is miraculous and confirming of his existence, nature, and plan of redemption. If that is true, sin is sin against it, which is the pretending in some way that that thing that is not God and from God is sufficient to take his place.

If you’ve ever been disturbed by our commentators on Jesus’s declaration of the unforgivable sin as sin against the Holy Spirit, leaving it as “putting the things of God as the things of Satan,” this is nowhere near his intention. God is spoken of as the same as His miraculous works, Christ’s same works, in which he historically fulfills the mission of the Messiah. Sin is the denigrating, beating, disrespecting, abusing, spitting on, relegating, rejecting and apathy toward that revelation and preferring tradition, feeling, learning, reason, works and self-esteem over it as a reigning power over religion. That is Satan, the other is God.

I told you I had a perfectly orthodox identification of God, but if you are orthodox, you may not want to hear it? Just think about that.

Since the spirit is belief itself, and is a quintessential action itself, the object of its handling has to be a different spiritual object which establishes God so far above and beyond humans that, after this object is found proof of it and accepted, we are counted as having, while not being and actually having except as a mere image, an image of him which perfectly represents him. What spiritual image is it then that perfectly represents him, which we have and which blots out sin?

Whatever it is, this is what Christ is on the Cross to fulfill and give to the world, to which attachment one is saved. Christ is not atoning for physical sins, but for spiritual sin. Christ is not atoning by a mysterious, heavenly religious rite ex operato, he’s giving a truth about God and man which man could never have otherwise, and the rite by man is the formal giving of what is most precious about God back to God spiritually, by mans spiritual hands of free will and honest moral action and engagement. Christ is not atoning for you not obeying the 613 Rabbinic laws, or because one day you got angry and cussed out a waitress for accidentally spilling your drink on you, making you unfit for heaven. What keeps us out of Heaven for which atonement is a compulsory fix is that our minds, our hearts, our spirits, our souls, because of their loves and attractions which forever make them like a negative pole to God’s positive pole. Somehow we come up as a reversal of that polarity, a switch in that corrupt love by exposure to and acceptance of another: God’s. God’s love is Truth because God is the personification of Truth, of ultimate reality. Reality is a public fact, not a personal feeling. Christ is not atoning to change your purely insular and voluntary feeling and you don’t accept it by your feelings, but for your spiritual fact, your fundamental spiritual, moral reality through his. There is only one kind of information that is exclusively biblical that qualifies for this spiritual object of atonement, which is the equivalent of Christ by which knowledge of and a decision over must be made.

We are getting there. This is about a certain kind of sin of ours defined against a kind of righteousness that Christ is displaying in spades here. What kind is it?