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

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

Some of this will echo what has been said, but it must now be placed in this specific context.

Christ does not atone for the sin of the world simply by being on the Cross. The atonement is not completed until after His death and resurrection. From His entrance into the world until the Cross, He is in the progressive act of fulfilling the entire Word of God concerning Him—the prophetic record. You know: what the prophets said would come to pass, that which Paul insisted was the sole content of his preaching. Christ finishes that work with the seal of divine approval—after He fulfills all.

But how, then, is a man “set” for the atonement of the sin of the world? You will never truly know until you know what that sin is—specifically.

This cannot be fully answered until we examine the Cross. But the direction should now be clear.

Atonement is the means by which sin is forgiven. And since sin is internal—spiritual in origin and nature—it cannot be addressed by external means alone. However the atonement is made, it must be accomplished by supernatural means within the spirit. The question then is: does this supernatural act mean a unilateral movement by God—something like a divine wave of the hand, or some heavenly rite performed invisibly on our behalf? Or does it involve your active belief in a supernatural act by God—a public, visible, historically knowable act—by which He makes Himself known?

One is a religious idea. The other is a revelatory confrontation with divine truth. One is passive. The other demands engagement—an acknowledgment of who God is, by means of what He has done. And if this is true, then sin must be defined as rejection of this revelation: the refusal to see God’s reality in the very thing He did to reveal it.

If you’ve ever been uneasy about Jesus’ declaration of the unforgivable sin—the sin against the Holy Spirit—because commentators reduce it to “calling the works of God the works of Satan,” then consider: that interpretation doesn’t go nearly far enough. The Holy Spirit is not merely a vague divine actor. The Holy Spirit is the revelatory power by which God shows Himself through the works of Christ—the miracles, the fulfillment of prophecy, the messianic mission. Sin is not merely attributing this to Satan. Sin is denigrating it, beating it down, disrespecting it, abusing it, spitting on it—replacing it with tradition, emotion, reason, or religious ideology. It is exchanging God’s self-revealing act for the self-soothing comfort of a religious system. That is Satan’s work. The other—God’s revealed reality—is divine.

I told you my conception of God was fully orthodox. But if you are invested in orthodoxy as a system rather than a Person, you may not want to hear it.

Since the spirit is belief, and belief is itself a kind of quintessential action, the object of that belief must be a spiritual object—one that radically transcends us, but once received, makes us like God in image. Not in essence, but in representation. So, what spiritual image perfectly represents God and is available to be believed in? What blots out sin—not in the heavens, but in you?

Whatever it is, this is what Christ is fulfilling and offering at the Cross. This is what attaches you to salvation. Christ is not atoning for infractions of ceremonial law. He is not atoning for incidental moral failings or social faux pas. He is not offering a magical cleansing for moral hiccups. He is atoning for the condition of man’s soul—that it is attracted to what is false, self-made, and anti-God. What makes us unfit for Heaven is not what we’ve done, but what we are—spiritually opposite to the divine polarity. The atonement resets this polarity. It exposes our corrupt love and replaces it with the love of Truth—because God is Truth, and Truth is public reality, not personal sentiment.

Christ is not atoning to reform your emotions. You do not accept His work through your feelings. He atones for your spiritual reality with His. And there is only one kind of information, one divine fact, one spiritual object, that qualifies for this kind of atonement. It is the exclusive, prophetic, messianic knowledge of Christ—foretold and fulfilled.

We’re almost there.

3. This is about a specific kind of sin, defined in contrast to the kind of righteousness Christ displays in full here by fulfilling the Prophetic Word of God. What kind of sin is it?

4. We have a man who is righteous in a way that no one else but He Himself could be because only He can supernaturally fulfill messianic prophecy. He is therefore to faith the informational, scriptural equivalent of messianic prophecy.

5. We have a man who is God because only God can fulfill messianic prophecy.

6. Therefore sin is in one way or another, through relegation, apathy, and outright denial of the messianic, oracular revelation of Jesus Messiah as the sole religious ruler of faith.  As Jesus, sin is that revelation ignored, abused, denied, sidelined, and murdered as the central truth of history as Christ the person is the central person of history.