How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.
This is an article in a series. Please see:
How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.
The Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus on a Cross for the Sins of the Word: The Man
Ok, what do we have so far?
1. We have righteousness and sin as originally spiritual, not physical.
I repeat that this does not mean that physical activity does not follow a righteous spiritual action and state as its reflection. It means its not a very good physical representation; it’s only indicative, and a two-dimensional one at that. You could say it’s the sin of the symbolism of the Holy.
Symbol and Substance: The Spiritual Sign
The symbol is never a fully reliable reflector. Sometimes it fails so completely that it barely resembles what it is supposed to signify. Physical action, as a symbol of inner state, remains a superficial gesture toward deeper reality. Righteousness and sin, like life itself, are not grounded in externality. Life manifests outwardly, but its essence is inward—directly unintelligible, accessible only to God without mediation or symbol. Hence the statement in 1 Samuel 16:7: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” This is the core of Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees: they collapsed the distinction between inner and outer, letting the lesser define the whole. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs… outwardly beautiful, but inside full of dead men’s bones.”
This may sound axiomatic, but do not underestimate its implications. If followed carefully, this logic begins to expose the true nature of sin, righteousness, and identity. Physical behavior is not the final verdict on moral or spiritual reality. That reality may be a lie.
Physical things—objects, actions, spoken or written words—are symbols, tangible representations of authority or intention. Symbolism is, at one level, merely a sequence of cause and effect. You see a movement in space and infer a reason. But it is irrational to assume that such causes are fully apparent or coextensive with the visible. Often, the real cause lies entirely unseen, working behind or beneath, like gravity. And if that is true for objects, how much more for persons?
A hand moves an object. That movement results from muscular contraction, which itself emerges from internal systems hidden from view. Medical science describes these processes, but even such understanding only grazes the surface. Beneath it lies the unknowable complexity of biological life—chemical orchestration beyond comprehension. Still, all of that remains material. The deeper question arises when we ask not how the hand moves, but why.
What motivates the person to reach? Not just physiology, but intent—immaterial, invisible, abstract. The hand becomes a symbol for something immaterial: the will, the desire, the plan. That plan, that motive, is not found in neurons or molecules. It has no weight. Yet it moves the hand. The person becomes revealed only at this symbolic threshold. The physical movement now points to something more—a moral intentionality, rooted not in matter but in spirit.
At this point, the person transitions from biological machine to moral agent. Thought, calculation, instinct—these alone are not moral. They serve the body, not truth. But when belief, love, selfless purpose enter, we cross into the spiritual. And here, external actions become less accurate in reflecting internal motives. The signal weakens. The symbol loses resolution. The deeper the motive, the more likely its representation is obscured or misread in the physical world.
This is the chasm between android and man—between mechanistic self-interest and transcendent spiritual motivation. One acts in service of biology and self-preservation; the other for a cause indifferent to physical consequence, and sometimes in defiance of it.
This is the true threshold of man’s multidimensionality.
Eventually, spiritual causes recede so far from the physical world that they border on the divine. At that point, what is external no longer merely points outward, but inward—to that which can only be known by likeness to God. This is the realm where symbol begins to invert: the external sign is no longer a disclosure of visibility, but of invisibility. We recoil from this idea. Religion clings to physical forms because they affirm the things we already love—what is tangible, tribal, ours. We invest in these transient things and hope they carry transcendence. But real transcendence cannot be validated by the things we made for ourselves.
At best, external signs can still point to internal states—spiritual health, moral soundness—but only analogously. They can reflect, but not define. The symbols that reflect transcendence must do so only in relation to what God is, not what we are.
This distinction is not merely academic. If we collapse it, then physical behavior begins to define morality, not the spirit. Then righteousness is long phylacteries. Then prayer in public is virtue. Then charity is righteousness. Then Confucius could have replaced Christ.
But if Christ is revelator, if He unveils the divine rather than merely symbolizes it, then His every word and act must be received as a sign from another world. Not a moral code. Not a spiritual platitude. But a messenger truth—unique, unreproducible, untransferable. His actions are not outward demonstrations of “spiritual truths.” They are revelations of a Truth which cannot be otherwise known. A truth that reveals God’s nature as moral, holy, other.
This is the final logic of symbolic revelation.
Faith is not belief in symbols. It is spiritual response to a spiritual reality that is symbolized only because of its distance, never because of its reducibility. Moral action in response to such revelation is itself symbolic: the Imago Dei testifying to the voice of the Dei.
Here is the symbolic progression:
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Physical symbols of physical things (primitive man)
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Physical symbols of spiritual things (religious man)
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Spiritual symbols of spiritual things (spiritual man; end of symbolization)
Spiritual symbols are the signs of our moral alignment with divine truth. They are the highest form of signification—not because they are showy, but because they are invisible. To choose faith in the fulfilled prophecies of the Messiah is the apex of moral symbolism. It is a spiritual act directed toward a spiritual truth, made known through a spiritual testimony that can neither be forged nor ignored without moral consequence.
Only this kind of spiritual symbol, born of transcendent witness, is worthy of the name revelation. Anything less is counterfeit. Anything else is a shadow.
