How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.

Hint about the title. If you are thinking the answer that is God is the person, so he is. But not “God,” only God. It’s really not confusing at all. Ideas like “God” are not our problem. It’s their meaning when it’s not something that we want to hear. Then the idea becomes a problem. Here is the real meaning for “God,” and is perfectly and conservatively Christian, but still not something that you may want to hear.

Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Why can’t religion be simple?

Well, actually it’s very, very simple. It’s just that kind of simple we don’t want.

When I was growing up and attending church, I increasingly realized the central theological message of Christianity as the sacrifice of the Son of God for the sins of the world. How does belief in this act affect the redemption of the individual? As time went on and I could reflect on a proposition deeper, this seemed harder to accept than presented.

Now the forgiveness of sin comes from more than the belief in Christ’s work on the Cross for your sin. That is a belief about your work, too, namely, that your sin keeps you from God, and if there is not a solution to this, you will die in your sins. 

In penal substitutionary atonement, why you repent is that you realize that you can’t save yourself, that God has to do it for you, by offering Himself as your substitute, taking your sin on himself. John McArthur puts it this way:¹

“The Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. The Lord God Himself chose the sacrificial Lamb, the Servant, Messiah, the sacrificial Lamb. The Servant Messiah was voluntarily willing to submit Himself to become the vicarious substitute. God caused Him then to pick up all the guilt that belonged to us and take the full fury of divine wrath. Five different ways in Isaiah 53:4-6, five different ways it speaks of the vicarious, substitutionary provision of Jesus Christ, dying in our place. This is the heart of the gospel.”

Now, for those that affirm it, everyone seems very possessive and insistent on a certain formulation of atonement. Still, no one seems eager to explain how faith comes into this, thought essential for salvation no matter to what version you subscribe.

Are your sins the issue? Why, and what is to compel you to think Jesus’s solution is better than anyone else’s version of the operation of transcendence?

Well, obviously it’s about a better miraculous event proving his is a real operation. But not a real one, as I had come to believe, only because of inference from a stand-alone miracle that only God could perform such as the empty tomb. Not better because of the kind of miracle assumed to be manifest because this kind of sacrifice is unique. Real because something else happened that makes it true, but not that it makes more sense and appeals to reason on its own. My thought became that it was better, and perfect, and real, primarily because of a miracle in our mind, triggered by one that God performed in the world, of its description of something in the mind of God.

A miracle is God’s calling card. A miracle is an overt display of God’s existence, nature, and mind, which is so overpowering to the senses that it is accepted as such without meditation. But I think that if this miracle can happen in the outer world, it can also occur inferentially in the subjective world. This miraculous occasion has just as much power coming through spiritual senses and the physical senses. If that is true, then it is also a miracle that Christ hung on a cross for the forgiveness of sin. Although not a miracle in the objective sense, I expect it to be itself the wonder of a divine concept expected to change us once seen for what it is.

Why is this an important consideration? Because no one thinks the Parable of the Sower is a miracle meant for our spiritual awakening and then our salvation, only that of things such as Jesus’s healing ministry and the resurrection. Then, few are as impressed with Isaiah 53 as a miracle to write sermons upon as they are with Jesus’ ethics in the calling the little children for a blessing, or his washing of the disciple’s feet. And then, we look at Jesus on the Cross and think that this represents only what he had to go through to secure our forgiveness, while never so much as having heard of Daniel 9:26. There is a working assumption in our theology and the human heart that what we have of evidence of transcendence that is clear is fake, because it’s too good to be true, and only fit for the naive religionist. What is not so clear, and looks more mundane, but while still being also a product of the agent of transcendence which produced that clear view, is also not worthy of the remarkable either, but only of an uncommon morality. Viola, religion!

What is left, on the one hand, is an evidential sideshow of curious and eyebrow-raising unsolved mysteries of Christian religious literature called apologetics. On the other side, a revival tent of swooning and sweating enthusiasts in which everything that we need to or happen to feel at a given moment is granted the most serious respect as sincere moments of truth-seeking. Still on the other side of the Christain compound is the dimly lit hall of writing and reading desks, over which hover the innumerable bald heads of the scholars, deep in the patristic fathers for the discovery of the 2nd-century kerygma. But with all that brainpower never divinely fired, they never do know how to use that knowledge to bring up a revelation about what really changed from the 1st century. Our Christian experience and expression of faith is a mosh-pit of brains and bodies thrown against each other and never against any other, which is not a body and not in a mosh-pit. We have the truth, but what we really love about it that it allows us to use it and feel good about having it while not having it at all.

What this comes down to in this mediation of Jesus and the Cross is if we are practicing His Christianity or some chimera of our own making. Then, by that, whether we are saved or damned. I think it a pretty important topic.

I think that the teaching of Jesus is supposed to be a transfer of knowledge from the otherwise impossible source of God’s mind. There is not supposed to be in Christ’s action of the raising of Lazarus a disconnection to any other truth that God communicated. Isn’t the acceptance of a greater truth and a greater miracle manifest to our spiritual senses not supposed to be its point? Is not the teaching of Jesus in his words and actions the inducement of such a miracle, to open us up to the understanding of spiritual, otherworldly truth? Arent we saved through the hearing of the Gospel, presumably, as we think of commonly it, not an overt miracle?

Ok then, we know that the function of these external displays of God’s glory is for stopping our selfish mouths and brains from thinking our thoughts and replacing them with God’s. I believe that the real miracle that we have to witness is a miracle of the content of God’s thoughts in ours: an exclusively miraculous content.

If the image of Christ on the Cross will not be one of these, is it no wonder why we think it’s possible, and normal, for a saved person never to have seen or understood it as anything more than and OT act of religion replaced by a universal one? That it does not have any other symbolic theological significance past “propitiatory atonement by sacrifice”? Not a wonder that Christ on the Cross becomes to the unbelieving world a mere creative religious notion intrinsically no more ingenious than those of any other religion? That the suspicion that it has a unique divine intrinsic power, far beyond its ability to inspire a common emotional response to any such scene, like pity and love for someone suffering in our place, is lost? Is it no wonder then if we were to denigrate and dismiss any inference from it that would suggest that its signification denotes a disclosure about a kind of crucial sin to which we are addicted? That we would sell our souls and re-crucify Christ again if its transformative power were to be thought possible of exposure and judgment of us?

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1. Schuurman W. Penal Substitutionary Atonement is the Heart of the Gospel: Who Agrees? | Trinity Bible Chapel. Trinity Bible Chapel. https://trinitybiblechapel.ca/penal-substitutionary-atonement-is-the-heart-of-the-gospel-who-agrees/. Published July 19, 2018. Accessed October 26, 2019. ↩

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