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

Not an inconsequential line of investigation, I hope you agree. Here is not some minor concern that only requires the tweaking of an error in an understanding that came from a Greek word or two.

What I found was that, yes, although I found the Atonement in the Bible, the way it was there I found different from the one they offered me in Church, and, as I said, for a long time, this brought complete terror to me before it became a challenge and a blessing. It changed my life, but not before it daily ground me to the pavement and whispered how miserably hopeless and weak I was, that this was not something that I could have thought up myself. I knew now for sure that my “sin” was not really about doing or not doing something, or about how genuinely I accepted and believed a religious idea, or how deeply I believed in God and willing to give up my life for him. These are, again, asking no more of us than the kinds of things any other religion would ask. The problem was that I knew that what stood between God and me was something supernatural, something alien to the world but a part of it. It represented the only spiritual thing that was most manifest, but also the one thing that we are least willing to accept and integrate into our lives.

Symbolic Preliminaries.

We have someone on a Cross in the process of being executed. There are two essential elements to this picture: the person and the method of torture and execution. In the method, there is this means of nailing, tying, and fixing to that which also raises that person from the ground. What does this mean?

In natural sight, this is a man, and in natural sight, this is a piece of wood and some nails. The man is slowly bled to death and asphyxiated. In that natural sight, that is all it has for you. You can see that this is not a public miracle of the supernatural, although miracles accompanied it. It was a very common sight in a 1st Century Roman province. And, also a natural thought, how easy it would have been for God to have sent an army of his angels from the sky, take him off and fly him to heaven in the sight of all the people. Boy, this would bring many people to examine the doctrine of Jesus, would it?

But, if the fundamental problem of humanity is not that he does not believe what he sees, but that he does not believe what he can spiritually see but does not, then such as act as this expectation of God to casual thought would not be respectful of our personhood, our free will, as a person like God. It would be a deletion of free will since such a supernatural act would remove the choice of whether this is the act itself is from God.

However, the supernatural is what man has a problem with and is what God wants for him to accept to be a spiritually righteous person, not just a physical one, which the fulfillment of Personhood and not only its imitation.  If this is not an overt supernatural display, how could it be supernatural in a way that is not the same as the prosaic image of a man dying on a cross to which his natural senses lead him? If this supernatural display supposed to be something like “this was a universal sacrifice for the sins of the world in fulfillment of the tribal one carried out in the Law of Moses,” isn’t that just as well a mere religious and creative mere idea?

A mere religious idea is not tracking with the fact that this Jesus is a man and God,  natural and supernatural, and together is something so unique and transcendent it/He should stand as the most unusual and earth-shattering event in human history. Not just a universal symbol, either Jesus or the Atonement, to replace/correct a Jewish Messiah or its old symbol. That would not be only God placing one thing for another, that would be the historical fulfillment of a Jewish symbol, a symbol designed by God to become miraculously fulfilled. A supernatural meaning in fulfillment of a supernatural symbol of a yet unfulfilled part of Jewish law. Yet as the realization of an Old Testament symbol in its meaning, the physical act and a unique theological message can’t be the meaning because this would say that symbols comprehensively carry and are determinative of meaning. That is precisely the opposite of divine revelation, where divine phenomena and appearances are first and our inferior but morally sufficient ideas about it second.

What kind of meaning are we talking about that aligns with the essential definition of meaning, one which is of knowledge impossible without special revelation by God?

Let us remember that a symbol or an idea is a representational device for the carrying of identification and operation of a thing in itself. It is not meaning itself, only a tool for it to appear in the world. Remember that this sacrificial act by someone who claims to be the Son of God is someone that uses miracles not to bind someone up in a decision but to help them. To point them to the gravity and importance of another one which, like the miracle, is not imminent, but spiritual and self-attesting. Jesus is then not just supposed to be the fulfillment of Elijah or Moses.  No matter how he satisfies them his mission, his mission is not only to bring their ultimate personal instances into the world. Its to deliver their final transcendent message into the world, which represents the end of a chain of symbolic assignation to render ultimate meaning, not another round of it.

Lets also not forget that a proposition is not Truth, its a symbol of truth. You can and must worship, give ultimate value to Truth, but you cant give it to a mere symbol (“mere” making it the pagan equivalent is the idol). To believe “Jesus saves” is a saving proposition, or that saying and believing the propositions “Jesus saves” or “God is sovereign,” will not save you ay more than bowing down to a carved image of Molech. These are conceptual symbols of a faith container, a placeholder for a Truth, not the God who is Truth. And so emotion does not save you, and reason does not save you, doctrinal propositions do not save you, no matter how important they are in the disgesting and understanding of revelation. Those are also only possible images of a Truth received, understood, and believed, not that truth itself or your moral acts themselves. Christ saves you, but not “Christ,” insofar as this is only a designated name and an idea for something of his which is his abstract equivalent and which is nowhere near a cultural formulation. Christ is an objective Person, and he is a revelation of knowledge. You get to use the symbol of faith “Christ” through his informational entity of miraculous knowledge. You don’t get to use the symbol effectively as if independently imbued with that divine power, which rubs off on you like an idol that you merely hold without your demonstrated spiritual connection to the declared truth it represents.

Continued here: How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World By His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 2. The Messianic Secret

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