Jesus and Atonement. What is Sin Really? A Prophetic Think Tank
The God of the bible actively poured out wrath/retribution upon Christ. Cites Isa 53,
Isaiah 53:1: “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?” “The Father was well pleased to crush the Son, because our sin as upon him.”
Yes, but wrath of temporary abandonment to the evils of the world who would fulfill prophecy by trying to exterminate it, and in this their belief that they were doing God a service (Joh 11:50-51;16:2). The world was trying to blot out the prophetic religious motivation once and for all, by making it fail. We cannot but fail to notice that Isaiah 53 is, again, a messianic prophecy. Wrath is then defined in the context of prophecy, not “wrath.”
The God of the bible actively poured out retribution upon Christ in the sinners stead. Cites 2 Cor 5:21
2 Corinthians 5:21: For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
“So then, if God actively and willingly crushed Christ, and if he did so because of the sins which were upon him, and if he is indeed a God who deals in retribution, and in fact is too pure not to deal in wrath and retribution, then any model of the atonement which does not embrace a penal aspect fails to do justice to the character of God as we find it revealed in his word.”
That God poured out wrath on the Messiah in our stead is true, but it is prophetic wrath, and this makes all the difference in the world. If it’s prophetic wrath, it’s wrath specifically because of the hard-heartedness of religion to refuse to make it the predominant influence in religion. The wrath poured out on Jesus was not because of a general conception of “wrath,” but because of prophetic indifference, which is by definition hostility to Christ. Both the wrath that was not poured out on humanity and the wrath that was poured out on Christ is entirely prophetic. Jesus suffered in our stead for sin not because of “sin” the concept, but because of that particular sin which is endemic in humans. Its a dismissal of Truth for self-benefit. The cure is Jesus bringing through his revelation what is quintessentially, infinitely not for His self-benefit for the awakening of righteous faith, only prepared for the world after Jesus completed the prophetic vision and gave it to us.
“God’s wrath” is both a prophesied wrath upon Messiah and wrath against a people who have rejected his Law/prophecy. This is allowed to be directed toward Christ for but for a moment so that he may fulfill the prophets, allowing the world to “come out” and confirm who they really are or what to be through love.
Dealing with the Proof Texts: The Law
The law demanded a curse. Gen 2:17, Deu 27:26, James 2:10, Titus 1:2
Genesis 2:17: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
“The first law given in the garden, the breaking of which issued in a curse, as God had in fact promised.”
We note also this statement by God is a prophecy: do not eat, for if you do “thou shalt surely die.” Even the author confirms this unconsciously with the words “God had in fact promised.”
The omniscience of God demands that this is not only a warning about transgression but at once a prophecy that there will be a transgression. This is true at least to the extent that a statement that holds out to man the possibility of transgression is a guarantee that he will transgress since it is also a statement to Man about his possible choice of following his own will to power (Nietzsche). This is a choice that Man will always make: that he must reject God’s prophecy by a desire to fulfill his own, thereby intending to remove the transgression of the disbelief in God’s Word.
The aspect of fulfillment is therefore twofold: the fulfillment of God’s Word as a Law and the fulfillment of man’s own plans as his own Law, desires, and priorities in an effort to delete God’s and replace it with another carnal, idiomatic standard. However, this fulfillment must always be a proof of God’s righteousness: for God’s Word speaks of man’s sure rejection of it (Deu 28:25; 32:35). Any transgression of the Law is therefore not essentially going against what God says, it is against the miraculous, predictive component of that which God says: the rejection of the entire premise of a Holy kind of prophecy for one that is not, since the Law at its root is not stricture but a future prediction of the rejection and rising again of itself as His prophetic revelation.
To demonstrate this critical kind of transgression of the Law, it is interesting why there is rarely an attempt to explain the Tree of the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in most commentaries, but it is just accepted as a forbidden object. How can a tree that is both good and evil have a result that is only evil and deadly?
This problem was not entirely ignored in Jewish tradition, which at least admitted that the good and evil as a mixture of good and evil. The two were separate, evil being an abstract before the eating of the fruit. When evil, however, was allowed to take its place along with the good, the entirety was tainted with evil. But what is evil and what is good?
The tree is a prophetic tree, and a tree which is a symbol and also a tree of the symbolic knowledge paradigm, which is a tree of true and false prophecy, and then a tree of obedience and rebellion. It was not so much that evil was unknown before the fall, but the symbolic world was unknown, which can become a necessary evil.
The symbolic is a mediatory world, an indirect, inferred in respect to Truth. One which is not the world of direct revelation as in the Garden. Adam and Eve had direct access to God, did not require faith to apprehend his majesty and good nature, but knew of it firsthand. There was no mediator between them and God. God, however, introduces the possibility of a world that is a mixture of good and evil, where he is accessible, but only by difficulty (Gen 3:19), only indirectly and indistinctly, and only through a symbolic representation of himself. A world of code, of signs and puzzles, of reason and judgment, challenges and stumbling blocks, but one also where the good and the evil are clearly drawn out.
In the world, as stated, there is a good form of God’s symbolism, and there is an evil kind of mediatory device. That is, between mediators that Man uses to obtain power for transhumanism by God, or by the hand of man.
Man uses technology, philosophical speculation, social programs and government, his own plans and by his own effort, in an attempt to vault himself past himself. This is man’s attempt to fulfill his own oracles by prosaic intermediaries, which must fail.
God’s oracles are on the other hand those which are fulfilled only by God taking direct action in the face of man’s helplessness and man accepting that gift of truth. In religion, in Christianity, it’s the belief in the achieving of satisfaction with God through God’s oracles or, as evil, through man’s own oracles of performance, emotion, tradition, intellectual speculation, conclusion, creed, or any other motivational reason.
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