Jesus and Atonement. What is Sin Really? A Prophetic Think Tank
But this condition did not exist pre-tree. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is a tree of a future kind of knowledge. The partaking of the tree, a tree of a kind of future world of obscurity, is the ingesting of that kind of prophetic knowledge that is open to interpretation instead of openly disclosed: one good and one evil, that becomes permanent. Where death is a certain consequence but also where there is the possibility of its spiritual escape.
Once this knowledge is known, there is no way to remove it. It activates man’s sense of grandeur and power of self-salvation. It is the action of the fulfillment by Man of what the Tree is, a prophecy of Man’s fall into hopelessness, that flips that switch.
Deuteronomy 27:26: Cursed be he that confirmeth, not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen.
James 2:10: For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.
“We find without exception that the law demands a curse, and that the exaction of this curse is contingent upon the very word and solemn promise of God.”
This is fine, except we are faced with the same kind of question: what is law, what is a curse?
Is the Law just a command to do or not do something? Is a curse just punishment for an organic defect or actions against it?
Deu 27:26 is, of course, is a curse insofar as it binds one to a Law that can never be satisfied. It would require perfect behavior and a perfect spirit for this, and anyone who thinks he can achieve or maintain righteousness by it is deluded. But the Law is more than a command to action or inaction, and it does apply first to the individual at all, but to Messiah, and is a prophecy of Messiah, that only he is the one who will fulfill it.
The Law, being prophetic, is a means of teaching that the scriptures are not primarily about its student, but about another to come who is master of all. That it was not instituted for the purpose of religion, of a self-worship, but the worship of a Divine being that will one day incarnate. Therefore, the heart of the Law is prophecy, not stricture, and the taking of it as stricture is by this definition a rejection of God’s miraculous Word pertaining to the Messiah in faith and practice.
Furthermore, in the record of Jesus’s ministry, there is no attempt to give evidence that Jesus was not an adulterer, a whoremonger, a thief, a liar, or an unjust judge, in other words, a fulfiller of the letter of the Law. That he was that fulfiller is stated by his disciples and by Jesus himself, that he committed no sin, but a claim is not an attempt to demonstrate it as true. What is demonstrated repeatedly is that he was the Messiah according to the prophets, and this essence of the Law he was sent to fulfill, and by so fulfilled the letter.
This is the same pattern of our faith as was intended, that the righteousness of Christ is not one of moral performance except by being that unique one who fulfilled the prophets, and his virtue is applied to us as that virtue of the fulfiller of the oracles, not the Law, by which we are excused our incidental and organic rebellion against the Law. The writer in the above statement states this again, unconsciously: “this curse is contingent upon the very word and solemn promise of God.” The curse is a prophecy and the Law is a prophecy.
Titus 1:2: In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;
God, “who cannot lie.” God prophesied a curse, and the cure and the blessing. These words from Titus are self-revealing.
Christ became the curse of the law. Gal 3.
“The law did indeed curse those who had failed to obey it, asserted unequivocally that Christ was made a curse for us.”
Christ was made into the appearance of a curse as a false prophet by the accusation of false prophets and prophecy, not an actual curse. The most impossible things imaginable is that Christ’s soul can be cursed ontologically, but to the view of the world, he can be set up as a demon, a false prophet and false messiah, and a joke.
It is in this sense that the evil of man reaches its zenith, and in the sense that the meaning of “curse” is fully come into its quintessence. It is necessary for Christ to be an actual curse in the ontological sense only if the “curse” has no epistemic biblical ground, but if it has such ground it would be a curse of appearance, a curse of evil faith, before an evil generation. The effect is the same since a curse that is not experienced in the mind and heart through belief is only a novel theological concept. The curse that became Christ is the impulse in all of humanity that abhors un-defiled, Divine and miraculous revelation that they cannot make into a self-aggrandizing industry, which is the sin of Eden. The curse, the effects of this reflexive perception of the world, was temporary, as that same thing that they rejected was shortly resurrected and by this God’s Word and honor was vindicated by His rising from the dead, which was also a prophecy.
Christ became the curse of the law for us. 1Pe 2:22, Heb 4:15.
1 Peter 2:22: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.
This we handled before. Was the lack of guile or perfect righteousness biblically contextual, or is it self-defined? We note that Peter is quoting Isaiah 53, the greatest of all messianic prophecies.
Hebrews 4:15: For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
Indeed. His temptation is recorded. There were three temptations set forth in Luke and Matthew. The temptation to cast oneself off the pinnacle of the Temple because of the promise of the messianic Psalm 91 that Messiah would be protected in all cases. This is intended by Satan to fulfill the prophecy in committing suicide and performing a miracle, not being crucified. Making the messianic vision to fail by appealing to Jesus’ human sense of stature.
Two, the temptation to make stones bread to prove Messiahship, is to accept that the carnal word of Man and Satan (stones), not the Word of God (bread), by performing another miracle to convert them, not by fulfilling the redemptive plan.
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