How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only One Way. Part 4. The Man.
The world, including our theology, has access to “truth,” but this only appears to be a value, because it is not a concept formulated with an unavoidable transcendental attachment. The way the world handles the ultimate spiritual bank is they make their own currency, and their own bank, and loan it out to their own people, that don’t place upon it so harsh and strict qualifications.
The currency they exchange and spend is a boon to the world. It finances countless books, lectures, seminaries, emotions, churches, and pious intentions very successfully and lavishly, but only because they can’t get into the other transcendent bank and use its currency of truth, which has a firewall around it which keeps them out.
The only way a real revelation of God is of possible success when given into a world with a majority of people hostile or apathetic to it, but still for a small number who are receptive, is to make sure it gets through to the right people and hide it from the wrong people. The bank hides its money by putting it into safe. With God, he protects it from the wrong people by baiting them with what they really love. Those are the things of the world, mystery, puzzles, work, tantalizing questions, and generally a possible view of transcendence taken for the exclusive service to them and their desires. It superficially looks like the real thing, giving a feeling that they are holding something ultimate, but the comparison stops there. At the same time, this symbol that can signify carnal things to carnal concerns, having the competence to appear holy but is not, is for those looking for God also symbols of things that pertain to eternity, truth, spiritual law, God’s mind and the provably miraculous. The one honestly looking for truth gets it, which is entirely abstract but of life and death importance, and the one looking for other things gets it, which can only fuel carnal ambition and die with them. This accomplishes two things.
One, God’s Word, his message, is preserved untouched for those that will receive it since the carnal majority never know it in order to mount a targeted effort to demagogue it too vigorously and widely. Two, God’s Word remains as a foundation for the growth of a larger religion not divinely motivated, but which reveres the “Bible” idea. In this, its members unconsciously create a much broader, global protective context in which that Word is preserved and distributed. Every biblical symbol reflects this same strategy.
There is a temptation to ask if this truth is of ultimate value to everyone, why is it not given unambiguously? After all, if an entire people are dying of some new virus and you have a sure-fire cure, love means offering it freely. Why does the revelation have to be symbolic at all? This is a persistent and loud complaint of liberal, universalist sects and atheists.
I remind you that the spiritual body is not the physical body, and a physical drug is not a spiritual one. The spiritual body, as the physical body, is a body effected by the accumulated attitudes and actions as a result of free will with respect to that life. But the spiritual body is by definition free will, history, reason, love, attitude, and belief itself, not sloughed off in death but remaining to stand as an indelible witness of that person as the being in himself, not the beings corporeal representation device. The cure for spiritual sickness is spiritual and will metabolize successfully only by working in nuclear agreement with the spiritual body of its introduction. Since the spirit is itself a decision and its effects, not only a possible reflection of it, a cure passed out indiscriminately is one that assumes that the spirit will benefit from it like the physical cure, without the synergistic cooperation of the receiver. In all due respect to Calvinists, this is then a denial that we even have spirits (or souls if you will), defined as the strongest and most identifying part of an individual which has to power and responsibility to accept or deny reality. To such an entity, you compassionately make the drug freely accessible. But since it is a transcendent truth, information, and not a thing, it can’t work in a spiritual body which treats it as a medical talisman, but only by being in the sense of a receptor to what it already is. If not, your just an antibody to the divine antibody.
By this same logic, God coming down and appearing on the White House Lawn before CNN cameras is not compassion, it’s the forcing of truth upon the receiver and the removal of his free will in accepting it. It’s not respect, its infantilizing, or thinking of people as programmable androids. In that case, no one can reject God. It leaves no room for your moral conscience to move in the process of search, discovery, and commitment. As such, it gives the holiest aspect of God, his sovereign non-contingency, and inter-dimensionality, which makes him inaccessible except through a mediator, an inconsequential aspect, and, therefore, just a notion.
We are discussing a moral decision and a moral choice made for your spirit when that is a most important act you can perform, emblematic of the soul, is not your moral decision, nor a moral decision of the one who makes it for you.
But if this depiction of Christ on the Cross represents God’s plan of redemption, and the plan demarcates fundamental evil from good, the depiction’s meaning has to be as earth-shattering by its true reveal as it is protective of it. The two essential elements of the Cross of Christ begin with this: rather than an answer, I ask if the Cross is first showing as a question and a moral choice between two things?
This is where it really gets interesting. But if your fear snakes override your need for the truth, don’t even try to follow me from here.
The Man: Sin and Righteousness
There is a cross. There is a man on the cross.
The man, again, tortured and murdered by hanging on this cross. His life, draining away. Bound, affixed, tied to this wood. Abused, crushed, and dying. Finally, he dies by hanging on this device of murder.
Our time now will center on this man. Who must he be a sacrifice for the sin of the world?
The act is not transcendently redemptive if it is not, first and foremost, a revelation. I think we have sufficiently exhausted this. We must then conclude the consequences of you taking this as something primarily designed to be mysterious with benefits that reach out to the individual only from Heaven is a full-frontal coup to its designed power and the crushing of the message.
As I have just discussed, sin is the forcing of a spiritual cure into the function of a physical, “evil” one, that one receives and holds without the necessity of moral reflection, with it giving healing benefits automatically. This is called talismanism, what the ancients called idolatry. Many of us readily insist that before the act of the Cross and the Man can in any way be redemptive, it must be known and believed. But taking the meaning of the Man and the meaning of the Cross as God/Jesus/Savior/Redeemer on burden/death/sacrifice/love are weasel words. They are designed to accommodate the necessity of divine meaning with the ardent love of a religious device transmitting virtue to a person without necessarily any depth of understanding, love, and meditated engagement. These words are conceptual, not revelatory. What would be revelatory is when the meaning reduces to a symbol concept so powerful that it then forces a signification which then stands for the end of the signification process, not the beginning or middle. It is ending in the thing-in-itself, not its mediator. It is ending in a piece of knowledge that could not have come from the human mind. Those words are infinitely re-assignable to another vulnerable concept, such as “political activist,” “radical rabbi,” “hippy saint,” “persecution,” “lover of people,” “ultimate ritual sacrifice,” etc. None of these stops a possible chain of signification because “truth” has arrived by the symbol’s instrumentality. We want an idea that is revelatory outside of the mind’s resources in an engagement with common words.
For this mediation to succeed in producing a revelation, there are some theological keywords for scoping out that apply to this man: righteousness and morality, lust, and sin. He has to be righteous and not carnal, but by the meaning of carnality and sin, because righteousness is defined by what it is not. We are not going to offer “righteousness,” for example, and leave its definition open or rendered to “lawful obedience” or some similar. The working definition has to be consistent with the spiritual receiver in the act of free will in wanting and choosing to see some revelation which, like the motive, is alien to carnal thought and expectation.
After this, we consider the display of righteousness and sin in the scene of a man hanging on a Cross, which is the display of sacrifice for world sin.
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