Two Big Lies

I don’t intend to make my blog a platform for theological exposition, but I can’t resist writing about two lies that have bothered me for decades.

Lie #1 – God is angry but Jesus has calmed him down. (God the Father doesn’t love the world as much as God the Son.)

The Old Testament is filled with stories of God’s terrible judgment upon human depravity. The wrath of God is a prominent feature of all the prophetic books. The book of Judges is filled with examples of God’s judgment being poured out onto whole nations and people groups. Perhaps the most famous judgment of all is the fire and brimstone that fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding villages.

You can’t help but get the feeling that the nation of Israel (and all the others as well) can’t ever get right with God. They sin and then they repent and then they commit the same sin again. No wonder God gets exasperated with them and wipes them out from time to time. Israel was sacked twice. The Babylonian and Assyrian empires vanished. Scores of minor city states and nations surrounding Israel were swept away. And yet God keeps coming back to the remnants of these people groups with high hopes for regeneration.

Fast forward to Golgotha and the crucifixion of Christ. Evangelical theology is emphatic that on the cross Christ became an actual sin offering upon which the entire reservoir of God’s judgment and wrath was poured out. Christ actually became sin and God judged him as worthy of death. On the cross Christ depleted God’s anger and righteous indignation to the point that God the Father could now forgive the humanity he was determined once to annihilate.

This theological point flourishes everywhere in evangelical Christianity. In my view, Satan could not be happier with the idea that God the Father is not as loving as Jesus Christ, the precious Lamb of God, and that the torture and crucifixion of his own son was necessary to nudge the Father to becoming just as loving as his son.

We all know this notion of the character of God is absurd based on the Scriptures. God the Father is just as loving and kind as God the Son. Even Jesus asserted that if you saw him you saw the Father. Everyone believes Jesus Christ is the embodiment of love. God must embody that same degree of love.

So, if God is that loving, then why do Christians believe that God’s wrath had to be poured out on Christ in order to mollify God’s anger?

Most evangelicals subscribe to a payment theory of the atonement. Essentially, the Son is paying off the Father so the Father can begin to act differently towards those Christ is in the process of forgiving and saving. It is through the cross that God’s wrath is finally depleted and he can begin to love the world like his son does already. Even though the verse God so loved the world that he gave his only son suggests God already loved the world before Christ’s death, and before the pouring out of his wrath, Christians embrace an atonement that has to explain the torture Christ experienced and the verse that says Christ became sin. Because he was sin in actuality his brutalized death is evidence that God punishes sin, even when it is found in his own son. This judgment upon Christ is so tremendously huge that God is satisfied that the punishment represents payment in full of God’s justice. Now God is free to forgive in his mercy because his justice has been satisfied.

Lie #2 – Christ did not want to die for the sins of the world. (God the Son doesn’t love the world as much as God the Father.)

In the Garden of Gethsemane, hours before Jesus was arrested and later crucified, he knelt to pray to God his Father asking him to let this cup of death pass him by. And he quickly added not my will but yours be done. He prayed this prayer at least three different times. This was serious business for him. His life was hanging in the balance.

Apparently, Jesus was not completely convinced that he really wanted to die. Perhaps at that moment he experienced real fear because he was a man just like the rest of us. And naturally, like any of us would, he asked God to spare him the torturous death that awaited him.

Evangelicals glide over this prayer in just this fashion – Jesus was a man subject to all the typical temptations and emotions we also experience, including apprehension and doubt. He prayed to be spared but only if it could be part of God’s plan for his life.

It wasn’t. Jesus knew that from the very beginning of his ministry. He knew all along that he was destined to die for the sins of the world, and thereby bring the possibility of salvation to billions. If this self-knowledge wasn’t enough to convince him of his purpose, then maybe a face-to-face visit with Moses and Elijah would help. These two appeared to Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration for the sole intention of conveying to him the manner and time of his suffering and death. This was a fact that Christ repeated to his disciples frequently. The Son of Man was to die and be raised on the third day.

Yet, this prayer gets in the way of his life’s principle work of becoming the Messiah. Regardless of all he understood about who he was and where he was headed, Jesus takes a moment to tell his Father that he’d rather not fulfill the role of being the Lamb of God.

Imagine the impact of this interpretation of this passage! God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, living in human form on earth, tells God the Father that he’s hesitating to complete his mission; that he has second thoughts about its wisdom and efficacy; and that if there were any other way to save the world then Christ preferred that way over the sacrificing of his life.

It’s my judgment that this interpretation of this verse of Scripture cannot be true. Jesus could not have harbored any doubt or fear about his assignment. He could not possibly have been reluctant to walk resolutely to the cross.

Think of how this interpretation impacts John 3:16. God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son, who begrudgingly (because he didn’t love the world as much) came into this world to save the lost. Good grief! This is an impossible rendering of Christ’s prayer in the garden.

If Christ weren’t asking God to rescue him, then for what was he asking? Christ was experiencing supernatural oppression to such an extent that his sweat was like blood. He was under tremendous pressure to forfeit his destiny and this heaviness was so great that he feared he might die right there in the garden, or at the hands of the angry mob that was approaching likely with the intention of stoning him to death, the customary Jewish means of capital punishment.

He would have known that he was to die on a cross, as Moses and Elijah had told him, and not in the garden and not by stoning, which would have quickly brought Christ to an unconscious state and sudden death. If the plan had changed, Christ needed to know. So, he prays to God and asks him to let this near-death experience pass him by so that he can go forward to the cross, but only if it were still God’s will. If God had changed his mind and was bringing about Christ’s death right there, then he was willing to die without the cross.

Jesus Christ did not have to be convinced to die for my sins. He didn’t have to be cajoled into loving the world enough to endure horrendous suffering and death on a cross. No, his entire earthly life was focused on one event in one place, and that was not cardiac arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, or death by stoning at the Temple gate.