"Knowing God" [VII]

- The Heart of the Gospel -

On Pagan Propitiation. "The idea of [pagan propitiation] is as follows. There are various gods, none enjoying absolute dominion, but each with some power to make life easier or harder for you. Their temper is uniformly uncertain; they take offence at the smallest things, or get jealous because they feel you are paying too much attention to other gods and other people, and not enough to themselves, and then they take it out [on] you by manipulating circumstances to your hurt. The only course at that point is to humour and mollify them by an offering. The rule with offerings is the bigger the better, for the gods are inclined to hold out for something sizeable. In this they are cruel and heartless, but they have the advantage, and what can you do? The wise man bows to the inevitable, and makes sure that he offers something impressive enough to produce the desired result. Human sacrifice, in particular, is expensive but effective. Thus pagan religion appears as a callous commercialism, a matter of managing and manipulating your gods by cunning bribery; and within paganism propitiation, the appeasing of celestial bad tempers, takes its place as a regular part of life, one of the many irksome necessities that one cannot get on without."

On Biblical Propitiation. "[The] Bible takes us right away from the world of pagan religion. It condemns paganism out of hand, as a monstrous distortion of truth. In place of a cluster of gods who are all too obviously made in the image of man, and who behave like a crowd of Hollywood film stars, the Bible sets the one almighty Creator, the only real God, in Whom all goodness and truth find their source, and to Whom all moral evil is abhorrent. With Him there is no bad temper, no capriciousness, no vanity, no ill-will. One might expect, therefore, that there would be no place for the idea of propitiation in biblical religion. But we do not find this at all: just the opposite. The idea of propitiation--that is, of averting God's anger by an offering--runs right through the Bible. In the Old Testament, it underlies the prescribed rituals of the sin-offering, the guilt-offering,... and the day of atonement... In the New Testament, the 'propitiation' word-group appears in four passages [of] transcendence importance. [Romans 3:21-26, Hebrews 2:17, 1 John 2.1 & 4.8-10]." 

Propitiation vs. Expiation. "What is the difference? The difference is that expiation only means half of what propitiation means. Expiation is an action that has sins as its object; it denotes the covering, putting away, or rubbing out of sin so that it no longer constitutes a barrier to friendly fellowship between man and God. Propitiation, however, in the Bible, denotes all that expiation means, and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby." 

God's Wrath at Calvary. "What manner of thing is the wrath of God which was propitiated [pacified/appeased] at Calvary? It is not the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered and conceited anger which pagans attribute to their gods. It is not the sinful, malicious, infantile anger which we find among men. It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the demands of God's moral law, [and] of that righteousness which is expressed in God's acts of judgment and reward... God's wrath is 'the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of His holiness' (John Murray, loc. cit.). And this is the righteous anger--the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator towards moral perversity in the creature. So far from the manifestation of God's wrath in punishing sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for Him not to show His wrath in this way. God is not just--that is, He does not act in the way that is right, He does not do what is proper to a judge--unless He inflicts upon all sin and wrongdoing the penalty it deserves."

Propitiation: God's Initiative. "In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates His wrath by His own action. He set forth Jesus Christ, says Paul, to be a propitiation; He sent His Son, says John, to be the propitiation for our sins. It was not man, to whom God was hostile, who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn His Father's wrath against us into love. [It] was God Himself who took the initiative in quenching His own wrath against those whom, despite their ill-desert, He loved and had chosen to save." 

Propitiation: God's Motive of Love. "Love to one another, says John, is the family likeness of God's children; he who does not love Christians is evidently not in the family, for 'God is love' and imparts a loving nature to all who know Him (1 John 4:7 f.). But 'God is love' is a vague formula; how can we form a clear idea of the love that God would reproduce in us? 'In this was the love of God manifested towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son... that we might live through him.' Nor was this done as God's acknowledgement of some real devotion on our part; not at all. 'Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that'--in a situation where we did not love Him, and there was nothing about us to move Him to do anything other than blast and blight us for our ingrained irreligion--'he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.' By this divine initiative, says John, the meaning and measure of the love that we must imitate are made known."

Why Blood? "'Blood', as we hinted earlier, is a word pointing to the violent death inflicted in the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant. God Himself instituted these sacrifices by His own command, and in Leviticus 17:11 He says why. 'The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement...' When Paul tells us that God set forth Jesus to be a propitiation 'by His blood', his point is that what quenched God's wrath and so redeemed us from death was not Jesus's life or teaching, not His moral perfection nor His fidelity to the Father, as such, but the shedding of His blood in death. With the other New Testament writers, and explains the atonement in terms of representative substitution--the innocent taking the place of the guilty, in the name and for the sake of the guilty, under the axe of God's judicial retribution. [Galatians 3:13; 2 Corinthians 5:14, 18-21]."

Representative Substitution: A Signpost. "Representative substitution, as the way and means of atonement, was taught in typical form by the God-given Old Testament sacrificial system. There, the perfect animal that was to be offered for sin was first symbolically constituted a representative, by the sinner laying his hand on its head and so identifying it with him and with it (Leviticus 4:4, 24, 29, 33), and then it was killed as a substitute for the offerer, the blood being sprinkled 'before the Lord' and applied to one or both of the altars in the sanctuary (verses 6 f., 17 f., 25, 30) as a sign that expiation had been made, averting wrath and restoring fellowship. On the annual Day of Atonement, two goats were used: one was killed as a sin-offering in the ordinary way, and the other, after the priest had laid hands on its head and put Israel's sins 'on the head' of the animal by confessing them there, was sent away to 'bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited' (Leviticus 16:21 f.). This double ritual taught a single lesson: that through the sacrifice of a representative substitute God's wrath is averted and sins are borne away out of sight, never to trouble our relationship with God again. The second goat (the scapegoat) illustrates what, in terms of the type, was accomplished by the death of the first goat." 

Mankind's Primal Problem. "No reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin against God. By sin the New Testament means, not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before, God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we all need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God."

Propitiation: Illustrations and Pictures. "Sometimes the death of Christ is depicted as reconciliation, or peace-making after hatred and war (Romans 5:10 f.; 2 Corinthians 5:18 ff.; Colossians 1:20 ff.); sometimes it is depicted as redemption, or rescue by ransom from danger and captivity (Romans 3:24; Galatians 3:13, 4:5; 1 Peter 1:18; Revelation 5:9); sometimes it is pictured as a sacrifice (Ephesians 5:2; Hebrews 9-10:18); an act of self-giving (Galatians 1:4, 2:20; 1 Timothy 2:6), sin-bearing (John 1:29; 1 Peter 2:24; Hebrews 9:28), and blood-shedding (Mark 14:24; Hebrews 9:14; Revelation 1:5). All these thoughts have to do with the putting away of sin and the restoring of unclouded fellowship between man and God, as a glance at the texts mentioned will show; and all of them has as their background the threat of divine judgment which Jesus's death averted. In other words, they are so many pictures and illustrations of the reality of propitiation, viewed from different stand-points."

The Cross: A Window into Judgment. "On the cross, God judged our sins in the person of His Son, and Jesus endured the retributive come-back of our wrongdoing. Look at the cross, therefore, and you see what form of God's judicial reaction to human sin will finally take. What form is that? In a word, withdrawal and deprivation of good. On the cross Jesus lost all the good that He had before: all sense of his Father's presence and love, all sense of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, all enjoyment of God and created things, all ease and solace of friendship, were taken from Him, and in their place was nothing but loneliness, pain, a killing sense of human malice and callousness, and a horror of great spiritual darkness. The physical pain, though great... was yet only a small part of the story; Jesus's chief sufferings were mental and spiritual, and what was packed into less than four hundred minutes was an eternity of agony--agony such that each minute was an eternity in itself, as mental sufferers know that individual minutes can be."

On the Peace of God. "Too often the peace of God is thought of as if it were essentially a feeling of inner tranquility, happy and carefree, springing from knowledge that God will shield one from life's hardest knocks. But this is a misrepresentation, for, on the one hand, God does not feather-bed His children in this way, and anyone who thinks He does is in for a shock, and, on the other hand, that which is basic and essential to the real peace of God does not come into this concept at all. The truths after which this account of God's peace is feeling (though it misrepresents them, as we said) are that God's peace brings both power to face, and live with, one's own badness and failings, and also contentment under 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' (for which the Christian name is God's wise providence). The truth which this account ignores is that the basic ingredient in God's peace, without which rest cannot be, is pardon and acceptance into covenant--that is, adoption into God's family... The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us... The peace of God, then, primarily and fundamentally, is a new relationship of forgiveness and acceptance--and the source from which it flows is propitiation."