I've heard two very good illustrations over the last couple of weeks which I would like to share with the world.
The first I heard at my home church in Leicester, Goodwood, which is from a book on worship by Stuart Townsend. It's an illustration on how a Christian's life should be, stemming from what God looks for in a worshipper, compared to how we often see worship. Like a stick of seaside rock that has lettering printed throughout, we should live our lives with Jesus printed throughout. We shouldn't be just a stick of rock with a wrapper on, labelled as a Christian, but have Jesus throughout our lives in everything we do.
The next illustration I'd like to share was heard at the UCCF Forum weekend I went on. A boy wants a toy boat to ride in the local water expanse (be it the sea, lake, Brayford Pool, whatever) and so he gets to work making one. Finally, he makes his boat, his masterpiece, which he is very proud of and set it off in the water. It is perfect and is floating along absolutley finely but all of a sudden it goes missing. The boy loved the boat so much and would do anything to get it back. One day soon, he hears that in the local bits and bobs shop has appeared his exact boat! The boy ventures out to this shop: 'That's my boat, which I made and I love it! It floated away the other day...'. The shopkeeper replies 'It floated away to me. If you want it back, then you'll have to pay up for it' The boy loved his creation so much and, even though he didn't owe it anything and it was created by himself, he needed to have it back. He paid up every penny that he had and left the shop with the boat back in his posession.
This isn't a like for like illustration but it goes to show a little bit into why Jesus had to die for us. The little boy represents Jesus and we are represented by the boat. We were created by Jesus (all things were created by Him and for Him (Col 1:16)) and we were very well created (Genesis 1:31). We were loved by Him dearly but we went astray to sin. I guess the shopkeeper could be seen as representing sin, but the main point is that, through His love for us, Jesus ventured out to the Earth in an effort to buy us back. We belong to Him, for we were created by Him, but we went astray and Jesus had to pay the price to get us back. The price was everything he had on Earth; his life. But Jesus overcame death and bought us back, as unfair as it was that He had to.
i think the use of illustrations here is very helpful. thanks.
ReplyDeleteim afraid i dont find this way of talking about jesuss death satisfactory (or at least by itself). for starters the idea that god needs to adhere to some abstract concept of justice doesnt seem to fit the biblical picture of an all powerfull god. also it fails to do justice to the part humans have to play in salvation which is very important.
this way of talking about salvation is only one very narrow explanation, and needs to be combined with many many others to even begin to make sense of the salvation we experience in our lives. in fact we see many ways of talking about this experience in the bible itself. this model here is very influenced by paul. the gospels use very different imagery such as the sacrificial lamb. and im sure we can be creative ourselves and use our own imagery to talk about how we understand that jesus saved us, beyond just matters of debt and payment. these ways of talking about jesuss saving us are simply our best attempts to make sense of how he saved us and will never be enough. sadly i have some problems with the idea that we should celebrate the death of jesus when it was in fact a massive tragedy and a terrible end to a life that deserved anything but death. i dont think god wanted jesus to die. i think human beings are responsible for putting jesus to death. this is one of the problems i have with pauls way of talking about salvation, but i admit that it is very helpful.
maybe im being provocative here but id ask whether this way of talking about salvation (though still very useful) is dominating the way we talk about it too much, and question whether there are other more relevant ways of doing this
thanks for giving people a chance to think about these things. peace
Thanks for the comment, Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteI think that for God to be any sort of just God He must punish all sin. This naturally puts us humans in a bad position, being sinners, but we have a way to be reconciled to God. We will never know this as our human selves, I think, but only when God fully reveals himself at the end of days will we even come close.
Of course, these illustrations are just a way to try and get people to think about the position God is in in relation to the sin that all humans are subject to and to start to thin about what He has actually done. They'll never get as far as full explanation.
However, I still do believe that it was God's plan for Jesus to die, all the OT prophecies point to it and all of NT teaching is based on it. To say that Jesus was killed against God's will is contradictory, I think, as Jesus was Himself God...
i think we agree on the matter of these models being illustrations and our best attempts to make sense of salvation
ReplyDeletethe problem with this idea of god having to send his son to die in order to pay for our sins doesnt seem to make complete sense. surely if god is all powerfull he could have forgiven our sins without sending his son as a sort of ransom to satisfy an abstract concept of justice that god is tied to?
again with the argument of scripture foreshadowing and the new testament talking about jesus in this way, they are simply doing their best to make sense of jesuss saving them in the most powerful imagery they have available to them, and if thats not a huge claim i dunno what is!
i think it does make sense to say that jesus was killed against gods will. first of all christians have never spoken of jesus as god in terms of them being exactly the same person. the trinity speaks of three persons. secondly i believe that the incarnation was an event in which god made himself and his revelation vulnerable in an attempt to connect with human beings. i think this includes the potential for humans to reject jesus, which they did
thanks
I don't think that the fact that sin needs to be punished with death is abstract. However I concede that I'm not knowledgable to enough to talk about God being all-powerful as far as forgiving sin without punishment...as I am I would say that justice is in the same category as morals: they are objective and just are.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Christians calling Jesus God: first of all Jesus himself said He was God and secondly Paul often talks of him as fully man and fully God. Yes there are three persons of the Trinity, Jesus the Creator, begotten of God, is the one who was born man (see Philippians 2). I believe he is the same 'God' that walks in Eden, meets with Abraham and appears to Daniel and John in apocalyptic visions.
your solution concerning justice being in the same category as morals works. however some people might find the results of this unsettling, since it means that god is bound by an objective law of justice. im not sure what i think, but i know there are definitely a lot of theists who would be troubled by the idea of a universal system of morality and justice that was not created by the creator
ReplyDeleteit doesnt seem obvious to me that god had to go through the ordeal of sacrificing his son in order to overcome the injustice of people, thats all.
i dont think jesus himself ever talks of himself as god, though some gospels do certainly want to talk about him like that (eg the confession of thomas in john). whatever that means he talks about himself as the son of god and the son of man a lot more. regardless, youre right in saying that paul does talk about jesus as fully man and fully god. the distinction i was trying to make was between the person of jesus and the person of god, and i think its clear from the gospels themselves that they are in a very real way different people eg when jesus prays to god (though we can talk about jesus as god in some sense)
As I said, I really don't have enough knowledge to discuss it properly but it seems tome to be in the same category. They may well be created by God, and be subjective only to him, but either way that is how it is and God works with it.
ReplyDeleteI think either way, we need to see ourselves in the order of things: if God does something that we don't understand or can't make sense of, let us trust that it is His divine authority that it is done by.
i definitely agree that god has done something that we're trying to make sense of as best as we can, and imagery of debt and ransom has been very useful for this. we can all sleep easy knowing that our attempts to do justice to the reality of salvation pale in significance to the reality itself
ReplyDeletewe are both united in our failure to do justice to a world overflowing with grace
peace be with you, brother