Over at The Blog for InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network I have been writing a review series on J.I. Packer's Knowing God, which is a collection of short articles on the nature of God and humankind. Here I want to revise the series, but I'm going to do it backwards, starting with the final installment and ending with the first.
The Problem
There's a common thought among many outside observers of those following the Way of Jesus. I've overheard people talk about Jesus' death as a strange act of cosmic child abuse, employed to change the mind of the angry God of the Old Testament. But this, as J.I. Packer puts it, is a polytheistic misunderstanding of the gospel. Jesus is the same in character as the God of the Old Testament. Jesus and the God of the Old Testament have the same essence.
Far from being cosmic child abuse, the death of Jesus was a self-sacrificial death.
Hold on. Let's be honest. From an outsider's perspective this all sounds pretty weird. But lets be honest about another thing. The human spirit is really into sacrifice. When soldiers sacrifice their lives for those whom they love on the battlefield, they're still given the highest honor in the United States military. Our awe inspiring movies and television shows and New York Times Bestsellers (at least in the fiction genre) center around selfless, sacrificial heroines and heroes dying (in one way or another) for the sake of others. Think of, say, The Hunger Games, or Harry Potter. I hate to use the "U" word, but self-sacrifice (not only in battle but in love and family and friends) is a universal theme with us humans. It might appear to us differently when expressed through other cultures, but the nature behind our will to sacrificial giving is the same. We were all created in the image of the same God.
God chose, because of his love for his creation, to pour out his just wrath onto himself in Jesus, who was willing to die in perfect humility and holiness for the sake of the millions and billions of hurting people whom he loves. Jesus' death was the perfectly ultimate self-sacrifice. It was an act of self-sacrificial love with more significance than we can fathom. And Jesus didn't stay dead. He actually and powerfully protects the hearts of those who put their hearts in his hands, no matter what they've done.
So how is this divine justice also loving? It is loving because it is justice for those who are crushed by broken things in a physically and spiritually broken world. Those who do the breaking and crushing, without seeing their own fault and humbly accepting God's gift of the self-sacrificial love of Jesus, will experience this loving and just God as well.
Here's a little more of what J.I. Packer's Knowing God has to say on the issue. Chapters 14-17 of Part II and the whole of Part III, Chapters 18-22, have as their foundation the biblical concept of propitiation, which is centered upon the age-old problem of the just and loving God of Christianity. Packer confronts God’s righteous anger and his judgment head-on. Today we prefer to name anger “frustration.” (Surely it isn’t as bad — or should I say, sinful — to be frustrated as it is to be angry at the person who gets your order wrong at the drive-through.) And judgment? Far be it from us! More than that, we tend to put God into our categories. We’d rather have a God who, after a short period of frustration, smiles and forgets all about the ugly stuff. An “angry” God doesn’t sound like one I’d want my family worshiping. But in Knowing God Packer ushers us into a confrontation with the pervasive biblical theme of anger and judgment as inextricably linked to the character of our God. The anger of the God of the Bible is not like ours. Because it’s perfect. So is his judgment. Packer points out dozens of scripture references related to both God’s anger as his righteous response to injustice and unrighteousness AND to his judgment upon those who practice sin — actions in rebellion to God — without remorse.
I’ll let you read the book, but let it be said by way of introduction that, for Packer, the good news is this: our Judge is stainless in his holiness, perfect in his justice, and infinitely abounding in his goodness. We can therefore trust him in his dealings with his creation, including in his wrath and anger. Furthermore, as Packer points out, we know that "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1).
But how is this possible?
Propitiation
Packer moves seamlessly from a discussion of judgment and anger to one of propitiation. Propitiation is a fancy word used to deliver the message that an entirely holy, all powerful God can hang out in intimacy with people who, having rejected his help, are anything but holy and powerful. In Chapter 18 Packer quotes John Murray’s The Atonement:
The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath… (185).As Packer points out, in some translations of the New Testament “expiation” takes the place of propitiation. Packer argues that expiation, which “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” (182), is too weak. For expiation does not, as propitiation does, begin from recognizing the pacification of the just and loving wrath of God on the cross, a motif on display too often in the biblical story to be avoided (see especially Romans 1-3). Packer takes this argument all the way to a claim that all of the various understandings of the interaction between God and us on Good--so very Good--Friday can be traced back to propitiation.
…When you are on top of the truth of propitiation, you can see the entire Bible in perspective, and you are in a position to take the measure of vital matters which cannot be properly grasped in any other terms (191).
So if knowing God is the desired pursuit of the Christian life, then propitiation is the fact that makes it all possible. Although in Knowing God Packer discusses many other truths of our faith, he begins and ends with knowing God and propitiation. I hope this brief study has opened up some questions for you, as it has for me. I disagree with Packer from time to time, and so will you. That’s completely okay. Even Peter and Paul went through that. What is most important, as we saw argued for in the first several Chapters, is that you come away with a deeper knowledge of the true God. For indeed, as Brennan Manning put it so eloquently in The Ragamuffin Gospel,
The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly.
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