We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Cruciform Aikido Pt 2: God-Forsaken Judgment
So if Jesus is the supreme revelation of what God is like, as we explained in our last post, what does that tell us about the nature of God’s judgment?
As Jesus was dying on the cross he cried out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46). This shocking cry reveals that on the cross, the all-holy Son of God experienced God-forsakenness as he bore the sins of the world. In the words of Paul, God did not “spare his own Son” but “gave him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32) and “delivered him over to death for our sins” (Rom. 4:25). On the cross, we see, the one who bore our sin experienced God’s judgment on all sin by being abandoned to suffer the death-consequences of all sin. The essence of divine judgment, we see, is divine abandonment.
As he usually does, God worked through human agents when he abandoned Jesus. Hence Scripture also says that Judas delivered Jesus up to the Jewish authorities (Mt 26:2, 14-15; Mk 10:33; Lk 22:4-6) while the Jewish authorities in turn handed Jesus over to the Roman authorities to be killed (Mt 27:18; Lk 20:20). The Father’s act of delivering Jesus over to suffer, we see, was mediated through humans who delivered Jesus over to suffer. This is why Scripture describes these wicked acts as taking place in accordance with “God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge” (Ac. 2:23, cf. 4:27-28). It’s not that God predestined or in any way caused these specific individuals to betray or abuse Jesus, for this would make God the determiner of these individuals’ sin and thus make him complicit in their evil. Rather, God used individuals who had, of their own free volition, already made themselves evil, to fulfill his predestined plan. Through the wicked character and evil intentions of Judas as well as Jewish and Gentile authorities, God delivered Jesus over to suffer for the sins of the world.
But it wasn’t only human agents who played into God’s predestined plan. Even more importantly, God delivered Jesus over to Satan and other fallen powers to carry out their evil agendas against him. John indicates that Satan was instrumental in Judas’ betrayal (Jn 13:27), while Paul teaches that ruling cosmic powers were behind the scenes orchestrating Christ’s crucifixion (I Cor 2:6-8). Moreover, in the process of delivering Jesus over to suffer at the hands of these fallen powers, God was wisely turning the wickedness of these spirit-agents back on themselves such that they brought about their own defeat. Hence Paul teaches that, if the wicked powers had understood the wisdom of God that had been kept secret throughout the ages, they “would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (I Cor. 2:8). For by means of the crucifixion — which they themselves helped orchestrate — God “canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness” and thereby “disarmed the powers and authorities… triumphing over them…” (Col. 2:14-15). Through the unsurpassable love of God expressed on the cross, God defeated the devil, and thereby freed humanity and all creation from his rule (Heb. 2:14; I Jn 3:8).
Through the crucifixion, in short, God ingeniously turned evil back on itself and triumphed over it. But what does all this teach us about the nature of divine judgment?
Stay tuned…
Cruciform Aikido Series
Image by Flickr user bRokEnCHaRacTer . Used in accordance with Creative Commons. Sourced via Flickr.
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Judgement
Related Reading
When the Last Few Moments Changes Everything
One of the central things ReKnew wants to accomplish is to challenge followers of Jesus to accept that the self-sacrificial love Jesus revealed on the cross is the definitive, and even the exhaustive, revelation of God’s character. Everything about God, we believe, should be understood through the lens of the cross. For most Christians, Jesus…
A Response to “Are Greg Boyd and I Reading the Same Old Testament?”
Collin Cornell has recently published a review of Cross Vision (CV) and, less directly, of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) in The Christian Century. In this post I will respond to the two major objections Cornell raises against these books. Cornell begins by recounting a discussion I had with a woman who was deeply impacted…
Did God Destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? (podcast)
Greg considers the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and speculates on the nature of the angels who were sent there. Episode 597 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0597.mp3
The Revelation of God in the Cross
The cross cannot be understood apart from the resurrection, just as the resurrection can never be understood apart from the cross. They are two sides of the same coin. If you consider the cross apart from the resurrection, then the crucified Christ becomes nothing more than one of the many thousands of people who were…
The Cross Above All Else
The way to know what a person or people group really believes is not to ask them but to watch them. Christians frequently say, “It’s all about Jesus,” but our actions betray us. Judging by the amount of time, energy, and emotion that many put into fighting a multitude of battles, ranging from the defense…
The Cross and The Trinity
Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside the glory he had with the Father from before the foundation of the world, became a human being and bore our sin as he died a God-forsaken death on Calvary (Phil 2:5-7). Though Jesus remained fully God, he…