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.
Not the God You Were Expecting
Thomas Hawk via Compfight
Micah J. Murray posted a reflection today titled The God Who Bleeds. In contrast to Mark Driscoll’s “Pride Fighter,” this God allowed himself to get beat up and killed while all his closest friends ran and hid and denied they even knew him. What kind of a God does this?
The kind worth loving.
From Micah’s post:
You would expect a god to have a pride fighter’s tattoo carved into his leg. But Jesus’ feet were covered in dust from walking among us. You would expect a god to wield a sword in his hand, distributing vengeance on all his enemies. But Jesus’ hands healed his enemies who’d been wounded by the sword. For a moment it had seemed like he would be the god we had always imagined – overthrowing the Empire, leading a victory parade through the city streets, planting his flag in Jerusalem. Instead, He was betrayed with a kiss, arrested without a fight, and prosecuted without cause.
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Easter, God, Humility, Jesus, Mark Driscoll, Micah J Murray, Sacrifice
Related Reading
The Heavenly Missionary
In his second sermon introducing the ideas in Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Greg suggests a metaphor to help us frame the things we encounter in the Old Testament that seem at odds with the God we find in the life and death of Jesus. God is a heavenly missionary who stoops to accommodate our…
The Most Beautiful Truth
Jesus was God incarnate. Yet he continually referred to, and prayed to, God the Father as someone who was distinct from himself. He also continually referred to, and claimed to be empowered by, God the Holy Spirit as someone distinct from himself. And yet Jesus, along with all Jews of his time, believed there is…
Does God Have a Dark Side?
In the previous post, I argued that we ought to allow the incarnate and crucified Christ to redefine God for us rather than assume we know God ahead of time and then attempt to superimpose this understanding of God onto Christ. When we do this, I’ve argued, we arrive at the understanding that the essence…
The Destiny of God’s People
Jesus represents the realization of God’s glorious dream for humanity. In Christ, we see what we who are in Christ are destined to be. As a stick placed in a river is destined to be carried to whatever body of water the river runs to, so all who have allowed themselves to be drawn by…
The Call to a Cruciform Life
Jesus repeatedly taught that following him meant that one had to be willing to “pick up their cross daily and follow [him]” (Lk 9:23; 14:27). Picking up our cross is the centerpiece of following Jesus because this was the centerpiece of what Jesus was all about. The thematic centrality of the cross is also illustrated…
Was Jesus Fully Human and Fully God?
The New Testament is very clear that Jesus was a full human being. He had to grow in wisdom (Lk 2:52) and learn obedience by going through trials, just like every other human being (Heb. 5:8). He grew hungry and tired, like the rest of us. He experienced the same range of emotions as the…