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.

key

Two Questions to Unlock Violent Divine Portraits

There are two basic questions that help us to interpret what is going on in the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament, as I propose in Crucifixion of the Warrior God.

The First Question: What does the “God-breathed” revelation of the cross teach us about the nature of God’s “breathing”?

God “breathed” his supreme revelation on the cross by both acting toward us and by allowing others to act toward him. Because God honors the personhood of others, and because he therefore works by means of the influential power of the cross (1 Cor 1:18) rather than by exerting coercive power, God’s “breathing” is a dialectical rather than a unilateral process.

This cross-centered, dialectical understanding of the way God “breathes” should shape how we interpret the way that God “breathed” the Old Testament witness. We must read it with the awareness that it reflects both God acting toward us, insofar as God’s people at that time could receive it, as well as God humbly allowing others to act toward him, insofar as God had to accommodate his people’s fallen and culturally-conditioned hearts and minds. We must read the written witness of the OT knowing that portraits of God will display the same beautiful character as is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the former, but they will reflect the same ugliness of sin that is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the latter.

In this light, the OT’s violent portraits of God can be understood as testaments to the truth that God has always been willing to humbly stoop to bear the sin of his people and to thereby take on a literary semblance that mirrors the ugliness of this sin, just as he did in a historical way on the cross.

The Second Question: How does a guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal become the definitive revelation of God for us?

It is not what everyone can see on the surface of the crucifixion that reveals God. Rather it is only when we by faith look through the surface of this event that it becomes the definitive revelation of God for us. Only by faith can we discern the Creator stooping an infinite distance to become this guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal.

Since the God who “breathed” this paradigmatic revelation is the same God who “breathed” his written witness to this revelation, we should read Scripture expecting that there will be times when the revelatory content of a portrait of God is to be found not on its surface, but in its depth. The first can be understood by straightforward exegesis, but the second calls for faith to discern the humble, loving condescension of God.

However, we can only interpret the OT’s violent portraits in this sin-bearing way if we place our compete trust in the character of God revealed on the cross. If we suspect that God has a dark side and is capable of doing the monstrous things that the OT authors attribute to him, we will mistake the “shadow” for the “reality” (Col 2:17; Heb 10:1).

To put it another way, if we fail to place our trust in the revelation of the crucified Christ, we are trading the unclouded revelation of the Son, who alone is the “radiance of God’s glory” (Heb 1:3) for the cloudy perspective of ancient authors who could only catch “glimpses of truth” (Heb 1:1).

Only the slain lamb unlocks the secret of how macabre portraits of God point to him.

—Adapted from Crucifixion of the Warrior God, pages 1250-1252

Photo credit: Vitor Sá Photo via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Related Reading

A Foolish and Weak-Looking God

The New Testament assumes that the God of Israel and the God revealed in Jesus Christ are one and the same God. But there also can be no question that the portrait of God that was unveiled when the Messiah arrived on the scene was in some respects quite different from what the OT had…

The Reformers and the Centrality of Christ

The Christocentric nature of the Church’s hermeneutic approached a zenith in the Protestant Reformation. While Luther and Calvin rejected allegorical interpretation, in theory if not in practice, they nevertheless relied on typology and other creative hermeneutical strategies to discern how Christ was the subject matter of the OT. For Luther, Jesus was “the Word” in…

Sin-Bearing God

On the cross, God became our sin, as Paul wrote: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). However, God didn’t begin to be a sin-bearing God when Jesus walked the earth and hung on the cross. Rather he became Incarnate and bore our sins on the cross…

Podcast: Was Jesus’ Experience of Separation on the Cross a Hallucination or a False Belief?

Greg talks about the paradox of Trinity and Christ’s experience of separation on the cross.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0349.mp3

God Became What He is Not To Reveal What He Is

We are saved because Jesus became the curse of the law for us (Gal. 3:13). So too, the way Christ freed us from the condemnation of sin and enabled us to “become the righteousness of God” was by becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). What is more, since the curse of the law includes enslavement to…

Divine Accommodation and the Cross: where Calvin was onto something

Over the last few posts, I’ve been arguing that the cross represents the thematic center of everything Jesus was about. Hence, rather than striving to have a “Christocentric” theology — which is so broad it means next to nothing—we ought to sharpen our focus by striving for a “cruciform” theology. I then offered some suggestions…