Well, let's pray. Father, I do ask that you would truly capture all of our hearts this morning. We come from different places, different circumstances this morning, different life circumstances, different things that weigh on our hearts and our minds, things that preoccupy us, things that distract us in all sorts of ways. But as we gather here in the shared life, the name of our Lord Jesus, that you will truly bring us together in your spirit. And Father, that you will sweep us up in this glory that is in the Lord Jesus and who he is and what he's accomplished. Father, we could live a thousand years and we wouldn't begin to plumb the depth of the mystery of your love and its power and its accomplishment. We know and we speak of and we marvel in the cross, we marvel in the incarnation, the climax of it in Calvary's cross and yet Father we truly don't have anything more than just the slightest glimpse into your glory that is in the face of Christ. So I pray that you will meet us this morning and help us to see, to be encouraged. Father, to have our hearts just explode with a sense of joy and rejoicing, exultation in the goodness and the power, the faithfulness, the abiding, loving kindness of our God. how richly we've been blessed. We don't even know the beginning of it. But we do come together, Father, to be built up in this most holy faith and we pray that your spirit will meet us in that way, that you will instruct us and that you will indeed encourage us. Give us all joy, give us all hope and all resolute confidence in this faith that you have given us in Christ our Lord. the faith that will endure forever as the faithfulness of sons and daughters who trust and walk with and love our God. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we've spent many, many weeks talking about the ministry of Jesus, beginning with the issue of incarnation and of tried to make this point that incarnation is really the heart of everything that we would call the Christian faith. It's the heart of what we know about Jesus himself and how we should understand his work. And we've seen the ways in which incarnation worked itself out in the proclaiming of the kingdom, really substantially the incarnation was the embodiment of the kingdom. In the incarnation we see the truth of what this kingdom was to be in its essence, the reconciling of heaven and earth, the bringing together of heaven and earth in the reconciling of God and his human creatures, ultimately the whole creation in and through that divine human reconciliation. And so Jesus' life was directed towards the manifesting of this kingdom in his words, in his works, in his very person. And you've heard me say before, often Christians don't know quite what to do with the Gospels because we're taught to think in terms of, okay, well, Jesus, we have to believe in this thing called incarnation because Jesus had to be something other than a normal human being because it was critical that he be sinless in order that he could be a sinless sacrifice. So really the issues are just immaculate conception, sinless conception, a sinless life, so that Jesus can be suited to be a sinless sacrifice. So it's really just the birth of Jesus and the death of Jesus are all that we really care about, and all the other stuff in the middle we're not sure what really to do with it. But when we understand that Jesus' coming was about this thing called the kingdom of God, then we understand why there was that 33 years, right? Why there was that three years of preaching and teaching and doing the works, things that would testify that he was indeed the Messiah, the one that the Father had promised to come and bring into existence this kingdom. And when I say the kingdom of God, again, that's another part of our Christian vernacular, but we don't often define it very well. But the kingdom that we speak of, the kingdom that Jesus came to proclaim and to inaugurate, is the kingdom that the prophets had been promising, the kingdom that is disclosed in Israel's scriptures, not some kingdom that we imagine or that a system of theology might tell us. but the kingdom that God had been promising, making known, building the case for through the scriptures. So as I say in the notes, this was the kingdom that would be born out of God's return to Zion. As we read Isaiah 35, Isaiah 52, we see this idea. The Lord's going to return to Zion, and he's going to return as redeemer to do a great redemptive work. And through that redemption, he will liberate his captive people He will restore the relationship with them, gather them back to himself, and ultimately renew the curse creation and take up his throne as the king over all the earth. That's what the kingdom of God is about. That's what Jesus proclaimed. That's what he said was already being manifested in his very life. But he didn't come just to proclaim this kingdom as a future event. He came to inaugurate it. The way in which Yahweh would return to Zion as Redeemer is in and through the person of this messianic servant. So ultimately, the Gospels move us to the point where we come from heralding, proclaiming, manifesting the kingdom to inaugurating it. And that's where this issue of atonement comes into the picture. And the reason for even starting out the way I did today is because atonement, like so many other words, concepts, It's a part of our Christian vocabulary, and we all know the word atonement, but do we really understand what it is, what it's about in a biblical way? And what the scriptures insist that we understand is that whatever this atoning work is that was accomplished in the Messiah, it's directed towards the establishing of this kingdom. This isn't just about individual souls being saved to go to heaven. This is the way in which God will establish his kingdom. So, as I said in the notes, the inauguration of God's kingdom, which kingdom? The kingdom disclosed and promised in Israel's scriptures. It's the inauguration of that kingdom that has to inform and govern our understanding of Jesus' atoning work and what it accomplished. If we don't look at the cross and what it accomplished through that lens, then we're skewed. We may not be entirely wrong, but we're off track. And again, as I say, I have to emphasize this because I think most Christians, certainly most Christians that I've met, understand the atonement simply in terms of the way in which God's justice against lawbreakers is satisfied. God has a standard, he has his laws, he has his commandments, he has the obligations that he imposes on human beings. Failure to meet those requirements demands punishment, it demands justice, or else God is not a just God, and atonement is the way in which that justice is meted out. Somebody's got to pay for these infractions. It's either going to be us, the violators, or it's going to be somebody else. And in this case, it's Jesus. So atonement is about the way in which God brings his just punishment against sin so that his justice can be satisfied. That's the way we typically understand atonement. And note that that has nothing to do with the concept of the kingdom in the way that we've been fleshing it out through Israel's scriptures, even as we've come to Jesus' own proclamation, Jesus' own manifestation through his three years of ministry. So as I say here, that notion of atonement that I just articulated, you see it in gospel tracts, you hear it in gospel presentations, people that take classes to learn how to preach the gospel, to do evangelism. This is generally the way atonement is understood. It's very much front and center in a lot of Christian writing, a lot of Christian preaching, but it is less than biblical. And I'm careful to not say unbiblical in the most absolute sense, but less than biblical. It's deficient. because it doesn't interpret Jesus' cross work from within its scriptural, meaning it's Israelite in salvation historical context. So what I want to do today is just talk about this thing of atonement. How does the Bible actually understand it? What is the scriptural concept of atonement? And this won't be exhaustive, but at least put some things out there for us to chew on. So the first thing again is that we have to keep kingdom and cross together. The cross is the way in which the kingdom of God is inaugurated and to put it the other way, the kingdom of God is the goal of the cross. We have to hold those two things together or we're off track. So when we start with this notion of atonement being understood in forensic terms, and forensic means legal terms, there is a law, there is a code, here is the sanction, here is the punishment for breaking the law, here is the reward or the benefit of keeping the law. Just as every society has laws, it has commandments, it has structures, okay, the law says in this school zone, the speed limit is 20 miles an hour, if you break that law, here's the penalty, X amount of points on your license or X amount of dollars, and all of this is spelled out in statute, right? And we tend to think of atonement and God's standard as working in that sort of a way. Here's what you have to do. Oh, you've fallen short. Here's the punishment based on God's standard. Somebody has to endure this punishment. And often, again, it's treated in terms of, well, if God's going to be faithful, He has to uphold his own system of justice. He's the one that devised it. God has to uphold his own standard of justice, or what's the point of it? If we have the laws of the state of Colorado and they don't get enforced, then what's the point? We make a mockery out of the whole thing of righteousness and justice and what is right and proper. And so in the same way, God can't just wink. He can't just look the other way. He has to deal with violation of his standards, of his legal demands. And it isn't entirely wrong to say that there's a forensic quality to atonement. We're going to see that. There is, in a sense, a legal aspect to it, in that there is a rightness and a wrongness that's implicated in God's relationship with human beings, and therefore this thing of dealing with sin. There is a rightness and a wrongness that's behind that. but ultimately it looks beyond legal satisfaction to resolving the actual elemental, fundamental issue in the problem between God and man, and that's this thing of alienation. It's not just that God has put his law book together and people are breaking his commandments, his ordinances, his statutes, his laws, the fundamental issue is this thing of the human relationship with God, the issue of alienation. And I want to show that first by considering the three primary categories of violation or offense that the scripture uses, true both in the Old Testament Hebrew, language, and in the New Testament as well, and that's these ideas of sin, iniquity, and transgression. Together, those three are the primary categories, and they kind of encompass all of the issues of what we would call violation or error or sin. Sin is the most general and encompassing, and we've talked about this before, but sin, you hear people often say, sin means missing the mark. And that's a good general definition, but the idea is deviating from the truth. You know, if an arrow is aimed at a target and it flies off to the side, the bullseye on the target represents the truth in that sense. That's the actual thing that is of concern. And so in terms of a living human thing, sin has to do with violation or deviation of the truth. But not truth as we define it, not truth as the culture defines it, not truth as human beings might think of it, but truth as God knows it. And as I say here, as he manifests it in the way that he has structured and ordered his creation. Truth as God knows it and as he's worked it into the fabric of his creation. So when things are operating according to God's design, they are conformed to the truth. and any deviation from that order, that structure, that function is sin. On the face of it, it has nothing to do with what we think of as sin, which is bad behavior. Bad behavior is just an outworking or a symptom, the fleshing out of this thing of sin. But sin in the first instance is the principle of deviation that leads to all the aberrant behaviors that we know but those things are down the road. Sin itself is this principle of deviation. So if you have an internal combustion engine, when it is operating 100% in conformity to its design specs, it is righteous. It is conformed to the truth. To whatever extent it deviates from those specs, in whatever way, it is guilty theologically of this thing called sin. It's deviated from the truth. So in the case of human beings, then sin is any deviation from authentic human existence. Based on whose definition? Based on God's definition. Well, how do we know God's definition? We know it in Jesus of Nazareth, the man, right? So since man was created to be image son, and all that's wrapped into that, but man created to be image son, this deviation from the truth is a violation of sonship in some way at some level. Because that's what man is. So in whatever way he deviates from his sonship with all that that entails and implies and requires, he is guilty of sin. And that essential sonship, that the truth of that sonship is in what? Man's absolute, complete, uncompromised union and communion with God, because man is image son. So when man is righteous, when man is fully conformed to the truth of his created nature and function, he exists in perfect, exhaustive communion and union with the Father. As you've heard me say so many times, This is what Jesus was getting at when he said, when you see me, you see the father. That's a statement of his humanness, not his deity. When you see me, the son who is in perfect conformity to the father, to see a true human being is to see the God whose image that person is. So sin then, to boil it down, is failure at the point of that intended comprehensive intimacy. We haven't talked about any laws. We haven't talked about any morality. We haven't talked about any code of ethics. We've simply said any deviation from the truth of what man was created to be is sin. Iniquity, the second of those categories that the Bible uses, is a similar thing, but it kind of tightens up or elaborates on this idea of sin by emphasizing deviation as an inward condition. It really kind of connotes the idea of a crookedness or a bent, like a branch that's bent, that doesn't follow a true path. So iniquity Even though it can refer to external things in its basic meaning, it refers to this bent of the human heart and mind away from the truth, which is a bent away from God himself, right? Away from this communion, away from this intimacy. It's the human condition that renders all people idolaters. Idolaters who have themselves as their supreme God. to whatever extent we deviate from this comprehensive, conscious, absolute union and communion with God is to, in a sense, substitute ourselves for that, right? To, in any sense, pull back from that I in you, you in me with God is to be, in a sense, pull back into an I in me, I in me. And this is why all human beings are idolaters. And really, there's just one idol, and that's myself. All of the things that constitute idols in my life are just concoctions and conceptions that I have put together or embraced or formulated as things that I perceive will serve my good, my best interest, my perceived best interest. Remember again the picture in Isaiah where he's mocking the idolaters among Israel who take a piece of wood and they take part of it and they throw it in the fire to create heat and warmth and to cook their food. So the wood serves their self-interest in warming them and cooking their food. And he said, then you take the other part of that same block of wood and you carve it into an idol and then you fall down before it and you say, you are my God, deliver me. It's all the same thing. It's taking something and making it into an idea or a conception that I think is going to serve my blessing or my best interest or my perceived good. Whether it's a physical good, a natural good, a spiritual good, whatever. But behind all of that is the notion that I determine all of what's beneficial, what's good, what's right, what's appropriate to me. I am my own God. And we even obviously form God in our own image, right? G-O-D is just three letters. It's just a sound. It's just a notion. We fill out the meaning of that with a being or a deity or a power that conforms to our sense of our best interests or what kind of a God we would want or what kind of a God we think is appropriate or good or just or whatever it happens to be. So iniquity takes this idea of deviation and shows that it's fundamentally an internal bent or corruption of the heart, the inner man. Transgression then moves things more to the outside. Most commonly, you'll see transgression referred to a violation of a specific obligation, like transgressing a law. To transgress means to go alongside, to move off course. But when you look at the Hebrew concept, it too is fundamentally relational. And as I say here, that's underscored by the fact, hopefully we recognize this at this point, even as we've gone through the Old Testament, all of God's commands have an essential relational dynamic behind them. God never just comes up with arbitrary standards. Drive 25 in this work zone or in this school zone or whatever. It's not just arbitrary stuff. But everything that God discloses, everything that he obligates people to is in the service of truth. the truth of who human beings are in relation to him. All of God's commands reflect the relational obligation of humans to him, and that's what the law of Moses is all about, not just the Decalogue at its center, but the law of Moses was the covenant, the relational contract that formed the relationship between God as covenant father and Israel as covenant son. So all of the law was about defining and prescribing that relationship. And that's why Paul can say in Romans, as he cites from the Decalogue, and then he says in whatever law there is, it has its play Roma in what? The obligation of love. Love your neighbors, yourself, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Jesus said that is what the law and the prophets are all about. Well, love is obviously preeminently relational, right? It's not just about me because love involves the other. So all of God's commandments, Paul says, have love really as their pleroma, their essential fullness, which shows that they are relational. Let's just look at a couple of these things real quick just to show you this. If you look at Genesis 31, and I picked this because this is before Sinai, this is before the law of Moses, and this is how you see this idea of transgression play out here. This is when Jacob leaves Laban and he's going to return back to his homeland and Laban follows after him and accuses him of stealing his household idols. But in Genesis 31 beginning verse 36, Jacob became angry and contended with Laban and Jacob answered and said to him, what is my transgression? What is my sin that you have hotly pursued me? What is my transgression? He hasn't broken any law, right? He's violated the relational integrity. He's stolen something from his uncle is the claim. You see that? This isn't breaking one of God's laws. This is a relational violation. And then if you look at chapter 50, this is where after Jacob dies, Joseph's brothers are afraid that now that their father's dead, Joseph is going to take out retribution on them for selling him into slavery. They're all in Egypt. Here's another instance of where you see this used. Genesis 50 verse 14. After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt. Remember, they went back to Canaan to bury Jacob in the field at Machpelah where Abraham and Isaac were buried. He returned to Egypt, he and his brothers, all who had gone up with him to bury his father. And when Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us back for all the wrong which we did to him? So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, your father charged before he died, saying, thus you shall say to Joseph, please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers in their sin, for they did you wrong. They transgressed against you. They did not treat you according to their brotherhood, right? It's a relational violation. It's not the breaking of a law. You see the same thing in Exodus. Just one more passage we'll look at real quickly here, Exodus 22. And this is during the giving of the law of Moses. Exodus 22 verse 8, if a thief is not caught, then the owner of the house shall appear before the judges to determine whether he laid his hands on his neighbor's property. In other words, if he's not caught red-handed with the property in hand, then you have to determine whether he really stole something. If a man gives his neighbor money or goods to keep for him and it is stolen from the man's house, if the thief is caught, he shall pay double. If the thief is not caught, then the owner of the house shall appear before the judges to determine whether he laid his hands on his neighbor's property for every breach of trust. That's how the NES renders it here. But this is transgression for every transgression. I wanted to read this because again, it shows that this is a relational violation here. The NES renders it breach of trust. Not breaking of a law. Breach of trust. Whether it's for ox, donkey, sheep, clothing, whatever, any lost thing about which one says this is it, the case of both parties shall come before the judges. He whom the judges condemn shall pay double to his neighbor. This is the claim of theft or defrauding. So these are instances of the Hebrew concept of transgression. So transgression at bottom is relational infidelity. It is active, acted out rebellion born of disloyalty, breach of trust. So when you take these three ideas, sin, iniquity, and transgression together, they do underscore from God's perspective that human failure, violation, and guilt, what God considers to be violation that incurs guilt, All of that is fundamentally relational, and it has a person's relationship with God at the center of it. So even if a person sins or transgresses against another person, that violation is ultimately a trespass against his sonship. I put in here this quote, Psalm 50, we're familiar with it. David, after he's confronted by Nathan about the Bathsheba episode, he says in his prayer to Yahweh, against you and you alone have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Well, wait a minute. You transgressed against Bathsheba. You transgressed against her husband, Uriah. You transgressed against the whole nation. You transgressed against the covenant. And he says, ultimately, this was against you, O Lord. So even when our offenses are horizontal and seem to really have nothing to do with God, they are ultimately a violation of our sonship. Why? Because what are the obligations of our sonship, of our humanness as imaged children? Love the Lord your God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Paul says love does no harm to a neighbor. My point then, in kind of summing this up, is that compliance with directives as such isn't the issue in one's obedience to God. See, we want to turn this whole thing of violation into simply, God says do this, you didn't do it, you're guilty. And it doesn't matter what he says. He could say, sing the Star Spangled Banner in French backwards. If he says do it, you have to do it. If you don't do it, you're guilty. And we want to treat it in that kind of impersonal, detached, forensic way, as if God is the lawgiver and he just can come up with whatever definitions or rules or laws or commandments he wants. And whatever he says, we've got to do it because he's the boss, he's in charge, he's sovereign. And that's not how these things work. And in fact, what we see from the scriptures is that that sort of compliance, dotting I's and crossing T's, upholding the letter of the law, so to speak, even when we're zealous for it, even when we're meticulous in doing it, that itself constitutes disobedience and unfaithfulness. It constitutes violation. That's how Paul could say that he who was blameless under the law was actually a blasphemer. See, we can do everything right, and I give you this citation from Isaiah 1. God says to the people of Israel, you're doing everything just right, all the sacrifices. You're dotting the I's and crossing all the T's, and I hate it because I can't abide iniquity in the solemn assembly. Your hearts are wayward. Your hearts are out there. You're doing everything just exactly the way I said, and I hate it. because it's just mechanical compliance. There's nothing of love or devotion in it. Well, what's the point then? All of this is important because atonement is set out in the scripture as the provision for addressing human failure and disobedience. So the point is, if sin, iniquity, and transgression involve relational infidelity, relational violation, then obviously, or hopefully obviously, atonement must deal with relational violation. Atonement must be concerned with relational issues, because atonement is God's provision for violation. And this is exactly what the scripture insists. Atonement and the concept of an atoning sacrifice, where does this even come in in the scriptures? Where does this concept even come into the picture? Well, it comes into the picture in the ordaining, the providing and the setting apart and the ordaining of the priests and the priesthood. Aaron and his sons, to be consecrated as priests, had to offer up to God an atoning sacrifice. So the first time we see anything to do with atonement, it has to do with the consecrating of the priests who are set apart to God to be in the most intimate position with God for the sake of mediating the relationship between God and the nation. At the very outset, atonement is centered in the relationship of the Israelite people with God, which has the priests at the center. They're the ones that mediate that relationship. So the Law of Moses then provides Israel with a system of atonement. There are many different kinds of atoning sacrifices and structures within the Law of Moses, but that was not for the sake of a punishment or vengeance, retribution. God's upset. He's going to, you know, you're going to get it now. You've made him mad, he's going to come after you. This atonement was God's gracious means for preserving his relationship with his people. In the context of an unfaithful, wayward, iniquitous people, God gave them a way to preserve the relationship. This was his goodness to them. It wasn't, you've broken my law, somebody's got to pay here. That wasn't what it was about. But because that unfaithfulness, again, ruptured and distorted the relationship, it created alienation. It created estrangement between God and the people. Atonement was the way to bridge that chasm. Atonement was the way to bring the relationship back. That was what it was about. And that's why atonement has, as a central idea connected to it, this thing of redemption. and the passages that I wanted us to read emphasize this idea of redemption. Well, why does redemption enter into it? Because redemption has to do with liberating something from some alienating, fracturing, separating principle or power. Liberating something or someone from something that has either taken it captive, or led it astray, or even perhaps enslaved it. Israel was redeemed out of Egypt, right? They were exiled, they were separated from God under the enslaving power of the Pharaoh, and this is what God's redemption was all about. So throughout the Old Testament, the promise of God of this day when he will put all things right is it will be a redemptive work. because Israel's entire life, Israel's entire history, was one of ongoing, increasing, and repaired alienation and distance. In a certain sense, Israel was always exiled from their God. Even during the period of the judges, they were in the land, but they were alienated from God. He made them subject to Gentile powers, Canaanite powers. and they'd cry out to him, and he'd send them a deliverer, a judge, who would bring them back, right? And then their faithfulness would continue for a while, and then the whole cycle would happen again. So God was continually breaching the chasm. He was continually pulling the people back to him. That was these micro-redemptive works that were taking place. And the supreme redemptive ransom, redemptive ritual took place on the Day of Atonement. That was the annual event where all of the uncleanness, all of the alienation, all of the separation involving the covenant nation, its institutions, its structures, its functions, all of that was dealt with in this one grand day-long ritual. It was the way in which God pulled everything back in the context of uncleanness and distance and separation. Well, that whole atonement-redemption connection, remember again atonement was to heal distance. Well, that's what redemption is. It's about bringing something back. liberating, recovering something that has been lost or taken away or enslaved. And that dynamic between atonement and redemption reached its climax with the Christ event. This is what you see happening in the Gospels. Because Yahweh there is sending his messianic servant to redeem Israel. Remember even on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection when Jesus is walking with the the two men and they're asking him and talking about what's happened with this crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and they don't recognize him and he asked him, what are you talking about? Why are you the only one in Jerusalem that doesn't know what's happened in these days? And they're lamenting, they said, we thought that he was the one who was going to redeem Jerusalem. The Messiah would come to redeem Israel from its exile and captivity by offering himself as the atoning sacrifice for them. Jesus even said that the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give himself a ransom for many, the payment of redemption. That's what a ransom is. Jesus understood he was the one in whom Yahweh was acting as redeemer of his people, ending their exile, ending their bondage, restoring them to their covenant God. And this is why, as I've said so often, Jesus chose Passover as the setting and interpretive context for his death. Not Yom Kippur, Passover. Because Passover was the great redemptive event. That sat in Israel's consciousness large. That was really the way in which the nation was born, brought out. The covenant relationship was ratified with them. And the prophets had promised a new exodus, a second exodus. Just as God had done with Egypt, he was going to do again. We read Isaiah 35. We read chapter 52. God is going to rise and do another work like he did with Egypt. So Jesus chooses Passover to say, this is the way in which you need to understand my cross. This is what you've been waiting for. This is this great redemptive work that will bring about your liberation your restoration, your in-gathering. If we look just quickly at this passage in Romans 3, we'll talk a little bit more about Romans because Paul is often made to say things he's not really saying, I think, through his letters. But just look at this section in these few verses in Romans 3. Paul says, now apart from the Torah, the righteousness of God has been manifested that was witnessed by the law and the prophets. God's faithfulness has now come into the world. God has shown himself faithful. He has fulfilled what he said he was going to do, not through the administration of Israel's Torah, but apart from the Torah and yet in accordance with what the Torah was talking about all along. That's what Paul is saying. Apart from the law, The righteousness of God, meaning the faithfulness of God, the integrity of God to accomplish what he promised, that has now been manifested. It was witnessed by the law and the prophets. Well, what is this righteousness of God? It is God's faithfulness in accomplishing his purposes that has come through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah for all who believe. There is no distinction. All of sin to fall short of the glory of God are justified as a gift by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation. We're going to get to that. In his blood through faith, through his faithfulness is the idea. This was to demonstrate God's righteousness because in the forbearance of God, he had passed over the sins previously committed for the demonstration, I say, of his righteousness at the present time. In other words, his accomplishing what he said he was going to accomplish. That he should be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So notice the way Paul works all of these concepts into a very compacted statement there. This is how God has proven out and demonstrated and accomplished his righteousness. It's what the law and the prophets had promised, but it's not come through the administration of the Torah, but apart from it, it's come through the faithfulness of the Messiah himself. So the next thing I wanted to talk about quickly is this idea of justification. Usually when people think of atonement, they tie it to justification, right? and certainly because of Paul's writings. Paul's the one who mainly deals with this doctrine in the New Testament, primarily in Romans and Galatians. But because of so much focus, certainly since the medieval period on Paul's writings, justification kind of is what people tend to think of when they think of this thing of atonement. Whatever atonement is, that's the way in which we get justified with God. And because justification has forensic undertones, to be justified is to be declared to be in the right. It has legal or forensic undertones. It also adds to this idea of atonement being a forensic thing. Atonement is how you get justified, right? It's on the basis of the atoning work of Christ and faith in him that you get justified. But I would argue that when you read Paul closely, our commonly held forensic understanding of justification we see is actually imposed on Paul. It's not really what Paul is saying. Paul's doctrine of justification by faith in the Messiah isn't concerned with how a person meets a supposed requirement of legal righteousness in order to escape condemnation and be saved for heaven. and you may have to search this for yourself to see whether I'm right, but that's not what Paul's doctrine of justification by faith is concerned with. Rather, it's concerned with how a person becomes a part of God's covenant household and what that then means for the relationship amongst the diverse members of God's household, particularly Jews and Gentiles. If we keep reading in Romans 3, here's one of the the passages in which Paul says this. Look at verse 28 of chapter 3. Paul says, we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. And we say, there it is. You don't earn your way into heaven. It's a gift of God through faith in Jesus. But look at the next statement, or is God the God of the Jews only? Paul isn't talking about how a person goes to heaven. Is it by his own good works or is it by Christ's good works and us believing in him? Paul is talking about if status in God's household, being declared by God to be part of his people, comes through Israel's Torah, through the law, meaning the Torah, then God cannot be the God of the Gentiles as such. The only way he can be the God of the Gentiles is for them to become proselytes to Judaism. They have to come, right? That's what he's getting at here. So justification by faith here is talking about the fact that we become a part of God's family, God's covenant people, not through owning Israel's covenant, Israel's Torah, but through owning the Messiah. Paul's not talking about, do we earn our way into heaven or is it a gift of God? And if you look in Galatians chapter three, you see the chapter three, but also chapter two leading into chapter three. And I won't spend a lot of time on this, but chapter two, verse 15 of Galatians, Paul says, we are Jews by nature. We're not sinners, Gentile sinners. This is a term that the Jews use for Gentiles. They were sinners. Not because they did anything, they behaved badly, but they were outside of the covenant. They weren't part of God's people. They were unclean. They were aliens. They were foreigners. This is what we read in Ephesians 2. So they just attached the label to them, sinners. These are sinners. We are Jews by nature. We're the children of Abraham. We're not Gentile sinners. And yet we know that a man is not justified, recognized as part of God's family by his conformity to Israel's Torah, but through the faithfulness of Jesus, the Messiah. Therefore, we who have believed in Messiah Jesus, We have believed in him, therefore, that we may be justified by faith in him, not by owning being faithful to Israel's Torah, since by the works of the Torah no flesh will be justified." There's Paul again saying the same basic thing. This is how we recognize who are the people of God. But I want to define this other Well, and I'll let you read it. I don't want to take the time to do it, I guess, now. But if you continue reading, then, in chapter 3, where Paul again talks about this thing of justification by faith and how we are saved by faith in Christ, he talks about how in that way we see that God is keeping his promise to Abraham to bring in the Gentiles. Paul is tying justification by faith to God's purpose to bring in the Gentiles. And the fundamental issue in the Galatian epistle is that at Galatia, there is a two-tiered Christian church. You have the Gentile believers and the Jewish believers. And Paul talks about how when Peter was down there at Antioch, you know, he was sitting and eating at table with the Gentile believers. And then when Jewish brethren came up from Jerusalem or down from Jerusalem, to Antioch, then Peter began to separate himself and now he got all the Jewish believers at one table and the Gentiles. In other words, there's a limitation of their fellowship with one another. Table fellowship was the ultimate sign of we're all the same. and Jews would not eat at table, they wouldn't even enter the home of a Gentile, right? So now there's this bifurcating, and Paul says, I was so upset by that I had to call Peter to his face. He was causing the brethren to stumble, even Barnabas was stumbling because of this, and I couldn't let it slide. And that becomes the basis of what we just read from chapter two. Paul is saying, look, We understand this. We understand how this works. And he says, when you make any distinction between Jewish believers and Gentile believers, you are being unfaithful, untrue to the gospel. You are lying against the truth of the gospel. When Paul says, if any man brings a gospel of him that I brought to you, let him be anathema, that's what he's talking about. Because in Christ, there is one new kind of man. And how does that new man get formed? Because we become a part of the people of God by faith in the Messiah, not by Torah, not by Israel's covenant. If it's about Israel's covenant, then God is not the God of the Gentiles as such. They have to become Jews. That's what Paul's argument about justification by faith is all about. So what's the point of all of that? Well, first I would say that the way in which people often, the hair goes up on the back of their neck and they say, oh, you don't believe that people are saved by faith in Jesus, you think it's by their works. No, that's not the point. And commonly people will say, oh, if you take that view of justification that this is how you know who the people of God are, you're actually stripping it of its soteriological significance. You're saying justification has nothing to do with how a person gets saved. It's just about the church. It has nothing to do with salvation, personal salvation. But it really is a straw man because hopefully we understand that the whole point of personal salvation is that you are grafted into Christ to become a part of his body, right? To say, oh, that's about the church and not about salvation is to separate two things that can't be separated. If we are saved through faith in the Messiah, we are taken up in his life to become one body with all others who are saved in him. So I give you these passages here, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 2. This is what Peter says in 1 Peter 2. having come to Christ the living stone, you now become living stones in him so that you are built together into a spiritual house. So to say, oh, this view of justification is all just about the church, it has nothing to do with salvation. Well, what is the church but the body of Christ? So if justification by faith has to do with how a person gets saved, it has everything to do with how we recognize who Christ's people are, who God's household is, who are his covenant people. But that's what Paul's concerned about in these epistles, is recognizing that the body of Christ is defined by union with Christ through faith, not by Jewishness or Gentileness or whether you bind yourself to Israel's covenant or not. So my point in all of that as far as dealing with justification is to say that Rather than saying it's all about how you meet God's moral, ethical standard so that you can go to heaven when you die, and it has nothing to do with this relational dynamic, it actually reinforces the fact that this is all about the relational obligation of human beings. Justification is about how we recognize God's people, even in relation to one another. And then the last thing I'll mention in closing is this thing of reconciliation, another term that's very central in this idea of atonement biblically. And hopefully we already can see how this factors into it. Reconciliation is what? The restoring, the bringing back together of an estranged relationship. That's what reconciliation is all about. Well, obviously that's the very purpose for atonement. Atonement is not about forgiveness, although it includes forgiveness. Because relationship with God can't be restored without forgiveness. And forgiveness depends upon cleansing from sin, right? Dealing with this thing that has estranged. But ultimately unto what end? The adoption of sons. Ultimately unto the reconciling of human beings to God and reconciling the human race to itself. people to one another. So all of the various means of atonement that God provided to Israel and the way in which those atoning acts worked, what they were targeting, what they were seeking to repair, shows that always atonement was about restoring of relationship. And as I mentioned earlier, Yom Kippur is the preeminent expression of that. The whole point of Yom Kippur was to remedy the estrangement, the uncleanness, the alienation that had accrued to Israel over the preceding year because of their unfaithfulness to the covenant. The goal then of that ritual of atonement, we can say, was propitiation, another theological word that we throw around but we don't often think what it means. We read that in Paul in Romans, right? Propitiation. We say, oh, propitiation means appeasing of wrath. So it has to do with God punishing so that now he's not mad anymore. Once I spank you, then I won't be mad anymore. That's what you deserve. But propitiation is not about punishment or retribution, but healing of the relationship. Healing of relationship. Yes, through cleansing. Yes, through forgiveness. But propitiation is about healing of the relationship. And the easiest way I can show that quickly is that in the Greek writings of the Bible, the New Testament, and in the Old Testament Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament, they use propitiation language to translate Hebrew atonement language. The New Testament and even the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses Greek propitiation language to render Hebrew atonement language. That's how closely they're related. And the easiest example I can give you is the Greek term hilasterion, tied to that hiloskamai verb that has to do with propitiation. Hilasterion is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew kapareth, kippur, yom kippur. Kippur is that atonement idea. Kappa Reth is the place of atonement or the mercy seat in Hebrew, Kappa Reth, and it's rendered in Greek with Helasterion, the place of propitiation. And then I've given you a whole bunch of string of things, and there are a myriad more, but just to make the point. So propitiation is at the very center of this idea of atonement, just as redemption, justification, all these things, and propitiation is preeminently relational. healing of relationship. So to summarize then, in every instance atonement had its goal in reconciliation between Yahweh and his covenant people. But unto what end? That Israel should fulfill its own covenant election as son for the sake of all mankind. God wasn't just healing the relationship with wayward Jews He was laboring to preserve the covenant relationship with Israel that Israel would fulfill its own election on behalf of the world. Their ongoing personal and national reconciliation ultimately had in view God's goal of reconciling all mankind to himself. How would he do that? By reconciling Israel to himself in incarnation. That's the fundamental way in which God reconciled Israel to himself. He took up Israel's life and lot in this thing called incarnation. So that in the incarnate one, the seed, the kernel of reconciled Israel, God could now reconcile the world to himself in order to finally achieve that eternal design to become all in all, gathering up the entire creation in himself. So just to close with this quote, this quote from Colossians, Paul says, he is head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead that in everything he might be preeminent. For it was the father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him and through him to reconcile all things to himself. whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of his cross." God's goal is the reconciling of everything in the creation to himself so that God becomes all in all. From the very beginning to every extent, in every way, it was about God's relationship with his creation in and through man the image son. What we see fleshed out for us in Genesis 1 is ultimately where this is going. That God will be intimately in and among and with and through, present in and exercising his lordship and his creation in and through man who is the creature that bears his image and likeness. And all of that is yes and amen in Christ himself. That's the biblical lens through which we think of atonement. And if we reduce it down just to the fact that people have broken God's righteous requirements and somebody has to be punished, and Jesus was willing to take that punishment so that we don't have to, we've really reduced the whole notion of the cross of Christ down to something that is only in the most remote sense connected with what it was really about. So even if we say, well, there was this legal or forensic aspect of it, only in the sense that forensic speaks to what is right and what is wrong. But the rightness issue is a relational obligation, right? If justification is to be declared to be in the right, what is it for a human being to be in the right? It is for a human being to live a fully, exhaustively, truly human existence, which is an intimate, exhaustive union and communion with the God whose image and likeness we bear. Righteousness is a relational thing, right? All the laws have their pleroma in the obligation of love. So that's kind of an overview, biblically, of this idea of atonement, and we'll consider next time this idea of atonement, even as it's bound up in the very person of Jesus himself. Why we have to think of incarnation as the substance of atonement, not the cross incarnation. So that's what Lord willing, we'll deal with next time. Let me close this in prayer. Then we'll close with this final song. Father, I do pray that you will work these things deeply into our hearts and minds and We don't just grow up in Christ through osmosis. It doesn't happen to us out of the blue. We don't get zapped one day while we're walking down the road. Our maturing in Christ is the result of intentional, continual, laborious effort to more thoroughly know him, to be conformed to him, to walk with him, And Father, that requires that we be a meditative people, that we be a people who are devoted to your scriptures, not just to reading X amount of verses or chapters a day, but to being people who immerse ourselves in the scriptures as they reveal your mind, your heart, your will and purpose for the world. All that ultimately has is yes and amen and Jesus our Lord, the word made flesh. And so Father, I pray that we would be a scriptural people in that way. I pray that we will be a people who truly do apply ourselves to grow up in all things into Christ. And Father, help us to be burdened to be laborers of that growth with one another. that whatever our time with one another, whatever our enjoyment with one another, whatever we're ultimately about in our interactions, that there's always this ultimate goal to, as Paul said, see everyone made complete in Christ. May we be bearers of his life, his fragrance in the world and amongst one another, and may we be zealous to see this thing called the church truly manifest the glory of your kingdom, the glory of this glorious purpose in the world. Help us in all these things, Father. We ask them in Christ's name and for his sake. Amen.