“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” – John Calvin

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?”- Psalm 8:3,4

Intercultural Ministry is inevitable; yet we make the choice of embracing it or ignoring it. No two humans are alike, even those from the same “culture.” We are all unique in our own ways, therefore it is critical to learn how to do intercultural ministry, whether in seminary or not.

The definition of my personal theology of intercultural ministry is the process of striving to know God and mankind and the application of this knowledge. As the author in Psalm 8 states, God is the one who created the heavens, moon and stars, but who is man that God pays attention to him? God is the one who shakes the earth and parts the Red Sea. He is the Holiest of Holies. He is the Alpha and the Omega. He has always been. All mankind is contingent to Him and yet he loves man.  He is the One who sent His Son into the world to be murdered and sacrificed for us, for me.

As we learn more about God, we see how fallen man is. Romans 3:10,11, “”There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.” We see how completely depraved man is and yet how valued man is in the eyes of God through the blood of Jesus, even to the degree that God loves His only begotten Son. John 17:23, “that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.” This is a mystery. My heart resonates with the psalmist as he asks, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” This is the question at the heart of intercultural ministry, what is man ontologically? Who is God? And why does God who loves man so? How does this knowledge affect our lives?

What I learned in the course

Through this course, I picked up tools on how to interact interculturally and think critically. Here are a few of them:

1. De-essentializtion – A person is more than their socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation, religions, etc. For example, people who write about slums are, more often than not, people who do not live in slums, so the literature about slums is not a complete representation of slum dwellers. Often they are essentialized as poor and pitiful. We must hear more than one side of the story.
2. Intentionality -While we were presenting our final projects this is a topic that came up over and over again. When doing intercultural ministry mistakes are bound to happen. For example, it is almost impossible to translate a worship service into the native language of everyone present, but having translators available and approachable simply as an option would be kind and considerate. Also, having signs translated into every language necessary is not possible, but at least English, Spanish and Chinese would be helpful (depending on your demographics).
3. Local Sages – Often there are certain members of the congregation who are never called on to preach a sermon. But they have gone through the test of time and have so much wisdom to share. These are the people I should seek for wisdom and insight.
4. Metaphors – There are seemingly harmless words like white, black, human capital, volcanic anger, etc. and when we use them they may imply things that we never intended. It is necessary to use our words carefully, respectfully and with love towards those we are addressing or referring to.
5. Lenses – We all come to the table wearing many lenses whether they be existential, social, psychological, political, economical, etc. Often times our beliefs are results of the country we live in and the time period we are in. As Christians, God’s opinion should have first place in our hearts, minds and lives. Thus we should be aware of the lenses we wear and make an effort to remove them.
6. Flip the Narrative, Embrace Diversity – This means to open up the conversation. When discussing issues of race, make sure there are different races represented. For example, when talking about “white privilege” do not simply ask people who all look the same
7. Pray for milkshakes – While Prof A shared about his life, I learned things about prayer I did not know before. I learned that every decision is a theological one, even the decision to buy a weekly $2.30 Mcdonalds milkshake. (My prof shared about how he would pray about whether to spend money weekly on milkshakes or not). Honestly, for me, prayer sometimes seems tiresome, exhausting, and time-consuming. But through this course and other courses I am learning how liberating prayer is because it implies that every single part of my life matters. Also, I am not a good steward of my life. I have only been around for 26 years; God has much more wisdom than me. I want God to have the monopoly over my life.  Even now, I am so confused with what I am doing at seminary or why I am here. But I want to take it one day at a time, one semester at a time, just as Prof A prayed when he drove by Mcdonald’s. Sometimes the Lord said yes and sometimes the Lord said no. May the Lord teach me to listen to Him in all my decisions whether big or small.

Ways this course was helpful

“Humans don’t want to hear about the depth of human depravity.”

This course was so uncomfortable because we were forced to come face to face with difficult questions. For example, why are children allowed to suffer? Or ISIS allowed to exist? Why do we spend so much money on coffee? And why do we not notice when thousands of people are dying around us? Why do we spend time and money in seminary when so many people need Him outside the walls of Moody? Is there a better gospel?  I needed to ask these questions. I need to be shaken out of my bubble where my biggest dilemma is deciding whether to get Indian or Chinese food for dinner or what to watch on netflix. I live a charmed life. I cannot deny it. It is like a living version of the Hunger Games and I live in the capital. I’m glad that in this class I could be reminded of that. Every week, Prof A would survey the room and comment on how wealthy we are. This was helpful because it brought me back to reality.

It seems like this was a morbid class, but it wasn’t completely. I saw hope through this class. The honesty was refreshing because healing cannot be done until we diagnose the state we are in. There is a huge idol in US churches and it’s green; it’s money. But we are not powerless before it. We don’t have to hate and criticize American culture or wait to be shipped off to a foreign country for our real ministry to start. The US is ripe for harvest; we are plump and overfed. And God is mercifully opening our eyes to this.

Another point Prof A often shared is that “ministry is everywhere.” It is even in my neighborhood elderly home. There are so many refugees and unreached people in Chicago right now. They are inside their homes waiting for someone to minister to them. I can start right now. This was very encouraging to me.

And finally, through our discussions I began to love Jesus more. I began to see that He was not one to cut people short or give simple reduced answers. He is someone who could see so much more in a person than the human eye can. He is someone who wept over people. He was someone completely unpredictable. My human mind cannot wrap around the fact that God destroys and punishes but he does it lovingly with tears in his eyes. This is an impossible combination according to the opinion of my overly tolerant and affirmative culture. How can Jesus bear both grace and truth uncompromisingly?

Jesus loved people; and His love was evident to those he loved. He wants our submission, but he does not demand it. After our discussions I often thought where would Jesus be if he came back to Chicago in 2015? What neighborhood would he be living in? How would he spend his time? What would He be doing? And this gives me insight into how I should be living my life and spending my time.

I also learned about the jealousy of God the Father, especially because we memorized Zephaniah 1:8, 3:8. God is not only the God who answers our prayers and sends rainbows. He is a God who has emotions such as wrath, anger and jealousy. It really reminded me of Aslan in Narnia. He was not safe, but He was good. And yet in Zephaniah 3:17, it talks about a God who takes great delight in my, quiets me with his love and exults over me with loud singing. Our God is a complex God whose depth and breadth cannot be explained even if we had all eternity. Through this course I learned more insights into the heart of man and the heart of God.

Look!

1. Is There No Other Way?
2. Why Have You Forsaken Me?
3. Where, O Death, Is Your Victory?
4. Why Do You Seek the Living among the Dead?
5. Do You Not Know These Things?

These probing questions drive to consider the mystery of Easter.

1. In anguish of soul and with sweat like drops of blood (Lk 22:44), Jesus asks that the cup of God’s wrath pass from him (Mt 26:42). Why does the Father remain silent?
2. How do we understand Jesus’ mysterious cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46)
3. What does Paul mean by asking rhetorically, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55)
4. What do the angels mean when they ask the women at the tomb “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”? (Lk 24:5)
5. What might we know about epistemology (knowing), when the two travelers to Emmaus asked the risen Christ, “Do you not know these things?” (Lk 24:18)

Why did the Father say No to Jesus? Chap. 1 explains. It was not because of neglect or indifference or that God was a “divine deadbeat dad,” but so that he could say yes to us on legitimate grounds–no legal fiction, no injustice to threaten or question the exchange of our sin for Jesus’ righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). The Father had to say no to present Jesus as a “propitiation” or sacrifice of atonement (Rom 3:25). This saves sinners. But it also proves his justice–to demonstrate his righteousness for sins committed beforehand. Because the Father said no, we will forever–through faith in the Son–enjoy and share the glory of the Father and Son in the unending, timeless age to come.

How can the Father turn his face away from Jesus? Chap. 2 begins with the sacred creed of soldiers–Leave no man behind–in order to express the horror of God abandoning his Son to die on the cross (Mt 27:46). A theologian calls Jesus’ cry “one of the most impenetrable mysteries of the entire Gospel narratives.” Yet God records this mystery for us to consider. There are at least three ways Jesus experienced suffering from being abandoned: Social abandonment, emotional desertion, and spiritual separation. To be face-to-face with God the Father is the Bible’s idea of the highest possible blessing and happiness. Conversely, to have God turn his face away would be the worst condemnation. Jesus experienced the latter from the depth of his being. On the cross Jesus was cursed (Gal 3:13), made sin for us (2 Cor 5:21) and “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet 2:24). In the unspeakable terror and agony of being abandoned by the Father, Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34) Calvin said that in his soul, Jesus endured the punishments due to us. But because Jesus was abandoned socially, we become children in the household of God. Because he was deserted emotionally, we become whole again–renewed in the image of God. Because he suffered spiritual separation, we are now spiritually united to him through faith, never to be separated from God’s love. Because he was forsaken, we are forgiven.

How can we truly know what we know? Chap. 5 explains epistemology–a fancy word for any theory of how we know things. Everyone has their own theory of what they know. We say, “I just know it’s true” (subjective feeling), “It’s a proven scientific fact” (confidence in observable facts), “Let’s be reasonable” (insisting on rules of logic), or “I know because someone told me,” which is an epistemological claim based on knowing things by someone else’s testimony. But is there a way of knowing that is more reliable than feeling, facts, emotion, perception, science and testimony.

One way to know what we know. Luke 24 shows three insufficient ways and one infallible way of knowing the truth about Jesus and the resurrection. The three insufficient ways are physical senses alone, facts alone (even if they are firsthand eyewitness testimonies) and Bible study alone (surprise!). In contrast, the one infallible way of knowing the truth about who Jesus is and the power of his resurrection is that we must have our eyes opened by God (Lk 24:31, 16; Mt 11:25-27; 13:10-11; 16:17).

I recommend this book for being fresh, experiential and practical. Please do share other views of the atonement.

(a sermon based loosely on Romans 1:18-32, delivered at Hyde Park on 9/22/13)

The topic for today is wrath. More specifically, the role of God’s punishment in understanding the gospel. This is a topical message, and I hope that you will bear with my ramblings, listen critically, and judge for yourselves whether or not I am being faithful to the witness of Scripture.

The gospel is summarized by John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16) The gospel is good news of love and life. But there’s a flipside to that in certain gospel presentations, that if you reject the good news, there will be “hell to pay.” Sometimes that flipside becomes the main story. As in that famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which depicts the non-believer dangling over a pit of hellfire, held up by only a spider’s web which can break at God’s whim. The message is that, unless and until we believe in Jesus, we are the objects of God’s wrath. ”For God was so ticked off at the world that he gave his one and only Son…” Now some people will say that the Church has gotten too soft, that we have become morally lax and ineffective in our witness because we’ve stopped confronting people with their sin and no longer warn them about God’s wrath. And others will say that we should stop up talking about wrath altogether, because it gives an ineffective and misleading picture of what the gospel is about.

Being raised as I was in the Roman Catholic Church, wrath and divine punishment were very much a part of my childhood education. I was taught that if I committed a mortal sin (such as missing Mass on Sunday) and then died before going to confession, my soul would go straight to hell. In the evangelical world, I heard that God is love, but he is also wrathful; he wants to forgive us of our sins, but he also has to punish every sin, so he decided to punish Jesus instead of us, which satisfied both his love and his wrath. Love and wrath were the opposing sides, the opposite poles of God’s character, as were grace and truth, and those opposing sides were brought together at the cross. Bingo! Problem solved.

That explanation sounded logical, and it was good enough to keep me from worrying about it for a long time. But after two decades of assuming that I had this gospel thing all figured out, I began to have doubts, and I started to notice some deeper contradictions. As I became more honest with myself, a terrible truth started to dawn on me. The truth was: I didn’t love God very much. All along, Christians had been telling me that the gospel brings people to “a personal relationship with God” and “a love relationship with God.” But I began to admit that I didn’t really have that. Don’t get me wrong; I was deeply involved in church activities, I was doing lots of things for God. I was carrying out my Christian duties. But I wasn’t in love with God in the sense that I wasn’t liking him. I wasn’t longing to be with him, to see him, to worship him, to know him. For the longest time, I had just assumed that the problem was me. I supposed that I had failed to grasp the deep truth of the message that was given, that I just hadn’t believed it enough, that I hadn’t tried hard enough, and so on. I put all the blame on myself, thinking that I, as an individual, was deficient. But as the years wore on, I began to notice that lots of other Christians – evangelical Christians, the ones who supposedly “knew the Bible” and had gotten the gospel “right” – were in essentially the same boat as I was. For all our talk about having a personal relationship with God, our experience of God was impersonal, driven by rules and principles and teachings; our worship was intellectual, abstract and sterile; all of that wonder and joy and heavenly sunshine that we promised people they would experience if they “just accepted Jesus as their personal savior” wasn’t fully there; it wasn’t being realized in our lives and in our community.

So I went back to fundamentals. I asked myself some basic questions like, “What is love?” and “Is it possible to love someone if you don’t actually like them?” I decided that the answer to that second question is “No.” If you claim to love someone but you don’t actually like them, then something is fundamentally broken; that love is retarded, it is stunted, and it can’t be fixed by reinforcing the status quo and doing more of the same. And I came to realize a truth I had never known before. That truth is that love requires freedom. If an expression of love isn’t given freely simply because the giver wants to give it, then it’s not love. Many of the gospel presentations that I’ve heard have more than a hint of coercion. “God loves you, and he has a wonderful plan for your life. And oh, by the way, if you don’t accept his offer, you’re gonna burn in hell for all eternity, so you might as well say, ‘Yes.’” Picture a man proposing to his girlfriend. He gets down on one knee, takes out a diamond ring, and says, “I love you more than anything in this world; I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me? And oh, by the way, if you say no, I’ll find ways to punish you and ruin your life.” Would that marriage be off to a great start? If the purpose of the gospel is to bring us into a loving relationship with Jesus the bridegroom, then how could such a relationship be established by threats or by force?

The understanding that love requires freedom has enormous implications for how we live out our faith. One of my spiritual breakthroughs, a real “Aha!” moment, came when I read the classic book True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer. Early on in that book, he makes a point that is profoundly profound. He say that if you are a Christian, it is not good enough for you to simply do the right thing; you have to do the right thing in the right way and for the right reason. What he means is this. It is possible for any of us to generate good behaviors by our own human strength and willpower. But that isn’t how God’s kingdom operates. To a pragmatist, motives don’t matter. A pragmatist would say, “What does it matter why you do something? As long  as somebody is doing something good, there’s no need to worry about why.” (Some will even support this with Scripture, as Paul wrote in Philippians 1:18: “But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”)  But in Christianity, the why really does matter. In God’s kingdom, the good works that we do are of no value unless they are being brought forth through the living person of Jesus Christ who has made his home in us – or, in other words, by the active work of the Holy Spirit who is alive in us. The outward fruit that Christians bear must be the visible manifestation of the inner fruit that comes from the Holy Spirit, and according to Paul in Galatians 5:22, the most basic fruit of the Holy Spirit is love.

What I’m saying is this. Whatever we do as Christian life, the motive for doing it must be love. Not a sense of honor or duty. Not a sense of fear. Not peer pressure or groupthink or pleasing mommy or daddy. Not to make myself look like a leader and gain acceptance by people because I do what’s expected and follow the rules. My motive must be pure affection for God and pure affection for others, the pure affection of Jesus that flows like a river from the throne of God into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. That kind of pure love is not generated by our efforts; it is simply a gift. If the reason why we do what we do is not love, then what we are doing is not gospel work. This isn’t rocket science. This is Christianity 101. This is the language of the new covenant (Jer 31:31-34). This is part of what Jesus meant when he said that all the law and prophets, in other words, the whole teaching of Scripture, hinges upon love for God and love for our neighbor (Mt 22:40). The authentic Christian life is motivated by love, powered by love, experienced in love, consummated in love. Love reigns supreme.

I used to think that love was one of the many excellent qualities of God. In western Christianity, there’s a tradition of defining God by listing his attributes. God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-sufficient, all-holy, and so on. Who is God? “Well, God is a being with all those attributes. If your walking down the street, and by chance you encounter a being with all those attributes, you have found God!” That understanding of God can be helpful up to a point. But it is impersonal and it falls short when we come to love. The Bible doesn’t merely say that God has love. Scripture says that God is love (1Jn 4:8). Love is not an abstract quality or attribute that a single person can have in isolation from other persons. Love manifests itself in relationships. Love is an other-centeredness that is realized only when others are present.  Unless multiple persons are involved, there is no love.

This is why it’s so important to understand that God is not a single person but a Trinity – three persons, distinct but co-equal, each one fully free and fully God, but living together in unity and dwelling in one another and delighting in one another. When some people imagine God, they picture him as one white haired guy sitting on a throne completely in love with himself and demanding that everyone love him too. But the God of the historic Christian faith is a Triune community of love. So when the Apostle John said, “God is love,” he really meant it.  God’s missional purpose, his plan for us and for the world, flows from who he is. His intention is to draw us into his loving community, to delight in Father Son and Spirit and be delighted in by them as they delight in one another, participating with them to the extent that we can as earthly human beings on in that amazing dance that has been going on in the heavenly realms since before time began. That was the reason why we were created. That is the reason why the kosmos  was created. That is the reason why God incarnated himself to become part of the kosmos to redeem us and all the kosmos. “For God so loved the kosmos that he sent his one and only Son…” (Jn 3:16)

If we want to explain the gospel well, we need to start in the right place. Some gospel tellings start with Romans 3:23, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” Sin is a huge part of the story. But we won’t be able to understand sin unless we go father back to see what God was in the process of making before sin broke it. It’s hard to come up with a definition of sin that internally resonates with everyone because, although everyone has some sense of good versus bad, the way people understand good versus bad varies greatly from one culture to another. Western understandings focus on guilt: people sense they are bad when they as individuals break a rule or violate an objective moral standard. But Eastern understandings focus on shame: people sense they are bad when they fail to live up to the expectations of their group and bring dishonor to the family or community. In a guilt society, order is maintained by explicit rules and punishments for breaking the rules. In a shame society, order is maintained by marginalizing and ostracizing people who step out of line. These differences make it very hard for Easterners and Westerners to agree on how to deal with unethical behavior, or even on what constitutes unethical behavior.

The manner in which we understand sin will deeply affect our understanding of biblical terms like justification. Evangelical Protestants tend to explain the gospel in legal or forensic terms. We imagine a courtroom where God the Father is the judge, and we are on trial for everything we have ever done. The evidence is presented, and we are found guilty and sentenced to hell. But just before we are handed over for eternal punishment, Jesus bursts in and says, “I died for his sins! The price is paid!” and we are set free. In this framework, justification means that God declares us as individuals to be innocent of the crimes we have committed. Children of the Reformation tend to think in terms of law, because the Reformation was carried out by lawyers. Zinzendorf, Melanchthon, and Calvin all studied law. They inherited the Western tradition of Lex, Rex (“Law is King”) which supposes that people of all standing, even rulers and kings, must submit themselves to legal principles and be punished in a fair and impartial manner if they disobey.  Now if you take this western legal understanding of the gospel and bring it to eastern cultures which operate on a system of shame and honor, a great deal will be lost in translation. This is one of the issues that the UBF ministry has been wrestling with, and we need to better understand what is happening here if we are going to develop a workable ecclesiology, a system of church governance that sets the ground rules by which we operate. But I digress.

Kingdoms of the west maintain the social order by rules, guilt and punishment. Kingdoms of the east have developed elaborate systems of honor and shame. So what about God’s kingdom? How does it operate? If the kingdom of God is the realm of the Father, Son and Spirit, it must function as the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. Is the Father ever ticked off at the Son? Does the Father say to the Son, “Don’t ask questions, boy, just obey”? Do the Father and Son draw up rules for the Spirit and say , “Holy, we want you to go into the world and do this, because this is safe, but don’t ever work that way, because that way is too unpredictable”? In the first three centuries after Christ, the Church Fathers had passionate, heated debates about this, sometimes resulting in fistfights, because they sensed they needed to get it right. They were not arguing over esoteric abstractions. They were grappling with the most basic question, “How does the kingdom operate?” They looked carefully at the apostolic tradition, including the writings of Paul and the Upper Room discourse of John 13-17. They struggled to find just the right words to describe who the Father, Son and Spirit are and how they relate to one another. What they said, in essence, is that the persons of the Trinity never bind one another, never lord it over one another, never impose rules or obligations or guilt trips or manipulations of any kind. Their relationship is one of complete equality, complete freedom, complete openness and honesty, complete unity in the midst of creative diversity, to the point where they are not simply admiring one another from a distance but actually getting inside of one another and indwelling one another in an atmosphere that can only be described as pure joy.

The persons of the Trinity are doing the “happy dance.” As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Their delight in one another is so infectious that it bursts out of them in creative energy that produces new life. Think of what happens when a husband and wife who delight in one another and come together in freedom and just do what comes naturally; their passion leads to babies. Babies are amazing.  From the moment they come out of the womb, they are an explosion of joy and wonder. The are little autonomous beings who want nothing more than to just be with people and thrive on the receiving and giving of love.  We are the children of God, the babies of the Trinity. God’s whole purpose for us is to draw us into his everlasting happy dance and experience a baby’s pure love and joy and wonder.  The dance that God intends for us is not on some pie-in-the-sky heavenly cloud, but right here in this world, in this physical, natural environment that he created us for and that he created for us. Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

In light of this understanding of how the kingdom operates, we start to realize that the views of guilt and shame that dominate the cultures of west and east fail to describe the full scope and tragedy of what sin has done. Sin is something like a cancer which has metastasized, twisting and distorting and injecting hurt and pain into every aspect of that happy dance for which the children of God were created – our relationship with Father, Son and Spirit; our relationships with one another; our relationships to ourselves; and our relationships to this created world. In our fallen state, we come together and try to perform damage control in these various areas using the tools of social engineering that our parents handed down to us. Some of our solutions are quite creative and work better than others. But in the end, none of our treatments can cure us or truly heal our relationships. And may I suggest that many of our deficient understandings and outright misunderstandings of the gospel stem from taking our personal and cultural ideals of what a good, orderly human society or church ought to look like – all of our creative strategies for sin management — and forcibly projecting those views onto God’s kingdom, rather than stepping back and asking God with open hearts and minds, “Lord, how does your kingdom operate? Reveal yourself. Show me how you work.”

When we ask that question and go back to Scripture, we gain insight upon insight. There are so many ways to describe about how God brings his kingdom to us and us to his kingdom.  Those insights from the Bible tend to come not so much in the form of doctrinal statements that we are told to just accept, but as colorful stories, narratives and parables that we hear and chew on and discuss with one another until they take root in us. The key figure present in all those Scriptural stories and parables is a single character, a man named Jesus, who has been revealed as the Messiah by virtue of his suffering, death and resurrection. When we approach Scripture as Jesus and the apostles taught us – a method that can be described as “forward and backward” – when we read it prospectively in its original historical context, and then re-read it retrospectively in light of the historical experience of Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension – then we gain glimpses of how that kingdom is already breaking into this world and into our experience if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

God’s kingdom is already fully realized and fully present in the person of Jesus. Jesus is fully divine and fully human. He is all God, all man, all the time, and two natures in one person, and the divine and human are always in harmony, never in conflict. Where Jesus is, there is the kingdom of God, insofar as human beings can experience it. Since Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he is no longer here in bodily form. He has promised to return to us in the flesh, and when he does we will be together with him and experience the full reality of the kingdom in our spirits and our bodies. Until then, while we wait, we have his presence among us in the body of the Church through the activity of the Holy Spirit, whom Paul described as a seal, a downpayment , an arrabon (engagement ring), a foretaste and sure promise of the kingdom life that is to come (Eph 1:13-14).

Now when the Holy Spirit comes to us, his intention is not to throw us into a fog of guilt and shame. Nor does he want to terrorize us with fear. Nor does he come to us chains of slavery, with long lists of rules and conditions that we need to fulfill before we measure up to God’s standard. Scripture is very, very clear on that point. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Sonship, the polar opposite of fear, the one who unites us to Jesus and enables us to cry out, “Abba, Father” (Ro 8:15, Gal 4:6).

To conclude this sermon, I want to return to the subject of God’s wrath. That word, which basically means anger, appears in the Old Testament (NIV) 152 times, and in the New Testament 29 times. I believe Scripture is divinely inspired, and I believe that word is an accurate reflection of how human beings in our fallen state experience God as he works to reveal himself to us in our context. I find it extremely fascinating how often the psalmists use wrath in ways that, in light of the teachings of Jesus (for example, in the Sermon on the Mount) are distinctively unchristian. For example, in Psalm 79:6: “Pour out your wrath on the nations that do not acknowledge you, on the kingdoms that do not call on your name.” And Psalm 69:24: “Pour out your wrath on them; let your fierce anger overtake them.” And Psalm 6:1: “Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath.” The psalmists appear to be totally in favor of God pouring out his wrath, as long as God does it on other people and not them. This is often how we feel, and it is an accurate reflection of how fallen human beings sometimes pray. But this is not the teaching of Jesus; he commanded us to love our enemies. I have found a similar spirit at work in certain kinds of gospel preaching: the idea that God’s wrath is being poured out on other people, on people outside of the fold, on people who are not seen as God’s people by virtue of their beliefs and behaviors.

But when we turn to the New Testament, we see a distinct shift in the frequency and manner that wrath appears. In the NIV gospels, Jesus used the word only twice: Once in Luke 21:23 when he predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, and again in John 3:36, when he’s speaking to Nicodemus: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”  Colorful and intense preaching about God’s anger, the kind that appears in Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, is very rare in Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel. In Jesus’ parables, he does occasionally speak of God’s judgment, but it tends to be against God’s people who refuse to forgive and reconcile with one another (Mt 18:34), those who claim to be Jesus’ followers but refuse to show love and mercy to people in need (Mt 25:46), and against hypocritical religious leaders who misuse their positions if authority and abuse people under their care (Mt 24:51). I have not yet found anyplace in Scripture where Jesus applies wrath and anger against nonbelievers, pagans, Samaritans, Gentiles, tax collectors, public sinners, or anyone who lies outside the boundary of those who were considered God’s people at that time.

The most systematic development of God’s wrath that I see in the New Testament appears in Romans 1:18-32, where Paul declares, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness…” I won’t take the time to go over the details of that passage, but I will comment on the big picture. Paul says that God’s wrath “is being revealed.” He uses the present perfect tense to indicate that it is going on now. How is God now revealing his wrath? Is he bombarding us with pestilence, famine, earthquakes and tsunamis? As the passage progresses, Paul explains how God is pouring out his wrath. Three times – in verses 24, 26, and 28 – Paul says that God “gave them over.” In response to human wrongdoing, God gave them over to sexual impurity, to shameful lusts, to a depraved mind. The response is not an active, willful punishment by God, but a removal of his protection that allows people to go out from his presence to experience the consequences of sin on their bodies, their minds, their families, their society. If God’s loving design is to draw fallen human beings into joyful relationship with him, with one another, with themselves, and with the created world – and if love requires actual freedom — then it makes sense that God’s wrath would be to give wayward people what they are asking for, to remove his hand of protection, and allow the forces of sin to metastasize in them and in the world, leading to horrendous and deadly consequences.

I believe this picture of God’s wrath, a wrath that is more like the passive flipside of love than the active retribution, is fairly consistent with how God dealt with sin throughout the Bible. [Note to self: I don’t think it explains everything in the Old Testament; there are still difficult problems in the OT that none of us seem to understand very well.] I can see this picture in the Levitical system of animal sacrifice. Animals offered for human sin as a picture of atonement, but the animals were simply killed; they weren’t tortured to death. Above all, our understanding of God’s love and wrath must be shaped by what happened at the crucifixion. At the cross, God allowed Jesus to experience the full cup of suffering, to taste God’s wrath and experience human death. At the cross, I do not see the Father actively meting out punishments against the Son. I do see a Father who has apparently forsaken the Son, removed his hand of protection from him, and allowed the forces of darkness to take their course, as sinful human beings do unspeakably cruel things to Jesus.

In conclusion, I do believe that a violent form of wrath that we perceive as punishment is sometimes part of our human experience. It is how fallen people often deal with one another. It is how we may perceive (or misunderstand) God’s working as he breaks in to our lives. I do believe that God gets angry, but his anger flows when things and people he loves dearly are being devalued and destroyed. God is love. He is not equal parts love and wrath. His wrath flows from his love.

Our tendency to think of God as equal parts love and wrath may also stem from our tendency to “flatten” the Bible, to read the Bible as though every part of Scripture is equally important, that every verse no matter where it is reveals God’s character to the same degree and with the same clarity. We tend to suppose that every psalm, every chapter in Leviticus and Numbers and Judges and Jeremiah, carries the same kind of surface-level revelation of God’s character as, say, Jesus’ teaching in the Upper Room.  The Old Testament passages about holy war and genocide are read the same way and given the same weight as Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. But that is not the way that most Christians have always approached the Bible. Many Christians throughout history have understood the Bible as God’s progressive revelation of himself. As the story progresses, the portrait of God being painted through his written word becomes clearer and clearer, and culminates when he himself shows up as Jesus, the living Word.

And [I owe this insight to pastor Greg Boyd] we need to remember that the Bible is a story with a surprise ending. In a typical movie, the story marches along, and the plot takes various twists and turns. But some movies hit the audience with a big surprise at the end. A good example of this kind of movie is The Book of Eli. As you watch that movie, the plot unfolds, and there’s plenty of excitement and action. But in the final moments of the story, the last sixty seconds, something is revealed that is totally unexpected, and that revelation causes you to go back and reframe and reinterpret everything that came before.

The Bible is that kind of story. The Bible shows in human language how God works through the nation of Israel to reveal his salvation plan. But when the Messiah shows up, some things happen that are totally unexpected. First, he looks like a very ordinary man. Then he is rejected, he suffers and is put to death on a cross. Then he rises again; his body comes to life and bursts out of the tomb. He appears to his disciples and then ascends bodily into heaven. Then he sends the Holy Spirit upon the Church and the good news is spread to the Gentiles. All those happenings were totally unexpected, and what you then see in the epistles is the early church trying to make sense of what just happened; and  the authors of the New Testament go back and reframe the entire Old Testament in light of the historical realities of Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost. If we stop flattening the Bible; if we stop treating all passages in the same way regardless of their historical setting and genre; if we realize that God’s ultimate revelation of himself is not in the written word of a document but in the living Word who is a person; and if we believe that the kind of love that characterizes God is defined by the cross; then God’s wrath and love start to come into proper focus.

In closing, I believe, as the Scripture testifies, that the death of Jesus is a substitution; he died for us (Ro 3:25-26). But that isn’t the whole picture. Scripture also testifies that it is a union; at the cross, he died with us, and we died with him; on Easter he rose with us, and we rose with him (Ro 6:1-14). The Christian rite of baptism, the initiation into the family of God, has always been seen as a baptism into his death and resurrection, an initiation into a relationship where we die with him and rise with him. The atonement is“for” us but it is also “with” us. So that we may be “in” Christ and Christ may be “in” us. So that we may join with one another in that everlasting union, that eternal happy dance, with the Father, Son and Spirit. Glory be to God.

The ancients never had the Law. Without the Law they felt the following:

1. The gods are angry with me.
2. My sin has caused the anger of the gods.
3. I must do something to placate the gods’ wrath.

Without the Law their ignorance is also threefold:

1. I do not know which god is angry.
2. I do not know which particular crime I committed that provoked the divine fury.
3. I do not know what exactly it will take to placate the wrath of the gods.

Into this dark world the Law (Torah) of Moses shines its beacon of glory and grace:

1. Israel’s God has revealed himself.
2. Israel’s God has declared the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
3. Israel’s God provided a way of forgiveness that actually solves the human problem of sin.

The plan of God. In the plan of God through the obedience of his people they would demonstrate their greatness to the nations and so fulfill the promise of the ancestors and serve as agents of worldwide blessing (Dt 4:6-8). In the language of the NT, Paul says that Israel was to be a letter from God to the world, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Cor 3:3).

The failure of Israel. Sadly, the nation as a whole failed in this mission, and the individuals within the nation who fulfilled this calling were rarely more than a remnant. But Israel’s failure negates neither the grace nor the power of the Torah to yield life when understood in proper perspective. Israel’s failure testifies simply to the hardness of the human heart.

What does “keep/obey my commands” mean? It does not simply mean, “Do as I tell you from now on.” “My commands” (Jn 14:15; 15:10) alludes to specific commands revealed long ago as God’s will. When the disciples hear this from Jesus, they are hearing the voice of the One who revealed his “decrees and laws” (Dt 4:1) long ago at Horeb. Through obedience to Jesus we demonstrate our covenantal commitment (“love”) to him. We also display to the world the privilege of salvation, divine presence, knowledge of his will, and blessing. Delighting in obedience to the revealed will of God represents the key to fulfilling the divine mission of reaching the world with his grace.

Is the Law a blessing? John 1:16-17 say, “Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (NIV 2011). The 1984 NIV says that “we have all received one blessing after another.” It is not as though the Law is a curse and that grace and truth through Christ is a blessing. Both are blessings. Both are God’s grace. The contrast here is not between law and grace, but two ways of expressing grace: mediated grace (Law) and embodied grace (Jesus). For the Israelites, possession of the Law was a supreme grace (Rom 9:4), a grace exceeded and superseded only by Jesus.

May your obedience be a loving obedience to a loving God. May your obedience be rooted and grounded (not in the Law but) in the grace of Jesus who loves you and all people immeasurably.

One question surfaced lately is this: What if God loves Esau?

Ever since my marriage 20 years ago, I’ve been wondering about this question. But until now I didn’t do anything about it. I just dismissed the question. But could God love Esau? Why am I any different from Esau? Does Jesus choose only “Jacob” and despise “Esau”? Does the gospel only apply to “Jacob”?

This week the question surfaced again as I read “The Household of God” by Newbiggin. He asks piercing questions about the nature of the church and the boundaries of the church. My way of stating Newbiggin’s thoughts is like this: Does the boundary of the church only extend to Jacob?

No way!

So I searched the Scriptures for what God would have to say about Esau and Jacob. And I was continually drawn to Romans 9. I know the immediate reaction to my question: No way! Romans 9:13 states: “Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.'” End of story. “Jacob” is God’s chosen people, Israel who became the Christians and “Esau” is everyone else who does not believe and stands condemned under the wrath of God. Others will also expound further and claim (and perhaps rightly so) that Romans 9 declares God’s sovereignty in the predestination of the elect. Much has been said about this subject.

Many have expounded on Romans 9. I am ill-equipped to discuss their writings on election. And election is not my subject today. I will only say that at this point I agree with St. Augustine: “Hence, as far as concerns us, who are not able to distinguish those who are predestinated from those who are not, we ought on this very account to will all men to be saved… It belongs to God, however, to make that rebuke useful to them whom He Himself has foreknown and predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son” (On Rebuke & Grace, ch. 49). And I agree with Spurgeon: “All the glory to God in salvation; all the blame to men in damnation.” Jacob and Esau sermon by Spurgeon

My question again is, “What if God chose to love Esau?” Why do I ask such a question? Well it is a question asked by God through Scripture for starters. And it’s because I am drawn to the end of Romans 9, to the verses that seem to have been either overlooked or not delved into. Specifically I refer to Romans 9:22-33.

Objects of wrath and mercy

22 What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Clearly there are two groups of people here: objects of wrath (“Esau”) and objects of mercy (“Jacob”). Clearly Apostle Paul is making his grand point here that Gentiles (“Esau”) are also included God’s salvation along with Isreal (“Jacob”). What if God chose to bear Esau in order to show Jacob his glory?

And to make this grand point, the Apostle points us to Hosea the prophet:

25 As he says in Hosea:

“I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people;
and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,”

26 and, “In the very place where it was said to them,
‘You are not my people,’
there they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”

Does this mean that God loves Esau (those who were not God’s people)? Does this mean that Esau, along with Jacob, is now “God’s loved one”? Why or why not? Thoughts or criticisms?

But what about other theories of the atonement? Aren’t they more plausible and less offensive to the dignity of man? Here we review two other theories of the atonement to see if they are better suited to explain what happened on the cross. These two other theories are called the Ransom Theory and the Christus Victor Theory.

Tradition

The first alternative theory of the atonement is called the “Ransom Theory”. This is “the view, developed by (the theologian) Origen, that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to Satan since he held mankind in bondage.”^[12] In other words, God sent Jesus Christ as a ransom to pay to Satan in order that Satan would release human beings from his grasp. The blood of the Lamb of God therefore was the “currency” that was paid out to the devil for us.

At first glance, this might seem somewhat plausible. Jesus did say in Mark 10:45, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And in the last days the heavenly host is even going to sing about how Jesus ransomed people, “And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation…” (Rev. 5:9). However, there are a few problems with Origen’s view.

R. C. Sproul explains why this theory in its original phrasing is not widely held today, “If the ransom is paid to Satan, Satan laughs all the way to the bank…But when the Bible speaks of ransom, the ransom is paid not to a criminal but to the One who is owed the price for redemption-the One who is the offended party…it is God the Father. Jesus as the Servant, offers Himself in payment to the Father for us.[13] If we view the Ransom Theory in this light it makes much more sense. While it does not displace the Penal Substitution theory, it may supplement it and even add to its validity because if God is the one who is still the offended party and God is the one to whom the ransom is paid, then Christ as our penal substitute, and Christ as our ransom are two sides to the same gem.

The second theory is called the “Christus Victor” theory of the atonement. This view was made popular in the 20^th century by Gustav Aulen.[14] It states that one of the main reasons Jesus went to the cross is to obtain victory over sin and Satan. There is also scriptural support for this view. In Genesis 3:15, God promises to send the seed of the woman to crush the head of the serpent. And many times, the gospels and new testament letters state that Jesus has victory over the devil as well (See John 16:11; Matthew 4:1-11, 12:29; 1Corinthians 15:54-57).

This theory of the atonement has many merits, and one can see how it is legitimately held, however it does not negate the fact that penal substitution is still a main component of what occurred at Calvary. Even though there are many who would currently like to see the Christus Victor theory displace penal substation, the Bible, tradition and reason do not give grounds for it. In fact, there are many great Christians throughout history that have proudly held the doctrine of Penal Substitution as a precious truth, even though there are people today who would make the claim that this doctrine is a recent development. From as far back as Justin Martyr (c. 100-165), the authors of the book “Pierced For Our Transgressions” cite a plethora of famous Godly theologians who believed in penal substitution. People like Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Bunyan, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, Martyn Lloyd-Jones and many others.[15] So it is not for lack of scripture or lack of history that some deny this crucial doctrine, instead it could stem from the scandalous nature of the cross itself. In the next section we shall see the reason behind the necessity of penal substitution.

Reason

In discovering why penal substitution is needed in the first place, we must delve deeply into both the character of sinful man and the character of the Holy God. Part of the reason why penal substitution is rejected by some people is the offense that it necessarily brings to the pride of man. In other words, penal substitution says that man’s sin is so bad that Jesus Christ had to leave the courts of heaven and come down to earth to bear the punishment that everyone of us deserves from the Holy God. This doctrine crushes the pride of the man who wants to think that he has some meritorious goodness within himself, that his sins are not so bad, and that God is not Holy. Only penal substitution displays how heinous sin really is and also how holy and gracious God really is!

There is therefore a close relationship between the concept of propitiation and penal substitution. Leon Morris says, “The wrath of God is real and…we must reckon with that wrath. Unpalatable though it may be, our sins, my sins, are the object of that wrath. If we are taking our Bible seriously we must realize that every sin is displeasing to God and that unless something is done about the evil we have committed we face ultimately nothing less than the divine anger.”[16]

In this light, we see that Jesus is our substitute who takes the righteous wrath of God on our behalf as our propitiation. This is what God has done about the evil we have committed! Wiersbe continues this thought, “In His holiness, (God) must judge sinners; but in His love, He desires to forgive them. God cannot ignore sin or compromise with it, for that would be contrary to His own nature and Law. How did God solve the problem? The Judge took the place of the criminals and met the just demands of His own holy Law!”^[17] Reasonably, the question begs to be asked, “why does God consider sin to be so bad that He would need to send his Son to die on a cross as a penal substitute?

Jonathan Edwards illustrates four propositions about why sin is so sinful: First, that every sin or crime deserves a punishment in proportion to the heinousness of the sin/crime. Second, A sin/crime is more or less heinous according as we are under greater or less obligation to the contrary. Third, Sin against God, being a violation against infinite obligation, is infinitely heinous. Fourth, Persons who sin against God are infinitely guilty and worthy of infinite punishment.[18]

Perhaps this could be stated in a simpler way with an analogy. A man is sitting around a table with some of his personal acquaintances and one of them says something that offends him, so the man hauls off and slaps his acquaintance. It might be that nothing would happen, the acquaintance simply shrugs it off. The man is so angry when he leaves that he speeds in his car on the way home and when the police pull him over he slaps one of them, now he will definitely go to jail. While he is in jail he keeps thinking about his court date when the judge will see his point and let him go, but when that day comes, the judge sentences him to another year. The man is even more angry than before, so he walks up to the judge and slaps him. The next time he is sentenced, it is for 10 years instead of 1. Finally, after stewing in jail for 10 years, the man thinks that it is the president’s fault that jail sentences are so harsh so he finds the president at a rally and slaps him! If the Secret Service does not kill the man, he will probably spend the better part of his life in prison. The penalty is incrementally greater, and the sin worse for the same act because as Edwards says, “sins committed against anyone must be proportionately heinous to the dignity of the being offended.” God is infinitely worthy of our love, worship, devotion, honor and obedience, and the natural man does the opposite of these things. It is no wonder that he stands infinitely guilty and thus deserves the infinite punishment which is eternal hell. It is here that the doctrine of Penal Substitution becomes all the more glorious in our sight! Jesus took the infinite punishment for our sins that we deserve, and in return, he imputed his righteousness to us!

Christian Experience and Application

Penal substitution has had a great impact in the history of the church. What other doctrine more forcefully proclaims the Love of God for sinners than that He sent his Son Jesus to take the penalty for our sins as our substitute? The evangelical gospel preacher must have this doctrine in his heart and on his tongue every time he preaches the gospel. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones says, “Is there anything greater than this, that God should take your sins and mine and put them on this own Son and punish his own Son, not sparing him anything, causing him to suffer all that, that you and I might be forgiven? Can you tell me any greater exhibition of the love of God than that?”[19] Oh how wonderful is the Love of God! The doctrine of penal substitution should lead all Christians to say with Horatio Spafford, “My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”[20]

[12]Enns, Paul. The Moody Handbook of Theology. Revised ed. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008. 626.

[13] Sproul, R. C.. Saved from What? . Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008. 66-67.

[14] Hebert, Gustaf; A.G., and trans. Aulen. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

[15] Jeffery, Steve, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach. Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution. Leicester, England: Crossway Books, 2007.

[16] Morris, Leon. The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984. 176.

[17]Wiersbe, Warren W. Be Comforted. Wheaton, Ill. : Victor Books, 1996, c1992 (An Old Testament Study), S. Is 53:10

[18] Jonathan Edwards, “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” in Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, 2nd ed. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2005)

[19] Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. Great Doctrines of the Bible: God the Father, God the Son; God the Holy Spirit; The Church and the Last Things. Leicester, England: Crossway Books, 2003. 335.

[20] Spafford, Horatio. It Is Well With My Soul. Celebration Hymnal. orchestration ed. Nashville, TN: Word Entertainment Music, 1997.