A Purposeful Propitation...

"In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins..."

-1 John 4 v 10

Dealing with life isn't always easy. Trust me, I know. Things happen which are out of control, sometimes good, sometimes bad. I think you're intelligent enough to flick back through my old posts to discover that my life hasn't been a cake walk. Rather, my life has been quite tough. That's not to signal me out, I know plenty of people who have experienced far worse things then I ever have, and hope not to experience.

I'm thinking that this post is going to be a hard one to write, because A) my brain has decided to not function properly due to tiredness, and B) what I'm going to talk on is something that we don't tend to talk about a lot...wrath...

More importantly, the wrath of God. See, I know a lot of people have this image of the father as being this grumpy old man who, whenever you do something bad, snaps His fingers and...BAAM! Lightning bolt in the face. And I know this because a lot of the time that's the image I have of Him. But He's not just angry, He is Love, as clearly shown through the most well-known Bible Verse of all time;

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life..."

-John 3 v 16

That's not to say that God isn't angry, or that it is wrong to be angry. Rather, if anger is shown in a way that reflects the righteous anger of God, it's justifiable. God's shows anger to sin and ungodliness, so if we are angry at the evil in the world, its perfectly acceptable in God's eyes. Loosing tempers though, that's a big no-no, as there is no justification.

But the thing about God's anger is, while we as humans are normally quick to anger, God's anger is aroused slowly (Ex 34 v 6-8), sometimes turned away (Deut 13 v 17), often delayed (Isa 48 v 9), and frequently held back (Psa 78 v 38).

So what have we learned so far? God is angry, but His anger is justifiable... Let's move on.

Because of God's hatred towards sin and evil, He can't simply stand back and do nothing. Like we've discovered, He gets angry, but we haven't talked about what He actually does. This is when the wrath of God comes into play.

Many people, myself included, see God's wrath as being active. You do something wrong, God instantly throws said lightning bolt in thine face, or something similar. But God's wrath not only is active, but is passive. Put simply, God may just one day decide to passive on your sinful bee-hind...and let you keep sinning. And that's scary;

"Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them..."

-Romans 1 v 24

That's scary, the fact that we could face the wrath of God by Him not doing anything. Even when God does nothing, He's still doing something far more powerful than we can ever imagine.

This is starting to sound like a really depressing blog, but in truth, its needed. A lot of church folk today simply don't want to talk about God's wrath, because it ain't something that we like to talk about. Its probably one of the biggest taboos in Christianity today, if not in the whole world. But its necessary in order to understand a key doctrine of our faith.

The Day of Atonement was one of the biggest days in the Jewish calendar. It represented the day when the people of Israel were forgiven of there sins. The part that we're most interested in today is the first part. Two spotless lambs, signifying sinless perfection, we chosen by the High Priest. One was taken and slaughtered it. He then took some of the blood, and sprinkled it on the mercy seat atop the Ark of the Covenant. The lamb was no longer a representative of sinless perfection, because it had become a sin offering...

Likewise, so did Jesus become our sin offering.

What we have here is the doctrine of propitiation. You may not have seen that word before. That's because in many translations of the Bible today, its translated into "sacrifice" or "atonement" and various other words which come close to its meaning, but are not the same.

To put simply, propitiation is something that appeases or conciliates an offended power. To put it even more simply, its the diversion of just wrath from a guilty party. Instead of us suffering at the hands of God's wrath, Jesus propitiates for us, and takes our rightful wrath upon Himself. God's wrath is taken from us, and placed on Jesus.

Romans 5 v 8 gives a beautiful description, saying that because of propitiation, we no longer need to view the Cross as the place where God's love was absent as His righteous wrath was poured out on Jesus, but that it is exactly where His love is shown through the propitiation of Jesus;

"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us..."

-Romans 5 v 8

Its something that I've often thought about, but never in this way. I always thought that God decided to place Jesus instead of us against His wrath, and while to an extent this is true, Jesus freely takes our place out of love;

"...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed..."

-Romans 3 v 23-25

It is because of this that we need no longer hold any grudge, because at the Cross, justice and mercy kissed, and it is because of this that we can forgive those who have wronged us.

How we can avail of Jesus' propitiation for our sin?

Simple...

Let Him Be The Nexus Of Our Lives...