We Should See Other Blogs

Last Sunday’s sermon was right on the money (I hate to say that, because it was one of those video sermons, and the preacher looked like he had been bathing in coconut oil before he started), but it strikes me as only partial.

Substitutionary atonement is great; it’s a core doctrine, one of the great threads of Christian thought. But it’s not enough, is it? It doesn’t seem to go far enough.

I think that’s because it only speaks to what Jesus did in a legal sense. I think that it speaks to balances and weights and accounts, and that’s fine, but it’s only a part of the puzzle.

That’s part of the problem with Christianity as we know and practice it today. We get a lot of things right, but we don’t follow through. It can’t be just that Jesus died and we believe and have his righteousness transferred to us and then we can go to heaven.

I think there’s more to it than that. Doesn’t Jesus’ death speak to present reality as well as future? Doesn’t it speak to how we live now, how connected we are to God now, as opposed to us living in that middle time between the cross and eternal bliss.

Scripture speaks of Christ not only dying to redeem souls — it doesn’t speak in the language of “souls” at all, does it? — but also of redeeming everything. People are part of that equation, and a big part, but Adam’s and our sin doesn’t just affect our souls. It affects everything.

When Adam fell, everything changed. We live in a broken world, a world that is winding down and falling apart. It’s a world where the best works of humanity decay and fall apart, something that strikes most of us as completely backwards.

Jesus death is the start of fixing all that. On the cross he fixed the divide between perfect God and imperfect humanity, but also between perfect reality and imperfect reality.

Between heaven and earth, if you will.

In other words, I think it’s entirely appropriate to think of Jesus’ death in terms of saving people, but also of saving the world, of seeing his Kingdom come, not just in our hearts but in our reality, in our physical world.

So the question becomes… what are we doing? Are we working with God to fix this reality? Are our acts of love helping to bring in the kingdom? Are we in line with God’s plan?

It’s not enough to stand around waiting to get lifted into the sky in some absurd escapist rapture. Anyone can do that. We need to celebrate Jesus’ death in remembering what he did for us, in celebrating his agony, but also continuing to remember what that means going forward.