We have all too often imagined “sin” as the breaking of arbitrary commandments and “death” as the severe penalty inflicted by an unblinking divine Justice on all who fail to toe the line. We have then tried to insert Jesus and his death into this picture, so that an unblinking divine Justice kills him instead. This doesn’t look good. More important still, it doesn’t look biblical. It is not “in accordance with the Bible.” It may invoke a few odd proof-texts, but it snatches them out of the much larger context of Israel’s scriptures as a whole. They mean something different as a result.
