Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

by Brian Zahnd

God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus; we haven’t always known this, but now we do. God is like Jesus!

People have never seen God until they see Jesus. Every other portrait of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God, the Logos of God, the Logic of God in the form of human flesh. Christians are to believe in the perfect, infallible, inerrant Word of God—and his name is Jesus. Jesus is the icon of the invisible God.

Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.

You have nothing to fear from God. God is not mad at you. God has never been mad at you. God is never going to be mad at you. And what about the fear of God? The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love.

The hands of God are not hands of wrath but hands of mercy. To be a sinner in these hands is where the healing begins.

The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived. What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition developed in the crucible of enduring threat, invasion, and oppression from Gentile empires. In this crucible of suffering a theology of justice was forged, but it also produced the slag of vengeance theology.

It’s amazing just how angry some people can become if you try to take away their religion of revenge. As long as Jesus announced that it was the time of God’s favor, the crowd spoke well of him. But as soon as he made it clear that God’s favor is for everyone, as soon as Jubilee was made inclusive and not exclusive, they tried to throw him off a cliff.

To say it as plainly as I know how, the Old Testament is not on par with Jesus. The Bible is not a flat text where every passage carries the same weight. This is why Jesus can say things like, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

With the “eye for an eye” command, the Old Testament presents a vision of reciprocal justice. Which, in its time, was a vast improvement over unrestrained and ever-escalating retaliatory violence. But Jesus is not a mere echo of Moses. Jesus is taking the revelation of God’s nature and God’s will far beyond where the Torah ever could. Jesus is not giving the word of God through a Bronze Age cultural filter. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh! This is among the most radical and central claims that Christians make concerning Jesus Christ.

Wars of conquest, violent retribution, the institution of slavery, and women held as property are all biblical. But when placed in the light of Tabor these primitive assumptions must be renounced. What was once acceptable in the dim light of Moses and Elijah is now rejected in the light brighter than the sun shining from the face of Christ. Today Moses and Elijah (the Law and the Prophets) do one thing: they point to Jesus!

Well, there you have it. If the Bible says there’s a time for everything, including killing, hating, and waging war, then presumably there is a time to torture your enemies. This is how we make the Bible stand on its hind legs and dance a jig to whatever tune we play.

Among the demographic groups Pew Research studied, only white evangelicals had a majority who supported the use of torture. How could 60 percent of Bible-believing white evangelicals come down in favor of torture? Well, as Bob Dylan said, “You never ask questions when God’s on your side.”*27

Find the promises, learn the facts, heed the laws, live the lessons But don’t forget the Story

Prose-flattened literalism makes the story small, time-confined, and irrelevant But poetry and allegory travel through time and space to get in our face

The cross is many things, but it is not a quid pro quo to mollify an angry God. Above all things, the cross, as the definitive moment in Jesus’s life, is the supreme revelation of the very nature of God. At the cross Jesus does not save us from God; at the cross Jesus reveals God as savior! When we look at the cross we don’t see what God does; we see who God is!

Think about Good Friday. Where do we find God during the suffering of Christ? Do we find God in the high priest Caiaphas demanding a sacrificial scapegoat? Do we find God in Pontius Pilate requiring a punitive death to satisfy imperial justice? No! On Good Friday we find God in Christ absorbing the sin of the world and responding with forgiveness. The cross is where God receives the most vicious blow of human sin, turns the other cheek, and forgives.

The cross is not a picture of payment; the cross is a picture of forgiveness. Good Friday is not about divine wrath; Good Friday is about divine love. Calvary is not where we see how violent God is; Calvary is where we see how violent our civilization is. The justice of God is not retributive; the justice of God is restorative.

The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives. The monstrous aspects of Good Friday are of entirely human origin. What is divine about Good Friday is the completely unprecedented picture of a crucified God responding to his torturers with love and mercy. Golgotha offers humanity a genuinely new and previously unimagined way of conceiving the nature of God.

Jesus was put to death by the structures of political, economic, and religious power represented by Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, and Joseph Caiaphas. In the Gospel narratives we see the Roman governor, the king of Judea, and the high priest acting in demonic concert to execute Jesus. God did not kill Jesus; human culture and civilization did. God did not demand the death of Jesus; we did.

The cross is a cataclysmic collision of violence and forgiveness. The violence part of the cross is entirely human. The forgiveness part of the cross is entirely divine. God’s nature is revealed in love, not in violence. The Roman cross was an instrument of imperial violence that Jesus transformed into a symbol of divine love.

What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God’s love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin!

God did not kill Jesus. God’s action on Good Friday was to surrender his beloved Son to our system. And our system killed him. But on Easter Sunday God overthrew our satanic verdict by raising Jesus from the dead!

When Jesus does speak of an afterlife hell (most extensively in the parables of the rich man and Lazarus and of the sheep and the goats), he is making this point: it is the wicked who end up being condemned. And we need to recognize that Jesus uses the word wicked in a conventional sense: the wicked are those who live wicked lives, inflicting evil upon others. Jesus does not use the word as a technical term for all of humanity except those who have “accepted Jesus into their hearts.” Jesus does not use wicked as a synonym for non-Christians!

And we should note that Jesus doesn’t say that those who have done evil will be tortured eternally; all he says is that they will face a judgment of condemnation. A lot of wrong thinking about hell is the result of reading into the text what is not actually there.

Luther had no use for the book of Revelation, until he used it to preach that the pope was the Antichrist. Pope Leo X returned the favor and used Revelation to preach that Luther was the Antichrist. Protestants and Catholics have been weaponizing the book of Revelation ever since. Unfortunately, this kind of mistreatment of the Apocalypse has been common throughout church history. Revelation has been regularly shanghaied as a polemic against enemies and as a warrant for violence. All of this abuse is sad, since Revelation gives us one of the most stunning, creative, and beautiful portrayals of Jesus Christ and his kingdom in all the Bible.

The final book of the Bible is not a coded newspaper foretelling of future geopolitical events. Rather, it is a glorious depiction of the triumph of Jesus Christ. Revelation is not about the twenty-first century, but nothing could be more relevant for the twenty-first century than the vision John saw!

Armageddon isn’t the end of war; Armageddon is endless war. We cannot war our way to peace. There is no way to peace; peace is the way, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace. If we try to end war by war, we always get another war.

A Left Behind theology of Revelation turns the Lamb into a beast! It turns a text that was intended to subvert empire into a text that endorses empire. There is not a worse possible abuse of the final book of the Bible than this!

John stresses that Jesus reigns through self-sacrifice by depicting the white horse’s rider as wearing a robe drenched in blood before the battle begins. Jesus’s robe is soaked in his own blood. Jesus doesn’t shed the blood of enemies; Jesus sheds his own blood. This is the gospel! The rider on the white horse is the slaughtered Lamb, not the slaughtering beast.

John tells us that New Jerusalem is fifteen hundred miles long and fifteen hundred miles wide,*4 not coincidently the same dimensions as the Roman Empire. The meaning is obvious: the Roman Empire is to be replaced by the empire of the Lamb! That John also says the city is fifteen hundred miles high tells us that New Jerusalem is the marriage of heaven and earth.