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by
Brian Zahnd
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July 4 - July 8, 2021
If transformation is by the renewal of the mind and I have never changed my mind, then be assured I am actively resisting the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. Everyone who grows, changes.
One of the main challenges in talking about God is the problem of metaphor. We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent.
But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error.
The only way to deal with this problem is to create a multitude of metaphors and occasionally retire some that have outlived their usefulness. The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love.
What I want you to know is that God’s attitude, God’s spirit, toward you is one of unwavering fatherly-motherly love. 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.
When the prodigal son returned home and fell into the arms of his father, I’m sure the boy felt afraid. We can tell by how he immediately speaks of his unworthiness: “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”*26 This wayward son has fallen into the hands of his father; his fate is in his father’s hands…and he is afraid. But there is no better place to be!
When we fall into the hands of the living God, we are sinners in the hands of a loving God.
I cannot accept the heterodox idea that God changes. What I can accept is that our own understanding of God is in the process of growth, change, and mutation.
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.
What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard.
Biblicists who desire to condemn sinners to death can quote the Bible by citing Moses. But Jesus says something else. That is why I was so appalled when a well-known evangelical leader wrote an opinion piece for CNN defending the death penalty by citing Moses, yet never once mentioned Jesus.*15 We cannot create Christian ethics while ignoring Christ!
War-affirming Biblicists who desire to justify drone strikes and carpet bombing can cite Elijah, but Jesus says something else.
The Bible (in both the Old Testament and the New Testament) does indeed give us the biblical principles for adjudicating the institution of slavery. But that doesn’t mean that God endorses slavery. Jesus is what God has to say, and Jesus gives us a trajectory of love that leads us to the abolition of slavery. The Bible may not give a clear repudiation of the institution of slavery, but the living Christ does!
Amid the contradictory biblical messages on violence, we must always remember that Jesus is what God has to say.
The sacrifice of Jesus is not a utilitarian payment to an offended deity bound to an economy of appeasement. The ugliness of the cross is found in human sin. The beauty of the cross is found in divine forgiveness.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us; Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God!
At the cross we discover that the God revealed in Christ would rather die in the name of love than kill in the name of freedom.
A good deal of atheism is protest atheism. The protest atheist is essentially contending that the angry god of ritual appeasement should not exist.
God did not kill Jesus; human culture and civilization did. God did not demand the death of Jesus; we did.
Is it true that God created humanity in such a way that every single man, woman, boy, and girl deserves to be beaten, scourged, and nailed to a tree? Of course it’s not true! You know it’s not true! No one deserves to be tortured to death! So where does this religious nonsense come from? It mostly comes from Calvin painting himself into a theological corner in order to maintain the logic of his system. (Once you’ve concocted a theological system that forces you to defend the idea that every person deserves to be tortured to death, it would be best to just scrap the whole system!)
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.
The chief priests accused Jesus of many things—heresy, blasphemy, sedition—because they were under the sway of the satanic spirit of envy and blame. The spirit of God is not heard in the blood-lusting cries of “Crucify him” but in the merciful plea “Father, forgive them.” We must not imagine the machinations of the devil as the handiwork of God!
On Good Friday we see that our violent system of blame and ritual killing is so evil that it is capable of the murder of God. And once we see it, we can repent of it, be forgiven for it, and be freed from it. This is how the cross saves the world.
If we persist in thinking that somehow it was God who demanded the murder of Jesus, we continue to exonerate the very system of evil that God intends to save us from.
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! The idea that all non-Christians are wicked is the result of some very arrogant and deeply mistaken theological systems.
To be a Christian means I am deliberately attempting to follow Jesus. Being a Christian does not mean I can ignore Lazarus with impunity! Being a Christian means I can no longer pretend that I don’t see Lazarus lying at my door.
Hell is not God’s hatred of sinners; God has a single disposition toward sinners, and that is love. God is always the loving father of both the prodigal younger son and the resentful older son. He always loves them both.
Jesus can save whomever he wants. Jesus is Lord.
Hell in its popular and pagan misconceptions has been a blight upon the beauty of the Christian gospel.
One of the ways of thinking about the book of Revelation is that it is an extremely elaborate political cartoon.
Revelation is not about the twenty-first century, but nothing could be more relevant for the twenty-first century than the vision John saw!
