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

by Brian Zahnd

And presumably some of those hapless souls thrown into hell were Baptist kids who tried to believe in Jesus with their hearts but really only believed in Jesus in their heads. That kind of theology is a prescription for religious psychosis!

Toward you. This is the good news that God is love. At our worst, at our most sinful, at our furthest remove from God and his will, God’s attitude toward us remains one of unwavering love.

I know all the stories, from Genesis to Malachi. But no matter what visions, dreams, revelations, epiphanies, theophanies, or Christophanies people had in times past, they pale into insignificance when compared to the full revelation of God that we have in Jesus Christ!”

God has a face and he looks like Jesus. God has a disposition toward sinners and it’s the spirit of Jesus.

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!

understand how this image of God can be justified. I understand we can use the Bible as our palette to paint a monstrous portrait of God, but when we’re finished, if the image doesn’t look like Jesus, we have got it wrong!

Every other portrait of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the icon of the invisible God.*11

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

What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus.

Very Nazarene.

The Bible doesn’t stand above the story it tells, but is fully enmeshed in it. The Bible itself is on the quest to discover the Word of God. What we find in the Old Testament is a progression of revelation.

We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent.

Canadian theologian Brad Jersak says, “The wrath of God is understood as divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.”*19

We can call this the wrath of God if we like; the Bible does, but that doesn’t mean that God literally loses his temper. God no more literally loses his temper than he literally sleeps, even though the Bible says, “The Lord awoke as from sleep.”*20

Hmm I don’t know if this is the same thing. God sleeping is a metaphor. God becoming angry doesn’t seem like a metaphor.

These verses reveal that what we may call the whetted sword of God’s vengeance is, on a deeper level, the reciprocal consequences of seeking to harm others.

The revelation that God’s single disposition toward sinners remains one of unconditional love does not mean we are exempt from the consequences of going against the grain of love.

The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear God in the same way that as a child I feared my father. I had the good fortune to have a wise and loving father, and I had deep respect, reverence, admiration, and, perhaps, a kind of fear for my father, but I never for one moment thought that my dad hated me or would harm me. God does not hate you, and God will never harm you. But your own sin, if you do not turn away from it, will bring you great harm. The wisdom that acknowledges this fact is what we call the fear of God. Sin is deadly, but God is love.

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!

Once we realize that Jesus is the perfect icon of the living God, we are forever prohibited from using the Old Testament to justify the use of violence.

This Gentile widow survives the famine through a miracle given by a Jewish prophet. This isn’t just a nice story about God’s supernatural provision. This is a subversive text about God’s love for Israel’s enemies!

An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard.

Jesus omitted the bit about “the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus edited Isaiah like this: to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.

In claiming that Isaiah’s prophecy had been fulfilled in their hearing, Jesus is claiming to be Jubilee in person.

Jesus has edited out vengeance, and this gives us a key to how Jesus read the Old Testament.

If we try to hold on to a divine warrant for vengeance, Jesus passes through our midst and goes away. If we cling to vengeance, we lose Jesus. If we don’t want this to happen, we need to learn to give mercy to our enemies. If we commit to loving our enemies, Jesus will abide with us and help us learn how to do it.

When we speak of the Word of God, Christians should think of Jesus first and the Bible second.

The Bible is the word of God in a secondary sense, faithfully pointing us to the perfect Word of God: the Word made flesh.

Jesus is what the Law and Prophets were always trying to say but could n...

Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet are representative figures signifying the Law and the Prophets, or what Christians commonly call the Old Testament. Peter, James, and John are representative of the church and are witnesses to what happened. On Mount Tabor, Moses and Elijah are summoned from the Old Testament to give their final witness to the anointed Christ who will fulfill what they had begun.

But initially Peter misinterpreted what the presence of Moses and Elijah meant. Or to say it in the symbolism of the story, the church misunderstood the relationship of the Old Testament to Jesus. Peter’s first impulse was to build three memorial tabernacles on Tabor, treating Moses, Elijah, and Jesus as approximate equals. Peter’s implicit suggestion that the Old Testament be given roughly the same authority as Jesus is what I mean by a flat reading of the Bible.

Moses and Elijah have left the stage and now only Jesus remains. There’s now no possibility of Jesus being upstaged or countermanded by the Old Testament. Jesus is all in all. The Law and the Prophets were the lesser lights in the pre-Christ night sky. They were the moon and stars. They were sent by God, but they were not the fullness of divine light.

Imagine a preacher today saying, “The Bible says, but I say to you…” This is what Jesus is doing. Those listening to Jesus were forced to make a monumental decision: Does Jesus have the authority to challenge the Scriptures? This is why in his book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Jacob Neusner is uncomfortable with and ultimately rejects the Sermon on the Mount. As he says, “Only God can

demand of me what Jesus is asking.

Is Jesus merely an expositor of Scripture, or is he the Word of God in person?

a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence Jesus.

we are trying to build an Old Testament tabernacle on the holy mountain of Christ’s glory, to which God says, “No!”

The role of the Old Testament is to give an inspired telling of how we get to Jesus. But once we get to Jesus we don’t build multiple tabernacles and grant an equivalency to Jesus and the Old Testament.

It’s not biblical principles that we seek to live by but the truth of Christ.

Jesus is what God has to say, and Jesus gives us a trajectory of love

It’s not biblical manhood that men should aspire to but Christlike manhood. If we only speak of biblical manhood, who is our pattern? Abraham? Moses? David? Elijah? With their propensity for deceit, anger, adultery, and violence? No, Jesus alone is our model of redeemed manhood.

The Bible is subordinate to Christ.

Even though the Bible does not give a clear and unmitigated denunciation of slavery, the living and reigning Christ surely does! But until 1865 a majority of American evangelicals had a hard time seeing slavery in the light of Christ because they recognized that the Bible treated slavery as normative. Their reading of the Bible prevented them from being illumined by the light of Christ.

Across one thousand years, the human conscience began to reject what human life had always apparently required, and the record of that rejection is the Bible.

John Dominic Crossan convincingly sets forth how a Christian should decide what is authoritative and what is not.

Not a good source about what Christians should believe about the Bible.

As usual, he holds a book in his left hand. But he is not reading the book—it is not even open, but securely closed and tightly clasped.

He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel.

Reading the Bible Right It’s a STORY We’re telling news here Keeping alive an ancient epic The grand narrative of paradise lost and paradise regained The greatest “Once upon a time” tale ever told The beautiful story which moves relentlessly toward— “They lived happily ever after” Never, never, NEVER forget that before it’s anything else, it’s a story So let the Story live and breathe, enthrall and enchant Don’t rip its guts out and leave it lifeless on the dissecting table Don’t make it something it’s really not— A catalog of wished-for promises An encyclopedia of God-facts

A law journal of divine edicts A how-to manual for do-it-yourselfers Find the promises, learn the facts, heed the laws, live the lessons But don’t forget the Story Learn to read the Book for what it is— God’s great big wild and wonderful surprise ending love story Let there be wonder Let there be mystery Let there be tragedy Let there be heartbreak Let there be suspense Let there be surprise Let it be earthy and human Let it be celestial and divine Let it be what it is, and don’t try to make it perfect where it’s not This fantastic story of— Creation Alienation Devastation

Incarnation Salvation Restoration With its cast of thousands More like a Tolstoy novel than a thousand-page sermon It’s a Story because we are not saved by ideas but by events! Here’s a plot line for you: Death, Burial, and Resurrection Yes, it’s a story—not a plan, not an ology or ism, but a story And it’s an amalgamated patchwork story told in mixed medium Narration, history, genealogy Prophecy, poetry, parable Psalm, song, sermon Dream and vision Memoir and letter So understand the medium, and don’t try so hard to miss the point T...

It’s not how many cubits of water you need to put Everest under a flood But why the world was so dirty that it needed such a big bath Trying to find Noah’s ark Instead of trying to rid the world of violence Really is an exercise in missing the point Speaking of missing the point— It’s not did a snake talk? But what the damn thing said! Because even though I’ve never met a talking snake I’ve sure had serpentine thoughts crawl through my head Literalism is a kind of escapism By which you move out of the crosshairs of the probing question But parable and metaphor have a way of knocking us to the floor Prose-flattened literalism makes the story small, time-confined, and irrelevant But poetry and allegory...