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

by Brian Zahnd

Punishing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is monstrous logic, atrocious theology, and a gross distortion of the idea of justice.

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.

In our scriptures and creeds, we confess that Christ died for our sins, but this does not mean we should interpret the cross according to an economic model where God had to gain the necessary capital to forgive sins through the vicious murder of his Son.

The justice of God is not an abstract concept where somehow sin can only be forgiven if an innocent victim suffers a severe enough penalty. In the final analysis punitive justice is not justice at all; it’s merely retribution. The only justice God will accept as justice is actually setting the world right! Justice is not the punishment of a surrogate whipping boy. That’s injustice!

Ritual sacrifice does not originate in the heart of God; it originates in the violent heart of humanity.

Jesus did not shed his blood to pay off God in the form of a ritual sacrifice. That’s not what God wanted. Jesus shed his blood in faithful obedience to his Father’s will, demonstrating divine forgiveness even as he was crucified!

Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!

Viewing the cross as payment to God for our personal debt of sin ignores the deep problem of systemic sin. When we turn the cross into a payment for our personal sin debt to an offended God, we leave unchallenged the massive structures of sin that so grotesquely distort humanity. If the cross is simply Jesus purchasing our ticket, our “get out of jail free” card, then the principalities and powers are left unchallenged to run the world the way they always have.

It’s very eye opening to realize that in all the evangelistic sermons found in the book of Acts, none of them makes an appeal to afterlife issues. Not one. If preaching the gospel is telling people how to avoid an afterlife hell, the apostles in Acts did not preach the gospel!

Peter and Paul were not preaching a gospel of “how to go to heaven and not hell when you die.” Their gospel was the audacious announcement that the world has a new Lord, a new King, a new emperor: the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. Their invitation was to believe this joyful announcement, turn from the destructive ways of sin, and be baptized into the new world where Jesus is Lord.

According to Jesus, the coming of the Son of Man is not an event postponed to a distant future but an imminent event. On the night of his arrest, Jesus told the high priest Caiaphas that he (Caiaphas) would witness the coming of the Son of Man.

It is to this Son of Man that the Ancient of Days*14 gives everlasting dominion over the nations. When Jesus, the Son of Man, was vindicated by God in resurrection and given all authority in heaven and on earth, the nations were given a Christ-informed moral arc that if followed leads to what Jesus describes as “the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”*15 But if the nations reject the way of Jesus, it leads them to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”*16 Jesus teaches us that the nations that care for the impoverished, the infirm, the immigrant, and the imprisoned enter the Father’s kingdom, while those nations who ignore “the least of these”*17 are on the path to a smoldering Gehenna with the devil and his angels.

The way of self-interest that exploits the weak is the wide road to destruction; the way of cosuffering love that cares for the weak is the narrow road that leads to life.

Jesus’s teaching on hell is basically this: if you refuse to love, you cannot enter the kingdom of God and will end up a lonely, tormented soul. If we take Jesus seriously as a teacher, we must never think the gospel is a means by which we can ignore God, scorn the suffering, mock the poor, and have everything turn out all right. If you want to know how to find hell, follow the path set by the rich man…you’ll get there.

If you want to find your way to hell, a good way to go about it would be to assume that everyone unlike you is headed there!

The idea that all Christians upon death are received into heavenly mansions of eternal bliss while all non-Christians are plunged into an eternal torture chamber is more the product of popular and pagan myth than derived from anything Jesus ever taught.

Jesus never taught anything that remotely supports the idea that all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists will be tortured for eternity. This kind of thinking about hell crept into the minds of Christians via popular misconceptions and glitches in systematic theologies run amuck. It doesn’t come from Jesus.

The truth is that the gospel is the joyful proclamation that the kingdom of God has arrived with the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel is the audacious announcement that Jesus is Lord and that the world is to now be reconfigured around his gracious rule. The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ. If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!

Though I often cringe at how Revelation is typically preached, the book is perhaps the most important biblical text for the American church right now. Its particular relevance has to do with Revelation’s intensely political nature. If there is one book in the Bible that is written specifically for Christians living as citizens in a superpower, Revelation is it. The Apocalypse brings the Bible’s most creative and powerful critique of the idolatry inherent within economic and military superpowers.

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! With consummate skill the Revelator shows us how Jesus’s lamb-like kingdom is the saving alternative to the beast-like empires of the world.

Revelation isn’t about the violent end of the world; it’s about the end of the evil of violence. The book of Revelation doesn’t anticipate the end of God’s good creation; it anticipates the end of death-wielding empire.

Reading Revelation Responsibly, Michael J. Gorman

We don’t arrive at the peace of New Jerusalem by going to Armageddon first; we find New Jerusalem by following the Lamb. Armageddon is the antithesis of New Jerusalem. The two are always distinct possibilities but divergent fates. New Jerusalem is the ever-present hope and possibility that the nations can forsake the Beast with its endless Armageddons and follow the Lamb into the heavenly city whose gates are never shut. Armageddon and the burning lake are symbols John of Patmos employs to warn us against following the Beast of empire.

Our looming Armageddons are always a possibility but never an inevitability. The demonic seduction of accusation, empire, and propaganda always leads humanity to another bloody battlefield. 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.

If Jesus conquers evil by killing his enemies, he’s just another Caesar. But the whole point of John’s Revelation is that Jesus is nothing like Caesar! The idea that the world would continue to be run by the violent ways of Caesar and Pharaoh and all the rest was the bad news that made John weep when the elder told him there was none worthy to open the scroll of God.

The perennial vision of the prophets was that Jerusalem would embody fidelity of worship and a commitment to neighborliness, and thus be a light to the nations. But the prophets spent most of their time calling Jerusalem to repent of its idolatry and injustice. Instead of being a light to the nations, Jerusalem was mostly just another city built on the idolatry of self-interest and the injustice of exploitation. As Jesus began his ministry he spoke of fulfilling the aim of the Law and the Prophets, and of gathering a people around himself who would be the light of the world, a city set on a hill.*2

It is such a ludicrous notion that the God who is love would of his own volition inflict torment upon people eternally. The idea is so ridiculous that it is either hilarious or horrendous. In that moment we chose to have a laugh about it. But again, I sternly add this: I believe in hell. I believe in hell here and now, as Jesus taught, and I believe in the possibility of self-exile from the love of God in the afterlife, as Jesus indicated. But the notion that God, out of personal offense and infinite spite, inflicts eternal torture upon his wayward children is completely incompatible with the revelation of God in Christ. Being saved includes being saved from belief in malicious libel against God.

If John 3:16 is to mean anything, it must mean that God gets what God wants through love, or not at all. If I believe that love never fails, it’s because I believe that God is love. To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naive optimism; it’s Christianity.