Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland continues the Lenten journey through Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion, exploring four major biblical images for understanding the death of Jesus: Passover and Exodus, blood sacrifice, ransom and redemption, and final judgment. Derek insists that we do not begin with atonement theories or later theological debates. Rather we begin with the Old Testament. The cross only makes sense within the story of Israel, especially the Exodus, where salvation is framed not as abstract forgiveness but as liberation from slavery and deliverance from death.
This episode also tackles the controversial question of propitiation. Rutledge argues that the Greek word hilasterion in Romans 3:25 should not be translated as “propitiation” (appeasing an angry God), but as expiation, that is the removal of sin. The barrier between God and humanity is not God’s anger but our sin. Redemption, then, is the Triune God’s loving work of buying back humanity from the enslaving powers of Sin, Death, and the Devil. Judgment, or what Rutledge calls “The Great Assize,” is not contrary to love but an expression of it. God’s righteous commitment to set the world right.
Books Mentioned
- The Crucifixion — Fleming Rutledge
- The Day the Revolution Began by N. T. Wright
- Centering Jesus by Derek Vreeland •On the Incarnation by Athanasius
Scriptures Mentioned
- Exodus 12–15
- Leviticus 16
- Isaiah 53:7
- Romans 3:25
- Romans 8:3
- Hebrews 9:26
- Mark 10:45
- 1 Corinthians 6:19–20
- Matthew 25
- John 8
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Order Derek’s new Bible Study Series, God in the Neighborhood: Book 1: Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us || https://amzn.to/42jSZAs Book 2: Crucifixion: 8 Lessons on How God Saves Us || https://amzn.to/459bNUk Book 3: Resurrection: 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us || https://amzn.to/40T0sp0
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Transcript
Welcome back to
Another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland.
Thank you for joining me for this episode.
We are in the season of Lent, and so I have taken on this very ambitious.
Goal of walking through Fleming Rutledge’s book, The Crucifixion.
Of all of the books I’ve read on the meaning of the death of Jesus, this
has been perhaps the most comprehensive book, also the most influential, I would say, for me
And because it’s a big theological book, I want to walk through and try to explain some of the big theological concepts.
Because here in the season of Lent, we want to know nothing among ourselves other than Christ crucified.
And I love reading big, thick, theological books.
And it’s a book that I really want everybody to read, but I know most people aren’t going to take the time to read it, so I am happy.
To walk through this important book with you.
So before we get started today, let me invite you to subscribe to Peaceable and Kind.
Recommend this episode.
Maybe you want to recommend
This entire mini-series.
We’re spending seven weeks going through Rutledge’s The Crucifixion.
Maybe you want to go back to a previous episode.
But if you would share peaceable and kind episodes with friends, that helps us a lot.
And also, if you would be so kind, leave a rating and review.
Okay, so we’re ready on this episode to walk through the first four
of eight biblical motifs or images of the death of Jesus in the scriptures.
Now she uses the word motif, which is a bit of a technical term
But in literature, we think of motifs as recurring images that represent something.
And whenever we want to take a deep dive into understanding the mystery
of how the death of Jesus saves us from our sins, we have to use metaphorical language, because the atoning death of Jesus is a mystery.
It is a mystery that I don’t know if we will ever fully explore
this side of the new heavens and the new earth.
I mean, I think in the age to come, maybe Jesus sits us all down and and explains it for us.
But until we get to that point, what we have is God’s revelation in Scripture, and this language is metaphorical.
So Rutledge in the second part of her book, the the final 400 pages of her book
She explores these eight different metaphors, these eight different motifs or images.
And so on this episode, we’re gonna tackle the first four.
So let’s jump right in.
From chapter 5, we see the first image or the first motif, and that is the Passover and Exodus.
I appreciate that she begins with this image, the very important image of the Passover.
In the book of Exodus, the story of the ancient people of God who were slaves in Egypt, they were tasked with harsh labor
uh making bricks for the Egyptian Empire for all their great building campaigns.
And the story of Passover is the story of God’s judgment on Egypt
And the freeing of the ancient Israelites from slavery as they crossed the Red Sea and
They had a bit of a wandering in the wilderness, forty years of wandering, before they get to the promised land.
And I appreciate that she begins with this motif
This metaphor of Jesus’ death connected to the Passover.
I like it because it starts where we need to start.
And that is we’re starting in the Old Testament.
I cannot emphasize this enough
But if we want to understand the meaning of the death of Jesus, we don’t start with
the hundreds and hundreds of of years of theologians with their arguments and their theories and all their theological puzzles.
That’s not where we start.
Now, on the previous episode, I talked to you about all sorts of theories of the atonement.
We talked about satisfaction, we talked about penal substitution.
So there’s value in exploring, but that’s not where we start.
We don’t start with theories created by theologians, and we don’t start in the New Testament.
Some people want to start their exploration of the death of Jesus in Paul’s letters, particularly Romans.
And we’ll look in a little bit at a verse in Romans chapter 3.
And as important as Paul is, Paul created Christian theology.
He was the first Christian theologian.
But before we start with Paul, we need to go deeper than that.
And we don’t even start in the Gospels themselves, which record for us the death of Jesus.
If we want to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death, we have to start in the Old Testament.
Because all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable
for doctrine, for teaching, for our understanding of these big concepts.
And so I appreciate Rutledge
In identifying these eight images, these eight motifs, that she starts with one in the old testament
The Passover and Exodus event.
You can read this in Exodus chapter 12 through, I think, chapter 15.
And this has the death of the Egyptian firstborn, the freedom from slavery, the crossing of the Red Sea, and this whole event, the Passover and the Exodus event
Looms large in the history of the ancient people of God.
You see it referenced as you read through the Old Testament.
You see the Passover and Exodus event.
Repeated over and over again.
And it is a story of deliverance.
What was the problem?
For which Passover becomes the solution.
The problem was slavery and bondage.
The solution was liberation and freedom
Now, we start with this image, the Passover image.
If you remember, in Exodus, it says
that Israelite families were invited to bring a lamb, a lamb with no blemish, a perfect lamb, into their home
And they were to kill it.
They were to slaughter it.
And they were then to cook
the meat and eat the lamb, but then take blood from the lamb and apply it to the doorpost and the lentil, to the framing around their door.
So that when the destroyer would come through, the death angel would pass over
thus the language Passover, any of the houses that’s where the blood had been applied, the death angel would pass over and bring no destruction to their homes.
Now this image and motif we see in the New Testament because Jesus
Enters into the story of Israel as the Passover lamb to lead a new Passover
Refashioned in the spirit of the original Passover.
In this motif, we see how the death of Jesus is both the rescue from death
It’s the blood of Jesus that causes death to pass over us.
And we also see how the blood of the Lamb.
delivers us, frees us from slavery to sin.
Now Rutledge is sensitive on this topic of slavery
Because it is a bit of a stinging motif and image for black Christians.
I understand that, and so does Rutledge.
And she says in this chapter that it can be a challenging image for white Christians to grasp in totality.
And so it is good for white Christians to read the Passover event, The Freedom from Slavery, from the perspective of African Americans.
To think through the slavery of black people and the ongoing oppression of black and brown people
Particularly here in the United States.
If you think about slavery from an African-American perspective, then you can see the joy of liberation.
And so this Passover and Exodus theme is a primary way of thinking about atonement in the New Testament.
You also see it in the early church.
Well, let’s move on to the next motif.
We have to do four.
So I’m not going to do her chapters justice because I’m really summing up a lot of things.
In chapter six, we encounter the motif or the image of blood sacrifice.
And Rutledge writes, quote,
The motif of sacrifice, and specifically blood sacrifice, is central to the story of our salvation through Jesus Christ.
And without this theme, the Christian proclamation loses much of its power, becoming both theologically and ethically undernourished
Rutledge in this chapter encourages us to focus on the blood of Jesus, not so much in a literal sense, but in its metaphorical sense
You know, we have a number of hymns in the church that we sing about the blood of Jesus.
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that blood, lose all their guilty states.
Now, in a in a literal sense, if you’re honest, that sounds like something out of a horror movie.
There is a fountain filled with blood, and we’re plunged into a fountain of blood.
If you take this image, this metaphor, literally, it’s kind of gross.
And we talk about that and we use language like washed in the blood of the lamb.
And for someone on the outside who doesn’t know and understand scripture and biblical language, it it sounds kind of gross.
So let’s remember that this blood sacrifice is a metaphor.
It is not literal.
We are not literally washing in the blood of a human being.
So once you see that it’s a metaphor, then it becomes a beautiful poetic metaphor.
Because again, I love the hymns that sing about the blood of Jesus.
Just because people on the outside may not understand at first this blood imagery, I think it’s good for us in the church
to keep the blood of Jesus as a place of honor.
It’s something sacred.
And so to sing our songs about
What can wash away my sins?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
To sing songs and hymns like that, I think is a beautiful thing.
It’s good.
But we want to read scripture about blood sacrifice
Understanding that this is a primary motif, a primary metaphor, a primary way of talking about the death of Jesus.
And if we want to understand
Jesus offering his blood as a sacrifice, we have to understand the sacrificial system in the book of Leviticus.
So again, let me offer to you this important advice that your Bible study of the death of Jesus
Requires you to start in the Old Testament.
If you want to understand Jesus’ blood sacrifice, go back to the book of Leviticus, Leviticus 16.
That is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.
And read, and you don’t necessarily need Hebrew or Greek, just read Leviticus 16
in English and ask yourself as you’re reading, what’s happening here?
What’s the purpose for this?
So if you read through Leviticus 16, what we discover is that blood sacrifice was to cleanse Israel of their sins.
The blood that would be sprinkled in the Holy of Holies, on the mercy seat, on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant.
The blood that was sprinkled was to purify Israel, to make them holy.
And Rutledge goes on to say that blood as a metaphor for atonement
Helps us see that sin really does indeed cost us something
And you get that from reading about blood sacrifice in Leviticus.
This is a big deal.
Blood sacrifice is a big deal.
That’s why it’s only the high priest one time a year that enters into the Holy of Holies, sprinkling the blood.
It is important, it is sacred, and it costs something.
The blood of Jesus is the cost that God paid.
For the liberation of our sins.
According to Rutledge, she writes, one of the simplest ways to understand the death of Jesus
is to say that when we look at the cross, we see what it cost God to secure our release from sin
It’s interesting that she uses the phrase one of the simplest ways.
She’s writing a 600-page book about the meaning of the death of Jesus.
But
Somewhere in the middle, I think we’re in the 200s, she has this line.
Here’s one of the simple ways to understand it.
When we see and when we reflect on the death of Jesus.
We see what it costs.
And it costs God, the blood of His Son, to release us from sin.
She goes on in this chapter on blood sacrifice to say that the death of Jesus was not God’s plan B.
There is a reading of Scripture, an interpretation, an understanding that says, well, God tried something with Israel in the Old Testament.
That was Plan A, this whole covenant with Abraham thing.
And well that didn’t work.
Israel kept messing it up.
So God scrapped that and he went to a brand new plan, plan B
called Jesus and the Church.
And that is not the truth at all.
Jesus’ death was not God’s
Plan B, the death of Jesus was the great culmination of the story of Israel.
Remember.
Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture.
The death of Jesus is the climax of the story of Israel
Jesus came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.
And so Jesus in his incarnation
In his life and ministry, in his death, in his resurrection and ascension is fulfilling
the law and the prophets.
And so if we want to see the value of the blood sacrifice motif in the New Testament, the place we want to go is the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews, according to Rutledge, is such an invaluable resource for understanding the blood sacrifice image from a Jewish perspective.
And Hebrews is deeply pastoral.
That’s the way Rutledge describes the book of Hebrews.
I say the book of Hebrews is like a sermon manuscript.
When I read Hebrews, it preaches.
It has rhetorical strength and bite
Hebrews, that that book, that let’s call it a sermon, wants God’s people to see not only the connection between the mission of Israel and the death of Jesus.
But the Hebrews sermon also wants God’s people to take comfort and courage in what God has done in and through Jesus.
Hebrews 9 26.
He, Jesus, has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself
The blood sacrifice metaphor can be seen in the sacrificial lamb, as talked about in Isaiah 53, 7, and the Passover lamb of Exodus.
Paul will write in 1 Corinthians 5.
7, Christ is our Paschal lamb.
He has been sacrificed for us.
Paschal refers to the Passover.
So while you do see images of a warrior lamb in Jewish apocalyptic literature
The New Testament writers, particularly John the Revelator, depicts Jesus as the lamb who reigns as a slain lamb
King Jesus as the Lamb of God reigns, not by slaying his enemies, but by being slain.
Rutledge also goes on to argue that we see the sacrificial lamb in the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah.
This is the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.
In the rabbinic tradition, this is called the binding of Isaac, because Isaac is bound up and he’s laid on this altar and
Abraham pulls out the knife and the angel speaks, no, don’t, don’t, don’t do this.
I see now that you are faithful to the Lord.
But Rutledge argues
And actually, I argue the same point in my book, Centering Jesus, that Jesus himself is not identified with Isaac
But Jesus in that Old Testament story is identified with the lamb or the ram that God provided for Abraham.
Abraham, as the father of our faith, is not sacrificing his son, because this is not what God is like.
God is not the one killing his son.
But a substitutional sacrifice was offered in the place of Isaac.
And that sacrificial animal was provided by God.
So
The Father, God the Father, doesn’t sacrifice God the Son, rather, the Father provides the sacrifice, who is Jesus
In this chapter on blood sacrifice, Rutledge dives into the age-old debate on the proper meaning of the Greek word hilosterion.
Now I don’t like to do lots of here’s the Greek word, here’s the Hebrew word, but this is an important one.
The Greek word hilosterion appears in the Greek New Testament in multiple places, but one place
Which is important and also highly debatable is Romans 3.
And I just want to give you a line
from Romans 3.
25, so you can see how this Greek word Hilesterion is using.
So Romans 3 verse 25
says, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement.
This is the new revised Standard Version
A sacrifice of atonement is an English phrase that is translating the Greek word hilosterion.
So again, let me read this whole line from Romans 3.
25, whom God put forth as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood.
Effective through faith.
So it’s important to read, not just the entire
context of Romans three twenty-five in terms of just chapter three, but really you need to read Romans one through five as a big chunk, with this important verse kind of in the middle, Romans three twenty-five.
But I think that the New Revised Standard Version translates the Greek word Hilostereon correctly as sacrifice of atonement.
The King James Version translates this Greek word using a very technical English word, propitiation.
And I’m going to say from the jump here that this is the wrong translation of that Greek word.
Propitiation
Means a sacrifice offered to appease an angry deity aimed at satisfying divine wrath.
So here we go again on another episode talking about satisfaction and the wrath of God.
Now, this translation of Hilesterion is debated among conservative biblical scholars, among evangelical biblical scholars
And there are many biblical interpreters, Fleming Rutledge being one, myself included.
that prefer to interpret Hilesterion not as propitiation, that is, a sacrifice
that appeases and satisfies the anger of a deity, but rather as expiation.
And so this is the big debate in biblical studies.
How do we interpret this word?
Is it
Propitiation or expiation?
Is it the appeasement of an angry God?
Or is Hilesterion atonement meaning the removal of sin?
And I think consistently in the New Testament and the Old Testament.
Atonement and blood sacrifice is for the removal of sin.
So we explored in the last episode that propitiation
belongs to a blend of the satisfaction theory.
Remember satisfaction theory is that we owe God
honor because we have dishonored God by our sin.
And so God is rightly angry because he’s be been dishonored.
And so Jesus’ sacrifice is the satisfactory sacrifice that pays God the honor due God.
and resolves the anger or wrath or satisfies the wrath of God.
Satisfaction theory.
Penal substitution is the idea that God punishes Jesus
so that God can forgive, because God being holy has to punish sin, and therefore God punishes Jesus instead of punishing us.
And so propitiation really blends into the two of those.
They’re somewhat distinct theories, but they’re interrelated.
And Rutledge has an outstanding observation.
She points out that
With the understanding of expiation, that is, sacrifice to remove sin, the barrier between God and humanity is within humanity.
Our sin is the barrier, and we need to be changed.
With propitiation, the barrier between God and humanity is within God
God’s righteous anger is the barrier, and God needs to be changed.
And there is so much wrong with that.
The problem for which the cross and the blood sacrifice is the solution is not God’s anger, but our sin.
God’s anger or wrath is not righteous.
Anger is not righteous
God’s anger or wrath is a metaphor.
God is not literally angry because we have dishonored him by our sin.
God’s anger is God’s ultimate rejection.
And it’s a metaphor that speaks of God’s judgment
So not only is propitiation the wrong translation of the Greek word hilosterion, there are theological problems created
Because propitiation makes the assumption that there is something not right with God, and God needs to be changed.
So Rutledge continues by saying
The insistence on propitiation has, perhaps unwittingly, but nevertheless wrongly, divided the father from the son.
And she is right
If the death of Jesus is appeasing God the Father, then there is now a fracture in the Trinity.
No longer are the father and the son on the same page, but the son has to do something to change the father, which is a theological problem.
So Rutledge concludes this section by writing any concept of Hilisterion
In the sense of placating, appeasing, deflecting the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of God is inadmissible.
And I agree.
She has so much more to say about God not being divided against God’s own self.
And it is true that sin was judged and condemned in the death of Jesus
But Jesus was not condemned.
Now, the theory of penal substitution is not altogether wrong, because there is punishment, language, and metaphors throughout the scriptures
But what gets condemned, what gets judged, because in the penal substitution model, it is about the law court or the adjudication of a wrong
And so in that model, something needs to get condemned.
And Romans 8.
3 says that what gets condemned is sin.
So the Father is not condemning the Son, but it’s sin in the flesh of the Son of God that gets condemned
The son does not change the father’s disposition towards us.
The anger
As a metaphor toward sin is not something that needs to be satisfied
Jesus comes as our substitution and our representative to save us from sin, which is the problem, and in saving us from sin, saves us from judgment.
I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that the next two Bible studies in the God and the Neighborhood Bible study series are available for pre-order.
Crucifixion: 8 lessons on how
God Saves Us and Resurrection.
Eight lessons on how God restores us, both release on February 17th, just in time for Lent and Easter.
Pre-order now.
Links are in the description.
show notes.
All right, we got two more metaphors to work through.
Hopefully you’re still with me
But this is one of my favorite topics, talking about the death of Jesus and working through the nuance of all these scriptures.
But let’s go on.
Two more metaphors.
The next one is ransom and redemption.
And it informs the language of Jesus.
Paying the price for our sins.
Have you heard that phrase before?
That the death of Jesus, it pays the price for our sins.
Well, this is biblical language.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, you were bought with a price.
But this price has to do with Old Testament concepts of ransom and redemption.
Jesus himself said, this is Mark 10, 45, that he came to give his life as a ransom for many
And so these metaphors allude to Jesus’ sacrificial death, and they’re not really used by
Paul or Mark in the context of a of a longer theological argument about atonement
In other words, when Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 or Jesus in Mark 10 use this bought with a price ransom language, it’s not really in the context of atonement.
Talking about how the death of Jesus saves us.
Nevertheless, they do indicate the cost, the price, and the value of Jesus’ death.
And Rutlich has already helped us to see that.
When we think about blood sacrifice, this should communicate to us the cost at which our salvation came
What Rutledge emphasizes in the ransom metaphor is that Jesus Himself is the price of our redemption.
And to me, this is really helpful.
It is not only the blood of Jesus that is the price, but his entire life.
In other words, it’s not just his death that saves us, but, as I said earlier, Jesus saves us by his incarnation, ministry, life, death, resurrection, and ascension.
The entirety of the work of Jesus from his birth to his ascension is what is necessary for our salvation.
And this is very consistent with the early church fathers and the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
And Rutledge again wants to draw on language from the Trinity.
to note that the entirety of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is at work buying back humanity from the unholy Trinity of sin, death, and the devil.
The early church fathers would often use this image of ransom to speak about the price that was paid for our liberation from sin.
And Athanasius, in his book on the incarnation, says that the price was paid to death itself.
Death was the slave holder.
And so death was paid off.
Of course, these are all metaphors because death is being personified here.
So redemption, which is connected to ransom language, redemption is God’s work
of setting things right by buying back humanity from the slave auction of sin.
So for Rutledge, the death of Jesus was not compulsatory.
It was not demanding.
It wasn’t contrary to God’s nature.
Rather, the death of Jesus is an expression of who God is.
God is not the one getting paid off.
God is not the one to whom the ransom is paid.
The death of Jesus is a revelation of God’s love
And the fourth and final metaphor or motif that we’re going to explore on this episode is the great assize.
Great assize.
Sometimes I’m frustrated when theologians use archaic words.
A size is an older and kind of outdated word for any kind of judicial investigation.
So the great assize is really the law court metaphors that are used in the scriptures.
Now
The reality is that the big story that the Bible is telling is one where guilt and shame is a major element.
We believe that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead
So there is a judicial or a legal way of thinking about the death of Jesus
Now, this pending future judgment is both individual and it is corporate
According to Rutledge, when the Bible is thinking about judgment, it is thinking mostly about that collective, communal, and ultimately she calls it cosmological judgment.
It’s powers that will be judged.
Nations will be judged.
Structures will be judged in the end.
And all nations will stand before the judge, as Jesus taught in the parable of the sheep and the goats.
All nations will stand before King Jesus, and Jesus will separate them as one separates the sheep from the goats
So when we consider the blood of Jesus and his death from the perspective of the law court model,
We see Jesus in and through his death rescuing us from judgment as an expression of God’s love.
God must be against all that would threaten or destroy God’s purposes for us
So the wrath of God, as I have said multiple times, is best understood as a metaphor for God’s judgment.
And according to Rutledge, she speaks a little bit about the wrath of God.
God’s wrath has always been God’s love in service of God’s purposes.
In other words, God does not judge simply to punish people.
God judges in order to discipline, in order to bring about his purposes.
And contrary to a number of Christians, God’s righteousness or God’s justice is not a matter of God’s need to punish sin.
But God’s desire to set right all that’s gone wrong because of sin
It’s important to understand in the law court motif and model that God does not need to punish in order to forgive
There is among those that emphasize the penal substitution model that Jesus was punished, so God doesn’t punish us.
That it is required according to God’s justice to punish someone.
God simply cannot let sin go unpunished.
This is not true.
And to me, the biggest evidence of this is when we see Jesus in the Gospels.
Jesus is regularly forgiving people of their sins and not
Requiring punishment.
Think about the woman caught in the act of adultery in John chapter 8
If you remember, this woman is caught.
She is dragged out into the street, thrown before Jesus.
And the Pharisee says, the law of Moses says we should stone such a woman.
What do you say?
They’re trying to trap it.
He had been preaching a message proclaiming the kingdom of peace and mercy and compassion and forgiveness.
And so for him to say, yeah, let’s go kill this woman would go against what he had been preaching.
So they tried to trap him, and Jesus, who is so wise, doesn’t initially answer.
Instead, he stoops down, starts writing in the dirt
Then he stands up with this woman who I can just imagine the shame and the embarrassment.
She’s probably hiding her face with her hair.
And in front of this woman, Jesus looks at the Pharisees and says, Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her
And then the scripture says that all the Pharisees they just dropped their rocks and left.
And so Jesus is left alone with this woman.
And he asks her, Where are all your accusers?
And I imagine the woman looking up and looking around, and so she says, I don’t, I don’t see them.
There are no more accusers.
No one’s condemning me.
And then Jesus says, Neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more.
Now, if you notice in the story, Jesus forgives this sinful woman and requires no punishment
If Jesus is the full revelation of God, if Jesus has come to show us what God is like, which all Christians agree that he does.
Then we cannot conclude that God must punish in order to forgive.
That would not be consistent with what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels
So again, there is punishment in Jesus’ crucifixion, but it was Roman punishment, it was humanity.
punishing Jesus, not God the Father.
So Rutledge wraps up this chapter on the great assize, uh the great
law court metaphor by saying God’s work of justification, and she likes the word rectification, includes reconciliation
Justification is not about who gets punished and who gets free from punishment.
Justification is much more about
Reconciling humanity to the Trinity and reconciling us to one another.
Well, that is quite enough for one podcast episode.
If you made it to the end, congratulations
I hope you are enjoying this deep dive and reflection on the death of Jesus.
I still hold the blood of Jesus as sacred, and I hope some of this theological work.
is helping you to grow in your appreciation of the death of Jesus for his blood which takes away our sin.
That’s it for this episode.
Go in peace.
And be kind
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.