PODCAST
Our Atonement In Christ
January 9th, 2015
Hebrews 2:10-18
What’s a good God to do? He is merciful and just, and now He’s dealing with rebels. Beings He created who flaunt His will and steal His honor!
This was the dilemma, Anselm, the eleventh-century church leader and thinker, wrestled.* If God exercised his mercy and ignored humankind’s sin, He would be immoral. God’s will orders the universe: These rebels defied that order. So, how can God be untrue to His own nature? To maintain the moral order and balance of the whole of His creation, satisfaction must be rendered.
Yet, Anselm reasoned, these created beings can only offer God what they already owe. Even if they perfectly live out His will, this is no satisfaction for the sin wreck. “If I leave them unredeemed,” God reflects, “I’m frustrated. I created them to enjoy ‘the supreme good, that is myself!”
What a conundrum! Only humanity can make the satisfaction, yet it must be made by One greater than anything in all creation. First humanity sinned: Then the God-man redeemed. O, what an “at-one-ment!”
*See Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity: Beginnings to 1500 (Vol 1), Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1975, 500-501.
Author: Paul Martin
January 9th, 2015 at 11:48 am
The fatherly nature of God demands discipline and righteousness. Where as the motherly nature of God offers love and forgiveness. We are perfectly imperfectly. But the grace of God made it possible to satisfied the demands of God.