Speaking Well of God
Presentation 7. God and Atonement

[Edited transcript. This article preserves aspects of a spoken delivery]

Thank you so much for being here in Bauru tonight.  And thank you so much for the invitation to share together with you over the next few days.  Thank you, Elder, for being here and inviting me in, and thank you to the person who will be doing the hardest job tonight.  This is my good friend, George Luis.  I want to thank the team that’s come along with us—who’ve helped us out so much already in our time there in Rio in Barra de Tijuca. 

Let us ask the Lord to be with us as we begin.

Our Heavenly Father, what a wonderful privilege it is this Easter weekend to remember especially what you’ve done for us.  Lord, we want to understand better what it truly means. We share together, we say “Happy Easter,” but let us think again about what it means to you and to us to bring us back to be with you once more.  This we pray in Jesus name, amen.

So it’s Easter.  What do you think when you think Easter?  Every country has different traditions.  Luis was explaining that here, as in many parts of the world, we celebrate Easter with chocolate eggs.  Pastor, could you find that Bible text about chocolate eggs in here for me?  Maybe you have Easter bunnies, rabbits, or chickens too.  Is this what we are supposed to be celebrating for Easter? 

I want to talk to you today about some of the meanings of, and even here I have a problem with the word.  The word that we are using for our theme tonight is God and atonement.  As soon as my brother says expiacao, I want to say, whoa, hold a moment, because I don’t know whether I really want to say expiacao.  You see, I did my homework before I came, and I picked up my wife’s very old Portuguese dictionary, which belonged to her beloved father.  So maybe, Pastor, you can come and read here with me the definition in the dictionary I have at home, we have at home, for expiacao, and to save my wife’s pain, I will not read it. {Dictionary definition in Portuguese]. As I read that, and as my wife helped me to understand what that meant, what about that last one, “Prayers to appease the deity?”

Are we trying to get appeasement with God?  Are we trying to pay a penalty?  There’s some more here, Pastor, let’s look at Romans 3:25 and the word “propitiation.”  Is that what Jesus did?  Did He, on our behalf, do this to the Father? 

Do you like stories?  Alright, I see some smiles, people wake up, thankful this isn’t just going to be a theology lecture.  I want to tell you a story, but it’s a kind of a story that you shouldn’t get the lesson from because it’s the wrong lesson.  Does that sound confusing?  This is a story about Big Tom, who was a big boy, and Little Johnny.

Little Johnny came from a poor family, and when he went to school his parents didn’t always have food to give him to take for his lunch.  So one day he was so hungry that he stole Big Tom’s lunch.  Well, of course, he ate the lunch and Big Tom didn’t have his lunch.  Big Tom went to the teacher and said, “Somebody stole my lunch!”

So the teacher went and investigated and found that it was Little Johnny who had committed the crime.  “Well,” she said, “now there has to be punishment.” 

So this is back in the day when you beat the children, you know?  She had a big ruler, and she said, “Okay, bend over, Johnny; I’m going to have to punish you for the crime of stealing Big Tom’s lunch.”

And, of course, Little Johnny was very upset and started crying. “I don’t want that, I’m terribly sorry.”

But the teacher said, “No, you committed the crime; you have to pay the penalty.”

And she’s just about to start whacking him, but Big Tom steps in and says, “No!  Please, let me take the punishment.”

The teacher says, “Well, as long as there’s punishment, I suppose that’s okay.”

So Big Tom bends over and the teacher whack, whack, whack, gives Tom six of the best.  At the end Little Johnny runs over to Big Tom and says, “I’m so sorry for stealing your lunch.   Please forgive me, and thank you for taking my punishment.” I heard this story told in the church, and the pastor at the end said, “That’s what Jesus does for us.”

Yes or no?  If Jesus is Big Tom taking the punishment, doesn’t He look good?  But what about the teacher?  If God is the teacher, how does he look?  You know, when we speak well of Jesus let’s not speak badly about our Heavenly Father.  I hope I’ve got you thinking by now, because I want to talk to you about what it really means, what it really means to say that Jesus died for me. 

We’ve already seen some problems with the word expiacao.  We can do some more, there is propiciacao  You know, these are good long words.  They come from the Latin root.  And we think propiciacao is to try and persuade somebody who is mad with us to like us.  So we talk about Jesus propitiating, in English, the Father.   That suggests that the Father is upset or angry with us.  But I don’t read that in scripture, do you?  Do you find a text in scripture that says God hates us, or is hostile towards us?  What do you read in John 3:16?  Isn’t it that God loved the world so much that he gave his only son? 

But we have taken some ideas from these words and turned them into a theory in which God has to be propitiated.  I can read from that historic Council of Trent in the 16th Century?  I won’t read all of the quotation here, but it talks about making satisfaction, that Jesus made satisfaction for us to God the Father, and that the sacrifice is truly propitiatory—and that was the only way that God was appeased so that he could forgive our sins and our crimes.

The reason I mention this is this is our cultural heritage, our background here in this country.  Here is another quotation from a Catholic source: “Without the daily offering of the Catholic Mass throughout the world, God would have no choice but to destroy immediately for its sins.”

Then it says, “It is only through the propitiatory offering of the mass that God is appeased enough to allow the world to go existing one more day.”

How does God look?  And before you think I’m pointing the finger at our Catholic friends, let me read a Protestant one for you: “Propitiation is that priestly work of Christ wherein He removed God’s anger and wrath by the covering of our sins through the substitutionary sacrifice of himself to God.” 

And then one more, this is the Saxon confession from Germany: “Such is the severity of his justice that there can be no reconciliation unless the penalty is paid.  Such is the greatness of the anger of God, that the Eternal Father cannot be placated save by, except by, the beseeching and death of his son.”

The title, the general title for this series is “Speaking Well of God.”  How many of you think that this is speaking well of God?  God looks mad; he looks angry.  You have this angry, hostile Father who’s about to hit you and to strike you.  It’s only Jesus saying, “Please, please, please,” that stops Him from doing it. 

How have we come to misrepresent God so badly?  In Malachi, God says, “You have said terrible things about me.” We are speaking badly of God!

Let’s look at what went wrong in the first place.  Adam and Eve were the first people to sin in the universe, right?  No.  There was somebody who sinned before Adam and Eve?  Yes? Good.  I’m glad to see you’re good Bible students.  Satan had sinned before, and when it came to Adam and Eve, there was a choice that they have to make.  Do they trust God or do they trust Satan?  God tells Adam and Eve if they eat of that tree in the Garden, that one tree, what?

“If you eat that fruit I will execute you!”

Is that what He says?

“I will impose the death penalty upon you!”

No.  He simply says,

“You will surely die.  If you sin, then the result, because of sin, is death.” It is not God imposing a penalty, a punishment.  What does Satan, the serpent say?  He says, “You will not surely die.  You’ll just be like God.”

Was that true?  Part of the answer of Jesus dying on the cross is to show us what happens if you experience, and practice, and have the consequences of sin. Death: that’s the consequence of sin.  If you sin you die.  Sin pays a wage.  What is that wage?  Death.  God doesn’t pay the wage; it is sin that pays the wage.  Because what does the rest of that verse say?  It says, “The gift of God is eternal life.”

Not sin resulting in death.  God doesn’t want that, he wants to give us eternal life.  Want another story?  Again a bad story I’m afraid.  This is a story that has been around for a long time. 

There was once upon a time a bridge keeper whose duty it was to let down a draw bridge over a river.  A movable bridge that would be let down over a river. When the train came it would blow its whistle and he would let the bridge go down over the river. Now on this particular day, he heard the train blow its whistle, and he was about to lower down the draw bridge, when he saw his only son playing in the mechanism of the bridge.  If he let the bridge go down his son would be crushed to death in the machinery.  But if he didn’t he would have, everybody on the train would be killed.  So he let the draw bridge down, killed his son, so that the train could go over the bridge.  That’s supposed to be what God did with Jesus.  What do you think?

This story was meant to be one of our Adult Bible Studies some while ago.  And I was sitting on the reading committee at church headquarters at that time.  I read this story as an illustration in the draft of the manuscript.  So when I went to the committee to talk about that particular set of lessons, I said, “Listen, I’ve never really asked for very much here, but please this time, I’m begging you.”  I said, “Please take that story out of the lesson, it speaks so badly about God.”

I’m pleased to report that they did take the story out.  Because what is that story saying?  It’s saying that there’s an innocent son being killed by a father. The sacrifice is not even voluntary, and it is all kind of a pointless mistake.  A mistake that is pointless, doesn’t have a reason.  And would our Heavenly Father ever dream of acting like this?  No wonder so many people reject some of these stories about the cross.  

You see, we need to understand the atonement, and Pastor, we need to think of a better word than expiacao.  Could we talk about reconciliation maybe?  Or maybe, harmony?  Or maybe, even unity?  That’s really what Christ came to achieve. 

I was on a plane flying across the United States.  I sat next to a lady.  It’s always good to be on a plane and be able to talk with people, because you’re sitting right beside them and they can’t get away from you for many hours!  She says to me, “So what do you do?”

I say, “I’m an Adventist minister.”

And she said, “Well, please don’t talk to me about religion!”

I said, “No, I wouldn’t dream of doing that.  But maybe we could talk about God.”

And she said, “Oh, that would be fine.”

I don’t understand this world, but you know, she was happy to talk about God.  And so she said, “So what do you think God is like?”

Well, I started with the whole of the great controversy.  You need four or five hours to explain all this.  And we went through what sin really is that it’s not about breaking the rule, but breaking the relationship.  And how when Jesus comes and lives and dies among us he’s coming to restore and bring us back to a relationship with God.  He’s not paying a penalty to his Father.  He’s not trying to persuade the Father to be nice to us.  He’s trying to win us back!  You know, I guess we could talk about “propiciacao” to us.  We are the ones who need to be persuaded to be favorable to God. 

Anyway, for a long time we talked backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.  And she kept on saying, “Is God really that good?  Is that God really that good?  I can hardly believe it!”

When she left, she said some words which have been very precious to me ever since.  She said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I never understood God like that.”

So I believe it is better to have no concept of God at all than one that is misrepresenting Him.  It’s better to have no picture, no concept of God at all than one that misrepresents Him, especially when it comes to the reconciliation. 

So what did Jesus really do on the cross?  Well, we could read many verses, but Pastor, maybe you could pick up your Bible and read together with me in Romans chapter 5.  We look at Romans 5, and always pick up different versions because sometimes you get better insights.  This is from, well, it doesn’t matter what English version, the NIV.  Romans 5: 10 and 11.  Maybe just you read it Pastor. 

Reconciled. There’s the word, and I know enough to know that Pastor is reading it and I can understand bits of it, so that’s good.  What does it say? we are reconciled to God through the death of His son.  We are brought back into a relationship with him.  And we are reconciled by his death, by what that does and what that speaks to us about God.  But then it says, and here we often get this part wrong—we often don’t say this right.  We often say we are saved by Jesus’ death, don’t we?  What does it say here? “We are saved through His life.”

Because if there was no life of Jesus, both before His death and after in the resurrection, we have no evidence of the kind of person he is, or his power to save us.

Another text to look at, 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verses 18-21.   Please, Pastor, 18-21.

One of the best descriptions of what is happening there in the death of Jesus.  It says there in verse 19 that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to himself.  So where is the problem?  Is it with God or with the world?  It’s with the world.  So why do we so often make the problem, the problem that God has?  Does God not love us?  Doesn’t he care for us?  Doesn’t he want us to come home?  Of course he does!  The problem is with us.

When Jesus told the story of the prodigal son, it was the son that ran away, it wasn’t the father.  The problem wasn’t with the father; he was willing to welcome the son back whenever he came.  So let us be sure to speak well of God, particularly when we’re talking about the death of Jesus.  If Jesus is the innocent, the pure, the wonderful revelation of God to us, does it make any sense for God the Father to be punishing him? 

You know, sometimes we speak wrongly here too.  How could it be that the death of the most innocent, the totally—completely, utterly innocent—person in the universe, how could that satisfy the demands of justice, as sometimes we say?  How could the most unjust act in the whole of time be something that would please the God who is just? 

I have many texts here, but we don’t have time to go through all this.  But I want to finish with a few more images of reconciliation.  It was this morning I was talking with Jansen and he was commenting that there are some, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting you Jansen, that some in the Church who kind of prefer to feel guilty.  Some of us want to feel guilty.  We want to deal with that guilt in church in a certain way.  You know, we kind of feel like we deserve to be punished.

I had a friend who was a school teacher, and he said, “The following boys will stay behind after school and I want to talk to them.”

In fact, all he wanted was some help in moving the chairs back from the hall to the side.  But the boys came to the front, and the teacher was standing there, and then the smallest one, the youngest one, said, “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to throw those stones at the cars.”

And another one said, “I knew I shouldn’t have been reading those kinds of magazines, but I did throw them away.”

And another one said, “I didn’t mean to steal those things from the store.  I’ll promise not to do it again and I’ll pay them back.”

My teacher friend hadn’t said anything.  He just took out his notebook and started writing all these things down.  At the end he had all those boys crying there.  They didn’t notice that he was smiling.  So when he said, “Well, could you help me move the chairs to the side of the room, maybe for the whole of the rest of the month?” they were very happy to do that.  You know, because we’re guilty.  If  were to say, “Everybody put their hand up who feels guilty tonight!  Everybody would put their hand up and we’d all say to ourselves, “I wonder what their putting their hand up for?”

So maybe you shouldn’t put your hand up, but doesn’t that describe the kind of people we are?  We feel a long way from God.  We need to be brought back to Him, but we say, “But we can’t, I’m too guilty, I’m too bad.”

I remember one brother there in the church in England.  He would never come into the church building itself, into the sanctuary because he said, “I’m not worthy to be in there.”

He would come into the foyer, but he would never come into the sanctuary.  And I said, “Listen, we’re all sinners.”

He said, “No, I’ve done too many bad things.” 

I visited with him; I shared with him at home.  And I read these texts about reconciliation.  I told him, “God forgives and God heals us.  Come into the church and be with us.”

That Sabbath he did come to church and he came into the sanctuary.  Then the next week he died.  I’m just so glad that he, at least, got that far.  We leave all those things in the hands of God.  We need that reconciliation; we need to know that God loves us and that He’s not hostile. 
“This then is how we know that we belong to the truth.”  This is 1 John 3: 19 and 20.  “And how we set our hearts at rest in His presence, whenever our hearts condemn us.  For God is greater than our hearts and He knows everything.”

You can’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know.  He knows everything you’ve ever done.  When I was small I used to go and hide under the bed covers so God wouldn’t see what I was doing.  God sees everything wherever you are.  And he still wants you back, every one of us. 

I could talk to you about some of those Biblical stories of reconciliation.  Thinking of Joseph and his brothers.  It’s a wonderful story of finally being reconciled, the family is reconciled.  And then Jacob and Esau being reconciled as brothers.  How Jesus prayed for all of us that we might be one as he was one with the Heavenly Father. Harmony, reconciliation.  God comes to us wanting to be reconciled.  There’s nothing wrong on His side.  The problem is all with us, and he wants to win us back.  And so he comes with a gift.  This is the gift of Himself to us.  That’s Jesus propitiating us, winning us back to love him and trust him so we will be healed.

Now I’m sure there’s never any problems in this church between husbands and wives.  You never need any reconciliation.  So don’t come and tell me afterwards it’s not true. 

So just a little story from my wife and from me.  And now she’s wondering, “What is he going to say now?”

The problems in our relationship are usually mine.  I remember I was upset and I wasn’t thinking very favorably, and I have a little bit of stubbornness in me. I can hold onto that kind of animosity for a little while.  You know—how you don’t talk, you just look the other way, and I think she was getting a little tired of the way I was acting.  I thought I was so right in my position.  But as I think back on it I probably was not.  No, that’s not true, I definitely was not. 

I love orchids. I came into my office and there was this beautiful orchid on my desk, she left it there, with a lovely little note about how much she loved me.  You’d have to be a very hard-hearted person to not respond to that, wouldn’t you?  A gift that brings peace.  That’s one of the best ways of translating the word in Romans about appeasement and reconciliation.  In the same way that Ana brought a gift to bring peace, to restore the relationship, Jesus comes, he lives among us.  Even though he comes to his own, his own receive him not, there is not reconciliation.  Even when he goes through the Garden of Gethsemane everybody abandons him.  Even when he’s on the cross, people are mocking him; he still goes through with it all because he wants to be the gift from God to bring reconciliation.

I pray this evening, that we this Easter time, will think again about what Jesus means, during this Easter time.  Let’s think again about accepting the gift that brings peace, so that we can enter once more into that full relationship with our loving Father.  Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, as we speak to you again this evening we thank you for the gift of yourself.  We remember that Jesus truly is God, and when we see Jesus on the cross we see you winning us back, wanting us back, wanting us to see what terrible situation we’re in, that sin kills.  And that only you can heal the damage that sin has caused. 

Let us not speak badly of you, let’s not make you seem to be angry and hostile towards us, but may we see you as a loving Father, always ready to welcome us home.  Accept us now we pray, as we accept you into our lives.  This we pray in the loving name of Jesus, amen and amen.

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