Penal substitution

I don't have time for a big theology blog right now.

But in summary - there are many valid ways to think of the mystery of the cross and we don't understand any of them fully enough to say with absolute certainty what their relative merits are. What is certain is that none tell the whole story, and need oters to fill in the gaps. Of the many approaches, Penal Substitution is ingrained in the scriptures from cover to cover. Over the last few days I have read a lot of comments and objections to it, and many of them wrongly think it is a new invention, many wrongly think it implies divine child abuse, many wrongly think it is a new invention. They all forget that God is a just God, and cannot let sin be unpunished without compromising that justice. Faced with the dilemma of punishing his own creation, he takes responibility for it by hiding the sinner in himself so that he becomes sin and takes on himself the punishment.

This moves on to the mystery that really blows my mind....that the main punishment for sin is [death of course, but within death it is...] separation from God. So God takes on himself, separation from himself. And so to draw attention to this Jesus on the cross cries out "Why have you forsaken me?"... not becasue he doesn't know but becasue he wants us to think about it. Get your head around this - a division in the Trinity?!?! No wonder the earth shook and the sun went dark! What a cataclysmic event!

The Father was still with the Son in the sense that he is omnipresent and continues to run affairs associated with the crucifixion and beyond, but for that time Jesus took on himself MY separation from God. What a cost for our God - to be separated from yourself after an eternity of union!

After filtering the dross of objections to PS that are based on total misconceptions of it, there were two that made me stop and think.

One is that PS does not explain the resurrection. Well, like I said above, none of the explanations can stand on its own. But thought of in terms of this separation, although the task of penal substitution does not require resurrection, it does make sense for the divided trinity to re-converge and resurrection makes sense as a mechanism for that to take place.

The next best objection was that God will not aquit the guilty or punish the innocent (there is a Bible verse that says so), and this seems to contradict substitution. But like I said, the sinner is in Christ, and Christ becomes sin: Christ though innocent becomes guilty on our behalf. the nearest analogy, poor though it is, is when [in the UK] a junior engineer makes a mistake on site resulting in an injury accident, and the boss of his company gets sent to prison. The Junior engineer is 'in' the boss - the boss takes responsibility for his staff's mistakes even though he himself is innocent.

And so I thank God, because althoughI had broken his law, and owed him my life, he took me into himself and took on himslef responsibility for that debt. And so now, I am not separated from God, but join with Christ in union with him forever. HALLELUJAH!

A final word to those who think it is a new idea - the real new, twentieth century, idea is that God is somehow too nice and cuddly to actually get angry, and too soft to implement his own promises of judgement. Get real, and go and read the scriptures! "Woe to those who say 'Peace, peace', when there is no peace!"