Hot Springs to Heresy

As I child I went to Rotorua in New Zealand. This is an area of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The mud made an impression on me because you could see where a bubble was about to appear – the surface would slowly heave up, then it would seem to stretch and get thinner before finally the bubble would burst, splattering hot mud randomly in all directions.

The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.

Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.

This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.

So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?

If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.

Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.

If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.

So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.

The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)

Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.

[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]

This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.

The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.

So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.

And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.

When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.

Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”

This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.

And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.

And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.

He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.

And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.

But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.

If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!

And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.