What It Accomplished: Part 1
What is the central focus of these following passages? (1 Cor. 2:2; 15:3; Gal. 6:14). 
The writers of the New Testament used a variety of metaphors, images, and pictures in their attempts to express the saving work of God in Christ. In this lesson (and in Wednesday's) we sample a few:
1. The Concept of Sacrifice, Offering, Substitute—Ephesians 5:2: Christ "gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering [prosphoran] and sacrifice [thusian] to God" (NIV). Hebrews 9:26: He came "to do away with sin by the sacrifice [thusias] of himself" (NIV). Hebrews 10:14: By means of "one sacrifice [prosphora] he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy" (NIV).
The idea in all these passages is that of vicarious death, death in our place, death as our substitute. Vicarious suffering is suffering endured by one person in the stead of another. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul says that "Christ died for our sins"(NIV); Romans 5:8 says that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us"(NIV); and 1 Peter 2:24 says that Christ "bore our sins in his body on the tree"(NIV).
2. The Concept of Ransom: The word ransom derives from the Greek term lutron; the basic idea conveyed is that of a payment for something delivered. In classical Greek the term often was used in connection with the redemption of slaves and war prisoners. The sacred writers borrowed the concept and pressed it into the service of a grander theme: Matthew 20:28 (compare Mark 10:45): Jesus came "to give his life as a ransom [lutron] for many" (NIV). (Here "many," incidentally, means all.)
The family of words from which lutron comes puts the finger on the substitutionary nature of Christ's sacrifice. He gave His life for us, the tense of the verb gave in the original Greek pointing to a specific event in time, to Jesus' death on the cross. The basic concept here is that we were slaves to sin, condemned to eternal death, and unable to free ourselves; but Jesus came as our ransom, our lutron.
| Think about the things that you have done wrong, things you knew were wrong but did them anyway. What does it mean to you to know that someone else, Jesus, someone innocent, received in Himself the punishment that would, otherwise, be yours for those things (and others) you did? |
| WEDNESDAY | June 4 |
What It Accomplished: Part 2
Yesterday, we discussed two of the many metaphors employed by the writers of the New Testament to express the accomplishments of Christ's death. Here are two more:
3. The Concept of Propitiation (or Expiation) (hilasterion): In regard to the mission of Christ, the word is found in Hebrews 2:17, where it speaks of Christ making "propitiation for the sins of the people" (NKJV). "Propitiation" has the sense of pacifying someone. The belief was that when a god was angry, the people should make a gesture of appeasement (hilasterion) in order to render the god hilaros (happy, joyous) once more. What students of the New Testament repeatedly have noted, however, is that its authors, though borrowing vocabulary from classical Greek and elsewhere, nevertheless fill that vocabulary with brand-new content and meaning.
Accordingly, many Bible scholars agree that a better English translation of the word is "expiation." So understood, the idea is that by means of Jesus' death, God "expiates," "covers," "erases" our sin. Any idea of human appeasement of God would be utterly foreign to the New Testament writers. Instead, they wanted to emphasize that the entire human race, threatened by the righteous wrath of God on account of sin, was rescued by Jesus' death. Jesus became our hilasterion, covering us from the wrath of God (see Heb. 9:5).
4. The Concept of Reconciliation (katallage):
Read the following passages. What important emphasis do they share in common? (Rom. 5:10, 11; 2 Cor. 5:18-21; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1:20-22).
Sin is departure from God and God's will. It puts us into a condition of estrangement from God, a state whose end result is death.
Reconciliation speaks of the restoration of harmony between us and God, the recovery of wholeness. And here is a critical point to note: It was God who took the initiative (Rom. 5:8-11). "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). Because of sin, the whole world stood condemned before a righteous God; because of the Cross, our standing before God changed, and thus all who come to Jesus, by faith, have the assurance of eternal life.
Because of the Cross, you have the opportunity by faith to stand perfect, holy, and accepted by God. In what ways, on a daily basis, should your life reflect this new standing that we can have through Jesus?
No comments:
Post a Comment