The technical
term is propitiation, but the sound of it suggests little of the devastating meaning
it contains. Jesus propitiated the wrath
of God in His death on the cross. The
word brings with it both the terrifying wrath of the Creator and appeasement of
that wrath. I have heard people say that
the God of the Old Testament is wrathful and the God of the New Testament loves. Such a statement demeans what was
accomplished by my Master on the cross.
The love of my Master is understood best when His wrath is laid alongside.
Just my sin
incurred the wrath of my Master. Sure I was
born with it, but I also earned it. It’s
not reasonable to blame my Master for being penalized for the way I was made, I
ensured the sin I was born in rightly applied by my own activity. When I read that my Master died for the sin
of the cosmos, I am immediately struck by an unimaginable enormity of what He
took upon Himself in that act. More than
that though, it says literally that God put on Him the sin of the world, so
that He was killed for that magnitude of sin.
And that is the essence of wrath; it is the high price paid to balance
justice.
I remember
feeling the shame for my addiction and it crushing me. In a sense I needed to feel that, but in the
sense of my guilt before my Master, not by succumbing to the crushing weight on
myself. He bore that crushing weight on
Himself, and to take it back is ridiculous, and shows a lack of faith and
understanding. I was supposed to be
aware of my guilt before the Creator of the cosmos, and therefore, His amazing
love showed toward His human creatures through the sacrifice of my Master in
our place. In taking on more than that, I
continued in my pattern of stacking more onto the wrath poured out on my
Master.
Love and
grace are best embraced in the face of wrath and justice. I think sometimes I become so accustomed to
the love and grace of my Master, I forget and take for granted the stark
contrasting wrath and justice that makes them so glorious and powerful. The closest I come to understanding what my
Master has done on the cross is when I allow the conviction of my contribution His
wrath to expand to include as much of humanity as I can imagine, and then
extend that back into history and beyond.
There are realities of this life that I easily miss and so trivialize my
relationship with my Master. It’s a
forest-trees thing.
The wrath of
the Creator on His creation was laid on His Son, who obediently took it upon
Himself. A stunning truth which is then
followed by another: the Resurrection.
It’s impossible to encompass the enormity of what Jesus did on the
cross. But when I extend that into the
resurrection I find that the grace and love of my Master was not satisfied with
removing the crushing weight of the wrath of God. He also extended eternal life to that same
rabble whose weight He bore. I still can’t
get there to wrap my mind around the enormity.
I can’t get my emotions to engage with it; it’s so huge I lose the sense
of it permeating all life on earth (all life on earth is difficult at best to
imagine all on its own). I’m so
overwhelmed I’m numb and easily fall into apathy. I need to strain at the limits of my ability
to imagine and describe this unimaginable indescribable reality in which I live. That is my life’s work.
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