Your Daily Cud
Random thoughts to ponder during your lunch break . . . There are many worse things than death. Continue reading Your Daily Cud
We Belong to Each Other
Your Daily Cud
How about I start passing on random thoughts to chew over during your lunch break? It’s OK, you’ll like it. Sometimes I tell my 14 year old two things: 1. You’re acting like a 14 year old. 2. You’re allowed to act like a 14 year old. Continue reading Your Daily Cud
Why the Cross Pleased God
So, I got a comment today on my engagingly titled post “Did God Really Demand the Death of His Son as a Sacrifice for Sin?” I was going to answer it in a comment, but I realized that most of y’all would never see it there. And sometimes the best conversations take place in the comments section. Especially when there’s a question from someone who thinks I’m wrong.
My blog posts purposely distill a lot of background information into a hopefully interesting, informative and sometimes challenging post. So I can’t cover everything, but I promise that if you have a question, I have an answer. It may not always be the right answer. But I do have an answer. I have been called Hermoine Granger more than a few times over the years. (I am very grateful to the Harry Potter books for giving us a nicer way to call someone a bossy know-it-all, btw.)
So here’s the comment:
I loved reading your article and it does make a lot of sense. However, Isa 53:10 says, But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; If he would render himself as a guilt offering..(NAS)
So, I think that the theological stand point that is argued against in your article is actually derived from the Word of God. This has been a point of inner controversy to me as well?? Why would a loving God send His Son to be beaten to a pulp in order to satisfy justice for the sins of humanity, if the sinner will just believe in Jesus? That would be like punishing the good kid in the class in front of everyone to justify the rest of the bad kids who acted up in class and then telling them, if they only believe that the good kid got punished for their misbehavior; their deeds would be forgiven?
Believe me when I tell you how I have struggled with this as a Christian..
For those following along at home, Isaiah 10:53 says:
But the LORD was pleased
To crush Him, putting Him to grief;
If He would render Himself as a guilt offering
We can easily read this as saying that God was pleased to allow these things to happen because through the work of the cross, his children (us) would be returned to him. Continue reading “Why the Cross Pleased God”
Wounds
A Prayer for Easter Morning
Father God, We come to you today as a family of the broken, the humbled, the weak and the victorious. We have walked down dark paths and through dark places. We have been wounded, we have been lost and we have been foolish. Yet no matter how hopeless or empty our spirit’s dwelling places have been, Easter morning is always there speaking victory to us. … Continue reading A Prayer for Easter Morning
Beautiful and Terrible Things
This seems appropriate for the time when death has just passed and resurrection has yet to happen . . . Continue reading Beautiful and Terrible Things
Did God Really Demand the Death of His Son as a Sacrifice for Sin?
As you are perhaps aware, today is Good Friday, and as I said yesterday, I’m more interested in looking to Easter Sunday than in thinking too deeply about the crucifixion this year. But I thought this would be a good time to share my take on the why’s of the cross. Why did Jesus die? Why did that result in the forgiveness of sins? etc. . .
One of the more poignant arguments against Christianity is that the Christian God demanded that his son be offered up as a human blood sacrifice in order for justice to be satisfied and forgiveness offered. In this view the Christian God is an angry, blood thirsty tyrant who must be sated before he becomes a loving father. Christians will of course argue that people who view the crucifixion this way are missing the point, don’t understand God’s righteous anger, are minimizing the need for justice, etc. However, I think that the real truth is that many Christians misunderstand the reasons for the crucifixion and our critics are simply making some pretty obvious observations about our own teachings regarding the propitiation of sins and the death of Jesus. I know that I’m treading on some pretty hallowed theological ground here, but if you’ll stick with me, I think you may find that my upside down world understanding of this issue is a better fit with reality than what many of us have been taught.
Let’s start our discussion with the issue of blood sacrifice itself. The first thing to be noted is that blood sacrifice is not something which originated with the Hebrew God. It had been practiced for millennia prior and has occurred all over the world. It is a human invention. In his excellent book Ideas That Changed the World, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto offers the anthropological explanation for the pervasiveness of the practice of blood or animal sacrifice:
Gifts are a common way of establishing reciprocity and cementing relationships between individuals and human groups; by extension, a gift should also work to bind gods and spirits to the human givers, connecting deities to the profane world and alerting them to its needs and concerns. . . During the last 10 millennia . . . sacrifice has acquired a great many meanings: as penance for sin; as thanksgiving; as homage to divinity; as a contribution to the well-being of the Universe; or as a sacrilized gift, considered as an act of worship or of imitation of God.
One of the things which we need to understand about God as revealed in scriptures is that over and over again, God does not wait for us to become acceptable or advanced enough to establish a relationship with him. Instead, he reaches out to meet us where we are and bit by bit draws us forward towards him and away from our previous ideas and ways of doing things. The rituals of animal sacrifices did not reflect a need or demand of God. Instead, by instituting rituals of animal sacrifice God is co-opting a human institution and way of doing things and directing it back to himself with the ultimate result that the human institution drops away while the devotion to God remains. Continue reading “Did God Really Demand the Death of His Son as a Sacrifice for Sin?”
Raising Moral Kids Pt. 3
Let’s say that you take your young child to a friend’s house and while she is there, she breaks a toy. Would you prefer that she:
A. Bring you the toy, ask for help fixing it and apologize for breaking the toy.
Or
B. Hide the toy so no one will know that she broke it?
Let me give you a minute to think about this one . . . . OK, I’m psychic so I already know that your answer is A. You’d rather have a kid who admits her error, apologizes, tries to correct her error and will ask for help to do so. You’d also rather have a kid who didn’t lie to you, didn’t hide from you and was able to admit when she is wrong. Am I right? Of course I’m right.
It just so happens that we know what the difference is between a kid who hides a toy they broke and one who takes responsibility for it:
Parents rated their toddlers’ tendencies to experience shame and guilt at home. The toddlers received a rag doll, and the leg fell off while they were playing with it alone. The shame-prone toddlers avoided the researcher and did not volunteer that they broke the doll. The guilt-prone toddlers were more likely to fix the doll, approach the experimenter, and explain what happened. The ashamed toddlers were avoiders; the guilty toddlers were amenders. ~ Raising a Moral Child, NYT
The difference between a kid who admits error and a kid who avoids it is the difference between guilt and shame. While sometimes you will hear people talking about healthy shame, the truth is that shame is often really toxic. We will do just about anything to avoid it. Including hiding our errors, lying, engaging in destructive self-soothing behaviors, mistreating others and ourselves. People will go to their graves never knowing a moment of real peace or love rather than facing their shame.
Clearly shame is part of the normal repertoire of human emotions, but way more often than not, we experience it in really unhealthy ways. Too many parents encourage shame in their kids as a way to control them. Even parents who know better will unknowingly create shame in their children. According to current thinking, based on pretty much every human’s experience, shame is what you get when a caregiver uses anger, fear, ridicule or contempt in an attempt to control their child’s behavior. Continue reading “Raising Moral Kids Pt. 3”
The Upside Down World 