Featured Romans 3:21-26 doesn't support penal substitution

"I still think that our main worry as people should be pleasing God and not offending him and that is sufficient motivation."

I think the motivation discussion is a bit separate. My first question is what IS sin? I want to know the correct biblical definition. If it fits in our modern category of "therapeutic," well, then so be it. The Bible says what the Bible says.

My argument is simply that sin is a violation of God's created order, and therefore necessarily is destructive within the act itself. See attached chart on natural law morality vs divine command theory.

"I just think it's a weak approach to base coming to God on the fact that it is better for your life."

Depends on what you mean by "better for your life". You can't NOT seek what is better for your life. Every action you take is in pursuit of your own happiness. You can't NOT seek your own happiness. The goal is to align your pursuit of happiness with what will objectively make you happier. Only following God will ultimately make you happy, both in this life and the next. We are designed to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. And that pursuit, Jesus promises, is the cruciform life. As Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

It is penal substitution that leads to the prosperity gospel. "Jesus suffered in my place so I won't have to suffer." That is not Jesus. Jesus says we are to take up our cross and follow him.

 

"you are taking the part of Job's 'comforters' in your analysis. They argued that Job was suffering because of his sin."

No. All sin is a type of harm. Not all harm is due to sin. Operations like surgery can do harm without being evil. Discipline can do harm without being evil. Punishment can do harm without being evil. Exercise, struggle, striving can do harm, without being evil.

"Even the apostles thought that sin brought immediate retribution on people."

I am not arguing that "sin brings immediate retribution to people." The self-destructiveness of sin, and God's punishments of sin, are many times two different things. Although the wrath of God at its worst is when God gives sinners over to their own self destruction. I don’t want to get too graphic here, but I think what lies behind the belief that God’s wrath is worse than human sin is, again, a failure to take sin seriously. It’s the belief that sin, by itself, is insufficiently destructive and miserable. God needs to punish in order that sin really result in the kind of destruction and misery it should. But God does not rape and sexually abuse people for His own pleasure like humans do. God does not sadistically torture people, like humans do. God does not sanction cannibalism, like humans do. If you are still not convinced, look up the case of the Black Dahlia murder and read about the horrible crime committed. Read about the crimes of the Golden State Killer, and his string of rapes and murders. Look up a summary of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom and read about the depravity described there. Human sin is worse than the wrath of God. God’s wrath is just and merciful and good because God is just and merciful and good. God’s wrath is not evil. Human sin is evil.

And the self-destructiveness of sin is often not felt immediately. But that is a subjective analysis. We are doing an objective analysis, and the objective analysis is that sin is destruction. It is a violation of God's created order. When we rebel against God, we rebel against our own design.

Of course God has wrath, but the self-destructiveness of sin is independent from and prior to God's wrath, and humans would need to be saved from sin regardless of God's wrath. So any proper atonement theology must deal with the central problem that humans face.

 

"I guess my first question would be that if Edwards and Piper say that is it still true?"

Piper's entire ministry is called "Desiring God" and based on the idea of Christian Hedonism, that we are created to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. That we are to find all our happiness in Him, because that is where all true happiness is found.

The problem with Piper is that I don't think he consistently follows that theology regarding the negative (as I seek to do). If God is our true source of happiness, then to rebel against God is to rebel against our own happiness. Now, the question of "why don't people in rebellion against God all seem to be unhappy?" is a fair one, but the easy answer is simply: time.

"If you live in a time period of extended peace and no persecution, where the wisdom principles of Proverbs can operate, then yes, Christians tend to prosper and even get rich."

But I am not arguing that "prospering and getting rich" equals happiness. Happiness comes from purpose. The purpose of the Christian is the cruciform life. The cruciform life, participating with Christ in his crucifixion, is conceptually completely contrary to the idea of "substitution." A substitute does not say "take up your cross and follow me."

So, conversely, the nature of evil and unhappiness is ultimately purposelessness—that which is absent or against the purpose for which a thing has been created. Evil is not suffering, for people will voluntarily and even joyfully undergo all sorts of suffering if there is a good enough purpose to suffer it. Many of us, deep down, long to strive, struggle, and even suffer for a purpose we are certain is good. “Heroism” could be defined as “suffering plus noble purpose”. It is likely that certain types of suffering are even part of paradise: the suffering of a workout, the suffering of problem solving, the suffering of creating art, the suffering of competition in a game and losing the competition; all of those brands of suffering are not evil. Evil is when there is a destruction of our God-given purpose.

We see this in the Bible’s two great treatises on suffering: Job and Ecclesiastes. These two books attack the problem of suffering from opposite angles. Job is the suffering of a righteous man who loses everything. Ecclesiastes is the suffering of a wicked man who gains everything. But though they have opposite approaches, the essence of both of their suffering is the same: Purposelessness. Meaninglessness. Job says “I could endure all the pain and loss in the world if I just understood why God was doing this—if it didn’t seem so meaningless.” Solomon says “Vanity of vanities! All the pleasure in the world didn’t bring me happiness because it all seems meaningless.” The heart of goodness is purpose, and the heart of evil is that which is contrary to purpose.

"I think natural law is in operation and to me, it makes sense that it would be if our understanding about God is in any way true. But it is insufficient by itself without God's revealed will."

Careful not to confuse "what is good" with "how I know something is good." The natural law exists. But without God we may not know, or be able to know, essential facts about how it operates. We may not be motivated to live according to the natural law without God's rewards and punishments, but again, the question of motive is secondary to what is.

 

That only "takes God out of the equation" if you deny God as creator, which I don't. Do you?

To deny that "sin is intrinsically destructive" is to deny that God is Creator. It is a flat denial of Genesis 1.

 

There is no distinction. Following the natural law is always what is best for you. You can’t do what is best for yourself without following the natural law. The first rule of the natural law is to love God and obey Him, for that is what we are designed to do. And you can’t NOT seek your own happiness. John Piper himself makes this clear in the first pages of Desiring God.

 

Great! I think we are getting close to the same page. So, given the self-destructiveness of sin, what is God to do? The self-destructiveness of sin puts God in a Divine Dilemma, which goes as follows:

The Divine Dilemma is not, as penalty substitution would have it, that God is caught between His desire to save humanity and His promise to punish humanity. The Divine Dilemma is rather along the following lines: Given the self-destructiveness of sin, it seems that humanity is damned regardless of whether God acts in blessing or in wrath. Here is why I summarize things this way:

If God acts in wrath to destroy sin, then He will destroy humanity also, for all humanity is infected with sin. However, if God acts in blessing to restore sinful humanity, humanity will continually pervert His blessing through sin to their own increased torment. Imagine you are a parent of a teenage son who has a serious drug addiction. Every good that you do for him is used as a way to further the drug habit that is destroying him. If you give him time away from the house, if you give him an allowance, if you give him time alone, if you let him take the car out, all will be taken advantage of to obtain drugs. How do you be good to someone who only uses the good you do for them for their own harm? That is what God is up against. Whether God acts in wrath or blessing, humanity is destroyed either way.

God faces a similar dilemma regarding Israel. God has promised to bless all nations through Israel (Gen 12:3), but Israel is an exceedingly wicked nation, just as wicked as all the other nations. So how is God going to remain true to His promise to bless all nations through Israel, thus proving Himself just, yet not let the world be polluted by Israel’s sin? If God acts in wrath to destroy Israel, then he will fail to save the world through them, He will fail to be a just God who keeps his promises, and the rest of the nations will see God as incompetent (Exodus 32). But if God continually blesses sinful Israel, then Israel will pollute the nations of the world with their sin. So what is God to do?

What God could do is only bless those who are righteous, those who are uninfected by sin and who will not pervert the blessing and further sin’s destruction, and then only pour out wrath on sinners. That seems like what our basic conception of justice would have Him do: bless the righteous and condemn the wicked. But there are two problems with this. One: there is no one righteous. Not even one (Romans 3). Second: a perfectly righteous person does not need the blessing by which sin will be undone, because the person has no sin in the first place. So, only a righteous person can be given such a blessing of restoration, but only those destroyed by sin actually need it. The only answer, then, is that the blessing to restore the world goes to a perfectly righteous person who will undergo all of the destruction sinners have wrought upon themselves. And this is just what God sets in motion.

First, to destroy sin once and for all, God exiles humanity from the Tree of Life and consigns them to physical death whereby sin will be extinguished. That is the purpose of physical death; it is the means by which God destroys our sin. Physical death is how God cuts us off from the creation that we are continually perverting by our sin. It is like the parent that ceases to give allowance to the son that continually uses it to buy drugs. The Bible goes as far as to say that “He who has died is free from sin (Romans 6:7).” In order to be free from sin, we have to die. Physical death is the process by which sin is “condemned in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). This is why, even after becoming Christians, we still commit sins until the day of our death. It is the death of our sinful flesh that will finally end our sin.

Second, to restore us from sin and death, God gives humanity the promise and blessing of restoration, which He calls His covenant. This promise can only be fulfilled and blessing only be fully received by a perfectly righteous person, and so God Himself becomes the righteous person in Jesus Christ. Only those who have suffered sin’s destruction need to be restored, so Jesus undergoes our death with us. In sum, God institutes a death and resurrection process to destroy our sin and remake us in perfection, and He Himself undergoes this process with us in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus, in Christ our sin dies and we are remade, when we participate in his death through confession, and participate in his resurrection through repentance, and when we undergo physical death and resurrection at the end of our lives.

 

"The first is, who says that a given action is sin?"

God does. And he has established good and evil in the created order. "And God SAW that it was good." The word good there, "tov," is the same used for "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil."

"what do you think is the sin most frequently and most virulently condemned in Scripture? I haven't counted, but I am pretty certain that it is idolatry."

Correct. Idolatry is replacing God with that which is not God within the human heart. It is a disordered (destructive) act. God is not replaceable. To replace God with that which is not God is to destroy oneself. It is to, as Jeremiah 2:13 says "forsake the fountain of living waters" for "broken cisterns that can hold no water." What happens when someone does that? They die. As a result of the act itself.

As far as the Prime Minister, it is just a matter of time. God cannot be replaced by Ganesha.

"My point is that whether something is sinful is not up for a vote. It is God who decides what is sinful and what isn't, and whether a certain sin is 'self-destructive' or not, what He says goes."

There are no sins that are not self-destructive. That is impossible. God is not replaceable. You are correct that "whether something is sinful is not up for a vote. It is God who decides what is sinful and what isn't."

"My second observation is that God is never in a dilemma."

Yes on anthropomorphism. Using the same dilemma illustration that Athanasius, penal substitution advocates, and the Bible does.