Featured Christ being made sin Volume 2

"Christ died for our sins".
"He is the Propitiation for the sins of the World"
"God laid our iniquities on Him"
"Christ bore our sins bodily"
The first thing that I find contradictory is the "propitiation" aspect. I have never heard anyone who rejects penal substitution accept the idea of propitiation. I believe this is because the idea is that God, not acting as a capricious or vindictive deity, but as part of His holy nature has wrath against sin. Most people against penal substitution object to this with the idea that God is God and therefore free to forgive if he chooses to without any punishment being needed. You don't reject the idea of the necessity of propitiation and I'm glad, but it is confusing.
But if the concept of this wrath is valid then who caused there to be this wrath. It was us who sinned. (Propitiation for the sins of the World). And I don't think I'm making a theological leap to say that these sins or iniquities were laid on Him, as you said.
So what I'm trying to say is that if you are willing to have the atonement involve propitiation, then it must by definition involve the wrath of God and the cause is our iniquities and you have already said yourself that these iniquities were laid on Him by God. Laying our iniquities on Jesus means that they were transferred from us to Jesus. Now, there was discussion on exactly what this means or how it was done and so on but there was a transfer first to the one being sacrificed.

Now I suppose you could say that in the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament and the case with Jesus that the idea that God got angry with the sacrifice or with Jesus is not the correct way to look at this - well maybe that's true at some level. We have to make sure we do not become irreverent or dare to try to psychoanalyze God but you have to keep in mind that this is the method of our redemption and we have enough scripture to back up the idea that the Father and the Son were in on this plan. And also, I believe there are scriptures that when you put this plan with verses like "The wages of sin is death but the gift of God...." you can easily see an aspect of deserved punishment being averted on our part. And why? Because our sin was transferred to Christ. The connection between our sin - God's wrath - our guilt - God's plan - transference of the guilt to Christ - God's justice as part of His holy nature - the necessity therefore of sin's punishment - Jesus being the propitiation for our sins - this all fits together by scripture, by linear, simple logic and it comes with parallels and symbolism from the Old Testament sacrifices.

Is there anyone else who teaches that the idea of propitiation is valid and that the translations that use the word are OK, and yet says what you say in that "I have totally rejected the theory that God poured out His wrath on Christ instead of us"?

Now I looked this over after I wrote it and it is redundant but I'm going to leave it because it might help by explaining what I'm trying to get at in several different ways. I'm not trying to win an argument because I think you are already on the page of penal substitution but that you don't like the terminology or the theologians who are getting credit for articulating it in modern form.

 

Did God the Father sacrifice, his only begotten Son, as an appeasement unto Himself because of wrath toward the ungodly?

Am not sure I can answer myself but methinks I lean toward the affirmative.

 

Personally as a propitiation for the ungodly, Romans 3:23-26, 1 John 2:2, 1 John 4:10.

 

I'm sorry not to have replied before. It's been a busy weekend.
There is no sin on Christ. He had so sin of His own to pay for, but our sin was laid upon Him and He paid for it in full. 'The chastisement [NIV, ESV 'punishment'] that brought us peace was upon Him,' but by that punishment our sin is expiated, and, as I said, nailed to the cross marked 'Paid in Full.'

 

God's wrath is His righteous anger against sin. Christ died to expiate His justice.
Romans 3:25-26. 'Whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith ......... to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness that He might be just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus.' By doing so, God establishes His Law and makes it honourable (Isaiah 42:21; Romans 3:31).

 

I think that the important thing to understand is that God is angry against sin, not against the animals and certainly not His beloved Son. But the animals in the OT and our Lord in the NT were the sin-bearers. The Lord laid all our sin upon the Lord Jesus and punished our sin in Him (Isaiah 53:5-6). God's wrath was not upon Him but upon the sin that He bore.

 

I like the Eusebius quote, which I haven't seen before.
“In this he shows that Christ, being apart from all sin, will receive the sins of men on himself. And therefore he will suffer the penalty of sinners, and will be pained on their behalf; and not on his own” (Proof of the Gospel, 3.2).
But there are umpteen illustrations of Penal Substitution from the Fathers in the book recommended on the site: Pierced for our Transgressions By Jeffery, Ovey and Sach. This is a wonderfully detailed book that absolutely establishes Penal Substitution.

 

This is a false dichotomy. God is angry at sin; sin is committed by sinners. Therefore God is angry with sinners.

 

This plan of our redemption was a one time thing that Jesus was uniquely qualified to accomplish. If you read a good Bible teacher on the passage where Jesus asks John the Baptist to be baptized and John balks at the idea and then Jesus says it must be done you start getting the idea. In the other thread we all were agreeing, somewhat at least, that the whole Bible is about Jesus and everything being made right so that this could be accomplished.

 

I agree with you in that it must end in an appeasement of wrath or propitiation did not occur. But you have made an error when you say that the pouring out of wrath is never a part of propitiation. It most certainly can be and it was the case historically that the propitiation of God's wrath against us occurred in this case because the wrath was poured out on Jesus.

My dog chews up a document and appeases my wrath by looking cute. But if he ran across the street and attacked the neighbors toddler that would not work. We have offended an infinitely holy God repeatedly and willfully. I realize that comparing God's wrath to ours as an illustration breaks down in the sense that we are explosive and out of control but the use of the term "wrath" when combined with our knowledge of God's wisdom and patience is what scripture chose to use to explain this to us.

 

I think that is the plain meaning. If you are struggling with your pack and I take it then the weight was laid on me. But it was also, by definition, transferred from you to me.