I, truly, admit that I'm sorry but this opening salvo does not ring true for me. YHWH, Yashuah ha'Machiah and Ruah are one
Elohim, one God! If YHWH were angry with Yashuah, He would be angry with Himself and Ruah as well. Our Elohim, being perfect, cannot sin and hating our Elohim, there is no greater sin.
Some helpful study is:
Hatred is a feeling that can be both Godly and sinful depending on what it is that is causing us to hate. The Bible speaks of loving God and hating evil (Psalm 97:10) and hating the assembly of evildoers (Psalm 26:5) and hating falsehood (Psalm 119:116). (continue this 30 verse study at
30 Top Bible Verses About Hate - Top Scriptures)
This is the other part of my blog post which was originally a post on this forum a year or so ago. It may be helpful in explaining the relationship among the Persons of the Trinity.
Since writing on the subject of Penal Substitution a few months ago, I have been accused on a Christian discussion forum of “Destroying the Doctrine of the Trinity” (as if I could!) by suggesting that Christ was the recipient of the Father’s wrath and more especially by suggesting that the Son was ‘forsaken’ by the Father. There have been amazing textual gymnastics to make
Mark 15:34 say the opposite of what it so plainly does. In the early Church, the reality that there is one God in three Persons (not ‘members’) was safeguarded by speaking of a single divine ‘substance’ shared by Father, Son and Spirit. This substance is simply what God is, the thing that makes Father, Son and Spirit divine without implying three deities.
The Lord Jesus tells us that He and His father
mutually indwell each other (
John 14:11; c.f. also
John 10:38; 14:10, 20). The technical term for this is
perichoresis. This implies both union and distinction between Father and Son. One of the many problems with polytheism is the idea that different deities may make different demands of people and compete with one another as we see in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Within the Trinity this is avoided, not because the Persons fortuitously happen to agree on most things, but because they must agree, for they are one God. The idea therefore that on the cross the Father inflicts a punishment upon the Son that He is unwilling to bear, or that the Son draws from the Father a forgiveness that He is unwilling to bestow is a non-starter.
But there is also a
distinction between the Persons. Without it, it would be ridiculous to talk of a distinct Father, Son and Spirit at all, and it would be impossible for them to relate to each other as separate Persons as the Scripture teaches they do. But if Son, Father and Spirit are all fully Divine and equal in their possession of all the Divine attributes (e.g. holiness, wisdom, truth etc.), what distinguishes them? The answer is their asymmetric in their relationship with each other. The Father is in a relationship of Fatherhood to the Son and the Son is in a relationship of Sonship to the Father. The Son is everything the Father is, save that He is not the Father, the Spirit is not the Son and so forth.
It must surely be agreed that God’s actions reflect His nature. He does what is holy because He is holy; what is good because He is good. Therefore God’s nature will be reflected in the actions of each Person of the Trinity and both unity and distinction between the Persons will be reflected in what God does.
So the actions of the Persons reflect their unity. In
John 14:10-11, the Lord Jesus teaches that His works are at the same time His Father’s works and this is grounded in the
Perichoretic Union. In
John 5:19, He testifies that
‘Whatever He [the Father]
does, the Son also does in like manner.’ The fundamental unity in their actions mirrors the fundamental union of their Persons.
On the other hand, the actions of the Persons reflect their distinctions. The Bible teaches that the Father sent the Son, and that the Son willingly obeyed the Father (
John 10:15-18;
Philippians 2:5-9). Father and Son send the Spirit, but the Spirit does not send the Father. The work of the Trinity in salvation is outlined in
Ephesians 1:3-14. The Three work in perfect harmony to accomplish their single goal, but their roles are quite different.
In order to represent this unity and distinction between the Persons, Augustine taught that the Father’s actions are
not without the Son and the Son’s actions not without the Father. That seems to work rather well. Augustine affirmed that while the Persons of the Trinity do not perform the same action in the same way, nevertheless they do not act independently of one another– their respective contributions to any given activity are
inseparable.
So it is not meaningless to say that God the Son propitiated God the Father. The same Person is not the subject and object of the verb. Nor does the fact that the Father exacts a punishment borne by the Son mean that they are divided or act independently. Their relationship is asymmetric, but they are mutually and inseparably engaged upon two aspects of the same action with one purpose– the salvation of guilty sinners while satisfying the justice of the Triune God.
I now want to look at the Lord Jesus being
‘forsaken’ on the cross. First of all I want to repeat what I said above. We must never imagine that God the father imposed upon the Son any burden that He was unwilling to bear. On the contrary, He declares,
“I delight to do Your will, O My God….” (Psalm 40:8;
Hebrews 10:7; c.f.
John 4:34; 6:38). Nor should we imagine that on the cross, the Son extracted from the Father a mercy that He was unwilling to give (
John 3:16;
Romans 5:8). On the contrary, on the cross,
‘Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed’ (Psalm 85:10).
[continued]
