[The natural philosophers] become lost in their own ideas and claim to be wise, attributing to themselves things which belong to you. In an utterly perverse blindness they want to attribute to you qualities which are their own, ascribing mendacity to you who are the truth, and changing the glory of the incorrupt God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man.

—Augustine, Confessions, 5.3.5

Augustine here confirms the old adage that, “In the beginning God created man and ever since man has been attempting to return the favor.” I am thinking now of the strand of liberal theology that denies and distorts, often in perverse ways, NT atonement theology. A typical version of liberal theology that rejects the notion of Christ’s substitutionary atonement goes something like this: “We reject the notion of a bloodthirsty, vengeful God seeking ultimate satisfaction by torturing and killing his son.”

Indeed. I reject this kind of god and am likewise repulsed by this concept. Any sane person would be too.

There was a day when I was younger when I drank this silly kool-aid. Fortunately, however, God caused the scales to fall from my eyes so that I could see clearly the cross for what it is (at least as clearly as I am humanly able). For that kind of thinking is not remotely close to the biblical teaching of Christ’s atonement.

Rather, it seems to me that what we have here is a human attempt, whether conscious or not, to make God into our own warped image because sadly there are people who would take pleasure in torturing and murdering an innocent person. Moreover, this kind of screwball theology ignores the indissoluble nature of the Trinity, God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It implies that Jesus and God are separate in a way that denies the true nature of the Trinity.

If we begin to understand the nature of substitutionary atonement, however, we begin to see what a wondrous and awesome God we do have. He is not some doting old fella who cares little about human sin and forgives willy-nilly. Neither is he some vengeful, bloodthirsty god who derives great pleasure in punishing and torturing people.

Instead, the biblical teaching about the atonement is pretty straightforward. God is a holy God, a God of both justice and love (two complementary dimensions of his holy character). God takes human sin very seriously because he created us to have a relationship with him and sin perforce causes separation between humans and God and causes us to be alienated from him. Because of the Fall, we are not able to right this wrong on our own so that we can enjoy the kind of relationship with God we were created to have.

So God entered our history, took on our flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, and bore the punishment for our sins himself on the cross so that our exile and alienation from him would be abolished forever. In Christ we see God himself bearing his just punishment for our sins so that his holy justice might be fulfilled, for sin is terribly grievous and offensive to God and separates us from him. The cross makes it possible for us to approach God in faith so that we can once again enjoy a relationship with him, a relationship that our sin destroyed. It is God’s free gift to us and it is offered to everyone.

When we finally begin to understand what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot help but be thankful. Yes, the cross is a symbol of torture and shame. But it is also a symbol of God’s holy love for us and his justice. It reminds us that God did the impossible for us because he loves us passionately and wants us to live with him now and forever. Jesus didn’t go to the cross to die a meaningless death. He went to the cross to give us our only hope and chance to live with God forever. But unless we understand and believe that Jesus was God-man, the cross will never ever make sense.

As Augustine points out above, at least implicitly, whenever we deny or diminish the seriousness of human sin, or have a deficient or incorrect understanding of God’s holy love and wrath, or think of Jesus as anything other than the very Incarnation of God, our theology of the cross will surely be deficient and likely be a turn-off (and rightly so).

But when we understand all of the above, suddenly the cross becomes the very symbol of God’s unfathomable love for us. When I was a boy, whenever I read the Passion narratives, I used to root for Jesus and hope he would come down off the cross as his enemies mocked him to do. I don’t hope for that any more. Had he come down off the cross, we would all be toast and we really would have a vengeful and unloving god.

Yes, it is awful to watch our Lord suffer and die a terrible death on the cross. But when we realize that we are watching the Father’s great love for us being poured out on the cross for our sake and for love’s sake, it makes the spectacle a bit easier to bear. It also makes us want to fall on our knees in wonder, love, humility, and praise as we thank God for being the loving God he is, a God who desires that his creatures live with him now and forever.

Think on these things as you observe a Holy Lent this season.