Happy Thursday, friends! This morning’s post will likely be short (no time today!), but will include a link to my weekly video-post, so don’t miss that two-minute opportunity. CLICK HERE.

Essentially, I’m following up on yesterday (“Hit the back of the ball“) and also continuing an ongoing conversation with a friend who constantly struggles with Christianity because faith in God through Jesus is so impossibly resistant to being held to account by logic, reason, argument, and what we have come to understand thus far about science.

QUESTION: Yesterday I wrote that “Jesus came to take care of the distance between (humankind and God), to ‘square us up’ as it were…”

So the question/comment came back like this:

How does “sacrificing yourself to yourself and getting yourself back 3 days later” serve to facilitate restoration of that relationship?

“Jesus is alive and well in heaven as I understand. He is not dead. Sacrifice by definition is to lose or give something up or give something to….”

AMATEUR THEOLOGIAN: My personal credentials as a theologian are simply the fact that I think about God, and about my/our relationship to God. I tend to see things less from a “legal” standpoint and more from an “unstoppable initiative of love” point of view.

Some people interpret atonement as a strictly legal transaction, where God’s “hands” are literally tied when it comes to the fate of the human race. A sacrifice is required by law, these folk argue, and the only sacrifice that could possibly satisfy God is the spilled blood of the perfect Son of God.

In my own, constantly evolving, theology I tend to see God as motivated by the idea of reconciliation and restoration: “I love my creation so much that I’m willing to actually become one of them, and teach them my ways, even though I know it’s going to end in betrayal, rejection, misunderstanding, torture, and brutal execution.”

So now I have the opportunity – because of Jesus, and through Jesus – to respond positively to God’s sacrificial initiative, to accept forgiveness, and to follow the Way of Jesus. I don’t believe that God is somehow “obligated” to accept me because the right blood was spilled. I believe that God has always loved me, and always wanted a restored relationship, but that it’s only because of Jesus that I have found my way home.

No, I haven’t cleared it all up; I may even have muddied the waters. But this is a little bit of what I believe, and what makes sense to me – DEREK 

Don’t miss today’s video-post! CLICK HERE