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Texts Claimed to teach Penal Substitution
No. 1: It is argued, "Christ died for our sins" means a penal substitution (KJV: 1 Cor. 15:3). But Scripture also says: "Sons shall not be caused to die for fathers. A man for his own sin shall be caused to die." (Deut. 24:16). And it is repeated in Ezekiel 18: "The sinning soul shall die. A son shall not bear for the inquity(
The Torah takes the form of a legal prohibition against Penal Substitution. So even if someone were to volunteer to take the penalty for another's sin, it would be prohibited by the legal-justice of Torah. No judge required to execute a penalty could accept a volunteer to substitute. Deut. 24:16 and Ezekiel 18:20 forbid the use of a substitute to satisfy penal justice. The Torah is Israel's legal code given by God. We must assume this legal code reflects the character of the Most High. And further there is no separate divine code that coutermands this law for any situation.
How then do we explain "died for our sins"? In current English, it is very difficult to avoid forming a penal substitution theology when faced with these words, because the sense of the word "for" that would allow a correct interpretation has mostly fallen out of use, especially in American English. So one approach is to revive the older usage of the word "for". The word "for" means "because of." Here are some example sentences taken from dictionaries of English:
I'm feeling all the better for my holiday. This sentence in current English might be interpreted to mean the subject is feeling better for an upcoming holiday, but the words "all the better" seem to imply the holiday was past, and is the reason for feeling better. The dictionary assures us that the intended sense was "because of."
"How are you?" "Fine, and all the better for seeing you!" In current English someone will think a person's eyesight has improved for seeing his friend, as akward as it might be. However, the dictionary assures us that the intended sense is that he is better because he has seen his friend.
I couldn't see for the tears in my eyes.
The things you do for love!
He's widely disliked in the company for his arrogance. In this example, arrogance is a specific sin. And disliked is a form of consequence. We may summarize, "He was disliked for arrogance." Semantically, this is parallel to "He died for sin." The only reason that people see something different in "Christ died for our sins" is philosophical and theological preconditioning which blinds the reader to the wider possibilities of the language.
She couldn't talk for coughing.
I didn't say anything for fear of (= because I was frightened of) offending him.
He looks better for having lost weight.
She was the worse for drink.
with fiery eyes sparkling for very wrath
"A summerly day for you," said my host; "You ought to be here in winter. It is impossible then to get out of the doors for the snow and wind. Ugh! dreadful weather!"
I could not see his hands, for the thick gloves he wore, and his face was partially concealed by a red woollen comforter; but his entire appearance and manners tallied with what I had seen of Yorkshire farmerhood.
In the above examples, the dictionaries say the word "for" means "because of" and nothing more. So the correct sense of 1 Cor. 15:3, then is to interpret "for" the same way, "Christ died because of our sins." Our sins caused him to die. This removes the contradiction with the passages legally prohibiting vicarious punishment. And it gives a solution to the contradiction created by the false penal substitution doctrine.
A second approach is that the Greek word translated in English as "for" in the KJV, more literally means "over," i.e. "Christ died over our sins," and then to explain over (ὑπὲρ) to mean "because of," e.g. "They fought the war over oil," which is "because of oil." This approach also reconciles with Deut. 24:16 cited above where the preposition for is the Hebrew word
So, the translations are wrong in view of the common interpretation of "for", since the older sense of "for" is not understood in most English any more. The (forthcoming updated) Good News of Messiah will consequently read, "The Anointed died because of our sins." I had considered using the translation "over", but I have relegated it to the margin upon the advice of my wife, and also since "because of" is harmonious with the Hebrew in Isaiah 53. And we should expect 1 Cor. 15:3 to agree with Isaiah, because Paul's meaning must be 'according to the Scriptures.'
There is yet another nuance. The translation could read, "Christ died concerning our sin," and he did. His death was the result of his efforts to get Israel to turn away from its sins. Israel did not want to hear the message that they should repent of their sin, and so in their sin they killed him. Also, we may say that the life he lost in death, was restored in the resurrection, and this life which departed from him when his blood was spilled is the same divine life that cleanses us from our sins. The message then is that freeing man from sin requires divine loss and sacrifice. The loss is caused by the circumstances and by sin. All mankind, and all creation suffers because of sin. But the Most High suffers the most because of sin, in Spirit, and also when he became man. It is legal to suffer as a consequence of attempting to do good for a sinful world. This kind of suffering is not just. It is by nature unjust. And for this reason, the Torah prohibits the suffering of the innocent to pay any legal judicial penalty of the wicked.
GNM: 1 Cor. 15:3
Note: For apologetical reasons, I have moved the reading of the current edition to the margin, and have entered the update in red for the next edition. The meaning of "on account of" in the current edition is intended to have the same meaning as stated in the update. In fact, the current footnote calls attention to the fact that the Greek word does mean "over."
Literally, the Greek says, "over our sins," which means "because of" or "from" them. This sense is also given in the Hebrew text of Isaiah 53 and in the Old Greek version. The collective transgression of Israel in rejecting the Messiah led to his death. See Isaiah 53:5 below. Our sin was the cause of his death. That is the sense taught in the source text.
The translation is based on the Greek word ὑπὲρ, which literally means "over." This is Strong's No. Greek 5228, which says, "a primary peposition; "over." Thayer's Lexicon, "1. over." LSJ Lexicon, "I. of Place, over." Since the text is based on Isaiah 53:5, the Hebrew must be determinative in interpreting the text. Isa. 53:5 uses the word "from." So "over our sins" means "from" or "because of" them. The Septuagint (Old Greek) supplies the word διά in Isa. 53:5. This means "through," or "because of" our transgressions.
The sense in which "over" is meant is contained in the expression "over the matter of," or "concerning something." The BDAG Lexicon suppreses the definition "over" and tries to force the word to mean to the advantage of something "in behalf of," "for the sake of," but only in definition No. 2 does it supppy a translation that would be acceptable, "because of." The Lexicon tries to read the modern opinion into the text, "in order to atone for (the) sins." "Atone" is a modern word that does not mean what the underlying Hebrew means.
Paul carefully states that "over our sins" is according to the Scripture. The only place in Scripture that one can go for a synonymous statement is Isaiah 53, where it says "from our transgressions," "from our iniquities." The interpretation of 1 Cor. 15:3, therefore, must be the same as the interpretation of Isa. 53:5. If it is any different then Paul lied when he said according to the Scriptures. But as we shall see they now mistranslate this Isaiah text in contemporary English for the sake of their false doctrine.
Before moving on to the Isaiah text, I should point out that No. 1 here "died for our sins" or more shortly quoted "died for sin" is the most often repeated theological phrase in Christian circles to explain the death of Messiah in Western Christianity. Even if something could in the past be interpreted correctly, it is a mistranslation if it cannot communicate in the currently used English. It is also a mistranslation if is a stock phrase surrounded by a heretical theological presuppositional context created by Christian denominations that use "for" to mean payment of penalty by substitution. This shift in the meaning of biblical language to an imposed context that changes its meaning is the work of Satan. It is how he opperates. It is a result of a lack of knowledge about what God's Law teaches. Yeshua and Paul warned us about false doctrines promoting lawlessness by professed followers of Yeshua. Both indicated that in the last days many would claim to know Messiah, but they would be teaching lawlessness.
It is necessary, therefore, to immediately correct anyone who says he "died for sin" whenever they are repeating what they heard, or whenever they mean a substitutionary exchange. And that is so often, that it is nearly every time. I suggest upon hearing this phrase that one reply with, "Messiah died from our sin."
This phrase has been programmed with this meaning so often into Christians as the heart and soul of the gospel. It is necessary to explain that the good news is not that Messiah sacrificed himself to pay a debt to the Father, but that he forgives sin outright for the repentant, and sacrificed himself to show the cost invovled in rescuing man from sin. The cross makes a less visible cost to the Most High much more visible. The cross was necessary to bring the divine cost of our redemption before the eyes of men as the most convincing way to turn man from sin. And the most convincing way is the most loving way. That is why Messiah died in such a public way. God was always bearing the consequences of our sins, even when forgiving them. In Messiah, he makes as clear as possible the love of God, by means of the suffering he is willing to endure from our sin without bringing sin into judgment, giving us a chance to repent, but while doing so, suffering from our sins.
Messiah was lifted up to draw all men to God in sympathy for God's unjust suffering, so that we might see the unjust suffering and repent of our sin. Messiah was not lifted up to make any points about injustice, namely the innocent suffering a wrath penalty for the guilty. That is Satan's reinterpretation of the cross.
God forgives our sins on the basis of his love and our renewed pledge of loyalty to him, and not because he has been paid a judicial penalty. The later is not love. It is a legal perversion of God's law.
When the Calvinist cultists make their case, they quote their misinterpreted phrases from the Scripture over and over again, and ask how it can be explained any other way but their way. This is after they have fixed the result with their commentaries and translations, since most of these were produced under Augustinian influence. Most of the victims of Calvinism, and even those who disagree with them are unable to counter them at such a specific textual level. And this is part of the reason why Calvinists continue to be able to deceive their followers, and to win debates, because they are perceived to be going by "what the Scripture says."
There is a sense in which "for" can be understood, but it is far from the modern mind. He died "for the purpose of our sins," meaning for cleansing them. So I recommend also coming back at this with the words, "He died to purge our sin."
No. 2: "He was wounded for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:5a). The translation is wrong, at least in contemporary American English, and ambiguous in United Kingdom English, with the sense of "for" tilted to the theological context Calvinists have invented for it. The Hebrew says, "He is being made to be wounded from our transgressions." The text agrees with the correction issued in No. 1. The text cites our transgressions as the reason for his death.
Isaiah 53:5
Some versions have corrected the early King James Version mistake in Isaiah 53 by translating "because of":
CSB because of our rebellion...because of our iniquity
CEB because of our rebellions...because of our crimes
CJB because of our crimes...because of our sins
CEV wounded and crushed because of our sins
GNT because of our sins...because of evil
HCSB because of our transgressions...because of our iniquities
LEB because of our transgressions...because of our iniquties
NET because of our rebellious deeds...because of our sins
TLV because of our transgressions...because of our iniquities
Chabad.ORG because of our transgressions
because of our iniquties
JPS because of our transgressions
because of our iniquities
Aramaic Bible in Plain English
because of our sins
because of our evil
Brenton Septuagint Translation
on account of our sins
because of our iniquities
Among the versions, we remarkably find the Christian Standard Bible, The Complete Jewish Bible,, The Holman Christian Standard Bible, The New English Translation, and The Tree of Life Version.
Finally, anyone who knows even beginning Hebrew knows that the Hebrew preposition MIN means "from," i.e. "from our transgressions...from our iniquities," and can be taken to mean a cause "because of." The concept of someone being injured from someone else' sin makes perfect sense. Since from, is the normal sense for the Hebrew preposition
Tradition is the foundation of circular reasoning. Be careful about trying to find penal substitution in this text on the basis of OTHER traditional mistranslations and misinterpretations. Because the other texts you might try to bring to this text will prove to be incorrect also.
No. 3: "He was bruised for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:5b). Same problem as No. 2 above. The translation is wrong. The Hebrew says, "being made to be bruised from our iniquities." Satan has always been trying to suppress or destroy the word of God. Promotion of mistranslations along with misinterpretation is a key method of attack. Christians do not realize that their leadership promotes Scripture only on the one hand, and on the other mistranslates it to say what they want it to say. Modern Scripture burning consists of one part mistranslation, and three parts misinterpretation. The genius of this method is that the sheep do not even know that the truth is being destroyed just effectively as outright burning. Promoters of tradition criticize fringe translations. But their own translations that control the narrative they never question. And anyone who knows enough to question it and put them to the test or to refute them can expect a character assassination just the same as Messiah received from the religion authorities of his day, the scribes and the Pharisees. If his own people crucified him and thought that he was smitten by God, then what is to stop this from happening again to his followers? Christian Pastors and Theologians are as great a danger to the kingdom of God as anyone who openly opposes it.
No. 4: "The punishment of our peace is upon him" (Isaiah 53:5c). Again, the translation is wrong. The Hebrew text should be rendered, "The instruction of our wellness is upon him." I explain this instruction fully elsewhere. Here is a summary. The suffering at the cross by the Messiah is the climax of all the divine suffering going back to the beginning in dealing with our sin, forbearing, bearing, forgiving, cleansing, and patiently suffering its effects, and watching our destruction of the creation. This is the ransom price paid by the Most High to win us back and draw us into repentance. To bring us to wellness costs the Most High an enormous price, and in the Son, that price is expressed in his suffering in human form. Sin is exacting the cost. Sin is the lawless counterparty to the ransom. [2]
No. 5: What about, "The LORD was pleased to crush him" as a guilt offering? That translation is also corrupted. The Scripture really says, "And Yahweh will have been pleased to make his crushing to be the malignancy when his soul makes an offense offering. He will see seed. He will make long his days. And the pleasure of Yahweh in his hand will prosper" (GNM: Isaiah 53:10). See page 423, GNM. The context is that Messiah is suffering from the evil of Israel. He is being crushed by Satan, who incited the rulers against Yeshua. And the people were led to believe that Yeshua was smitten by God's justice through their ruling authorities. Their verdict was that he was guilty unto death. But the preceding context goes to great lengths to make it clear that Israel was mistaken and that justice was miscarried. Messiah was innocent of the charges. Vs. 10 brings it all to a climax when the Most High gives his verdict. The Almighty gives his judgment, overruling the verdict. He is pleased to do this and makes his crushing to be the crime, the malignancy. Did you catch that? YHWH makes his crushing to be the malignancy! He declares the crushing act against Messiah to be the crime, the plague. Then he raises him from the dead because, in YHWH's judgment, justice has miscarried, and he considers Yeshua perfectly righteous in the whole matter. Therefore, he raises him back to life.
So you see, Messiah was declared righteous and in the right. In his Father's eyes, he was not made to be a sinner, nor was his punishment just, but he "declared his crushing the malignancy," the crime, the offense, the disease, the plague. How can this happen? How can a text be so turned around and corrupted by translators? Their theological tradition caused them to stumble. The verb can be translated two ways, and their theology caused them to choose the wrong way. The literal structure is a Piel infinitive construct, "making being crushed him," which may mean "to cause crushing him" or "to make his crushing." One way the pronoun is possessive, and the other way it is the object of the verb. A similar ambiguity occurs in Isaiah 53:11. The text says literally, "in knowing of him," which may be rendered "through his knowing" or "through knowing him." Most versions render it as a possessive, "through his knowing," i.e. knowledge. But it may also mean "through knowing him" taking the pronoun as the object. So we see what most versions did in vs. 11, they should have done in vs. 10. They should have taken the pronoun in the infinitive construct as a possessive, "to make his crushing" and not the object of the verb. The precedent for doing this correctly is right there in vs. 11!
So the words "to make his crushing" do not say YHWH does the crushing or is pleased with the crushing. But rather, the text says what YHWH does with his crushing when it occurs at the hands of evil men. He overturns the verdict and declares the act of destroying Messiah the malignancy. He reverses the verdict, declaring the injustice, which the people thought was justice, to be the wrong itself, the evil plague. He is pleased to overturn their verdict against Messiah, and to make their action against his Son to be the crime, the disease which afflicts Israel. The Father was not pleased to take out his wrath on his Son. He was pleased to make the evil wrath of Satan against his Son to be the disease. See the notes in GNM for further details. The text describes what YHWH is pleased to do with the evil situation and how he planned to turn the tables with his resurrection. Please let the Spirit do a work in your heart today, and remove the doctrine of Mystery Babylon.
Why does it say, "he put him to grief" in the versions? This is again a mistranslation, literally inserting the lawless theology into the translation. I explain it in the GNM notes. The mistranslation is exposed by the Old Greek (LXX, Septuagint) at this point. It simply reads τῆς πληγῆς, "the plague," or "the malignancy" as I have put it. And the words are properly the object of the previous clause: "he makes his crushing the malignancy."
At this point, my beloved, you should realize that, in general, the translation of Isaiah 53 is unsound in nearly every version, and in nearly every verse that counts. And all the more, I encourage you to take advantage of learning Hebrew, the original tongue of all the earth so you may know the truth, and may come out of Babylon.
No. 5.5: I have considered this so important, that I have gone ahead and made the interlinear version of Isaiah 53:10 using the conventions for the interlinear work:
Isaiah 53:10
Here are some translation notes. First the PIEL is a PIEL declarative, "declaring his being crushed." If for the causative nuance of the PIEL we use the word "making" or "causing," then it is "making his being crushed," or "causing his being crushed [to be] the sickness." The Father is delighted to overturn their verdict against his son by raising him from the dead.
Second, "will have delighted," being a perfect in prophesy is taken to be a future perfect.
Third, the sickness is the same as the bruising of the heel in Genesis 3:15.
Fourth, notice that the word "delight" is repeated after the verb at the end of the verse. This parallelism helps us to interpret "will have delighted" properly. Yahweh's delight is shown by raising him from the dead. And in fact, Yeshua is the Delight of YHWH. He is his only kindred Son in whom he is well pleased. So the Delight (Messiah) of YHWH will prosper in YHWH's hand. Messiah is the right hand of YHWH. He is YHWH at the right hand of YHWH.
Fifth, Messiah's crushing was declared unjust by a divine act, the act of raising Messiah from the dead.
Sixth, "his soul makes an offense offering." This is why Yeshua allowed himself to be attacked this way by evil. In the offense offering the sin of the sinner is confessed onto the offering. The death of the offering signifies the cost exacted by the sin. The blood of the offering significes the cost of the purging necessary to remove the sin from the sinner. So the offering is "bearing" the sin. The offfering is suffering from the sin. The offering represents God and any other innocent party harmed by the sin.
Seventh, "He sees seed" or "He will see seed" if we decipher the transformer, the three asterisks, and "he will prosper." The promise here is that if Messiah be lifted up then he will draw many to himself, and many will be converted from their sin and come to him to be purged from their sin. Thus he will make many righteous.
So and evil act makes it possible for Messiah to make an offense offering, and become the instruction our our peace.
Eighth. The interlinear translation "declaring-his-₪ being-crushed" follows the exact standardized rules I use for the PIEL translation and the infinitive construct. I will explain. If the infinitive is prefixed with a lamed "to," then I use the English infinitive, but if it is not prefixed with a lamed, then I use the English participle (a word with -ing). This is because without the lamed, the infinitive is working as a noun. With a lamed prefixed, it would read "to declare his being crushed." Also the transformer ₪ means that "his-₪ being-crushed" unpacks as "being-crushed-of-him." The Piel views the action as progressive or iterative, and the word "being" is in it for that followed by the past participle "crushed." Being crushed is a nominalized idea of iterative suffering. It is possible therefore to see a reference to God's wider suffering than just on the cross here.
No. 6: "He became a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). Since it was our sin that killed him, it was our sin that regarded him as accursed. He subjected himself to sin's attack to ransom us from slavery to sin. The GNM translates, "having become a curse over us." [3] A key point is that Isaiah 53 says we regarded him as smitten by God, but the text goes on to say that this is mistaken, because he was innocent. It is to be noted that Paul omits the Torah phrase "of God" in conjunction with the word "accursed." He does not say the Messiah was accursed "of God." It was the serpent that wounded the Messiah in the heel, not God. Gal. 3:13a, GNM, "The Anointed ransomed us from the curse." While ransoming the repentant sinner from among the wicked, Messiah was accursed by them, but this is the cost of dealing with evil. It never sees anything rightly.
Why does Messiah's soul make an offense offering in this case? Isn't that a penal substitution? The suggestion reveals a fundamental theological heresy concerning sacrifice, and its purpose. Sacrifice is not to propitiate the wrath of God. Sacrifice is to show the cost of sin, the cleansing of sin, and the cost of cleansing in terms of life. The offering bears the sin to carry it away. The fundamental meaning of the Hebrew verb mistranslated "to make atonement" is "to make being purged" or "to declare being purged." The offering of Messiah purges both our sins and any judgment against us. Our penalty is not paid. It is wiped off the books by forgiveness, taken to the grave, and left there by the Messiah.
No. 7: "He who knew no sin became sin for us" (1 Cor. 5:21). Corrected translation, GNM: "The one not having known sin, he made a sin offering on our behalf." The word "sin" is used in the Old Greek (LXX) to mean a "sin offering." A sin offering is for purging sin away, for removing it. That is the symbolism. What the sin offering does for ritual impurity, the Messiah does in the spiritual realm. He purges our sin, and as a result, our sin strikes him in the heel. Penal substitutionists will say that sin was legally regarded as Messiah's sin and that his death was the Father punishing the sin in Messiah as a satisfaction of divine wrath. This view is blasphemy. But the sin Messiah bears, my beloved faithful, he bears to carry away, to cleanse away, and to remove from us. We forsake our sins, and he carries them to the grave. The sin offerings were always to be perfect unblemished animals, representing their innocent state. They were called "sin" because they carried the sin confessed onto them. The message of the symbolism is that it takes perfect life to purge away and cleanse sin, and that this operation represents the loss caused by sin and suffering involved in purging it. It is not a legalistic symbolism representing appeasement or propitiation. Rather, it is a practical symbolism of the cleansing operation in the spiritual realm.
In Hebrew the verb "to sin" really means "to miss." As such it has two senses in Hebrew. It can refer to the error itself, or it can refer to the removal of error. The offering is made to be a "miss" when we convert it to a noun. This is the same as saying the offering is made to be a "purgation." The offering is to bear the sin to miss it. The Hebrew word "hattat" is used in this sense in many places in the Torah. But you don't see it in English, because the translators usually translated it by "cleansed" or a synonym. The miss offering causes the sin to be missed. The offering bears the sin away in the symbolism to the grave. It removes our sin as far as the east is from the west. As such, it is an image of forgiveness. "He who knew no miss became a miss for us." Satan took aim at Messiah and struck him in the heel, but he missed, and the false accusations against Messiah were overturned by his resurrection. Our sin, he took to the grave. He purged it from the midst of the judgment. This is legal symbolism of course. What happens in reality is that our fleshly nature is crucified with him when we repent and are forgiven. His Spirit purges us over time from the effects of the sin. But this only happens with our cooperation. We must eat his flesh and drink his blood, which is metaphor for crucifying our sinful self and drinking up his Word, which are his commandments.
It is written, "When there will be a dispute between men, and they will have drawn near to the court of judgment, then the judges will have judged them. And they will have declared to be righteous the righteous, and they will have declared to be wicked the wicked" (Deut. 25:1). "One declaring right the wicked and declaring wicked the righteous are an abomination of Yahweh, both of them" (Proverbs 17:15). These codify legal justice in the Torah. It is not legal to impute guilt to the innocent or innocence to the guilty. The guilty may be forgiven, but they cannot be acquitted. The innocent may suffer, but they cannot be made to suffer a legal penalty.
No. 8: "He is the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:2). But the correct translation is, "He is the cleansing concerning our sins" (GNM). The synonyms of the Greek word ιλασμος are purging, cleansing, wiping away. See the note in GNM for documentation. Another word put into the false translations is "atonement." The symbolism of sacrifice does not teach "atonement for sin," but rather the Hebrew communicates "purging of sin" in the symbolism. The sacrifice dies as the cost, as a ransom, and it carries the sin away or purges it. While the Eastern Orthodox Church has fallen to the teachings of Mystery Babylon in other departments, there is one respect in which they are more righteous than western Christianity. The Eastern Church correctly takes a medical or cleansing view of "atonement" and widely rejects penal substitution, which is the illegitimate child of Anselm and Hodge. I say this to show that the institutional Church is not one regarding the false substitution doctrine, and I would point out that those calling us heretics in the west also call the Eastern Orthodox heretics. The current war we are witnessing is also a civil war, a religious war of Western Christianity, which has rejected all morality, with the Russian Orthodox Church making a last stand for morality.
No. 9. God "will not leave the guilty unpunished." It is assumed that Exodus 34:7 teaches this. For example, see the NASB, NIV, and TLV. But this is a mistranslation, and the KJV should give those who trust these mistranslations a pause: "...and that will by no means clear the guilty" (KJV). First, the text is opposed to penal substitution even in its mistranslated form, because the guilty are left unpunished when someone else is punished in their place. Second, the Hebrew text means that he will not absovle, acquit, or clear the guilty. These words do not mean punish. They mean to find the defendant innocent of the charge. God will not find a guilty person innocent of sin. He will not clear him of doing wrong in the first place. Forgiveness is possible only for those found guilty.
No. 10: "I am crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2:20). Penal Substitution Theory claims this means that the sinner is legally reckoned to be on the cross with Christ in receiving the punishment for sin. Christians have been mentally trained to automatically think this is what the text means. The Good News of Messiah translates as follows: "I have been fastening myself up on the execution timber with the Anointed One, so I no longer live [to self], but the Anointed One is living in me." This is what it means to crucify our sinfulness. We have to confess the sin and stop living for self, and then the sin offering can bear it away to cleanse it from us. This is why the Greek uses the middle reflexive perfect tense, "I have been fastening myself up on the execution timber." Disposing of our sin through the Messiah's cleansing power is a constant activity through our faithfulness.
Penal Substitution Theory interprets "I no longer live" to mean that the believer is reckoned as legally dead with respect to a penalty. But the phrase is clearly not literal with respect to physical life. So in what sense does Paul mean he does not live? He means his sinful identity. He means the "I" part of himself attached to sin. This is what he is sending to the grave where Messiah can leave it. This is the good news that rescues the faithful from their sin. The other gospel is lawless legalism justifying the guilty and acquitting the sinner. The true good news is the sharpened edge of the sword of the Spirit able to defeat lawlessness and bring forgiveness.
No. 11: "Christ died for us," as men die for the sake of other men in war, "so why is penal substitution objectionable?" In this case, the 1 Thess. 5:10 text says Christ died for us, not "for our sins" as in the mistranslation of 1 Cor. 15:3. The GNM text translates this verse as "who died on behalf of us." The point is that Messiah took risks for us, for Israel, in bringing the divine in the flesh so close to sinful Israel to rescue Israel that it resulted in his death. He came to ransom captive Israel, captive to sin, but our sin killed him. Nobody imagines that a soldier who dies in war is paying a formal judicial penalty in place of someone else who is under the sentence of death. This is not a strawman argument. The question was actually asked by Richard L. Mayhue, Th.D., "THE SCRIPTURAL NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S PENAL SUBSTITUTION" (TMSJ 20/2 (Fall 2009) 139-148).
No. 12: GNM, "But the Almĭghty commends his love to us, because while we being sinners, the Anŏinted died on behalf of us." The explanation here is the same as in No. 11 above. He died "over us" (literally). "On our behalf" does not mean he went to death in our place. Indeed, the faithful still die due to sin. But to go through death was the necessary ransom price to best establish the resurrection of the dead, and Messiah's power to rescue us from death. To teach us this, he went through it for real. He literally died for our advantage. And since the Messiah raises the dead, repentance from sin is not in vain, and he cleanses us from all unrighteousness. And now what was hidden in the prophets is out in the open. And now it is in the open: to whom is given more, more is required.
So a good answer to the question why Messiah submitted to death at the hands of evil men was to show us the resurrection of the dead with the resurrection body. By showing us the resurrection, the argument of Satan that the first death is the end is exposed as a lie. The argument of Satan that we must by all means preserve our life in the face of a threat, and sacrifice our faithfulness in the process is shown to be a lie. The resurrection proves that he who loses his life for the kingdom will recover it in the next.
Messiah's death and resurrection, are therefore, the best form of persuasion that God loves us, and is willing to suffer to save us, and that he has the power to keep his promises. He went throught it to strengthen our resolve and our courage and our holding faithful to him.
No. 13: GNM, "Because the wages of sin is death, but the favorable gift of the Almighty is everlasting life in the Anointed Yeshua our Adonai." The interpretation lurking behind the often quoted usage of this text is this: there is a divinely assigned penalty for sin (the wages), and this wage is paid out by God. It is death, and furthermore, this death penalty legally applies regardless of whether a person is repentant or unrepentant. Also injected into this interpretation is the concept that God cannot withdraw or cancel this penalty under any circumstances.
But it is only necessary to come up with that interpretation by imposing the traditional theological paradigm. The text may be interpreted perfectly naturally as sin itself being the agent that pays out the wages, i.e., "the wages of sin." This is obvious because sin causes death. Choosing to disobey morality laws leads to disease and genetic degradation. Choosing to lie, steal, and cheat leads to hatred, which leads to murder and death. Being a drunkard or eating garbage leads to disease and early death.
The word "wages" (ὀψώνια) refers to the pay a Roman soldier would receive. It would be fairly easy to assume that Paul chose this word because a common consequence of serving in a military is death. In that case, sin would be the military, and the wage would be death in battle. Death is more than the physical termination of life. It is also corruption, mortality, and degrading of the thinking and spirit. Sin results in all of these things.
So to interpret this text, we only need to listen to it: "The wages of sin is death." It does not say "the wages of God is death." But even if it did say that God pays death, the next clause of the verse would appear to overturn this or imply an exception to the rule. What reformed theologians at this point wish to do is define the nature of the exception as based on penal substitution. But the text includes no such definition of the terms "favorable gift." The gift does not have to be what the theology claims. It could just be forgiveness or cancellation of the penalty. Or the gift could also be a gift given to us that reverses the mortality process or the consequences of sin. In fact, both of these suggestions are the actual case. The life of Messiah purges us from sin resulting in life for us.
Under the general paradigm of "original sin", specific biblical judgments against sin are widened and extended in the scope of their application, via clever interpretation, so as to imply or make outright forgiveness of sin an impossibility and thereby require the remedies that false teachers propose. For example, the doctrine of original sin is misnamed to mislead. It does not mean, as one may suppose, that sin originated with Adam. It did. But the doctrine teaches that all of Adam's offspring are guilty of Adam's sin. The proper name of the doctrine is "inherited guilt." It teaches that the culpability of Adam and the judicial sentence against him were transferred to all men.
But in reality, the judicial sentence was only against Adam, and the rest die both as a natural consequence of Adam's sin, and because the corruption caused by Adam's sin corrupts all men, under which condition all men succumb to committing their own sins. Adam's sin does result in our death, but I must note that Scripture nowhere says Adam was under the judgment of eternal death. The judgment on him was only to die the first death.
When Ezekiel 18 speaks of the soul that sins will die, it is speaking of the second death, but when it speaks of the person who repents, it is speaking of the life to come. Because all obviously die the first death. Clearly, the sentence on the unrepentant can be changed to a determination for life if the person repents. What I am saying is that what the reformed theologians (and Augustinian theology in general) are doing is overstating the scope and application of divine judgment in order to propose their own remedy for the problem. So if they are allowed to define the details of what God said, that Scripture doesn't actually say, then obviously the solutions they propose will be the only solution.
So, for example, Augustine invented the doctrines of total depravity and infant depravity, along with inherited guilt. Accordingly, the Catholics supplied water baptism as the ritual that removes original sin. But if total depravity is not true, and infant depravity is not true, then the use of the ritual to solve a problem that does not exist will show that what they claim for the ritual is in fact false.
So obviously, teachers of "original sin" (inherited guilt) are going to read the consequences of Adam's sin and the divine sentence against him into the wages of sin, and into a penalty applied to all men regardless of whether they are good or bad, or repent or don't repent. They are teaching that the guilt is overturned by water baptism for an infant who has done neither good nor bad. And now repentance is entirely dismissed as the basis for fogiveness of any penalty.
In like manner, the proposed solution of penal substitution is based on the assumption that the penalty still stands after a person repents.
There is a logical problem with penal substitution, and it is exposed in asking this question. Is the penalty imposed on the repentant eternal death? Obviously, the penalty imposed on the unrepentant will be the second death, so the question is: "Is the penalty imposed on the repentant in Messiah the second death, eternal death?" So, now penal substition theory must answer yes to this question, because substition is only made for the repentant under this theory. Those who teach it most hold to limited atonement, the L in TULIP. But even if one does not hold to L, it is sufficent to say that when the unrepentant die the second death because of the things they have done that they have neither been forgiven nor have had their penalty paid.
Now to the logical problem. If someone says that only the first death was substitited for by Messiah, then the answer is easy. All the faithful after Messiah have died the first death. So this kind of gesture would be meaningless. And indeed, even if some never die at the end, it would be meaningless for most.
But now we return to the claim that Messiah paid the penalty of eternal death. To this we ask the obvious question. If that is so, then why did he rise from the dead after only three days and three nights? Obviously, Messiah did not suffer an EQUAL penalty to the one he is supposed to be substituted for.
The standard answer to this objection is predictable. They say the value of Messiah's death is equal to eternal death for only a short period of time because of his divine rank. But now the wicked can demand to know why there is favoritism regarding the judgment of their unrepentance and the same judgment leveled against them. Because the situation is that of a rich man who is shown favoritism by a judge in regard to the same sentence given to a poor man. Because of his rank he does not have to suffer as the poor man. The reformed theology teaches that in making substitution, that Messiah did not have to suffer the second death because of his RANK, and that due to his RANK his penalty was less than eternal death.
This kind of justice, of course, is the same justice in the Amorite code of Hammburabi, where the severity of punishment was different if against the king, or man of equal rank, a freeman, a woman, or a slave. But the Torah says, "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour" (Lev. 19:15). So if a noble is allowed to pay a fine and save his life, but a commoner must suffer death for the same crime, then that is favoring the noble. If a commoner is under a death sentence, can a noble offer to pay a fine and get him off? Is a noble paying a fine for a murderer under death sentence fair justice, because the noble's payment is of equal value in satisfying the penalty to the death sentence? Isn't allowing such a procedure a partial forgiveness? And if a partial forgiveness is possible, then why not a complete forgiveness?
Yes, this is the logic problem. But regardless of the logic, the scripture does not teach it.
Denying real forgiveness pulls down the mercy of the Most High. Establising a demand for penalty payment covers up the fact that the losses due to sin cannot be recovered. God is in the position of having a net loss from our sin. Punishement does not restore his loss. Establising punishment as a judicial means of equalization in captical cases disguises the fact that God institituted punishment to limit the spread of evil, and not to get even.
No. 14: Texts like Deut. 27:26, and all other texts calling for the death of, or a curse on the sinner, or that the sinner should be repaid with death to serve justice are held up as irrevocable requirements of justice by PSA (Penal Substitution Advocates). They argue that since the judgements are irrevocable, then penal substitution results as a logical necessity of making sure that the irrevocable punishment still occurs. They forbid forgiveness which outright cancels the punishment.
To refute this line of reasoning, it is only necessary to point out that all these judgments call for the judgment of the sinner, and not the judgement of a substitute. If the statue is irrevocable in respect to the application of punishment, then it is also irrevocable in respect to whom the punishment is applied to: the sinner.
If an exception to the sinner receiving the punishment is made on the basis of substitution, then the statute is no longer an irrevocable absolute. Exception may then also be made for simple forgiveness. The PSA solution requires part of the statute to be revocable. Since the statue does not say whether it is revocable or not, and much less that part of it is, and part of it is not, there is no way to know from the statute itself whether it is completely or partly revocable.
Since it cannot be known, there is no logical proof reasoning from the existence of penal statues for a logical necessity of penal substitution.
PSA require exception to the statutory requirement that the sinner die. But if part of the statute may be excepted, than all of it may be excepted. In Ezkiel 18 it is stated that the soul sinning shall die. Yet this is overturned if the sinner repents. Eternal death is meant by the death sentence, because even the those repenting die the first death. The verdict for the repenting is that he shall surely live.
So, it is evident that the law for death may be excepted through forgiveness if the person repents. Because, if an exception is made one way by PSA, then an exception may be made another way, by forgiveness.
No. 15: It is often inferred from the irrevocable status of a penal statue on a human level that it is irrevocable at the divine level. As pointed out in No. 14., the judgments for life and death are divine judgements in Ezekiel 18. The passage makes zero sense if it is talking about the first life, or the first death, because regardless of the verdict, the unrepentant continue to live this life, and the repentant continue to die the first death. But there is an analogy in western law to a distinction. A President or governor may issue a pardon which a lower judge may not. Therefore, the Most High may forgive sin when human judges are not allowed to do so. Furthermore, when the Most High forgives, the actions of the lower judges are overruled, just like in western law.
No. 16: The fathers have eaten sour graps and the sons teeth are dulled. (Eze. 18:2). Often this observation is true. When the fathers sin, the sin comes back around and punishes the innocent. And when Israel sins as a nation, the innocent were taken into exile along with the guilty. This happened because it was logically imposible to excise the evil from Israel without exiling the whole. However, God compenated for this by favoring the innocent in the exile. And the sinners, he says will be destroyed among the nations. It was actually Israels enemies that exiled Israel. It is simply that Israel lost divine protection as a nation when it sinned. And further, God was angry with those nations that took advantage of it. He was a little angry, but they went too far in their anger.
This observation that the innocent suffer from the sins of the guilty however does not teach that the guilt of the guilty is expunged by the suffering of the innocent. It is not so. But the wicked who were exiled are still to be punished. The only truth of the matter is that the innocent are also harmed. The harm to the innocent does not expunge the judgment against the wicked.
Nevertheless, the people extrapolated the fact that the innocent were suffering for the guilty to a divine judicial principle that the innocent could suffer for the guilty so as to remove the sentence against the guilty. So while there is truth in the proverb, there is no truth in taking it so far as to teach penal substitution by it.
Ezkiel 18 is talking about divine justice, everlasting life, and everlasting death. And the proverb while holding true in the world of consequences does not hold true in the system of God's justice. Likewise, in the world of consequences, the sons die for the sins of the fathers. There is no denying this. So then why did the Most High bring this up? Because this is parallel to life and death and the sour grapes. While in the sinful world were consequences happen to the innocent, in the system of divine justice, the innocent cannot pay the penalty for the guilty. Sons may not suffer for the fathers, and innocent fathers may not suffer for guilty sons.
Sons may not be caused to die for the fathers, and fathers may not be caused to die for the sons. The reason this is restated in Ezekiel 18 is so that we may know that this is a principle of divine justice at the divine level, and not just a directive for human judges.
The reason this is explained in Ezekiel 18 is because the Most High knew that the nations had corrupt systems of justice, and he knew that Satan sought to pervert divine justice, because it is in Satan nature to cause men to blaspheme the good name of God.
No. 17: Isaiah 53:4 states, "But our malignancies he will have carried. And our sorrows he will have been laden with them." Is this a PSA's text (Penal Substitution Advocate's)? The GNM commentary states on page 422, "He is laden with our grief. The negative results of sin land on him also. This is not a divine judicial punishment for sin that he is burdened with. It is rather a human injustice committed against him due to the wickedness of the authorities. The cost is not exacted by divine justice. But, the cost is taken by sin in the face of the Most High seeking to forgive his faithful ones. It is thus a ransom cost, as when men give their lives to deliver their country in the face of evil invaders."
Now it was pointed out to me that this text is cited in Matthew 8:17, where I have translated it, "And he cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill in order that what was spoken through Yeshayahu the prophet will have been fulfilled, saying, 'He took our infirmities and carried away the diseases.'"
This confirms that the text is not being understood in the PSA sense. The image of judicial substitution does not come to mind here, but rather the image of a battlefield doctor going beyond the call of duty. The rest of the verse continues, "And we, we will have considered him being smitten, being struck by the Almighty, and being made to be afflicted." The image here comes of the battlefield doctor in the trenches hazarding the shelling of the enemy as he goes about his healing work, and then a narrative going something like this. Some of the medical officers corps were jealous of his good work, and spread the rumor that he was really an enemy spy. They gave the enemy the coordinates of the field hospital so that a shell killed him. Then they spread the rumor that he was probably a spy and that God had smitten him. The army then believed the story.
So you see, the words "We will have considered him being smitten, being struck by the Almighty, and being made to be afflicted" indicate the opinion of people who have believed a lie. He text does not say it was so, but it says that it was considered so. Isaiah goes on the speak of the innocence of Messiah in the matter. He wasn't guilty of the narrative raised up against him.
Now why did Messiah suffer in this way? Keep in mind that all men suffer in this way also. Everyone has been accused of doing something wrong and punished for it when they did not. Satan is always using lies against us and getting people to mistreat us on the basis of the lies. In the same way Israel is considered as sheep fit for slaughter. Yeshua did this, because he is showing that as God in the flesh, he is willing to suffer from what we suffer from, and as the divine rescuer he is not just an elite generalisimo showing up to lead the troops to a bloody victory and take the credit without staining his uniform.
It wasn't that way, but Yeshua stands in the trenches suffering undignified treatment in every way, even paying the price in the battle with Satan, the price of death. It is this kind of Hero that attracts the love and admiration of all men who are willing to disbelieve the enemy narrative. This is why Messiah submitted to being lifted high. It was in order to draw men to himself, to draw them to repentance, love, and a pledge of faithfulness to him.
Again, the prophecy in the Garden was that Satan would attack the Messiah and wound him, and then in turn his head would be crushed. Therefore, it has always been understood that the divine seed would deliver Israel from Satan, but not without cost in the battle. If Yeshua had not done this, then Satan's lies could gain more traction. He could say that God was unwilling to dirty himself with the sufferings of humans. He could claim that God would not suffer any negative burden for the result of his creation.
But God is love, and so he defeats sin and Satan in the best way. In any case, Satan still charges God with non-involvement, because the Chritian Pharisees teach that God is "without emotion" or "without feeling." By doing so they promote a Gnostic doctrine! And this gnostic doctrine separates the human experience of Messiah from the divine experience. That my friends is heresy! That claim is among the deep things of Satan.
No. 18: At Passover they sing a song, Dayenu, "It is enough for us..." and then following this refrain on each round of the song a redemptive act of the Most High is mentioned. Each redemptive act is an act of God's love toward Israel. Let's consider this in conjunction with the reason why Messiah died. I can think of of some lines, "Da, Da, Dayenu...." It would have been enough for us if the Most High had appeared as an Angel and Man to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It would have been enough if Messiah had appeared to Moses, Joshua, and Manoah. It would be enough for us if Messiah had lived among us. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had taught in our Synagogue. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had healed our sick. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had shown us the correct interpretations of Torah. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had forgiven our sins. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had revealed God in the flesh. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had modeled divine righteousness in a sinful context, even suffering from the insults and slanders of our religious leaders. It would have been enough for us if Messiah had broken the mental fears that Satan holds over the nations and many of our people in the power of death by proving that the dead rise again. He would have been enough for us from him to prove that he is everlating life, and that as such he raises the dead.
It would have been enough if he had carried our sin penalties to the grave and left them there, not justly paying the penalty, but figuratively executing the penalty itself and burying it. It would have been enough if he had symbolized crucifying the fleshly nature for us, and also leaving that in the grave. It would have been enough if he had taken the divorce decree that the Most High handed to Israel for idolatry, and upon Israel's contrite repentance, taken that too with him, nailed to the cross, to the grave. It would have been enough if he had disposed of the decree.
You see, one thing, and one thing only motivates the Most High to sacrifice. It is called love. God's love is a choice. It is his choice based on his righteous nature. He is not a Hellenistic God, a god of Platonic simplicity, a god who cannot bend low and show his love, and feel his love in the most human of ways. He is not the god of paganism, demanding blood to assuage his anger or wrath. God introduced the lesson of sacrifice after the fall, but Satan perverted it and changed the narrative among the nations.
Truly, the blood of Messiah cleanses us from all sin. Truly the blood of Messiah purges us from sin. It is not the physical blood itself, but it is his divine life that was in his fleshly blood that cleanses our souls from sin. Messiah's sacrifice assures us that he is making us being purged from sin. This operation is still ongoing. It is a present tense operation and a future tense operation. The final purging is at the very end.
Indeed, the sin of the whole world will be purged. Whichever souls do not join him on the cross and seek the aid of the Spirit of life in Messiah to free themsleves from the norm of sin, will find out that the Spirit of the Most High will yet purge sin. He will purge them from his kingdom. So it is imperative to cooperate with Messiah. Those who do not will have to be purged a different way.
Yeshua is the rescuer, the purger from sin. He said we must drink his blood and eat his flesh. He was taken literally by the Jews who did not want to confess that he was the one, the Everlasting Life. He is also taken literally by the Gentile Church, which claimed that the Passover cup turned into actual blood. Yeshua, however, explained himself. The flesh profits for nothing. The words I speak to you are Spirit. Therefore, to eat his flesh means to crucify our fleshly nature, and to drink his blood means to allow his Spirit to cleanse us from sin. Because, it is written, he will sprinkle many nations. He will cleanse them from sin. Just as the prophet was told to eat the book, so in the same symbolism we must eat his word. We must eat the Word of the Most High.
No. 19: "But a certain one of them, Qayafa, being high priest that year, said to them, “You have been knowing nothing at all, nor are you taking into account that it is expedient for you that one man will have died on behalf of the people, and that the whole nation will not have perished.” Now this he did not say on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Yҽ̆shua was going to die on behalf of the nation, and not on behalf of the nation only, but that he mighȶ also gather together into one the children of the Almĭghty who had been getting scattered abroad. So from that day on, they planned together that they may kill him." (John 11:49-53, GNM).
Qayafa is speaking out of political expediancy here with respect to the Romans, but he is also caused by the Spirit to say one man should suffer so that the people will be spared. We should note that no one thinks that suffering for someone else's political problems is considered justice that that is deserved.
There are many scenarios where one or a few have suffered on behalf of the many in order to gain a respite for the many. Spock would say, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." This of course works best in a world where the few know that their sacrifices will not be unrewarded. Yeshua knew he would rise from the dead on the third day.
What Qayafa does not mention is that the Scripture says that Messiah's blood will sprinkle many nations. The sprinkling of blood was for ritual cleansing. The picture here is that the divine life in Messiah's blood will cleanse the house of Judah and the house of Israel from their sins. This is explained in John 6. The other nation that John speaks of is the house of Israel scattered among the nations. Indeed, he means the house of Israel so intermarried with the nations that the difference cannot be told between the nations and the children of the Almighty scattered abroad. His blood will cleanse and purge from sin all who repent and pledge faithfulness to him.
Yeshua is dying to make it plain that purging of sin and cleansing from sin comes from the God-man, God in the flesh. The cleansing is coming via the Spirit of Messiah, that died, and was restored. This is why Messiah is God and man united, and not two separate natures. God is suffering the ultimate cost of our cleansing.
The Most High judged it best to become a man. That is he judged it the most loving thing, and to provide divine deliverance through himself as the man-god. The Hellenistic theology of the Pharisees could not bring itself to accept that God could bring himself down to the level of a man, or to sum up the divine life of God in Yeshua, through which he would deliver Israel from sin. The blood of Yeshua represents the instrument of our deliverance. Yet is not the phsyical blood that counts, but what it means. It is the Spirit of Life in Messiah that counts as he said in John 6 and also mentioned in Romans 8:1-4.
The Pharisees could not believe that God would become a man and channel his divine life as a man to Israel and the nations. Their Hellenistic theology prevented it. God was too high to become a man. We have a similar problem today with Calvinists. Their god is too transcendent to exist in time or to limit his perspective in time. Their god must decree in a timeless eternity all who are saved and lost, and indeed everthing else with absolute determinism. The Calvinist god has no emotions or feelings. So it logically follows that the Calvinist god cannot truly enter into time and have emotions, or truly suffer in time. The Calvinist god is a gnostic god, a platonic ideal. This gnostic God is detachted from space and time. So logically there exists a man god divide between the the man and the god for the Calvinist.
The incarnation of the Most High as the son of man destroys all this Hellenistic and Gnostic Theology, because it is Messiah's life that purges our sin. His sacrifice as a human is amplified by his glorified divine life in the resurrection, and so this everlasting life is sufficient to cleanse us from all sin.
The incarnation proves that God can relate to humanity on a human level. It proves that God can share our experience and point of view. Of course accepting this requires the faithful to crucify their platonic classical view of God. Open Theism generally has the answer here.
Qayafa, of course, is speaking about a substitution. Messiah is standing in the breach between the destructiveness of sin and the people. Only he is able to survive the destructiveness of sin and come through it with the spiritual power to cleanse all who follow him from sin. So where we cannot stand sins attack, Messiah has been drafted for us to meet with attack and defeat it. What is portrayed in the physical realm through the cross and the resurrection is even more true in the spiritual realm. As a result Messiah is standing in the gap for us. He is standing in the gap in-between, to defeat the corruption of our personal sins when we cry out to him to war against our sin. If we cooperate, we will be rescued.
The substitution being made is the god-man to meet with out sin and purge it. This is made plainer in Messiah. But the same thing happened in the spiritual realm before the details were known for those of old who repented. Frail man cannot take on sin in his own power. But it must be cleansed with the help of divine life. 1 John 3:3 states that we must cooperate with his cleansing by purifying ourselves. With his divine power it is possible.
Without Messiah, we would have to storm the breach of our enemy sin all alone. A breach is a gap in a wall where you would attack a city to overthow it. So sin is like this city, and the breach is repentence, but we must depend on Messiah to be first in the gap to defeat our enemy sin. So Messiah is the volunteer who steps into our place to fight the fight. All we have to do is follow him with a smaller cross, one which we can bear and crucify the flesh.
The enemy is sin. It is not the wrath of God or the wrath of the Father. The cup is the cup of suffering in the fight against sin. Messiah drinks the cup, and then he tells the two sons that they will drink the same cup. He was not predicting the two sons would suffer God's wrath. He was only predicting they would drink the same cup as him, the cup of suffering for a good and righteous goal. They would suffer in carrying the message of the kingdom to the Judah and the nations, and that message is that Yeshua stands in the gap with our sin to cleanse us from it.
When we repent, God forgives us. Messiah's sacrifice, therefore is not to defeat divine wrath. It is to provide us with cleansing from our sin. Messiah is to bear our sins to the grave. After the resurrection, Messiah is not still on the cross. Yet he is still cleansing us from sin. He is still interposing himself between us and our sin. You could say he is taking our place at the forefront of the battle.
The divine wrath against the sinner who repents is replaced by forgiveness. We may say that Messiah's cleansing blood is substituted for the punishement. And symbolically speaking the punishment is taken and destroyed in the grave. The punishment itself is extinguished and purged through the blood. And it is the divine life that bears with our sins, which means he tolerates them while we are being cleansed. Rebellion is not tolerated. There is a sin to death, but the sins not unto death he bears and cleanses from us.
Matthew, Mark, and John make it clear that the Messiah drank the cup of suffering because of the need for his divine service, as the suffering servant. He commands his followers to take up the same cross and to enduring the same suffering. The one who will be first must be the servant of all. The one who loves men will be the servant to be the substitute to ransom them from the evil that threatens. The servant will stand in the gap and warn the people. The servant will endure the insults and attack of sin and the godless, and the demonic world that recognizes the servants of God who go to war with it for the sake of souls being won to the truth.
Since the cup to drink, and the baptism to be baptised with is the same cup and the same baptism that Messiah received and drank, it is not the cup of divine wrath. The wrath satisfaction model is Satan's narrative for God. The Almighty is merciful himself. The Father's wrath against us is assuaged when we repent of our sin. He does not need to be paid by punishing the innocent to forgive. So the cross is not about wrath satisfication. It is about sin bearing and cleansing.
No. 20: I picked up a copy of N.T. Wrights book, "The Day The Revolution Began". Wright wastes a lot of words dodging the penal substitution issue until page 221 of his book, leading the reader to believe that he might have some modified position from PSA. But no, remarking on Mark 10 and the cup that Yeshua must drink, he states "he must drain to the dregs the 'cup of the wrath of God' so that his people won't have to drink it." I took pause at his citations, "See particularly Jer. 25:15-17; 49:12; 5:7; Lam. 4:21," truly, an impressive list of texts supposed to back up his claim for this cup. The pause was only brief though as I looked up the first passage. I'd been through this use of smoke and mirrors many times before, which is a claim, a long list of texts, and then when looking up the texts finding that they fail to prove the claim.
Looking up these texts, one finds that he does prove there is a cup of wrath. But invariably, it is the wicked who are said to justly drink this kind of cup. The texts do not prove that Messiah's cup is the cup of God's wrath though.
Wright stated "so his people won't have to drink it." Yeshua quickly contradicts this claim, necessary as it is to make a case for PSA: "But Yeshua said to them, 'You have not been realizing what you are asking for. Are you able to drink the cup that I am drinking, or to be immersed with the immersion with which I am getting immersed?' And they said to him, 'We are able.' And Yeshua said to them, 'The cup that I drink you will drink, and you will be immersed with the immersion with which I am immersed.'" Whoa there! The Scripture also says, "For God hath not appointed us to wrath" (1 Thess. 5:9). And now, according to Wright's interpretation, his people are being appointed to wrath.
Is that really what take up your cross and follow him means? To also suffer from God's wrath? Yeshua equivocates that they will drink with same cup he drinks, and be baptised with the same baptism he is baptized with. So, if that is so, then James and John also take the penalty of the wrath of God so their "people won't have to."
Wright's failure to understand the text is diagnostic of the general failure of Christian teachers to understand the difference between suffering while doing good, and suffering as a just penalty of one's own sin. The cup that is described by Messiah is the cup of suffering, and nothing more. If one wishes to be great in the kingdom of God, then one must imitate the suffering servant, and become a suffering servant also. This very passage makes that very point a few verses later. Paul repeats the thought, saying, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill up and fill up what lacks in the sufferings of the Anointed in my flesh, on behalf of his body, which is the Assembly" (Colossians 1:20).
If Messiah received a cup of God's wrath down to "the dregs" using Wright's metaphor, then how can Paul make up anything that lacks. There would be nothing left over for Paul. Peter speaks of suffering because one is guilty, and then again of suffering because one takes up the name of Yeshua (1 Peter 4:15-16). So even he knows the difference between suffering due penalty for guilt vs. suffering unjustly for doing what is right.
What if some say that Yeshua's disciples committed sins and that their suffering is just the round about consequences for those sins. I say that they cannot believe that and also at the same time that Yeshua paid it all. And would not that be a form of double jeapordy? Does not God forgive sins? Or does he retain part penalty to be paid. Well yes, the Catholic Church has taught this. It's called purgatory.
Wright isn't the first teacher to claim that Yeshua's cup of suffering was the cup of the wrath of God. As I have shown, and logically explain, he teaches falsely. This false teaching is the worst possible one. Because, Moses the first time struck the rock, and water came out. This was sybmolic that Messiah would be smitten by Satan as the Genesis 3:15 prophesy says. He would be caused to suffer unjustly as a consequence of entering into a sinful world. He would bear our burdens and suffer from what we suffer.
But the second time, when Moses was angry with the people, God told him to speak to the rock so that water would come out. But Moses disobeyed God and smote the rock twice in his wrath (Numbers 20:10-11). Now the rock represents Messiah. We have Paul's word on that. Therefore, the lesson is this for those who smite the Son with the wrath of God. They are not holding faithful to cause God to be holy in the eyes of the sons of Israel! And what is holy? It is to uphold God's justice. Only the sinning soul shall suffer God's wrath, and the Son shall not suffer in place of the guilty.
Moses' penalty for failing to sanctify the Most High in the eyes of Israel was judgment that he should not enter into the promised land. In the future Moses will have the opportunity to correct the wrong lesson he put before Israel. It is a good thing that God is forgiving, and that he will give Moses a second chance. But how many chances will others get? False teachers should take the warning seriously.
No. 21: The mutating, drifting, shifting meaning of ATONE. According the the etymology dictionary this word meant in the 1590's "be in harmony, agree, be in accordance. Literally, "at one," a contraction of at and one. Then the meaning of "make up for errors or deficiencies" is from the 1660's, and then "make reparations" is from the 1680s. The noun atonement in the 1510's meant a "condition of being at one (with others)," a sense now obsolete, from atone + ment. The theological meaning "reconciliation" through Christ is from the 1520's. The sense of satisfaction or reparation for wrong or injury, propitiation of and offended party is from the 1610s.
Things get more interesting in the Tyndale Bible (1526). Romans 3:25 translates the underlying word, "whom God hath made a seate of mercy thorow faith in his bloud"; 1 John 2:3 goes, "and he it is that obteyneth grace for oure synnes"; 1 John 4:10 reads, "Herein is love not that we loved god but that he loved vs and sent his sonne to make agreement for oure sinnes."
Going back to the Wycliffe Bible (1382), the passages read "and he is the forgiveness for our sins" (1 John 2:2); "In this thing is charity, not as we had loved God, but for he first loved us, and sent his Son forgiveness for our sins [and sent his Son helping for our sins]." (1 John 4:10). Wycliffe reads Romans 3:25 as, "Whom God ordained forgiver [Whom God purposed an helper], by faith in his blood, to the showing of his rightwiseness, for [the] remission of before-going sins, in the bearing up of God."
If we inspect verses from the OT, Wycliffe has "The delivering from sin, and the cleansing of you, shall be in this day (shall be on this day), (and) ye shall be cleansed before the Lord from all your sins;" (Lev. 16:30). "and thou shalt offer a calf for sin by each day (for) to cleanse; and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast offered the sacrifice of cleansing, and thou shalt anoint the altar into [the] hallowing (of it). (And each day thou shalt offer a calf as a sin offering for cleansing; and so thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast offered the sacrifice of cleansing, and then thou shalt anoint the altar with oil to consecrate it." (Exodus 29:36). Verse 36 follows in a similar fashion, "Seven days thou shalt cleanse and hallow the altar, and it shall be the holy of holy things; each man that shall touch it shall be hallowed. (For seven days thou shalt cleanse and consecrate the altar, and it shall be most holy; anyone who is unclean who toucheth it, shall be harmed.)"
Where the Hebrew root KPR is used in Psalms, we have for Psalm 65:3, "forgive" (NAS), "purge" (KJV). In Psalm 79:9, "forgive" (NAS), "purge away" (KJV). Why is the book of Pslams exceptional? Because Christians read the NT and the Pslams. Corruption came into the other books sooner.
These translations show that Christians of an earlier age understood the word L'Kippeyr to mean cleansing and forgiveness. The reason is not hard to find. In the LXX the word occurs massively parallel in the texts to another Greek word for cleansing and forgiveness. This is also the case in the Hebrew texts. From these texts, it is clear that the Hebrew is explaining the meaning of L'Kippeyr in terms of the synonym L'Taheyr, "to make being cleansed." This is perfectly clear in the equivocating parallelism in verses like Lev. 16:30.
The moral of this story is. The people who paid attention to the parallel structures reading Scripture were much better off than scholars who tried to redefine terms and write dictionaries with their redefinitions. It was the theologians and Church scholars that shifted the meaning from purging to that of paying for sin by sacrifice.
The reason the Church is in such deep trouble in the 21st century, is that the gospel is viewed exlusively in terms of payment for sin, and seldom or never in terms of purging from sin. Payment for sin does not change anyone's life. Payment for sin does not rescue from sin. Only purging and cleansing from sin rescues from sin. What I am saying is that the Church has allowed a pagan idea of atonement to corrupt the original scriptural teacing of purgation or synonymously cleansing. If you ask me, their corruptions are at the heart of the mystery of iniquity.
The root snese of the revelant word L'Kippeyr" without explaining the PIEL conjugation (yet) is "to purge." It is explained by a close synonym L'Taheyer "to cleanse," without yet explaining the PIEL conjugation. In the next installment, we we see that a wonderful thing happens when I explain the grammer of these words.
To sum up, wherever the words "atone," "propitiate" or "expiate" occur in Modern terms, the original term as intended by the biblical authors meant PURGE. The original sense has zero relation to the idea of paying for sin, appeasing God, or propitiating wrath. It was not understood to be so by earlier Christians, and especially not by the Greek speaking Church. The readers of John Wycliffe's translation understood the sense of cleanse and forgiveness.
Even though Catholic Bishop Anselm had left a legacy of satisfaction theology, i.e. satisfaction of justice by punishment, that false idea had not gotten into Wycliffe's version. It is no wonder then that they wanted to murder him. But he died from a stroke in 1384 at the age of 56. Later in 1428 they dug up "his body" and burned it, scattering the ashes in the River Swift.
No. 22: The meaning of the verb L'kipper is "to purge" as its basic sense. The synonym L'taheyr is close in meaning. It's basic sense is "to cleanse." Both verbs however, are in the PIEL conjugation, which means the middle root letter is phonetically prolonged. That's why you see the double PP in L'kipper. You don't see a double H in L'taheyr because one does not typically put a dagesh in a guttural letter. However, it is fair to say that the HE is prolonged, or the vowel before it. The significance of the PIEL is to give a causitive durative state. In plain English, the durative element is conveyed by injection of the word "being", the past participle "purged" and a causitive word like "make." So the PIEL unfolds as "to make being purged" or "to make being cleansed" in the case of the synonym.
Almost every PIEL verb can be explained this way. For example, "to make being blessed" or "to make being set apart," or "to make being spoken," or "to make being commanded." It gives a durative emphasis on the unfolding action. Sometimes the PIEL is ambigious. For example, "to make being destroyed." It is not clear whether it refers to the process of destruction, or the enduring state of the rubble left over. One of the most common verbs in PIEL is the verb "to bless," e.g. "to make being blessed." This is not something that happens all at once when a blessing is announced. It is rather something that unfolds over time due to continuing divine favor. The PIEL sees the blessing as iterative. This is to take "being" as denoting continuation of the action. The word "being" in English is ambiguous. It may refer to unfolding action or it may refer to a state of existence described by the participle verb, as in the "being destroyed" example above. Just so you know, when we add "-ed" to an infinitive verb, we obtain the participle verb. So "to purge" becomes "purged," and with the other elements we obtain "to make being purged." The difference between "to make being cleansed" and "to make being purged" is a difference of severity. To purge is more intense and more thorough than "to cleanse." And this explains why the latter verb was chosen to explain sacrifice. Dealing with sin requires a purgation of the sinner. "To make being cleansed" is a less severe term. Although, in context the terms are synonyms. I'm just saying if there is a difference between them, then it is only a matter of intensity.
The PIEL conjugation is the most misunderstood and controversial in higher Hebrew studies. Jouon (and Muraoka, 2018) state on page 140, "In terms of the identification of function, Piel is the most elusive of the Hebrew conjugations." Their footnote #4 states, "The same difficulty exists with the corresponding pattern in all other cognate Semitic languages, including modern living languages." They restate on page 143, "As briefly mentioned in § a above, the question how the function of the Piel in relation to other conjugations, notably Qal, should be defined still remains one of the major challenges facing Hebrew and Semitic linguistics."
I propose to solve this problem now. The infinitive forms "to cleanse," "to purge" represent the Qal sense, at least in theory. These verbs are not used much in the Qal. The Piel transforms the infintives: "to make being purged," and "to make being cleansed." The causation element is obtained by prolonging the middle root letter, which is where the Hiphil modifies the verb also for causation. The prolonging element is analogous to the Niphal dagesh in the first root letter. Statives are often formed out of passives. But statives also indicate a duration of the quality of the verb. The historic struggle to understand the PIEL has swung from one extreme at the stative, resultative end of the spectrum to the iterative, frequentive sense at the other end.
Now to translate this for you. Stative means a resulting state, "to make being destroyed," may be interpreted to be an unmoving pile of rubble. Frequentive means to repeat the action, and "to make being destroyed" may refer to the ongoing process of destruction. I can use the English helping verb "being" to express both these ideas. In conjunction with causation, "made being" may denote either the final state, or the action creating the state. "Being" may denote unfolding action, or an existing state.
As "to make being blessed" is an iterative or fequentive action, so also "to make being purged" is an iterative action. This isn't the whole story yet. I have yet to explain the declarative usage of the PIEL. While we wait, I will summarize with a quotation from Walke and O'Connor, "An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax:"
In the chapter on the PIEL stem, they say under the heading of "Frequentive...There is a group of verbs that in the Qal are intransitive and denote physical movement or effort, voice projection, or expectation; the Piel of these denotes a frequentive aspect, either iterative over time or plural through space. Ryder finds about forty of these roots. Whereas earlier grammarians wrongly built their theory of the stem's intensive meaning largely on the narrow base of this realitively small group, Jenni overreacts by miminizing the iterative meaning. He tries to explain these verbs in terms of the resultative Piel, either as a plural resultative (the Piel reflects a multiplicity of actions or objects; the corrsponding Qal designates a single action or object) or as a definite resultative (the Qal designates an activity with no definite outcome or product; the Piel refers to a definite outcome or product). Jenni fails, however to take adequate account of certain facts: these words are intransitive in the Qal and tend not to take an object in the Piel. Because of their distinctive lexical and syntactic features, we prefer with Goetze and Ryder to interpret them as denoting frequentive aspect in the Piel." (page 414-415).
Walke and O'Connor then supply us with examples: Gen. 22:6, "Then the two of them go, they together" (my translation). Notice that "go" is modified by an adverb, and the verb "go" is intransitive. There is no object. The subject is in fact the object. They contrast this with a Piel of the same verb in Job 24:10, "They (the rich) make being gone (the poor) without clothes." Are we talking here about the poor being in a perpetual state of nakedness, or that they are frequently deprived of the clothes they need due to oppressive poverty? My gloss, "being gone without clothes" allows for the possibility of both outcomes. The context has to sort out which is the case. Walke and O'Connor decide for the iterative sense, and I agree in this case.
So "to make being purged" may be interpreted to refer either to a process of being purged or to a state that has resulted from being purged. Obviously, with respect to ritual objects, a state of purgation results. But with human beings a process of purgation happens, simply because this side of the resurrection, humans are not perfected.
No. 23: Let us move on to the declarative Piel. The Piel is used in official pronouncements that recognize a state or frequentive action that is already happening. As a declarative, the utterance in the Piel does not teach the beginning of the action, or the end of it. For example, a cohen will examine someone who has contracted a disease, and he will "pronounce him to be unclean." Or more literally. "He will declare being contaminated" the person. The truth is that the contamination preceeds in time the declaration. The priest is only making it officially so. He "makes being contaminated" the diseased person. It is a matter of legal formality or community formality. We may say that the declaration is the beginning of a new action. It is the action of making him (officially) being contaminated" in the eyes of the law. But it is not the beginning of the underlying state of the person.
The cohen may also "declare being cleansed" someone when he examines him. Two things are clear when he does this. The first is that the person is already clean enough when the declaration takes place. But he is not finished being cleansed because he has to wash his clothes first. Lev. 13:34 states, "Then the cohen will have declared him being cleansed. Then he shall make being washed his clothes. Then he will have become clean." So in this verse we have first a Piel declarative that is frequentive, i.e. iterative. And then a stative Piel which means his clothes need to be in a state of being washed, i.e. the result of washing. And then we have a simple Qal that states he has become clean.
Now with the verb L'kipper, there are 104 occurences of this verb in the Torah, most of them Piel. The first Piel conjugation is in Gen. 32:20. Jacob states the intention of his gifts to Esau as, "I will make being purged his face with the present." He means to purge any possible anger that Esau might have. But as Jacob discovers, Esau has no wrath against him any more, and the present was not needed for such a purpose. Esau has already done the right thing and forgiven his brother. Jacob's gift therefore serves only as a sign or declaration of his repentance for cheating Esau.
Exodus: 29:33: Then they will have eaten them, those things which had been making being purged them, [used] to make being filled their hand, to make being set apart them.
Exodus 29:36: And a bull of sin offering you shall offer each day, for a making being purged. And you shall have made being cleansed for the altar when making being purged thou be for it. And thou will have anointed it to make it being made holy. So we see here that being cleansed is used to explain being purged.
I will leave the rest of these ritual purgings to the side for now. Since there is a physical connection between the physical thing to be cleansed and the blood, the purging is effected in conjunction with the offering, that is simultanteously. The purging is initiated with the application of the blood.
When persons sin in ignorance or a circumstance that cannot be avoided, through error, without rebellious intent, then the refrain with the sacrifice is spelled out like this, "The cohen has declared for them being purged. And it has been forgiven for them." (Lev. 4:20). On a spiritual level the forgiveness and the purging come before the offering when the sin is confessed. The offering itself is merely declarative of the fact of their being purged. Pslam 32:5 says, "And thou has forgiven the iniquity of my sin." There hadn't been an offering when David made this statement. Animal offerings were not allowed for the serious iniquity he had comitted.
The effect of the offering is to delcare [the sinner] being purged [from] sin. This is like the man pronounced being cleansed. The state of being cleansed comes before the offering. For certain it begins when the sin is confessed in the heart to God. Forgiveness takes place then also. The offering serves as public and legal notice of what is unseen in the spiritual realm. The offering pronounces the confessor being purged. Aside from the offering, the Spirit of God performs the cleansing in the human spirit in his own way, and at a time according to his mercy.
"When we may be confessing our sins, he is faithful and righteous, so that he shall have forgiven us our sins and he shall have cleansed us from all unrighteousness" (GNM, 1 John 1:9). The actual process of cleansing comes about with repentance. Yochannan can go on to directly state, "And he is the purging concerning our sins, and not concerning ours only, but also concerning the whole world" (1 John 2:2). Messiah himself, being the Most High works the purging in the spiritual realm. He also will purge the sins of the whole world. If anyone confesses their sins, he will forgive them and purge their sin from them. And for whosover will not hold faithful to him, he will purge them from the world. He is the purging for the whole Cosmos. Only there will not be an offering declaring that a faithful person is being purged from sin. Rather, the Cosmos will be purged by divine fire.
In Messiah as the suffering servant, the symbolical aspects of the animial offering come together in the actual service of Messsiah. Animal life was spilled as a figure of the cost of our sin, the cost of bearing it, and the cost of purging it. So the offering is a legal pronouncement of something that God does.
But the offering of Messiah sums up all of the divine sacrifice to purge sin from the world. In his blood was spilled the divine life that does the purging. This life was raised against from the dead, and continues to purge the faithful, and will finally purge the world, even the unrepentant in the manner just mentioned above.
At the very least, compared to animial offerings, Messiah's offering, seen in an expansive sense, is the actual instrument of the purging. It has all the aspects of the animal offerings. And then again, it has the additional aspect that his offering is given on behalf of the life in the world. John 6 :51. Similar to the animial offerings Messiah's offering also gives declatory notice that the sinner is being purged. The sinners guilt is purged. But even more so, since iniquity effects a much deeper corruption on the human spirit than a sin of ignorance, the divine purging will take longer. Divine purging comes from eating the Word of God, taking it into the heart, and then obeying it. Good habits have to be developed, and bad habits unlearned.
The Piel conjugation of "to purge", i.e. "to make being purged" or "to declare being purged" wherein both senses are applied in the Torah, allows us to bring into harmony the Levitical offerings and Messiah's offering. Messiah's offering contains both halves of the Piel, the making and the declaring. The cross itself is certainly the declaring. Making being purged is not temporally synchronous with the cross. But it is synchronous with the living and resurrected life of Messiah. Because he lives to cleanse us. He says that he is the bread that came down from heaven. Bread sustains life. He is not just the bread one day on the cross, but he is continuously the bread. So we have to understand that what is declared at a point in time is actual over a much greater span of time.
The Piel conjugation of "to purge", i.e. "to make being purged" or "to declare being purged" wherein both senses are applied in the Torah, allows us to bring into harmony the Levitical offerings and Messiah's offering. Messiah's offering contains both halves of the Piel, the making and the declaring. The cross itself is certainly the declaring. Making being purged is not temporally synchronous with the cross. But it is synchronous with the living and resurrected life of Messiah. Because he lives to cleanse us. He says that he is the bread that came down from heaven. Bread sustains life. He is not just the bread one day on the cross, but he is continuously the bread. So we have to understand that what is declared at a point in time is actual over a much greater span of time.
The animal offerings are only declaring being purged the sinner. It is God who does the cleansing. That is, it is God who actually does the purging in the spirit. For this reason the cross and the animal offerings are declaring the same thing, that the divine life of Messiah purges sin. There is, therefore, no objection to renewed Levitical offerings in a the new Temples to come. This is because they declare the same thing.
Now under a PSA model of "atonement" the animal offerings are absolutely incompatible with a PSA understanding of the cross. If the animial offering pays a PSA judicial penalty for a sin in the OT, then it cannot be paid for twice. And if Messiah pays for a PSA judicial penalty in the NT, then the animal offerings cannot be brought back to pay for what is already paid for! Since, the prophets say that the Levitical offerings will be restored, it logically follows that the PSA system fails to explain matters.
The Catholic Church sought to continue sacrifice in their own way after the ceasing of the Temple service. It then split up into Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. The Western Catholic Church split up into Protestant and Catholic. Yet even the Lutheran's continued to claim sacrificial benefits of the Eucharistic service. Finally, the Evangelicals emerged and said it was only symbolic. But they are still conducting things in their own way. At each stage of this game, the Church claims that divine grace flows from the sacrament, until we reach the evangelicals which say there is none.
As a result of this, it is extreme hypocrisy for the Church to fulminate against the Levitical service. While condeming the bloodly sacrifices they have lost sight of the fact that the cross itself is a bloody suffering. The Church rebels against the Levitical service because they do not understand it. The Church has been lied to by Satan. The lie even made it into their bible versions as the Alexandrian letter, where it is straw manned that the Levitical offerings could not purge sin. Of course not. Because those offerings are only declaring it. And we should ask the same for them of Messiah's offering. Did this purge all sin at the cross? Of course not. Sinners still exist, even Christian sinners.
No. 24: The current work is a result of research from the Genesis Interlinear. This project is not finished yet. That project presented many opportunities to test out the Piel conjugation. The confessed ignorance of top Hebrew grammars concerning this stems from a darkness that no doubt came about with a corrupt understanding of sacrifice. But I see the great need for this, even at the expense of delaying the Genesis project for a while.
No. 25: Isaiah 6:7 says, "Then he causes it to touch upon my mouth. Then he says, 'Behold, this has touched upon thy lips, and has been turned away they iniquity, and thy sin be made being purged." Here the KJV translated "purged," also, and the NAS "forgiven." This text shows that purging happens without sacrifice. Isaiah 22:14 says, "And it has become plain in my ears of Yahweh of Hosts, 'Never will be made being purged this iniquity for ye onward ye die, has said Adonai Yahweh.'" The verb here is KPR. The KJV translates it "purged," and the NAS "forgiven." Ezekiel 43:20 states, "And thou will have taken from its blood. And thou will have put opon the four horns of it, and against the four corners of the ledge, and against the rim surrounding. And thou will have made being absent it [impurity], and thou will have purged it." Again the KJV uses the word "purge" here. It is interesting that what is usually the verb for "sin" is used to mean "cleanse." This is because the word really means "miss." You will have made being missed it means that the blood will have caused the contamination to be absent. The translations render this cleansed. We should also note that these instructions are for a Temple that has not yet been built.
In Ezekiel 45:15 the KJV translator rendered "to make reconciliation for them." By this the KJV translator shows an older understanding of the word "atone" as explained earlier. But actually, the sense here is to "declare being purged for them" or in a ritual sense even to "make being purged for them." In vs. 17 the KJV has reconciliation, and in vs. 20. Also amazingly, the KJV follows suit in Daniel 9:24, "and to make reconciliation for iniquity." But really, this should be "and to make being purged iniquity." However, if the word "atonement" is used here as in the NAS, with its modern definition, then the text contradicts the modern PSA theology of the cross!
No. 26: Often a PSA apologist will offer an accussation of heresy along with a word salad example of their own theology. This is also called the birdshot response, as a shot gun shooting birdshot. Their many arguments they pack together in a short response is like all the beads of birdshot. It is supposed to overwhealm the defender of the faith. Here is a live example:
Word Salad Example
The typical accusation is: "You're just making stuff up." Now, I don't recommend continuing a conversation with anyone who talks like this. An accussation is not an argument, and they are not listening. But so that you will know how to answer this for yourself I will speak. The first thing is not to be discourged or frightened by a word salad argument. You just have to realize that they have responded to your argument with many arguments at once. And each little shot they have fired at you is its own little lie. Individual lies seem to be more convincing when they are all put together in one big ball of emotional outburst. But this is an illusion.
So in this document I have cited the Scripture about sons and fathers from Ezekiel 18. So clearly I am not making it up. The accusation itself is made up.
He says, "Read Isaiah 53." This is birdshot because there are a number of verses that are misused, misinterpreted or mistranslated in this text. It is also begging the question, because I told my opponent that "there is no statement" of PSA nature in Scripture. So they need to come up with a counter example, and not an imperative to read Isaiah 53. You have to hold your oppenents feet to the fire of Scripture only. And it is only specific texts that can make a specific point. In a word salad, when a text is cited, it gains support from all the other birdshot, even though most of the birdshot does not come from texts.
The 2 Cor. 5:21 text is dealt with in point No. 7 above." Guilt cannot be imputed to the innocent.
No. 27: A PSA apologist stated:
'PSA Orthodoxy Test'
How does one reply to statements like this? The way of salvation isn't accomplished by doctrines only just believed. But it is this: to repent of one's sins and receive forgiveness while being purged from sin, as described in Ezekiel 18. The way of salvation is described in Deut. 30:14, "But the word is very near thee, in thy mouth, and in your heart, to do it." This the word of faithfulness. Certainly the whole method of our rescue is not fully explained in Torah, but the essential points to be saved are.
Neither Torah, Yeshua, or his Emissaries , taught that salvation was only by accepting something, by accepting doctrines. But they taught to turn away from sin, and that none would have everlasting life without it. Those who practice evil will not inherit the kingdom of God. Anyone who does not cooperate with the Spirit in being purged from sin by the blood of Messiah, by taking up his cross and crucifying the flesh and following him, is not worthy of him. This is just another way of restating what Torah already teaches. Scripture says near the end, "And by this we know that we have been knowing him, if we may be keeping his commandments. The one who says 'I have been knowing him,' and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him;" (1 John 2:3-4). The blood of Messiah is not payment for breaking the commandments. Rather it is purging from sin for the repentant. Messiah said you must eat his flesh and drink his blood. The flesh must be crucified with Messiah, and his Spirit of Life must be applied continuously. See John 6. There is certainly no purging from sin without the divine spiritual life in Yeshua, because it is precisely divine life that is needed to cleanse us from our sins, and this life dwelt in the blood and flesh of Messiah. There is also no purging of the penalty without his blood, because symbolically he takes the penalty to the grave. The penalty does not rise again, but he does. This is quite different from paying the penalty. He disposes of the penalty by killing it at the same time he was unjustly punished, not by satisfying it. This is symbolic for all who repent. Killing the penalty is another way of forgiving it. Yeshua is our passover, and indeed, we must apply his blood to the doorposts of our hearts to purge ourselves through his divine life, "Everyone who has this hope fixed on him purifies himself, just as he is pure" (1 John 3:3).
No. 28: I have a retired Lutheran Pastor friend. If you greet him, saying, "How are you," the invariable response will be, "Better than I deserve." I find that Christians flippantly use the word deserve saying one way or another even after following Messiah that they deserve death. They don't say they "deserved" death, but that their sins deserve it (present tense). Yet John speaks of "a sin not leading do death" (1 John 5:16). They don't say that they committed sins in the past deserving death (as if tense mattered), but that they deserve it. But there is no scripture saying we deserve death after repentance and forgiveness. Ezekiel 18:21-22 teaches the exact opposite.
Without a doubt the doctrine of Penal Substitution leads to attitudes like this. The unbiblical sentimenet serves as a basis for a penal substitution argument. PSA wishes to claim we all deserve to die at all times, and in every kind of sin, even after pledging faithfulness to Messiah. And then to get out of the result of deserving to die, they invoke penal substitution. The foundation of this is the belief that divine judgment or penal justice is irrevocable in all cases and all circumstances.
However, the argument is self-defeating. One who deserves to die deserves to die. An innocent party does not deserve to die: "The sinning soul should die. A son should not bear because of the inquity of the father, and the father should not bear because of the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous should be upon the righteous, and the wickedness of the wicked should be upon the wicked" (Ezekiel 18:20).
"But the wicked man, because he will turn from all his sins which he has done, and will have kept all my statutes, and will have done justice and right, living he should live. He should not die. All of his transgressions, which he has done, shall not be remembered against him. Because of his righteousness which he has done, he shall live" (Ezekiel 18:21-22).
So we see, that because of repentance, the Most High changes his mind and declares a different intention for the repentant: he should live.
Several objections will be made. The first is that they will claim this is earning salvation. But it is not. Who compensates God for the loss caused by the past transgressions? No one. Those transgressions are "not remembered," which is the same as forgiveness. God is bearing the loss caused by it. To fairly earn something you cannot give your Master value in your work after having taken away value from your Master, and claim that he owes you.
I used to frame houses for a man named O'brien. One day we were to install windows and doors. I leaned up a large glass sliding window. It was an Anderson, the most expensive kind, or almost. But it was a very blustery day. I went about other work, and heard a loud crash as the the glass door blew over and shattered into a thousand pieces. I thought that surely I'd be charged for the door. I should have known the wind could blow it over. But Obrien told me that I would not be charged for it. Clearly, I did not earn this act of charity. But someone else suffered the loss.
Yes, someone else suffers the loss. That's not the same as saying that a punishment is transferred to them. To transfer punishment to them only makes the loss greater than it is. It is to strike the rock twice.
Another objection, is that they will claim the repentant person is saving themselves by repenting. Yet Acts 2:40 says "rescue yourselves," or "get rescued" suggesting the participation of the repentant person in their salvation in the imperative. And to the rich young ruler, Messiah also suggested his participation in his deliverance by keeping the commandments, as does also Romans 2:6-10! No one is suggesting that we rescue ourselves all on our own. Certainly we need divine power and divine purging to suceed, and this is given by grace and not because it was earned.
No. 29: The Hebrew word for fogiveness is "to bear," or "carry." It is this way because the person who forgives is bearing a loss. They have suffered from the sin against them, and often continue to suffer from the sin against them even after the sin has ended.
When we say that Messiah bears our sins, this is the same as the Most High saying elsewhere that he bears our sins. For example, Exodus 34:7, it says the Most High is "keeping loving kindness to a thousand generations, bearing (forgiving) iniquity and transgression and sin, and making being acquitted not he will not make being acquitted, attending the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons, and upon the sons of the sons, upon the third and upon the fourth generation." The word is
Bearing sin means that the forgiver suffers from the sin. The one forgiven ought to acknowledge the pain and suffering their sin causes. The message of the cross is that God suffers from our sin when bearing it, when forgiving it.
Now without a doubt, he also bears the sin of the wicked. He suffers from that also. But he does not "bear" in the sense of forgiving it. He asked the Most High to forgive those who cause his suffering in ingorance. He did not ask this for those who claimed that they saw the truth and taught a lie. To them he says that now that they say that see, their sin remains, and they will die in their sin. And though bearing sin, Messiah will not purge their sin.
So we must understand that "bearing sin" does not mean penal substitution. It means suffering from it. The Father did not judicially attack the Messiah on the cross or penalize him. But it was Satan wounding the seed of the woman as prophesied in Genesis 3:15. The people thought he was smitten by God, but this wasn't so. He was smitten by Satan and our transgressions. He was bearing them.
The Father and the Spirit bear our sin just the same as Messiah, in anguish of spirit. The Son additionally bears our sin in the flesh, because God became a man. The cross is the manifestation of divine suffering in the physical realm that already occurs in the spiritual realm.
To bear is like the English word to suffer. It means to allow, permit, or overlook. God suffers the sin of the unrepentant in hopes they might repent. He suffers (forgives) our sins when we repent. But he will not suffer the sin of the evil forever. He will destroy them at some point and end his suffering.
The penal substitionist claims that justice demands an irrevocable penalty. But in truth, penalty in Scripture is for reasons of deterrance of evil and limitation of evil. It is not because there must always be punishment because justice demands it. None of the texts which are misinterpretred as a demand for irrevocable punishment make an allowance for substitution. They make their demands on the sinner, not on the innocent. So the PSA is already weakening their own argument by straw-manning these texts.
Why does God suffer a delay in punishing sin? Because he wants some to repent, or to have a chance to. Meanwhile the suffering increases. So we see that suffering a delay is a step back from strict justice also.
A demand for strict punitive justice to be satisfied is justice in place of full repairation of damages. God says he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He would rather recover all his losses including the person needing to die. But the person must die a punitive death, because the person will not repent, or is too corrupt to repent. It is not logically possible for God to undo his suffering or to recover his loss. The judgment is simply to prevent the loss from growing greater. Therefore, a penal substition gains nothing for God. A penal substition makes the claim that God values the concept of irrevocable punishment as a legal fiction, even though it gains him nothing. It gains no recovery of loss, and it has no deterrance power.
The cross only has deterrance power in us recognizing the suffering that our sin causes to God, and therefore having eyes opened by such a display we repent of our sins. In this way, by his stripes we are healed. Our sins are stipes on Messiah's back. The stripes on Messiah's back are not divinely ordained punishment. But they were caused by the sins of Israel.
Those who argue for PSA, also argue for double imputation. That is, not only was sin put on Christ to be punished on the cross to satisfy God, but also Christ's righteousness is put upon the sinner making them innocent in God's sight by means of substitution, to satisfy positive righteousness. Now is God made whole again by closing his eyes to the permenant damage that our sin causes? Hardly. God cannot escape from his suffering and loss.
The PSA camp does not just impute righteousness to the sinner after repentance. They imputed it back to the day of conception, or even back to the Calvinistic decree in a fictional timeless eternity, and also to coming eternity. Coming eternity? Yes, in their definition of timeless eternity, to speak of coming eternity is completely illogical. So now, God 'in eternity' suffers no loss. Such doctrine turns the message of the cross entirely upside down. It is not the good news of the kingdom. The secret doctrine of the Gnostics, of the Manicheans, of Augustine, of Calvin, of Hodge, and their followers is that God does not suffer. They call this divine impassibility.
The Scripture teaches that God suffers from our sins, but what does philosophy teach? The wikedpedia explains it, "Some theological systems portray God as a being expressive of many (or all) emotions. Other systems, mainly Christianity, Judaism and Islam, portray God as a being that does not experience suffering. However, in Christianity there was an ancient dispute about the impassibility of God (see Nestorianism). Still, it is understood in all Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, that God is "without passions", because God is immutable. So in Christianity, while the created human nature of Christ is mutable and passable, the Godhead is not. (Bible, book of James, chapter 1 verse 17: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." (King James Version)." This Philosophy is a Platonic idea, namely that which is perfect cannot change in any way, since it could only change to imperfection. It logically claims there is only one way to be perfect. Since suffering required reaction and change to time bound actions of men, it is not allowed in this system. But this system being applied to God, is nothing but Hellenistic Idolatry. James, of course, is speaking of God's moral absolutes. Those do not change. God says of himself that he will go down now to see if it is so, and if not I will know. He says to Abraham, now I know, and says to Israel that he tested them in the wilderness to know what was in their heart, whether they would keep his commandments or not.
Some would like to back out of this like Willaim Lane Craig, but as soon as one admits that God suffers loss, the whole philosophy of trying to make God whole again, even if by legal fictions, is logically refuted. God cannot demand the legal perfection in justice of his fallen creation either by strict punitive justice nor by impuation of perfection. It does nothing to lessen his suffering. The only thing that could possible work would be to purge sin and then when a righteous state is restored to no longer remember the past. That's where real forgiveness leads.
No. 30: We can call the cross a substitution. A display of divine suffering from our sins has been substituted in place of a demand for our punitive suffering from sin. God forgives our sins in conjunction with lifting up his own suffering because of sin. We can also say Messiah is bearing a penalty on the cross. He is bearing an unjust penalty charged to him by a lawless proceeding of the scribes and Pharisees! He is also bearing a natural consequence of sins corrupting the hearts of the men who put him to death. By allowing an unjust penalty to substitute for a forgiven penalty God is highlighting his suffering and his forgiveness at the same time.
We could even call it "penal-substitution." But of course, this would not be what PSA doctrine means by it. It is like the word atonement, which in scripture means "to purge," and which in English started out meaning "to reconcile," but which later came to mean appeasment by means of paying a penalty. Now a ransom is a substitution just as much as the PSA doctrine. The ransomer gives up his life for the release of many. The kinsman redeemer gives himself up to the widow to restore the name of the dead. Yeshua told the arresting party he was the one they wanted, and to let the rest go. It is the powers of darkness that are receiving the substitue. The substitute is representative of God, i.e. is YHWH. Three times Yeshua said it, and they fell back.
But Satan has managed to turn the gospel upside down and reverse the narrative. He has turned the ransom truth against the truth claiming that the Father is demanding the ransom the satisfy a penalty that cannot be forgiven. By doing so, Satan has managed to divert the whole good news away from divine suffering, dividing the Father and the Son, and at the same time redefining L'KIPPER, which means "to purge" into "atone" in its corrupt modern sense. He has also perverted the necessity of crucifying our own sin nature with Messiah, and the need to be purged from our own sins, and to purge ourselves from them (1 John 3:3), so that we may stand in the real day of divine wrath which is coming. If we die with Messiah, then we will be passed over in the day of wrath, which is for the wicked and unrepentant at the end of this age.
No. 31: The the hearts of many are not with the true good news. And I am not speaking of those just holding to wrong doctrine. One can still hold to PSA and practice the true good news and take up their cross and follow Yeshua and be purged from sin. But I am speaking about those who are Christians and Messianics in name only, and who have used the false doctrine as an excuse to not practice the true good news! Or even more possible, I am speaking of those who have never heard the true good news, and have only heard sermons from certain Pauline letters, and have never read the whole context of Scripture, and so have come away with the wrong definitions of things promoted by the like of Luther. And they therefore have never understood the true good news, and have felt they are safe with the false doctrine.
It was the true good news that overthrew the old paganism, despite a lot of false doctrine. So we should not take lightly the change the good news worked in the Viking culture at the time of Eric the Red. We should not take lightly what the good news did to the gods of Rome and Greece, or the transformation that it worked in Russia and Europe and the New World and in Africa. The reason that the old gods were overthown is that in larger measure the true good news was taught enough to work in these cultures. And further, that the people under the old paganism were responding after having been ignorant of the truth for thousands of years, and because they had suffered from their own sins, and wanted to get free of them.
But what now? Satan has been working to destroy the word of God and the word of the good news. He deprives the world of Scripture, for those having none. He burns it sometimes (Tyndale). He adds books that don't belong at others (Augustine and Jerome). He takes away books that belong at other times (Marcion). And lastly, he causes Scripture to be misinterpreted as with the scribes and Pharisees, and by tradition, and by Philosophy of the Gnostics. And he has prospered greatly in these operations. So much so that Western Civilization is now unwinding from is former glory into a cessposs of evil and corruption. If you want my opinion this fall cannot be stopped because it is ocurring with a history of having had the true good news at one time, and then having rejected it. The pagans who had their old gods, and then rejected them at the preaching of the good news will rise up in the judgment, and they will condemn this generation along with the men of Nineveh.
And the judgment will be this against this generation. They will fall far into a dystopian apocalypse, and only the house of Israel will be delivered.
No. 32: Colossians 2:13. Read notes in GNM on this and on page 617. The timing of matters in this text is critical to understand. "And you, being dead to transgressions and to the uncircumcision of your flesh..." This first phrase occurs when a person repents and turns away from sin, whether long before the cross or long after. Being dead to transgressions is an idiom for a state of repentance. Being dead to the uncircumcision of the flesh is also an idiom for repentance. Flesh is to be understood as living in evil. Flesh is put for person not dead to transgression, but still living in it. It is equivalent to uncircumcision of the heart. Now Paul may be speaking this way because these converts were circumcised, and he is explaining the symoblism of the physical in terms of the spiritual. Whether, circumcised in the flesh or not, before they repented they were uncircumcised in flesh, meaning in their disposition toward living a holy life. If they had been already circumcised, before repenting their circumcison had become as uncircumcision as stated in Romans.
Next Paul states, "he will have made live together with him, granting loving-kindness to us concerning all the transgressions." The Greek tense here "will have made live" is like the Hebrew perfect used for the future. See for example how the LXX translates Isa. 9:6, "because unto us a child [will] haf been born" (εγεννήθη)." This usage of the Greek aorist is called proleptic. It is the same as saying the Hebrew perfect is used for the future, a future perfect. So the promise here looks to the resurrection of the dead and everlasting life. The Greek also allows us to understand it as a present tense, "he makes live together with him." Unhappily in English, we have to chose one or the other, and in the GNM I chose the future perfect as the hope of the resurrection is the most important point. This second use is called gnomic. He is at all times that we are repentant and taking in his word and obeying it purging us from sin with his divine life.
Verse 14 continues, "wiping out the writing [put into our] hand according to the decrees against us, which was hostile to us, and he has been taking it out of the way, having nailed it ot the execution timber." Now the most misunderstood tense in Greek is probably the Greek perfect. It is equivlaent to the English continuous perfect, "he has been taking it out of the way." God has been removing our judgment. The timing of this is iterative recurring each time a person repents and pledges faithfulness to Messiah.
Paul then states "having nailed it to the execution timber." Now this is clearly figurative, because it wasn't our judgment that was nailed to the cross, but, "This is Yeshua, King of the Yehudim." It is figurative because Paul is interpreting the meaning of the cross. He is not stating what actually occured on the cross. As I explained before concerning sacrifice for sins, the offering "declares being purged the sin," and as I explained the PIEL conjugation refers to reality both before and after the offering. What is officially put on notice occurs both before and after the offering, just as a priest pronounces a person being cleansed, so even afterward, he must wash to be clean. So what is declared by the offering becomes so when the person confesses and repents.
Now I have spoken in terms of personal transgressions and sins. There is also a collective element to the symbolism here. The hand writing (cf. Deut. 24:1ff) refers to the divorce decree between the Most High and Israel. This is figuratively nailed to the cross, and taken in death to the grave with Messiah, were it is disposed of, that is cancelled and declared void. The Messiah rises again from the dead. So at the cross, the house of Israel is corporately reinstated, the divorce being undone. John 11:52 refers to this. Again, the act is declatory. Since Israel is made up of individuals, each one must pledge faithfulness to Messiah to be included in corporate Israel.
The cross is not just a figurative victory, but Paul states, "disarming the rulers and authorities. He bodly disgraced them, celebrating his triumph over them with it." His triumph refers to his rising from the dead. Satan, via his proxy, sin and death, via his agents with leaders of Israel, had killed Messiah, thinking they were saving Israel from a false teacher and the Romans. But this backfired on them. God in a public way displayed his suffering to ransom man from his sins, and that the divine life in Yeshua was sufficient to purge man from sin and also raise him from the dead. In declatory symbolism, be purges the divorce decree also, and the individual judgements against us.
His death is not meant to pay the judgments. It is meant to bear them away and bury them in declatory fashion, because God is forgiving us who repent. All who confess their sins onto Yeshua the lamb of God, are confessing them there to be purged and carried away, and for the judgment to be purged and carried away. So in reality, the timing of forgiveness and the beginning of his making us being purged is when we turn our heart to him.
This is where PSA runs into a big problem. They are forced to say that the penalty was paid at the cross at one time. A paid penalty discharges a debt, namely the judgment against sin according to PSA theory. This means that PSA is claiming that forgiveness happened in the past for those who have not yet repented. And this is contray to 1 John 1:9 and Ezekiel 18.
It was quite shocking to see Jesse Morrell and Matt Slick dance around this question in their debate "The nature and extent of the atonement." Matt was claiming that the debt was paid at the cross and that forgiveness occurs when a person comes to faith. Jesse Morrel did not know how to answer this question correctly because his view of Colossians 2:14 was just as bad as Matt Slick's. Jesse maintained that the ceremomial law is what was meant by the handwriting.
Neither participant understands that sacrifice is legal sybolism for an underlying spiritual reality that is not simultaneous with the offering. The offering is the instruction of our peace. Messiah's offering is indicative of a ransom cost that is spread out over all time since the fall of man.
Messiah offering is actually only a climactic part of the whole ransoming cost. We may call it effective in demonstrating to man both the suffering of God, in the purging of sin, and the power of God over death, through the resurrection of Messiah. The cross should call our attention to John 6, where we are told we must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Yeshua did mean for this to be taken spiritually. The important point, however, is that the injunctive to consume the divine spirit to be purged from sin extends over time before the cross and after the cross.
The message, then is this: the penalty is also purged over time simultaneous in time with confession and repentance, and simultaneous in time with the heart pledging faithfulness to Messiah. And it is this condition that Luther and his allies did not want to hear. They wanted to change the good news so that good works and faithfulness by keeping God's law were not part of it.
The effort to locate the full payment for all sin at the cross had led to fruitless debates about limited atonement. Since the PSA doctrine wants to make the cross the literal payment or the effective payment, they tie themselves up in knots trying to convince us that the debt was discharged then only for the elect, but apparently this does not mean the forgiveness granted when a person confesses their sin. But then again, paying a debt ends the debt, and one is entitled to ask based on John 2 that if Messiah is the purging concerning all men then if the whole debt was purged at the cross and not at confession, then why does anyone need to confess?!
So the only logical solution to this conundrum is that PSA is entirely incorrect. Sacrifice does not discharge debt by paying it. Neither does it actually discharge debt. It only teaches the cancelletion of debt and the suffering of the Most High, and the suffering of his creation caused by our sin. Retributive debt is canceled by the Spirit of the Most High in forgiveness whenever the repentant pledges faithfulness to him, and this faithfulness is to be tested, know what is in your heart, whether you will keep his commandments or not. So you see the cross is not a blank check, an automatic entrance pass into the kingdom of God.
No. 33:
Notes
[2] Most often, whenever the church cult, Mystery Babylon, is explaining theories of atonement, the ransom theory they explain is their version of the ransom theory. The Scriptural ransom truth isn't even explained. Their version is a straw man, a caricature, designed to make listeners believe it is odd, weird, or nonsensical. Meanwhile, what is truly meant by our ransom is ignored. What they will say is that the "ransom" theory, as they define it, was a bargain or exchange with Satan whereby Messiah allowed Satan to kill him and Satan agreed to let the sinners he was holding in bondage go. So they teach that the Messiah's death is a formal payment of his life to the Devil. Then they cite some ancient Christian teachers in the past who taught this, as if this is the ransom theory. It is their motive that you will not consider the real ransom truth. After setting up the straw man, they proceed to transform the "ransom" language in Scripture into the idea of a ransom from the wrath of God by means of a penal satisfaction.
The truth is that the ransom represents the lawless cost extorted by sin—our sin. Sin charges its cost by its nature, not by a personal agreement between the Devil and God. In order to rescue and deliver men, Messiah had to enter into the world and endure the attack of sin. He had to sacrifice himself in spirit and in flesh. And the cross is but the climax of this operation. The divine had to come into contact with the unholy to rescue that which was held by sin. Sin and Satan's deception hold men in fear of death. By allowing himself to be killed and then rising from the dead, the Messiah killed this deceptive work of Satan. He also kills the deception that God doesn't suffer from what we suffer from. By suffering, he ransoms us from deception. There are other ways to explain the ransom. One way is that, by his blood, the Messiah purchases us from the nations for God. This is the idea that his blood, representing his spiritual life, breaks the bondage in which we are held by the nations in exile. The nations is another way of saying the domain or kingdom of lawlessness and darkness, where we were exiled when Israel rebelled against the Most High and turned to idols. Messiah's blood is, symbolically speaking, the nourishment that releases us from bondage to sin. So this and other explanations fit the ransom. But the idea that God had an agreement with the devil is fanciful speculation. The devil does not have any legal right to hold onto the faithful once they have repented and been forgiven. And furthermore, it is quite evident that the devil isn't willing to let the faithful go. Like Pharoah of old, he is a liar and a deceiver. As Pharoah had to be forced, so too will Satan have to be forced. Only the raw power of the Most High constrains Satan, or more subtly, the Most High's ability to manipulate Satan into attacking what he allows to be attacked and overlooking what he wants preserved. The ransom theory, as portrayed by the church cult, makes our salvation depend on the devil keeping an agreement to let us go. That is hardly a hopeful basis when Satan is all about lies, deception, and murder. And the fact is, Satan is unwilling to let any of the faithful go.
[3] The translation "over" is a recent update in the GNM, so it may not appear in your edition. The reason for the change is that "on behalf of" is used to mean "for the advantage of." Viewing Messiah as accursed represents the viewpoint of his enemies that he deserved to be cursed, because they thought he was smitten by God. But this was not the case. Messiah was neither smitten by God nor forsaken by God, though he may have felt forsaken. The Psalm goes on to say that he was not forsaken. Messiah became accursed over us. This was part of the ransom price. He was despised and forsaken by men who did not consider that he suffered the injustice in view of showing the power of God in his resurrection. Sin and injustice did what they naturally do, and played right into the hands of the Most High. This was Paul's issue with Messiah's death on the tree. This was his stumbling block, that he considered him accursed of God, until it was shown to him that he was innocent, and that Messiah was allowed to suffer, to pay the cost to defeat Satan's lies. So Paul suffered the sufferings of Messiah going blind for three days until he was restored.