The Propitiation for Sin

In an ongoing effort to challenge readers of my blog to rethink the whole question of whether or not the cross was a place where the Father of Jesus punished the Son by pouring out anger on Him, I want to bring forward a verse that may suggest something very different from what many have been taught and believed thus far. As regular readers of my blog and listeners to my teachings know, I do not hold the penal substitution view of the work of the cross. In other words, I don't believe that the Father was in any way pouring out anger on Jesus while He was on the cross. To the contrary, the work of the cross was a unified expression of love by our Triune God. The Father was "in Christ" while Jesus was on the cross (see 2 Cor 5:19) and this rescue mission for humanity was accomplished as Jesus offered Himself "through the eternal Spirit." (see Hebrews 9:14) So the whole Godhead was at work in securing our salvation from the death sin brings.

In Romans 3:25, Jesus is referred to as the One,"whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith." The word "propitiation"is a key word in understanding the meaning of the atonement. It is a word that has often been used to indicate an appeasement for sin, in a punitive sense. The English word comes from the Greek hilasterion and is defined as, "relating to an appeasing or expiating, having placating or expiating force, expiatory; a means of appeasing or expiating." Here's the link to the Greek Lexicon online so that you can see the word for yourself: http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/hilasterion.html

At first pause, the word can certainly suggest the sort of act that makes Jesus the recipient of retribution from His Father, especially if our minds are already hardwired to see God the Father as somebody who just had to vent all that anger we have wrongly imagined Him to hold toward us because of our sin.

I suggest, however, that there is another way to see the word "propitiation." Note in the Greek Lexicon that the definition is further expressed as, "a propitiation used of the cover of the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies, which was sprinkled with the blood of the expiatory victim on the annual day of atonement."

Here's where we can interpret the Bible in a way that is consistent with "God is love" as our point of origin in discovering its meaning. Note that this aspect of its meaning refers to the mercy seat that covered the Ark of the Covenant. It was on that mercy seat that the blood of the sacrificial animals was poured out and the efficacy of that blood poured out at that place brought the remission of sins for another year.

So the word "propitiation" is used not only to refer to an expiation in a judicial sense but also to refer to a place - the place where sin was dealt with by the blood of a sacrifice. The Septuagint is a translation in which the Old Testament Scriptures (written in Hebrew) were translated into Greek. When the translators came to the Hebrew word kaporeth (mercy seat), they chose to use the Greek word, hilasterion (propitiation)as the equivalent. So they obviously held the view that propitiation had more to do with the remedial aspect of the sacrifice for sin than it did for any sort of retribution exploding out of an angry Father upon His Son. The propitiation was the place where sin was dealt with. In other words, the cross was the New Covenant substance foreshadowed through the Old Covenant shadow of the mercy seat.

The cross was no more a place where God poured out anger on Jesus that the Mercy Seat was a place where an Old Testament high priest poured out anger on a lamb. Propitiation was remedial, not retributive! The cross was the place of Divine Agape not divine anger! The only anger there that day was the anger of sinful humanity unleashed on Pure Love.

Another interesting aspect of the word hilasterion (propitiation) is that it shares the same family history as the word hilaros. (Think "hilarious"). It refers to a place of Divine Joy, not rage.

The cross of Jesus Christ is the most pure expression of love that has ever or will ever exist. In that place of propitiation, Pure Agape submitted Himself to the ferocity of sinful humanity while at the same time absorbing our sin into Himself so that we would be delivered from its consequence.

Your God isn't angry with you. He never has been. The cross proves that. Religion has smeared His face with mud from the Garden of Guilt after the fall of man, but that false image doesn't negate the reality of who He is at all. "God is Love." Always has been. Always will be.