The Right Hand of God: the Bible's Deconstruction of Wrath ~ Hebrews 2:14-18

 

Last week we explored Romans 5:9 and wrath as being something that Jesus saves us from and I offered the interpretation, common to our denomination, that “wrath” is not the active, punitive response of an angry God but the natural consequences of our own sinful choices which God allows us to experience. Today were going to hang out once more in the deep end of the Bible and discover that the wrath that Jesus saves us from isn’t only the natural consequence of our sin, which is death, but also the destructive work of the archenemy of God, “who holds the power of death, the devil,” the Destroyer. That’s the meaning of our series image where we see Jesus wearing a chain-gang uniform in a cruciform position moving off the cross and out into the world like words leaping off a page. Jesus’ right hand is turned against the demonic powers that brought him to the cross, while the other is extended to embrace the whole of creation. The right hand with authority halts evil, while the left hand vigorously beckons (I imagine like an unspoken “Come here! You’re free! You’re safe!”) That “right hand” is significant to the writer of Hebrews who also defines Jesus’ work as breaking the authority of the devil “who holds the power of death.”  

To truly understand the role of the Devil developed by Jesus, Paul, the writer of Hebrews, and others, we need to go back to Scripture and notice a retelling of stories which speak of a growing recognition, that begins in the Old Testament and continues into the New Testament, about the Devil whose work, power, and sway over our lives, must be broken. So my first point is that

Our atonement needs a devil: the devil – introduced and revisited.

Throughout the story of the Bible, God is increasingly unveiled as a life-giver rather than a death-dealer. The biblical authors over time become more and more careful to shift blame for terror and destruction away from God towards an enemy of God, Satan, who is at work. A profound example of this shift appears in 2 Samuel 24 when David counts his armies. We read, “Again, the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah’” (2 Sam. 24:1). As David makes his plans, Joab resists and tells David that something is wrong. Don’t’ do it! (vs. 3). But David overrules Joab and takes the census anyway. Immediately David regrets his decision. Though God had supposedly instigated the census, David admits guilt, and says, “I have sinned greatly by what I have done. Lord, I beg you to forgive me, your servant, because I have been very foolish” (vs. 10). Of course a careful reader is forced to ask, “Why is it a sin if the LORD was behind it?” The story is challenging and problematic seemingly recounting an angry God who provokes David to sin and then destroys 70,000 people as punishment. I think that’s crazy and harsh. Do I think so because I’m too sentimental or soft? Maybe. But if you also think it’s troubling, you’re in good company. The author of 1 Chronicles does too! Critiquing the perspective of 2 Samuel, he retells the same story with one enormous difference. Who inspires the census? Is it the LORD? No! The chronicler revisions the story and says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.” (1 Chron. 21:1). While the story continues to raise challenging questions, don’t miss the world-shaking revision of 2 Samuel by the Chronicler to place the blame on Satan NOT God. Centuries later, Jesus, Jesus’ brother James, the Apostles Peter and Paul, and the writer of Hebrews, will confirm this corrective:

Jesus: ¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. ¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

James, the brother of Jesus: “No one should say, ‘God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed (James 1:13-14).

Peter, the Apostle: ⁸ Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8)

The Apostle Paul will also demonstrate this shift of blame away from God towards the devil. For example, in Numbers 16, 21, and 25, the children of Israel rebel against Moses’ leadership, grumble against God, and then conspire with the paganism of Moab. In these stories, the narrator says that plagues of judgment came upon the people, with body-counts in the five-digit range. The author assumes that God sent these plagues. He killed them.

However, in 1 Corinthians 10, reflecting on these same stories, the Apostle Paul, like the author of Chronicles, revisions them:

⁹We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents. ¹⁰nor grumble as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer.

Paul is careful here to distinguish: yes, the people wrongly tested God, but what actually killed them in response to their disobedience and sinfulness where the serpents and “the Destroyer.” Paul’s warning, like the writer of Hebrews, is not like the Johnny Cash song “Great God Almighty’s gonna cut you down.” but that engaging “evil things” opens us up to the intrinsic consequences of sin and a Destroyer who seek to lay waste to our lives. In other words, like the Chronicler who takes wrath that had been attributed to God and attributes it to Satan, Paul does the same. The witness of both Testaments then, as I see it, is: The Devil destroys and God redeems.

I want to take this one step further in order to explain the position that I am making which will help us understand what the writer of Hebrews is doing. The writer of Hebrews looks to be borrowing a line of argument from a text known as the Wisdom of Solomon. It’s a Jewish text, written around the time of Jesus, and appears in the writings of Luke and Paul, and exists in some versions of the Christian Bible, which maintain the Apocrypha: Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Episcopal. The great Reformer Martin Luther is known to have said of this book, “this book . . . deserves to be in everyone’s hands and to be familiar to everyone . . .” Whether or not you think it’s Scripture is beside the point, for it helps frame what I have already shown you – that there is a growing trend that understands violence, wrath, and death, which had been attributed to God, to be the work of the Devil and that God’s servant stands against the Destroyer and his work.

This time it’s a story about Aaron in Number 16:41-49 to which Wisdom 18:20-25 recounts. The story is one of a number of mutiny attempts by the Israelites against Moses and Aaron. The LORD says to Moses, ‘get away from this congregation, so that I may consume them in a moment’. Moses, with a terrific pastoral heart for the people and perhaps a deep concern for what is about to happen, instructs Aaron to step into the space between the LORD and the people “to make atonement . . . for wrath has gone out from the LORD.” Aaron succeeds to some extent, but not before 14,700 people lie dead.

Like the story of 2 Samuel, this is a puzzling story in which Moses and Aaron stand in the breach between God and the nation. I can almost imagine Moses thinking to himself, “Well, LORD, I’m glad I have you on my side to keep this rebellious mob in line, but, ‘Hey, I think you’ve killed enough people today to make your point’”. We have this slightly weird situation where humans seem more compassionate than the LORD. And into that weirdness, the Wisdom of Solomon steps. This is how it retells the same story:

²⁰ The experience of death touched also the righteous, and a plague came upon the multitude in the desert, but the wrath did not long continue. ²¹ For a blameless man was quick to act as their champion; he brought forward the shield of his ministry, prayer and propitiation by incense; he withstood the anger and put an end to the disaster, showing that he was your servant. ²² He conquered the wrath not by strength of body, not by force of arms, but by his word he subdued the avenger, appealing to the oaths and covenants given to our ancestors. ²³ For when the dead had already fallen on one another in heaps, he intervened and held back the wrath, and cut off its way to the living. ²⁴ For on his long robe the whole world was depicted, and the glories of the ancestors were engraved on the four rows of stones, and your majesty was the crown upon his head. ²⁵ To these the destroyer yielded, these he feared; for merely to test the wrath was enough.

Note that in the passage above there is no reference to God being the cause of the plague or the source of wrath, even though the narrator of Numbers says so. Rather, God, through Aaron the high priest, the blameless man, is quite explicitly standing against the mob/plague/death/Destroyer to bring about atonement.

This retelling then becomes a prophetic source for the writer of Hebrews who understands this “blameless man” . . .

·       the champion

·       the conqueror

·       the servant

·       the crowned one

to be Jesus himself defeating the Destroyer, the devil, and making atonement.

And notice the victory:

·       he stayed the wrath (remember Paul in Romans 5:9)

·       he overcame the destroyer

·       he subdued the avenger

All these texts are a part of this growing awareness that there is a cosmic fight going on in which God will defeat the devil as God’s redemptive move to save people.

Atonement breaks the power of the devil. And that’s good news in 13 words.

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. ~ 1 John 3:8b. What was the redemptive story that Jesus was telling and acting out through his ministry and on the cross? He faced off against the Devil and reenacted Israel’s time in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13; Mark 1:12-13).

He talked a fair amount about the Devil and defined his actions as an assault on Satan’s activities (Luke 13:10-17). He believed that Satan was “the prince of this world” (Jn 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) and yet also claimed that he was being dethroned (Luke 10:18). And John goes so far as to claim that the entire world is “under the power of the evil one” (I Jn 5:19). So everything Jesus does was centered on taking back the world that Satan had seized, and liberating people from him (Gen. 1:26-28, cf. 2 Tim. 2:12; Rev. 5:10). Each one of Jesus’ many healings and deliverances were understood to diminish Satan’s hold on the world (Luke 11:20; Matt. 12:28; Luke 10:18). Peter succinctly summarized Jesus’ as: “he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil…” (Acts 10:38).

So Jesus came to destroy the wrath of the devil not save us from the wrath of God. Under the rubric of spiritual warfare, salvation is understood as being liberated “from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will” (2 Tim. 2:26). It is about being “set free from this present evil age” (Gal 1:4) and liberated from our “enslavement to the elemental spirits of the world” (Gal 4:3, cf. Rom 6:18, 8:2; Gal 5:1; Col 2:20; Heb 2:14-15). Indeed, Peter seems to suggest that because of the cosmic significance of what Christ has accomplished, even some who “in former times did not obey” can now be set free (I Pet 3:19-20) and that because Jesus’ took on our full humanity, we can now “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). This is the essential meaning of “salvation” in the New Testament.

Why is that good news? Well – because if you move away from this language of battle and struggle against powers which seek to do us harm the struggle of evil gets foisted upon God. If there’s no battle, no real enemy, then we turn the problem of evil into a problem about God’s goodness and God’s wrath.

This is why we change the lyrics of In Christ Alone and sing a different song – NOT “the wrath of God was satisfied” but “the plan of God was satisfied.” The death of Jesus to satisfy God’s wrath doesn’t make good sense of the ministry of Jesus or of the motif of spiritual warfare. BUT if the plan of God was “to destroy the works of the Devil” then it’s not about God being placated but God winning and that model best incorporates and unites all that Jesus does – healing, exorcism, table fellowship with sinners, under the heading of redemption.

Did Jesus do for us what we cannot do for ourselves? Of course he did. Did he ‘step into the ring” as our substitute? Did he go through the battle royal with Satan, sin and death for us? Sure he did. Did Jesus ‘take a bullet for us’? Yes! The key is to remember, God is not the one holding the smoking gun. The forces of death, wrath, us, and Satan himself, are. And as he bleeds to death, he forgives us and says, “I’ll be back. I am the right hand of the LORD – see you in three days.”

The Cross as the Unwrathing of God ~ Romans 5:6-11

 

Romans 5 is a text that has shaped you whether you recognize it or not. And while I’d love to begin with a clever story or a funny analogy, I simply don’t have time. There’s too much important ground to cover on a topic that demands our careful attention, a wakeful mind, and a willing spirit. Today we are going to confront the question of God’s wrath in the story of the crucifixion and discover 1) that God’s wrath is not central to the story of the cross in the Gospels (the wrath of people is), 2) God’s wrath is not the source of our salvation – it’s God’s love, 3) and finally we’re going to discover how Paul reworks the concept of God’s wrath in a loving way (it's not God's punishment but God giving us the freedom to experience the natural consequences of our sin). There’s a lot to cover. I’m running out of time and yet that’s precisely where Paul will begin.

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Because we often move so quickly to theories about how God saves us from our sins through Jesus, we often dehistoricize the actual story, the “right time” that Paul mentions, and forget that Jesus Christ suffered wrath, violence, rejection, and death at the hands of human beings on the cross. All four Gospels repeatedly reveal scheming, plotting, betrayal, and attempts at actual violence toward Jesus from stranger and friend alike. The church’s earliest preaching of the gospel – the good news of God’s salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – is oddly historically centered and theory free. When the evangelists in the book of Acts went preaching, whether through Peter, Stephen, or Paul, and regardless of audience, they often followed the same basic storyline:

·       God sent Jesus into the world to announce the good news and save us.

·       Jesus was crucified by “wicked men” who “put him to death by nailing him to the cross” (2:23); Stephen will actually use the word “murdered” (7:52)

·       God raised him from the dead.

·       Jesus is Lord and Savior and is making all things new.

·       So turn to Jesus, entrust your life to him.

The crucifixion, in other words, is what actually happened in space-time history with people before it’s ever described in its more cosmic realities. And the earliest preaching was largely devoid of clever theories or analogies. What the early church was not doing, in other words, was offering so much a theory of atonement but a real story, bound in time, in which a flesh and blood Jesus, the messiah, the son of God, gave his life and suffered at the hands of other human beings and rose again. That’s the why the earliest creed of the church outside of Scripture, the Apostles’ creed, states those realities while offering no mention of the mechanics as to how. The cross is history first before it is ever theology or theory. One of the most significant elements of our worship is the recounting and remembering of Jesus’ death as a historical event in the form of communion.

The origin, the purpose, the energy of God’s reconciliation with us, Paul says, is enemy-love.

For Paul, the extent of God’s love is shown by Jesus’ bizarre behavior, humanly speaking. From a human perspective, Paul admits, people have been willing to sacrifice themselves for a loved one, for a child, for a “good person.” But that’s not what God does. No, God willingly dies to demonstrate love toward “enemies,” the irreligious, and sinners. He loves those who cheered and sneered at his death.

“Sinners” here is not merely a statement about the things we have done. Paul is preparing to launch into a full-scale exposition of the state of the cosmos as being enslaved to sin and to death. We are, he says tragically, in vs. 6, “powerless.” “Sinners” are those who are held captive and conscripted against God in the cosmic conflict of good versus evil, of life versus death. For Paul, sin is more than transgressing the law; and demands more than expunging guilt. Sin is a power that enslaves people to be at war with God, to see the God of love as an enemy. Humans caught in sin are like child soldiers who are twisted to fight against their own people. They are captives conscripted to be against God.

However, God’s love was demonstrated, Paul tells us in vs. 8, which literally in the Greek means to “stand with or on,” by dying for enemies in order to make us free from sin (righteous), standing rightly with God (justified), and no longer seeing God as the enemy (reconciled). We are liberated and recruited to God’s side not because God fights back but because God refuses to harm us in return.  We have this peace not because we bravely decided to change sides in this cosmic conflict but because God determined to be at peace with us and love us any way. We get to be in God’s camp, if you will, because Christ has brought us there.

Friends, Paul’s point is not to be missed God is at work in Jesus and God loves us like Jesus. God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness. And God’s own love is demonstrated in God’s willingness to suffer and die at the hands of enemies. So the cross mirrors Jesus’ own teaching about nonviolent resistance to opponents and God’s equitable love toward the evil and the good (Matt. 5:43-48). The cross is the consistent reality of Jesus living out his teachings in the face of human evil and destruction. The life that saves us is the resurrection of the one who lived out the good news of God’s enemy-love even to his own death. In other words, Jesus’ real death, which entailed forgiving enemies, actually explains how and why he died.

On the Cross, we hear Jesus’ teachings about love given voice: “Father, forgive them!” (Luke 23:34). Brad Jersak, a theologian tells the story of a 9-year-old boy named Malachi who once grilled him on this text. He asked, “When Jesus prayed that prayer, do you think the Father answered?” Jersak turned the question on him and Mal concluded, “Yes, I think the Father answered with a yes, because the Father loved Jesus and Jesus always prayed in the will of his Father” (smart kid). He then asked, “Who did Jesus mean by them?” Again, Jersak deflected to Mal, who felt “them” included all the conspirators: the temple authorities and Sanhedrin, the crowds, Pilate and the Roman soldiers, both thieves and even Judas Iscariot. The cross is God in Jesus Christ forgiving and loving all of his enemies. That’s the why.

“the wrath” of . . .?

I want to quickly cut to the chase and ask, “What are we being saved from?” This may seem like a straight-forward question, but it isn’t and we find this struggle and ambiguity in different Christian traditions and the Bible itself, specifically vs. 9 where the NIV states: “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him.” In Romans 5, who is the agent of salvation? Whose love is at work? Who is forgiving and reconciling sinners? God! God is the agent of salvation through Christ. And what is God saving us from? Himself? No. I don’t’ think so. In Romans 5, does God say or even imply, “I love you so much that I will save you from myself?” No, is my answer. But that requires some explanation. What do we do with “wrath”?

First, while it doesn’t necessarily settle the problem, it is incredibly important to know that the word “God” in vs. 9, which modifies “wrath” is not in the Greek text or any Greek text. It’s been added by translators because A. grammatically, “wrath” appears in the genitive case which can imply an “of” though there are other instances where they don’t add it (Matt 3:7; Luke 3:7) B. a more obvious answer is due to a theology which comes out of the Reformation called Penal Substitionary atonement whereby these translators are making a theological assumption that it is God’s wrath that we must be saved from because God’s justice supposedly demands it. Personally, I think that there is enough grammatical evidence to at least imagine that the text says, “God’s wrath” though it is also true that a strong case could be made to translate it as the wrath of human beings or simply leave it as “the wrath.” I’d be in favor of the latter.

But, even if we believed that we should translate the Greek to say, “we will be saved by him from the wrath of God” we must do the interpretive work of understanding what that might mean. Is the “wrath of God” God’s active willingness to, apart from the death of Jesus, bring about our death for the sake of justice? This question is important for it’s asking, “What are we being saved from?” To this we must look at how Paul uses and reinterprets the concept of the “wrath of God.” [This could be a whole sermon in and of itself so I will focus on one main point]. The phrase appears over two hundred times in most English translations of the Bible. Paul himself is tapping into a growing Jewish reconstruction of the concept at the time and will use the term often metaphorically to reflect God’s willingness to allow for the natural consequences of our sinful choices. That is, God’s wrath is a metaphor for God allowing us to resist him for a time and the unfortunate consequences and fall out of those actions. Earlier in Romans 1 (1:24, 1:26-28; see also Isaiah 64:7), Paul will signal this reality three times by defining “wrath” as God “giving over” (God consenting to) rebellious people to their own self-destructive trajectories – even when our actions create collateral damage on others. So God’s wrath functions as the intrinsic consequences of our refusal to live in the mercies of God. The wrath of God might be illustrated by the metaphor of the addicted, chain smoker who eventually suffers from breathing trouble, followed by lung cancer but then, to his own horror, discovers that his non-smoking spouse also has lung cancer from second-hand smoke. Are these realities punishments of an angry God, is God giving just-desserts, or is this the painfully tragic reality of God offering the dignity of human freedom even with painful consequences? It’s not God’s punishment, it’s the reality of freedom in a sin-soaked world which God himself will suffer for the sake of enemies, remember?

SO we are not to infer that Jesus is saving us from God the Father, but freeing us from the ultimate wrath of the natural consequences of our sin, which are enslavement and death. In the very next chapter, Paul himself will once again make that plain when he clearly states: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our LORD” (Romans 6:23).

So what is Paul saying?

Who is rescuing us? God

What does God rescue us from? The wages (or consequences) of our sin.

What consequences does God rescue us from? Death

What don’t we receive from God? We do not receive the wages or consequences of sin from God.

What do we receive from God? We receive a free gift.

What free gift do we receive? Salvation. Justification. Reconciliation. Eternal Life

How? Through Jesus Christ

Paul is not envisioning a good cop / bad cop scenario. Jesus is not the nice guy, staying the angry hand of his dad. When Paul says that God saved us from “the wrath” (Rom. 5:9), he is speaking of the natural consequences of our sin which is death. This is “the wrath” that God in Christ saves us from.

“Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, “and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” (Heb. 2:14-15)

Why did Jesus die? Because of our wrath. And in the face of that wrath, we see the face of God—the final revelation and decisive act of God to love enemies. And friends, listen to Paul, look at the cross, and receive the insane, illogical, love of God that saves us from the wrath – the consequences of our own sinful choices our enslavement, our death. The Apostle Paul is inviting you celebrate and boast about the unwrathing of God.