Semi-Random Musings (37)

After almost eleven years and nearly 4,000 posts, my closest friends are getting a little warier about our conversations and emails, suspicious that almost anything interesting they may introduce in conversation will probably end up on the blog in some form or another. That’s not entirely true — I try to respect people’s privacy. If you’re just spitballing a theological idea with me by text or email, I won’t quote you on it, and I certainly wouldn’t use your name. You may change your mind about it next week, after all.

That said, if you’ve refined your thoughts sufficiently to voice them from the platform or put them up online, it’s game on. Maybe my pals are right to be cautious!

Yesterday, two friends and I had an extended email back-and-forth that started by inquiring into the cruelty exhibited in the lead-up to the cross. Did men go beyond the requirements of prophetic scripture — the beard plucking, the spitting, the mockery and so on — and in doing so “further the disaster”, to nick a phrase from Zechariah, increasing God’s anger beyond what might otherwise have been? The ensuing discussion provoked so many different lines of thought that there was no real way to work through them all or order them logically, but that’s not what this series is for, so let’s have at it.

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Thought #1: On Preferences and Purposes. We need to distinguish the preferences of God from the purposes of God. Readers who cannot make this distinction are encouraged to jump off here. It is, for example, not God’s wish that any should perish. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. It is not his preference to cast rebels out of his presence for eternity; he would prefer they be reconciled to him. However, in the sovereign purposes of God, those who refuse to turn from their wicked ways and live are fated for the lake of fire. There is simply nothing else to be done with them that would not be an eternal violation of God’s holiness and justice, not to mention their own desires.

With respect to the cross, it was necessary in order to accomplish the purposes of God that a spotless Lamb give his life to take away the sin of the world. At the same time, it was not at all the Father’s wish or desire to subject his beloved Son to the variety of abuses inflicted by of an out-of-control mob. We should not let the poetic language of the KJV (“it pleased the Lord to bruise him”) lead us to think the Father was gleefully rubbing his hands together as he viewed the events of those awful hours. The troubled dream of Pilate’s wife; the Lord’s admonition to the mourners not to weep for him but to weep for themselves; the darkness mid-afternoon; the earthquake; the rending of the temple veil; the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD70; the scattering of the Jewish people for most of the last two millennia — all these testify to the immense displeasure of the Father as he surveyed that tableau. I strongly suggest we ought to take that word “pleased” in Isaiah 53 in its legal sense, not its literal sense. If God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, surely he takes even less in the death of the innocent, let alone in the unique Son in whom he was, and remains, “well pleased”.

So then, God always gets everything he purposes, but it is a testimony to his great grace that he does not always get everything he would prefer. That is not a denial of his sovereignty. It is simply a reminder that in the sacrifice of Christ, the Father too made a sacrifice, withholding the full display of his wrath against a future day.

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Thought #2: On the Fulfillment of Prophecy. John gives us a fine example of the conscious fulfillment of prophecy when he writes, “Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’ ” That said, the vast majority of those who fulfilled prophecy before and after the cross did so inadvertently. Judas, for example, experienced great remorse when it dawned on him that “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” That the Lord’s innocence had never before so impressed him in three years of traveling with him every day is a remarkable testament to the blindness that afflicted Judas. But he is typical of men who fulfill prophecy in spite of themselves.

If we think about the predictive component of prophecy as miraculous insight into the future, this makes perfect sense. The Lord Jesus apart, prophetic fulfillment is not people pantomiming out what they read in the Old Testament, it’s the thing coming to pass which the prophets foresaw or foreknew in spite of all the contrary efforts of the principalities and powers opposed to God’s will. How, then, is it possible to take “too far” or to be too enthusiastic in fulfilling the revealed will of God? Those who fulfilled the Lord’s will were acting in ignorance, blind to their role in Bible history. If they had understood and correctly applied what they read in the Prophets, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”. The Jews, their rulers, Pilate, Herod, the Roman soldiers … none of them were acting under orders and none of them thought of themselves as engaged in fulfilling scripture except the Lord Jesus.

How, then, is it possible to “further a disaster” which God so thoroughly and comprehensively foreknew? Every drop of spit, every taunt, every wicked thought, every blow, every thorn, every nail … all was anticipated, and most of it was explicitly foretold.

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Thought #3: On Commanding versus Desiring. Somewhere along the line, we got into the question of Abraham and Isaac. God commanded Abraham to offer up his son Isaac as a burnt offering. Had Abraham physically abused Isaac in the process of getting him to the altar, we might reasonably say he had gone “too far”. Obedience to the command is one thing, excessive cruelty another. This took us to the so-called Euthyphro dilemma (Is something good/bad because God says it is, or is it good/bad in essence?), which, as one correspondent pointed out, William Lane Craig resolves by affirming that “good” and “what God commands” are identical with God’s nature and character. There is no real dilemma.

I think he’s right about that last part, but that we ought to amend his solution a bit. The problem with it is that sometimes God commands things he does not actually desire (like sacrificing a child), or suggests solutions to problems that he does not intend to implement (like destroying Israel and restarting the nation through Moses). God says things he doesn’t mean for the benefit of the person he is addressing, for the benefit of those who read these stories thousands of years later, and for everyone in between. He is looking to reveal his true character to men, so he puts them in situations where they must jump into the deep end, test who he is, and learn for themselves.

So then, “good” and “what God actually desires” are identical with God’s nature and character. Any given command may or may not be. It’s pointless to debate the question of whether Abraham would have been right or wrong to follow through on God’s command to sacrifice Isaac (let alone rough him up in the process!) because it never came to that, and it couldn’t possibly have come to that. God does not desire human sacrifice. It’s against his nature.

And yes, that’s why I hate debating hypotheticals.