Category Archives: Propitiation

Was ‘the wrath of God satisfied’ on the cross?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

‘In Christ alone’ (Stuart Townend and Keith Getty) is a fine Christian song.

But what about the words that stick in the throats of many:-

Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.

Please don’t tell me you won’t sing these words because you unwilling to think or speak of God’s wrath, and wish to sing only of his love.  The song as a whole does a great job in exploring the various dimensions of Christ’s death and resurrection. …

The driving force in Jesus’ life

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Sit down (suggests J.I. Packer, in his celebrated book Knowing God) and read through Mark’s Gospel, and you will receive an impression of Jesus that includes at least the following four features:-

1. Jesus was a man of action.  He was ‘a man always on the move, always altering situations and precipitating things—working miracles; calling and training disciples; upsetting error that passed as truth and irreligion that passed as godliness; and finally walking straight and open–eyed into betrayal, condemnation and crucifixion (a freakish sequence of anomalies which in the oddest way one is made to feel that he himself controlled all along the line),’

2.  …

Propitiation

Walking With Giants Posted on by

How did the cross of Christ achieve its purpose?  In what ways did his death and resurrection usher in ‘the day of salvation’ (2 Cor 6:2)?

Just as several pictures, or metaphors, are needed to fill out the meaning of ‘church’ (bride, temple, household, and so on), so several are required to illustrate the salvation that Christ achieved.  Chief among these are the terms ‘propitiation’, ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, and ‘reconciliation’.  It is important to realise that these images are complementary to one another, for underlying them all is ‘the truth that God in Christ has borne our sin and died our death to set us free from sin’. …