Theological Term of the Week

sacrifice
Used as a description of the work of Christ on the cross, this is a way of looking at Christ’s death that recalls the Old Testament system of sacrifices in which the blood of animals was shed and offered to make atonement for sin. Viewing Christ’s death as a sacrifice emphasises that it is the fulfillment of the pattern set out by the Old Testament sacrifices and “accomplishes in reality what the old sacrifices pointed to but could not do.”1

• From scripture:
  

  And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 5:2 ESV)

  [Christ] has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:26 ESV)
  

• From The 1689 London Baptist Confession, Chapter 8, Of Christ the Mediator:

  The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself, which he through the eternal Spirit once offered up unto God, hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.

• From The Atonement: It’s Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris:

  No more than any of the other ways of looking at the cross does this one tell us the whole story. But it is an important chapter. It brings out the meaning of the cross in its own distinctive way. We may say that it puts emphasis on these things at least.

  1. Sin is defiling
  In an ancient sanctuary everything was arranged to put emphasis on the holiness of God. Even ceremonial faults were seen as defiling and sin was much more so. Sin stained the worshipper and made him unclean. Sin meant that he was not fit to approach the holy God.

  2. Purification
  When a sacrifice was offered the worshipper was cleansed. Whether it was a ceremonial defilement or a moral lapse, the offering of sacrifice was seen as purging the sin so that the worshipper was now in a state of purification. His sin was completely removed.

  3. The death of the victim counts
  In a sacrifice the blood must be manipulated in prescribed ways and part or all of the animal must be burnt on the altar. All this speaks of the necessity for death, nothing less, if sin is to be put away. Sin is not some trifle, to be airily dismissed with no effort. Sin means death and nothing less suffices to take it away.

  4. Salvation is at a cost
  David showed an insight into the meaning of sacrifice when he said to Araunah, ‘I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offering that cost me nothing’ (2 Sa. 24:24). The use of the terminology of sacrifice means that the way of forgiveness is costly. It is not until we come to the death of Jesus on the cross that we can see the full meaning of costliness. but inherent in the concept is that forgiveness comes only at cost.

  5. Spiritual sacrifices.
  The New Testament writers look for a response to the sacrifice of Christ. The believer must offer himself as a living sacrifice, which certainly means that his whole way of life is to be different because of what Christ has done for him. The sacrifice of Christ means that the way of salvation is free; but it does not mean that it is cheap.

  But the really important thing is that Christ has made the perfect sacrifice, and ‘there is no longer any sacrifice for sin.’

Learn more:

1. J. I. Packer in Concise Theology: Sacrifice: Jesus Christ Made Atonement for Sin (pdf)
2. Shawn M. Hall: The Death of Christ: Fulfillment of the Old Testament Sacrifices
   
3. Michael Lawrence: Biblical Theology: Sacrifice (mp3)

1 The Atonement: It’s Meaning and Significance, Leon Morris, page 63.

Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order

Sunday's Hymn

For a few weeks, I’m going to post some of my own favorite hymns.

Jesus Paid It All

I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

Refrain

Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

For nothing good have I
Whereby Thy grace to claim,
I’ll wash my garments white
In the blood of Calv’ry’s Lamb.

And now complete in Him
My robe His righteousness,
Close sheltered ’neath His side,
I am divinely blest.

Lord, now indeed I find
Thy power and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.

When from my dying bed
My ransomed soul shall rise,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
Shall rend the vaulted skies.

And when before the throne
I stand in Him complete,
I’ll lay my trophies down
All down at Jesus’ feet.

— Elvina M. Hall

Here’s Fernando Ortega’s version of this hymn:

Other hymns, worship songs, sermons etc. posted today:

• Rejoice the Lord Is King at Hiraeth
• O Come, O Come, Emmanuel at Field Stone Cottage
• Lord’s Day 52, 2008 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Through All the Years, May Israel Say at joythruChrist
• The Red Sea Place at The Happy Wonderer
• Of the Father’s Love Begotten at Nova Scotia Scott
• Mighty Christ, from Time Eternal at Whatever Things
• Songs of Thankfulness and Praise at Tapestry of Graces
• The Coventry Carol at Conjubilant With Song
• Your Weekly Dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: A Message for the Last Sunday Night of the Old Year

Have you posted a hymn today and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar and I’ll add your post to the list.

Getting Your Theology on Track

[I wrote this piece on the day after Christmas 2005. I whipped it off on the spur of the moment right before I flew off to Vancouver for a week’s holiday. Yesterday I thought of some things that have happened to friends from the blogworld during the past few months—things that brought the subject of God’s sovereignty over our suffering to mind—and I remembered this post. And because I was thinking of it, I decided to edit it up a bit and post it again.]

Generally speaking, I’m a C. S. Lewis fan. I’m willing to overlook disagreements I have with his theology because of the clarity of his writing. There is, however, a book of his I didn’t like much—A Grief Observed. It was recommended to me as helpful to the Christian who is grieving, so I read it twice after my husband died, but I found it much more disturbing than helpful. Lewis’s wife’s death brought him to a place of real despair, a response to the death of a spouse that I tried to understand, but couldn’t, even though my circumstances were very similar to his. I couldn’t help wondering what his view of God’s relationship to suffering had been if something like his wife’s death could pull the rug out from under his faith.

That’s why I enjoyed reading this post at Triablogue. The whole post is good, but here’s the paragraph that I believe is crucial:

It is important to get your theology on track before disaster strikes. It won’t spare you heartache. But it will spare you gratuitous heartache, and it will hasten the healing process.

In what I believe was God’s providential preparation, in the years right before my husband’s cancer diagnosis, we came to a much fuller understanding of some things about God: that he is working his plan in every bit of the universe all the time; that he has righteous reasons for everything he does, even though we might not—and probably won’t—understand them; and that suffering and death, when they occur, are God’s chosen means to accomplish good things.

When the cancer diagnosis with its grim prognosis was announced, my first thought—really and truly—was, “Aha! We learned all that just so we could go through this.” We had no crisis of faith because we had already come to an understanding of God’s work in the world that included his choices of suffering and death as the best way to accomplish his right and good purposes. I won’t pretend that ours weren’t difficult circumstances, but I will say that we were not unsettled by them. No, they made sense from the get-go, because we already had a theological framework with a cubbyhole for difficult suffering.

I had a friend in Bible college who went on to have a child who was severely handicapped, and then, on top of it all, was horribly burned when his clothes caught fire on a burner in the kitchen. She wrote a book that explained the understanding about God that she and her husband had come to as a result of their child’s suffering. Some of the answers they’d been given when they questioned pastors and relatives about God’s role in their child’s suffering were what I consider to be orthodox and satisfying answers, but they found them unsatisfactory. She wrote that over time, they came to understand that for the most part God simply lets his universe run without intervening. Thinking of God as one who chooses not to interpose himself in affairs of the world was the way out of their crisis of faith. It allowed them to keep loving God and stop seeing him as cruel for not stepping in and keeping their child safe. When I read her book, I kept thinking that this solution to the problem of human suffering was much worse than the solutions they had rejected. How could anyone trust a God with a hands-off policy in his creation?

Someone else who went to the same Bible college and whose family, for a while, attended the same church as ours, became one of the more well-known proponents of open theism. He mentions his brother’s death in a motorcycle accident as one of the things that pushed him toward his belief that God does not know the future choices of human beings and takes the risk that bad things will happen in order to allow for autonomy in his creatures. I have the same question about the open theist’s God: How could I trust him?

Why have I told you these stories? Because these are two examples of people whose crisis of faith following tragedy led them to less-than-orthodox views of God. It sometimes works this way, I think, when people have no firm theology of God’s relationship to human suffering before a crisis strikes. It’s more difficult to come to see God as a God who knowingly works good things through suffering while we’re in the midst of it.

If you’ve already come to love a God who you understand to be purposefully working in all things—even the terribly tragic ones—for his good purposes, then you keep on loving and trusting him when real tragedy strikes you. And more than that: You cling to him as the only sort of God who could be a rock for you in difficult times. That you weren’t spared suffering doesn’t throw you for a loop, because you expected that somewhere, sometime, you would have your share of it as God conforms you to the likeness of his son.

You still suffer, of course, but you suffer knowing that there is meaning in your suffering, something that cannot be there if God is simply creation’s uninterested or unknowing overseer. You still suffer, but you suffer with God as a firm comfort and a source of steadfast hope, for you know that your tragedy, in his hands, is working good things.