03/02/2026
Some Good Quotes that I Didn’t Get To Last Sunday
I have been working out of Adam Hamilton’s excellent book, Why Did Jesus Have to Die? And when I find something that says what I want to say more succinctly and expressively than I can, I like to quote it. I always want to bring to my congregation the best of what is out there. (And some of you know I also just love quotes). Here are a few quotes that cover a lot of what we talked about this last Sunday. For those who want to take it just a bit further, you’ll enjoy these.
“Did Jesus die in order to placate God’s wrath? Asked another way, Did Jesus die for God? Did Jesus’ death change God’s heart, or did it, rather, reflect God’s heart?” If you think about it long enough this idea makes God the father something of a monster. A lot of our unchurched sisters and brothers—not steeped in the scriptures—will get the idea that God is unwilling to love or forgive without bloodshed.
So Hamilton goes on to quote “Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright, reflecting on the questions raised by penal substitutionary atonement, notes, “We have taken John 3:16, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,’ and what people have heard is that God so hated the world that he killed his only begotten Son.” Needless to say that is not what we want to communicate at all. More importantly it runs absolutely contrary to the life and teaching of Jesus, the living Word of God.
Hamilton goes on: “In moving away from seeing the Crucifixion as a formula or equation, but instead as God’s message to us, Christ’s death is not something God needed in order to forgive us, but something we needed in order to understand and accept that we are forgiven. In seeing the Crucifixion as God’s Word, we see God demonstrating the pain he himself experiences as a result of human sin but also the lengths to which he is willing to go to save us from it.”
Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory is a mouthful, and from my perspective, there are several aspects that don’t hold up to scrutiny. I think it is enough to say that God so loved the world that he would anything to save the world, even giving up his one and only son. The faithfulness of Jesus that ended up leading him to the cross is what shines forth for me and many others who have studied the variety of approaches to understand our salvation. Yes, he is substituted in that he suffered the penalty that should have been ours. But he did it of his own accord and he did it in complete surrender to the purpose and plan for which he was sent into this world in the first place.
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