Killed because of our Satan-manipulated sins..Raised because of our actual innocence!

I love this from facebook..

Stephen Burns

"The nuances and shifting of language seem to have diluted the message about what the resurrection of Jesus Christ is all about. You are righteous! Now discover your righteousness!

"He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised BECAUSE of our justification" - Romans 4:25

"Who was delivered up because of our offences, and was raised up BECAUSE of our being declared righteous" - Romans 4:25 YLT

Here's my "Berean" note. I included two versions that translate the verse correctly from the Greek. One is in the New American Standard Bible. The other is the Young's Literal Translation. The majority of verses render the resurrection as happening "for our justification". But the same Greek preposition (dia) is used in conveying the idea of Jesus being given "because of our transgressions" as is used to express that is was also BECAUSE of our justification that he was raised to life! The use of the preposition "dia" actually means "on account of" or "by reason of". So you can hear this more precisely expressed as the resurrection of Jesus actually having happened ON ACCOUNT OF and BY REASON OF your being found righteous by God!"

Why did Jesus die?   Because of our sins - in other words, Jesus died because we did the wrong thing and slandered, wrongly condemned, abused and killed Him.. And why did Jesus rise?  Because God found us innocent of any crime!  Jesus Himself pointed that out on the cross, that the stance of the Godhead concerning our crucifixion of the Son was that 'they don't know what they're doing.'  Wow!

Jesus rose to prove to us that God didn't believe we did any wrong!  He knew we were misguided, hurt, lied to, blind and confused..trapped in the lies we'd heard all through our lives/human history - the lie that God doesn't love us, that we are bad, that we are misshapen, broken, inadequate and 'not enough,' that we must prove ourselves to God or else be punished, that God rejected and abandoned us, that we are on our own and must measure up to a standard in order to be 'ok' in ourselves and before God, the relationship with God must be earned and merited, that we are 'wrong' and innately sinful..and we seemed to prove all this by being so rebellious in our actions, so angry and bitter against God, so mistrusting and withdrawn and suspicious, so hateful in our acts toward Him, even to the point of murdering Him!  Yet God proved otherwise.  He did not call us out, punish or condemn us, or even call us sinners!  Instead He brought Jesus back from the dead without a word of reproof, without a bit of anger or 'righteous indignation,'  without a bit of retaliatory or retributive 'justice' in His ways towards us!

It was almost like He was saying, oh, you little children didn't know what you were doing when you killed my Son.  So I am going to make it all better, take responsibility for your confused and misguided acts; I am going to clean up this mess and make it like it never even happened - for I am just going to pop my Son back up in life again.  Haha!  Infected with such a love demonstrated and proved to us by such an act of the loving Dad, we can't help but live abundantly and freely with Him forever!  Eden revisited and more!

So He died because we went and killed Him in our Satanic delusion (trapped as we were by Satan's lies...so that we weren't in control of our acts but were slaves to this confusion he put on us by lying to us), and yet..
And yet He rose because God knew that we were actually innocent of any wrong and was proving that!

Satan tried to convince us we were guilty and unloved by getting us to lash out in our confusion and angst and kill the Son of God..
But God popped Jesus back up to life, erasing the crime!  No body, no murder to convict or punish us of!  God showing He knew we were innocent all along!

He has only ever seen you, me and everyone as His beloved children, in whom He is well pleased!  How could the perfect Father ever see His children as anything less than perfect - pure, sweet, lovely and innocent?  How could the One who is Pure Love (undiluted love, love without any mixture of anything else!) ever have any other stance towards us than complete love, acceptance, joy and delight?  How could we, made in His perfect and pure Love Image, ever be anything BUT pure Love at our core?  The cross proves His Love, and the resurrection proves our Innocence, bathed as we are in that same Love, made as we are of that very BEING of Pure Love!   We're Pure Love just like our Daddy!  Thank You, Papa for showing us that - who You are and who we are - through the cross and resurrection!

Ponderings on His Loving Ways

How wonderful to think how beautiful God is in His LOVEliness!

God is vulnerable and we can be too..for we are truly loving by nature just as He is, made in His image as we are!  Like Father, like children!

We are not bad or selfish but need to get rid of the idea that we are..once we see ourselves as beloved apart from our actions, and as good apart from our thoughts and feelings and behaviors, we feel safe and can afford to let others misunderstand or defame us, and we find ourselves freed up to love others instead of trying to get love..

For we know we are loved, safe and "good eggs"..one with God who is vulnerable and generous Love..so that frees us up to finally be ourselves, for we are vulnerable and generous Love as well..

It's not the Real, True Self (spirit) that needs to 'go down' and 'be humbled' or whatever, it's the false ideas of ourselves that need to die out, and they automatically do in the light of God's truth dawning upon us..

And so often we can only really see and dare to believe this truth when it's demonstrated just after a massive fail!

I truly feel He doesn't orchestrate such failures or difficult times, and they are not 'punishment from God' or anything like that!  He is simply amazing enough to bring something beautiful out of those moments of 'wipeout' ..beauty for ashes..He is able to take the worst things we do and turn them something more beautiful than we could ever imagine!  Men may concoct a crucifixion, but God is in the business of resurrection!  As Robert Capon says, the worst we can be is dead, but since He is the Resurrection and the Life, that makes us just His cup of tea!

So we find the 'lean times' or 'desert wanderings' are not the wasted or squandered times but instead the stuff from which He makes beautiful miracles in our hearts, times when we see into eternity and catch a glimpse of His love more beautiful than we'd ever seen before!

For if He loves us and sees us as innocent and good THEN, at what we think of as 'our worst moments,' then He ALWAYS sees us innocent, beloved and good and it must actually BE TRUE that we really ARE the innocent, good, beloved, loving creatures He says we are!

To me, this is the message of the cross and resurrection..that even when we did the worst thing we could do and killed His Son, He simply absorbed all our 'wrath' and called us innocent, taking care of our crime by even removing the evidence of it - the body itself - by raising His Son back to life without a word of anger against us, without a single reproach, simply holding out His hands to embrace us and give us the full experience of His love and life that has always been our birthright as His created children!  THAT is true acceptance, THAT is eternal security, THAT is unconditional Love, THAT is truly good news!

The cross and resurrection shouts out that good news of unconditional love, and it truly seems to hit home for us personally at those moments of massive fail..when we find He hasn't left us at all but is still there, loving us, caressing us, blessing us, carrying us along..and at that moment the truth dawns upon us in a new way..that He really isn't going to leave us, no matter what we do..GRACE..it's true!  He really IS all grace and love and not a bit of law or judgment!

The lying voices die away and the intense need to prove our right-ness melts off like fog before the morning sun, and the intense cravings for love, now satisfied, turn into quiet contentment simply to BE as we are, to enjoy both God and life, to enjoy both love and loving, seeing we are wrapped in such a LOVE that defies description!!

I feel this is the most beautiful and profound experience in the world, to find out how deeply we are loved and how purely and absolutely God's nature IS that very love!

What Happened Through the Cross Was for Us, not for God!

The cross is so powerful..I feel I am seeing its meaning in new ways and uncovering layers of truth not fully experienced before.  This article is so great and I want to ponder the thoughts written here more and more.  Just wanted to share this article with you all:  

 

Jesus Died for Us ... Not for God - Brian Zahnd

“You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” –The Apostle Peter, Acts 3:15

Golgotha is where the great crimes of humanity — pride, rivalry, blame, violence, domination, war, and empire — are dragged into the searing light of divine judgment [this word threw me off a bit - I think I would have said that humanity's ways were put in the light of divine truth, juxtaposed against the truth of Love and thus shown to be terrible and not God-like at all..this makes me realize that it isn't accurate to see the cross as God's violence, blame, domination and war against His Son or us!  WE were the violent ones who killed the beloved one of the Father...] At Golgotha we see the system of human organization that we blithely call “civilization” for what it is: an axis of power enforced by violence so corrupt that it is capable of murdering God in the name of what we call truth, justice, and liberty.

Golgotha is also the place where the love of God achieves its greatest expression. As Jesus is lynched in the name of religious truth and imperial justice he expresses the heart of God as he pleads for the pardon of his executioners. At the cross we discover that the God revealed in Christ would rather die in the name of love than kill in the name of freedom. Our savior is Jesus Christ, not William Wallace.

The cross is both hideous and glorious, simultaneously ugly and beautiful. It’s as hideous as human sin and as glorious as divine love. It is a collision of sin and grace. But it is not a contest of equals. In the end love and beauty win. We call it Easter.

What the cross is not is a quid pro quo where God agrees to forgive upon receipt of his Son’s murder. What the cross is not is an economic transaction whereby God gains the capital to forgive. These legal and fiscal models for understanding the cross simply will not do.

Jesus does not save us from God, Jesus reveals God as savior. What is revealed on Good Friday is not a monstrous deity requiring a virgin to be thrown into a volcano or a firstborn son to be nailed to a tree. What is revealed on Good Friday is the depths of human depravity and the greater depths of God’s love.

Before the cross is anything else, it is a catastrophe. It is the unjust and violent lynching of an innocent man. It is the murder of God. Jesus is sacrificed by the Father only in this sense: The Father sent his Son into our system of violent power (civilization) to reveal how utterly sinful it is — so sinful that it will murder the Innocent One. God did not will the murder of his Son, he simply knew it would occur. But even Plato knew that. In imagining what would happen to a perfectly just man in our unjust world, Plato said, “our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered…and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified.” (The Republic, Book II, p. 37) Plato wrote that three centuries before Christ. God knew what Plato knew. For Jesus to proclaim and inaugurate the kingdom of God in the midst of our unjust and violent world would require a supreme sacrifice.

The death of Jesus was a sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice to end sacrificing, not a sacrifice to appease an angry god. It was not God who required the sacrifice of Jesus, it was human civilization. A system built upon violent power cannot tolerate the presence of one who owes it nothing. The sacrifice of Jesus was necessary to convince us to quit producing sacrificial victims; it was not necessary to convince God to forgive. When Jesus prays for forgiveness on the cross he was not acting contrary to the nature of God, he was revealing the nature of God as forgiving love.

Think of it this way: Where do we find God on Good Friday? Is God found in Caiaphas seeking a sacrificial scapegoat? Is God found in Pilate requiring a punitive execution? Or is God found in Jesus, absorbing sin and responding with forgiveness?

The Apostle Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. (2 Corinthians 5:19) And this should not be misread as God reconciling himself to the world…as some mistaken atonement theories do! Jesus died for us…not for God.

The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive, the crucifixion is what God in Christ endures as he forgives. The cross is where God absorbs sin and recycles it into forgiveness.

The crucifixion is not the ultimate attempt to change God’s mind about us — the cross is the ultimate attempt to change our mind about God. God is not like Caiaphas seeking a sacrifice. God is not like Pilate requiring an execution. God is like Jesus, absorbing sin and forgiving sinners.

The cross is not about payment, the cross is about forgiveness.

Good Friday is not about divine wrath, Good Friday is about divine love.

Calvary is not where we see how just God is, Calvary is where we see how unjust civilization is.

As long as we think Jesus died for God instead of dying for us, we will never see the sinfulness of human civilization and the beauty of the divine alternative: the kingdom of God.

The justice of God is not retributive justice. In the end retributive justice changes nothing. The justice of God is entirely restorative. The only thing God will call justice is setting the world right, not punishing the innocent. (Our sense of retributive justice is derived from the fact that we are more punished by our sins than for our sins.)

[These thoughts are so powerful to me..the Father wasn't the ogre demanding a sacrifice in order to appease His anger..He was forgiveness and love the whole time..He was the one taking the worst thing that ever happened - that we would kill God! - and turning it into the best thing ever - God calling us all innocent and ending the strife inside us once and for all - the need to sacrifice, the anxiety that we must 'do' something to get His love - for we see at the cross that we ALREADY had His love and have had it all along, can't lose it!  We know now His love and grace and acceptance are ours forever because they remained even when we did the worst thing we could possibly do by killing His Son..if He loved us, claimed us, embraced us even THEN, He loves, claims us, embraces us forever!]

 

The bottom line is this: God did not kill Jesus, human civilization did. We did. Jesus absorbed the blow in love and forgave us. The Father vindicated his Son on Easter. Now Jesus calls us to follow him into the kingdom of grace, the kingdom of love, the kingdom of God.

Let us follow the Lamb.

BZ

(The artwork is Golgotha by Edvard Munch, 1900.)

The post Jesus Died for Us…Not for God appeared first on Brian Zahnd.

Wow!  The cross wasn't ever about a 'payment' for sin, was it?  It was always about God showing us, in such extreme love and grace, that a payment was never needed!  Real Love never makes people 'pay!'  

The cross is not another chapter in the book of religion but is the end of religion, God slamming the book shut forever!  

God didn't need the cross to be 'okay' with us..we needed it to be 'okay' with ourselves and finally see that we really are worthy to be loved, valued beyond imagination..

Wow, we really are 'to die for,' aren't we?  

We really are His very own beloved children in whom He is well pleased!  How could any good father say anything less than this about His own dear children!  

What a relief to know that the cross wasn't something God demanded and did so He could put a judgmental, wrathful spotlight on our sin but was something we did (in confusion and pain, not seeing we were loved) that was turned around and used by God to put a bright heavenly spotlight on LOVE!  

What a Love!  This is a love beyond anything we could ever dream, a love that is strong enough to truly banish every fear and heal every hurt in the human heart!