Propitiation by His Blood

Father in heaven, we think of the words that we have just sung. Jesus, thank you. We give thanks for your Son, for your initiative and purpose – that you so loved the world, you loved sinners, you loved the people of your own choosing – that you sent your only begotten Son to die for us, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, should not know your wrath, but have eternal life. Having given us grace upon grace, we ask once again that you would give us more grace, that we may hear from you in your Word. In Jesus we pray. Amen.

One verse this morning – only half a verse, actually – Romans chapter 3, the first half of verse 25. Turn there in your Bibles, and I will begin reading at the end of verse 22, where in English we have the beginning of the sentence. Beginning at the end of verse 22 of Romans chapter 3:

“For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.”

Here’s a thought experiment for you. How would you summarize the entire message of the New Testament in one sentence? In fact, that’s too easy. Let’s make it more difficult. Not one sentence, because you could have semicolons and various subordinate clauses. How would you summarize the entire message of the New Testament in three words? What if you had just three words? In his book Knowing God – all of you should read that – in his book Knowing God, J.I. Packer famously gave his response to this thought experiment. Now, it’s not the only correct response, but it is J.I. Packer, so it’s a pretty good one: “Adoption through propitiation.” Those were his three words. Adoption through propitiation. “I do not expect ever to meet,” Packer wrote, “a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.” Adoption (God the Father welcoming strangers and aliens into his family as his children) through propitiation (the turning away of divine wrath by the sin-bearing substitutionary sacrifice of God’s own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.) Adoption through propitiation. It’s the last of those three words, you can tell, that is the theme of this morning’s message and verse 25. We are walking slowly through these verses, about one sermon for each verse, because these are some of the most important verses in the Bible. Many people, in fact – preachers and commentators – have suggested that this paragraph from 21-26 is the most important paragraph in all the Bible and therefore some of the most important sentences that you can ever come to grasp. Whatever you’ve been following in your life, whatever reel, whatever Tik Tok video, whatever thing you want to binge watch (oh, I heard football is back), this is more important – this paragraph. We have seen already some of these words: glory, redemption. We will come again to justification and faith and this morning, propitiation.

Let me make a little parenthetical aside here. If you ever go to find a new church, and many of you will – you’ll grow up, you’ll go to college, you’ll get a job, you’ll move away; or your job will take you somewhere else; or you’ll move to a different part of town; any number of reasons – you may find a different church than Christ Covenant. Now, we do things a certain way here, and I’d like to think that we have good reasons for doing the things that we do, but praise God, we’re not the only good church in the world. We’re not the only good church on our street. There’s lots of other good, faithful gospel churches. But have this as a question in your head when you someday are looking for a different church. Ask, “Would anyone in this church ever talk to me about what words like propitiation mean?” Would a pastor or someone care enough about theology and about the careful definition of words to tell you about propitiation? Some of you know this word already. Some of you – “I remember when the first time I heard this.” Others may be encountering it for the first time. I hope you will find a church if it’s not this someday where people care enough about the truth of God’s Word that someone will teach you. If you’re at a church and you think, “Well, the youth group’s good, the music is exciting, there’s a lot of good things they’re doing in the community, and no one would ever care to teach you about words like propitiation, see if there’s a different church. Close parenthesis.

I have five questions this morning. Question number one: what does the word mean? Question number two: is it the right word here in verse 25? That has to do with translation. Question three: by what means was this act of propitiation accomplished? Question four: how are the benefits of this action, this accomplishment, to be received? And question five: who purposed this act of propitiation? We will spend most of our time on question two and then question five.

So, question number one, here’s where we need to start. What does this word mean? Well, I’ve already given a simple gloss. Here’s another way to put it: propitiation refers to the pacifying, placating or appeasing of God’s wrath. It refers to the turning away of God’s anger – how God is propitious toward us. You may have heard me say before, the simple way to remember this: propitiation is about how the God of love is allowed to be pro-us. How does a holy God who loves us and is just, how can he be pro-us? So, you just see that first part of the word propitiation and think about how can a holy God be pro-us? And this is part of what Paul is getting at with redemption and propitiation to come to the second half next week. Verse 25 and verse 26. How can this God, as righteous as he is, as holy as he is, be just and the justifier of the ungodly? No one thinks that it is a good judge who looks at someone who is absolutely guilty and says, “But I like you. You can go free.” How can God do this? How can he do such a thing to let guilty people be free? Redemption in propitiation – the answer to that question about justifying the ungodly. Propitiation is a relational word. It entails three things: someone who is offended, someone who has committed an offense, and a means of making atonement for that offense and for that offender. So, you see those three things? It’s very simple. There is in propitiation someone or some party offended, someone who has offended, and then some means of a gift or an offering or an atonement by which the offended party is reconciled to the one that he or she has offended. So that’s the first question.

Here’s the second question, and this will take more of our time. Look at verse 25. Hope you have your Bible open. Second question: is this the right word here in verse 25? This is a question of translation, and there is a long, controversial history about verse 25. You read in the ESV “whom God put forward as a propitiation.” I’m going to give you a Greek word – it’s okay most of you haven’t had Greek – just to tell you what the word is: hilasterion. You might transliterate it H I L A S T E R I O N if you are really, really intense about your note-keeping. Hilasterion. It is translated variously in different English translations. For example, you see in the ESV it’s translated “propitiation.” Same in the Christian Standard Bible, in the New American Standard Bible, and in the King James Version – all have propitiation. Other translations – I’ll explain why in a moment – have the word “expiation.” The RSV (that is the Revised Standard Version), or the NAB (the New American Bible), or the Revised English Bible have expiation. And then other translations have “sacrifice of atonement.” The New Revised Standard Version has that. The NIV has sacrifice of atonement. So, this word is translated in a number of different ways in our English translations. William Tyndale, that pioneering translator of the Bible into English, translated hilasterion as “mercy seat.” What is the mercy seat? The mercy seat in the Old Testament was the name given to the lid that covered the ark of the covenant. It was the seat. It was called a seat because it was the place, once a year in particular, when the high priest would enter into the Holy of Holies, and the glory cloud would descend, and God’s presence would be there, and the high priest would sprinkle blood all around the mercy seat – that lid. I hate to get you thinking about Raiders of the Lost Ark, but there you got a picture in your mind of what this looks like, minus the melting faces. You have the angels there with their wings extended, this gold-plated box in which you have the Ten Commandments and Aaron’s staff. The mercy seat. This is the word used throughout the Old Testament – hilasterion in the Greek translation from the Hebrew – in 21 of the 27 occurrences, it uses this word. Mercy seat. And there is one other instance of this exact word. Now, there’s a group of words like this – this hilasmos word group – but this exact rendering, hilasterion, there’s one other usage in the New Testament in Hebrews 9:5, and there it is translated as mercy seat.

So, there are reasons why Tyndale and others have thought that the reference here is to the mercy seat, that covering on the ark of the covenant. And it’s true the theology of the mercy seat and what takes place in the day of atonement is critical in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And you say, “Well, then why don’t we see that in our English Bible?” Well, there are some reasons to think that though this may be an allusion or this concept may be in Paul’s mind somewhere, that this is not the best way to translate the word here. For starters, the Hebrew word is not always translated with this word hilasterion in the Old Testament, and that word is used of other objects. So, all that to say, it’s not a one-to-one correspondence that every time one word equals the other in the Old Testament. Perhaps most critically why we don’t translate it – the ESV doesn’t – with mercy seat is because those instances in the Old Testament where we have now in English “mercy seat” have the definite article. So, an indefinite to show a noun’s indefiniteness – we have an “a” or “an” in English. Definite, meaning “that one,” we have “the.” So, the definite article. There’s no definite article here to say the mercy seat. There is the other instance in Hebrews 9:5 has the definite article, so that seems to be an indicator that we’re not talking about a theological concept but about a particular item, the mercy seat. It would also be a little confusing, though Paul likes to heap up metaphors – it would be a little confusing to think about, as he’s going to say, propitiation by his blood if we translate it as the mercy seat. So then, Christ is the mercy seat upon which the blood is sprinkled, and the blood is also his own blood upon the mercy seat himself. It gets a little complicated. And if we look in Hebrews chapter 9, we’ll see that the context there makes very plain that it must be talking about this Levitical item, because in Hebrews chapter 9 “most holy place” is mentioned, Aaron is mentioned, the curtain, the tablets of the covenant, the tabernacle. The context in Hebrews is clearly taking us back into this world of Leviticus and the various utensils and artifacts there in the temple and the tabernacle. So, there it is the mercy seat. We are not in the same conceptual world here in Romans chapter 3.

Now, even though the word is not translated mercy seat, it still is a helpful word picture to have in mind. Carries forward the idea of the day of atonement. But by itself, if it were to say in your Bible, the mercy seat, you’d still be left with the question, now what does that mean? What is accomplished? What sort of atoning work is accomplished on the mercy seat? Well, there’s another word. It’s the word expiation. Expiation refers to the removal of sin. Think of that word ex – E X. Expiation is like the exit strategy for sin. The expunging of sin and guilt. Expiation refers to how God covers our sin or takes away our sin. It’s a moral term instead of a relational term. Now, both expiation and propitiation are biblical words. So don’t hear – I’m going to argue why we don’t translate it expiation, but don’t hear me say, “Oh, we don’t believe that” – no, we absolutely believe that. That’s a very important part of Christ’s atoning work. But there was a specific reason why some wanted to translate this word with expiation instead of propitiation. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a British New Testament scholar named C.H. Dodd. If you’re going to be a New Testament scholar, it just helps – you just got to give just your first initials. N.T., C.S., J.I. It just fits. C.H. Dodd. And he argued that the word here should be expiation. Now, the Bible certainly teaches that Christ’s death was an expiation for sin, but there was a reason that God didn’t like the King James Version with propitiation. His argument was linguistic, but more than that, he was driven by theology. He believed the idea of placating God’s wrath was not befitting the God of the Bible. He argued that’s what pagans do. That’s what we see in pagan literature. This whole idea that there’s a God who is angry with sin and angry with sinners, and does he need to be bought off with some sort of bribe? He thought this whole idea of propitiation was not befitting the God of the Bible, to describe with this kind of wrath and many people were happy to accept his arguments and his conclusions. His views were influential in several mid-century Bible translations, including the Revised Standard Version.

So, giving you more than you wanted to know about Bible translation history, but maybe this will be helpful. King James Version 1611. Wonderful translation of the Bible. Some of you may still use it. Many of you grew up on it. It’s elegant. It’s beautiful. It’s based on what turns out to be some less-reliable manuscripts, and some of the language we don’t speak anymore, but it’s still a faithful, beautiful translation. The Revised Standard Version in 1952 was a revision of the King James Version, and that RSV is for the most part a good translation, except that there were a few elements that showed some liberalizing tendencies that really had more to do with theological commitments than just a new idea of what these words meant. So, one of these was the removal of this language of propitiation, influenced by Dodd and others who thought, we don’t want this idea of God’s wrath having to be turned away. And most famously, or infamously, in the RSV, it changed from the King James Isaiah 7:14, the promise that “the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us” – they changed the word virgin to young woman. Now, you can see how someone who’s not quite sure about the full supernaturalism in the Bible might find that more palatable. Well, maybe she wasn’t a virgin. She was just a young, unmarried woman. So, the RSV was never going to find a wide audience among conservative, evangelical Christians. Now, the Bible that you’re probably holding in your lap and is there in the pews, the ESV, is a revision of the RSV. King James, RSV, ESV. The ESV, then, is a grandchild of the King James Version. And there’s a whole fascinating story about that – this is the 25th anniversary of the ESV, which first came out in 2001 – because you can’t just go and take somebody else’s Bible and start changing it, and Crossway can say, “Here we got a new Bible.” So, they had to get permission, and who had the copyright to the RSV was the National Council of Churches, and initially they said, “No, we have the RSV.” This was in the late 90s. And so, Wayne Grudem decided to try again. Said he sat down for seven hours and wrote a long letter to a representative from the National Council of Churches asking if Crossway could have permission to revise the Revised Standard Version, and he explained some of the things they wanted to do. And clearly, he drew a line in the sand and said, “If we cannot go back to Isaiah 7:14 and say virgin, which we think is the right translation and is, then this isn’t worth any of the money to pay out or get the lawyers involved. Well, quite providentially and surprisingly, they said they would be willing to talk further, and eventually the two sides hammered out an agreement. Wayne Grudem’s letter became the core legal document for the lawyers on both sides, and Crossway was given permission to revise the Revised Standard Version. So, the ESV is about 92% the same as the Revised Standard Version, which was itself a revision of the King James. Today hardly anybody uses the RSV because there is a new Revised Standard Version, and that tends to be used – to put it fairly, it just tends to be used in more liberal churches and denominations. J.I. Packer was the head of the translation team that revised the RSV and produced the ESV, and at the end of his life, J.I. Packer said that was of all the things he had done, it was perhaps the one he was most proud.

So, back to C.H. Dodd. He was arguing for expiation. He did not like this idea that God would have wrath. His views were refuted – I would say decisively – by an Australian theologian. So, this is a morning – we got a few Aussies. Win one for the Aussies this morning. The Australian theologian and New Testament scholar Leon Morris in his book, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross from 1955. This is one of the most important books I was assigned to read in seminary. You can see it. I always remember it. It was very good. It’s very dense, and I think it was the only pink book I was assigned in seminary, but it has this very, sort of 70s-ish pink cover, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross by Leon Morris that deals with all of these terms around Christ’s atonement. Right at the heart of the book are two long chapters about propitiation. He makes the very decisive argument that propitiation is a better translation here, and it has to do with the wrath of God. In the ancient world, this constellation of words from hilasmos almost always refer, when applied to God, to appeasing wrath or turning away anger. This is how these words are used in classical Greek, how they’re used in the Septuagint of the Old Testament, how they’re used in Judaism, how they’re used by the church fathers. The word has to do with wrath and anger. But the argument is not just linguistics. You may say, well, now I have to just rely on, you know, the Aussies fighting with the Brits, and who’s right? You can discern this from reading your Bible and knowing the context, because in the context of Romans 1, 2, and 3, what is the fundamental problem that human beings are facing? We’ve seen it at least three times. Look at chapter 1:18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” Chapter 2:5, “But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath.” Chapter 3:5, “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say, that God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us?” So, clearly the issue that Paul has been pressing home is that the human race is facing the wrath of God. So, it will not do, as C.H. Dodd argued, that somehow this is beneath God. Now we’ll come back to in a moment, it’s not the same as the pagan deities. That would be a blasphemous thought. But you cannot escape the conclusion that the human predicament is sinfulness under the domain and dominion of sin, such that we are facing the just wrath of God.

And a final reason for propitiation rather than expiation is because propitiation is a relational word. Now expiation may be implied here as well – the removal of sin – but it’s not just the removal of sin that Paul is talking about. It’s the restoration of a relationship. So, we’ve already seen about his patience, and then the end of verse 25, this was to show God’s righteousness because in his divine forbearance, God has been patient with sinners, overlooking their sin. This is not the mere removal of sin, but as we saw with redemption, in Christ Jesus this propitiatory sacrifice is to restore a relationship with God. And so, in most instances where this word group is used now in the New Testament, we have the translation in the ESV of propitiation. Four times we have the word translated propitiation. Once, as I mentioned in Hebrews 9:5, mercy seat. And then as a verb in Luke 18:13 – you know the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector – the tax collector who beats his breast and says, “be merciful to me a sinner” is actually this same word. You could translate it that he looks up into heaven, and he says, “Be propitious to me. Be propitious to me.” That’s okay. It’s my right hand. I got another one. Look upon me with mercy, because I am a sinner. It’s not that mercy seat is a wrong idea. It’s not that we don’t believe in expiation. We do. But the ESV rightly, I’m arguing, translates this as propitiation, just as the King James did. So, it’s not inventing something new, because propitiation encompasses both of those ideas. What took place at the mercy seat in the Old Testament and the removal of sin, which effect is to restore a right relationship with God by turning away his wrath. Sin expiated becomes wrath propitiated. The word carries this idea that a sacrifice has been made which enables God to be propitious toward his people. His wrath has been satisfied so that God looks upon us with favor. Pro-us. You do not have to wonder if God is for you or against you. He is, in Christ Jesus, always, only and forever for you. Now that’s the second question. I told you that was the long one.

Third question: by what means was this propitiation accomplished? You see there in verse 25, “by his blood.” It was accomplished by blood. Now note, it does not say that the blood is the propitiation. It’s not as if Jesus, separated from himself, presented something else as an offering, but rather Jesus himself was the offering poured out in blood – blood here being a way of speaking obviously of his death, his sacrificial, substitutionary death, the means by which this propitiation is accomplished. So, think about it. The incarnation is absolutely necessary. We saw that earlier in Hebrews chapter 2, that the Son had to take on human flesh so that he might be qualified to be our faithful high priest. He had to be made like his brothers in every respect except for sin so that he could save. He can heal only that which he assumes. He had to take on a human nature so he could save human beings. The incarnation was absolutely necessary. At the same time, without denigrating in the least the glory and the majesty and the wonder of the incarnation, the incarnation by itself was not propitiatory. Sometimes when people don’t like this idea of turning away the wrath of God, or you’ll hear people talk about penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) – penal meaning a penalty; substitution, in our place; and atonement, how estranged parties are reconciled. Christ death was a penalty paid, a substitution for our sakes. People will say, well that’s one theory of the atonement. Well, it’s not a theory. It is the very heart of the atonement, around which all of the other things we want to say about the atonement depend. Sometimes when people don’t like that, rather than just saying, well, I don’t think that’s true – well, you can’t sing a whole lot of songs in our hymnal if that’s not true – they’ll just say, well, that’s one theory, or you’re making central what is peripheral, or I really want to just focus on participation language or how Christ becomes like us so that we can become like God, all of which are true biblical themes. And yet, we see here that only by the shedding of blood could our atonement be made. He had to be made like us so that he could be qualified to become our high priest. But the wrath of God could not be assuaged apart from the shedding of blood. So, it is not enough just to have one like us if he is not also a sacrifice for us.

So, one of the other places in the New Testament with this hilasmos language is 1 John 2:2 that Jesus Christ is a propitiation, and we have an advocate. He is an advocate for us. Well, think about it: an advocate, a propitiatory advocate for us in heaven. That word “advocate” is lawyer. So, here’s another good one for Aussie lawyers today. Lawyers. Christ is a lawyer in heaven. He is pleading our case. We sang these songs already. Five bleeding wounds he bears. He pleads for us. But he’s not just a defense attorney in heaven. He has to have something to plead. What does he plead? He does not plead before the throne, “Well, she was a pretty good person. Don’t you understand? He had a lot going on, and he was doing the best he could. Don’t you know she had a bad family, and people were unkind to her? You can’t expect more than what she did.” That’s not what he pleads. He has to plead his own blood, so he is in heaven both a lawyer (a defense attorney) and a priest. A high priest. And you might say a high priest who offers himself as the sacrifice. So, he pleads for us by the merits of his own blood. That’s what you need in heaven. You need a high priest, you need a lawyer, and you need one who can do both.

The fourth question, how are the benefits of this accomplished work to be received? How – as what did Brian Regan say one time about Pop Tarts? “How do I get this goodness in me?” – how do we get these good things? Well, the answer, verse 25, is by faith. And we might also say by the work of the Holy Spirit joining us to Christ. Here, what’s emphasized is faith. We have seen this several times already. We will spend more time on this point in the weeks ahead. By faith. That is to say, nothing earned on our part, nothing deserved, nothing merited. Also, let us be clear that faith itself was not the purchase price. Faith was not the golden ticket. We do not stand before God condemned as sinners, and he says, “Well, what do you have to show for yourself?” And you say, “Well, I thought you’d never ask. I have faith.” And faith is worth a bajillion good works. That’s not how faith works. Faith is not the thing that is so valuable that God deems it worthy of acceptance, but faith is the means of reception. It’s the means by which we receive the gift. Redemption and propitiation are telling us that salvation was infinitely costly. No greater cost has ever been paid than the death of the Son of God. In fact, no greater payment could have been made. The cost is incalculable. It is infinite. And at the same time, though the cost to God was infinite and incalculable, the grace to us is given as a gift. All the payment was made by God. None of the payment made by us. Ours is only to receive it by faith.

Which leads, then, to this final question: who purposed this act of propitiation? Now notice at the beginning of verse 25, it says “whom God put forward.” You could translate that set forth, put forward, brought out into the open. So, it speaks both of the origination of this idea (it was God’s idea) and the public manifestation of this work. Christ Jesus – that’s the end of verse 24 – is the one that God put forward, manifest on the giant iMac screen of history called Golgotha. I was listening to Lloyd-Jones’ sermon on this text, and he keeps saying, “God placarded.” I think, well that worked very well maybe in 1950s Britain. None of us use the word placarded. A placard, a sign, a manifestation. So, I say he put it on the movie screen, an analogy that Lloyd-Jones would probably not approve of. He showed it to all the world: Christ there is the redeeming, propitiating sacrifice, and it was put forward by God (“whom God put forward”). Do you see then how this is utterly different from any pagan Greek mythology and their notions of propitiation. First of all, the gods of the Greeks and Romans were capricious. They were irritable. They were petty. They were conniving. And the gods had to be paid off by a gift supplied by men and women – namely, usually some sort of offering or maybe some sort of trick or they prove some test. They were the ones who presented some kind of offering that that conniving, petty, irritable god or goddess might be propitious towards them. There is nothing like this here. Man does nothing to present this gift. The sacrifice is not given by man. But the gift and the sacrifice is entirely owing to God, to the Father’s initiative. Christ’s death was God’s work of reconciliation. God on the cross gave his very best for the sake of man, rather than in Greek mythology that man would have to give his very best for the sake of God. God gave his very best for the sake of man, not man giving his very best for the sake of God.

I have to quote a few sentences here from Leon Morris, as he explains this so well: “Among the heathen, propitiation was thought of as an activity whereby the worshipper was able himself to provide that which would induce a change of mind in the deity.” The deity is upset. The worshipper has to come, has to do something. Alright, you’re placated. You changed your mind. We can get on. Morris continues, “In plain language, he bribed his god to be favorable to him. When the term was taken over into the Bible, these unworthy and crude ideas were abandoned and only the central truth expressed by the term was retained, namely that propitiation signifies the averting of wrath by the offering of a gift.” There’s a simple definition: the averting of wrath by the offering of a gift. He continues, “Thus the use of the concept of propitiation witnesses to two great realities – the one, the reality and seriousness of the divine reaction against sin; and the other, the reality and the greatness of the divine love which provided the gift which should avert the wrath from men.” In other words, do not think that the Father was won over to the exercise of grace and mercy. This is not a good cop/bad cop. It’s not a blasphemous idea of cosmic child abuse or some rupture in the Trinity. John Murray says, “The Father makes the provision by which the propitiation was wrought.” God put him forward. God willed to forgive you in Christ. God purposed to pay the penalty against himself in the person of his Son. God took the initiative to satisfy his own wrath to meet the demands of his own justice. To put it very poignantly, God gave himself to save us from himself. Say it another way, according to his own great love, God purposed to propitiate his own holy wrath by the death of his own holy, beloved Son. That’s why I’ve been saying it turns away the wrath or the anger of God, not the hatred of God. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son. Not God so hated the world, and he needed somebody to do something. God so loved the world. Can you love someone? Can you have someone set upon your heart as the object of your affections and also be angry? Have you ever met parents? Not grandparents – they don’t have that, but the parents need to. Parents understand that you can have your heart set upon this one, and yet when an infraction has been borne, you understand some punishment must be paid. And parents understand that. And if you forget that, another sibling will remind you, “Why did you let her get away with that? I thought you parents of justice when it came to me. Why not them? The cross, listen carefully, the cross is not what made God love us. It is what enabled the holy God of love to satisfy the standard of his own holiness and at the same time be gracious to us, to be just and the justifier of the ungodly.

So, when people object to this whole concept of propitiation, and they think it is not fitting for a god of love, and they think that it makes God rather like some petty, bloodthirsty, pagan tyrant who must be bought off with a bribe, we must understand how different the God of the Bible is. His wrath is not arbitrary and capricious. It is a part of his immutable justice and holiness. And his wrath is not bought off by a bribe. But his wrath is turned away by the shedding of the blood of his own Son. The gods of the Odyssey and the Iliad were not slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. They did not delight in forgiveness. They did not take the initiative to devise a plan to atone for the sins of the people. It was the electing love of God for us that purposed the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ. 1 John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us” – how? What does it look like? Does love mean unconditional affirmation? – “that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” So many people misunderstand. God must love us. Therefore, he loves us so much, there’s nothing he could be angry about. There’s no way he could ever disapprove of what I do. Isn’t he a god of love? He is a God of love, which is why the Son’s death was necessary, so that the God of love could be propitious toward us and his anger assuaged. God in love sent his Son to satisfy the wrath of God by becoming the bloody, human, divine sacrifice for our sins.

So beloved, this is the best of news. It is worth believing, savoring, and in just a moment singing about. Jesus did not merely turn away the wrath of God. He took it upon himself, so that we should not say technically divine wrath was withdrawn. Praise God. It was not withdrawn. It was spent. And if you are in Christ, it cannot touch you any longer. For Jesus himself said, “It is finished.” Amazing love, how can it be that thou my God should die for me? Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, what a glorious word, that you set forth your beloved Son to be a propitiation by his blood, received by faith. Give us such a heart of faith to embrace all that you have for us in Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.