I commented on another video by darkmatter2525 yesterday (which lead to some discussion on diapsora*), and if you checked the source page where I found it, you’ve seen that there’s also another one. This one.

Somehow I even like this one. It does a fair bit of critizising satisfaction theory, which I do not consider correct myself either. It might not be doing the satisfaction theory justice, but it points out some good points that speak against it.

The most important question might be, why an omnipotent God cannot forgive.

Ad this is my major problem with satisfaction theory, too. Why does God have to see blood in order to forgive? Standard answers go like God was too holy to forgive, His glory would be affected, or His justice. People tend to cling to that satisfaction theory as if it was the good news. But what is so good about a God that has to sacrifice His own son in order to be able to forgive us?

Actually, it’s even unbiblical. Which is why it baffles me that biblicist Christians still cling to it, though they usually also cling to the letter of scripture. God does forgive oftentimes. Also throughout the Old Testament, without Jesus even being born by Mary. Biblicists claim that God was only able to do so because Jesus was crucified later.

Of course darkmatter2525 presumes that all Christians would follow satisfaction theory. We don’t. And this is why his critizism of it might be nice, but I still would like to see that there is the alternative as well. Any of the alternatives. Let me tell you about the one I consider the most probable:

The first question I’d like to address is: Who was reconciled with whom? Was it God who was angry and needed to be reconciled with us, or were we angry at God and needed to be reconciled? While satisfaction theory says God needed reconciliation, I do believe that God was all fine, loving us and all, while we were the ones full of hate for God and whom not.

The cross was there to reconcile us with God. We needed to be changed. So the death of Jesus wasn’t God’s fault, He didn’t need Him to die. We needed it, we wanted it. And we would do it again.

Imagine some person coming down to earth and telling us in the face what we did wrong, without even hating us, just telling us. We’d be angry. Imagine someone who would make you realize how many people had to suffer for your sneakers, your clothes, your food. How your way of living destroys lives somewhere else, destroys nature. How your bank account and the interest you get leads to other people losing their jobs, homes, maybe make them starve? You’d hate the person who reminds you of that. You’d call him names, and you’d seek a chance to pay him back. And you’d use that chance, if it came up. And after a while he’d be killed, for whatever reason. Main thing, he’s out of the way and we can go on living the way we do.

So God doesn’t want Him to die. We do. And we did when Jesus was around. Jesus was God, fully, completely. You can hardly differ between the two. So anything Jesus had to suffer, God suffered. It was God there on the cross, it was God who died. We wanted Him to die, we want to be our own Gods. We want to run the world.

We needed reconciliation, and He was willing to give it to us. But how can you reconciliate a horde of haters?

Love prevails!

If someone keeps striking you, how can you overcome him, without doing him harm? You wouldn’t want to harm someone you love. God loves us.

So He endured all we did to Him, He endured even death. And rose again.

So now there are two possibilities. Either you hate that God that just won’t die and be dead so you can be God instead, or you see that this God is really God, almighty and worthy to be praised eternally.

Why would anyone of us want to be God in the first place? Because we want the power t ourselves, to care for ourselves, because we fear if we are not in control, whoever is in control could turn against us and harm us. We fear to be harmed, so we try to take over control.

When you see that there is someone who even overcomes death, who promises love and lives it (sic! why else would an all powerful being endure all that pain, crucifiction and death if it wasn’t for te love?), you have no more reason to fear. So you have no more reason to try to take over control, because you see control is in good hands, in God’s hands. And you have no more reason to hate anybody. Instead, you grow strong. You grow strong enough to endure. If you can endure, you can also love. And all through the faith in God, the faith in His crucifiction and resurrection.

If you don’t see that is was really God who died and rose there, if you miss that faith, you must hate Him even more, you have to deny Him to cling to that target of yours, to be the one in control yourself, to get rid of fear not through the power of Gd, but through your own power. Anyone who claims you wouldn’t be able to make it must be an opponent, who is trying to hinder you from getting rid of your fears by gaining power. What others cal the good news is rather disturbing. People not following the rules of gaining power, of „taking their lives in their own hands“, that’s just not predictable. You don’t kow what they are up to next and how they’d harm your attempt to gain more power.

All would be so easy, if you’d rather cling to love. But it seems to me, that people cannot be made to seeing what happend in the crucifiction and resurrection. God needs to show it to them individually. And He goes by His own timetable. So we have to be patient and wait. And keep on loving in the meantime, because by love we overcome the world.