TURNING AWAY FROM GOD

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”  (Isaiah 53:6)

Augustine shows clearly the religious character of sin. Sin for him is not a moral failure; it is not even disobedience.  Disobedience is a consequence but not the cause. The cause is: turning away from God, and from God as the highest good, as the love with which God loves Himself through us. For this reason, since sin has this character -- if you say "sins", it is easily dissolved into moral sins; but sin is first of all basically the… turning away from God.  For this very reason, no moral remedy is possible.  Only one remedy is possible: return to God.  But this of course is possible only in the power of God.

-- Paul Tillich (1886-1965) in “A History of Christian Thought”

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KNOWING OUR SIN

"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar and His word is not in us." (1 John 1:8-10 NIV)

God is none other than the Savior of our wretchedness.  So we can only know God well by knowing our iniquities… Those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him, but have glorified themselves. 

-- Blaise Pascal  (1623-1662)


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GOD’S PURPOSE AT THE CROSS

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”  (Isaiah 53:6)

“Suffered.” This word carries not only the everyday meaning of bearing pain, but also the older and wider sense of being the object affected by someone else’s action. The Latin is ‘passus’, whence comes the noun “passion.” Both God and men were agents of Jesus’s passion: “this Jesus, delivered up according to the plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23, from Peter’s sermon). God’s purpose at the cross was as real as was the guilt of the crucifers.

What was God’s purpose? Judgment on sin, for the sake of mercy to sinners. The miscarrying of human justice was the doing of divine justice. Jesus knew on the cross all the pain, physical and mental, that man could inflict and also the divine wrath and rejection that my sins deserve; for He was there in my place, making atonement for me. “All we like sheep have gone astray… and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

-- J.I. Packer, quoted in “His Passion: Christ’s Journey to the Resurrection”

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