John MacMurray If You Look at It as a Relationship...
"...Jesus defines eternal life as a relationship. My entire education had defined eternal life as believing the right ideology… All I knew was, God was better than I thought he was and there was no way I’m going back…”
Jason Clark is a relational theologian, storyteller, husband, and dad who believes the gospel is better than the last time we checked. He's the author of several books, the host of Rethinking God with Tacos, and lives in Cornelius, NC, with his wife, Karen, and their four kids.
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I’ve just heard the intro, and I’d like to give 5 stars and leave a review! haha. But where do I do that? I’m just listening on your website.
Okay, now I’ve listened to the podcast. Mind blown so many times I need a nap! haha. That was awesome. I have a thought I’d love to run by you. My friend and I were talking on the subject of “why did Jesus have to die” recently and she put forth an interesting thought. She said, what if it was like in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. It wasn’t Aslan who required Edmund to die for being a traitor, it was the White Witch. So, Aslan made a deal with her and chose to die himself to take Edmund’s place, to pay for Edmund’s consequences with his own blood. Could it be the same with Jesus? Us humans, when we don’t believe in God’s love for us, his good nature, we essentially kind of “make a deal” with the devil and believe his tricks, live Eve. And now the devil commands us to pay the consequences with our death. Jesus, in his love, makes a new deal with the devil and says, I’ll die for them instead. I know this might be a simple way of explaining it and potentially totally flawed, but it does change the whole narrative. I was brought up to believe that God requires death as a punishment for sin. It’s quite different if it was actually the devil who required it and God only ever died to save us from THAT, not to enact his own requirement for death. This is all new to me and I’m trying to wrap my brain around it, so I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you for this awesome, inspiring podcast.
Hey! It’s such a fun journey, this ever-expanding revelation of perfect love!
First, if you listen on iTunes (which is where about 2/3rd of folks listen, then there is a place to rate and review) Thanks for asking 🙂
Second, hope you had a good nap 🙂 Love the insight into The Lion Witch and Wardrobe. Yes, it was the witch and her fallen mindset paradigm of justice that required a death for a life. It wasn’t on Aslan’s end that death was required. But Aslan, knowing Edmond was trapped in his punishment paradigm stepped inside his delusion, laid his life down, rose, and set him free from his fallen broken retributive thinking.
If you haven’t listened to the Baxter Kruger Podcast I would recommend it. http://afamilystory.org//2020/06/c-baxter-kruger/
Baxter says it like this, Jesus climbed inside our delusion to set us free. “Jesus has stepped into our delusions, into our darkness, and the discovery of Christ in us that is the hope of glory, life, wholeness, and freedom.”
The punishment we both grew up with, it wasn’t required by God, it was the implicit demand we felt because of our partnership with the way Satan thinks, his behavior-focused retributive mindset. Jesus stepped into our broken “Tree of the Knowledge of good and Evil” thinking and takes it to its conclusion. He stepped into our delusion and blew it up from the inside.
Let me quote a commentary from the Mirror Bible. It’s in 1 John chapter three, particularly, taken from the verse, 12.
The Mirror Bible is written by Francoise du Toit.
“…(See also First Peter 1:18-19) It is clear to see that you were ransomed from the futile fallen mindset that you inherited from your father’s, not by the currency of your own labor, represented by the fluctuating values of gold and silver, and the economy of your religious efforts.
But you were redeemed with the priceless blood of Christ; He is the ultimate sacrifice; spotless and without blemish. He completes the prophetic picture! In Him, God speaks the most radical scapegoat language of the law of judgment and brings final closure to a dead and redundant system!
In Psalm 4:6-7 it is clearly stated that God does not require sacrifices or offerings!
Jesus is the Lamb of God! He collides victoriously with the futile sacrificial system whereby offerings are constantly made to the pseudo, moody, monster gods of our imagination.
This is the scandal of the cross! God does not demand a sacrifice that would change the way He thinks about mankind; He provides the sacrifice of Himself in Christ in order to forever eradicate sin consciousness from our minds and radically change the way we think about our Maker, one another, and ourselves!”
Isn’t that amazing!!
If you want to hear more from Francios, we had him on the podcast as well, http://afamilystory.org//2020/04/francois-du-toit-podcast/
It is incredibly amazing!!! Thank you very much. All the pieces are coming together. I will share your insightful response with my friend as well. Many thanks!!!