Yes, I think the offer of forgiveness is more about giving us the ability to believe we can do better rather than escaping God’s wrath or consequences. Jesus always said, “Your sins are forgiven, so go and sin no more.” It is all about getting up and trying to do better. I don’t believe in this nonsense about sin being some offense against God. The only wrath He has is about the harm done to His children. Of course, He wants it to stop.
I don’t believe there is any escape from the consequences of sin. This is the primal axiom of all religion and belief in an afterlife. It is why nonexistence looks too easy – an escape from the consequence of what we have done. This cannot be what the grace offered in Christianity is about because that remove the reason for believing in any religion, making atheism far more believable than Christianity. Thus what Christianity is offering must be God’s help in fighting against the sin which is demolishing our humanity and turning us into despicable monsters.
He who is having my commands, and is keeping them, that one it is who is loving me, and he who is loving me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. John 14:21 YLT
I’ve been sort of drifting into the Michael Heiser view that sin isn’t a judicial offense God gets mad about, it’s a failure of loyalty. The Orthodox use the judicial view very, very sparingly, preferring New Testament and Patristic models that include a variation on Heiser’s loyalty idea. I was reviewing ancient near eastern suzereignty treaties the other day (yes, I have weird tastes in light reading) and noticed that the penalties weren’t set up to “pay for” misbehavior, they served to demonstrate two things: a lesson, i.e. disloyalty can have a cost, and an apology, i.e. “Sorry, master, I really am loyal”. Then there was the Orthodox priest who used to be with Jews for Jesus who noted that the Torah was never a judicial system, it was meant to be a wisdom system where the people were supposed to pick up the themes of mercy and faithfulness from all the ‘ordinances’, noting that the first appearance historically of treating Torah as Law comes during the Babylonian Exile.
Under those two rubrics forgiveness is more about addressing how we chastise ourselves than it is about “satisfying” God, and that suddenly makes a lot more sense of some things Jesus had to say, including the tale of the Prodigal son.
Though I was reminded of a talk given by a Lutheran pastor/priest years ago to the Sunday morning adult class on the topic of “The Wrath of God”. He went through a lot of scriptures and a heavy amount of church Fathers and pointed out finally that the big thing in common is that the wrath of God was aimed at the Cross – but that we’ve generally gotten it wrong because we regard it as wrath that should have been against us and thus was directed at Jesus, when it wasn’t directed at Jesus but at the whole system of things that put Jesus there, not merely human self-righteousness but sin itself and the harm and death that come with it – in other words, God’s wrath was aimed at the same things that we get angry about! Paul hints at this when speaking of the Cross he says that God made Jesus “to be sin for us”: the wrath wasn’t at Jesus Himself, it was at the dark package He took on and bore in order to restore a way forward when God’s people had pretty much been spinning their wheels ever since the Divided Kingdom.
I would still put it in a familial context, disobedience to a loving Father’s wishes (rejection of and failure to obey family rules, ‘laws of love’, designed for the individual’s and family’s wellbeing) and thus subsequent ejection. That’s not to say the sibling does not leave of her own accord and disloyalty too, to become a delinquent on the streets subject to coercive arrest and discipline.
And Jesus rescues us as a first responder would, laying down his life to save us from whatever metaphor best fits, for instance a wasteland on the other side of an otherwise uncrossable chasm. Another thing a first responder might do is sacrifice his or her life to rescue someone from a burning building. Of course, those analogies have no judicial aspect to them, unless the reason the subject is in those situations is because of willful disobedience and disloyalty. Also regarding judgment, there is always skeptical theism and lèse-majesté, “to do wrong to majesty”, maybe disrespect and rejection of the rule of law, choosing chaos.
Having risked my life a couple of times as a lifeguard, once because of teenagers not paying attention and once because of teenagers just being stupid (and getting in the way of a younger kid who ended up in trouble), I don’t know if my after-the-rescue lectures would qualify as a judicial proceeding or not. Whether their actions were “willful disobedience” is a tough question, though at best it was borderline.
Burning buildings . . . . At least as a lifeguard I was trained for the risks I took!
