I am currently reading Lamb of the Free by Rillera. A substantial read and I am on my third reading of it. It is the most consistent challenge that I know of that pushes back against a substitutionary view of the atonement (and beyond that of the most common ‘penal substitution’). Most recently in Chapter 5 where he moves from Old Testament material on sacrifice to the New Testament I was very taken by how he holds together the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. In simple evangelical theology we can be forgiven for thinking that the life of Jesus is simply a prelude to his death, and the resurrection proof that his death is sufficient.
The aspect that stood out for me was the description that Jesus was the ‘mobile holiness’ of God present on earth. As such he confronted and overcame the effects of the power of death, such as healing, casting out demons and raising the dead (and commissioned his disciples to do likewise) and then in death he confronted death itself which could not hold him captive. Living and dying ahead of us rather than for us in a substitionary sense. [An aside Paul uses the same language for the resurrection in relationship to believers as he uses for the cross. If Jesus died so we do not have to die then he was raised and thus we will not be raised!!! OOOPS!!]
A few days ago I posted concerning David’s desire to build a ‘house for God’. Here is the biblical text:
Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ (2 Sam. 7:5-7).
The mobile God… Jesus described his own body as a Temple – destroy this Temple and I will raise it up in 3 days, speaking of his own body… The Temple the location that God never requested; in John’s Gospel we read that he ‘dwelt among us’, using a very specific Greek verb σκηνόω – to dwell in a tent, to pitch a tent, to ‘tabernacle’. Mobility – the restoration of the tabernacle.
Post Pentecost – ‘Go’. Mobile not static. We are in process, there is a restoration of mobility. The way God always was and desired to be.