The Other Man

The plane glided smoothly over the wood boards, birthing perfect curls of shavings. It would be a table fit for a king’s palace, but was crafted for the Levite who led the local synagogue. Sturdy and large enough for feasts and councils, with some adornment of abstract design along the legs and edges, consistent with the prohibition against graven images in Law, yet elegantly simple, it’s artisanry understated.

Twenty-seven year old hands, muscular, with remarkable dexterity, gripped the plane with the confidence of a skilled tradesman. They had gripped tools for nearly all of their days, and formally for fourteen years, since the hands’ owner’s apprenticeship that began after he celebrated his bar mitzvah. At twenty-one he began to cultivate his own style and clients, while still in the family shop.

If all went well, another few months would see him established sufficiently to wed his fiancée. He wondered as he whistled over his work a tune from the synagogue service, where did the fourteen year training period for crafts and trades come from? Did it originate with Father Jacob, who labored fourteen years for his two brides, a week of years for each? If so, why did one these days have to work fourteen years to just get the one wife? Not that he wanted more than one! No, no! He’d observed that one was plenty for most men. He just wished it could be seven for the one, and then get on with life.

Journey of the Magi

Melchior stretched and stiffly turned in his camel’s qatab, or saddle, and groused lightly to Gaspar, “I’m too old for this long on camelback. Every trip it takes me longer to get my ground legs back. The emir once thought I was drunk when I went to his audience room upon my return from a long trip, until his nose caught whiff of the beast, not the flask, about me.”

His old friend chuckled over the favorite memory, then gasped, “Look! We’re here!”

They were just cresting a ridge. (the desert had suddenly turned to rocky hills the day before, shortly before they crossed the Jordan River and into Israel. Balthazzar, the youngest, and originally from the sands of Arabia, hadn’t been thrilled with the change to hard rocky ground.) Suddenly, they caught a glint of the noonday sun reflecting off of gilt buildings hugging a hill a few stadia and several more ridges ahead.

Melchior snorted, “I’d say we’re nearly there. It looks like it will take most of the rest of the day before we actually are there.” But he did sit in the qatab straighter and lean forward a bit in eagerness. The camels, sensing the anticipation sped up a gait.

What Other Surprises Does God Have for Us?

The relatively big news out of astronomy recently is the amount of water discovered in space. They have found an amazing amount of water surrounding a massive black hole—enough for 120 trillion earthlike planets! (That’s even nearly ten times the size of our national debt!)

But wait, there’s more…

What Did Mary Know?

In chapter 12 of John’s Gospel, Jesus is attending a party at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, whom he just raised in chapter 11. The party is going fine, when Mary shocks everyone. She pulls out an alabaster (likely modern day calcite) jar of fine perfuming oil called spikenard. Largely due to its likely origins in the Himilayas, it was extremely expensive. The jar contained about a pound of it, costing a year’s wages. She breaks the flask open, begins to pour it all over Jesus, head to toe, including his feet. If this weren’t scandal enough, she uncovers her hair, letting it fall free, so that she could wipe the excess up with it.

To the party’s guests, this was wrong on so many levels.

Do I Know You

Great Bible Study tonight on John 10 at Hill House!

Two scenarios:

1)      You are hosting a seminar speaker and while walking down the hall with them, you see, coming towards you a colleague from another department with a joint appointment whom you know but rarely see. You start to introduce your guest and realize that your colleague’s name has completely left you. Awkward for all involved.

2)      You are at an international conference. Coming down the hall is the founder of your field, whom you met once 30 years ago when a first year grad student. You start to introduce yourself to them, but they interrupt, call you by name, saying, “I remember meeting you at the Helsinki conference in ‘82. I’m impressed with your work so far and am looking forward to your talk tomorrow at 3:20.” You feel like you have ‘arrived,’ and the talk you were bored about giving now has significance.

HWJV: How Would Jesus Vote?

At grave risk of breaking my rule to be apartisan in this blog, I feel compelled to comment on the issue of Christians in politics.

Growing up in Texas, at least post-Reagan, it has been commonly viewed among evangelicals here that you can’t be a Christian and Democrat or a Christian and politically liberal. I had a roommate in grad school who grew up in Pennsylvania believing you couldn’t be a Christian and a Republican. Obviously, what we have here is the heart of Christian unity.

The Loser Celebrates

The Prodigal Son, by Rembrandt van Rijn, circa 1668,The Hermitage Muesum, St. Petersburg Russia, hermitagemuseum.org

I have spent several recent posts discussing the justice and judgment aspects of God’s personality because they are there and all too real. But if it ended there, we miss the climax to the story. God IS just, and His moral character leaves no room for our selfishness. However, for some bizarre reason, He still loves us with a reckless, crazy abandon and therefore He is unable to just leave us to our fate, but pursues and searches for us, wooing us back to Himself. And when we have reconciliation, God celebrates.

Large Nobility

On my mother’s desk is the following quote by Abraham Lincoln, “We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.”

Today's post comes from observing how a major incident costing many people their jobs escalated from an unwise but relatively minor comment made in a meeting. How many troubles would be avoided if we would ignore offensive things said by others and sought to minimize the opportunities for others to take offense at our words. In today’s culture, the burden for avoiding conflict lies almost exclusively with the speaker and the hearers are rarely expected to let things slide by. In fact, much of the “politically correct” mentality seeks to hunt for any potential opportunity to infer offense in someone’s words. Author intent and gracious forgiveness are not options. To me, what is even more diabolical is when a hearer is offended on behalf of some hypothetical person not even present who might be offended had they heard the comment.

God-In-The-Box

We have a problem. The Bible hasn’t changed in nearly two millennia, but how we view God changes regularly and certain aspects of His character rise and fall in trendy popularity. In short, regardless of how His Word describes Him, we still “create” God in our image.

During pretty much my whole lifetime, our culture focuses on the aspects of God that deal with love—‘Our Father in heaven,’ ‘God is love,’ and so on, with just enough of His justice so that we can get back to mercy, grace, love, peace, blessings, and so on with some sort of ‘context.’

There is also a kick of flavor added in by Lewis (in Narnia), Young (in The Shack) and others, including me who talk about God’s unpredictability, that He is wild and doesn’t conform to our image of him, but we still tend to think of things more on the softer side of wild, as a whole.

It was not like that 200+ years ago.

Bizarrities in the Bible

One of the all-time strangest passing references in the Bible occurs during the description of the crucifixion. I share it with you now as food for thought for Easter weekend.

“And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”

Abiding

John 15:1-17 talks about abiding in Christ:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

This is one of the densest passages of Jesus’ words, so I want to focus on abiding. This translation renders the word abiding as “remaining in me,” and variants. One of the most striking parts of the passage is the use of passive verbs, primarily ‘bear,’ and ‘remain.’

“Bearing fruit” is a passive activity. A branch is where the fruit is located, but the nutrients and supplies come from the roots via the trunk and from the leaves. This seems to say that our job is to be the conduit of God’s work, rather than straining to ‘produce fruit’ like it was up to us.

Similarly, a branch doesn’t have to work to remain attached to the plant. It can neither leave nor stay of its own accord. Remaining implies continuing in the state in which you find yourself at the time the command is given.

Nearly all active work in this passage is done by God and Christ. Pruning, speaking, throwing away, burning, choosing are all activities Jesus is reserving for the Godhead.

That said, there are two active verbs given for us to perform:  love and keep (obey) His commands. Yet these are given fully and deliberately in the context of our abiding, which is His primary command in the passage. Thus, the ability to follow the active commands comes from following the passive ones.

What’s the point? Someone has quipped that we are called ‘human beings,’ not ‘human doings.’ The command to abide recognizes this, and in a way that no other religion, faith system, or worldview has—that it is God who is the active agent of our redemption and sanctification, not us. Just as a surgeon does not need (nor want!) our help during surgery to remove a tumor, God wants us to get out of His way to remove our sin nature. Once the surgeon has permission from us to cut, our job is to give him complete free reign to do it, and any resistance from us makes the job harder on both him and us. In the same way, once we invite Jesus into our lives as our Saviour, we need to let Him work. He did all of the work on Calvary, and now we need to let the work be completed in us.

Surely it isn’t that easy! Yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that there really is no thing that we can do to improve our position spiritually apart from His gift of salvation. No, because that goes completely against our feeling that we have to do something to earn back favor. But there isn’t. Scripture is abundantly clear on that point. The Laws and commandments provide the proof that we can’t attain to His standards. We are impotent, and our efforts actually get in His way of redeeming us.

So what are we to do? There must be something. Well, yes, but it isn’t what we would expect. Healing and growth occur not by our willing it to happen, but by taking care of ourselves—eating right and exercise, and growth and healing follow from that. Once we are alive (born) we maintain it and the internal systems largely function on their own. However, once our rebirth happens, we are born spiritually as part of a larger organism, union with Christ and other believers. Thus, our maintenance is largely more passive than in biological maintenance. The key activity for maintenance is to abide—to allow sustenance into ourselves and pass on to others in the organism. We do this through things such as Scripture reading, worship and maintaining fellowship with other believers.

But what about evangelism, ministry and all the other ‘oughts?’ If anesthesia isn’t available, a surgeon has the patient distracted by other things, so she can work in a more unobstructed manner. Since God can’t easily just knock us out and cut out our spiritual tumor of sin, He distracts us by focusing our attention on Him and others. Not only do these things distract us from the transformation He’s working in our lives, but it also aids Him, because as we focus externally, we effectively relax our grasp on ourselves. Just as unclenching muscles allows a surgeon to do less damage as the surgery progresses and makes tissues easier to separate from each other, as we focus on others and let go of our agenda, our selfish interests, it is easier for God to separate them from us, and we miss them less when they are gone.

To put it another way, from behavioural psychology, we know that in order to take something away from someone, we must replace it with something else, and hopefully with something better. Thus God removes sin and gives righteousness. He replaces selfish indulgence with selflessness. However, He does not take away self, but redeems it. We are still us, but a re-formed us.

Here’s another cool thing—God is incredibly efficient. When He has us outward focused to complete the redemption of our spirits, He is also working through us to do the same in others, so that His redemption is ‘multiplexed’ if you will, knitting souls back together dynamically and from multiple angles so that the new whole is stronger. It doesn’t matter, really, that we don’t see it with our own experience—We see healing and growth over time, usually through ‘snapshots’ rather than visible changes. In fact, we are more apt to notice it the less we concentrate on it.

Thus, our spiritual growth is accelerated the less we focus on it and the impeded the more we focus on it, which is why Christ calls us to abide, instead of calling us to grow.

In a practical sense, then, this can be achieved by living our lives daily—doing the things we need to do, and open to special instructions when they come, but not trying to ‘over-spiritualize’ things. In fact, the better we get at abiding, the easier it is to see spiritual opportunities He wants to show us.

It is like being an expert driver. A good driver is focused on the road ahead, but also has an high awareness of what is going on around the vehicle in all directions, so that if a sudden change is needed, the driver already knows the available options and can act immediately without having to deliberate. As we are better at abiding, we can be focused on whatever our daily task is, but also aware when a spiritually significant opportunity arises and hear the Lord’s voice directing us to meet it.

A plant doesn’t plan out a strategy to turn its leaves toward the sun—it is aware of where the sun is and moves to maximize light exposure to the leaves, and tracks with the sun. Abiding is being aware of God’s actions around us and moving with them. This is achieved best when we aren’t worrying about if we are tracking with Him or when we aren’t too busy being our own sunlight. When we are tracking with Him, then praying and asking Him to act are actually responses to what He is doing and the direction He is moving, and it becomes a dialogue.

Let me close with this thought. Abiding is passive in a real sense, but there is a reason why Jesus compared us to branches on a vine as opposed to something like an algae bloom. A vine is a single organism, with distinct parts, that is fast growing, flexible, with a structure, and works together for the benefit of the whole. An algae bloom is a chaosed mass of single celled organisms that once formed compete with each other and are solely concerned with their own individual survival and choke off life around it.

Someone once described the Christian as a glove. A glove is completely limp and useless until a hand is inserted into it, at which point the glove becomes as strong and useful as the hand that wields it. So there is a difference between the passivity of abiding and the passivity of apathy, lifelessness, and abdication. It is a mistake to think we have to do enough to earn salvation and reward, and it is a mistake to think we can get away with ignoring the world around us and live in a little bubble unaffected by (and unaffecting) our surroundings.

Abiding is allowing His strength and His purpose to move us and move through us rather than ginning up our strength and purpose. His Life produces much better fruit than ours can, so it is better that we bear His fruit than produce our own.

SDG

Worth

I want to thank one of my best friends, Greg Grooms, of Hill House Austin for tonight’s study on John 7:37-39, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'" Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

The ‘feast’ is the Feast of Tabernacles or Feast of Booths, which remembers the 40 years wandering in the wilderness. One of the daily rituals during the feast is the priest would take a golden pitcher from the temple, lead a procession to the Pool of Siloam, fill it with water and proceed back to the temple where he would pour it over the altar. This ritual remembered the event in Exodus 17 where the people called out for water, so God had Moses strike a rock and water came forth. After watching this ritual commemoration, Jesus stands up in the assembly, calling out that HE is the source of living water. It is a claim of divinity, because in Exodus 17, God’s presence is hovering over the rock when Moses strikes it. Paul even declares that the Exodus rock was in fact Christ Himself. (I Cor 10:1-4)

There are several questions that arise from the passage, that echo the question of the woman by the well in John 4, “What must I do to get this living water?” From Jesus’ words, we see that 1) we must realize our thirst and 2) drink.

Our thirst is for relief from our fallen existence, relief from the attitude that we must do all things from our own strength, and relief from our false sense of sovereignty and the burdens it puts on us—we can’t be perfect on our own, we aren’t the rightful sovereign of our destiny, we aren’t, in short, God. The first step is to realize how trying to be our own God has dried us up and we thirst.

But how do we know if we’ve drunk from Him? He says that whoever believes in Him has drunk. But what does that look like? How do we know if our belief is real and sufficient? We have the rivers of living water coming from our hearts. That really helps. We don’t see too many people spewing from their chests like mobile fire hydrants. John goes on to explain that the Holy Spirit in our hearts is the living water. But does that really get us farther in our understanding? It all sounds like spiritual mumbo jumbo talk.

It is in times like these that knowing much of Scripture helps because it cross-references itself all the time through both direct reference and through allusion. The more familiar you are with the full text, the more of the allusions come clear and a framework appears that helps us see how the Bible answers and explains itself.

Galatians 5:22 describes the fruits of the Spirit, or the natural outworkings of the Spirit in our lives:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In I Corinthians 3:9-15, it says, “For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”

From these and other passages, we glean that our daily lives, our moment by moment activities, as long as they aren’t sin, God will use to conform both us and the world as a whole to His image and to His glory. There is no secular/sacred divide, that our faithfulness in our daily work, helping the world turn, is a demonstration of living water. What we build with our lives is really built in partnership with God, His Spirit giving life and permanence and significance to what we do. In short, He imbues our lives and the fruits of our lives with worth. Whether we share the Gospel with 10 people or clean the toilets, it has lasting value. That takes a lot of pressure off, that we should be ‘doing more,’ doing ‘different,’ ‘doing significant.’

In short, how we live testifies to God’s presence and work in our lives. As St Francis says in what has become, in effect, my life’s motto, “Always share your faith. If necessary, use words.” Paul says as much in I Corinthians 3:1-3, “Are we like others, who need to bring you letters of recommendation, or who ask you to write such letters on their behalf? Surely not! The only letter of recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your lives are a letter written in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. Clearly, you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This “letter” is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.”

This should be a source of comfort to us in academia, where we minister in the name of Christ through our teaching, research, and service. If we are given the chance to speak or even proclaim His Name as the underscore of our efforts, all the better. But even when we don’t or our courage fails us, He redeems, magnifies and glorifies, because His Spirit is life and the fruits of that Spirit are living. As C. S. Lewis says in the Narnia saga, a thing must act in accordance with its nature.

But, as you read this, you may ask in your heart, as I did, “but I know so many who are far from Christ who are more effective, loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, disciplined, talented, etc, than I am. How can my meager acts be greater than theirs?”

Scripture says that apart from Christ, we can do nothing, and that our most righteous, our highest and most noble deeds are like filthy rags (the connotation is literally, ‘used feminine products,’ seriously!). We are created in His image, so among our traits are the ability to create and do great works, for that is our nature. But, our nature is also fallen, so it does not rest on the solid foundation of Christ, and anything built on a poor foundation cannot stand for long and will fall eventually. It is only the work of those redeemed that is built on an eternal foundation and so stands the earthquakes and tsunamis of eternity. {This is NOT a reflection on the spiritual condition of Japan or any country. It is an analogy effective because of the timeliness of current events, meant to help realize that our best efforts fail because there are greater forces than us. Believing otherwise is hubris.}

Keep in mind that as hard as it is for our modern, materialistic minds to grasp, there is a whole realm of the spirit concurrent and concentric with our daily visible world. They are tied together and interact intimately. So when one talks about spiritual truths, they are just as real and significant as worldly truths, and will reflect in the world to greater or lesser extents. Just as we are currently seated with Christ in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6), somehow, a redeemed soul mopping a floor has more lasting impact on eternity than a non-redeemed king building a great monument or leading an army to a great victory.

It is a mystery. Yet it is also true.

Have you drunk of the living water?

Drink deep, and let the river flow out of you. Cast anxiety upon the current, that peace may flood your spirit.

In Christ, the mundane duties, faithfully performed, have an impact for hope and change far out of proportion to their appearance.

For drinking redeems mere effort into lasting, incomparable worth.

SDG

Holiness versus Legalism

If you’ve been reading TSR for very long at all, one of the themes I often come to is that of God’s holiness, goodness, and righteousness, and how they are surprisingly dynamic, unpredictable and even in some ways, wild. I also explored the idea that God interacts with humanity as a single organism, growing to maturity as a race, not just with individuals. Under this paradigm, the Old Testament, with its Mosaic Law, is essentially God’s version of “don’t play in the street,” “don’t stick things in the electrical socket,” “clean your room,” “don’t color on the walls,” “eat your vegetables,” “mind your manners, please, thank you,” and so on.

I proposed that Christ’s incarnation and the birth of the church was in some ways, our bar mitzvah, or ‘coming of age.’ The rules are lessened and independence increased. This has lead to a wide range of approaches by Christians, from those that largely ignore the Old Testament and the Law to those who largely follow its dictates, well, ok, religiously.

I am currently following a reading plan that will allow me to read the entire Bible in a year. (I’ve done this sort of thing several times over the years, and this is the second year in a row in recent history.) It is good for me because I do get to read the whole thing, and it helps me be disciplined to do so daily. Currently, I am in Leviticus, the third book of the Mosaic Law, and where most of the minutiae are given. So it has been interesting to read it in light of the above perspectives.

Much of the Law we now know is for their protection—the dietary restrictions, the health and safety rules about various diseases and unhealthy situations, and so on. It led to the Jews being healthier, safer, and therefore easier to prosper. Other laws are moral, but even there, most are meant as protection from threats that would not be obvious to people back then. Then there are the ceremonial laws on how to do sacrifices, what the priests’ tasks were, and so on. I know that many of them functioned to keep them aware of their sin nature and the need for a redeemer. As such, they point to Christ’s coming and Redemption (one of the other major TSR themes). Fine.

But there are still some doozies. I know many of those are given with reasons along the lines of ‘because I am a holy God,’ so I conclude that they created a hyper awareness in some way that as God’s people, the Jews were to be different than the other nations, to be separate, called to something higher, even if they didn’t make much sense. There are other laws that I simply don’t get. Why is it that a woman is unclean for a week after giving birth to a boy, but two weeks after a girl?

The idea of uncleanness after birth makes some amount of sense—it gives the woman a chance to heal up before her husband has sex with her again—being told that he’ll be ceremonially unclean if he does, when you live in a deeply religious society like that, and that you’ll have to sacrifice the finest in your flock to atone for it, can be a good motivator to keep the hormones in check for a few days. I also suspect there is something deeper than merely giving the mother a break during a stressful and busy time, but I haven’t studied what that might be.

However, why the gender difference? Given that there are so many GOOD reasons for most of the other laws, leads me to conclude there must be one here too. I just don’t get it. Similarly, most sacrifices must be a male, but some are specified to be a female. Why? The males I interpret to point to Christ, so what about the females? Again, I am fully confident that it is far from arbitrary, and I look forward to learning someday. (Maybe you know and can educate us all—leave a comment!)

So, what? As Christians, we have been given freedom to live in a relationship with God in and through Christ. He calls us friends, and His bride. Yet, that is not done in a vacuum, but in the very context of the Law that Christ fulfilled on the cross. The purpose of the Law was to train us in God’s character, just as our parents raised us in a certain way as children, so that when we have the freedom to act, we do so within the context of our upbringing. If we individually are not taught those ways, then it is difficult to live in a manner consistent with God’s character.

Thus, learning and studying and understanding the Law is a healthy thing for those free from it by the blood of Christ. On the other hand, hopefully we have moved past the stage where we need to be reminded not to write on the walls or clean up our room, and we have the maturity and collective wisdom to apply those principles in a more sophisticated way to other problems and issues that arise in our new-found freedom.

But we cannot apply knowledge and wisdom we do not have.

SDG

Follow up to “I Want Blood!”

About 10 days ago, I attempted to explain, in response to a reader’s question, why God needs a blood sacrifice, and why it had to be Jesus Christ. I also promised to consult with folks who’ve studied theology formally to get an ‘official’ perspective and follow up. I asked four pastors and a friend about the issue, all of whom I respect highly for their thoughtful responses as opposed to ‘party line’ autonomic responses. I have heard back from four of the five, two by email and two by conversation, and the summary is that all of us pretty much have the same understanding. Tonight, I will include the two written responses, edited for clarity.

My current pastor was the first to respond, hurriedly and briefly due to giving his kids a break in caring for a sick grandchild. His first thoughts are as follows:

1. The question of sacrifice is not a "difference maker" for God. By that I mean sacrifice does not change or make a difference in God, There is no need for him to sacrifice. It is a response of man to God as you have indicated in your house analogy. He did create (sole mover) all things but the point of the sacrifice is not God's need to sacrifice. It is man's need of redemption that creates the need for sacrifice. God created us as free, moral choosing beings, and it is our choice to respond to God appropriately, in this case sacrifice, not God's NEED to make a sacrifice.

2. Jesus was not sacrificed by God. Jesus CHOSE to endure the cross and crucifixion for our sins John 15: 12-17; John 19:8-11; John 1:1-5; Philippians 2:5-11  (just a few references) {RJW Note:  yes, Jesus is God, in the person of the Son, but was not ‘made’ to sacrifice Himself by God the Father. I know, I know, the whole Trinitarian idea of 3 Persons yet 1 Being is a tough one. For purposes of this discussion, think of the Trinity as 3 independent persons whose will is completely unified in inseparable purpose. Yeah, it’s still clear as mud. Let’s move on and see if things clear up as we move downstream.}

3. I am going to give you a web address below just for some reading. Like all things on the internet, I don't agree with everything in this response (even most things) but it is a good foundation on the background of the sacrificial system and the need for sacrifice. http://www.crivoice.org/sacrifice.html

I will try to get more from him this week. The second respondent was my pastor in another town, and a former engineer with a passion for thinking things through. He and I are a lot alike, though he would cringe at the idea! :P He says:

Before getting to the blood sacrifice itself, a couple of preliminary remarks:

(1) We must begin with God's character. If He is righteous, just, merciful, gracious, holy, etc., whatever he does must align with His character, or He is no more than the mythological pantheon of gods who are not consistent, and who are not perfectly righteous, etc. If His character is not perfect, it seems foolish to worship Him other than in fear of what He might do to us.

(2) We must understand the seriousness of sin. Sin is intentionally violating God's character (e.g., if we lie, we act contrary to His character of truthfulness). And, we must understand that we are fallen creatures to our core (i.e., we sin because we are sinners, not the other way around). We sin often and repeatedly.

(3) Now, because of God's character and our character, a "great gulf" exists. As Habakkuk cries out to God, "You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, And cannot look on wickedness... " (Hab. 1:13). God must do something about this gulf. He can

(1) ignore it, and consign us to our fate,

(2) ignore it, and pretend nothing really happened (essentially, universalism), or

(3) deal with it justly.

We know because of His character, he cannot choose either option (1) or (2)

(4) The next key issue is, how serious is the crime? Even if we ignore the death penalty in our culture, a person who murders once is usually sentenced to life imprisonment ("usually" allows for the limitations of our legal system). So, is the scope of the crime God must deal with greater than or less than a single murder? I would argue it is much greater because (a) we ultimately are replacing God with ourselves (idolatry) and (b) Jesus tells us that if we hate another, we've committed murder in our heart. So, I would argue, the crime is much greater, so it is reasonable, based on our own morals, to expect the penalty to be much higher. So,

(5) To satisfy His justice, the penalty for the sin must be paid. At the same time, God is gracious and merciful, so how can He act to perfectly satisfy all His attributes? The cross - Jesus endured the full brunt of our sin, thus the price has been paid. Because he is God, He alone could endure the high price. So, in His death, the price was fully paid legitimately. Because he was man, He legally represented mankind and could substitute Himself for us. His blood, ultimately, implies a life was given as penalty for the severe nature and penalty of the crimes (sin). But, in Jesus, the blood is not the end - the price was fully paid, but Jesus alone, as the sinless sin sacrifice, was raised from the dead. A life was paid because of God's justice, He was raised "for our justification", i.e., showing God's perfect graciousness.

All "blood sacrifices" prior to Jesus portray the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus, but could not pay the required price because the sacrifice was not of a perfect being and was not of a legitimate substitute for man. The blood sacrifice symbolized, however, the high requirement God's justice demands for our sinfulness. The ones making the sacrifice realized (or should have!) that a life was required for life.

I hope this is of help to folks. If there is interest, as I hear more, I’ll share it. Like I mentioned above, the two with whom I discussed this in person shared similar thoughts.

SDG