Humanity’s sins have significantly damaged our relationship with God. But not irreperably. God can fix anything. And he did.
As most of us know from the times other people have sinned against us, some of the time we can simply, easily forgive those sins… and sometimes it’s not that simple. Some sins are mighty destructive. When we wrongly destroy something, it oughta be replaced, but that’s not always easy to do. If you destroy something with a lot of sentimental value attached to it, a simple replacement isn’t gonna cut it. If you destroy family photos, sometimes they’re not replaceable. Same deal when you wrongly kill someone: It’s kinda impossible for us to replace them. God could do it, but we certainly can’t.
So when people ask me, “Well can’t God just forgive all our sins, and that’s that?”—it’s not gonna be that easy. Our sins do damage. We don’t always see or care about all the spiritual damage, but it’s there. God can see it, even though we can’t. So God can’t just forgive us; he’s gotta do damage control. He’s gotta fix things.
That’s what atonement is: God’s act of fixing sin-damage.
That’s what it means whenever we try to atone for evil we’ve done: When we try to fix sin-damage… with various degrees of success. We don’t always succeed. Some of our acts of atonement are actually kinda pathetic. Like when a corporation offers people money to make up for harm they’ve done—and it’s always too little money, unless the courts get invovled and make ’em pay something gargantuan.
The Hebrew words for atonement are
כֹּפֶר/kofér,
כִּפֻּר/kippúr
(which you know from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, “day of atonement”),
and its related verb
כָּפַר/kafár.
It literally means “plaster.” You know, like when somebody knocked a hole in a wall. You put some plaster or putty or spackle or cement on it, paint over it… and if you applied the filler properly, the wall’s as good as new. Sometimes better than new, ’cause your plaster is stronger than the drywall you’ve patched. And that’s the word the LORD uses in Exodus to describe what the ancient Hebrews’ ritual sacrifices represented to him: Their sins poked holes in their relationship with God, and needed plastering. It’s a really simple metaphor: Sin breaks stuff, and atonement glues it back together.
The word English-speakers used to use to describe kofér, and its Greek translation ἱλασμός/ilasmós, was “propitiation.” It’s still found in the King James Version Ro 3.25, 1Jn 2.2, 4.10 and comes from the Latin verb propitio, “to appease; to regain the good favor of.” It sorta misses the point of kofér—and of grace. Thanks to God’s grace, we already have his good favor; he already considers us right with him. But sin-damage still needs to be dealt with. We still need to make things right in the universe. God’s just fine—a fact which many Christians still don’t wholly grasp (and occasionally send me rebuking emails to complain I’m making God sound too radically gracious, as if that’s possible) ’cause we still struggle to fathom how deep and wide God’s love and grace is.
Anyway, there used to be a Middle English word, “onement,” which means unity. John Wycliffe used it in Ezekiel 37.17. English-speaking preachers started to use the prefix “at-” with it, meaning in, to describe our relationship with God: We’re in unity with him. Supposedly atoning acts bring us back to this state of unity… but remember, God does grace, so we don’t need to do these atoning acts.
Because Christ Jesus already did the atoning act: He sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. Cl 1.22, 1Pe 1.19 He took care of it. We need do nothing more than accept that he took care of it. We can’t add to it; we’re not good enough to sacrifice ourselves for anything more than our own sins.
Since Jesus is God, it makes God himself our plaster. We have him patching the cracks that sin made in our lives—in much the same way the Holy Spirit was sealed to us when we first turned to God. But don’t play with that metaphor too much, lest you get the idea it’s okay to poke holes in your life so God can putty them with more of himself. We’re not meant to keep on sinning so we can get more grace. Ro 6.1-2 Instead look at your life as a wall full of holes, patched over by God. We might imagine it as flawed; we can’t get past the idea of all the holes beneath the paint. But God nonetheless considers it a perfectly good wall. It serves its purpose: It keeps out the wind and rain. It keeps prying eyes from looking through it. It keeps listening ears from hearing better through it. It provides shelter. We can hang pictures on it. And so on, till the metaphor breaks down and we just get silly. But you get the idea.
God wants us, and our relationship with him, repaired, back to the way he originally meant things. He doesn’t want to knock us down and start again from scratch.
Atonement for everyone.
Humanity is too corrupt to save ourselves. We’re hopeless… unless someone else intervenes. And it’s kinda obvious where I’m going with this: God intervened, became the man Jesus, died for our sins, 2Co 14-15, He 2.9 paid our fines, 1Ti 2.6 and reconciled the whole world to himself. 2Co 5.19 He plastered over our sin-damaged lives, and declared us forgiven.
By “whole world” I mean what the authors of scripture meant: The whole world. Everybody. You oughta know the verses by now:
- John 3.16-17 KJV
- 16For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
Every human, past and future, near and far, vastly wicked or relatively “good”: We’re atoned for. God didn’t wait till we repented first; it feels like that’s when he first acts in our lives, but that’s only because we don’t see the big picture and our place in it. God didn’t wait till we’re worthy, ’cause we never will be. He didn’t wait till we’re sorry, or till individuals come to him: He simply decided to forgive the entire world, and did.
No, not just Christians. Not just monotheists. Not just “good people.” Definitely not just Americans. Everybody.
- 1 John 2.2 KJV
- And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
- 1 John 4.14 KJV
- And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
- 1 Timothy 2.3-6 KJV
- 3For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; 4who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. 5For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; 6who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.
- 2 Peter 3.9 KJV
- The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Now no, this does not mean universalism, the idea that nobody goes to hell because God has saved everyone. Some people don’t wanna be saved, or are so self-righteous they insist they don’t need saving, so they’re gonna reject Jesus’s forgiveness. God’s not happy about that, but he did grant us freewill, and therefore lets us resist his grace. Yeah, it sucks. But it was either this, or reprogram humanity like robots so that we’d have no freewill, and love and obey him no matter what. God didn’t find the no-freewill idea acceptable. Determinists do, but that’s them, and God help their children when they dare to express any thoughts and feelings which differ from their deterministic parents. The idea of a loving God tends to be a tough one when you much prefer the idea of a control-freak God.
Anyway if you’ve ever wondered, “Does God actually want me in his kingdom?”—worry not; he absolutely does. Jesus atoned for everybody because God wants everybody. He made you; he wants you. We’re not so filthy and nasty and offensive to God’s infinite goodness, he shuns us. He doesn’t turn his back when we call to him. He never says, “Well first you gotta get clean” before his Spirit comes to live within us. Yeah we’ll have to clean up afterward, but cleanliness isn’t a prerequisite. Nothing is a prerequisite but faith: We gotta trust God to save us. And he will!
And when Jesus finally returns to take over the world, it’ll be the whole world. Not part, Rv 11.15 not just Israel, not just the countries which claim they’re Christian nations. Jesus is Lord of all. ’Cause he died for all.
