An analogy relating to substitutionary atonement: are we standing on burnt ground?

This example was used in a recent message, to illustrate the gospel, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ.

In 1864, some settlers saw a prairie fire a long distance away. He thought the fire would reach them quickly, given the direction of the wind, so he burned the grass behind them in a controlled manner, and then placed the settlers on the already- burned ground.

The speaker used this an example of Christ's substitutionary atonement. Believers are on ground that has already been burned over.

God's wrath has been poured out on Christ, and if we are in Christ, then we are safe. If we are not, we face certain destruction from the fire of God's wrath.

This message accompanied a reading and explanation of Ephesians 2:1-10, which is one of the clearest explanations of the gospel in Scripture.

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Prairie Fire, 1864

When John S. Collins set out across the Plains in 1864, he never expected a narrow escape from a Nebraska prairie fire along the way. Collins, who traveled with an emigrant train that outfitted in Council Bluffs, later wrote an account of his first overland journey in a book titled Across the Plains in '64: incidents of early days west of the Missouri River-two thousand miles in an open boat from Fort Benton to Omaha-reminiscences of the pioneer period of Galena, General Grant's old home. Published in 1904 in Omaha, it was based on a diary kept during the 1864 trip.

Collins's account of the prairie fire: "April 15th [1864] we started at daylight and discovered a dense smoke to the north. It was a prairie fire ten miles away. The captain ordered [a] halt, and calling all hands around him, he said: 'If the wind changes and that fire comes this way, we must work fast or we are 'goners.' Half an hour brought us to a marsh and a small lake. We made camp between them. It was lively work, corralling the wagons 'close up,' and chaining them together. The stock was driven inside, and the entrance was closed and securely chained.

"Every man took a bucket and a grain sack, and under the orders of Captain Prowse began 'back firing,' by dropping a lighted match in the dry grass and putting out the fire before it got beyond control, and then beginning in a new place, repeating the operation over and over again, with a bucket of water always near by to keep the bag wet. In an hour's time several acres were burned over, all around us. . . . It was fast and strenuous work and was finished none too soon to avoid a most serious disaster.

"Soon the wind changed as the captain predicted. The blaze was in sight, coming toward us with the speed of a race horse. It was a line of fire a mile long, coming like a great wave, at times leaping fifty feet in the air. The roar, hissing and cracking of the flames could be heard a mile away. Deer, rabbits and prairie dogs swept through our camp in great fright. The sight was grand and awful.

"When the flame reached the head of the lake north of us, a quarter of a mile away, we could feel the heat. It was almost stifling. At this point, the fire stopped. We had 'back fired' a quarter of a mile along its edge. Fearing that when the tall grass in the marsh was reached the falling embers would set fire to our wagon covers, McNear fired the marsh before the main flame reached it. During the excitement the stock bellowed and brayed like wild beasts. Soon the two waves of fire met, and the smoke was so blinding that we were compelled to throw ourselves flat on the ground until it passed over. When the fire had passed and gone around us, the men were called together to ascertain if everybody was accounted for. All stood alongside their wagons and answered to their names."

Collins and his fellow travelers, thankful for their narrow escape, soon afterward resumed their journey through the charred landscape.

No, Christian's are not standing on burnt ground because Christ did not take our place in punishment. Eternal death was the penalty for sin, not 3 days in the grave. Christ paid the price that the Law demands, a blood sacrifice for atonement, but sin warrants eternal death of which he did not pay.
Thus, penal substitution is an invalid theory, and therefore, we are not standing on burnt ground.
But, we are standing on the faith that God will not commit us to eternal hell, because through grace, God has accepted Jesus Christ's perfect sacrifice, of which only the blood was symbolic of life and death, not the act itself. Christ died voluntarily, it wasn't a punishment, nor was it our intended punishment.
For I may even choose to not accept Christ if I knew that all i had to do for my sins was to be crucified and suffer 3 unconscious days in the grave. But instead, my fate was something much worse than that, and therefore even my gratitude is unworthy to recognize what Christ saved me from, even though he didn't go through it himself. But rather, he did what I couldn't do to keep me out of it i.e. love God with all his heart, mind and soul.

You have a real problem with your position.

Sin could not keep Christ because Christ never sinned. Christ carried our sin into condemnation and left it there. Sin and death will be cast into the lake of fire. The souls of men unlike Christ will be cast into the lake of fire because they cannot be separated from sin.

Christ is glorified in heaven with the Father. Our sin was left in condemnation not taken to heaven with Christ.

For the cause of Christ
Roger

Penal substitutionary atonement is totally valid, and Jesus did suffer hell on the Cross. Those who oppose it are usually liberals who cannot handle the idea of a God who would punish his son on the Cross.

Isaiah 53 couldn't be any more plain, and neither could the symbolism of multiple sacrifices in the OT.

By the way, Jesus DID voluntarily sacrifice himself, although the Father sent him.

We don't even know the full mechanics of what occurred on the Cross.

But, here's a great sermon on that topic by Colin Smith:

https://www.oneplace.com/ministries...days-key/listen/hell-on-the-cross-746666.html

No more Play-doh theology please.

Isaiah 53:4-12 4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.

I could dig up tons more Scriptures but these are most prominent.

Sorry..here's a better explanation..that audio was very short

Additionally, "death" is used as a metaphor related to separation from God, or spiritual death. Quite often, heretical groups support their view of annihilationism by claiming that the metaphor is literal.

In fact, I held that belief for a long time.

However, it is evident from Scripture that death is used as a metaphor for separation from God, who is the source of all life, whether the person is conscious or not.

There is a type between the Garden of Eden, the Israelite camp, the city of Jerusalem, and the New Jerusalem.

In each case, there are individuals who are "cast out" of these holy locations, where God's presence resides. They are conscious but they are "dead", in a sense, because they no longer dwell in God's presence in a real or ritualistic sense.

Jesus was taken outside the camp to suffer, according to Hebrews.

Way too many people are unable to understand Scripture because they are reasoning literalistically without seeing the shadows and types. And, some folks' church background make them more susceptible than others, such as dispensationalists due to their "literalizing" hermeneutic.

By the way, it is also significant that the Egyptians suffered blackness shortly before their firstborn died.

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Six Dimension of Hell on the Cross

Colin Smith

Artists and poets have speculated over the centuries about hell (consider Dante’s “Inferno”), but the clearest revelation of hell is given at the cross. The Apostle’s Creed affirms that Christ descended into hell. While this has often been taken to refer to a journey Christ made after his death, the Reformers understood it to refer to what Christ experienced in the hours of darkness when he bore our sins and became our sacrifice.

Hell has six dimensions and Christ experienced all of them on the cross.

1. He was in conscious suffering.
Jesus experienced great physical suffering—the scourging, the nailing and the mocking—all at the hands of men. He felt in his body all the pain of torture and crucifixion. Hell is a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Luke 13:28; Matthew 13:50), and Jesus entered into all of its pains and torments when he was suffering on the cross.

2. He was in blackest darkness.
“From the sixth hour [midday] until the ninth hour [3 in the afternoon], darkness came over all the land” (Matthew 27:45). The sudden darkness tells us that something entirely new was happening. Up to this point it had all been about physical suffering. Now Jesus was entering into the heart of his atoning work as our sin-bearer, drinking the cup of God’s wrath.

3. He was surrounded by demonic powers.
Scripture speaks of these dark forces when it tells us that “having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15). A full picture of this conflict has not been given to us, but we can be sure that the demonic powers were present at Calvary, adding their taunts and venom to the human hatred that was poured out on Christ.

4. He was bearing sin.
1 Peter 2:24 says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” God made him who had no sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). In the darkness, the Lord laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). To be our sin-bearer, Christ received in himself the hell that our sins deserve. Klass Schilder says God was “directly sending the torments of hell against the Christ.” This is the deepest mystery in the darkness of the cross.

5. He was under judgment.
Jesus endured hell on the cross because hell is the punishment for sin. All that hell is, he experienced right there during these hours of darkness in which he bore our sin and endured our punishment. The wrath of God was poured out on him, and he became the propitiation for our sins (Romans 3:25, 1 John 2:2).

6. He was separated from the knowledge of God’s love of God.
This abandoning of Christ meant that the love the Son had enjoyed with his Father for all eternity was now beyond his reach. It also meant that the terrors of the Father’s judgment were poured out on the Savior. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 says that “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus…will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.”

That is hell.

Hell is conscious suffering in blackest darkness, surrounded by demonic powers. It is bearing the guilt of your sin and coming under the righteous judgment of God. But the hell of hell for the sinner will be to know that there is a God of love and that he or she could have known this is love, but that now it is beyond their reach.

When people talk about hell, the discussion is often about whether or not it is real. Hell is as real as the cross. Jesus entered all of hell’s dimensions on the cross, and he endured them so that you would never know what hell is like.

If someone should say, “There is no hell,” I ask, “Then what was the cross about? Why did Christ have to suffer? Why the darkness? Why the forsakenness? These things happened because there is there is Divine wrath, there is judgment and there is hell. All of this was poured out on Jesus, and he absorbed it in himself to save us from it. But as Richard Sibbes says, “Whatsoever was done to Christ…shall be done to all that are out[side] of him.” [ii]

That is as plain a statement as you can get, and it is faithful to the Scriptures. It is why every person must come to Jesus Christ and be in him, because we cannot be saved without him.


https://unlockingthebible.org/2015/04/six-dimensions-of-hell-on-the-cross/

It is my conviction that free-willers worship a Play-doh god that they can emasculate and mold according to their expectations, rather than believing what Scripture teaches about Him. Election to salvation, divine sovereignty in salvation, omnipotence, omniscience, divine decrees, and exhaustive foreknowledge are thrown out the window in the effort to conform him to their presuppositions.

said the op

it is my conviction, you have a disgusting attitude towards many posters here and little respect for God as well

you are so busy emulating Calvin, you have not noticed he is basically an offshoot of Catholicism and as such, began a murderous career in Geneva which you Calvinists refuse to acknowledge

his reign of terror is well documented and should be understood as something God never ordained as Calvin did not emulate Christ, but his own harsh and critical spirit is obviously alive and well today...which in itself suggests the source as the enemy of Christ

yet, you pretty much channel him with the same disgust he showered over all who tried to point out his errors

thankfully, today, we can point to the unfruitful works of darkness he so boldly displayed and call the whole mess for what it is

CULT of Calvin

Nope, sorry guys, please tell me that you're all joking by trying to equate darkness from lack of sun, and hanging on a cross, as commensurate to the condemnation of hell??? Even the malefactors to his left and to his right suffered the same 'torment' as him. Your eisigesis in attempting to somehow, allegorically or analogously, define Jesus' time on the cross as equivalent to the forlorn and ostracized dimension of being out of God's presence, is desperate and just simply, quite the stretch. Again, the two robbers on the cross, of which at least one was saved, went through the same demise. No one suffered eternal death, for tasting of it, even though I don't even believe that much, is not the same thing, ...does anyone know what eternal means? It's pathetic, and again, a desperate attempt to suit his theology, the way that Colin Smith attempted to analogize human crucifixion with eternal condemnation and abandonment. Again, countless men died by crucifixion under Roman rule, let alone the Christian martyrs who died in an arguably more excruciating manner, equally potentially feeling 'abandoned by God', ...according to Colin Smith. Meaning, who paid the price since Jesus' death was no more hell fire than countless others. Jesus was never abandoned by the Father, he was sent by him to fulfill a mission and the Father was pleased with him the whole time through! Jesus ended the Law, he was the only available perfect sacrifice, no one else could qualify to remove the condemnation that Law inherently brings.
Keep it simple guys, if your forced to eisegete and bring up analogies that the Bible never uses, or intended to use, then it's because you've digressed, and missed the point of the message.

Are you Jesus?

Do you know all the mechanics of what happened at the Cross? Something way beyond the experience of a normal man having on the Cross occurred in his case. God was pouring out his wrath on Jesus.

Again, read Isaiah 53.

Anyone who denies penal substitutionary atonement is denying the core of the atonement.

Do you know what it means to be both God and man, joined in a hypostatic union?

I think Colin's explanation is credible, because whatever atoned for the sins of believers occurred before the words "it is finished".

And he was still alive at that point.

Sounds like a denial of penal substitutionary atonement is part of the "emergent church" crap that appeals to fallen man. Again, the Play-doh god stuff. Fashion God however you want him, to avoid the truth.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-reasons-changed-mind-penal-substitution/

3 Reasons I Changed My Mind About Penal Substitution
Daniel Hames

I was raised in the kind of evangelical church that drummed into us as children that Jesus died to save us from our sins. The cross of Jesus was the center of the message at summer camps, holiday Bible clubs, and youth group talks. Jesus had died in my place, bearing my sin and its punishment for me, so I could know God and live with him forever.

When I began reading theological books and exploring the faith for myself, I grew suspicious of the beliefs I’d been raised with. I read some thoughtful authors who raised serious questions about the way I’d always understood the cross and salvation. I read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian. I read Steve Chalke and Alan Mann’s now-famous line in The Lost Message of Jesus:

The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. . . . If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies. . . the idea that God was an angry deity, requiring a sacrifice to propitiate his wrath was surely more like an ancient pagan god than the Father of Jesus Christ.

I read critiques of Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, which revealed how influential it had been, yet how it was bound to its medieval, Western, forensic categories. More than that, the idea that God is an angry deity—requiring a sacrifice to propitiate his wrath—was surely more like an ancient pagan god than the Father of Jesus Christ.

If anything, early church writers apparently steered away from these pagan motifs and spoke about the cross in ways that didn’t focus on God’s wrath, sin’s penalty, and substitution. Such a picture seemed to emerge only as “a courtroom drama of Calvin’s imagination,” as Bradley Jersak put it. It made God out to be angry, his Son a victim, and me a grateful but (slightly shaken) beneficiary of the crucifixion’s violent horrors.

The vision of the atonement I’d grown up with seemed horribly distorted, simplistic, and not historically supported. It was time to move on.

There and Back Again
As I kept reading over the years, however, I sensed my theological revolution had been hasty. Was my childhood understanding of the cross simplistic and naïve? Sure—I was a child, after all. So it was easy to read adult-level critiques of Sunday school illustrations and scoff. It was easy to deconstruct my “youth group” faith and proudly ditch it for the enlightenment of my new favorite authors.
But was it really a theological revolution if I never had a serious atonement theology to begin with? I hadn’t read much Calvin, Irenaeus, Anselm, or Athanasius. I hadn’t spent much time digging into Scripture either—which should’ve been a warning to me. Doing theology this way has a funny way of exposing us. I began to realize that the vengeful, pagan, loveless god I’d supposedly believed in bore no relation to the real God I had come to trust as a little boy. Just how reliable had my new guides been?
Three significant things have shaped my thinking about the death of Christ, and I’m now much closer to where I started than I imagined I might be.

1. Actually Reading the Bible
Anyone can point to the “clobber” verses that present Jesus as a substitute for sin’s penalty, such as Isaiah 53:5 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. Plenty of people find ways around these to read the cross another way—and with proof texts, that’s always possible. Yet as I began to read Scripture more deeply, I came to see these texts in the light of Scripture’s great themes and typologies. I could see no other way to interpret them—the animal skins in Genesis 3, the ram in Genesis 22, the Passover lamb and the firstborn sons, the darkness of judgment the night of the exodus from Egypt and the darkness that fell as Jesus died, all the undeniable language of propitiation and the blood on the mercy seat, and so much more.

Actually reading the Scriptures in their cohesive entirety, and seeing the Old Testament repeatedly preview the gospel, showed me that Jesus bearing our sin and its penalty is central—not peripheral, and not artificially imposed—to the story’s vast sweep.

2. The Trinity
It’s fair to say that some explanations of the cross I heard as a child weren’t Trinitarian. “God” was angry at sin but wanted to find a way to save us, and “Jesus” was a third party who stepped in to make it work. It’s partially true, it’s simplistic, and it can lead to a distortion of the gospel and the Trinity. Yet, none of my Sunday school teachers was theologically trained, and I was 10. A little grace and patience can perhaps be afforded to us all.
According to Scripture, all three persons of the Godhead are offended by sin. All three persons are committed to destroying sin and to liberating humanity and the world from the curse. Jesus is the eternal Son, and when he died on the cross, he was there because he’d chosen to lay down his life, a plan devised in eternity. Philippians 2:6–8 clearly shows the pre-incarnate Son of God deciding to take on flesh, become a servant, and go to his death for sinners. His prayer in Gethsemane, contemplating the cup of wrath, is that the Father’s will would be accomplished through his death (Matt. 26:42).

It’s no use pitting “vindictive God” against “innocent Jesus,” for the one nailed to the tree is himself the sin-hating, sinner-saving God. The Son’s complicity in his own condemnation as our substitute is one of the gospel’s most glorious truths. Being clear about this truth doesn’t just safeguard our faithfulness; it displays Christ’s beauty and love.

3. The Witness of the Historic Church
For all the bluster that penal substitution is a late arrival to the party of atonement theory, I was surprised to read ancient writers offering plain expositions of it. And there were none of the distortions and childish lisping I’d been told to expect from exponents of this theology.

For example, here is one of the earliest Christian apologetic texts we have, The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, dated sometime in the second century:

O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!

In his exposition of Psalm 51, Augustine (AD 354–430) wrote,
For even the Lord was subject to death, but not on account of sin: He took upon him our punishment, and so looseth our guilt. . . . Now, as men were lying under this wrath by reason of their original sin . . . there was need for a mediator, that is for a reconciler, who by the offering of one sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the law and the prophets were types, should take away this wrath. . . . Now when God is said to be angry, we do not attribute to him such a disturbed feeling as exists in the mind of an angry man; but we call his just displeasure against sin by the name “anger,” a word transferred by analogy from human emotions.

Even ancient songs celebrated the wrath-bearing sacrifice of Christ. Written 1,500 years ago, Venantius Fortunatus’s (AD 530–607) beautiful hymn, “See the Destined Day Arise,” begins:
See the destined day arise! See a willing sacrifice!

Jesus, to redeem our loss, hangs upon the shameful cross;
Jesus, who but you could bear wrath so great and justice fair?
Every pang and bitter throe, finishing your life of woe?

I also read contemporary evangelical classics, John Stott’s The Cross of Christ and J. I. Packer’s What Did the Cross Achieve? and discovered them to be entirely consonant with my primary-source historical reading.

Hallelujah, What a Savior!
Perhaps my childhood understanding had been thin. No great surprise there. But in Scripture, in theology, and in church history, I kept staring at the death of Jesus, in my place, for my sin.

Sure, illustrations need to be tweaked, care must be taken with language, and there are vital concepts to be taken into account such as representation, headship and union, the overthrow of evil powers, the cosmic victory of the cross, and so on. Yet these considerations have only strengthened and enriched the “good deposit” given to me as a child.

UWC, Daniel Hames touched on several areas that make a comprehensive argument for his position. But, what I protest is that, after all's been said and done, I question his interpretation or understanding of the verses and events that he cited. Again, all I can say is that the imagery and symbolism of eternal darkness, ....and even this imagery is interpretive, not Biblically substantiated, is just that, imagery, not tactile or visceral. For again, eternity cannot be simulated.

If the blood of bulls and goats were able to absolve the ancient Jews of their sins, whether it be temporal or not, we see that the principal behind this form of sacrifice and atonement was not punitive or compensatory, but symbolic. And Jesus is the final sacrifice, his death is symbolic for God demands blood, not suffering. Only the guilty can suffer because their guilty, it is their conscience that is burning. Jesus Christ cannot relate to this. Therefore he simply offered what the Law demanded, blood for sin. His blood ended the Old Covenant, for a binding Covenant requires death in order to abolish it, and equally to be able to inaugurate a New Covenant. That's all his death was for. Not to emulate eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth!

You didn't deal with the text of Isaiah 53.

Additionally, we don't know the mechanics of what occurred on the Cross.

By the way, I do not move from penal substitutionary atonement.

Sorry, Isaiah 53 speaks of the immediate circumstance of why he had to go to the cross, an innocent and perfect man. It does not say logistically what he suffered, but what it meant. Yes, he bore our sins simply because he wasn't paying for his sins, they were ours. Yes, he was beaten bruised, abused, mocked and humiliated, when he didn't deserve to be, these are not characteristics of Hell. Hell is where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, total darkness where the flame never goes out.
The abuse that he suffered was not the point, that was a by-product of an evil world condemning an innocent man. It simply shows to what extent Christ went to obey his Father. Blood had to be shed to end the old Covenant. You keep taking the incidental aspects of the process, and turning them into dogma. Like both Colin Smith & Daniel Humes did. They thought that they were being clever and insightful by drawing conclusions from extraneous circumstances. Yes, one can analogize anything that they like, and that's what they did. You said it yourself, the mechanics are just not there to be so assertive about them.
Because we don't have the mechanics is because God always divulges truths on a need to know basis. Therefore, we do not need to know and thus, all your conclusions are speculative at best. What the Bible does tell us is the significance of his death, i.e. final sacrifice for atonement, end the Old Law, bring in the New. Not for punitive or compensatory measures!

Hallelujah, what a Savior!

This is a great Easter reminder.

The fact that only Israel had the sacrifices and atonement and the rest of the world perished speaks volumes for limited atonement.

Three days in the heart of the suffering corrupted earth it moans in expectation of the son of God. We are not what we will be.

Three is used as a metaphor throughout the word to represent the end of the matter . The demonstration of our patient Jealous God took three days. Which he could of performed in the twinkling of the eye. Love is long suffering, a day like a thousand years to the Son of man Jesus who cries out in his anxiety (why has thous forsaken me.?) He is of one mind and always does whatsoever His soul desires. Three is the end of the matter.

Strike three struck out the father of lies sent him back to the bottomless dugout out for the season .

He would not share that demonstration of the unseen work of Him and the father for any more than three days. Just as with Jonas . three days of suffering a living hell crying out and was strengthened in order to finish the work that Christ began in both Jonas and the Son of man .

No more demonstrations of that work that was performed from before the foundation of the world .Not a after thought (Whoops)