So we are looking at this really peculiar word “propissiation”. It’s in Romans 3.25 and it means to take away the wrath of God by sacrifice. Well, that really sounds very pagan, doesn’t it? In fact, it was a word understood by every Roman citizen because, as I mentioned the other day, the Roman citizen would sprinkle a little incense on various altars around the city to appease the wrath of Caesar. So how can this word be used of God? I mean, it is so strange that Paul would use this word. In fact, there are some, well, most theologians are so uncomfortable with this word that they don’t use it in their translations, that is most Bible translators. They use a word from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which came into being because many of the Jewish people who had been occupied by various countries like Greece had forgotten to understand and read and talk Hebrew. So the the Septurgent, as it’s called, the Bible was translated into Greek so that the Hebrews who had forgotten how to speak Hebrew could read the Bible. But that word, and so they would, the word the Septurgent is the word expiation, which means to wipe out, to remove. Well, that’s very, very different from the word propitiation that Paul used because the word propitiation, as I said, means to appease God’s wrath. So you can’t use the word expiation, which is about us, about human beings wiping out our sins, when in fact the word is about God who takes away his own wrath. Well, that’s the key you see. The key is that this is not a word about people appeasing God by offering him a sacrifice, but about God appeasing his own wrath by his own sacrifice of himself. Now, that is about a minute, 60 seconds of technical talk, but the fact is it has enormous significance to your life and mind. All false religion, and by the way we are surrounded by it, in this Western world and in the United States, whether it appears Christian or not, all false religion is the attempt by mankind, by human beings to appease God by offering him something. Now, when you think of that, think of your own life. In what way do you offer God something in order to quieten him down, shut him up or make him less mad with you? It’s very pagan ideas, isn’t it? It’s as if God is a real green ogre, and he’s always ready to kill us, and we’d better do something and to shut him up, to quieten him down, to appease him, to placate him, to propitiate him. All of those words mean the same thing. Have you ever done that? Think of it. We are filled with guilt and shame and fear, and especially if we’ve had struggles with addiction, like drugs or alcohol or food issues or sexual issues, and we feel the judgment of God, and we try to quieten him down. How do we do it? What I’m about to say may surprise you, by repentance. Well, wait a minute. How are we supposed to repent? Yes, indeed we do, but it is the goodness of God that leads to repentance, not the wrath of God. If you think that the wrath of God is leading to you to repentance, then you are actually using repentance to take away God’s wrath. And that makes you think in terms of how sincere is my repentance. I need to be more sincere with my repentance so that God will be pleased with it. I need to be more earnest with my repentance so that he will be pleased with it. I need to be more consistent with my repentance. And so what happens when we think that we are appeasing or settling down God’s wrath is that we concentrate on our works. Have you ever thought of repentance as being a work? Yes, it can become that. You see, your mind is saying, have I repented enough? Am I sincere enough? Am I earnest enough? And of course you always come up with a no because especially when you are struggling with addictions, if you struggle with an addiction and you repent one day, but five minutes later or half a day later, or one or two days or one or two weeks later, you turn away from your repentance and you go back into your addiction again, then you become all stressed out and all anxious, oh I didn’t repents sincerely enough, I didn’t repent consistently enough and you try harder. And so repentance becomes a work. Now supposing you understand that the goodness of God has led you to repentance. In other words, you realize that God has been so kind, he gave his only son for you, he took away his own judgment upon you by taking that judgment upon himself instead of putting it upon you and you saw how merciful God was, how much he loved you, how long, how much he longed to embrace you, came to you and said, I forgive you of all your sins. Then that leads to a repentance, oh God, you are so good, thank you so much. And the repentance is not so much a repentance of sin though it is that, but a repentance of unbelief because you believed that God was that green ogre, that monster God who was all that, only too ready to blot you out. And now you’ve repented of that distortion and that caricature of God and you have seen God in the face and kindness of Jesus and it has led you to repentance. Now people do it another way. Let’s suppose you failed in your favorite sin, you have been away from that sin for three or four weeks or months or days and then you went right back into it again. And you were so discouraged that you stayed away from God, you didn’t have the heart to come back to Him in repentance, you just went into a blue funk and you just stayed depressed for days and weeks. And you went silent in your soul, you didn’t open the Bible, you didn’t go to church, you just stayed in that moody state for a long time and then you came out of it. And why did you come out of it? Well, you might say, well, somehow the depression just passed or the sense of failure just passed, but no. What may well have been happening is that you were trying to impress God by how angry with yourself you were and how depressed it made you. And so if you stay away from God for three or four weeks or three or four days, then he will understand and realize that you’re very sincere. I mean, we are really crazy people, aren’t we? That is one of the ways in which we offer God a sacrifice. I’ll offer Him my spirit, chastened and punished by my own mind and my being so unworthy of God that I stay away from church and from opening the Bible and from praying to Him so down in my spirit, he will realize that I am sincere and then I can come back to God. What is that? It’s self-punishment. We’re trying to impress God. Look, if you sin at six o’clock, you get forgiveness at six o’clock. If you sin at three in the afternoon, you get forgiveness at three in the afternoon. You bounce back because God is good. If you think that you have to stay away from Him as penance for weeks or days or hours, that’s you feeling that you have to do this penance, which is perform something for Him in order to impress Him so that He will receive you. Look at the… Do you see how pagan it is? Christians at heart, you understand, no matter how converted they may be, are pagan. We’re all pagan because we are filled with guilt and shame and fear and we have this feeling that we must somehow impress God. Now there are some people who do it less subtly than repentance or depression and they think that, well, I think I need to go to church more often. They’ve sinned, they feel unworthy, they feel if they attend more services, they will become more holy or they will be more consistent in their victory. And so some people go to church Saturday night and Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon and Wednesday morning or Wednesday evening or whatever and they’re all the time going to meetings. And ostensibly that is overtly from the outside point of view, it looks as though they are simply going to meetings in order to stay on the straight and narrow. But if we examine our soul and heart and look at our motives, we are going to those meetings because we have a certain view of God. That is that He is displeased with us, that He’s a tyrant and that He wants to be impressed by how we do things. And so we offer sacrifices of attendance at many, many meetings in order to impress Him. All of this is paganism. It is an attempt to appease God’s wrath by our sacrifice in the ancient times and by the way in some places still in the earth today, people would give a sheep or a goat. They would give sometimes an oxen. In order to sacrifice to God, offer Him something that is very precious to them so that they would be impressed and so that God would be impressed and forgive them. It even came down to the paganism, horrible paganism of offering child sacrifice and young virgins to God in order to get His acceptance. This is how dark paganism can become when we try to please and appease God by a sacrifice. Now remember what I said, there is a sacrifice, but it is God’s sacrifice to mankind. God giving Himself a giving to us the gift of Himself in the person of His Son. That is the sacrifice and that was the origin of all and the motive behind all sacrifices in Israel. It wasn’t to please God and to get saved. It was God providing the blood on the altar as it says in the book of Leviticus. I have provided the blood on the altar for you. Not you have provided it for me in order for me to be pleased with you. I have provided it. Now look then, do you not need to get your faith straightened out? Do you not need to come before God in your prayer life and say, “Oh Father, I have diminished you to an idol. I am so sorry. I have been trying to please you in order to get peace. Oh Father, you have given me your Son to give me the gift of peace. Thank you so much dear Father.” In the name of Jesus. Well, thanks for listening. Today this is Colin Cook and this is my program How It Happens. You can hear this program on the radio at 10 o’clock in the evening, repeated at four in the morning, on KLTT AM670, those are the call letters in the Denver and Colorado and surrounding states areas. You can also hear this program though. Are any time of the day or night on your smartphone simply download a free app, soundcloud.com or podbean.com and key in how it happens with Colin Cook when you get there. And if you would care to consider a donation, this is listen a supported radio, please do so, send your donation to FaithQuest PO Box 366, littleton Colorado 80160, or you can make your donation online at faithquestradio.com. I do appreciate all your donations, your one-time donations or regular donations. Thank you also for your little notes. Thanks and I’ll see you next time. Cheerio and God bless. [MUSIC]
