Atonement (Remastered)

Tim Mackie (0:08)

Hey everybody, I'm Tim Mackie and this is my podcast, Exploring My Strange Bible. I am a card-carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 20 years' worth of lectures and sermons where I have been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can all be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts and classes about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find all those resources at bibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive in to the episode for this week.

BOOK 4 All right, this is the fourth of a four-part series. It represents a teaching series I was a part of at Door of Hope Church when I served as a teaching pastor there. And in the series, we basically explored some of the most basic words and concept in Christian belief and biblical faith. And they're words that are either not used anymore in our modern Western culture, or if they are used, they're used in a new and different way than they are in the Bible, which really doesn't help us when we go back and read the Bible. And so in this teaching, we're exploring the biblical word in concept of atonement, which is a hot topic, actually. And I mostly don't wade into the controversies surrounding this word in theological circles. I just kind of dive into the biblical text and the biblical story and let it speak for itself. So hopefully this is helpful for you and let's dive in.

For some of us, we've lost a sense of their importance or meaning because we're overfamiliar with them. You know, maybe you grew up around Christianity or churchianity, as I sometimes call it. And you know, you just, for a long time, you've been awash in religious vocabulary. And so these words lose their edge and their power from over familiarity. There's a whole bunch of you for whom the exact opposite is the case, where you didn't grow up around that and following Jesus and being a part of a church community, like this is a new thing in your life or a relatively new thing. And so all this vocabulary, this religious vocabulary of Christians is weird to you. And these words are foreign. And so this is what we're going to do this fall. It's what we are doing. We've looked at words like faith and freedom. We've looked at words like holiness and sin. And today we're going to look at one of the stranger words, at least to modern Western people in our vocabulary. It's the word atonement, the word atonement. You definitely didn't use it in conversation this week. And you shouldn't feel bad about that because this word comes from a place and a time that's just totally foreign to modern Western culture, or so it seems. We're looking at the word atonement. Here's where we've been. We explored a couple of weeks ago the concept of holiness, of God's holiness, that God is a unique and one of a kind, set apart being in all of existence. Because God has the power and the wisdom and brilliance to generate a universe like ours, like the one that we inhabit. And that's fairly remarkable. I certainly don't have any capability to do something like that. I can build Legos, who is my kid, but I can't generate a universe. And so one of the core convictions about a Christian's belief and what is reality and where are we, we exist in a world that was brilliantly and lovingly, creatively brought forth in love from God, the creator. And that God wants to share the beauty of existence with creatures and that humans have a unique role in that, that God has appointed humans, the crown of the species, to manage and oversee this good world under his care. And then that moves us into what Josh helped us explore last week is that what have we done with the place? We were appointed as stewards and managers and overseers of God's good world and we've become vandals.

We've become vandals of God's good world. Through our choices, our behavior, we end up defacing it and introducing ruin into God's good world, ruining ourselves, ruining other people. And that's what this word sin is all about. It's the human condition. It's somehow, there's something going on inside you and me individually, and there's something then that gets magnified collectively that we just hurt each other. We treat each other like with contempt and inappropriately. We violate each other's dignity as images of God. We redefine right and wrong.