Brilliance

I'm reading the book Evil and the Justice of God by one of my favorite authors, N. T. Wright. It's a very weighty book, and to be quite honest, I need a full pot of coffee nearby when I crack it open. I love to read books like this. I don't understand everything in it, especially on the first pass, but the more I read, the easier it gets to comprehend. And the stuff I do comprehend, brilliant.

Here is a snippet that I could understand. To set the stage, Wright is discussing the necessity of the cross for the atonement of sin. He discusses the inherent depravity of man and how Post-Modernism goes against Modernism and it's high view of man's inherant goodness. Which leads me to his explanation of God's response to our depravity.

"What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it's there, not a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it. This raises for us all the echoes of the ancient stories of the exodus from Egypt and the return from the exile in Babylon, and it is no surprise that the earliest Christians, both the New Testament writers and others on into the liturgical traditions of the second, third and fourth centuries, reached for imagery from both these events to explain what had happened on the cross. This, they are saying, is how God rescues his people from the evil in which they are trapped; and he does so through the suffering of Israel's representative, just as with the martyrs, only so much more so. This is what it looks like when YHWH says, as in Exodus 3.7-8, "I have heard the cry of my people, and I have come down to set them free." This is what it looks like when YHWH says, "Behold, my servant." As Isaiah says later (Isaiah 59), it was no messenger, no angel, but his own presence that saved them; in all their affliction he was afflicted. And the result of it all is that the covenant is renewed; sins are forgiven; the long night of sorrow, exile and death is over and the new day has dawned.

"The Gospels thus tell the story, centrally and crucially, which stands unique in the world's great literature, the world's religious theories and visions: the story of the Creator God taking responsibility for what has happened to creation, bearing the weight of its problems on his own shoulders. As Sydney Carter put it in one of his finest songs, "It's God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me." Or, as one old evangelistic tract put it, the nations of the world got together to pronounce judgment on God for all the evils in the world, only to realize with a shock that God had already served his sentence."

This is the Gospel, the Good News. God saw that what He had created went wrong. The law was a shadow of the form of salvation, but our loving Father knew the only real remedy. So He sent Christ. We cannot defeat evil. We war against it, physically and spiritually, but we cannot defeat it. That job has been done. This leads us to what can be our only response, worship. And this is why I love my job, to lead people in our response to the death of evil through the death of our Creator.