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Recently there’s the two words that have been floating around. You may have come across them, or you may not have. In discussions on the cross and what occured there, they both come up fairly often – Propitiation and Expiation. They usually come up together because they’re pretty similar, but they are different. Let me explain. Expiation is the covering, putting away, washing off or rubbing out of sin so that it no longer creates a barrier to Relationships between People and God. Our Rebellion against God seperates us from him – think Genesis 3, after Adam sinned he was expelled from the Garden. |
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But if Sin is rubbed out, then there’s nothing left to seperate us from the Love of God. Expiation is a pretty good description of what happened at the cross.
But Propitiation is even better! |
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Propitiation means everthing that Expiation does AND that God’s wrath is turned aside or pacified by that Expiation By his death on the Cross Jesus satisfied God’s anger at our sin and rebellion and washed it all away. The anger of God that we deserved fell on Jesus instead of us. On the cross Jesus wore the wrath of God instead of us. That means there’s nothing whatsoever keeping us from God. And that’s the centre of our message, our gospel. Peace with God is freely available to all because God has acted to bring it about through the propitiating death of Jesus on the Cross. How cool is Propitiaion? NB this raises a question; is right for God to get angry? I’ll offer some thoughts on that another time, but it’s clear that God IS angry at our Sin. Check out Romans 1:18, Deuteronomy 29:24-25, 2 Kings 22:13, Colossians 3:5-6 |
mmm, blogs with substance… hey just wondering if I’ve understood this properly: So does expiation mean that the legal aspect of salvation is taken care of but there’s still some relational animosity between God and us, whereas propitiation removes this too?
Hey Sam, inciteful question. That’s exactly right, Expiation is the washing away of sin without dealing with God’s animosity.
However one of the reasons you’d use Expiation instead of Propitiation is if you want to deny that God is angry at our sin. If Jesus’ death was just an Expiation then obviously God wasn’t angry in the first place.
But if Jesus’ death was a Propitiation then God was and indeed still is angry at us for our sin. And it’s only by Jesus death that his right anger at Sin is satisfied.
Hmmm I should get around to finishing that blog on the anger of God that I promised to write…
“Inciteful” in a blog about anger – gold!