Commentary

William Lane Craig explains the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Probably one of the most common questions that you hear from people who don’t fully understand Christianity is this question: “why did Jesus have to die?”. The answer that most Christians seem to hold to is that 1) humans are rebelling against God, 2) Humans deserve punishment for their rebellion, 3) Humans cannot escape the punishment for their rebellion on their own, 4) Jesus was punished in the place of the rebellious humans, 5) Those who accept this sacrifice are forgiven for their rebelling.

Are humans rebellious?

Some people think that humans are not really rebellious at all, but it’s actually easy to see. You can see it just by looking at how people spend their time. Some of us have no time for God at all, and instead try to fill our lives with material possessions and experiences in order to have happy feelings. Some of us embrace just the parts of God that make us feel happy, like church and singing and feelings of comfort, while avoiding the hard parts of that vertical relationship; reading, thinking and disagreeing with people who don’t believe the truth about God. And so on.

This condition of being in rebellion is universal, and all of us are guilty of breaking the law at some point. All of us deserve to be separated from God’s goodness and love. Even if we wanted to stop rebelling, we would not be able to make up for the times where we do rebel by being good at other times, any more than we could get out of a speeding ticket by appealing to the times when we drove at the speed limit, (something that I never do, in any case).

This is not to say that all sinners are punished equally – the degree of punishment is proportional to the sins a person commits. However, the standard is perfection. And worse than that, the most important moral obligation is a vertical moral obligation. You can’t satisfy the demands of the moral law just by making your neighbor happy, while treating God like a pariah. The first commandment is to love God, the second is to love your neighbor. Even loving your neighbor requires you to tell your neighbor the truth – not just to make them feel good. The vertical relationship is more important than the horizontal one, and we’ve all screwed up the vertical relationship. We all don’t want God to be there, telling us what’s best for us, interfering with our fun. We don’t want to relate to a loving God if it means having to care what he thinks about anything that we are doing.

Who is going to pay for our rebellion?

The Christian answer to the problem of our rebellion is that Jesus takes the punishment we deserve in our place.

However, I’ve noticed that on some atheist blogs, they don’t like the idea that someone else can take our punishment for us to exonerate us for crimes that we’ve committed. So I’ll quote from this post by the great William Lane Craig, to respond to that objection.

Excerpt:

The central problem of the Penal Theory is, as you point out, understanding how punishing a person other than the perpetrator of the wrong can meet the demands of justice. Indeed, we might even say that it would be wrong to punish some innocent person for the crimes I commit!

It seems to me, however, that in other aspects of human life we do recognize this practice. I remember once sharing the Gospel with a businessman. When I explained that Christ had died to pay the penalty for our sins, he responded, “Oh, yes, that’s imputation.” I was stunned, as I never expected this theological concept to be familiar to this non-Christian businessman. When I asked him how he came to be familiar with this idea, he replied, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance business.” He explained to me that certain sorts of insurance policy are written so that, for example, if someone else drives my car and gets in an accident, the responsibility is imputed to me rather than to the driver. Even though the driver behaved recklessly, I am the one held liable; it is just as if I had done it.

Now this is parallel to substitutionary atonement. Normally I would be liable for the misdeeds I have done. But through my faith in Christ, I am, as it were, covered by his divine insurance policy, whereby he assumes the liability for my actions. My sin is imputed to him, and he pays its penalty. The demands of justice are fulfilled, just as they are in mundane affairs in which someone pays the penalty for something imputed to him. This is as literal a transaction as those that transpire regularly in the insurance industry.

So, it turns out that the doctrine of substitionary atonement is not as mysterious or as objectionable as everyone seems to think it is.

News

What is Planned Parenthood?

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

This article from Live Action News lists 5 main points that describe Planned Parenthood.

They are:

  1. Abortion is Planned Parenthood’s number one priority.
  2. Planned Parenthood doesn’t have mechanisms in place to help pregnant women who want to stay pregnant and need prenatal care.
  3. Planned Parenthood has never done a mammogram, and the self-breast exams can be done by women at home for free.
  4. Planned Parenthood routinely gets caught breaking the law.
  5. They charge more for the services they do provide than you would pay for the same service at a real health clinic. And they over-bill the government for it, too.

Here is a short video on the first point, for those who cannot read the whole article:

Even those who are pro-abortion should be concerned about the last two points.

Let’s see the details on the fourth one – breaking the law:

One Live Action investigation on Planned Parenthood’s complicity in sex trafficking revealed that “seven Planned Parenthood clinics in four different states were willing to aid and abet the sex-trafficking of minor girls by supplying confidential birth control, STD testing, and secret abortions to underage girls and their traffickers.”

Live Action also exposed that the abortion chain was willing to cover up sexual abuse. Live Action reported: “Investigations found eight Planned Parenthood clinics in five different states were willing to cover-up sexual abuse, disregarding mandatory suspected statutory rape reporting laws.  Clinics also provided instructions on how to circumvent parental consent laws.

Of course, The Center for Medical Progress blew away any doubts that the abortion chain had altruistic motives when last summer it exposed the abortion giant’s motives to obtain aborted baby parts for use in research. While the abortion giant denied making any profit from its human fetal tissue dealings, it’s become clear there is profit involved. In fact, a congressional committee has been investigating the abortion chain’s wrongdoing since last summer and has found several indicators of questionable legal issues regarding human fetal tissue practices related to the nation’s abortion facilities. One name that appears throughout the committee’s investigation is Planned Parenthood, as indicated in this report.

And the fifth point – over-billing the government:

The abortion chain routinely over-billed Medicaid for its costs, and even admitted it last year. A former Planned Parenthood employee, Sue Thayer, filed a lawsuit against her former employer. Alliance Defending Freedom, who represented her, reported:

Sue found out that Planned Parenthood does whatever it can to cut costs and raise revenue—particularly on the abortion and birth control side of the business. After contracting with drug companies to purchase birth control pills at a bulk discount of about $2.98 per one 28-day cycle, Planned Parenthood would bill Medicaid for $35 and be reimbursed about $26. And, without reporting it to Medicaid, they would also collect a “donation” from the woman to help offset the cost of the “free contraception.” But double-dipping in the profit of birth control still wasn’t enough.

It’s apparent that profit is the motivation behind everything Planned Parenthood does. It behooves the abortion chain to offer “cancer screenings” and other legitimate services because they can bill Medicaid for the costs–and over-bill Medicaid, by its own admission.

Why do the Democrats who run the government give money to an organization that does these things? Answer: because Planned Parenthood gives political donations to the Democrats, and they need that money to win elections.

Do you want to be on their team?

News

Employee of company that wiped unsecure private e-mail server pleads the 5th

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton looks bored during Congressional investigation of her misdeeds

He declines to answer questions, for fear of incriminating himself with his own testimony.

Townhall explains:

Platte River Networks employee Paul Combetta, the person who wiped Hillary Clinton’s private server and email archive with BleachBit, plead the Fifth Tuesday and refused to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee.

“On advise of counsel I respectfully decline to answer and assert my Fifth Amendment privilege,” Combetta said.

Platte River Networks is the company employed by Clinton to host her private email servers and email accounts during her time at the State Department.

According to the timing presented FBI report on the criminal investigation into the servers, Combetta wiped the server with BleachBit four weeks after the investigation started and two weeks after Congress requested all emails be preserved. Combetta has also been accused of wiping the server while under subpoena.

Combetta’s colleague, Bill Thornton, was also called to testify and plead the fifth.

You might remember that another Obama official, Lois Lerner, also pleaded the 5th, during an investigation of the Obama administration’s effort to punish conservative organizations using the IRS.

Details:

Lois Lerner, former director of IRS exempt organizations, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights again Wednesday before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the IRS targeting American citizens for their political beliefs.

“On the advice of my counsel, I respectfully exercise my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer that question,” Lerner said in response to a slew of questions by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) regarding the IRS targeting of tea party and conservative groups.

 

You’ll recall that in Obama’s re-election year, the IRS persecuted conservative groups in order to help Obama win re-election. That’s what government workers do with the salaries that taxpayers pay them.  The only solution, of course, is to shut down their departments and only allow the federal government to perform the duties laid out for them in the Constitution. But it looks like Americans prefer to get goodies from their neighbors more than they care about honesty and transparency in government.