This morning in MPJ’s Doctrine 2 class, we discussed the limitations of a number of popular illustrations for the explaining what happened at the cross of Jesus.
Here are 3 things I’ve been thinking since:
- We often stumble when the illustration involves discussion involving a father giving up the life of his son. Parallels are quickly made between God the Father and God the Son. I don’t know of any illustration that adequately explains the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, one of the problems with these illustrations is that they’ve crossed into the impossible territory of illustrating the Trinity.
- For this reason, I think that it’s better to illustrate the love and sacrifice of Jesus with (albeit limited) examples of sacrificial love shown by other people. There’s the example of the husband who dies in the place of his bride (very different from this jerk) by putting himself in the line of the shark while on their honeymoon. There’s no need to allegorise the illustration so that the shark becomes a picture of God’s wrath or anything like that, but simply say that this is but a fraction of the love that Jesus has demonstrated at the cross.
- Don’t forget the Old Testament! Use it to illustrate the work of Jesus. About 10 years ago I heard Al Stewart explain the sacrificial system from Leviticus and used it to illustrate the work of Jesus – I’ve used a similar illustration quite a few times since. Another obvious example from the OT would be Isaiah 53 and the different images of Jesus the suffering servant.
What do you think?
No idea what the fuss is all about?? Check out this, this, this, this and this.
