EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
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EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
Greek writers used this verb of God being reconciled — an offended deity talked round. Paul turns it the other way, and the New Testament never once says God was reconciled to us.
2 Corinthians 5:18-21
Opening
All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s trespasses against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19 (BSB)
Written to a church that had turned on Paul. He is describing the thing he is asking them to do, by describing what God did first.
There is a direction hidden in this sentence, and everything depends on it.
Paul says God reconciled us to Himself. He does not say God was reconciled to us.
That sounds like a small distinction until you notice how unusual it is. In the Greek writing around Paul, this verb runs the other way. Second Maccabees uses it of God being reconciled — an offended deity being talked round, appeased, brought back into a good mood by people who had upset Him.
That is the ordinary religious arrangement, and it is the one most of us assume even when we would deny it. Something is wrong between us and God. Our job is to fix His attitude.
Paul inverts it. The offended party initiates. The one with the grievance absorbs the cost and comes looking. Across the whole New Testament, God is never once described as being reconciled to us.
John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage in the fourth century, put the question exactly where it belongs. Who was the aggrieved one? Himself.
So the breach is real. Paul is not softening it. He is telling you which side crossed it.
It helps to know who Paul is writing to.
The Corinthians had turned on him. Other teachers had arrived, more impressive on a platform, and the church had largely gone with them. Paul's authority was being questioned, his appearance mocked, his sincerity doubted. Second Corinthians is written from the wrong end of a relationship that has gone badly.
So when he starts talking about reconciliation, he is not lecturing from a comfortable distance. He is describing something he is in the middle of needing.
And he does not begin by asking them to make it right with him. He begins by telling them what God did about a much larger breach, and then asks them to be reconciled to God. The horizontal repair he wants is downstream of a vertical one he insists happened first.
REFLECT
Whose attitude have you been quietly trying to fix — God’s, or your own?
A Two-Minute Prayer
God, I have spent a long time trying to talk You round, as though the problem were Your temper. Paul says You came across the gap Yourself. Let me stop negotiating and start receiving.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ: Be reconciled to God. God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:20-21 (BSB)
The appeal and the mechanism, in two sentences. Paul asks for the response only after he has explained what was paid.
Yesterday we left a king asking whether anyone was left of the house that hunted him.
We skipped past something in that question, and today is the day for it.
The house of Saul had genuinely tried to kill David. That is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up. Saul threw a spear at him, hunted him through the wilderness with three thousand men, and slaughtered a town of priests for helping him. There was a real breach, with real blood in it.
When David asks after Jonathan's son, he is not being nice to someone who mildly annoyed him. He is extending kindness across a genuine wrong that was genuinely done.
And Mephibosheth understood this perfectly. Years later, describing his own position, he does not talk about a misunderstanding.
"For all the house of my grandfather deserves death from my lord the king, yet you have set your servant among those who eat at your table."
He knew what he was. Not an overlooked guest. A member of a house that by every convention of the age should have been executed, sitting at the table of the man with every right to do it.
Reconciliation is only meaningful where there was something to reconcile. Otherwise it is just politeness.
The offended party initiates. Across the whole New Testament, God is never once described as being reconciled to us.
Two different pictures sit underneath the way the New Testament talks about the cross, and it helps to keep them apart.
The first is katallagē, the word in front of us. It comes from commerce — the exchange of one currency for another of equal value — and it is used of people whose relationship changes from hostility to peace. Its object is always a person or a relationship. Paul is the only New Testament writer who uses it at all.
The second is hilasmos, which belongs to the altar. It is sacrificial language about turning away wrath, and its object is wrath or sin rather than a person. It appears twice, both times in John's first letter.
They are not synonyms and they are not rivals. They are two angles on one event, and each of them says something the other cannot.
There has been a long argument about the sacrificial word. C. H. Dodd argued in the 1930s that it means expiation — the removal of sin. Leon Morris argued that standard Greek usage meant propitiation — the averting of wrath. The debate is still live and honest people hold both.
What is not in dispute is the direction of the relational word. Whatever the altar language turns out to carry, katallagē says the estranged parties were brought back together, and it says who did the bringing.
One consequence of keeping them apart is worth naming.
If the only picture you have is the altar, then the cross reads as a transaction between God and God, with people watching from a distance. Something is offered, wrath is satisfied, the books balance.
If the only picture you have is the money-changer's table, the cross can slide into sentiment — a gesture of goodwill with nothing actually paid.
Held together, they say something neither manages alone. There was a real cost, and it was paid, and the point of paying it was a restored relationship between persons rather than a settled account in the abstract.
Paul finishes the paragraph with both in one breath. God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf — that is the altar. So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God — that is the exchange.
Then and Now
ANCIENT TRUTH
In the ancient world, restoring a broken relationship between unequal parties was the inferior party’s job. You brought the gift, you made the approach, you absorbed the humiliation, and you hoped. Nobody expected a wronged king to initiate anything.
Paul writes to people who thought exactly that, and tells them the approach has already happened from the other direction, and that the cost was already absorbed by the party who did not owe it.
MODERN APPLICATION
We have inherited the same instinct and applied it to God. Get the apology right. Get the behaviour corrected. Get the record improved. Then approach, carefully, and hope the reception is warm.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Isaiah had described it centuries before, in the passive voice, with the cost falling on somebody else: He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities.
But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (BSB)
Written centuries earlier. Note where the cost lands in every clause — never on the people being made well.
There is a bookkeeping word in the middle of Paul's sentence and it is easy to read past.
God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's trespasses against them.
The verb is logizomai. It is an accounting term — to reckon, to enter in a ledger, to put on somebody's account. Paul uses it constantly.
So the picture is not that the trespasses were never real. A ledger with nothing in it does not need a decision about what to do with the entries. The picture is of debts that exist and are not being charged.
And Paul says where they went. God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf.
That is the exchange the money-changer's word was reaching for. Not a cancellation, which costs nobody anything. A transfer, which costs somebody everything.
This is the part that makes the whole week possible. A king can seat a rival heir at his table because he has decided not to charge the account. But somebody still eats the loss.
On Sunday, David absorbs it. He gives away land, he gives away revenue, he takes a political risk that could cost him the throne, and he never sends Mephibosheth a bill for any of it.
On a Friday outside Jerusalem, the loss is absorbed on a scale the story of a king and a lame man can only gesture at.
There is one more thing in the word that is easy to miss.
Logizomai is the same verb Paul uses in Romans when he says Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. The ledger runs both ways. Something can be entered that was not there, and something that was there can be left unentered.
So the accounting language is not a loophole. It is the whole vocabulary Paul thinks in when he talks about how a person stands with God.
And it protects the story from becoming sentimental. Grace in this passage is not God deciding the debts were small. It is God deciding where the debts go.
The Funeral Sermon
George Whitefield and John Wesley began as brothers in the same work, and then broke over predestination in public.
Writing from Maryland on 24 November 1740, Whitefield set the breach down in his own hand. “O that there may be harmony, and very intimate union between us! Yet it cannot be, since you hold universal Redemption.”
Then came the plea.
“My dear brother, for CHRIST’s sake avoid all disputation. Do not oblige me to preach against you; I had rather die.”
He did worse than preach against him. He published something private — that years before, Wesley had decided whether Whitefield should abandon Georgia by drawing a lot, and had posted him the slip of paper. Whitefield later admitted he would never have published this private transaction to the world had Wesley not used the lot a second time.
Their followers split. The movement carried two camps for a generation.
Then Whitefield died in Massachusetts in 1770, and his executors asked John Wesley to preach his funeral sermon.
Wesley’s own journal, Saturday 10 November: “I returned to London, and had the melancholy news of Mr. Whitefield’s death confirmed by his executors, who desired me to preach his funeral sermon on Sunday the 18th. In order to write this, I retired to Lewisham on Monday.”
He preached it at Tottenham Court Road to an immense crowd, and again at the Tabernacle five days later.
He did not reopen the argument. He preached instead on loving people you disagree with — on a love that takes in everyone, of whatever opinion or mode of worship, who believes in the Lord Jesus.
Thirty years of public quarrel, and the mending is a man retiring to a quiet house to write well about someone he had fought.
The Line That Is Not There
There is a famous line attached to this story and it should not be used. Whitefield is supposed to have been asked whether he expected to see Wesley in heaven, and to have answered that he did not — because Wesley would be so near the throne, and he so far off. It is the most quoted sentence in the whole Whitefield and Wesley story. It is also unsourced. Searched against Whitefield’s collected works, against Wesley’s funeral sermon, and against both volumes of the standard nineteenth-century biography, it does not appear in any of them. The verified material is less quotable and considerably better. A man asking his friend not to make him argue in public. A private letter made public in anger. Thirty years of division. And then executors asking the other man to speak, and that man going away to a quiet house for a week to write it properly. The legend gives us a humble sentence. The record gives us a fortnight of somebody’s actual behaviour, which is harder and worth more.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Whitefield to Wesley, Letter 236, Bohemia, Maryland, 24 November 1740, in the collected Works, volume 1. Wesley’s Journal, Saturday 10 November 1770, volume 5 of the 1909 edition, pages 396 to 397. Wesley, Sermon 53, On the Death of the Rev. Mr George Whitefield, preached 18 November 1770 at Tottenham Court Road and repeated at the Tabernacle on 23 November.
REFLECT
Where have you been waiting for the other person to move first, in a breach where you know exactly what moving first would cost you?
Write This Down
Today’s is a journalling prompt. Give it five minutes and a real piece of paper if you have one.
Paul reaches for a political image, and it repays a moment's thought.
An ambassador is not a volunteer with opinions. He is a person sent, carrying terms he did not draft, representing a government whose decisions he had no part in making. His personal charm is irrelevant. What matters is whether he delivers the message he was given.
That is a relief, and it is also a limit.
The relief is that reconciliation is not something we generate. Nobody is being asked to manufacture peace out of their own reserves of patience. The terms already exist. They were settled before we were consulted.
The limit is that we do not get to adjust them. An ambassador who improves the message is not an ambassador. He is a private citizen with strong views.
Paul then says something odd about how this works: as though God were making His appeal through us. The word is a plea. God appealing, through people, to people.
That is a strange sentence to sit inside. The offended party not only crosses the gap Himself, but then asks the reconciled to carry the same appeal to the next person along.
Which means the ministry is not a reward for having sorted yourself out. It is handed to people in the middle of their own mending. Paul is writing to a church that is currently estranged from him, and he tells them they have been given the ministry of reconciliation while they are still not speaking to him properly.
Paul does not stop at describing what God did. He hands the same job over.
God reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are ambassadors for Christ.
An ambassador does not invent the message. He carries somebody else's terms, and he represents a government he did not elect.
So the shape of the week is not only something being done for us. It is something we get handed. If the direction of grace runs downward and outward, and the offended party moves first, then the people who have received that are going to find themselves asked to do the same thing in miniature.
Which is precisely where it stops being comfortable.
It is a fine thing to say God does not count our trespasses against us. It is a different thing to stop counting somebody else's. Wesley had thirty years of grievance available to him and an invitation to use it in front of an immense crowd. He chose the other sermon.
Tomorrow we look at the middle of this — at what it costs the searcher to come down. For now, hold the direction. He moved first. Then He asked us to.
Prayer
Lord, I have kept a ledger. I know the entries by heart and I could read them out without notes. You looked at a much longer list and decided not to charge it, and the cost of that decision fell on You. Teach me the arithmetic. Let me stop trying to fix Your attitude toward me, and start carrying Your message to somebody who thinks the same thing about me. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
Breathe in: not counting. Breathe out: You moved first.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Carry This
I will name one thing I am still counting against someone, and stop counting it.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
Check Yourself
What is unusual about Paul’s use of the reconciliation word in 2 Corinthians 5?
The Preacher Who Asked The Right Question
Antioch and Constantinople, around 347 to 407
Archbishop of Constantinople and the most celebrated preacher of the early church — his nickname means golden-mouthed. He preached verse by verse through the letters of Paul, and his homilies on 2 Corinthians survive.
Who was the aggrieved one? Himself.
LESSON FOR US
He puts the whole doctrine in four words by asking a question about who was wronged. The offended party is the one who crosses the room.
Go Deeper
RELATED SCRIPTURES
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Sources for today. Katallagē is Strong’s G2643, four occurrences, all Pauline; the verb katallassō is G2644, six occurrences. The participle at 5:18 is aorist active; at 5:19 it is present active. Hilasmos is G2434 and occurs only at 1 John 2:2 and 4:10. On the propitiation and expiation debate, C. H. Dodd argued expiation from Septuagint usage in 1935 and Leon Morris argued propitiation from standard Greek usage; both positions are represented here rather than resolved. 2 Maccabees 7:33 and 8:29 use the verb with God as the one reconciled. Chrysostom, Homily XI on 2 Corinthians. Whitefield and Wesley sources as given in the historical note above; the line about being near the throne is unsourced and is not used here.
Finished reading? Mark this day read.
BEFORE YOU GO
Anything you want to keep from today?
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