This Is Not That: Salvation
Most of us heard a version of the Jesus story that goes like this:
God is holy, and you’re not.
He’s perfect, you’re broken.
He can’t be near sin because it offends His purity.
But because He loves you, He sent His Son to die in your place—to absorb His wrath so He could finally forgive you and let you near Him again.
It’s tidy. Emotional. A little tragic. And it’s wrong.
That version of the gospel didn’t come from Jesus. It came from a long game of philosophical telephone played by people who wanted mastery, not mystery.
And it has haunted us for 1,600 years. It’s why we still talk about holiness like it’s God’s allergy to humanity. It’s why we believe salvation is conditional—that God’s acceptance only flows when we’ve inserted the right coin.
Sin: The Lie Beneath All Lies
As I unpacked in All A Lark, the real story of sin starts long before Augustine—or even Moses. It started in the garden, when the serpent didn’t tempt Adam and Eve to “sin” by breaking rules. He tempted them to doubt who God is.
“Did God really say…?”
Translation: “You can’t trust Him.”
That’s the birthplace of sin—not rebellion, but unbelief. Not bad behavior, but blindness to the One who holds our life in His.
So sin—at its core—isn’t breaking the rules; it’s believing a lie.
In the most radical indictment of human morality, Paul defines it this way: “Whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom 14:23). In short: the opposite of sin isn’t virtue—it’s faith in who God is.
Not seeing this, a distorted vision of salvation (life with God) drives the endless scrambling for a belonging we already have. This anxiety shows up as pride and fear, as moral failure and moral performance.
According to Jesus, religious ladder-climbing and rebellion are siblings; both try to achieve an imagined independence. And that’s what He came to destroy—not our frail humanity, but our distorted vision.
It’s why John the Baptist could say, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin”—the delusional misbelief—“of the world” (John 1:29).
The distinction matters. Because if we shrink sin down to bad behavior—something Jesus came to erase instead of unbelief He came to heal—we turn the good news into a lie we keep trying (and failing) to live up to.
But when we see that: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19), there’s no cosmic good-cop/bad-cop. The Father isn’t the angry one and the Son the kind one. They are one, undoing our delusion.
Where Our Delusion Dies
Seeing this, we come to the cross—the place religion turned into a divine execution but Jesus turned into a world-wide revelation. Hanging there, He cries, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46).
For centuries that line has been preached as proof that the Father, too holy to look at sin, turned away from His Son as He paid our debt.
But read carefully. Because Jesus is quoting David’s anxious unbelief from Psalm 22—a passage that begins in panic but ends in peace:
“You have not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; You have not hidden Your face from him, but have heard his cry for help” (v. 24).
In other words, Jesus doesn’t cease to be God on the cross. You can’t divide the Trinity. So as He dies at the hands of religious devotion, He does so as Father, Son, Spirit, and all humanity held in Him (John 10:30; Col 1:15-20; Eph 4:6).
It’s a scene where our obsession with control is exposed, His endless love unveiled, and our tendency to miss the point put on display. Because if you go back to the Psalm Jesus quotes, you run straight into the next one—Psalm 23:
“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing…
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”
That’s not a coincidence—it’s a road map: from anxiety to assurance, from “Why have You left me?” to “You were here the whole time.”
So when Jesus says, “It is finished” (John 19:30), He’s not declaring that a vengeful Father is finally satisfied. He’s announcing that the dreadful lie of separation is undone.
The cross wasn’t a transaction to change God’s heart; it’s a revelation that changes ours. The Father wasn’t punishing the Son: the Father was the Son, and the Son was revealing the undying “love” of a Father from which no one can separate themselves (John 10:27-30).
“But What About Wrath?”
Sure, this gracious God doesn’t fit our lust for control masked as “justice.” So hearing this often triggers the quote from R. C. Sproul: “A god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, and no wrath is an idol.”
“God’s wrath was satisfied,” the old songs say. But wrath in Scripture isn’t rage—it’s love’s refusal to let go.
Romans 1:18–24 says the wrath of God is revealed when He “gives people over” to their delusions—letting them run into the emptiness they choose so they’ll see it can’t heal them. Never will.
This isn’t God’s anger against sinners; it’s His compassion refusing to make peace with what keeps destroying us.
So when Jesus hangs on a cross, He’s not standing between us and an angry God; He’s standing between a loving God and our blindness, healing it. He’s not absorbing punishment, He’s revealing the violence of the human heart that would rather crucify Love than trust it.
Sure, Romans 3:25 says Jesus was “set forth as a propitiation for our sins.” But the Greek word hilastērion doesn’t mean payment—it means mercy seat, the meeting place of heaven’s reality and humanity’s blindness.
2 Timothy 1:9-10 couldn’t be more clear: His “grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.”
So why does Paul say: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3)?
In Greek, “for our sins” (hyper ton hamartiōn hēmōn) means “because of.” Meaning, Jesus died because “our sins” (unbelief) cause us to defend our righteousness rather than receive His. It’s what happens when you mistake freedom for independence.
His death was not payment but participation:
God entering our unbelief to end it.
And when Paul adds “according to the Scriptures,” he’s pointing to the entire story of Israel—Joseph betrayed yet forgiving, Moses interceding for rebels, the suffering servant (Jesus) bearing wounds that heal. In every case, God conquers evil not by retaliation but by redemptive love.
So when Paul says “Christ died for our sins,” he’s not teaching that the Father’s wrath was appeased. He’s announcing that humanity’s timeless hatred was exposed—and God’s love refused to quit.
The Cross doesn’t change how God feels about us;
it changes how we finally see Him.
Grace Isn’t Conditional
On that note, we often hear: “this is cheap grace.” But if grace depends on your ability to obtain it or validate it, it’s not grace—it’s performance-based credit.
Grace isn’t the price of admission; it’s the gift that awakens you to the party.
Ephesians 2:8 begins with: “By grace you have been saved”—meaning God’s grace saves you from your blind unbelief. Paul then follows that with “through faith”—meaning faith is the set of glasses that allow you to see reality. And to make sure the distinction isn’t lost, he says: “and this not from yourselves—it is the gift of God” (vs 9).
So salvation? It’s a gift you awaken to, not one you unlock. Because if your faith unlocks it, you have a salvation based on choice, not Christ. And that makes you self-justifying, not someone who is “justified by the faith of Jesus Christ” (original text in Gal 2:16).
You “have been forgiven on account of his name” (1 John 2:12)—not your faith.
Does that revelation undermine God’s holiness?” By no means. Holiness doesn’t mean God can’t touch sin; it means sin can’t survive God’s touch.
When Jesus touches a leper, the leper becomes clean—Jesus doesn’t become unclean. When the woman with the issue of blood grabs His cloak, she’s healed—He’s not defiled. When God enters death itself, death runs backward.
That’s holiness—not withdrawal, but invasion.
Not purity that separates, but love that restores.
It’s where the idea that God can’t be near sin collapses in the face of the incarnation: “The Word became flesh”—our flesh—and pitched His tent in the middle of our mess (John 1:14). His “light shines” from within “the darkness” tangled up inside us, not upon us from on high (vs 5).
The old story says: Jesus took the beating you deserved.
The gospel says: Jesus took your delusion to its death.
The old story says: holiness and sin can’t coexist.
The gospel says: holiness swallowed sin whole.
And that’s the scandal religion can’t stand:
God was never the problem. We were never the solution. And Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us—He came to change our minds about God.
The Father never turned His face away.
The Son never stopped revealing Him.
The Spirit never stopped moving between them and us.
Sin isn’t breaking divine rules; it’s blindness to divine love.
Salvation isn’t believing in a deal struck on a bloody hill; it’s trusting in the God who’s been with us the whole time.