"The Heart of the Gospel"

I

"Prince Paris had carried off Princess Helen to Troy. The Greek expeditionary force had taken ship to recover her, but was held up half-way by persistent contrary winds. Agamemnon, the Greek general, sent home for his daughter and ceremonially slaughtered her as a sacrifice, to mollify the evidently hostile gods. The move paid off; west winds blew again, and the fleet reached Troy without further difficulty.

This bit of the Trojan war legend, which dates from about 1000 B.C., mirrors an idea of propitiation on which pagan religion all over the world, and in every age, has been built. The idea is as follows. There are various gods, none enjoying absolute dominion, but each with some power to make life easier or harder for you. Their temper is uniformly uncertain; they take offense at the smallest things, or get jealous because they feel you are paying too much attention to other gods and other people, and not enough to themselves, and then they take it out on you by manipulating circumstances to your hurt.

The only course at that point is to humor and mollify them by an offering. The rule with offerings is the bigger the better, for the gods are inclined to hold out for something sizeable. In this they are cruel and heartless, but they have the advantage, and what can you do?

The wise man bows to the inevitable, and makes sure that he offers something impressive enough to produce the desired result. Human sacrifice, in particular, is expensive but effective. Thus pagan religion appears as a callous commercialism, a matter of managing and manipulating your gods by cunning bribery; and within paganism propitiation, the appeasing of celestial bad tempers, takes its place as a regular part of life, one of the many irksome necessities that one cannot get on without. 

Now the Bible takes us right away from the world of pagan religion. It condemns paganism out of hand, as a monstrous distortion of truth. In place of a cluster of gods who are all too obviously made in the image of man, and who behave like a crowd of Hollywood film stars, the Bible sets the one almighty Creator, the only real God, in Whom all goodness and truth find their source, and to Whom all moral evil is abhorrent. With Him there is not bad temper, no capriciousness, no vanity, no ill-will. 

One might expect, therefore, that there would be no place for the idea of propitiation in biblical religion. But we do not find this at all: just the opposite. The idea of propitiation - that is, of averting God's anger by an offering - runs right through the Bible." ...... 

to be continued. 

Knowing God, 1973, J.I. Packer, InterVarsity Press, pgs.161-162 

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My plan is to share some of J.I. Packer's "Knowing God" I'm starting with the chapter "The Heart of the Gospel" because I want those outside of the Christian faith to understand it and those inside the faith to be able to explain it. Sadly, Charlie Kirk was the exception, not the rule. Let this be a wake up call for us.