A Fragrant Aroma

I submitted the following to “Revival Theology,” an on-line Christian forum:

Ephesians 5:2 "and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma."

I find it strange that some imply that God turned away from His Son on the cross - I can't take my eye's off of it.

How is it that the O.T. type for the Atonement is a pleasing aroma when some well intended present day interpreters say it involved an offensive smell?

Strange smell that - which even angels and prophets of old desired to look into - but we are told the Father turned away His countenance.

It seems to me that when Jesus began his 'sin bearing' at the baptism of John, and Father made it a point to announce to the viewing public that He was well pleased, how much more pleased must He have been when he witnessed him finish 'bearing it.'

Stranger still, that the translators of the KJV did not see that they put entirely the wrong construction on his cry 'hli hli lema sabactani'  (Matt. ηλι ηλι or as Mark has it ελοι ελοι).  Notice, no one who was recorded to have heard him utter those words took it to mean he (Jesus) was confessing he was forsaken in the sense of Divine separation.  To the man, they thought he was calling for Elijah!!

This is mightily suggestive that the English translators had an existing bias by which they have inadvertently misdirected our gaze as to what the Savior was really trying to say.  I say a more inconvenient time couldn't have been chosen for the insertion of it.

This is further underscored by the fact that neither Luke or John mentions these words in their accounts of the death of Christ.  Strange, the absence of Apostolic notice by 'the one Jesus loved' is conspicuous given that he went to such lengths to bear witness to the proof of the 'water and the blood' flowing out from his pierced side.

I can form no idea of the vicarious suffering of Jesus, or as the scripture sacredly metaphorizes it, 'bearing our sins' (including sympathy with our experience of suffering of  sickness and disease) that has any dark stain or spot of unloveliness associated with it.  This kind of suffering the universe has never before witnessed.  It was pure, sacred, fragrant willingness to experience spiritual grief over the tragedy of what sin has done to the Godhead, man, and the whole moral universe.  And this thru the Eternal Spirit's agency until it overloaded his physical constitution and ruptured his heart insuring rapid and sure death.

I am so glad that I have a Gospel to preach that doesn't involve having to explain why the Father supposedly had to forsake his Son at the hour of his greatest accomplishment.  It maintains a clear avenue of comprehension of the great victory He was conscious of when he gave up his spirit into the hands of a loving and sympathetic Godhead.

When the Lord Jesus entered this world in Divine self-emptying the inhabitants of Heaven were revealed to have great rejoicing.  When Stephen, the first to give his life for the Lord Jesus in bearing witness to the truth was dying, he was given a vision of the Father and the Lord Jesus 'having come to be standing at the right hand of the Father' applauding his work.  How much more glory do you think the Father, the angels of God, and the faithful dead did greet the one 'who once for all tasted death for every man?'  What do you suppose Our Savior saw on his way out?

For Jesus,
Scott Taylor
Alabama 09.