The Bible Provocateur
The Bible Provocateur
LIVE DISCUSSION: Jesus the Reconciler (Part 1 of 2)
What if Easter isn’t a seasonal ritual but a verdict handed down from the cross and confirmed by an empty tomb? We open the door to a bigger, bolder view of the resurrection—one that breaks routine, shatters trivial faith, and restores holy awe. Starting in Eden, we trace how humanity’s attempt to “disrupt” God birthed a posture of pride that still lives in our questions today. Then we follow the thread through the Old Testament’s sacrificial rhythms to their ultimate fulfillment in Christ, who obeyed perfectly, suffered fully, and declared with authority, “It is finished.”
We don’t just recount events; we examine what they mean. The Day of Atonement taught that sin is serious and forgiveness is costly, yet those annual sacrifices could never finally cleanse. That’s why the incarnation matters: divine meets human in the only person able to be both spotless priest and perfect sacrifice. We unpack the claim that shocks modern sensibilities—Jesus did not die to make salvation possible; He died and rose to secure it. From there we explore assurance, repentance, and why the preaching of the gospel still matters if the work is already finished.
Along the way, we confront our habit of treating holy things lightly and invite you to recover reverence without drifting into gloom. Watch and pray becomes a practical way of seeing the world: attentive to the attacks on Scripture, honest about our pride, and anchored in a Savior who truly saves. If you’ve felt the hollowness of holiday faith or wondered what “atonement” actually accomplishes, this conversation offers clarity, conviction, and hope rooted in the finished work of Christ.
If this moved you, share it with a friend, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Your reflections help others find the truth behind the empty tomb.
BE PROVOKED AND BE PERSUADED!
Easter, a lot like Christmas, is pretty much days in America that are commensurate with a variety of cultural culture and traditions in America and elsewhere. And so it is typically a day where people get all dressed up and they go to a church, have a Easter Sunday sermon preached, and generally go back home and resume lifestyles the way they always were. And the magnitude of resurrection morning, the significance of resurrection morning, the sanctity and the holiness of resurrection morning is often lost on people who are in attendance. And to go, and to go to these services, to hear these messages and to not glean from them that which should stir the heart to a renewed and a holy reverence to our Savior, it actually makes people more empty without really knowing it because we have gotten to a point where we trivialize everything that pertains to holiness and God and worship and to the work that our Christ did. And so I want to have this sort of interaction with all of you so that when you go to church on Sunday morning, if you go to church on Sunday morning or if you go to church at all, I don't know. We all should. But if you do, it is my hope that you can walk into those doors with a mindset, with the mindset of really desiring to ponder exactly what Christ did for us. Because right now, we are definitely living in a time where Christ, the Bible, Christianity, is being constantly attacked for its veracity and significance. Now, this is not, this is nothing new. It's nothing new. Christ told us that it's going to happen, told us to expect it, and reminded us, reminds us to be prepared. He constantly reminded his disciples, as he does us, to watch and pray. To watch and pray, to pay attention, to be aware of all of the, to be aware of all of our surroundings from a spiritual standpoint. Because you're going to deal with people like this guy here, Peter Owens, Peter Owens films, God is not real at all. We don't want to get to the point where we trivialize the gospel, we trivialize the death of our Lord and Savior, we trivialize the resurrection, and then it just becomes a commonplace myth of our existence. It's just some kind of a fantasy that we are all experiencing. We have to remember that God created man to be in union with him. God created man in his image to be in fellowship with him. This is what God desires. But God is holy and cannot look upon sin, cannot bear sin, not even a single sin, not even the thought of a single sin by a single person. Can't do it. So man sinned. And he interrupted, or I should say, disrupted, the relationship between man and God by his sin. Now, we live in a day here in America where disruption is a common expression in business, especially in the technical world, which is where I come from. So whenever people are creating new things, whenever people are creating new things, they often refer to it as being disruptive. They want their invention or their creation or their new business to be disruptive. And to be disruptive means that it has to upset your business, has to upset the business of someone else's in order for yours to be successful. That's what disruptive really means. It means you want to do something that the competitors are not doing so that you can outstrip them in your efforts, in your competitive, from your competitive standpoint. Now, why do I say this by way of analogy? Because man, God put man in the garden, created man. God gave Adam one mandate. Do not eat from this tree. Do not eat from this tree. Because in the day that you do, there in the day that you do, you shall die. And then Eve went to the tree. The serpent didn't go to Adam, the one who received the command. The serpent went to Eve, went to his wife. Because he knew that she was the gentler creature. Gentler one. He had hoped that she could possibly be manipulated. And in so doing, could persuade her husband. Women, you women can get men to do crazy things. You know is true. And us men, we are often so boneheaded, we fall for it. I'm joking a little bit here, but my point is this. I talked about disruption. When Eve heard from Satan that God did not want her to know things like he does. When God, when Serpent told Eve that God knows that in the day you eat of this fruit, you will be wise like he is, knowing good and evil, that you will be like God, you'll be like the Most High. And in the in a in respect of time, without getting too theological on this matter, Eve ate from that tree. Because, well, before I get there, then she took from that tree and took and and got Adam, persuaded him to eat from it at all. Now we don't know if she took fruit to him and he ate it without knowing it, or if she persuaded him to come to the tree and to eat and to and to figure out what pleasure is to be gained from it. I don't know. But we do know this. She got him to eat from that tree, and the whole world was plunged into sin forevermore. Why did they do it? I'm gonna tell you why. Because they wanted to be disruptive. They wanted to be in competition with the Almighty. They wanted the playing field in their relationship between themselves and God, they wanted it to be level. They wanted to be on equal footing with him. And they wanted, in essence, to compete with him. Now we live in a day, we live in a day where that has not changed. That has not changed. Men want to be on equal footing with God. They want to agree on what God's mind should be like in certain circumstances. Now you will hear people say things like, How can God let this happen? How could a loving God let this or that thing happen? Or people will say that what God is doing is unfair. If he's doing this, it's unfair. There's this idea that men, men have an idea, a collective idea, that they have to agree first in terms of what God's motives are before they are going to respond in kind. Salvation, a relationship with God that leads to eternal life, is such a magnanimous gesture on the part of God because he doesn't owe us salvation. God sent Christ, his one and only son, to earth, draped in the fragility of human anatomy, to render obedience to God's holy law because man could not do it for himself. Man could not do it for himself. Man was incapable, no matter how much he was willing to exert his will in any capacity, it could never be driven to a love for God. Man, outside of God wants to be God. He wants, at the very minimum, to have dominion over his own heart. He wants to govern the throne of his own heart. He doesn't want God to rule over him. Man wants to rule. And when man waves his fist at our Lord and Savior, when he waves his fist at God and tries to negotiate the terms or the transaction for his soul, he undermines what's happening, what happened at the cross. When God sent Jesus to the cross, he was saying, I am serious about the relationship that I want to have with man. And he also is saying that he wasn't playing. He was not playing. Your last way to come out from under the wrath that hangs over your head right now. So Christ comes to earth once again in the fragility of the human anatomy. Divine meets human. For the first, the last, and the only time ever. Christ is truly the greatest wonder that the universe has ever known. Christ putting on human flesh is the greatest event that has ever happened. Until the day he died. Until that day when he said, It is finished. Until that day where he told the thief on the cross, today you shall be with me in paradise, today. This is the passion of Christ being arrested, being brutalized and mocked and scorned, being pinned to a cross, punctured by a spear, spat on, beat up, having his clothes ripped off of him, and then having Roman soldiers gamble for his garments. Basically, they shot dice for his garments. They gambled for him. This man lived a perfect life on our behalf. He obeyed all the laws that God had prescribed for man to obey. Could God have just instantly saved all of us? He could have. That's not what his plan was. Why his plan is what it is, we can't question it. That's just what it is. He's God. But what he did do, he said that he will accept the purity of his son, if sacrificed, for it to be the salvation for those for whom the sacrifice was made. Now, when you go back into the Old Testament and you study the sacrificial system, but particularly the annual sacrifice. That main annual sacrifice. When they made that sacrifice, that sacrifice, the whole idea was for their sins to be removed. For their sin to be removed by the animal sacrifice. Not by what they do, but by the sacrifice itself. The sacrifice removed their sin. But it wasn't able to remove their sin completely because sinful men were the ones who were offering up the sacrifice. So they had to come back annually because it couldn't remove sin. So it became more of a tradition in some respects. It had to be done over and over again because being offered at the hands of sinful men for being offered, and right, it's called the Day of Atonement. But because it was offered by sinful hands, it couldn't officially take away sin. So God sent Christ, his Son, to offer himself on our behalf. He was obedient to all of God's law, perfectly and flawlessly, no sin in him, he knew no sin and could do no sin. He laid down his life for his sheep in order to save his people and to give them eternal life. So let me ask you a question. What I'm going to try to communicate in the best way that I can possibly articulate. When Jesus died on Calvary and resurrected on that Sunday morning, and when he said it was finished, it wasn't just that he went through the process of dying. It wasn't just that his ministry was done. Although, in another sense, it is. But we need to understand what his ministry was. And this is what it was. His ministry was to save souls. Now you're going to think, you're not telling me anything new. I'm not telling you anything new. But I'm hoping that if you don't know this, it might render your understanding of it new. Here's what I mean: on the Day of Atonement, under the Jewish economy, the atonement didn't save them because they were sinners too. The ones who offered up the sacrifices. The priests, they themselves were sinners, so the offering that they were making couldn't actually save anyone because they too were sinners. So the Day of Atonement became a rite that had to be done every year because it couldn't take away sin once and for all. Now here's what you have to understand: their sacrifice could not take away the sin. It couldn't make men right with God. But then God sends Christ. Jesus comes sent by God, but also of his own accord, lays down his life for his sheep, to do what? To save them. Atonement, if you break the word down, it means to be made at one. At one. Atone at one. And atonement is the act of at one-ment. Bringing together, rendering salvation final. You may think, again, I already know that. But here's what I'm trying to say. Jesus did not die to make sin or to make salvation possible. When he died and resurrected from that grave, he actually saved his people that day. What remains now is for his people to know that they belong to him. What now waits is the process through which he has commissioned us to share the gospel so that those whom Christ has already saved will come to him. Christ said he came to the lost sheep, and that he had lost sheep of the house of Israel, and that he has lost sheep of the Gentile fold. When he died, he brought and enacted salvation that day. You have to understand that if he didn't, what makes his death different than the sacrifice made by the Jews on the day of apostles, I mean on the day of atonement, which had to be done every year? I hope this is making sense. When Jesus died, salvation was done. The only thing is, those of us who aren't who are called, but who haven't yet had the call, they don't know it yet. This is why we preach the gospel. But their salvation is theirs. But the new birth for them hasn't been, hasn't been experienced yet because the gospel still has to reach them so that they repent and come to faith in Christ. Hence, all of us believers, we know that the world only continues for one reason and one reason only. God hasn't brought all of his people to the awareness of the gift that he has prepared for them eternal life and salvation. I wish I could communicate this better.