Friends: Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father in eternal Heaven and occupies space in our hearts here below. When does He have time to love us? Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #1036

September 22, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Never a Time  

By Bob Walters

“And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” – Jesus praying for himself in the Priestly Prayer, John 17:5

“… before the world began.” For all the discussion in Sunday school and Bible study about “who” and “what” Jesus was, here we’re confronted with “when” Jesus was.

Christian orthodoxy – the basics of the faith, not the capital “O” Eastern church – tells us that Jesus was fully God and fully man. That’s a mystery I can’t define or explain, other than to say that the Almighty trinitarian God – Father, Son, and Spirit – reached down into history and in the person of Jesus, saved us from our sin.

Salvation means our curse and separation from God is resolved by the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross. From His seat in eternity, Christ entered humanity as Jesus of Nazareth, born of the virgin Mary and the seed of the Holy Spirit. Jesus lives, laughs, and suffers among humanity, is baptized, preaches God’s truth, rebukes Israel’s leadership, is crucified by the Romans, died, is buried, resurrected, and returned to his heavenly seat beside God. Then, the Spirit arrives to live in the hearts of the faithful. Our faith, trust, and love of Christ express our acceptance of eternity’s grace.

That’s “who” Jesus was, and is. As to “what” Jesus was and is, meaning His essence in the Trinity of being “from God” or “of God” – topics deep in the theological fabric of Christian truth, opinions, and heresies for 2,000 years – I go with the eternal, uncreated reality of God as a society, community, and relationship of goodness and glory that allows John to say “God is love.” Humanity is an expression of that love, and Jesus the Messiah Christ is Who rescues and heals humanity. He is the Word of God.

What anchors my faith, recognizes this truth, and cements my trust is that the story of Jesus has been discussed, challenged, and protected constantly for 2,000 years.  The fact that smart people have disagreed – and still disagree – on various doctrinal points does not tell me that the story is wrong. That the core Christian beliefs of Jesus’s life, death, burial, and resurrection have endured tells me it is safe to weather any storm, or celebrate any joy, in the name of Jesus.  He is the real deal; done deal.

So, Who Christ is and What Christ does isn’t screaming for further definition in my faith life.  God’s love – for me and others proven through Christ – is truth enough. My love for God and others, thankfully, “covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

I’ll gladly take it.

But this idea of “When” Jesus was, is currently occupying space in my brain. I heard a phrase this past week, regarding the Trinity as existing “before eternity.”  “Before” puts eternity in time, and I’m pretty sure that is not how eternity works. There is no “before eternity” or “after eternity.” Eternity, like the Trinity, was/is just always there. Our human minds, living as we do within the rhythms of God’s Creation of time, space, and matter, measure everything. The definable and measurable world is where we live.

Eternity – and it’s the same with God’s love, the sacrifice of Jesus, the indwelling of the Spirit, the authority of the Bible, the fellowship of the faithful, and probably many other things I’m forgetting – cannot be measured.  These are qualitative realities, not quantitative observations. Jesus on earth somehow had a foot in both camps.

My question: Jesus is in eternal heaven, but He is also in my earthly heart. Does that mean that Christ is there? Or here? Or both? And “when” am I in all this?

Fear not. I realize there is never a time Jesus doesn’t love every one of us.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) cites C.S. Lewis: “The present is where eternity touches time.” – The Screwtape Letters

 

Friends: Western commercial culture insists that everything has a price. What if an ultimate price is really an expression of ultimate love?

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Spirituality column #1030

August 11, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Payment Plan

By Bob Walters

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …” – Jesus, John 3:16

The following puts me at friendly odds with every evangelical preacher I can think of, but I think modern western Christianity has it wrong, or at least misdirected, by insisting Jesus died as a “payment” for our sin. I.e., a quid-pro-quo transaction, not grace and love.

In Orthodox circles, this transaction of the cross – an idea Anselm of Canterbury conceived in the early 1200s that grew into the stubbornly western mainstream doctrine of “penal substitutionary atonement” – is considered worse than head-shaking bad teaching. To the Orthodox, it is more like a heresy and considered an insult to Christ.

Now, we hear about Jesus “paying the price” every Sunday. It fits our western, commercial culture of cost and reward, penalty and payment, punishment and prize, etc. If we do something good, we get something good. If we do something bad, we get something bad. But we all know that’s not an accurate picture of how the world and humanity work.

Jesus, God’s son, the only perfect human, was given by God into the world, into humanity, to restore our divine relationship with our Creator; a relationship that was broken in the fall. Curses aside (read Genesis 3 for a refresher), God pursued humanity and Jesus was point of reconnection. In Jesus we know God is real, because Jesus was with us, and sacrificed mightily to cover our sins, ransom our souls, and restore us to God.

We think, generally, of sacrifice and ransom as payment options. But what if instead of a transactional installment payment, the Cross was a positive action of love? What if the Cross isn’t a metaphor for “final payment,” but instead is a freeing sacrifice of faith?

I see the Cross not as the wrath-driven payment of an ultimate price, but the gracious expression of an ultimate love. Do we see God’s wrath in the Bible? Sure, but we also see His righteousness and His truth. When Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” that is God saying to humanity that His righteousness, commands,  truth, and sacrifice are unassailable and reveal the heavenly realms of His existence.

We diminish it horribly, I think, by defining Christ’s person and faith with a price tag.

It’s not just a linguistic trick or a moot point of semantics – a gift vs. payment – that sustains this view in my mind.  There is the practical, obvious question of, “If Jesus paid a price, to whom did he pay it?” Certainly not to God, because He is God.  And certainly not to Satan, because God owes Satan nothing. Atonement and ransom are conditions that result in forgiveness and freedom. The cross is an invitation of faith, in faith, through faith.

And if 1 John 4:8 is correct, that “God is love,” think about the maximum and defining loves in our own lives.  Is my love for my wife a payment plan? Or for my children, my grandchildren, the friends in my life I cherish the most? Or for my country?

My longtime Bible mentor George Bebawi always willingly swam upstream on this issue of the Cross as a payment vs. the free grace of God’s love. He was a Coptic priest (Egyptian Orthodox), multi-lingual Bible translator, a divinity lecturer at Cambridge University, England, among other places, and renowned Patristics expert, the study of the early church and the church fathers. I studied with him for nearly 20 years,

George would joke that if modern Western evangelism and substitutionary atonement were correct, then John 3:16 should read, “For God was so mad at the world that he killed his only son.” That’s because we see salvation as a “deal,” not perfect love.

We see God’s wrath and Jesus’s punishment, not righteousness and obedience.

I could go on. I don’t write about this often, but I think about it all the time. Christianity survived its first millennia without “penal substitutionary atonement.” The Bible was taken at its word, and the glory of Christ was not reduced to a payment. I like that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wrote about this in 2015; see “The Price is (not) Right.”