The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

Week 14: Chapter 12 — The (True) Story of the Cross

Read Chapter 12 of The Reason for God by Timothy Keller.

The cross is the center of gravity for everything Keller has argued — this is the chapter where the whole book's logic converges. Come prepared to sit with the most important question in the book: what was actually happening when Jesus died?

Discussion Questions

7 questions

1.Many people find the doctrine of the atonement — that Jesus died as a substitute for sinners — morally troubling, even offensive. What is the most common objection you have heard? Before working through Keller's response, try to state the objection as charitably and powerfully as you can.

2.Keller presents several models of the atonement — the cross as moral example, as Christus Victor (defeating the powers of sin and death), and as substitutionary atonement — arguing that they are not mutually exclusive but that substitution is the heart that gives the others their meaning. Why does Keller insist that substitution is not one theory among equals but the center?

a.What is lost if we keep the "moral example" meaning of the cross but remove the substitutionary one?

b.What does it mean to say that on the cross, God himself absorbed the consequences of our sin rather than simply setting them aside?

3.Keller uses the profound illustration of forgiveness in human relationships to explain the cross: genuine forgiveness always involves the forgiver absorbing a real cost rather than passing it along. When someone truly forgives a wrong, they do not pretend the wrong didn't happen — they refuse to make the wrongdoer pay. How does this illuminate what God did at the cross?

4.He argues that a God who simply forgives without the cross would actually be less just and less loving, not more — because the cost of our sin would simply be disappeared rather than truly dealt with. How does this respond to the objection that a loving God should just forgive without requiring a sacrifice?

5.Keller points to the cry of dereliction — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — as the most important sentence ever uttered. He argues that the eternal Son experienced the full weight of God-forsakenness so that we would never have to. What does it mean to you personally that God himself went through abandonment and death for you?

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Closing Prayer

Full guide

Lord Jesus Christ, you who bore our grief and carried our sorrows — who were pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities — receive our gratitude, inadequate as it is. We confess that we have often kept the cross at arm's length, reduced it to a symbol or a doctrine, rather than letting it break us and remake us. Let the reality of your substitution sink deep: that you endured what we deserved so that we might receive what you deserve. May that love be the ground of everything we are and everything we do. Amen.

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