Why God Bought His Own Flowers (And What That Means for You)

There's a move in relationships that almost everyone has made at some point. You've done something wrong — or maybe just something inadvertently wrong — and you're aware that the other person is upset. And you're sitting there thinking about what to do about it. And you go get flowers. Or make a reservation. Or come home with something you know they'll like. Something to smooth it over. Something to make the person who was rightfully upset a little less upset at you.

That is, in one word, propitiation. It's a formal theological word that most people have never heard, and it sounds complicated, but the thing it describes is completely ordinary. You do something to make a person who has the right to be angry with you not be angry at you anymore. You lay something down between you and their wrath.

Now here's what God did.

The difference is that God was the wronged party. He had every right to stay angry. The wrath was justified. And instead of waiting for us to figure out how to smooth it over — which we never would have, because we were completely clueless about what was needed — he set the whole thing up himself.

The apostle John puts it this way in 1 John 4:10: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the propitiation for our sins. We didn't bring the flowers. We didn't know we needed to bring the flowers. God sent Jesus Christ — his own Son, in human flesh — as the thing that stands between us and the wrath we earned. We didn't arrange that. We didn't earn it. We didn't have one clue what we needed. God arranged it himself, and handed it to us.

That is a completely unprecedented transaction. In every human version of this story, the party who did the wrong is the one who has to make it right. That's what makes it meaningful. But in God's version, the wronged party made it right, because the guilty party was never going to be able to.

So when John follows this up with: "if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" — the logic is not guilt. It's not "he did this for you, so the least you can do is be nicer to people." The logic is: you received love that you didn't earn, didn't arrange, and couldn't have manufactured — love that cost Jesus his life. And now the reasonable response to that is to give love — also not because it's been earned, also not because it's convenient, also not because the person has made it easy. Because that is the shape of the love you received.

God doesn't say, I love you, so love me back. He says, I love you, so love each other. Pay it forward. Spread it around. Let what I did for you change what you do for the people right next to you.

The word for that in the New Testament is not obligation. It's transformation. When something like that happens to you — when someone absorbs the cost of your failure and restores you anyway — it changes the shape of how you move through the world.

You received it for free, at enormous cost to him. So give it that way.

— tobe