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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A theological inquiry: what do you believe were all of Christ’s personal motivations to be crucified, and what was the overriding motivation? We have, of course, brotherly love (John 15:13). But there’s also the motivation to live so as to exemplify the glory of God (17:4); to receive glory for himself from God (17:5) (5:44); consequently, there is the interest to always do God’s will (5:30) and work (4:34). There is also the intriguing verse that His motivation was for his own heavenly joy (Heb 12:2), as “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross”, which I think is the only verse which directly links personal motivation to the cross. This joy is not necessarily mutually exclusive to God’s glory, because glory itself is a supreme joy.

Regarding the overriding motivation, I am partial to Heb 12:2, that Christ was motivated by the glorious “joy set before him”, because the whole passage reads almost like a doxological summation of the faith (“let us look to the founder and perfecter of our faith”). It ties in neatly with a different underrated verse: “Those who, through patience in well-doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, God will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7), while the “self-seeking” face wrath (2:8). This is somewhat tricky because we no longer talk about glory as an emotion today. But if you understand that glory is a feeling that always emanates from a person’s assessment, then seeking God’s glory is not self-seeking, because all of the “social valuation” exists within another person. Seeking one’s own glory would mean something like “wanting to believe oneself to be glorious”, which is different and to be condemned. “Seeking that God give us glory” is equivalent to just “wanting to do our best so that God gives a ‘well done’”.

Maybe this is just the consequentialist in me, but it seems like love for humanity and the enabling of their salvation has to be the overriding one. Suppose that you literally had to pick one:

1: God will get glory equal to saving all of humanity, but you will not be gloried, and humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell

2: God will not get glory (at least, not any extra from your decision), but you will get glory from God as if you had saved humanity, but humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell

3: God will not get any additional glory, and you will not get any personal glory or credit, but humanity will be saved (or at least, have the ability to repent and be saved if they so choose)

Setting aside the inherent contradictions (because it would be unjust for God not to glory you or himself for saving humanity) for the sake of the thought experiment, it seems to me that the actually most good action would be 3: save the people. And this is in line with everything else Jesus preached. You do good works, even at the cost of your own material well-being, and then this automatically glories God and yourself automatically as secondary effects. But you have to actually do good.

Now, in reality all of these are inextricably linked: God only gives commands iff they are good iff they benefit people iff they glorify Himself iff they glorify the person who does them. I think that on a fundamental level there isn't even a meaningful distinction between "doing good" and "glorifying God", otherwise God would have said different things until they became the same thing. So I strongly suspect that Jesus had all of them as equally strong motivations because they're all the same thing if you have true understanding (which he did). But in-so-far as you consider them to be distinct, I think the saving of humanity was the primary motivation (but this might just be my perspective as a selfish human who loves being saved more than I love glorifying God)