Jake Walker

“And if, with that death, exile was over, “forgiveness of sins” was a new reality etched into the cosmos itself, and the ancient enslaving “powers” had been defeated once and for all in the “new Passover”—why, then, the important thing was to live within and celebrate that new world, not go rushing back to the old one where sin and death still held sway and where Jews and Gentiles ate at separate tables.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“Third, for a Jew (and Paul himself is the archetypal devout and zealous Jew, as he says in 1:13–14) to recognize Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and come into the Messiah’s family is to declare that “the son of God loved me and gave himself for me”: and with that the Jew too is given a radically new identity, the ultimate Israel identity, the messianic identity: “It isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.” Thus at every point the Messiah’s crucifixion, interpreted through the Messiah’s representative position vis-à-vis Israel and the divine purposes for Abraham’s family, means the creation and maintenance of a single covenantal family, the one sin-forgiven people of God, the people already celebrating the life of the “age to come.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“First, the event has occurred by which God has declared the “present evil age” null and void and has launched the “age to come,” so that the powers of the “present evil age,” which are the powers that had previously held people captive, have no longer any right to keep them prisoner.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“The problem is not the general problem of human sin or indeed of the death that it incurs. The problem is that God made promises not only to Abraham but through Abraham to the world, and if the promise-bearing people fall under the Deuteronomic curse, as Deuteronomy itself insists that they will, the promises cannot get out to the wider world. The means is then that Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, bears Israel’s curse in order to undo the consequences of sin and “exile” and so to break the power of the “present evil age” once and for all. When sins are forgiven, the “powers” are robbed of their power. Once we understand how the biblical narrative actually works, so as to see the full force of saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” the admittedly complex passage can be seen to be fully coherent.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion