The Work of Christ 2 / Substitute
‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’ For ‘you were like sheep going astray,’ but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
(I Peter.2:24-25)
It is written: “And he was numbered with the transgressors”; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfilment.’
(Luke 22:37, citing Is.53:12)
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
(II Cor.5:21)
The necessity of sacrifice is found in fallen humanity’s most ancient religious history, in the very moment the Lord God curses creation and exiles Adam & Eve from Eden (Gen.3:16-19; Rom.8:20). But even against the background of this spiritual trauma, there is grace. Alongside the promise of His conquest of Satan (Gen.3:15), is the first sacrificial slaughter. As death violates the world God had declared to be good, the first experience of that death occurs at the hand of the Lord Himself, and speaks of redemption. ‘The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them’ (Gen.3:21). It is no surprise that ‘sacrifice’ - even human sacrifice - has echoed in our memory ever since. Throughout the religions and spiritualties of the world, wherever we have felt our alienation from God, we have cultivated priestly classes and have linked redemption to sacrifice. In those religions we sometimes even find the idea of human sacrifices, that need to be hung on a tree, and subsequently eaten (see John G Paton’s account of his missionary endeavours amongst cannibals on the Island of Tanna).
Throughout the OT, pagan and idolatrous religions regularly centre on the idea of the sacrifice of a first-born son (hence the warning of Dt.18:9-10, see also e.g. II Kings,3:27, and the tragedy of such practises finding their way eventually into the life of the Church, II Kings 16:3; 17:17; 21:16).
This is, of course, a horrific inversion of the heart of true religion. As the Lord Himself laments: ‘They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded – nor did it enter my mind – that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin’ (Jer.32:35). The Gospel was never supposed to be that we sacrificed our first-born son. It was always that He would sacrifice His. Every animal sacrifice that the Lord ordained to stand in the place of sinful humanity pointed relentlessly to the ultimate Priestly Sacrifice on Calvary (Heb.9:1-14). Here Christ ‘gave Himself up for us as a … sacrifice to God’ (Eph.5:2).
Only this moment is adequate to deal with sin and alienation. Ways of thinking about the cross which don’t recognise that in His death Jesus is substituting Himself in our place, implode under the weight of human experience. We need something infinitely more drastic than a moral example, or a noble martyrdom. We need a sin-bearing sacrifice, willing and adequate to bear the eternal fury of God’s justice against the evil of that sin. We need ‘the self-substitution of God’ (Stott). It’s as if God says: Your sin is too immense for you to deal with. Let me take that and we will deal with it. And so, ‘He was delivered over to death for our sins …’ (Rom.4:25). ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…’ (Gal.3:13). We are reconciled to the Trinity by the Trinity (Flavel).
As John Stott puts it so clearly in The Cross of Christ, ‘Sin is man (sic) substituting himself for God … Salvation is God substituting Himself for man’. The Son, standing in the place of humanity (Heb.2:14), bears the sin of the world (John 1:29), and enters into the sinners’ dereliction (Matt.27:46). The Cross is a ‘judicial execution’. As a Man, Christ suffered with us but primarily, He suffered for us.
With characteristic pungency, Martin Luther captured brilliantly the dynamics of the cross. In his epic commentary on Galatians (3:13), Luther writes: ‘All the prophets did foresee that Christ should become the greatest transgressor … that ever was or could be in the world. For He, being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person without sins … but a sinner… Our most merciful Father sent His only Son into the world and laid upon Him the sins of all men, saying: Be Thou Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, cruel oppressor; David the adulterer … the thief which hanged on the cross… be Thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them’. Such is the glory of our Gospel.
Questions
In a book called: The Lost Message of Jesus, Steve Chalke (in)famously wrote: “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse – a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. . . . Such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement ‘God is love.’ If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil” (182-83). How would you respond to this sort of comment? What do you agree with? …disagree with? Why?
Read Rom.3:21-31
How has the righteousness of God now been made known (v.21)? Why is this significant in Paul’s argument? How does it shape our experience?
How serious is that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (v.23)? How would describe the impact of sin on us as humans? …on the world? Why is Paul underlining the issue of ‘sin’ so emphatically in this whole opening section of Romans (see esp. 1:18-32; 2:1-16; 3:9-20)?
What is a ‘sacrifice of atonement’ (v.25, NIV)? What is Paul teaching us about the nature of Jesus’ death on the cross?
Other translations render it: propitiation (ESV - some of you may recognise this word from BCP); sacrifice for sin (NLT); or ‘God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin’ (The Message).
In what sense has sin prior to the cross been left unpunished (v.25)? How does that call God’s righteousness into question? How is this resolved in the cross?
What does Paul mean when he describes God as ‘the One who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (v.26)? What does it mean to be justified (also vv.28 & 30)?
How does Paul’s teaching lead to humility (v.27)?
What is a Christian’s relationship to the Law of God as laid out in the OT? Should we keep it or not (v.27-31)?
Memory Passage:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Is.53:4-6
For further reflection:
As we saw in our first study, such a death has long lived in the mind and heart of God (Jn.10:17-18; Is.53:4-10 etc.). The Church however has periodically struggled to retain the integration of God’s love and justice that is so exquisitely revealed in the substitutionary death of Jesus. Our vision of both love and justice tend toward being far too puerile and superficial to allow for the glory and gravity of what God is doing at the cross: as the Son offers Himself by the Spirit to the Father (Heb.9:14). Over the years, many have struggled to hold together these two aspects of God’s character: His love and His wrath. One writer in the second century, Marcion, even when so far as to suggest that the God of the OT - a God of wrath and judgement - must have been a different being to the God of the NT who is a God of love and grace. We still hear echoes of this today, as people continue to suggest there is some discontinuity between the ways God behaves sin the O & NT. Such a dichotomy is utterly false, and betrays only our own lack of engagement with either Testament.
The beautiful integrity of God’s character is demonstrated supremely at the cross. At Calvary, as one theologian daringly puts it, ‘The wrathful God is loving’ (Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, p.31). We cannot treat the atonement without grasping that its source is the sovereign love of God (Jn.3:16; Rom.5:8; I jn.4:10). But the very fact of the cross demands we face up to the immensity of God’s wrath and the reality of His judgement. We often see the cross as the revelation of God’s love. But it is the revelation of so much more… I wonder if we have learnt to see it as the revelation of His hatred? To this we will return in a later study.