Foundations of the Christian Life. Chapter 8 - Christ Our Substitute.

Foundations of the Christian Life.
Chapter 8. Christ Our Substitute.

In the last chapter we looked at the idea that Christ is the mediator of a New Covenant. This is foundational to understanding both his person and his work, and was the key to the formulation of the Churches teaching as summarised in the Nicene Creed.

Having established that Christ is Mediator of a New Covenant the next thing that we need to consider is the question: How did Jesus remove the obstacles to relationship with God? In other words, how did he deal with sin? How did he bring reconciliation (atonement) between God and man?

There are two issues here:
1. The acts of wrongdoing we commit, i.e. our sins (plural).
2. The Fallen nature we have as a result of sin.

In this chapter we will look at the provision of God for our sins. In the next chapter we will touch on the provision of God for sin (singular), i.e. the sinful nature.

THE PROBLEM:

Mankind was created for relationship with God. However the entry of sin, rebellion against God, broke this relationship. We are separated from God by our sin.

If separation because of wrongdoing (sin) were all that hindered relationship then perhaps God could simply forgive and relationship could be restored. I say perhaps, but really even that could not happen, as we shall see. The situation is not that simple. With the entry of sin there was a fundamental change in the nature of mankind that bars the way to relationship. This change is called various things in the Bible, the primary way of referring to it is to call it “death”.

We see this firstly in the Garden of Eden when God gave the command to Adam:

Genesis 2:17
“…you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

The sentence of death was not immediate in a physical sense, but a process of death entered into man’s experience that led to eventual physical death. It would seem that, even if in the animal world there was death (which seems likely), this was not God’s original intention for man. He seems to have had a higher purpose for mankind. The translations of Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2) possibly point to God’s original intention for mankind. That death existed in the animal, world is certain to me for two reasons:
1. It seems unlikely that the "swarming" things God created would have been allowed to propagate forever and not die. Hence, in the insect world and other areas of animal life, death must have been a reality.
2. Adam, for the warning of impending death to mean anything to him, must have had some idea of what it meant. To have seen dead insects, birds, animals, etc., would have given him some understanding of what the possibility was.

In Man, sin activated a process of death that leads to death. The Apostle Paul talks about this in:

Romans 6:23.
“For the wages of sin is death..”

The use of the word “wages” is significant. When a man earns wages he earns them a little at a time over a long period. He does not earn them all at once. The Apostle is telling us that as we sin over time we accrue a payment of death that we must one day collect.

James also talks of this process in:

James 1:14.15.
“…each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has been conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.”

Death is the penalty for man’s sin. But death is not just an event which we call “physical death”, rather it is a process that we live in as a result of sin. The apostle Paul explains it slightly differently in:

Galatians 6:7,8.
“…A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction…”

So death is a power of destruction that generates a harvest of destruction which we experience – both in this life and the next.

So God is not faced with a simple matter of dealing with sins, our guilt for wrong acts; he is also faced with the destructive power of death as a result of sin. This death is with us from the moment of conception and is part of the separation we experience from God. It is a state we inherit from Adam. It is a penalty which must be paid.

The story of the Garden of Eden vividly pictures this. Adam and Eve, after God had exposed their sin, sent them out of the Garden, the place of his presence. They could no longer remain in fellowship with God but were banished into the world now caught in a curse of death and destruction through their actions.

So God had to not only find a way of forgiving man’s sin, he also had to deal with the legal requirement that sin be punished by death, and deal with that death in a way that allowed mankind to be freed from it.

John Stott ("The Cross of Christ"):
“The Cross is at the centre of Christian faith. Evangelical Christians believe that, in and through Christ crucified, God substituted himself for us and bore our sins; dying in our place the death we deserved to die, in order that we might be restored to his favour and adopted into his family. This belief is a distinguishing mark of the World-wide evangelical Church; it takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel.”

In many places the Bible states this belief. We shall look only at three here briefly:

Isaiah 53:5,8.
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him..
…We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

This is speaking prophetically of the coming “Suffering Servant of God”. Clearly the suffering he was to undergo was for other people.

* We have all done our own thing, and gone wrong in doing it.
* This “doing our own thing is called “transgression” or “iniquity”. It is sin.
* This sin has a “punishment”.
* The Servant, Jesus, suffered because of our sin. But this suffering was not just a by-product of our sin, because he came to a world with sin in it and so suffered as we suffer life in a sinful world. No, his suffering was clearly so we would not suffer – we would have “peace”. In other words he stood in our place and took our punishment for us. He substituted himself for us.
* This peace must be understood in the full Old Testament way meaning, “to have an intimate relationship”, i.e. with God.

Jesus clearly had this passage in Isaiah in mind when he made the following two comments:

Mark 10:45
“For the Son of Man came…to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Mark 14:24
“This is the blood of the (New) covenant, which is poured out for many.”

* Jesus clearly saw his life purpose to be one of self sacrifice on behalf of others,
* This self-sacrifice was a price, a ransom, implying those he did it for were in some way in bondage.
* The result of his self-sacrifice would be a New Covenant, i.e. a new relationship with God for those for whom he gave his life.
* The price is not directly stated but is hinted at by the word “blood”. This is a reference to the Old Testament sacrificial practice where the blood of the animal signified that it had died as a substitute for the offerer. Jesus is implying he was going to die so that others could have a relationship with God.

The implications of these verses are spelled out clearly in the Apostolic writings:

1 Peter 3:18.
“For Christ died for (our) sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

* Christ’s death was “for sin”.
* It was a substitution – “the righteous for the unrighteous”. In other words he didn’t deserve it himself.
* The result was so that we could have a relationship with God.

Christ’s death, taking the punishment due for us as our substituted, satisfied the claims of God’s justice so that we could be forgiven and enter into a new relationship with God.

(Most of what follows are notes taken from John Stott’s book: “The Cross of Christ”.)

“No two words in the theological vocabulary of the cross arouse more criticism than “satisfaction” and “substitution”. In the combination "Satisfaction through substitution” they seem even more intolerable.”

Two questions are raised:
1. How can we believe that God needed some kind of satisfaction before he was prepared to forgive, and
2. That Jesus provided this satisfaction by enduring as our substitute the punishment we deserved?
Are not such notions unworthy of the God of the Bible; primitive superstitions, immoral?

Satisfaction and substitution are not Biblical words, therefore we need caution, but each is a Biblical concept. “Satisfaction through substitution” can be presented in a way that is honouring to God and which lies at the very heart of the Church's worship and witness. Let us then look at these two questions.

SATISFACTION FOR SIN.

It is asked, “Why should forgiveness depend on Christ's death? Why does God not simply forgive us without the necessity of the cross? God asks us to forgive, why can't God practice what he preaches and be equally generous? Nobody's death is necessary before we forgive each other. Why should he need some form of satisfaction?”

The fact is this, the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from being exact. It ignores the elementary fact that we are not God. We are private individuals, and other people's sins against us are personal injuries. God is not a private individual, nor is sin just a personal injury. Rather God is the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him and against the law. The crucial question we should ask is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all?

There are two factors that bring the problem into focus.

1. Human Sin.

The emphasis of Scripture is on the Godless, self-centredness of sin. Every sin is a breach of the first commandment. It is a proclamation of self-dependence, autonomy, to claim the position occupied by God alone. Sin is not a lapse from convention; its essence is hostility to God. It is rebellion.

The Bible takes sin seriously because it takes man seriously. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man, by pushing off responsibility for our actions. To say that somebody is "Not responsible for his actions" is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions.

Emil Brunner:
“If responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears.”

C.S.Lewis writing on “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” argues thus:
He bemoans the modem tendency to abandon the notion of “a just retribution” and replace it with humanitarian concerns for the “criminal reform” and for “society-as-a-whole” deterrence. Lewis argues:
“This means every lawbreaker is deprived of the rights of a human being - because the humanitarian theory removes from punishment the concept of “desert”. This concept is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as ‘deserved’ that a sentence can be just or unjust. When we remove this link we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether. Instead of a person - a subject with rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a case. By what right may we use force to impose treatment on a criminal, either to cure him or to protect society, unless he deserves it? To be cured against one’s will, of states that one may not regard as a disease, is tyranny. But to be punished because we deserve it is to be treated as a human person in Gods image.”

In other words human sin has consequences before God’s law as we are lawbreakers.
If humans have sinned and if they are responsible for their sins then they are guilty before God. Guilt is the logical deduction from the premises of sin and responsibility.

2. The Holiness of God.

The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between Divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone, nor our guilt alone, but also the Divine reaction in love and wrath towards guilty sinners. How could God express his holy love by forgiving sinners without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love?

That God is Holy is foundational to Biblical religion. So is the corollary that sin is incompatible with his holiness. Closely related to Gods holiness is his wrath, which is his holy reaction to evil.

Definition: God’s wrath is his personal Divine revulsion to evil and his personal vigorous opposition to it. It is uncontaminated by those elements which make human anger sinful, i.e. being arbitrary or uninhibited. God's anger is always principled and controlled, not pique or vengeful, not spasmodic outbursts but a continuous settled antagonism, aroused only by evil, expressed in its condemnation. It is free from personal animosity or vindictiveness. Wrath is not a contradiction of Gods love. Indeed while God is angry at the offence he is simultaneously loving the offender.

Common to holiness and wrath is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. Sin cannot approach God, God cannot tolerate sin.

God hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it and refuses ever to come to terms with it.

Emil Brunner:
“Where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored them will be no understanding of the central concept of the gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the mediator. Only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy.”

Inadequate doctrines the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of man and God. If we reinterpret sin as a “lapse” instead of a “rebellion”, and God as "indulgent" instead of "indignant", then naturally the Cross appears to be superfluous.

3. The Root Problem:

Forgiveness is for God the profoundest of problems. Sin, on our side, and wrath, on God’s side, stand in the way. God must not only respect us as the moral beings we are, but he must also respect himself as the Holy God he is. Before the Holy God can forgive us some kind of satisfaction is necessary. The demands of his holiness must be met somehow.

I.e. The way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to himself must be fully consistent with his own character. He must satisfy himself in every aspect of his being including both his justice and his love.

Thus the primary obstacle to forgiveness is to be found in God himself. He must satisfy himself in the way of salvation he devises; he cannot save us by contradicting himself.

St. Anselm: “Cur Deus Homo?” Argues thus:
1. The real problem was that man owed something to God and this was the debt needing to be repaid. This debt, sin, is “not rendering to God what is his due” and is not so much to do with sins as with the submission of our entire will to him. Thus sin is to take away from God what is his own (our complete submission and obedience), and thus to dishonour him.
2. To be forgiven we must repay what we owe. But we are incapable of doing so. Our present obedience is already required, thus cannot make satisfaction for our past sins.
3. Neither can another man satisfy for us, as they already owe complete obedience for themselves.
4. Thus there is no one who can make this satisfaction except God himself, but no one ought to make it except man.
5. Therefore it is necessary for a “God-man” to make it.
6. Christ, who is God and man, performed a unique work. He died - not as a debt because he was sinless, but freely - for the honour of God.


Self-satisfaction in fallen humanity is unpleasant. But when applied to God it means that He must act according to the perfection of His nature or name. The law to which he must conform, must satisfy, is the law of His own being not something outside Himself. What God does must be consistent with who He is.

This inward necessity does not mean that God must be true to only a part of himself, nor that he must express one of his attributes at the expense of another, but rather he must be completely and invariably himself in the fullness of his divine being. His justice and his mercy must equally be satisfied. The work of the redemption of sinners must jointly manifested them.

SUBSTITUTION:

The idea of someone substituting for another’s sins is often rejected today as barbaric, intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous.

But how could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgement, and his love in pardon? Only by providing a Divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgement and the sinner the pardon.

We sinners still suffer the personal, psychological and social consequences of sins, but the penal consequence, the deserved penalty of alienation from God, has been borne by another in our place, so that we may be spared it.

1. How are we to understand this substitution?

The best way to understand these is by considering the Old Testament sacrifices.

The interpretation of Christ's death as a sacrifice is embedded in every important part of the New Testament teaching. Sacrificial language and pictures are widespread throughout the New Testament. The Letter to the Hebrews portrays Christ as having fulfilled the Old Testament shadows. The New Testament understanding is built on the Old Testament.

What did the Old Testament sacrifices signify? Do they have a substitutionary meaning?

Sacrifices were offered in a wide variety of circumstances in the Old Testament. The diversity warns us against imposing on them a single, simple significance. But there does seem to be two basic and complementary ideas of sacrifice in the Old Testament:
1. The first group of sacrifices express the sense human beings have of belonging to God by right. These see man as a creature while in them God is revealed as the Creator on whom man is dependent for physical life.
2. The second group express the sense of alienation from God because of sin. These see man as a sinner and pictures God simultaneously as Judge and Saviour who provides atonement for sin.
Both kinds were essentially recognitions of Gods grace and expressions of dependence upon that grace.
The second group of sacrifices is the foundation of the former. Sin must be dealt with before we can fully worship our Creator.

The idea of substitution is that one (person) takes the place of another. Such an action is universally regarded as noble particularly where pain or death are involved. Thus it is not surprising that this commonly understood principle of substitution should have been applied by God himself to sacrifices.

There are five main types of offering in Leviticus. The cereal offering was atypical and was only offered in conjunction with other offerings. The rest were blood sacrifices. The worshiper laid his hands on the animal - certainly identifying himself with it and solemnly designating the victim as standing for him. Some people see also a transferral of sins in this act. Then the substitute animal was killed in recognition it the penalty for sin was death, the blood - symbolising that the death had taken place - was sprinkled and the offerer's life was spared.

The clearest statement that the blood was substitutionary is found in:

Leviticus 17:11.
“The life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”

* The blood is a symbol of life. This is a very ancient idea. The emphasis was not on blood flowing in the veins, i.e. of life, but on blood shed, i.e. life ended, usually by violent means.
* Blood makes atonement. The reason is in the life - this word repeated. One life is forfeit; the other is sacrificed instead. Thus sacrifice is vicarious (on behalf of another).
* God ordained this process to be so. It is not man's idea.

The language used in the Bible makes it plain that the Cross was a substitutionary sacrifice.

2. Who is this substitute?

Was he just a man? Was he simply God? If he was simply God he would not represent mankind. If he was simply man he would not represent God.

The possibility of substitution rests upon the identity of the substitute.

Three Possibilities:

1. If he was simply man how could one man possibly or justly stand in for other human beings? As Anselm said, each man owed a debt for himself so could not pay for another. If he was only a man, but somehow different from us and separate from God, he must be an independent third party. And if he is an independent third party then he really has nothing to do with us and nothing to do with God. With this view we must present the cross as being either Christ's or God’s initiative. Thus God and Christ are divided - either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. Both ideas denigrate the Father. He is pictured in them as being reluctant to suffer himself so he makes Christ a victim. Thus he is seen as reluctant to forgive, a judge, full of wrath.

This ignores the fact of God’s love. The Bible portrays God as being totally willing. Jesus did bear our sins, but God was active and present in Christ doing it, and Christ was willingly doing his part. Their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrificing of love.

2. If Christ was only God this eliminates the contribution of Christ, ascribing everything to God. If God has done everything necessary for our salvation does that not make Christ redundant? But there is truth here - it was God himself, giving himself for us, in his own Son.

The doctrine of the Trinity sheds some understanding here. The Church teaches that each person of the Trinity is an individual but they also completely and eternally interpenetrate and permeate each other so that where one is the others are also fully present. Thus when Christ was on the Cross the Father was fully present with him, in him, suffering with him. The Father was not an impassive observer somewhere in heaven.

No verse actually says. “God died on the cross”. This is because God is immortal therefore cannot die. Thus Christ became man in order to die. Also we cannot say, “God died” because “God” in the New Testament always means “the Father”, and the person who died on the Cross was not the Father, but the Son.

3. God was in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and on that amount was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them. The New Testament never attributes atonement to Christ or to God separately, but to both, God acting in through Christ. The Father and the Son cannot be separated.

2 Corinthians 5:19.
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…”

* Christ is the agent of reconciliation.
* God took the initiative to reconcile and did it through Christ.
* It affects the whole world.
* It is past tense. Reconciliation in the New Testament is a work which is finished before the gospel is preached. Reconciliation was finished in Christ's death.
* We receive the reconciliation as a gift.

We see then, in the cross, there are not three actors but two: God and ourselves. Christ is not an independent third party. The incarnation means that he is both God and man, the two parties needing reconciling. On the other hand, the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering. God through Christ substituted himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath through divine self-sacrifice. Seen in this way the objections to substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here since the substitute for the law breaker is none other than the divine law maker himself. There is no mechanical, strictly legal transaction since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions. And what is achieved is no merely external change of legal status since those who believe are united to Christ by his Spirit and become radically transformed in outlook and character.
Judgement has been committed to the Son. He, as judge, also took the punishment. Thus there is no immorality in the substitution.

The words, “satisfaction” and “substitution”, need to be carefully defined and safeguarded but they cannot be given up.

The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.

The doctrine of substitution is the scandal of the Cross. Our proud hearts rebel against it. We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the Cross. We insist on paying for what we have done. We cannot stand the humiliation of allowing someone else to pay. The notion that this “somebody else” should be God himself is just too much to take. We would rather perish than humble ourselves. Only the Gospel demands such an abject self-humbling on our part for it alone teaches Divine substitution as the way of salvation. Other religions teach different forms of self-salvation.

Emil Brunner:
“All other forms of religion and philosophy deal with the guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a cheap conclusion. In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him. Man is thereby not stripped absolutely naked.”

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE CROSS.

Salvation has many pictures, or images the Bible uses to try to illustrate some of what it means. The five primary images are propitiation, redemption, justification, reconciliation and victory.

These images of salvation are incompatible and we cannot integrate them neatly together. However underlying them is certain themes:
1. Each highlights a different aspect of human need. These metaphors do not flatter us but expose our need.
2. They emphasize that the saving initiative was taken by God in his love.
3. They all teach that Gods saving word was achieved through the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. In Christ, God has borne our sin and died our death to set us free from sin and death. So substitution is not a theory of the atonement, it is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself.

Note:
I warmly recommend to you John Stott’s book, The Cross of Christ. It is a very clear statement of the Christian doctrine of Atonement.

HOMEWORK:

1. Here are some other verses that speak on this subject. Look them up. Think on how they teach this truth of Satisfaction through Substitution.


Romans 5:6-8.
2 Corinthians 5:14,15.
Galatians 3:13.
1 Thessalonians 5:10.
1 Timothy 2:6.
Hebrews 9:15,28. 10:10,14


Don’t forget to do the transformer verses.

TRANSFORMER VERSES AND PRAYER:
(Read the references and the verses out loud. Then pray the prayer.)

Mark 10:45
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

1 Peter 3:18.
“For Christ died for (our) sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

2 Corinthians 5:21.
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Father God,
I thank you that, in your love, you dealt with our sins so that we can come into a relationship with you. I thank you that Christ took on himself the sin of the world. He took on himself my sin and paid the penalty of death that sin brings. I receive as a gift your forgiveness of my sins now, for Christ has already settled the account on my behalf.
I thank you that in Christ you reconciled the world to yourself, you reconciled me to yourself. I am reconciled to you by your action not by my own. I receive the gift of reconciliation.

In Jesus name,
Amen.