Weekend Away 2010:The Cross of Christ 3 – Jesus on the Cross, The Righteous for the Unrighteous
April 17th, 2010 (PM). By: Rod Earnshaw
We’ve seen that the Bible makes Jesus death the centre and fulcrum of all history. And we’ve seen that by his death Jesus fulfils the OT – he is the true Passover lamb who delivers us from slavery to sin and death and the devil, and he is the fulfilment of the day of atonement, he is the true sacrifice that takes away our guilt and opens the way for access to God. But we haven’t fully explored the mechanism by which he does all these things… That’s what we’re going to spend our time on this morning.
To do that we’re going to explore the meaning of the concrete images the NT uses to make it clear how Jesus saves us.
The NT uses picture language to describe what the cross achieved in vivid images that would have been familiar to the first readers of the NT. These vivid images are analogies taken from real life that express some aspect of what Jesus’ death did for us. Sometimes they’re referred to as ‘theories’, but I prefer the label ‘images’ because ‘theories’ sounds like they’re explanations that we’ve thought up that may or may not be right – like we might say ‘evolution is just a theory’, meaning it’s not certain, not proven. But these aren’t just theories; they’re God given explanations of what the cross achieved for us.
We should also note that though these images are different, they competing explanations. They’re not alternatives but different aspects of the same thing, explaining the same thing from different points of view– they’re not a pick ’n ’mix bag, we’re not supposed to choose which ones we believe – they’re designed to be taken together so that as a whole they explain what Jesus has done. None of them on their own is an adequate picture of what Jesus has done. All these images need to be taken together to begin to begin get a grasp on the whole.
There are many images of salvation in the NT, and we won’t have time to look at them all. But the NT explanation leans heavily on four images in particular:
- Propitiation (turning aside wrath),
- Redemption (buying back from slavery),
- Justification (legal righteousness) and
- Reconciliation (restoring relationship).
So well focus our attention on these four this morning.
First: Propitiation
Propitiation is one of those old fashioned words that’s pretty much only used by Christians, and even we don’t use it much. Unfortunately it’s never been replaced by a new word with the same meaning, so we’re stuck with it.
Propitiation simply means to turn aside wrath or anger. As in: ‘after forgetting her birthday I had to propitiate my wife with flowers and chocolates’. If I’ve done you wrong you’ve a right to be angry and I’ll need to turn your anger aside, I need to deal with that anger, before we can make up.
Well if that’s what it means, it sounds a strange thing to be saying about God doesn’t it? But the Bible is clear that this is exactly what’s needed.
As we’ve looked at the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ death we’ve begun to get a picture that death is the required punishment for sin. The Bible makes clear that this stems from God’s wrath against sin.
God isn’t indifferent to our sin, quite the opposite – He’s personally angry in response to it. Ephesians is one of many places that makes its clear that God’s wrath is directed towards us as sinners:
Ephesians 2:3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
There’s no getting around this: God is angry with us because of our sin. But don’t misunderstand me. All the places that are clearest about God’s anger are the places that are clearest about God’s love and grace. In this instance
Ephesians 2:4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions–it is by grace you have been saved).
To say that God is angry with us for sin, to say that we are objects of God’s wrath is not to say that God doesn’t love us. He loves us even while he’s angry with us. Anger is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love – not caring. Ask any Father or Mother, it’s possible to be angry with your child, in love. So God’s anger doesn’t rule out his love, he loves us even while he’s angry with us.
It’s also important that we realise God’s anger isn’t like our anger. Our anger can be petty and insolent, we can be stirred to anger by the smallest thing. And we’re inconsistent – some days we’ll be crankier than others – some times we can reign ourselves in; others days our anger runs wild and there’s no holding it back. And our motives in our anger are hard to trace out accurately – what might seem justified at the time often turns out to be an over reaction based on our own insecurities.
I could go on, there’s lots of things that are wrong about our anger, but God’s anger is never wrong. It’s always justified, deserved. God’s not easily angered; his responses are never over the top or emotionally driven out of insecurity or low self esteem. He’s not inconsistent, He doesn’t operate to a double standard, and He never gets up on the wrong side of the bed.
God’s anger isn’t like our anger, it’s never unjustified or over the top. But God’s anger is deadly. God’s justified anger is referred to as his wrath, his intense, judging anger against our sin. The result of God’s wrath is our destruction – it’s like a fire that burns against us until we’re consumed, burnt up.
There’s lots of ways in which God’s anger against sin could be justified.
For instance at the personal level our sin almost always creates victims – if God wasn’t angry at the way we hurt others then he wouldn’t be a loving creator. At the extreme end we have the mass murderers, the terrorists, the dictators and the genocidal megalomaniacs. On the more innocent end even the gentlest souls leave behind a trail of emotional victims. Shouldn’t we expect God to care about the damage we do to each other?
On a more global scale human sin plunged the world into the darkness of the curse – all of nature has been affected by our fall, weeds, floods, droughts, earthquakes are all described as consequences of sin in different times and places in the OT. Shouldn’t God be angry at the way we’ve spoilt his good creation?
I could go on, but none of these explanations, true as they are, get’s quite to the heart of the issue of God’s anger. God’s anger isn’t just on behalf of others, it’s personal. He is personally affected by our sin. I’m sure you’ll be familiar with Psalm 51.
NIB Psalm 51:1 For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.
David’s sin is described in the heading – he committed adultery with Bathsheba – but that’s just the start of it. To cover up that adultery he betrayed Bathsheba’s husband, the man he’d already wronged by sleeping with his wife, and made sure that he was killed in battle, an end the prophet Nathan holds David responsible for. Lets be clear, David slept with Uriah’s wife, got her pregnant and then had Uriah killed so he wouldn’t be found out.
But look at verse 4:
NIB Psalm 51:4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.
David’s sin had a series of human victims, especially Uriah the Hittite whose wife he stole before he had him killed. But God is so great and so worthy of our love and obedience that all our sin, even sin so personal as this, is ultimately and primarily against God, not against our human victims. I don’t say that to minimise the pain we cause others, but to show the depths of our guilt before God. We recognise David bore a great weight of guilt towards Uriah, but under the leading of the Holy Spirit David comes to see that his guilt towards God is infinitely greater.
It’s no surprise then, that God’s anger is pictured in the OT as like the anger of a man who loves his wife and is faithful to her, only to see her committing adultery time after time after time. Just as Uriah had a case against David, so God has an even greater case against us. Israel is described as God’s beloved but she acts like a prostitute in every sense except she doesn’t need payment, she pays her lovers out of the gifts her husband showers upon her. [you might like to read Hosea of Ezekiel 16 to get a graphic picture]
That image seems deliberately designed by God to explain the nature of his anger. Wouldn’t you be angry if that was how your wife treated you? And wouldn’t your anger be all the greater for the fact that you genuinely loved her, that you had showered your affection on her, kept nothing back from her and kept forgiving her and welcoming her back? That’s how God treats his people, but they keep going astray to find new lovers to cheat on him with. That provocative image confronts us with the fact that God’s anger is richly deserved because we are so unfaithful to him.
So as a result of our sin, our unfaithfulness, God is justly angry with us. His wrath is aroused by our sin and all of us are by nature objects of that wrath. We need propitiation; we need God’s wrath to be turned away from us; otherwise we’ll be consumed and destroyed.
The NT makes it clear that at the cross God deals with his anger against sin and so makes it possible for our relationship with him to be fixed, to be restored.
There are three NT passages which talk of the cross as making propitiation. In the NIV they’re translated as ‘a sacrifice of atonement’, which is technically correct but which rather unhelpfully obscures the nature of the sacrifice. They are Romans 3.25, 1 John 2.2 and 1 John 4.10.
1 John 2:1 My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defence–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2 He is the atoning sacrifice [propitiation] for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.
1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice [propitiation] for our sins.
See how these passages together give a rich understanding of how God’s wrath has been turned aside.
Romans 3.25 is one of the best known verses in the Bible. We’re just going to pause here for a moment to mull it over. Here Jesus’ death is presented as the solution to the problem of God’s wrath against sin.
Romans 3:25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement [propitiation], through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished–
This is the culmination of a lengthy argument in Romans. From Romans 1:18 onwards Paul has been building a legal case against all mankind. His argument is that God’s wrath has come against all our godlessness and wickedness (that’s 1:18), and everyone of us deserves to experience God’s it, because everyone of us is guilty before God. He describes three categories of people – the wildly disobedient in chapter one, the self righteous religious in the first half of chapter two and the religious Jews in the second half of chapter two. All of those groups come under God’s wrath. because none of us keeps even our own standards, let alone God’s. As a result,
Romans 3:20 no-one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
So we’re all in trouble under the law, all liable to God’s wrath because we’ve all fallen short of God’s standards, all of us are facing God’s terrible wrath because of our sin.
21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement [Propitiation], through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished– 26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
God’s wrath was spent on Jesus as he died in our place, so that by faith in his blood we can avoid the wrath we deserve. This enables God to be just – he punishes sin – and to let us off the hook even though we’re sinners. Propitiation means we don’t have to endure God’s wrath, even though we deserve it.
This is one of the most awesome and perplexing things in all the scriptures – that God should pour out his wrath on his own son so that we could avoid it. Remember what we saw yesterday, this is the whole Godhead involved here – The Father in the Son takes his wrath upon himself. So we see here that it is God who presents this propitiation. Verse 25 God presented (or put forward) Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins!
We see the same thing even more clearly in
1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice [Propitiation] for our sins.
The atonement, even the propitiation, stems from God’s love. He loves us, even while he is angry with us.
John Stott summarises:
God in holy love needed propitiating, in holy love undertook to do the propitiating and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins.
So that’s the first image from the NT – by the cross God’s personal anger against our personal sin is turned aside as he takes the wrath himself in the person of his son. We’re going to move a little more quickly through the next three.
The second image is Redemption. To Redeem = to buy or buy back, to purchase or ransom. In the Bible it’s most often used in the sense of a Ransom – to ransom out of slavery. So this image focuses on our desperate need because of sin – remember John 8 34, Jesus said: everyone who sins is a slave to sin. We’re not just objects of God’s wrath, but we’re enslaved to the very thing that makes God angry so that we can’t stop inviting God’s wrath.
Redemption was a common image in the OT: the first born of all livestock belonged to God (so that it had to be sacrificed or given to the priests), but the firstborn donkeys and other unclean animals could be bought back, redeemed. The eldest son also belonged to God and had to be redeemed (there could be no human sacrifice!). Slaves could be redeemed either by saving up and buying their own freedom, or by family members; even land that had fallen out of family hands could be redeemed by a kinsman-redeemer, that’s a relative (cf. Ruth and Boaz women’s fellowship will know all about that).
But Redemption was costly.
As we move into the NT this image is used a little differently. The focus moves from the material – physical debt, physical slavery – to a spiritual problem – slavery to sin. And this spiritual slavery takes more than money to buy our ransom.
The ransom price by which we are freed is the death of the Lord Jesus.
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.”
This is a complex image so we’re going to chew over the details a little by asking a few questions about this ransom.
What are we ransomed from?
From our transgressions or sins; the curse of the law; the empty way of life handed down to us by our forefathers; and even all wickedness – that is to say we’re ransomed from all the effects of the fall, this ransom reverses the curse! References you can look up later include Titus 2.14, Gal 3.13, Col 1.14 and Eph 1.7
What were we redeemed By?
1 Peter 1:18 For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
From who? Who did God pay the ransom to? Here we see the limits of the image. The Bible never suggests that God paid a ransom to anyone. Some early church leaders followed the logic of a ransom to say that God paid off the devil, but Bible never suggests that Satan has any right or ownership over us. So we need to remember that the image is useful only as far as it goes – we shouldn’t take biblical analogies further than the Bible takes them, we can only say with confidence what the Bible has made clear.
Who Redeems Us? A much better question – because the one who redeems us buys the right of ownership and can make demands on us as our owner! So there is a moral/ethical edge to this image. Since Jesus has bought us we live for him, we live godly and holy lives that will be pleasing to him. And Christ is worthy of praise for his actions. So in 1 Corinthians we’re twice told that we should avoid sin because we were bought by Christ!
So redemption says that we’re by nature slaves to sin and all that sin lands us in, and we’re unable to free ourselves, but God buys our freedom from all that at the cost of his own son. Since God has paid for us we belong to him, a glorious slavery that is true freedom.
Justification (182)
Justification is an image from the law court – It’s the verdict ‘not guilty’, the opposite of condemnation.
To justify means to secure a verdict of not guilty, to demonstrate something or someone to be in the right.
This image is common in the OT where God is pictured as a just judge who always judges justly. Not only does God judge justly, but he will judge anyone who fails to judge justly! God’s justice is regularly on show in the OT, but perhaps the clearest and shortest summary comes from
Proverbs 17:15 which simply says
Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent–the LORD detests them both.
But isn’t that exactly what God does in Jesus? Acquitting the guilty is exactly what God has done for us. That’s what justification means, but how can it be right for the just judge of all to do what he expressly forbids?
This is the glory of the cross – that by it God rescues us from our guilt and sin without violating his justice. That’s why Jesus had to die as a sacrifice in our place, so that Justice could be done, and we could escape God’s wrath. The punishment has fallen on him so we can walk free.
Now of course, it wouldn’t be justice if Jesus was an innocent third party – God was the victim of our sin, we are the guilty party, and Jesus comes in as a third party to take the guilt and punishment.
This is why we need to get our thinking right about the atonement – because it’s very easy to present the cross as ‘God was angry with sin, but Jesus stepped in and took his anger’; or ‘God was angry with sin but he forced his son to take the punishment’. Both those sentences make Jesus sound like an innocent third party and pit God the Father and the Son against each other, so they call God’s justice into question.
But we need to remember that Jesus isn’t a third party, Jesus is no less than God himself. The doctrine of the trinity is essential for us to understand the cross properly – in Christ, God himself takes the penalty for sin. Remember, God the Father and God the Son were perfectly united in the cross, and the Father was acting in and through the Son to justify us.
That’s how God can be just and the one who justifies sinners. Remember Romans 3:
Romans 3:21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished– 26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Now the NT at various places says that we are justified by grace, by Jesus blood, by faith and in Christ. It’s not confused, but teaching that God’s grace is the source of our justification – it stems from his grace not our from works. And Jesus’ blood makes it possible – by his sacrificial death in our place, because he died as propitiation, because he paid the ransom price, not by our works. And our faith is the way we receive justification, by putting our faith in Jesus, not by our works. And it is in Christ that we are justified, when by faith we are united to him, not by our works.
You can see then that Justification, Grace and faith belong together – what God does for us by grace, we receive from him by faith. And faith isn’t a work, faith simply means trust, it has no value of itself, its value rests entirely in the object that we put our faith in.
A simple real world example should make this clear – faith means trust. You’re all putting faith in your chairs right now. You sit by faith in the chair. Is your faith holding you up? No, the chair holds you up. You can have lots of faith, or just a little, what matters is how strong the chair is. You need to exercise your faith by sitting in the chair – you sit by faith, but it’s the chair, not your faith that holds you up.
So we’re not justified ‘by’ our faith in the same way as we are justified ‘by’ God’s grace and ‘by’ Jesus’ blood. Faith is only the way we’re united to Christ.
But at the same time Faith is the only way. Paul bangs on about justified by faith because he wants to exclude works; justification can only be received by faith, by trust in what Jesus did. We can’t be justified by works because our works simply aren’t good enough – by works we can only be condemned. If we think that even the smallest bit of our salvation depends on our works then we’ll never be sure we’re saved, we’ll always fall short. The NT says we’re justified by faith to protect us from just that, to show us that it all depends on God, not on what we do.
So justification says we’re been freed from all condemnation it’s just as if we’d never sinned. We’re united to Jesus by faith in him and so freed from guilt because he took the punishment in our place.
Reconcilitation
This image is about friendship, it shows the personal side of salvation. Reconciliation talks about restoring the relationship that was lost by our rebellion, our sin.
Romans 5:10 when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son
This image is so important and rich that there are a number of different relational images that are used to make it clear. We’re adopted by God to become his children. As adopted children we have complete access to God. And because we’ve all been adopted by God we’re united to each other, Ephesians One.
2 Corinthians 5.18-21 opens this topic up to us:
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Three things to notice:
i) God is the Author
God is the author of reconciliation. Just like all the other images this is God’s work, He’s reconciling all things to himself. Reconciliation happened at God’s initiative.
ii) Jesus is the agent
See how this reconciliation works:
1) God doesn’t recon sin to us (the sinners, verse 19), but
2) God instead recons our sin to Christ (who never sinned, verse 21).
Therefore Christ is the agent of reconciliation. And his work of reconciliation is already finished. He has taken our sin on himself already.
iii) We are ambassadors
Verse 20 Jesus work is finished, but the announcement still needs to be made. Reconciliation needs to be announced, and to be responded to.
Reconciliation shows how our salvation is personal – God takes away the sin that got in the way of relationship and invites us into his family, adopts us as his children and gives us free, unlimited access to him through his son.
Now this brings us to the end of our survey of biblical images of salvation. I can only apologise that on the one hand we’ve skated over the surface of things and on the other we still haven’t been able to cover everything. But I wanted to give you a big picture view of how deep and wide and rich the NT pictures of our salvation are.
Reflecting on the four images together what have we learnt? There is a logical order between these four images – propitiation turns aside God’s wrath, then redemption buys us back for God and then justification puts on us a righteous standing before God. And having been justified by God our judge we are reconciled to God our Father.
How can we take all four images together? They can’t be neatly tied up in one package, but each highlights an aspect of our need – the wrath of God; our captivity to sin; legal and moral guilt and alienation from our God. They all highlight God’s initiative – he propitiated his own wrath; he paid the ransom price; he declared us righteous and he reconciled us. They all show that salvation was achieved through Jesus death on our behalf – he was presented as propitiatory sacrifice; we are purchased by his blood; we are justified by his blood; and we are brought near through the blood of Jesus.
At the heart of them all is a simple substitution – Christ for us. God saves us by giving one for many. In the words of 1 Peter 3.18
NIB 1 Peter 3:18 For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.