Out of the few things that Christ said while he was being crucified, one of the most prominent was “forgive them father for they know not what they do.” Although Christ was certainly speaking of the actual people of that time, Christ was also referring to the entire people of the Covenant, those that Christ died for, both Old and New Covenant. As Christ suffered he poured out his forgiveness to his Covenant people by his own words “Father, forgive them.” This was in some sense liturgical! God, in the form of man, was pronouncing absolution to his Covenant people. But this absolution was not just historical in the sense that once we find out about it then we just remind ourselves of this history. No, this absolution is eschatological…It lives on through our lives with power and authority through the Holy Spirit. You can rename it or dissect it all you want but the bottom line is that Christ’s atonement is everlasting.
The fall of humanity that began in the Garden of Eden was the flashpoint of our need for a savior. But this need is not strictly based on penal sanction, that God owes us all a lick’n and so he sent Christ to take the lick’n. Certainly we are, as St. Paul says, children of wrath, but Paul is speaking eschatologically when he says that we are all born in sin and are on the path of destruction.
The wrath of God is going to happen no matter what! Christ’s advent to the world does not cancel this wrath out but it does allow us to escape this wrath and to be redirected. This does not happen by so-called ‘penal substitution’ (that the lick’n on the people must happen and Christ takes it for them) but it happens through our redirection to another path, the path of eternal life so as not to experience the final wrath.
Atonement involves redirecting us from Satan to God. Without Christ, our direction is bent toward the path of destruction: Satan in all of his false promises. At the end of time, God will pour his wrath upon Satan and all who are a part of Satan’s world. God must do this not because certain people did not believe Christ took wrath but because they did not believe Christ was the Messiah and the “wages of sin is death.” But those that are believers do not sin eternally as we see in 1 John 3. This third chapter of 1 John teaches us that Christ came to destroy the works of the devil in our lives and because of this our sin does not continue to build itself to this day of wrath.
The problem with much of Western theology is that it is caught up in legalism. Much of Western theology teaches that God owed man punishment as a legal requirement and so Christ took this punishment to himself so that we would not receive it.
Christ’s sacrifice was not done because of the Law – because the law says that there must be a sacrifice – but his sacrifice was done in spite of the law; not that the Law is wrongheaded but that it was created to show the sacrifice of Christ. So, okay, some may be thinking of the chicken and egg conundrum but this is not like that. It is important for us to know that blood sacrifice was not created for payment. We see this notion of sacrifice-for-payment nowhere in the Bible. Blood sacrifice was first created to point to Christ’s sacrifice. The proposed notion that sacrifice was instituted for residual debt was, in my estimation, a result of insecurity; as if people may think that the laws of sacrifice were arbitrary and immoral.
Blood sacrifice was in no way arbitrary and immoral, rather blood sacrifice was necessary for a multitude of reasons. It was necessary because it involves life itself, the very thing that we are trying to protect. As people we live our lives so as to protect the sanctity of life and live as long and as prosperous as we can. Life is important to us and so when life is stopped we stop and we listen. We relate, sympathize and even mourn when life is stopped, when we see the face of death, especially if we are somehow relationally involved in the death.
The fact that we escape eternal death from the cross does not mean that Christ took a punishment upon himself. God does not punish himself. He never has and he never will. What God has done is sacrificed himself. Christ said this: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
Christ did not allow himself to be punished but what he did was he allowed himself to be martyred. There is a big difference. The Western thought that God punished Christ does not fully place the guilt on man by believing God punished Christ for us. It was man that murdered Christ! Think of perhaps when you were a child and you did something wrong and blamed it on someone else. We do this all the time! We always look for someone or something to blame our problems on. We look for a scapegoat. We search for someone to take away our problems, someone or something to take out of the picture so that things can go our way.
Christ is our scapegoat! This is a part of the Old Testament analogy of Christ; that our sins are taken away through the scapegoat (Leviticus 16:2-10). Christ takes the blame for our sin and endures the punishment that we instituted: execution. Remember, God said that we are to put to death those that sin by murdering another. Christ did not commit such an act. When Christ was tried he was tired for blaspheme and crucified for blaspheme by his own people, the Church.
If Christ was to be punished for our sins he could have simply called an execution to be done on his own accord. It could be argued that Christ died both because of God’s wrath/punishment due to us as well as His people’s rejection of him but these two purposes of his death actually oppose themselves. If God wanted the execution to be done then would his people really be guilty?
The way that God pours out the crucifixion onto our lives is not by us constantly reciting the modern doctrine of justification to ourselves (modern Christian, Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones first taught this and then Sovereign Grace picked up on it). God pours out the power of his crucifixion to us by the sacraments first instituted by Christ and also by the fact that we have this grinding psychological and spiritual need to reconcile ourselves to God (Christ forgiving us does not mean that our desire to reconcile to him is put to an end).
This does not mean that murder is primary sin that we need to repent of or that murder is the sum of all sins. This means that we have become a part of God’s elect people that murdered Christ. That does not sound very exciting, I know. But this is what it means to be a part of the people of God. It was not that the Jews were guilty and so then a new group was formed. No, the Jews were given the kingdom; and the Church as we know it is a continuation of those same people.
When we surrender our lives to Christ we begin to find out that we are a part of this Covenant people. We are grafted into the Holy people of God. This brings an enormous burden upon us that must begin to reconcile itself to God lest we fall away to the snares of the Devil before we become rooted.
We must believe that WE put Christ to death but that God forgives us for this. Your sin put Christ to death. You, because you are no different than the people of the first century. As St. Paul says, we all have the same sinful nature that needs to be dealt with.
Christ is the victim and you are the criminal. You must turn yourself in to his authority. You will first be imprisoned but after your eyes are fully opened from all the tears, you will realize that you have been brought into a very unique prison, a new city of hope; yes a city that is much more confined than that of the outside world but a city that is protected by great kingdom walls; a city that is expanding and growing into an eternal kingdom of heaven. You are now redirected! You have not acquired a legal status that you can jump up and down about. You have become a part of God’s covenant people, a people that has now acquired the “ministry of reconciliation” (St. Paul).
Take a hold of the feeling of guilt that you have and do not attempt to wash it away and believe that it is Satan telling you to earn your salvation (again, the modern teaching of Sovereign Grace). This feeling is a part of your holy calling to Christ. Take this to your Sunday worship and cry your eyes out so that you may be continually reconciled to Christ. Enter into a state of humility and sorrow! In secular terms, think of the kid you blamed or the kid you picked on in school and how you have this constant desire to help him/her. This feeling is similar to your relationship to Christ. You are guilty and you are spiritually inclined not just to say hey thanks, or even hey thanks a thousand times but you are spiritually inclined to reconcile with them through a genuine and continuing relationship.
There is a guilt that continues past all conversion experience directly into your life of Christ. It is a guilt that is healthy and that drives us to worship Christ with humility and tears…tears that lead to joy, but nonetheless, tears! How do we acquire these tears? Well, it does not come by modern doctrines of Western thought but by more ancient doctrines of the East which teach that Christ was much more of a scapegoat and a ransom than he was God’s voodoo doll (Okay, I know that was kind of low but I want to make a point that Christ is not a figure to be disciplined on our behalf).
The guilt that you may have as a Christian needs to come from the fact that Christ is your scapegoat. It will help to know that you are a part of His Covenant people that murdered him. Do not attempt to fabricate a guilt and obtain what St. Paul calls a “worldly sorrow,” by perhaps thinking of the worst few sins you have committed and then asking God to forgive you as a sinner (in order to enter his covenant). This may fade and you may find yourself a seed that never takes root. True sorrow comes from your position within the covenant and if you attempt to extinguish this sorrow you will become very confused and superficial.
As James says, morn…let your laughter be turned to sorrow. Certainly he is speaking to a disobedient people, but the medicine he is prescribing them is the same medicine that Christ prescribes to us all. As the Psalmist says, “He who continually goes forth weeping, Bearing seed for sowing, Shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, Bringing his sheaves with him.”
Remember Christ as the victim and the scapegoat so that you remain humble and do not fall into modern doctrines of legalism and false hope.
Some good points here; however, I find the contrast “legal or convental” problemmatic. Covental, certainly, but most to the point, “therapeutic”. “Behold the lamb of God who TAKES AWAY the sin of the world.” “the blood of Jesus His son cleanses us from all unrighteousness.”
I really like this site and I’m reading all your articles. Here is an Orthodox perspective on this subject by a former Anglican.
Fr. Patrick Reardon, Expatiation: Is the Sacrifice of Christ part of God’s “Divine Wrath”?:
In classical and Hellenistic Greek, the verb “to propitiate” (hilaskomai), when used with a personal object, normally signified the placating of some irate god or hero. It is a curious fact that since the rediscovery of ancient Greek literature in the West, beginning from the Renaissance, there has grown a strong tendency to impose this pagan meaning of “expiation” on the teaching of the Bible.
Understood in this way, Paul is presumed to teach that Jesus, in His self-sacrifice on the Cross, placated God’s wrath against sinful humanity. That is to say, the purpose of the shedding of Christ’s blood was to propitiate, to assuage an angry Father.
Let me say that this interpretation of the Apostle Paul is very erroneous and should be rejected for three reasons.
First, this picture is difficult to reconcile with Paul’s conviction that God Himself is the One who made the sacrifice. How easily we forget that the Cross did cost God something. He is the One that gave up His only-begotten Son out of love for us. It was Jesus’ Father “who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). Sacrificial victims are expensive, and in this sacrifice the Father Himself bore the price. He gave up, unto death, that which was dearest and most precious to Him. In the death of Jesus, everything about God is love, more love, infinite love. There is not the faintest trace of divine anger in the death of Christ.
Second, in those places where Holy Scripture does speak of propitiating the anger of God, this propitiation is never linked to blood sacrifice. When biblical men are said to soften the divine wrath, it is done with prayer, as in the case of Moses on Mount Sinai, or by the offering of incense, which symbolizes prayer. Because blood sacrifice and the wrath of God are two things the Bible never joins together, I submit that authentic Christian theology should also endeavor to keep them apart.
Moreover, when the Apostle Paul does write of God’s anger, it is never in terms of appeasement but of deliverance. At the final judgment, when that divine anger, far from being placated, will consume the realm and servants of sin, Christ will deliver us from it, recognizing us as His faithful servants (1 Thessalonians 1:10; Romans 5:9). There will be not the slightest hint of appeasement at that point.
Third, the word hilasterion, which I have translated as the substantive “expiatory,” seems to have in Paul’s mind a more technical significance. In Hebrews 9:5, the only other place where the word appears in the New Testament, hilasterion designates the top, the cover, of the Ark of the Covenant, where the Almighty is said to throne between and above the Cherubim. In this context, the term is often translated as “mercy seat,” and it seems reasonable to think that this is the image that Paul too has in mind.
On Yom Kippur, the annual Atonement Day, the high priest sprinkled sacrificial blood on that hilasterion, “because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions of all their sins” (Leviticus 16:16). Therefore, by saying that God “set forth” (proetheto) Jesus as the expiatory, or “instrument of expiation,” for our sins, Paul asserts that the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the Cross fulfilled the prophetic meaning and promise of that ancient liturgical institution of Israel, reconciling mankind by the removal of the uncleanness, “their transgressions of all their sins.” The Cross was the supreme altar, and Good Friday was preeminently the Day of the Atonement. The removal of sins was not accomplished by a juridical act, but a liturgical act performed in great love: “Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Ephesians 5:2). Loving both the Father and ourselves, Jesus brought the Father and ourselves together by what He accomplished in His own body, reconciling us through the blood of His Cross.
In the Bible, “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11). The victim slain in sacrifice was not the vicarious recipient of a punishment, but the symbol of the loving dedication of the life of the person making the sacrifice. This sacrificial dedication of life is the means by which the sinner is made “at one” with God. Such is the biblical meaning of expiation and the proper context in which to interpret Paul’s teaching on the sacrifice of Christ.