Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

1 What is the Bible?
2 What is God like?
3 What is the Trinity?
4 What is creation?
5 What is prayer?
6 What are angels and demons?
7 What is man?
8 What is sin?
9 Who is Christ?
10 What is the atonement?
11 What is the resurrection?
12 What is election (or predestination)?
13 What does it mean to become a Christian?
14 What are justification and adoption?
15 What are sanctification and perseverance?
16 What is death?
17 What is the church?
18 What will happen when Christ returns?
19 What is the final judgment?
20 What is heaven?
Appendix 1 : Historic confessions of faith
Appendix 2 : Books for further reading

Chapter 10 : What is the atonement?

Prior to Jesus’ birth, an angel told his earthly father Joseph that he was to name the baby in Mary’s womb Jesus, ‘for he will save his people from their sins’ (Matthew 1:21). Jesus did save his people from their sins - both through the life he lived and through the death he died. The work Jesus did in living and dying to earn our salvation is sometimes referred to as the atonement.

The cause of the atonement

Scripture is clear - Christ came to earn our salvation because of God’s faithful love (or mercy) and justice. God’s love is affirmed in John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’ God’s justice is affirmed when Paul writes that God put forward Jesus ‘as a propitiation’ (Romans 3:25) - that is, a sacrifice that bears God’s wrath so that God looks favourably towards us. Paul says this was done ‘to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins’ and ‘so that he might be just’ (Romans 3:25-26). In other words, the sins God ‘passed over’ or didn’t punish before Christ came to earth had to be punished somehow if God was to ‘be just’. Therefore, someone had to take the punishment for those sins. Because of God’s great love, that someone was Jesus. In Jesus’ life and death we find a full expression of God’s justice and faithful love.

The necessity of the atonement

Though it was not necessary that God should save any people at all, in his love he chose to save some. Once he made that decision, God’s justice made it necessary for Christ to live the life he lived and die the death he died.

After Jesus rose from the dead, he asked rhetorically, ‘Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ (Luke 24:26). Jesus knew there was no other way for God to save us than for him to die in our place. Jesus had to suffer and die for our sins. Other means, like the sacrifices offered for sins in the Old Testament, had no lasting value, for ‘it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (Hebrews 10:4). Jesus, ‘by means of his own blood’, secured ‘an eternal redemption’ (Hebrews 9:12), thereby putting away sin ‘by the sacrifice of himself’ (Hebrews 9:26).

The nature of the atonement

If Christ had only, through his death, offered himself as a sacrifice, thereby earning us forgiveness of sins, we would only have access to a partial salvation. Though our guilt would be removed, we would be like Adam and Eve when they were first created: guilt-free but capable of sin, and having no lifelong record of obedience. And in order to enter into fellowship with God, we would need to live a life of perfect obedience.

Therefore, Christ had to live a life of perfect obedience to God, so that the positive merits of that obedience could be counted for us. This is what Paul means when he says that ‘by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous’ (Romans 5:19). And that is why Paul does not count on his own righteousness, but instead ‘that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith’ (Philippians 3:9). Christ, through the sinless life he lived, became ‘our righteousness’ (Corinthians 1:30).

Jesus also lived a life of suffering; he was, in the words of Isaiah, ‘despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3). He suffered when he was assaulted by Satan’s attacks and temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). He ‘endured from sinners’ tremendous ‘hostility against himself’ (Hebrews 12:3). He was tremendously grieved at the death of his close friend Lazarus ( John 11:35). It was through these and other sufferings that ‘he learned obedience’ (though he never once disobeyed) and ‘became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him’ (Hebrews 5:8-9).

As Jesus drew closer to his death, his sufferings increased. He told his disciples something of the agony he was experiencing when he said, ‘My soul is sorrowful, even to death’ (Matthew 26:38). When Jesus was crucified, he suffered one of the most horrible forms of death ever devised by man. While he did not necessarily suffer more pain than any human being has ever suffered, the pain he experienced was immense.

When crucified, Christ was forced to endure a slow death by suffocation, brought on by the weight of his own body. He was stretched out and fastened by nails to the cross; his arms supported most of the weight of his body. His chest cavity was pulled upwards and outwards, making it difficult to exhale and then draw in a fresh breath. To breathe, he had to push up with his legs - putting all the weight on the nails through his feet, and pull up on the nails through his hands - sending fiery pain through the nerves of his arms and legs. His back, already whipped raw, scraped against the rough, splinter-filled wooden cross, with each breath he took.

But the physical pain was nothing compared to the spiritual pain. Jesus never sinned. Jesus hated sin. Yet Jesus voluntarily took upon himself all the sins of those who one day would be saved. ‘He bore the sins of many’ (Isaiah 53:12). That which he hated with his whole being was poured out upon him. As Peter tells us, ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Peter 2:24). ‘For our sake’, God made Christ ‘to be sin’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus became ‘a curse for us’, to redeem us ‘from the curse of the law’ (Galatians 3:13).

And Jesus faced this all alone. ‘All the disciples left him and fled’ (Matthew 26:56). God, his Father, abandoned him. Jesus cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46) because at that time he was cut off from the sweet fellowship with his heavenly Father that had been the unfailing source of inward strength and the element of greatest joy in a life filled with sorrow. At the height of his suffering, he was very much alone.

Even more difficult than the physical pain, mental anguish and complete abandonment was the pain of bearing the full wrath of God upon himself. As Jesus bore the guilt of our sins, God unleashed all the wrath and all the punishment for all the sins upon his own Son. Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin that God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the world. Christ necessarily and willingly bore the full punishment for our sin on the cross. And so, through his death, God’s justice was met. Christ ‘put away sin by the sacrifice of himself’ (Hebrews 10:26).

The result of the atonement

Christ lived a perfect, sinless life and died a horrific, sinners’ death, in order to ‘save his people from their sins’ (Matthew 1:21). He paid the penalty we deserved to pay for our sin. He bore the wrath we deserved to bear. He overcame the separation that our sin caused between God and us. And he freed us from the bondage caused by sin. Because of Christ’s work on our behalf, God can ‘deliver us from the domain of darkness’ and transfer us ‘to the kingdom of his beloved Son’ (Colossians 1:13). What a great salvation!