The glory of the cross - The great crescendo of the gospel

We may not feel guilty, but the Scriptures speak of our guilt before God as an objective reality (Romans 3.19,20).

Some people have less sensitive consciences than others, but how we feel does not change how God sees us.

Guilt is an objective reality and justification, which deals with it, is also objective. It is something God does; it is a declaration God makes about us. It is, as the 17th-century Shorter Catechism of the Church of Scotland says, ‘an act of God’s free grace, in which he, the Judge of all the earth, acquits the guilty sinner, and declares him to be righteous, and accepts him as righteous in his sight’.

Justification and sacrifice

The Greek word translated ‘justify’ (dikaioun) means ‘to count, or treat, as righteous’, not to make righteous in any ethical sense. Justification is not something that is done in us, but something done to us and for us, and outside us. This is made possible only because of the death of Jesus Christ as our substitute, in our place.

TWO SCENARIOS
In the early chapters of Romans, Paul is comparing two scenarios. The first is a sombre and dark depiction of human beings; the image in which we were created has been marred; we are now a travesty, a caricature of what God had planned. But Jesus Christ as ‘the second Adam’ is all that we are not. Let’s not miss the sheer drama of the comparison. On the one hand, we have ‘the many’ — humankind as a whole, in the first Adam — guilty before God; on the other hand we have ‘the One’ who is perfect.

Christ came to substitute his humanity, in all its excellence and perfection, for our sinfulness. Nothing about us is acceptable to God. From our conception, we have all been sinners (see Psalms 51 and 139). Christ identifies with us from that very point: he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born for us; he was baptised for us; he was tempted for us; he lived for us; he stood trial for us, taking on himself the charges that were against us; he suffered and died for us, going into the outer darkness for our sakes; and he rose again for us.

All his ‘work’ is imputed to us — counted as if it were ours — in his death on the cross, and our sin is counted as if it were his. It is this divine exchange that lies at the heart of the gospel, and makes it a gospel.

Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘And can it be’ sums it up:

No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in him, is mine!
Alive in him, my living Head,
And clothed in righteousness divine,
Bold I approach the eternal throne,
And claim the crown,
through Christ my own.

The prophet Zechariah gives a graphic picture of this great exchange in one of the earlier visions of his prophecy (Zechariah 3.1-5). Joshua the high priest appears before the angel of the Lord, with Satan ready to accuse him. The Lord rebukes Satan, and speaks of Joshua as a burning stick snatched from the fire. Zechariah continues: ‘Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. Then the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.” Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you.” And I said, “Put a clean turban on his head.” So they set a clean turban on his head, and clothed him while the angel of the LORD stood by.’

As we have already seen, the great themes of the gospel permeate the Scriptures and are threaded through them, each passage adding more light and texture. Martin Luther, reflecting on this theme in Romans, wrote: ‘I greatly longed to understand Paul’s epistle to the Romans, but one expression stood in my way, namely “the righteousness of God”. I took it to mean that God is righteous and deals righteously in punishing the unrighteous.’ He goes on to explain how he suddenly realised the context of these words; that righteousness is a gift received by faith. The very words which had been so hard to understand now became ‘inexpressibly sweet’. Luther’s discovery of the meaning of the Atonement sparked the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.

The sacrifice itself

No metaphor is perfect. The law court metaphor is helpful in illustrating our needs, but it does not deal with God’s ‘needs’. And by its nature it has something impersonal about it. The human judge in any court of law, in his official capacity, is an impartial figure. His job is simply to administer justice, and to see that it is administered fairly. He is not angry with the accused; the trial is all in a day’s work. He can go home in the evening and forget about the whole thing. But God cannot forget. He cannot brush sin aside as if it had not happened. God has been made angry by sin, and this presents a serious problem.

God’s anger is turned away by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. This does not suggest, as some would have it, that God is a bloodthirsty, vengeful deity. Nor does it contradict all we read of a loving God. We are powerless to do anything about our sin. At infinite cost to himself, God in Christ took our punishment in his own person, in our place. ‘This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 4.10). What love.

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION
The theological terms ‘propitiation’ and ‘penal substitution’ refer to the fact that Christ bore our punishment for us, in our place, to appease the wrath of God. This doctrine has come under attack at certain periods in church history, and again in recent years. Some Bible translators prefer to translate the Greek word hilasmos (used in 1 John 2.2 and 1 John 4.10) as ‘expiation’, which I believe is inadequate. Expiation emphasises the payment of a penalty, but contains no sense of the need to appease a holy God.
The eternal God found his peace — his appeasement from righteous anger — at the cross. This is the meaning of the term ‘propitiation’.

As human anger is usually wrong, we tend to think that anger from God must also be wrong. But love and wrath are not contradictory. God does not stop loving us, although he is angry with us for our sin, any more than a parent stops loving his child when the child has done wrong.

It is holiness, not punishment of sin, which pleases God. The seriousness of the situation, in God’s sight, comes home to us when we consider his character. Let me quote again from the Shorter Catechism. The language may be old, but it is full of profound truth:

‘God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne, clouds and darkness overshadow him. He is the Father of an infinite majesty; jealous, omnipotent, holy, terrible. He is of purer eyes than to behold evil, he cannot look on iniquity.’

So long as the relationship between mankind and God remains broken, there can be no thought of peace with God. Atonement comes only at the cross. To quote Horatius Bonar, a great Scottish hymnwriter:

I hear the words of love,
I gaze upon the blood,
I see the mighty Sacrifice,
And I have peace with God.

Let us pause here, or we may miss something. The precious blood of Christ brings peace not only to sinful, guilty human hearts, but also to the holy heart of God. As he gazes upon the blood, and sees the mighty Sacrifice, he too enters into peace.

This article is taken from the booklet The Glory of the Cross: the great crescendo of the gospel by James Philip, published in the Didasko Files series by The Lausanne Movement.

The booklet will come as a gift to readers with the September issue of EN.