The Atonement

Why was it necessary for Jesus to die on the cross? Welcome to another Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Lee Webb. There are many opinions out there about God. Some view Him as a cosmic grandfather who is obligated to provide our needs. They maintain that He forgives everyone, no conditions. What they forget, though, is that God is holy, He's righteous and just, and we are not.

Here's Dr. R.C. Sproul on the atonement. This week we looked at the narrative of the execution of Jesus by way of my normal method of biblical exposition, but I mentioned that this week I would depart from that and focus on a theological interpretation of the meaning of the cross. Again, I mentioned last week that anyone who was an eyewitness of that event would likely not understand what was taking place in the cosmic realm that day, and that was left for the apostles in their epistles to give to us that added revelation of the meaning and of the significance of the death of Jesus. We remember that Paul announced that he was determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. That is, Paul's focus on the cross, and of course that statement was something of hyperbole, which is a literary form of intentional exaggeration in order to make a point.

But really it's not too far as an exaggeration that we know Paul knew other things besides the cross. Nevertheless, all that he knew and all that he taught had its convergence in that central message of what took place that day on the cross. I remember my first year of seminary where a student in our class in preaching gave a moving and eloquent sermon on the substitutionary satisfaction view of the atonement. And in that class on preaching it was customary when the student finished for the professor of homiletics to give a critique, and the idea was to be a constructive critique on the art of preaching.

But that day the professor was furious, and he glared at the student, and he said, What is it in this day and age? And I heard that and I was thinking within myself, how dare this professor question the legitimacy of preaching on the satisfaction substitutionary view of the atonement. What is it in this day and age that makes this central understanding of the cross suddenly no longer acceptable? And I'm used on that for many years to come because when we talk about the satisfaction substitutionary view of the atonement, we're trying to answer the question, What really happened there on the cross? And one of the questions that attends that question is the question, Was Jesus' death on the cross really necessary at all?

And there have been different answers to that question throughout church history. Early on the Pelagians taught that Jesus' death and atonement was not necessary at all, that God could have redeemed His people by many different ways. He simply could have waved His wand of mercy and grace and pronounced His pardon on sinners without such a grisly method of execution. Others took an intermediate position saying that the cross was hypothetically necessary, but not absolutely necessary. It was only necessary because though God had many ways He could have done it from all eternity, He chose to do it this way and was in agreement with His Son and with the Holy Spirit to reconcile the world by way of an atoning death. And so the atonement was not necessary de facto.

It was not necessary de jure, that is legally, but it was necessary de facto, that is because an agreement had been reached, a covenant had been made between the Father and the Son, and once that covenant was made, it had to be carried out. But then the third view, which is the classic orthodox Christian view, is that the atoning death of Jesus was absolutely necessary. We reach back in time to one of the greatest thinkers God ever blessed the church with, the philosopher, theologian, Saint Anselm of Canterbury, whose little book, Curdeus Homo, has become a Christian classic, and that little book that is really a question is translated by the words, Why the God-Man?

And in that little book, Anselm spelled out the reasons why the cross was absolutely necessary. And the grounds of the necessity for Christ's offering payment and satisfaction for our sins was to be found in the character of God Himself. The reason why an atonement was necessary, dear friends, is because God is just, is just, because God is righteous, and because God is holy. But we've lost sight of the character of God in our age.

We conceive of God as some celestial grandfather, a cosmic bellhop who is on duty 24-7 to give us all of our needs. And we allow the love of God to swallow up His justice, to swallow up His righteousness, and to obscure His holiness. And we think that not only will God forgive all of our sins without an atonement, but we believe that He must do it if He's really going to be good and loving. And yet at the other side of that coin always stands His holy, righteous justice that must be satisfied. We remember the story of Abraham in the Old Testament where he got word that God was about to bring judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, which cities clearly invited that judgment from God.

And Abraham was concerned about the few innocent folks there in those cities that might possibly be punished along with the guilty. And so he raised the question to God, Lord, will You punish the innocent or the righteous with the guilty? And the reply was, God forbid that God would ever do such a thing. And then the statement came out of that narrative, will not the judge of all of the earth do what is right? To ask that question, dear friends, is to answer it because the God of heaven and earth doesn't know how to do anything except that which is right.

The God of heaven and earth has never done anything that is wrong. Now according to our sensibilities, there are times in the Scriptures that we object to what God does. I've told you before how when I was in my first year as a Christian as a college student, and I was reading the Old Testament, that I used to pace the halls of my college dormitory long into the night, three or four o'clock in the morning, because I'd never heard of this God that was being revealed to me in the Old Testament. And all I can remember from that is thinking that, wow, if I'm going to be a Christian, I'm going to have to be a Christian because God plays for keeps. If you don't believe that, let me just direct your attention to one passage in the Old Testament.

When God delivered His law to Moses after he had rescued His people from slavery, and the focus of that law was a prohibition against idolatry, and while Moses was speaking with God on the mountain, Aaron and the people made for themselves a golden calf and worshiped it. Do you think that was the last time that happened in church history? That's our propensity, is to exchange the God of heaven and earth for an idol and fashion for ourselves a God who requires no satisfaction, who requires no payment for sin. And in a day and age where we preach that God loves all people unconditionally, who in the world needs an atonement? You do, and I do, because the righteousness and the justice of God must be satisfied. Now when we look at the concept of the atonement in the New Testament, it's not monochromatic. I like to use the metaphor of a gorgeous tapestry that is woven by several strands, and I don't even have time this morning to even touch on some of the strands that the New Testament uses to describe what took place on the cross. But one of the major themes in the New Testament is the theme of reconciliation, that Christ is the reconciliation for us.

And one of the things of course that is absolutely necessary for reconciliation to take place anywhere is a previous estrangement because parties that are not estranged have no need of reconciliation. I gave a message many years ago in a university to the Atheist Club that invited me to speak there, and they wanted to hear my case for the existence of God, and I gave it to them. And after I was finished with that part of the message, I said, I'm happy to deal with these intellectual issues that come up. I said, but you have to know where I'm coming from. I believe that for you the issue of the existence of God is not an intellectual issue at all. It's a moral issue. Your problem is not that you don't know that God exists. Your problem is you hate the God whom you know does exist. Why? That's the closest I ever came to being tarred and feathered.

I was lucky to get out of there with my life. They were vehement in their denials and protest. We don't hate God. Well, if the Word of God is the truth of God, then by nature, dear friends, we are His enemies. We are at war with Him.

We despise Him. We don't get angry at the golden calf. If we create a new God, then we can live in comfort with that God. But the biblical God is the object of our wrath to such a degree that the Scripture says we will not have Him in our thinking.

That's where the estrangement is. That's where we are at war with God. That's where we are at enmity with God, and that enmity was mediated for us on the cross so that Christ became an enemy of the Father to satisfy your hostility and your enmity toward Him. Another dimension about which the New Testament describes the cross and the atonement is the dimension of ransom. Earlier in our study of Mark's gospel, we read where Jesus said that He did not come into the world to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. And because of that statement and others, the church has developed what's called the Ransom Theory of the Atonement. In fact, they're the dimension of the Ransom Theory of the Atonement. In fact, there's more than one Ransom Theory of the Atonement. There's a good one.

There's a bad one. The bad one that is popular in some circles is the idea that Jesus paid a ransom to Satan. After all, Satan is the prince of the power of the air. He's the prince of this world. He holds us captive and hostage. In a sense, he has kidnapped the people of God and now demands payment or ransom for our release, and so Jesus makes a deal with the devil. He pays him what he wants to purchase our freedom from Him.

No, no, no, no. In that case, the cross would not represent Christus Victor but Satanus Victor. Satan would be the winner. He would get the payment and enjoy it forever. There is a ransom paid, dear friends, but it's not paid to Satan. It's paid to the Father. A debt has been incurred to Him that has to be paid. Now we think of the New Testament speaking that we are debtors to God, and not only are we mildly in debt, but that we are hopelessly in debt. And the way in which the New Testament sets it forth is that we are debtors who can't possibly pay their debt. We have an IOU that can never be redeemed.

But there are different ways to understand that concept of debt. I tell the story of the little boy who goes to the ice cream store, and he asks for an ice cream cone with two scoops of ice cream, and when the lady behind the counter hands the little boy the cone, she says, that will be two dollars. And the boy's face sinks.

He's crestfallen. His lip begins to tremble, and he said, but my mommy only gave me one dollar. So what do you do if you're watching that transaction?

You know what you do. You reach your hand in your pocket, and you get out a dollar bill, and you hand it to the lady, and you say, here, this is legal tender. I'll pay the little boy's debt, and we all can go home happy. And she has to accept that payment because it's a pecuniary payment, a monetary payment, commercial debt. But that's not the kind of debt that we're in here. The debt that we have before God is not that we owe Him money that we can't pay. It's a moral debt.

It is a moral obligation that He has imposed upon us which we have not paid. Now we turn the story around with the little boy. Now he comes to the ice cream store, and he said, I'd like to have an ice cream cone with two scoops. And the lady comes and hands him the ice cream cone, and she says, that'll be two dollars. He sticks his tongue out at her, runs out the door, doesn't pay her anything, and she's chasing him, yelling, stop thief. And the little boy runs right into the arms of the patrolman who's walking down the block. He grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, brings him back into the shop, said, what's going on here? And the lady said, that boy just stole two dollars' worth of ice cream.

And I'm watching that. I reach in my pocket, and I take out two dollars instead of one, and I say, look, everybody settle down here. Here's the two dollars, no harm, no foul.

Let the boy go. Now does the owner have to accept it? Absolutely not, because now a crime has been committed. Now a moral debt has been incurred. And a policeman can look at me and my two dollars and look at the woman in the store and say, do you want to press charges?

And the storekeeper has that option on this occasion. Now with God, we have a moral debt. And even when His Son pays the debt as our substitute, when He pays the debt vicariously, the Father does not have to accept it. The fact that the debt is paid means that justice is satisfied.

Means that justice is satisfied. The fact that the Father accepts the payment expresses His mercy and His grace that as the Apostle says, He may be both just and justifier of His people. The justice is there insofar as Christ paid what was required. And that God wasn't playing. As the text I read indicated, the Son of God was forsaken, completely forsaken. And as Paul uses the other metaphor later in Galatians, He was cursed by God. He became a curse to fulfill the law of the Old Testament because all who break the law of God, all who sin are exposed to the curse of God's wrath.

And you say, but that's not fair. But as I mentioned last week, once Christ willingly took upon Himself your sin and my sin, God didn't play games. He punished Him to the fullest extent of the law. Christ didn't just go to the cross when He was on the cross. He went to hell, not after He died, but while He was on the cross.

He experienced the full measure of God's wrath when the Father turned His back on the Son and cursed Him for you and for me. Again, I'm terrified when people come to me and say, I don't need Jesus. I want to grab them by the throat and say, oh foolish one, don't you understand that there's nothing in the universe that you need more than Jesus? Don't you realize that at the end of your life you will stand before God, and you will be held accountable by God, and the God before you stand will be holy and just and righteous. And you either stand in front of Him on your own merit, and the only thing you have to bring is demerit, friends, or you stand covered in the righteousness of Christ. If you deny Christ, you face the curse on your own, a debtor who can't possibly pay your debt. Karl Barth, the late Swiss theologian with whom I disagree more often than I agree, made a comment once many years ago that I agree with completely.

He said the single most important word in the New Testament Greek is the word huper, which is the Greek word that is translated by three English words, in behalf of. And that's how the New Testament describes the death of Jesus, in behalf of His sheep, in behalf of the godless, in behalf of God's enemies. God's enemies. He paid this price. Therefore, dear friends, come, let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be as crimson, they shall be as wool, for He bought you with His life. That's the incredible, overwhelming good news of the gospel.

Christ died to pay the debt of His people completely. We're glad you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind today as we continue Dr. R.C. Sproul's verse-by-verse sermon series from The Gospel of Mark. Each Sunday we return to this series, and our resource offer today gives you the opportunity to continue your study. When you contact us today with a donation of any amount, we'll provide you a digital download of Dr. Sproul's commentary on Mark. You can go online to request it and give your gift at renewingyourmind.org.

Again, that's renewingyourmind.org. Before we go today, I'd like to remind you of our purpose here at Ligonier Ministries. We're an organization that works for the church. We come alongside the local church to help train believers. With that in mind, we don't intend for this Sunday program to replace your participation in a local body of believers. We hope you'll be worshiping with your church today. God bless you on this Lord's Day. We'll return to this sermon series from Mark next week, after the crucifixion Jesus' body was cared for and placed in a borrowed tomb. Dr. Sproul will examine the details of that next Sunday here on Redoing Your Mind. .