Outline:
- Does sin offend the law of God or God Himself?
- What does it mean for God to be wrathful?
- What does it mean for God to be satisfied in His justice, or to have His wrath satisfied?
- Is God’s wrath opposed or against His love?
When I started to write this, I had just finished a college quiz (and did fairly well at it if I do say so myself), and needed to do a test before I head out to my eight-hour work shift. Yes, the Atonement is something that a college going fast-food worker thinks about in his day. No, I don’t walk around in a robe or a sash—as cool as that possibly could be, and I don’t think I’m pompous (I’m fairly certain someone would have clued me in if I was). I sit for hours a day in front of a computer screen and stand for hours a day handing food out a window with friends I work with. And yet, this is indeed one of the things I enjoy spending my time thinking about, studying and marveling at. And I pray this post leads you to do the same.
If someone came up to you and told you that what happened on the cross was cosmic child abuse—”a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed”—could you answer him? What would you say? Easter comes every year, but I wonder if we know why Jesus had to come in the first place? Well, we say, He came to deal with our sin, or take away the wrath of God, or reconcile us to God—all of which are very true. But do we know why He had to be God incarnate? Do we know why He had to be perfect and suffer in our place? Do we know why God the Father even allowed that to happen, or why the Son did it? The goal of this blog post is not to answer all of those questions, but at least get you started on it. What I want to do is layout the logic of the cross—the why of the atonement.
If we want to understand the atonement, if we want to see the cross rightly, we must see our sin and God’s wrath clearly. This, unfortunately, is often neglected, and/or these doctrines misunderstood or mutilated. Therefore we will also address a few of these misunderstandings and mutilations, why they are so serious, and how we are to understand these doctrines aright.
___1. We often comprehend the wrath of God as being something that springs from His law and offends His law, rather than offending God Himself. An example of such thinking and its outcome can be found in the words of Richard Rohr,
“I believe that Jesus’ death on the cross is a revelation of the infinite and participatory love of God, not some bloody payment required by God’s offended justice to rectify the problem of sin. Such a story line is way to small and problem-oriented” (Childers, 210).
What are the problems in comprehending that it is “God’s offended justice” that needs satisfying, and not Himself? If you comprehend the issue between you and God being law, and being primarily on God’s side of things (i.e., He has instituted an arbitrary law which now He must follow in order to maintain His dignity, whether He likes it or not), you will not see salvation as reconciling man to God, but rather as God being reconciled to man. Nowhere in Scripture do you find this wording because it is a concept. “Paul speaks always of man, not God, being reconciled” (Stewart, 221). God’s justice isn’t something He came up with on a whim. “The law to which He must conform, which He must satisfy,” writes Stott, “is the law of His own being” (Stott, 124). Whenever God is faithful in the Scripture, it is not as though He is being faithful to someone else, but always to Himself. Even when He remembers His covenants which He has made others and keeps them, it is always because of who He is that He keeps them, not because of anything someone else did or is (see Hebrews 6 and Psalm 136).
Another issue springing from this is that salvation will no longer be personal (and by salvation, I mean to encompass in this case the whole work of Christ for us). It will only be transactional. If we comprehend law to be the issue, and not the “law of His own being” as being that which is of issue, why would we ever claim the Christ is our Savior in the way the Scripture comprehends that truth? If salvation is merely transactional, that means that Christ’s present work interceding for us, in being our advocate, in ever living and pleading “for me” is merely something He must do by a kind of contract. But as Dane Ortlund has observed, in reality, “Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is” (Ortlund, 80). Surely salvation is the great exchange—all our sins imputed to Christ on the cross, and all His righteousness imputed to us—but it is a personal reality. It isn’t the cold silent transaction that one might have with a bank. Jesus, with all due respect to bankers, is not our heavenly banker. Nor does Jesus come to purchase something for us as so many comprehend salvation and/or grace, or as a realtor come to give us a spot close to the lake in God’s heavenly country club. Jesus came to reconcile us to God, and give us life in Him by giving us the Spirit—by giving us Himself. And this is a vibrant, new reality bursting into the cold dark reality we are so accustomed to. Salvation isn’t merely a transaction; it is a union of Christ in the Spirit to the sinner in salvation by faith alone through the free gift of God alone. Jesus isn’t our banker. He is the Savior of all who would repent and believe. He is our prophet, high priest, and king. He is our older brother, ourselves being adopted into His family, and He loves us as an older brother, not as a banker secretly desiring retirement.
Last, and we will pick this last point up when we get to point 4, if we see God’s wrath as coming ultimately from His law and not Himself then we cannot possibly reconcile His love with His wrath.
___2. We do not understand what wrath is. Just to give you a few examples of this thinking on parade in the Evangelical church today, Progressive British minister Steve Chalke said,
“Penal substitution is tantamount to ‘child abuse—a vengeful Father punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed’” (Childers, 209).
William Paul Young, author of The Shack, came out with a theological treatise called Lies We Believe about God. He writes,
“Who originated the cross?
“If God did, then we worship a cosmic abuser, who in Divine Wisdom created a means to torture human beings in the most painful and abhorrent manner….
“The alternative is that the Cross originated with us human beings. This deviant device is the iconic manifestation of our blind commitment to darkness….
“And how did God respond to this profound brokenness?
“God submitted to it. God climbed willingly onto our torture device and met us at the deepest and darkest place of our diabolical imprisonment to our own lies, and by submitting once and for all, God destroyed its power…” (Childers, 207-208).
And Rob Bell,
“God didn’t set up the sacrificial system. People did. The sacrificial system evolved as humans developed rituals and rites to help them deal with their guilt and fear” (Childers, 209).
Lastly, writing in a book which was later made into a five-day devotional some young people in my church read through a year ago, Brian Zahnd in Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God writes,
“Calvary is not where we see how violent God is; Calvary is where we see how violent our civilization is” (Childers, 209).
Now the question for those who want to know the God of the cross is not what sounds good or even reasonable, but what does the God of the cross—what does Jesus of Nazareth—have to say about Himself and the reason for His wrath and His atonement for sin?
First, God makes it clear that His wrath is universally upon sinners. Ephesians 5:3-8 makes this clear,
“But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”
Most people know what John 3:16 says, but how many people know what John 3:36 says? “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”
Second, the wrath of God rests on persons, not on sins. Surely this is one of the greatest theological tragedies of our time: “God loves the sinner but hates the sin.” If you say that to an unbeliever, that is an outright lie. We may welcome them into the reality that if they repent and believe that can be true for them, but we must impress upon them that as long as they remain out of Christ, God’s wrath remains on them. Otherwise, it is not true. In the words of Rico Tice,
“God takes your life with infinite seriousness, and he takes your relationship to him with infinite seriousness. And… when I say infinite, I mean infinite. He takes you infinitely seriously. And if we reject that relationship then we reject Him who is life and the source of life, and in a strange way he dignifies us by saying ‘I’ll take your decision about your relationship with me with permanent seriousness.’”
Again, Stott, “The Bible [God] takes sin seriously because it [He] takes humanity seriously” (Stott, 103). Now, we immediately think that this is horrible if we aren’t born again (1 Corinthians 2). I don’t intend to conform this to your tastes, just state the truth in its entirety and in its reasonableness. It is a good thing that God takes sinners seriously and not just sin seriously. For then salvation would be from sinning to obedience, not from being once dead and apart from Christ who is life to now being alive in abiding in Christ by the Spirit (and then living in obedience). Now I understand this is a hard thing to bear, but I must state it clearly,
“If anybody imagines, [Anselm] wrote, that God can simply forgive us as we forgive others, that person has ‘not yet considered the seriousness of sin,’ or literally ‘what a heavy weight sin is.’ … ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ It is when our perception of God and man, or of holiness and sin, are askew that our understanding of the atonement is bound to go askew also” (Stott 90).
God’s wrath is personal because His justice isn’t based on arbitrary laws but founded in the glorious goodness of who He is! Sin isn’t merely a transgression of His law but a hostility against who God is (Romans 8:7). The reason we have such a hard time understanding the cost of God to forgive us and the logic of Christ’s sacrifice for sin is because we are sinners. We have no problem denying those things in us that oppose our “greatest happiness.” We compromise and shift. In short, “We don’t feel the weight of our sin because of: our sin” (Ortlund, 68). God does not shift. He is the ultimate reality underneath it all. And He will not change because He is not a man in sin, but God in glory. “God is God; He never deviates one iota, even one tiny hair’s breadth, from being entirely Himself” (Stott, 129).
___3. We try and fit what it means for wrath to be satisfied into our own twisted and fallen definition. It would be wise to heed the words of James Stewart,
“Between the wrath of God and most of what this world calls wrath, no parallel exists. Between them there is no connection, no faintest resemblance at all. Beware, then, of anthropomorphic interpretations here: they cannot but mislead” (Stewart, 219).
We have used a word up to this point, satisfaction, in the Biblical understanding that “Satisfaction is an appropriate word, providing we realize that it is He Himself in His inner being who needs to be satisfied, and not something external to Himself. Talk of law, honor, justice and the moral order [being satisfied] is true only in so far as these are seen as the expressions of God’s own character. Atonement is a ‘necessity’ because it ‘arises from within God Himself’” (Stott, 124). If we are encountering trouble along the lines of God being satisfied, it is likely because we are having trouble seeing who God is.
Our problem is that when we think of God being satisfied, we are imagining a God like us. We imagine a God by our standards, “an enlarged projection of ourselves—a bigger, more impressive me as measured by the values of this world” (Mead, 23). Often times for those who do not know Jesus make their idea of God out to be “a glory-grabbing self-absorbed being” (Mead, 23). For Christians it can often be that we cover over those bits in the Bible about God that we find uncomfortable, difficult to handle, or just don’t believe are worth our time. We convince ourselves in our sinful unbelief that God doesn’t take our relationship with Him as seriously as reading our Bibles every day, praying daily, or enjoying Him. All that is just projecting our unbelief in His Word and our distaste of time with Him onto Him. We project our self-sufficiency on to Him, and our lack of vibrant faith and joy with Him onto Him. Brothers and sisters, if that is you, repent. You are blind because you’ve painted your eyeballs with the God you want to see. This is the problem with us when it comes to the Biblical language of God satisfying His wrath. If we imagine a God who is like us or aligns with our desires, we will imagine a love and a wrath that aligns with our desires and looks like what we would do, only slightly more glorious, self-righteous, and grand scale. How does this tie in with the atonement? If we imagine God in our own image we come up with a God of cosmic child abuse. And that is exactly what has happened—outside of Christian churches and, sadly, in many of our churches (as those examples under point 2 demonstrate).
Let me work this out further. Think of what it would mean for a child to be satisfied. It might mean that they get all they ever wished for, whether that be all the candy, toys, or freedom their little hearts could imagine. Or it could be something a bit meaner. Kids often wish something like what the character Kevin McCallister did in Home Alone, that his family “would just disappear”—a thought not uncommon for children. Their desire is a sinful and selfish one. Their satisfaction matches that desire—it is mean and heartless and often thoughtless too. What would it be like for a murderer to be satisfied? It would mean that he would be satisfied in, well, murdering. His is a sinful and very evil satisfaction. Now imagine a good father, perhaps a father that deals with a child that would wish some of those things mentioned above. How would that father be satisfied in his dealing with his children? His desire would be to protect, nurture, and grow his child to be mature personally and spiritually. And he would be satisfied when that was happening and, ultimately, when it was completed. Now think of a good judge—a judge who holds to the right law of the land. What would satisfy that judge? It would look something like locking the murderer away so that justice would be accomplished for the one who lost their life to him.
What changed with those four examples? Their character. Sure, their age and responsibility changed too. Ultimately, though, the father could have been as bad as the murder, and the judge could have been as selfish and short-sighted as the child. Their character defined the way they responded to and dealt with others and situations. Their age and responsibility only meant that what they did carried with it more consequence and more seriousness. Just so with God. God’s character shapes the way he deals with people and reigns over the world. God’s character defines the meaning of the word satisfaction, atonement, redemption, etc. If we don’t let God shape our understanding of the gospel, we will have a false gospel, one not only without wrath but without love, and therefore without any glory or comfort; a “gospel” without God.
As so often is the case in understanding what it means for God to be satisfied, so people do with the reality of God’s wrath. R. W. Dale writes, “’It is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’” (Stott, 110). We comprehend wrath as the uncontrolled outburst that lacks any semblance of humility or self-control. In reality, God’s wrath looks vastly different. The wrath of God is His controlled, steadfast, and measured response to sin. The Bible uses several different kinds of language to describe God’s wrath from beginning to end (if I may steal from John Stott in his dealing with the matter). They are as follows:
“The first example is the language of provocation. … It indicated that there is within God a holy intolerance of idolatry, immorality and injustice. … He is never provoked without reason. It is evil alone that provokes Him.” In other words, wrath is as Isaiah says is his strange or alien work (Isaiah 28:21) not because it isn’t inline with His character, but because for all of eternity He has never had to express Himself in that way.
“Second, there is the language of burning. Under this heading may be mentioned the verbs that depict God’s anger as a fire and speak of its ‘kindling,’ ‘burning,’ ‘quenching,’ and ‘consuming.’ …it is precisely when he is ‘provoked’ to anger that He is said to ‘burn’ with it, or His anger is said to ‘break out and burn like fire.’ …God himself” refers to the “’the fire of my jealous anger. … Never from caprice, however; always in response to evil. Nor was His anger even uncontrolled.” Indeed, looking back through the Scriptures, especially as concerns God’s dealing with ancient Israel and the pagan world around it, patience and restraint are likely the best words to describe God’s wrath.
“Third, there is the language of satisfaction itself. … it means ‘to be complete, at an end, finished accomplished, spent.’ … Time, work and life all have an end. Tears are exhausted by weeping, water used up and grass dried up in drought, and our physical strength is spent. So through Ezekiel Yahweh warns Judah that he is about to ‘accomplish’ (AV), ‘satisfy’ (RSV) or ‘spend’ (NIV) his anger ‘upon’ or ‘against’ them.” God’s controlled, steadfast, and measured response to sin ends in being poured out and spent upon the object of His wrath in a controlled, steadfast, and measured way.
“This threefold vocabulary vividly portrays God’s judgement as arising from within Him, out of His holy character, as wholly consonant with it and therefore as inevitable” (Stott, 125-127). And that helpfully summarizes what God’s wrath looks like. He is provoked by sin, and He then burns in His holy anger, and then His wrath is spent or poured out.
___4. We comprehend God’s wrath being against God’s love. As we have seen, God’s wrath comes from within Himself. He is provoked by evil, he burns with anger, and he is satisfied in accordance to who He is.
“It is not even only that He must satisfy His law, His honor, His justice or the moral order: it is that He must satisfy Himself … the satisfaction of God himself in every aspect of His being, including both His justice and His love” (Stott, 129).
The problem evangelicals so often come up against is the desire to build an impregnable theology. To have all questions ironed out, all positions worked out, and all responses in good working order. This is a noble aspiration that deserves encouragement, but also needs to be constrained by humility and a right view of theology proper. Humility because we cannot know anything but that which God reveals to us, and therefore ought not only to not think very haughtily of ourselves, especially when it comes to theology, but also ought to live and study to know God and glorify Him first and foremost, and do so in reliance on Him. And constrained by a right view of theology proper (the theology of God) because we can think we know all about God and His workings and yet not know Him at all. This is the danger here. Let us tread carefully. We must always remember, whenever speaking of God’s attributes, that they are not disconnected from one another though they are distinct. For God to be God, God must be wholly who He is. It is unwise, then, to set His wrath above His love, or His love above His wrath, as though ultimately one attribute is stronger in God than the other, or that one attribute won the day against the other attribute. God is not in turmoil within Himself. There is no strife amongst His attributes, though to us it may seem from our perspective that there is. He is Trinity in unity, the monergistic Triune God. He is God and not a man that he should be divided and have His passions at war within Himself.
“Perhaps the boldest of all human models of God in Scripture is the pain of parenthood which is attributed to Him in Hosea 11” (Stott, 129). And while we may say here that we see the working out of who God is in all His attributes that involves emotion on God’s part—emotion far greater than any fathers—we cannot say that it is the “strife” of His attributes, for it is the human picture God has provided us for understanding a divine reality. The tremendous reality involving God’s heart—the deepest reality of who He is as the Triune God—described in passages such as Hosea 11 and others , is well put by Stewart,
“Had anyone suggested to Paul that God’s wrath alternates with His love, that where the one begins the other ends, that sometimes God acts out of character and needs to be won round from punishment to mercy, he would certainly have branded the idea as a deadly heresy: he would have declared that God’s wrath is not understood until it is seen as the obverse of His grace. … God’s wrath is God’s grace. It is His grace smitten with dreadful sorrow. It is His love in agony. It is the passion of His heart going forth to redeem” (Stewart, 220-221).
But where is this seen? It is seen most clearly at the cross! Rather than laying out a theological treatise—which, by the way, is precisely what would be needed for a full dealing with the attributes of God, which solid and helpful books you can find out there—I will simply, this Easter Sunday, point to the cross. In the words of Michael Reeves which I have quoted on numerous occasions,
“As John Calvin put it, ‘Nowhere, nowhere in God’s Word or all reality does the glory of God shine more brightly than at the cross. There, at the cross, we are exposed for what we are, and the glorious fearfulness of God is most clearly and profoundly expounded’ at the cross. And therefore, John brown could write [in] his expository discourses of first Peter, ‘Nothing is so well fitted to put the fear of God which will preserve man from offending Him into the heart as an enlightened view of the cross of Christ. There, on the cross, shines spotless holiness, inflexible justice, incomprehensible wisdom, omnipotent power, holy love, and none of these excellencies darken or eclipse the other but every one of them rather gives a luster to the rest, they mingle their beams, and shine with united eternal splendor—the just Judge, the merciful Father, the wise governor, and nowhere does justice appear so awful [he means our awesome in the old meaning of awful], mercy so amiable, wisdom so profound as at the cross’” (Reeves).
We need not hide from this God in our sin. We dare not lie to Him or deceive ourselves about our sin. He is not like us that He can excuse our sin as something less than it really is. God has not taken away your sin and mine, but He has imputed it to Christ. Christ bore it on the cross and it can carry no weight of guilt or shame for you and I any longer if we would but trust ourselves to the God of the Bible, the God of the cross.
“Do not minimize your sin or excuse it away. Raise no defense. Simply take it to the one who is already at the right hand of the Father, advocating for you on the basis of his own wounds. Let your own unrighteousness, in all your darkness and despair, drive you to Jesus Christ, the righteous, in all his brightness and sufficiency” (Ortlund, 94).
There you can be reconciled to the God who reveals Himself as the God of holy grace.
Works cited
- Another Gospel, by Alisa Childers.
- A Man In Christ, by James Stewart.
- The Cross of Christ, by John Stott.
- Gentle and Lowly, by Dane Ortlund.
- The Reality of Hell, by Rico Tice.
- Foundations, by Peter Mead.
- Our Culture of Fear and the Fear of God, Lecture Three, by Michael Reeves.
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