The Cross of Christ

by John R.W. Stott

The Passover story (Exod. 11 – 13) is a self-disclosure of the God of Israel in three roles.

First,

Secondly,

Thirdly,

The message must have been absolutely clear to the Israelites; it is equally clear to us who see the fulfilment of the Passover in the sacrifice of Christ.

First,

We must never characterize the Father as Judge and the Son as Saviour. It is one and the same God who through Christ saves us from himself.

Secondly,

Thirdly,

There had to be an individual appropriation of the divine provision.

Four...

second major illustration of the principle of substitution is the notion of ‘sin-bearing’.

The attempt by these theologians to retain the language of substitution and sin-bearing, while changing its meaning, must be pronounced a failure. It creates more confusion than clarity. It conceals from the unwary that there is a fundamental difference between ‘penitent substitution’ (in which the substitute offers what we could not offer) and ‘penal substitution’ (in which he bears what we could not bear).

Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.14

Some commentators make the mistake of driving a wedge between the two goats, the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat, overlooking the fact that the two together are described as ‘a sin offering’ in the singular

suggest that each embodied a different aspect of the same sacrifice, ‘the one exhibiting the means, and the other the results, of the atonement’.16

there is good evidence that his whole public career, from his baptism through his ministry, sufferings and death to his resurrection and ascension, is seen as a fulfilment of the pattern foretold in Isaiah 53.

my purpose in relation to Isaiah 53 has been to show how foundational the chapter is to the New Testament’s understanding of Jesus.

his two most important sayings, which focus on the sin-bearing nature of his death.

f...

the ‘ransom s...

Here Jesus unites the divergent ‘Son of man’ and ‘Servant’ prophecies.

second

the institution of the Lord’s Supper, when Jesus declared that his blood would be ‘poured out for many’,31 an echo of Isaiah 53:12, ‘he poured out his life unto death’.32

It seems to be definite beyond doubt, then, that Jesus applied Isaiah 53 to himself and that he understood his death in the light of it as a sin-bearing death. As God’s ‘righteous servant’ he would be able to ‘justify many’, because he was going to ‘bear the sin of many’. This is the thrust of the whole chapter, not just that he would be despised and rejected, oppressed and afflicted, led like a lamb to the slaughter and cut off from the land of the living, but in particular that he would be pierced for our transgressions, that the Lord would lay on him the iniquity of us all, that he would thus be numbered with the transgressors, and that he would himself bear their iniquities.

But what exactly did happen? The sinless one was ‘made sin for us’, which must mean that he bore the penalty of our sin instead of us, and he redeemed us from the law’s curse by ‘becoming a curse for us’, which must mean that the curse of the law lying upon us for our disobedience was transferred to him, so that he bore it instead of us.

Both verses go beyond these negative truths (that he bore our sin and curse to redeem us from them) to a positive counterpart.

Both verses thus indicate that when we are united to Christ a mysterious exchange takes place: he took our curse, so that we may receive his blessing; he became sin with our sin, so that we may become righteous with his righteousness.

Imputation, he writes, ‘does not at all imply the transference of one person’s moral qualities to another’.

No, what was transferred to Christ was not moral qualities but legal consequences: he voluntarily accepted liability for our sins. That is what the expressions ‘made sin’ and ‘made a curse’ mean.

Similarly, ‘the righteousness of God’ which we become when we are ‘in Christ’ is not here righteousness of character and conduct (although that grows within us by the working of the Holy Spirit), but rather a righteous standing before God.38

we are obliged to conclude that the cross was a substitutionary sacrifice. Christ died for us. Christ died instead of us.

The possibility of substitution rests on the identity of the substitute.

The first proposal is that the substitute was the man Christ Jesus, viewed as a human being, and conceived as an individual separate from both God and us, an independent third party.

open to gravely distorted understandings of the atonement and so bring the truth of substitution into disrepute.

Such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping-boy who is punished instead of the real culprit, or as the lightning conductor to which the lethal electric charge is deflected.

The whole notion of a compassionate Christ inducing a reluctant God to take action on our behalf founders on the fact of God’s love.

On the contrary, the saving initiative originated in him. It was ‘because of the tender mercy of our God’ (Luke 1:78) that Christ came, ‘because of his great love for us’,40 because of ‘the grace of God that brings salvation’ (Titus 2:11).

But we have no liberty to interpret them in such a way as to imply either that God compelled Jesus to do what he was unwilling to do himself, or that Jesus was an unwilling victim of God’s harsh justice. Jesus Christ did indeed bear the penalty of our sins, but God was active in and through Christ doing it, and Christ was freely playing his part (e.g. Heb. 10:5–10).

We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of each other or were even in conflict with each other. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment or God the object of Christ’s persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taking the initiative together to save sinners. Whatever happened on the cross in terms of ‘God-forsakenness’ was voluntarily accepted by both in the same holy love which made atonement necessary.

If then our substitute was not Christ alone as a third party independent of God, is the truth that God alone took our place, bore our sin and died our death?

The reason why both scholarly and simple Christians have felt able to use this kind of language is of course that Scripture permits it.

Scripture bears witness to the deity of the person who gave himself for us, but it stops short of the unequivocal affirmation that ‘God died’.

reasons for this

First, immortality belongs to God’s e...

therefore he can...

The second reason why it is misleading to say that ‘God died’ is that ‘God’ in the New Testament frequently means ‘the Father’ (e.g. ‘God sent his Son’), and the person who died on the cross was not the Father but the Son.

An over-emphasis on the sufferings of God on the cross may mislead us either into confusing the persons of the Trinity and denying the eternal distinctness of the Son, like the Modalists or Patripassians, or into confusing the natures of Christ, and denying that he was one person in two natures, like the Monophysites or Theopaschites.

humanity. It would be wiser instead to say what the New Testament authors said, faithfully echoed by the Apostles’ Creed, namely that he who ‘was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried’ was not ‘God’, still less the Father, but ‘Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord’. The apostles further clarify this by stressing the Son’s willing obedience to the Father.54

Our substitute, then, who took our place and died our death on the cross, was neither Christ alone (since that would make him a third party thrust in between God and us), nor God alone (since that would undermine the historical incarnation), but God in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and who on that account was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them.