A Biblical Atonement For A Biblical Worldview - Philip Hess- Penal Substitution?

What do you think it means that Christ was made sin for us?

It means exactly what it said. He, Christ, was made sin for us. I think to elaborate or extend is to dilute or appreciate. I don't care. Sure. Yeah, thank you. Why is there—what does that mean? What does it mean that Brother Hess is standing at the head of the congregation in the moment? Yeah, okay. Thank you. So in English, the English language, we don't say that—what's your name, brother? Slip to me. Brother Jason is sin. We might say he's sinful, but that's not a way that we use the English language. So the question is, what does it mean for Christ to be made sin? Well, there's a Greek word there, and it's called—I don't know how to pronounce Greek—but hamartia.

And there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament which uses that word 94 times. And the word hamartia translates to the word sin offering. So in the Old Testament, there is a sin offering that's prescribed by the Mosaic law.

So I believe that Paul, he read the Greek New Testament, he quoted from it. I believe that what he's saying is Christ is made our sin offering or offering on behalf of sin. So our point of need as humans is that we are sinful. We need our sins washed away. The way the Scriptures tell us that our sins are washed away is Jesus' blood cleanses our sin. And so he was made an offering on behalf of sin to wash our sins away, to make us a new creation. So I believe that verse, but maybe you haven't heard it explained that way before. I don't think that's convoluted. I think it's a simple explanation.

But that's why we're having a discussion about the atonement, because there are people that believe one way and there's people that believe another.

God bless you this morning. To joy to be with you all and to see your faces and fellowship together. Apostle John said that our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. That's what draws us together here this morning.

Jesus, when he was nearing his death, took bread, took the cup, and said, "Do this in remembrance of me." And as we fellowshipped around his death this morning, we remember what he has done for us. The fact that in that hour he pointed us to his suffering and death and said, "Remember this, do this," clearly shows us that that is a focal point of Christianity, the death and suffering of Jesus.

And if you did something amazing, something special for someone, you'd want them to remember and appreciate that. And so I think that we can never get done talking about Jesus, what he endured for us, how he gave his life for us. So we want to do that this morning as we talk about the atonement. Now I want to start with a song that probably many of you know as we remember Jesus.

There's a line that's been drawn through the ages. On that line stands the old rugged cross. On that cross, a battle is raging for the gain of man's soul or his loss. On one side, march the forces of evil, all the demons and devils of hell. On the other, the angels of glory, and they meet on Golgotha's hill. The earth shakes with the force of the conflict, and the sun refuses to shine, for there hangs God's Son in the balance. And then through the darkness, he cries, "It is finished." The battle is over. It is finished. There will be no more war. It is finished. The end of the conflict. It is finished.

And Jesus is Lord. Now I remember a dramatic moment in my life a number of years ago. There were two groups of people who had been in conflict with each other. Ideological conflict had been building over several decades.

And now it had come to a moment of crisis. So I got to sit there watching a drama unfolding of two sides struggling with each other as the conflict reached a particular moment of explosive outcry. And then following that moment, there was silence.

And we sat there, and the friend beside me leaned over and said, "What just happened?"

I think the experience of the disciples with Jesus must have been a bit like that. They were part of a drama that had been building for centuries, even for thousands of years. And I'm sure they had a sense that they stood at the pinnacle of great events. They'd been following this man, Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that he was the Messiah they had been waiting for. They knew he was the one the world had been longing for for thousands of years. They trusted that he was going to redeem Israel. They'd seen him open the eyes of the blind. He could make lame men walk.

He could heal lepers. He could take a few loaves of bread and feed a multitude with them. And he could confront religious leaders with confidence and poise and answer all their questions. And here he hung before them on a cross of wood, naked, bleeding, bruised, crucified, drawing his last breaths.

What was going through their minds as he hung there? A final straightening of his legs, a final drawing of his last breath, and then a loud cry. "It is finished." An earthquake, temple veil being torn in two, rocks crying out. I think it would be no surprise if the disciples turned toward each other and said, "What just happened?"

But I suspect they were too shocked even to do that. And for a couple of days, they still didn't really know what had just happened. Beyond the simple fact that Jesus was dead and their hopes seemed to have vanished, seemed to be dead with him.

But then Jesus rose on the third day, and they knew that he was the king of the universe. They knew now that he would reign until he had put all his enemies under his feet. He would be coming again to judge the living and the dead. And that's what mattered to them. That's what they preached. Jesus is the king. Repent and be converted. Repent and be baptized. Repent and believe the gospel. Obey Jesus. He's the king.

So that is the message that we preach. That is the core of our faith that Jesus is the king, and that's the message that matters to the world. But interestingly enough, after all these centuries, we're still debating the meaning of Jesus' death. What happened on Friday afternoon and evening of Passover around the year AD 33?

Now the apostles gave their thoughts about it in the New Testament, and people have been debating what they meant ever since. Specifically, how does Jesus save us? We all agree that we needed saving. Paul says this is a faithful saying and worthy of everyone accepting it, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. We should all agree with that statement, sinners of whom I am chief.

But what are we being saved from? What does salvation mean? What are we being saved to? There's more disagreement about this topic than many people are aware. And so that's my topic this morning, the atonement, the reconciliation that Jesus brought between God and man, and how to think about that.

Now, 10 years ago, or perhaps a little more, I first listened to the message that Brother David preached on the atonement. And I had not studied very much theology. I still don't know very much about it. And what little explanation I had heard for the meaning of Jesus' death was really the Protestant doctrine of penal substitution.

And Brother David shared a different view. And that just connected with my heart. Just like somehow I saw Jesus in a different light. Jesus is a person laying down his life for me, struggling against sin for me, being willing to let himself be beat up by the forces of evil for me. And that meant something special to me. And so I want to thank David for that today. That's ultimately why I'm here right now talking about this topic, because I found it so meaningful. It changed much in the way that I was thinking over time. For every thousand people hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one who is hacking at the root. And as I thought about this, all around us, there's Christians who don't seem to care very much about the teachings of the New Testament.

It doesn't seem like obedience is that important. Maybe they just outright say, "Well, we don't have to do that," that Jesus said. Or maybe they have another explanation for why it doesn't really mean what it says. But where does that come from? Well, I believe ultimately a careless approach to obeying Jesus, in spite of the fact that he said, "If you love me, keep my commandments, and he who loves me is the one who keeps my commandments," and so forth, comes from the doctrine that's called imputed righteousness, which basically talks about what God is looking for in the Christian life.

And that in turn comes from how does one understand the death of Jesus? So we have this chain of succession, lifestyle choices coming from a view of who God is and what he's looking for, coming from a view of what the atonement means. And so to me, at least, the question of what does the atonement mean began to look like a very foundational question that results in how churches end up believing the New Testament and following it.

So we're going to talk about a few different ways of understanding the atonement. And I'm going to be talking about the idea of penal substitution. Now let me start by defining that. Penal substitutionary atonement refers to the doctrine that Christ died on the cross as a substitute for sinners.

God imputed the guilt of our sins to Christ, and he in our place bore the punishment that we deserve. This was a full payment for sins which satisfied both the wrath and the righteousness of God so that he could forgive sinners without compromising his own holy standard.

So this is one basic explanation that many people give for how the death of Jesus works on our behalf. Now, I do want to say something about this. So I'm going to expose what I believe are some weaknesses and shortcomings in this way of understanding the atonement.

But at the end of the day, as we all know, when Jesus comes back, in Matthew 25, he separates the sheep from the goats based on how they treated Jesus. And so the reason this matters is that ideas have consequences.

And what you believe about this often does have a practical outworking that may not be the best. But there are very many people who believe what I just shared with you, who live wonderful lives, who are dedicated to God, who love God. And I think that's wonderful that they do live for God. Brother John D. Martin once said that many people have lives that are better than their theology.

So at the end of the day, I don't want to pretend that the important thing is that you believe it right so much as that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

And if this topic points us closer to that, then praise God. So do you have your asbestos suit on this morning? A well-known evangelical preacher once said that the righteousness of Christ is the asbestos suit that protects us against the white-hot wrath of God.

Now, maybe for those of you who aren't as involved in construction as I am, you're not sure what asbestos suits are, but asbestos is a fire-resistant material. So this idea is you put on your fire-resistant suit, and now you can come into God's flaming presence because you've got the righteousness of Christ protecting you.

Well, that's one possible explanation of what it says in Hebrews that we can come boldly before the throne of grace. Okay, I can come boldly before the throne of grace because I've got my asbestos suit on, so I'm safe.

And on one hand, I think that is the view that penal substitution leans toward. You're protected by this asbestos suit. You're protected by the righteousness of Christ.

But how I understand that passage in Hebrews is a little differently. I can come boldly before the throne of grace, not because God is some sort of casual individual that doesn't care about much, not because he's not as great as people in times past thought he was, and we shouldn't have holy reverence and holy fear. But I can come boldly before the throne of grace because the man on that throne walked in my shoes.

And he knows what it's like to be a human being. He knows what it's like to suffer. And the written record of his life is that he was a man of compassion. He was a man that when people came to him, he didn't turn them away. He would be willing to stay up all night and pray for me because he did that when he was here on earth. And so the reason that I can come boldly to the throne of grace is not because of what I have or what I am, but because of who I know who he is.

And that's why I want to talk about what it means that Christ died for us so that we can have a clear understanding of who God is and who Jesus is and the lengths that he went to to save us.

Now, a road has a ditch on either side quite often. And it's not so good to say that you stayed out of the left ditch if you did that by steering into the right ditch. You're not really much better off. So it's not that hard to stay out of the ditches while you drive. But it does take some attention. You can't leave your steering wheel in your RV and go back and make yourself a pot of coffee and stay out of the ditch. You will end up in trouble.

So theologically, there's sometimes opposite errors. And if I speak against Calvinism, for example, it shouldn't be assumed that I'm therefore a Pelagian. And if I speak against Arianism, you shouldn't assume that I'm a modalist if those terms mean anything to you.

So the reason I have spoken and written against penal substitution is because in the circles that I walk in, in the world around me that I have interacted with, that's the dominant theory about the atonement. But I've also found that I need to be clear I'm not ending up in the other ditch. So there's a large group of people that don't believe in penal substitution, and those are the theological liberals.

Now, a man named Richard Niebuhr described modern liberal theology this way: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross." I'll read that again. "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

So in liberal theology, they're not so interested in talking about man's sinfulness because they come from a humanistic perspective on mankind. And they tend to downplay the divinity of Jesus and the miracles and not take much of the Bible at face value. And their focus is on social improvement. The progressive movement was about making the world a better place and spreading the kingdom through social change and social reform. And that group of folks didn't really like penal substitution either because penal substitution emphasizes God's wrath.

And perhaps they were more interested in a God who did not have any wrath. Scriptures tell us that God does have wrath. So we want to stay out of that ditch too. I won't be talking so much about that this morning. But I want to note that I do believe that God is a holy judge. He's coming again to judge the living and the dead. And he is coming to eradicate all sin for his creation.

And that's a wonderful thing. That's a function of God's love because it says, "Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity." To love righteousness is to hate iniquity. You can't love them both. They're opposites. And our God loves righteousness.

So liberal theologians promoted generally what's called the moral influence theory of the atonement. And in this view, the purpose and result of Christ's death was to influence mankind toward moral improvement. This theory denies that Christ died to satisfy any principles of divine justice, but teaches instead that his death was designed to greatly impress mankind with a sense of God's love, resulting in softening their hearts and leading them to repentance.

Now, there's a lot in that statement that's true. It's not far off. But I think there's a lot more going on in what Jesus did for us than that summary. So we need to take that view that God, through Jesus, gives us a moral example and broaden that out a bit and talk about the other aspects of Christ's death and what it means.

So what's the problem with penal substitution, the idea that Jesus receives the wrath of God in our place?

Well, I'd like to point out what I think are a few problems. So Billy Graham said this in a sermon one time: "At the moment Jesus died on the cross, the lightning bolt of God's wrath hit him instead of you."

So God's lightning bolt was a wrath that was coming out to punish sin, and it's directed and hits Jesus instead of you. So you're safe. Jesus takes your punishment. Now, I think it's quite possible to believe something like that and understand God as a kind and loving Father. But this picture just has a certain tendency to go in a certain direction. And Brother Mike mentioned that to me before this service. He used to see God as a very angry God, an implacable God, not one that he could connect with.

And that's actually a very common understanding that the Protestant theology about salvation tends to push people towards. And again, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement here, but it often has that effect. So consider the words of Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." And think about where does this view of God come from? "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loath, some insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight.

You are 10,000 times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince. And yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.

O sinner, consider the fearful danger you are in. It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit full of the fire of wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder. And you have no interest in any mediator and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of that wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you one moment."

So what picture are we developing of God in those paragraphs?

Is that the God that was revealed through the face of Jesus Christ?

Well, what happens is with that view of God, there's often a picture painted of an angry God who's impossible to please. So anything you do, it's not going to please him. Your righteousness is just filthy rags. There's no hope for you of trying to obey and have a relationship with God except through one means. And that's through a legal means in which your case can be dismissed.

Well, I have a concern that this doesn't accurately represent the character of God. And we should be concerned about honoring God through showing people what he is really like. That seemed to be the concern of Jesus. Jesus said, "He that has seen me has seen the Father."

And yes, Jesus did have anger. He looked upon the Pharisees that didn't want the man's withered hand healed with anger, it says.

But I think this picture of God looking at the sinner like a hateful, venomous serpent and just ready to dump him into hell at any moment maybe doesn't portray the way we want to display God to the world.

One wonders why that picture of God, a God of that picture, would bother to save anybody. It's like he's licking his chops in anticipation of pouring out his vengeance, ready to pounce. As Edward says a little later, "He's going to crush you under his feet without mercy. He will crush out your blood and make it fly. And it shall be sprinkled upon his garments, so as a stain on his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt.

No place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as a mire of the streets."

That makes me wonder, how does this relate to the angel's proclamation when Jesus was born, "Peace on earth, good will toward men"? How does that relate to the Jesus who seemed to attract the prostitutes and the tax collectors? He attracted people that were considered to be serious sinners.

So perhaps a bit later, we'll talk about the wrath of God and how to understand that. But let's go on as we talk about my concerns with penal substitution. So I believe that view of the atonement presents a misunderstanding of man's problem.

So if the problem is that you are hovering over the pit of hell, your problem is that you've got a punishment coming to you. You've got this pending punishment that is just about to fall on your head. And so penal substitution presents a mechanism for you to escape that punishment.

It does so by proposing a legal mechanism for Jesus to take the sinner's sin and the sinner to legally take Jesus' righteousness.

That's why another prominent preacher, John Piper, says, "We become God's righteousness the way Christ was made our sin. He did not become morally sinful in the imputation. We do not become morally righteous in the imputation. He was counted as having our sin. We are counted as having God's righteousness.

This is the reality of imputation. And the righteousness imputed is not our faith, but an external divine righteousness." Once again, there's so many different channels that we could go down and talk about this morning. We don't have time to do. But the idea is here that there's a legal transfer happening between you and Jesus. And so when God looks at you, he sees Jesus, or he sees Jesus' righteousness.

And that's because the problem being addressed is, how do we escape this punishment? Well, I think we need to understand what man's real problem is. And then we'll understand more clearly what Jesus is doing to bring the solution.

Our problem is that we're fallen. We're sinful. We're ruined. The whole creation is groaning and travailing with birth pangs, Romans 8 says. We have this world that's under a curse, and we ourselves have sin dwelling in us that kills us. And so we need forgiveness from God. We've sinned against him. But that forgiveness won't do us much good if our real need is to be changed.

We need someone with transformative power to infuse his life into us, to restore God's image in us, to reunite us back to the God that we have left. We don't simply need a legal mechanism to be declared innocent.

Now, the view that man's problem is his pending punishment leads to a truncated gospel, or maybe we could say a reductionistic presentation of the gospel.

So the gospel was presented to believe on Jesus very often. But the change of the sinner is not an essential part of that presentation because salvation has become about escaping punishment, not about being transformed into Christ's image.

So the penal substitution view of the atonement talks about our sin and God's righteousness, but it has very little to say about the incarnation, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus as part of his redemptive work. It doesn't say very much about the defeat of Satan and the restoration of creation. Now, you can add these things into a presentation, but they're not necessarily part of the package. They're not firmly linked to it.

And then the next concern I have is that penal substitution, because it makes salvation available on legal grounds, provides a legal basis for salvation, easily allows for ideas that obedience is optional.

So the question really becomes, is God looking for a legal acquittal of the sinner? Or is he looking to redeem and restore the man so he can have fellowship with him?

So how should we understand the atonement?

Well, let's talk a little bit about the wrath of God because I do believe it's important that we understand that God has wrath. However, scriptures say that the wrath of man does not work the righteousness of God. His wrath is not like our wrath.

Our wrath is often connected to personal agendas toward feeling offended because people have hurt us. And our wrath is usually impure unless we're simply observing someone hurting someone else and we're feeling offended for the sake of the person who is hurt.

But God's wrath is his unrelenting, unchangeable, steady opposition to sin. Sin destroys his good creation. It cankers. It ruins. And God hates sin. And he is going to completely eradicate it from his creation.

So God has this dilemma that he loves all people like a caring, kind, compassionate heavenly Father, and he hates the sin that they do. And he will eradicate all sin the day is coming in which all sin will be eliminated from God's creation. But till then, God is meeting sinners in mercy in every possible way, doing everything he can to save them. He's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

Like the Father who went running to his prodigal son, the moment that someone repents and turns to Jesus or to God, he goes running to meet him. But God doesn't force love. To do so is not loving. That would be a paradox. And so for those who ultimately reject God to the very end, in the day when God destroys all sin, that will involve the destruction of sinners who will not repent.

Malachi 4:1 says, "For behold, the day comes that shall burn as an oven in all the proud. Yes, and all who do wickedly shall be stubble. And the day that comes shall burn them up," says the Lord of hosts.

2 Thessalonians 1:7 says that the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven in flaming fire, taking vengeance on those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. You see, God himself is a consuming fire.

When he told Moses that, "No man can see my face and live," he was not saying that he doesn't want people to see his face. If you peek around the corner and happen to see him, he's going to burn; he's going to kill you.

No, God is a consuming fire in his person. And all that is not holy is going to be burned up at the day of his appearing when even the earth and heaven flee away from his face, as it says in Revelation.

So how will we be saved? Well, we will be in him. It's going to be those outside him who will be burned. But those who are in Christ, who are in God, will be preserved.

Okay. So as we think about how to understand what Jesus did, as we've said before, we need to understand that what God is looking to do for us is to take us off the path of destruction, turn us around, head us back toward God. It means to have the life of God, which the sinner has lost, implanted back into him. It means to have the heart changed and sins washed away, to be restored to what God intended mankind to be before we were ruined by the fall.

So that could bring us back to our question: what happened on Friday evening of Passover when Jesus, the King of the universe, gave up his spirit?

Well, the truth is that our salvation is not easily explained. There's mystery there. There will always be mystery. There's always going to be more for us to understand. And so if I could come up with a paragraph and say, "Well, this is how it happens," then you should probably kick me off the stage and tell me that I'm reducing this in the way that I'm concerned about. The New Testament makes a lot of statements about salvation.

And it tells us many things about the why, but not the how. So here's an example, Romans 14:9, "For to this end, Christ both died and rose and revived, that he might be both Lord, both of the dead and the living." So there's a great little statement. Christ died so that he could be the Lord of the dead and living. Then you might be tempted to say, "Well, how does that work? What about his death makes him Lord?"

The New Testament doesn't provide a rational theory of the atonement, but rather it speaks about the atonement with a number of what has been called motifs or metaphors. And this is to help build pictures in our minds of what Christ is doing for us. So I'm going to share with you a number of motifs of the atonement. I'm afraid we'll have to go through them rather rapidly. But maybe if you have more questions, we can talk about them afterwards.

So number one, Christ's work is presented as an exchange. Here's a verse for that. "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich." So there's an exchange happening. God is in heaven. He's wealthy. He has everything that we don't have that we need. So he comes and gives that up, becomes poor so that we can become rich. There's an exchange happening.

To bring us to God, Christ had to come to us. He had to take on our humanity so he could share his divinity with us. He had to take on our weakness so that he could give us his strength.

Another picture the New Testament gives us is Jesus' work as a substitution. Now, this is different than a penal substitution because the idea behind penal substitution is that Jesus takes God's wrath. God pours out wrath on him. But there are verses in the New Testament that imply a substitutionary aspect of Jesus' work. And we shouldn't be afraid of that.

There's a difference between an exchange and a substitute because if I substitute for you, I'm doing something for you that you can't do for yourself or something for you so you don't need to do it. And there's an aspect of Jesus' work where he's doing something for us that we can't do so that we can experience that through him. Perhaps a verse for that could be 1 Peter 3:18, "Christ also hath once suffered for sins the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit." So it was for us. It was the just for the unjust. He's a substitute. Because we couldn't make our own way back to God, he had to stand in our place to open that way for us.

If I died on a cross, it wouldn't redeem anybody. Jesus' death on the cross, though, redeems me. So in that sense, he's a substitute for what I cannot do. Another picture of Christ's work in the New Testament is as a ransom.

Mark 10:45, "For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many." Now, there's plenty of debate about who the ransom was paid to. And the New Testament doesn't tell us the answer to that.

But I do feel like there's enough scriptural precedent for understanding the concept of ransom in terms of deliverance. So as a metaphorical usage that I'm comfortable looking at it that way. It's a picture of Christ giving himself to redeem us, to buy us back from the hand of the enemy, to save us. Then we have the picture of Christ's work as a sacrifice. And when I say picture, I'm not trying to say that it's not in reality a sacrifice. What Christ did really was a sacrifice on our behalf.

John said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." He's pointing to Jesus as the Passover Lamb being slain for us.

1 Corinthians 5:27 says, "Even Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us." Now, Christ's sacrifice is not pictured as a satisfaction to God in the New Testament. It's not to appease God's wrath. The Father is, of course, pleased with the work of his Son. But Christ's sacrifice involves not only his death, but his whole life. It was a sacrifice for him to leave the courts of glory and be born in a stable. It was a sacrifice for him to walk around as a human and endure all the things that he endured. He got tired. He prayed all night.

Of course, that sacrifice reaches its greatest intensity on the cross. But the meaning of the sacrifice image is Christ laying down his privileges, laying down his life to help us. Sacrifice, by the way, in the New Testament, or actually in the scripture, does not really explain. It's just taken for granted.

You go through the Old Testament, and people just give sacrifices, and they don't assume that they need to explain why God would want this. But inasmuch as it is explained, we are told that the purpose of blood sacrifice is the life of the flesh is in the blood. So there's a picture of life being given to those who need it. Then we have a picture, a motif of conflict and victory. This is why some people talk about the Christus Victor view of the atonement. And this view can really encompass a lot of the other pictures as well. If you picture Christ's work as a struggle and a victory. So one way to think about that is his victory against the evil powers.

We have a few verses about that in the New Testament. Colossians 2:15, "Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it." John 12:31, "Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out."

And Hebrews 2:14, "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of the death, that is, the devil." Now, there's a few other images that in my mind are tied in to this idea of conflict and victory. That is when the scriptures talk about Jesus as the forerunner or the pioneer or the captain of our salvation. It's like he's going ahead. He's the icebreaker ship going through the ice pack. He's clearing out the way. And so he's winning a victory on our behalf because we need something done to save us from our lost condition.

He goes before, and he wins the battle.

And then we have the moral example aspect of Christ's death or the moral influence motif. God changes us by loving us. In fact, that's how meaningful change happens in the world. So if you love someone, you change them. When your neighbor is upset and hits you on one cheek and you turn the other, that actually does something spiritually. Now, not every person who observes a non-resistant Christian has his heart changed. But the gospel goes forward through the example of Christians living out the life of Christ.

And so as Jesus hangs on the cross and we see his example, there is an aspect in which that itself works changes in our hearts and helps us to be like him. It's not the entire explanation for the atonement, but it's part of it. 1 Peter 2:21, "For even hereunto were you called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow in his steps." So Christ suffered as an example so that we could see that and follow him.

So how do these things all fit together? There's more about this than I can ever understand or more than I can grasp. But the way that it fits together in my mind can be summed up into the idea of life. We needed life. We were dead in trespasses and sins.

But how were we to get that life? Can God sort of zap us with the lightning bolt of his life? Well, Jesus had to become a person. And here's how one writer talks about the incarnation, the life of Christ and his death.

He's talking about a view of the atonement called recapitulation, in which Christ has to become man so that he can do the things for mankind that we need done and can't do for ourselves. So recapitulation teaches that Christ became human to heal mankind by perfectly uniting the human nature to the divine nature in his person.

Through the incarnation, Christ took on human nature, becoming the second Adam, and entered into every stage of humanity from infancy to adulthood, uniting it to God. He then suffered death to enter Hades and destroy it. After three days, he resurrected and completed his task by destroying death. By entering each of these stages and remaining perfectly obedient to the Father, Christ recapitulated every aspect of human nature. He said yes where Adam said no and healed where Adam's actions had damaged.

This enables us who are willing to say yes to God to be perfectly united with the Holy Trinity through Christ's person. Now, that's a lot of theology there, and that could use a lot of thought. But Jesus has become the new man. So in the book of Romans, it talks about the old man who is Adam and the new man who is Christ. Jesus started the new humanity. And just like we all were in Adam at one point, we all genetically descend from him. There's been a continuous human transmission from Adam. Christ has become the pioneer, the forerunner, the captain of the new humanity.

And he has done all those things that we humans and our sinful flesh and our weakness and our fallen nature cannot do. And so the way he helps us to become what we are to become is through unity through him. That happens through his Spirit. His Spirit is joined to our Spirit.

And he can help us do the things that we need to do because he went through them. It says in Hebrews that he was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. That's why he is able to be our high priest. So the way I understand what Jesus had to do is he needed to give us life that involved laying down his so that his Spirit could be put into us. That involved him suffering and responding with laying down his own life, responding to evil by turning the other cheek, showing us how to live so that then he could begin to do that in us. If someone mistreats me, I can't respond rightly to that in my own power.

My own heart doesn't have the things in it that it needs to obey Jesus. And so that, for me, is where the substitutionary aspect of Christ's work comes in. That victory that he won through his Spirit being joined to my Spirit then gives me the power to live his life.

That doesn't mean that you and I won't fall, but it means that we do have an overcomer who is in us, living in us, living through us, who will help us when we fall and will bring us on from day to day through each challenge and cause us to be conformed to the image of Christ.

That is what salvation is about. I'd like to share a little story that may help you to think about this. Suppose that I was born with a genetically defective heart. Now, because I have heart problems, I've never been able to live a normal life. I've always been sickly. I can't run, can't climb mountains, can't swim rivers.

I can't do the things that I was created to do. I have a weak heart. I need a heart transplant. But there's only one problem. Everyone alive is my close relatives, and they all have the same heart defect. There's no one that has the heart that I need to give me strength.

But there was someone who could help. However, he wasn't a human, so he didn't have the heart that I needed, didn't have a heart that I could use. However, this someone was so powerful that he was able to turn himself into a human. And so he did that. He grew and developed a strong and healthy human heart.

With constant exercise and with a perfect diet, he grew a heart that would work perfectly for me. Then he underwent a painful surgery without anesthetic in which he gave me his life so that his heart could become mine.

Now, I think this is a crude analogy, but it shows us our point of need and how Jesus met it, how he met us. Unable to save ourselves, we needed someone to do everything that we need to do to overcome every obstacle we face and then give us the perfect life that he did it with. And this includes undergoing death and conquering it so he could come out the other side with resurrection life.

So he submitted himself to his Father's will, giving himself into the hands of evil powers who were determined to make this process as painful as possible. But unknown to them, those sufferings made his sacrifice perfect. And his unlawful death meant that death could not contain him. By going through death, he rose to a new plane of existence that no one of Adam's race had ever reached before. That's why he's the first fruits of the resurrection. He's the beginning of the new humanity.

So I want to read, well, the way to tap into this well is to come into Christ. Then we can become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And when we are in Christ and he is living his life through us, that's when we can say, "The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." I'd like to turn your attention to a passage in the end of the book of Hebrews, sorry, the end of Hebrews chapter 2. And this passage simply contains quite a number of the motifs that I've talked about, a number of the ideas of what Christ did.

So we'll start in verse 9. We'll read verses 9, 10, and then 14 through 18. "But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, so that he, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone." So there's a substitutionary aspect in that verse that Christ tastes death for us. "For it was fitting for him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, and bringing many sons to glory to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." When I read about the captain of our salvation, I think of the conflict and victory, the victor model. I also think of the sacrifice.

His sufferings were a sacrifice.

Turning over to verse 14, "Inasmuch then as the children have partaken the flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil." We have conflict here. Jesus destroying the devil. "And release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." There we have ransom, Christ giving himself to release the prisoners. "For he indeed does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things, he had to be made like his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God to make reconciliation for the sins of the people."