"Does My Understanding of the Atonement Matter?" by Philip Hess

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Okay, well, good morning, everyone. I think it's 6 o'clock, so we might as well get started.

Um, we're here this morning, and it's good to be—good to be here. I—beautiful new day here, and looking forward to hearing—excuse me—looking forward to hearing what you have to share here, Brother Philip. And, you know, one of our purposes of Strength to Strength is to advance Jesus' kingdom by tackling thought-provoking topics, and another one is by stimulating candid discussion. And I hope that that this topic can do both of those.

So, counting on you, Philip. God bless you as you share. Um, looking forward to hearing—to—to take participating in this. And—and we're welcome questions for any of you audience at the end. We'll have a time for Q&A, so you can be prepared for that. So let's—let's have a little prayer here before we get started.

Father, we thank you for this new day. Thank you for this another opportunity to serve you. Thank you for, um, thank you for Jesus. Thank you for his life and his death. And thank you for the—the real difference that his life and death makes in our lives today. And God, I just pray that you would, um, be with this gathering here this morning and—and be with Brother Philip as he—as he speaks and shares. And I just pray, Lord, that—that you would help us to come have a, um, maybe a—maybe a clearer understanding of—of how and why Jesus gave his life. And I just pray that it would—would, most of all, be inspired to worship you and to live for you in return in response.

God, I just pray your blessing on Philip as he shares, and I pray for us as we—as we, um, take it in and—and as we participate. Uh, may your name be glorified. You are the one who is worthy. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Philip Hess, and I'm from State College, Pennsylvania. And, um, I've been interested in the atonement for a number of years. Um, atonement, of course, is the work that God did to bring reconciliation between God and man. And that ought to be something that we're all very interested in. So my topic this morning is, does my understanding of the atonement matter?

Now, that's a question about theology. What do you think when you hear the word theology? How do you respond to that word? Does it sound like dusty volumes on the shelves of antiquated quiet libraries where you can hear a pin drop?

Is theology something you think of as boring? Well, the word theology comes from the Greek word theos, which means God, and logia, utterings, sayings, or oracles about God. So in Greek, theology is discourse about God. Now, that ought to be the most exciting topic imaginable.

Now, today we use the word a bit more broadly to include the study of religious belief. Maybe that's why it can be boring. Sometimes man has the ability to get kind of technical and, uh, introduce boredom into their discussions. But if we think about theology as the nature of God, we're talking about a God who outshines the creation, a God who is too beautiful for human eyes to look upon.

If God created this fascinating universe all around us, then God himself must be more fascinating than the universe. So if the spangled sky inspires wonder in us, if the craggy mountains, windswept prairies, rolling seas fill us with awe, how much greater should be our excitement to get to see the divine hand that shaped these things, the divine voice who spoke them into existence, the divine lover who functions as the divine huntsman, pursuing, fleeing humans down the years?

This is the God that we want to understand. And one way of understanding him is to think about the atonement.

Now, in theology, we have an idea that's been referred to as Deus Absconditus, the hidden God. This could be referenced out of Isaiah 45:15, where it says, "Truly, you are God who hide yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior." I love William Calper's song, "God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm."

That paints an interesting word picture for us. Can you picture Deus Absconditus striding across the sea in his seven-league boots, but just out of our eyesight, so we have to track him by tracing the patterns of crashing waves rippling outward from his footprints?

Or can you imagine chasing the storm clouds, guessing that the hidden God is riding somewhere on them?

Now, that might be an interesting word picture. But the reality is, for the true-hearted seeker, thankfully, God is not hard to find. God plays hide and seek in a sense. But much like the parent who wants his three-year-old to find him, he doesn't hide very well.

He's not on the top shelf of the closet where the child can't reach. He's just around the corner where the toddler will stumble into him.

So God hides himself. He hides well enough that those who don't want to seek him won't find him. But for everyone who seeks, the promise is that they shall find him. Because God wants to be known by us. So the concept of the hidden God, Deus Absconditus, can be set against another theological idea, the Deus Revelatus, the revealed God. God reveals himself to those who diligently seek him. His revelation is given through Jesus Christ.

He's revealed for us in the scriptures. He's revealed for us through the witness of the Spirit in our hearts.

The essence of knowing God comes through knowing Jesus Christ's Son. So if Jesus is not the exact representation of the character of the Father, then we do not know who the Father is.

We can find that in Hebrews chapter 1, "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, as in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, end up holding all things by the word of his power when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they."

So there in that passage, Jesus is said to have purged our sins by himself. And that brings us to the thought of the atonement. So the atonement is a—it's a short word to describe a big concept. It's our shorthand theological way of referring to the work of Jesus to save lost humanity and to bring peace and unity between God and man.

But how did he do this?

And does it matter what we think about it?

We want to study the atonement to deepen our appreciation for God, deepen our understanding of what he did for us. So inasmuch as it brings us closer to God, the study of the atonement is very valuable. And it is through the atonement that the hidden God becomes the revealed God.

So theology underwent something of a development at the beginning of the Christian church. I think it's interesting. If you—if you read the book of Matthew, it's fascinating how little theology is developed in the book of Matthew. Now, Matthew is, according to church history, was the earliest gospel written. And you can see that at the end of it, it doesn't even comment on anything after Jesus' ascension. So the book of Mark says that the disciples went everywhere preaching the word. The books of Luke and John were clearly written, uh, decades after Jesus went back to heaven.

But there's nothing in the book of Matthew that couldn't have been written one day or two days or one week after the ascension.

And I think that it's very likely it was written quite early. I think if Jesus went back to heaven and you had just been with him for three years, one of the first things that you would do is write down the things that he taught to make sure that they didn't slip out of your mind.

So I think it's possible that Matthew's gospel was written, at least in an early Aramaic form, almost immediately. So if you look at the message of the book of Matthew, it's basically this: Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies about a coming king. He pointed to someone. Jesus fulfills that.

Jesus says, "Do X, Y, and Z." And since Jesus is the king, as revealed by his death and resurrection, you better obey him. So that's the basic message of Matthew. It's pretty simple.

Now, when you get into this concept of theology, studying about God, you can get into things that are harder to understand, or maybe there are things that can be interpreted in more than one way.

You know, I can't think of any heresies that are sourced out of the book of Matthew. Mostly, they're sourced out of the epistles.

So that could bring up a question: should we just stick with the clear commandments and not try to think about deeper meanings? Would that be the safe way?

Well, in one sense, that would be okay. In the sense that we would obey Jesus and be the kind of people we are supposed to be, we could get along with maybe just Matthew's gospel. But think about how impoverished we would be without verses like Romans 8:35-39: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, 'For your sake we are killed all the day long. We are accounted as sheep to the slaughter.'

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Precious verses there. Now, you may not have thought about this, but those verses sit very comfortably in lists of verses that are used to justify the heresy of unconditional eternal security. But would we want to get along without those promises?

I don't think so. So although in theology we're often talking about verses that can be interpreted more than one way or debated, they are important verses with wonderful promises.

So does my understanding of the atonement matter? Well, it doesn't. Not much, as long as you're firmly committed to obeying Jesus.

But let me qualify that. Yes, it does. If your view of the atonement affects your view of God in a negative way, you might be missing out on some of the pleasures of knowing God and appreciating him for what he is.

So let me explain that.

I wrote a book called Penal Substitution on Trial to critique what has historically been the dominant Protestant way of understanding the atonement. Now, as we said earlier, the atonement exists because there is a separation between God and man.

Atonement, in its original meaning, was composed of the words at, one, and the suffix meant. So in its root meaning, atonement means at one meant. It's the result of bringing two parties together, putting them at one again.

Now, when two parties are separated, it's because one or both have left or deserted each other. So we have this separation between us and God as fallen humans. The question comes up: what needs to be changed to fix that?

Now, many Christians would no doubt say that people need to be changed. But if you look at their view of the atonement, their view is really the idea that God needs to be changed.

Now, there have been a lot of ways of understanding the atonement. There's a number of theories about how God, Jesus, brought reconciliation between God and man.

And the reason this is, is because the New Testament does not give a nice little comprehensive summary somewhere. Instead, it uses a variety of images to speak about the atonement. Sometimes we call those motifs. And it says quite a number of statements about different things that Christ did through his work on earth and his death on the cross.

So as the early church looked at those verses and thought about what Christ did, they thought of the atonement largely in a sense of Christ winning a cosmic victory over sin, death, and the devil.

That focus on Christ winning a victory has been referred to as Christus Victor, or the classic model.

Now, today, much of the Protestant world understands the atonement more in terms of something Jesus did to satisfy God. And there is a lot of debate about whether the early Christians taught this.

Of course, if you believe that that's that Jesus died to satisfy God, you're going to want to believe that that's been taught throughout history. We won't get into that debate very deeply.

But the dominant Protestant view of the atonement is called penal substitution. And here's just a simple definition from Theopedia about what penal substitution is.

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 righteousness of God, so that he could forgive sinners without compromising his own holy standard.

So 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 according to this, God needed to be paid for our sins. Jesus accomplishes that by being our substitute. Furthermore, it's God's wrath and righteousness that needs to be satisfied so he can forgive sinners. Now, that might sound pretty harmless.

So what's the problem? Well, I'd like to point out a few problems with that presentation of the gospel.

So first, this is a reductionistic view, it's a truncated gospel.

As I said earlier, the New Testament uses a variety of metaphors and images to talk about the work that Jesus did. It speaks of Jesus' sacrifice as a ransom. It speaks of him redeeming us. It speaks of him cleansing us from sin. It speaks of the defeat of Satan.

It refers to Jesus' work of sacrifice. It speaks of Jesus' priesthood and kingship. Now, the presentation of penal substitution could be rounded out to include those ideas. But as it stands, the problem that's addressed is God punished Christ so he wouldn't have to punish you.

Okay, so I think that that view is kind of a reduced explanation of what our needs are.

The problem, according to penal substitution, that needs to be addressed is our pending punishment. Okay, as sinners, we can expect that we deserve to be punished. Now, if our focus is on escaping from our pending punishment, it could actually be rather selfish. It might not be so much about getting to know God, but more about how can I escape from being punished for my sins.

What does the New Testament focus on? The New Testament focuses on the problem of eliminating the evil and corruption that has marred the world. Not so much on figuring out a legal way to escape punishment.

The angel told Mary, "He will save his people from their sins." That's what Jesus came to do. He will restore the image of God in man, and Jesus will deliver us from the power of the devil.

Now, also in penal substitution, our problem is painted as a legal one. So you're in trouble with the law. You deserve punishment. You deserve death. So of course, it makes sense that a legal answer is given. The legal answer is that Christ died to satisfy the requirements of justice or to appease God's wrath.

Now, in a bit, we'll talk about whether this legal answer even makes sense.

But for the moment, I just want to say that the New Testament presents a God who wants to restore and renew his creation. Not one who just wants to create illegal fiction whereby he can overlook people's sins.

Okay, so one of my large concerns with the idea of penal substitution is how it affects our view of the character of God. Penal substitution belongs to a family of theories that are called satisfaction theories. So why pick on one of those theories? Well, the reason I focus on penal substitution is because it's the best known of those theories. It's the most prevalent around us. And at least in my opinion, it does the greatest disservice to the Christian faith.

Now, satisfaction is a legal word, and it basically means compensation or reparation for loss or injury. So satisfaction theories are based on the idea that the atonement is basically needed to satisfy God.

Did you catch that? Let me restate that. Basically, the problem is on God's side. His justice needs to be satisfied. His wrath needs to be appeased or something like that.

In short, something in God's attitude or in God's universe needs to be changed.

Now, the consistent testimony of Scripture, I believe, is that the change that is needed is on man's side. When Jesus was born, it was God's declaration of peace on earth, goodwill toward man. But man did not yet have peace in his heart and goodwill toward God.

Our hearts need to be changed. Our souls need to be sanctified. Our sins need to be washed away. We need to be reconciled to God.

Now, can God forgive without receiving payment?

The earliest clear defense of what is called the satisfaction theory comes from a church leader in the 11th and 12th centuries named Anselme.

Now, in Anselm's scheme or idea, sin greatly dishonors God. When God commands us to forgive without repayment, it wouldn't be fitting for God to forgive us without some restoration of his lost honor. So by Jesus willingly suffering, he restores God's lost honor, which frees God to forgive us.

So here's a quote from his book that he wrote. And Anselm's book is a conversation between him and his friend Bozo. So Anselm says, "Let us return and consider whether it were proper for God to put away sins by compassion alone, without any payment of the honor taken from him."

Bozo says, "I do not see why it is not proper." Anselm says, "To remit sin in this manner is nothing else than not to punish. And since it is not right to cancel sin without compensation or punishment, if it be not punished, then it is passed by undischarged. And truly, such compassion on the part of God is wholly contrary to the divine justice, which allows nothing but punishment as the recompense of sin.

Therefore, as God cannot be inconsistent with himself, his compassion cannot be of this nature." So God can't be consistent with himself to forgive and not punish somehow.

So I believe the testimony of Scripture is that God commands us to forgive without receiving any payment because that's what he himself does. And you could find that idea in the parable in Matthew 18, where the king forgives a servant of an enormous sum of 10,000 talents, and then expects that servant to forgive another servant who owes him a very small sum to show his appreciation for what he has been forgiven.

So is mercy or justice greater? In James 2:13, we read that mercy triumphs over judgment. Penal substitution paints a picture of a God who cannot show mercy unless he punishes. In crude expressions, this often sounds like God is hungering to punish and will not be satisfied unless he does.

Kind of like the song we sing sometimes, "Till on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied."

If God couldn't show mercy without first having his wrath satisfied, it's small wonder that many have gotten the idea that God is more just than he is merciful, somehow pitting the idea of justice against mercy.

So many people have gotten an idea of a distant Father who is not so merciful, and somehow Jesus comes between us and God's wrath.

Unfortunately, instead of hearing, "For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son," many have somehow gotten the idea as, "For God so hated the world, he killed his only begotten Son." Now, if you think that's overstating the case, compare that to this quote from a preacher named R.C. Sproul who said, "God the Father turned his back on the Son, cursing him to the pit of hell while he hung on the cross.

Here was the Son's descent into hell. Here the fury of God raged against him. His scream was the scream of the damned for us."

Now, many have criticized God for doing something that seems unjust. How can it be just to punish the innocent in the place of the guilty? How would that somehow undo wrong or atone for sin?

To many people, this makes God look foolish. If indeed the punishment of the innocent cannot atone for the guilty, and if in fact that would be immoral to do, to punish an innocent person instead of the guilty, then we may be bringing God's name into disrepute if we teach it.

Here's an example. It's an atheist named Michael Schermer. And in a debate titled, "Does God Exist?" he commented, "God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. This is barking mad."

I had a conversation one time with an atheist. I tried to say something about salvation to her, and she said, "I think this whole vicarious salvation is thinking horrible. Let's take someone innocent and torture her to death because someone else did something horrible."

The 19th-century writer George MacDonald called penal substitution a lie, which is to blame for much non-acceptance of the gospel in this and other lands.

Now, if you've just been taught the gospel this way, it may never have occurred to you that there'd be something wrong with it. Maybe it's hard to imagine why that would cause people problems to think about, but for many, it has.

I'd like to read a little bit more about what George MacDonald said on this subject. He said, "I know the root of all that can be said on this subject. The notion is embedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brains. And if I reject it, I know what I reject.

For the love of God, my heart rose early against the low invention. Strange that in a Christian land it should need to be said that to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free is unjust. It wrongs the innocent, the guilty, and God himself.

It would be the worst of all wrongs to the guilty to treat them as innocent. Behold, a vice is a piece of spiritual charlatanry, fit only for a fraudulent jail delivery. If the wicked ought to be punished, it were the worst possible perversion of justice to take a righteous being, however strong, and punish him instead of the sinner, however weak, to the poorest idea of justice and punishment. It is essential of the sinner, and no other than the sinner should receive the punishment.

I say justice cannot demand that which is unjust, and the whole thing is unjust. God is absolutely just, and there is no deliverance from his justice, which is one with his mercy.

The device is an absurdity, a grotesquely deformed absurdity. To represent the living God as a party to such a style of action is to veil with a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy. The face whose glory can be seen only in the face of Jesus. To put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God, merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty.

Rather than believe such ugly folly of him, whose very name is enough to make those that know him heave the breath of the heart panting for the water brooks. Rather than think of him, what in a man would make me avoid him at the risk of my life? I would say there is no God.

Let us neither eat nor drink that we may die. For lo, this is not our God. This is not he for whom we have waited. But I have seen his face and heard his voice in the face and voice of Jesus Christ. And I say that this is our God, the very one whose being the creator makes it an infinite gladness to be the created.

I will not have the God of the scribes and the Pharisees, whether Jewish or Christian, Protestant, Roman, or Greek. But thy Father of Christ, he is my God. Did not the Lord cast himself into the eternal gulf of evil, yawning between the children and the Father? Did he not bring the Father to us? Let us look on our eternal sigher in the face of his true Son, that we might have that in our hearts which alone could make us love him, a true sight of him.

Did he not insist on the one truth of the universe, the one saving truth, that God was just what he was? Did he not hold on to that assertion to the last in the face of contradiction and death? Did he not thus lay down his life persuading us to lay down ours at the feet of the Father?

Has not his very life by which he died passed into those who have received him and recreated theirs so that now they live with a life which alone is life? Did he not foil and slay evil by letting all the waves and billows of its horrid sea break upon him, go over him and die without rebound, spend their rage, fall defeated and cease?

Verily, he made atonement. We sacrifice to God? It is God who sacrifices his own Son to us. There was no way else of getting the gift of himself into our hearts. Jesus sacrificed himself to his Father and the children to bring them together.

All the love on the side of the Father and the Son, all the selfishness on the side of the children. If the joy that alone makes life worth living, the joy that God is such as Christ, be a true thing in my heart, how can I but believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ? I believe it heartily as God means it.

So how do we think of the character of God? Now, there's another thing I want to talk about, and that is how many of what I would call heresies, false beliefs in the church today, find their source from penal substitution, or at least penal substitution is used in the explanation of heresies.

So many people believe in what we call easy beliefism or cheap grace, unconditional eternal security, ideas about what it means to be a Christian. And I don't think that having a correct understanding of the atonement is necessary for salvation.

So I don't want anybody to get that impression. Many very godly and very zealous people have held views about this that I think are mistaken. I'll just quote from George MacDonald again. He said, "If you say the best of men have held the opinions I stigmatize, I answer, some of the best of men have indeed held these theories. And of men who have held them, I have loved and honored some heartily and humbly. But because of what they were, not because of what they thought.

And they were what they were in virtue of their obedient faith, not of their opinion. They were not better men because of holding these theories. In virtue of knowing God by obeying his Son, they rose above the theories they had never looked in the face and so had never recognized as evil."

Now, the Protestant Reformation taught salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

Now, that statement is almost true if it's understood in the right way. But when the reformers put the word alone in there, their concern was to make very clear that how a man lived, in other words, his works had nothing to do with his salvation.

But how would you defend this idea? Well, Protestantism was ready with an answer, and that ties back to how one understands the death of Christ on the cross.

And many Christians take a view of the atonement that allows them, as they think, to bypass the hard path of discipleship, suffering, and self-denial. And much of the story is true, but it's the way that it's put together that is a problem.

So I just review kind of how this salvation story is often presented. You stand guilty and deserving of punishment. You deserve hellfire. Okay, this is true. God wants to save you. However, God's justice must be satisfied. He cannot leave sin unpunished, or he would be unjust. Sin deserves his wrath.

God took your punishment upon himself in the person of Jesus. Someone had to be punished for sin. God took your punishment so you wouldn't have to take it. When Jesus hung on the cross, God the Father poured out his wrath against sin upon him.

Jesus took the punishment that was due for your sin. He paid your debt. As we sometimes sing, he paid a debt he did not owe. Although, as I mentioned earlier in Matthew 18, it's actually a forgiven debt, not a paid debt.

Now, as I said, a lot of that is true. We're very close to the truth. But it is a legal view of salvation. It's a declaration in a courtroom, so to speak, of your guilt and a declaration that Jesus is paying your penalty.

But since this is a legal view, a change in man is not necessarily required by this system. Now, Protestants and evangelicals teach that this salvation or debt payment is accessed by faith alone. And it's very important to them to say that good works have nothing to do with salvation, that it's only belief. So many people will preach that you just say a sinner's prayer.

Jesus' righteousness is counted to you. Now your sins go to Jesus.

And now that Jesus' righteousness is counted to you, God sees you as holy.

Doesn't matter what you do. When God looks at you, he simply sees the righteousness of Christ covering you. Your debt's been paid. Because your debt has been paid, you can't be lost.

Paid-off debts can't be reinstated. But again, in Matthew 18, when the first servant did not forgive the second, the Lord of that servant counted his original debt against him and said to deliver him into the tormentors until he had paid the uttermost farthing.

That was possible because the debt was not paid, but forgiven.

Now, I don't want to caricature anyone here in their views. And many people who believe in penal substitution will say that if a person truly believes, good works will follow.

However, it's pretty common that even if a person sins a lot or doesn't seem very sanctified, we tend to fall back on the idea, well, we aren't saved by works. So good works are often seen negatively.

And I don't want to caricature anyone. As I said, there are many Protestants and evangelicals who teach that if you don't live a holy life, that's simply proof that you were never truly saved. But this theology almost always has trickle-down effects.

Here's what one Christian wrote. The teaching I heard always appeared to me as though it had to be law or grace, belief or works, one or the other. Among my friends, keeping the commandments was always called works salvation. The fear of being labeled works Christians showed in the lives of most Christians I knew, despite the commandments of Jesus and the admonitions of the apostles to do and not to do certain things.

So somehow the idea that if you're trying to live a holy life, you're trying to be justified by your works, just trickles down to this idea that how you live is not very important.

On the podcast Anabaptist Perspectives, recently, Brother Daniel Willis shared about a Bible study in a church where Galatians 5 is being discussed. And there in Galatians 5, Paul says that seeking to be justified by circumcision will cause you to fall from grace.

The question was raised, what's the circumcision of today that will cut you off from Christ? And someone said, baptism. If you get baptized and you think it will make you closer to Christ, you'll be cut off from Christ.

Another person said, it's like if I look at less pornography to please God, I'll be cut off from Christ.

So maybe you think, well, you're really cherry-picking some extreme statements there. And I agree. Maybe that last statement was a little extreme.

But really, I do think this attitude is very prevalent around us. Many churches will teach that if you say, should you do this or that? No, but we aren't saved by good works. Should you do this or that? No, but we aren't saved by good works.

One pastor wrote that he knows the head covering is not biblical because every church that teaches the head covering is wrong on the gospel. He said they all teach that you must repent to be saved, but the Bible teaches that you have to believe to be saved.

That's how some think about it.

And views of that type spring easily from statements that are found in many denominational confessions. Here's an example. The Lutheran Church Formula of Concord says, if God has elected me to salvation, I cannot be condemned no matter what I do.

The Southern Baptist writing 2000, Baptist Faith and Message says, believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves. Yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.

So anytime theology ends up in such unbiblical places, we need to figure out where it first departed from the path. And I contend that a faulty view of why Jesus died is instrumental in the formation and defense of such theology.

The view that Jesus died to take our punishment distorts our view about how God deals with sin, what he is concerned about, and it easily leads to all kinds of doctrinal problems.

Doctrine of penal substitution implies that man's problem is he is headed for punishment. Someone needs to take this punishment. Jesus does that, and this misses so much of what the New Testament teaches.

Why would it matter whether it was God who needed changed or we? Because if the problem is on God's side, then maybe I don't need to change. I think that's a pretty enticing idea to the flesh, but the consistent testimony of Scripture is that it is people who need to be changed.

So how do we understand the atonement? The New Testament, as I said, makes many different statements about what Jesus did. And it can be hard to put these together and develop a picture in our mind of what's going on.

I think part of this is we're often not used to thinking in spiritual categories. So if I went to a jungle and met someone who had never seen an automobile and tried to explain to them how a car works, it would be very difficult to explain how the carburetor injects gas into the engine, how the engine turns the transmission, and the transmission turns the wheels, because they would have no picture of that in their mind.

And I think that as we think about spiritual things, often we run up against that problem. We struggle to imagine and understand the kinds of things that are being said. So I'm going to go through how I understand the atonement. I'll try to do this slowly. And if you struggle to understand what I'm saying, it's probably because I don't understand it very well myself, and I'm trying to grapple with what Jesus did for our salvation.

But the first thing that needs to be said is that we were dead as humans, dead in trespasses and sins, the Scripture says. Our basic need then is for life.

Christ came to bring us the life of God. Jesus said in John, as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself, John 5:26. He also said, I have come that they may have life, and they may have it more abundantly.

Ephesians 2:1 says, and you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins. So how did he make us alive? Well, it's through his Spirit. When his Spirit comes into us, it makes us alive. It's what we call the new birth.

When we accept Christ, we receive a new life, his life in us. That's why we call it being born again. Now, this happens by his Spirit being joined to our Spirit. 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, he that is joined unto the Lord is one Spirit.

If Christ's Spirit is alive and is joined to our Spirit, it will infuse his life into our Spirit, even like God breathed the breath of life into Adam. Now, it's no accident that people in the Old Testament were not born again.

David, Abraham, Moses, they were men who served God and loved him, but they were not born again in the way that the Christian is. They didn't have God's Spirit permanently residing in them, joined to their Spirit in this one Spirit union that 1 Corinthians 6:17 speaks of.

Now, the Spirit did come into them. When it did, signs, miracles, prophecies followed. But this appears to be a different phenomenon than the indwelling Spirit who came at Pentecost.

When Jesus spoke to his disciples in John 14, he referred to the Holy Spirit, and he said, he is with you and shall be in you. So prior to that, the disciples went around preaching the gospel, doing miracles, serving Jesus. But the Holy Spirit was not in them in the way that it would be after Pentecost. Jesus said, if I don't go away, he cannot come.

So when Jesus went to heaven, he was glorified. His glory that he had before he emptied himself and came as a baby was restored to him. Now, in some way, that glorification enabled his Holy Spirit to come and dwell inside of every Christian.

Now, if we don't understand how that works, we shouldn't be too surprised. But Peter says the outpouring of his Holy Spirit was a result of Jesus' exaltation, which I take to be the same as his glorification. He said in Acts 2:33, therefore being exalted to the right hand of the Father and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this, which you now see and hear.

Ezekiel 36:26, speaking of this new covenant reality, God says, I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you, and I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

So why didn't people in the Old Testament experience the new birth and the indwelling Holy Spirit? Well, I believe it's because God's Spirit first had to be joined to man's Spirit in the body of Jesus.

The incarnation is about Jesus coming in a human body so he can become the last Adam. Now, when he became a man, he was able to start the new humanity and be its head. Even as Adam started the old humanity and was its head.

The image of God in us has been marred through sin. Christ restores that image.

But the way he does it is by taking man's flesh and overcoming sin in a human body. We need to overcome sin, but we can't do it ourselves. So Christ overcomes sin through his life, through his suffering and death, and then he shares himself with us. That's how we share in his victory over sin. We do it by his power.

And that's why the Scriptures talk about coming into Christ or putting on Christ or being part of his body.

Paul says, we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones.

So by way of maybe a crude analogy, at this point in my life, I'm never going to win the Boston Marathon. It's not possible for me to do that. But if the world's best runner wins it, and then he chooses to share the $50,000 first prize with me, I could experience the benefits of winning the Boston Marathon through him.

So the reason that we can overcome sin is because we become Christ. Now, you might say, isn't that going too far? But notice 1 Corinthians 12:12, for as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is Christ. Christ is one body with many members, and you and I, if we know him, are in that body.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we become members of the Trinity or we become God or something like that. I don't think it's speaking that way, but it's speaking of Christ's Spirit dwelling in us and us becoming part of him as a consequence.

Paul says, we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

Now, by the way, if you are in Christ, you are saved. If you are out of Christ, you are lost. You don't get unsaved and resaved many times in one day just because you stumble. But since salvation comes through being in Christ and sharing in his divine life, if you leave, reject, or deny Christ, you are no longer saved.

John 15 speaks of how branches that don't abide in the vine are cut off. Now, the Bible says that Jesus' blood washes away our sins, and this is what it takes to keep us in fellowship with God. Our sins separate us from God, but if God keeps washing us, we can remain in relationship with him.

Now, this washing initially happens at conversion and baptism, but it's ongoing according to 1 John 1:7. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another in the blood of Jesus Christ's son, cleanses us from all sin.

Now, we don't know how the blood cleanses us, but surely it's through the operation of the Holy Spirit. As the Scripture says, according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I find this hard to articulate. I guess that's because I still understand it so little. But Jesus, by becoming human flesh and blood, overcame sin in the flesh and shares that overcoming power with us. Now, there is another aspect of this, and that is that in dying, Jesus overcame death and bound the devil. Now, how does that work?

Well, Jesus taught us to overcome evil with good. If you respond to evil with evil, evil spreads and grows. Just look at any conflict or war. When one person strikes, another strikes back, and the war is on. But if you turn the other cheek, as Jesus taught, you absorb evil, you choke it at its source.

On the cross, evil battered against Jesus, but he didn't fight back. And in so doing, he broke the power of evil. If Jesus had responded with one word of hate or one sinful response, the devil would have won.

But Jesus died an undeserving death. His death was unjust, unlawful. Because of that, it was not possible for death to hold him.

He was no lawful prey of death, so it could not keep him in its power. On the third day, he rose again. As he broke open the grave in Hades, he defeated death. We read this in 2 Timothy 1:10.

The gospel has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. And this is so important that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, if Christ is not arisen, your faith is futile. You are still in your sins. Then also, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

So what does he mean by that? Well, since our life comes from Christ, if Christ hasn't taken back that life by rising from the dead, then we couldn't possibly have his life.

Our life in Christ is dependent on his resurrection. Now, under penal substitution, what's needed is Jesus' suffering. So theoretically, Jesus could have stayed dead, yet we could have still been saved because under that idea that what we need is someone to suffer and be punished for us to satisfy the Father's wrath.