THE CENTRE OF THE ATONEMENT
The Children of Israel during many of their Temple ceremonies aimed to offer tributes of worship to the exalted Lord of heaven and earth the one who was the redeemer of Israel. As the people gathered for their feasts to come before the Lord they had other aims too. At the very centre of their worship at the altar, they looked for a word from God to their own soul. They perhaps even hoped that God would show His face. Some of the Psalms are full of expressions of repentance, hope and thanksgiving, but also tinged with longings that were intimate and personal. Life was poor and empty for the children of Israel, so coming to the temple at Jerusalem for the feasts was a cause for excitement and a thrill as they joined thousands of others to worship God. Just like the bride in the Song of Solomon they yearned to meet Him again - at the altar of sacrifice. God on His part longed to meet His people in spite of their unfaithfulness. It was surely the sacrifices that showed to the people His forgiveness for their sins. The Ark was a sign of His presence with them; this is what the Lord's Supper means to us to-day in the communion service. It was during this time that they confessed their sins and were cleansed, and were received back into fellowship with God. When Christ died on the cross the temple curtain was torn away from the Holy of Holies (Matt. 27:51) and Jesus Christ made access so that all could come into the presence of God. The temple, altar and sacrifice have all now been replaced. What the people longed for at the temple feasts is now given in a better way. Today the cross is where we come and meet Jesus as sinners the very centre of the Atonement. The Bible, Israel's history and the cross itself teaches us that we find wrath as well as love in the encounter between the holy God and sinners. We tend to think of God's wrath as upon those who reject God's love and salvation. His wrath is against all ungodliness and unrighteousness and He cannot even look upon sin. By this He is not being vindictive. We have to remember that in the Old Testament the wrath of God was on the child of Bathsheba because of David's adultery with her. (2 Sam. 11:2-5, 2 Sam. 12:14). Yet God's love was active to destroy evil and darkness and to the one who seeks to kill and destroy Satan. We see the cross God's longing for fellowship with His people. F D Maurice quotes "Since nowhere is the contrast between infinite love and infinite evil brought before us as it is there (i.e. in the cross) we have the fullest right to affirm that the cross exhibits the wrath of God against sin, and the endurance of that wrath by His well-beloved son. For wrath against that which is unlovely is not the counteracting force to love, but the attribute of it. Without it love would only be a name and not a reality". In the light of the meeting at the cross in our name with the holy love of God, that we are to understand Jesus' struggle in Gethsemane and the 'Amen' with which he accepted the cup He had to drink. P T Forsyth takes great pains to point out that the work of Christ was not only to confess human sin, but something of a more infinite value. God's holiness in His judgment upon sin. His confession was not made merely in words, but in a more wonderful way, by His own life and death He expressed God's holiness against all sin, cursing it, judging it to its very death. During Christ's life here on earth we are able through the Scriptures to see His meeting with both love and wrath, in this we are included, our reconciliation with God as already accomplished. We have to understand that the teaching of the New Testament that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus involves all mankind. In His only begotten Son, God has, as it were, drawn into Himself not only the individual person, but also all human nature. "For God so loved the world" (John 3:16). Jesus in His faithfulness in
fulfilment of His Father's will took the curse of sin and the condemnation of sin and the cross of sin, so that we might through Him be drawn to the Father. "For 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" (1 Peter 3:18).
The Structure of the Atonement
Our view of the Atonement is that Christ died for our sins to bring us to God' and have seen that God comes to meet us in Christ. We could almost admit that here was the centre of the Atonement, and yet the atonement is much bigger than the centre, it has to have as a doctrine some form of penal substitution in order to have a structure. This doctrine has over the years come in for harsh criticism. Our attention is drawn away from the real battle between God and evil, God and man and God and His Son, to some fixed rules of procedure, and in doing this abstract justice is put on the throne of the universe. We have to disregard this sort of thinking as it takes us in the realm of liberal doctrine and takes Christ's atoning work and makes nothing of it. But we are justified in seeing God's works in the Atonement as having to do with the upholding and manifestation of the law. God who was at the cross when His Son was paying the price that the law required proclaimed an inflexible regard for the law. God's law and God's love are very closely linked throughout the scriptures. On Mount Sinai the law was given to His people in love in order that they could come closer to Him. The law given to Moses and written on tablets of stone was enclosed in love. At Calvary we see love at the centre yet enclosed in the law. Jesus came to fulfil the law.
In the Old Testament God's justice is exalted as an aspect of His goodness and love, Isaiah exalts Him as a just God and Saviour (Is. 45:21). The psalmist seeks deliverance from sin and distress (Ps. 18:6, 118:5, 120:1) by His righteousness as well as His love. In redeeming us God as ruler and judge seeks to give us liberty and a freedom to know Him, to experience His love and to live for Him and with Him now. In Psalm 103 it stresses much of God's forgiving love, His mercy, and fatherhood, and also speaks of His crowning us with loving kindness, and working 'vindication and justice' for each one of us. We must not regard God as being enclosed in an iron structure of law totally binding Him, dictating what He must and must not do. God has the sovereign right to do as He pleases with complete freedom. John Owen insisted that it was false to assert that God could not have mercy unless satisfaction was made by His son. Scripture, he said, affirms no such thing. We can with confidence regard justice as the law of God's being, and of His love. It is grounded into His very nature. It is true to say that God could not ignore sin, because He cannot ignore His holiness. His way in the atonement is an expression of Himself. We can truly see that there was a necessity for the atonement, and that necessity arises from within God Himself, and it is hidden from us until God reveals Himself to us in the person of His son, then we see and come to understand the need of atonement. The law, which we see, related to God's activity in the atonement is not prior to love, nor is love bound by it. God created human life out of His love and in order to reflect His image. Human life and that love is only enjoyed in contact and obedience to His revealed Word. This gives stability, order and meaning in which love can find its fulfilment. This is not to say that we can disregard the penal aspect of Christ's sufferings on the cross. We said earlier that it put these sufferings beyond our understanding or our power of experience. According to the New Testament Jesus tasted death in its full horror, death with the 'sting of sin' fully active within it. It is precisely such a death that forms the 'wages of sin' and we are spared this because He took it all. He indeed entered into the region of the penalty and curse of sin, and this is where we cannot or desire to follow. It is sometimes suggested that in retaining the idea that Christ's sufferings are penal we need not and should not think in terms of retribution. Christ's sufferings some argue are penal only in the sense that He was punished as an example to deter others from sinning and so help God to maintain the moral order of the universe. Such a view does not truly reflect the truth of the New Testament, Jesus in the declaration on the cross of God's righteousness bore our sins in His own body. To use the cross merely as a deterrent without relation to what is to be done about each and all our own individual sins cannot bring a release or comfort to our lives that the preaching of the cross conveys. There is no doubt that the human conscience when it has been touched by the gospel and realises that it needs pardon and tries to make amends, more often thinks in terms of an offering or some punishment to purchase this forgiveness. This idea is propagated by all other religions except New Testament Christianity. In the Old Testament God insisted on sacrifice to make amends for sin. In the New Testament Jesus was the total sacrifice for sin as the writer to the Hebrews says "By the which we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all" (Heb. 10:10).
Christ our Substitute
There are many statements of what we term as penal doctrine that give the picture of Christ brought before God the judge as the one man innocent of all sin. The sins of all mankind are imputed to Him; He in every sense takes the place of all who are under a condemned sentence, and takes the full brunt of their sins so that they can go free. Such a picture attempts to do justice to the New Testament texts, which speak of Christ paying our penalty, and also not simply on our behalf but in our place. There is a problem in thinking of Jesus as our substitute unless we put to one side its legal connection. We must think in terms of an exchange that Jesus was able to make within the union He was involved in, in the Incarnation. Throughout His Incarnate life He involved Himself with the consequences of our sins in such a way that, always resisting, always hating it, yet He took its burden and guilt totally upon Himself. This thought of Christ making an exchange for us, comes through the New Testament writers and was a strong view in the earliest views of the church. It came to the fore during the reformation after suffering a lapse because of ignorance by the Roman church. We can see in retrospect why people of His days on earth felt that He was one with them, and that they in a sense belonged to Him. This was and has been the impression in every generation, apart from those who set themselves against Him. The church during its forming of the doctrine of the person of Christ tried to explain this. It affirmed that when the Logos became Incarnate He became one with us, and did this by taking our human nature. This we cannot fully understand, yet His uniqueness of the humanity of Jesus seals the bond with each member of the human race. This helps us to see how He can stand before God in our name.
Perhaps the people who were drawn to Jesus not because they felt He was one with them, but for the opposite, that He was so different from them. He was holy, righteous and undefiled, quite unlike anyone else. They said on one occasion "Never man spoke like this man" (John 7:46). "He taught as one having Authority, not as the Scribes" (Mat. 7:29). There is no way that He could be the same as they were, otherwise He could never have brought salvation. No one else could have atoned for the sins of humanity, only the unique Son of God and Lamb of God could stand in our place, the place of condemnation. The church recognised that His human nature was impersonal in the sense that it was our common human nature assumed by the Logos, and that He was distinctly individual in all respects. He indeed is our substitute and our representative.
Christ the Victor
There are those who would try to deny that there is a devil and in particular a personal devil. Jesus often 'cast out demons' i.e. "And His fame went throughout Syria; and they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and He healed them" (Mat. 4:24). We could have given credence to the thought of the mystical if the scriptures referred only to the medical illnesses by saying that the people of the day were ignorant and didn't understand the cures and the magical was their way of coming to terms in expressing what they saw. It was Jesus Himself who interpreted the cross as conflict with the evil one. Satan was the one who did everything in his power to try to keep Jesus from the cross (Mat. 4:3-11). Jesus knew that He had to go to the cross to defeat Satan and all his evil designs over humanity. The whole of the Atonement was designed and planned by God and forces us to regard evil as a personal and sinister power, with a ruthless and destructive will, and its ultimate goal is to usurp God. Evil was overcome by Jesus, evil is in retreat. But it was overcome in such a way that we too must watch and pray against it with the same vigilance as Jesus did. The cross is the proof that the victory was won by Jesus, and that victory can be ours also. The victory of the cross was very costly, His pain and agony proves it was not cheap or easy, even over an enemy so desperate because his final doom is sealed. For many centuries the church gave full attendance to the preaching of the atonement as the victory over the powers of evil. It was emphasised by Martin Luther and Calvin, and the Puritans expounded it as an essential aspect of Christ's atoning work. It was John Owen who said, "As the judge was to be satisfied so the jailer was to be conquered". Jesus not only deals with our past debts and legal status, but ensures that we are free to follow Him.