Chapter 18. The Divine Exchange.
SUMMARY SO FAR:
In the previous chapters we saw that the Early Church came to a certain understanding of the Work of Christ that became foundational for understanding the whole of the Gospel. The key idea was that Christ came to be mediator of a New Covenant between God and man. We saw that in the Bible the idea of mediation is as follows:
1. The Mediator is not an independent third party but must, in himself, embody the two parties needing reconciliation, otherwise he cannot be the mediator. Thus Christ, being already the Word, God the Son, took on human form so that he could embody both God and man.
2. As the “God-man” he was then able to work mediation. Here again the Bible idea is different from ours’. The parties at war do nothing to bring about the mediation, but the Mediator has to fulfil all the conditions required of both parties and bring the Covenant to a state of completion. The Mediator has to work the mediation on behalf of the two parties.
3. The Mediator then can offer the completed covenant to the parties involved as a gift. They simply receive the covenant already in place, already set up. They receive it as a gift.
4. In the last chapter we saw how Christ removed the obstacle to relationship with God (i.e. sin) through his death on the Cross. He satisfied the demand of God’s holiness that sin be punished by becoming our substitute and taking the punishment for us.
The New Covenant is completed, sealed.
T.F. Torrance:
“..the mediating action of Christ was twofold - God to man and man to God, and both divine and human activity must be regarded as issuing from one person. In order that there be perfect mediation it requires that both sides in the mediation be fully reconciled and fulfil all that is required of them. Because man is already fallen, God took on himself fallen humanity in order that he might fulfil our part of the mediation, thus providing a perfect salvation for us.”
Athanasius:
“As mediator Jesus ministered the things of God to man and the things of man to God.”
The result of this is that Christ fulfilled both the divine and human sides of the covenant.
The covenant is completed, sealed - Christ has fulfilled all of the requirements of the covenant both from the Divine side and from the human side.
* On the Divine side of the covenant Christ saves us – only God can save. Christ, as God, saves us.
* On the Human Side Christ fulfills all that is required of man for the covenant. Only man can be saved and Christ acts as our representative man. He is saved “for us”.
So not only was Christ acting for God in the Covenant, he was acting for us. The human responsibility for completing the covenant was undertaken by him. He was our representative.
Torrance:
“Jesus Christ constitutes in his … humanity a vicarious way of response for ALL mankind… His response avails for all of us and we may share in it through the Spirit of Christ, who he freely gives us…Therefore we do not approach God in our own right or merit but only “in Christ”. It is his mediating work that God responds to, not our works... Jesus thus fulfilled the covenant from both sides - he is “our God”, and he is “God's people.”
Acting as mediator, Christ fulfilled all that was required for both parties for the mediation to be successful.
The Church has always understood this to be true. The New Covenant was completed, sealed, by Christ 2000 years ago and now we receive it as a gift. It is grace not works.
The important thought I want to pick up here is the idea that Jesus was our representative. He was saved “for us”. The salvation he brings to us, then, is already completed; we receive it as a gift. He has already done for us everything that needs to be done on the human side so that we can experience the blessing of this salvation. To say otherwise would be to say that the covenant is not sealed, is not complete, that Jesus failed in his attempt to purchase us our salvation. And this would be a horrible thought because it would mean that mankind has no hope.
But the truth is, Jesus did perfectly complete all that was required so that the covenant would be operative for us.
One of the aspects of salvation that we need is a change in our inner nature. As we saw when we looked at the Fall and its results mankind was fundamentally damaged on the inside, there was a complete reversal of the human personality. Theologians call this “the Broken image” referring to the fact that the image of God in us was shattered by sin. Part of what salvation means is that God wants to restore his image in us. He wants to conform us to the image of Christ, who is the image of God.
In this chapter I want to touch on two ideas:
1. Not only did Christ take our sins; he also took our sinful nature.
2. The work of Christ exchanged all of our brokenness due to our fallenness for the image of God.
CHRIST TOOK ON (“ASSUMED”) OUR SIN NATURE:
The Teaching of the Church Fathers:
If we are to understand the work of Christ we need to understand what the Fathers of the Church taught concerning it.
The Fathers taught as follows (This, in part, is a summary of the ideas of St Athanasius’ book, “On the Incarnation of the Word”):
1. In Creation all things were made from “nothing”(Genesis 1:1-3, Romans 4:17). They were given existence and form by the Word of God (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 1:2). Mankind was thus created by the Word of God (“Let us make man…” Genesis 1:26) such that the nature of mankind was grounded in the Word of God. In this way man was made “in the image of God”, being grounded in the Word of God who is Himself the image of God (Colossians 1:15). Thus we derived our “image” from him who is the image of God.
2. However with the sin of Adam, the Fall, mankind broke free from the Word of God as his ground and source. Through disobedience to the word (the command) we broke free from the Word (The Divine Lawgiver). We “fell away” from the Word which/who gave us form and substance and are now in a state where we hang suspended above “nothingness”. We are in danger of falling totally into nothingness, the nothingness from which the world was originally created. The image of God in us is shattered. By being divorced from the Word, who gives us the image, we lose access to the image and so we live lives that deny the image.
3. The human problem is that we are now cut off from the Word, the ground and source of our being and we have no way of re-establishing contact with that Word, if left to ourselves. Therefore God, in his love, stepped into our situation by sending his Son, the Word of God, to earth as a human being to reunite humankind with the Word of God. He did this so that we could again find our being and purpose in God. It was fitting that the Word of God, who was the ground of the creation made from nothing in the beginning, should enter into that same creation as a man and reclaim that creation from the curse of nothingness (vanity) it was under, for the glory of God.
4. To do this the Word, the Son of God, became man (Philippians 2:6-8). Retaining fully his divine nature (as the Word) he took on (“assumed”) our fallen, broken humanity. Thus he had two natures, human and divine,each perfectly preserved and fully intact in the one person. This is what we call “The Incarnation” from the Latin words meaning, “to be in the flesh”, i.e. a body.
5. Then in every stage of life, being as we are in the world, he was fully tempted, but instead of sinning (as Adam did) at each point of test he brought to bear his Divine nature (the Word) onto the human situation so that our human nature was again connected to the Word of God.
Hebrews 4:15.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet was without sin.”
The word “tempted” here, in the Greek, means simply “tested”. The English word “tempt” originally meant “test”. It had no connotation of evil. Through its use in the English Bible where the test of faith leads to a pass (doing the will of God) or a failure (sin) it came to mean “to lure to do evil”. But that is not the meaning of the word really. Here it is used in its original sense. Jesus was tested:
* In every stage of life – from conception to adulthood and then (physical) death.
* In every area of life – all of the areas that we as human beings struggle with – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.
* In every sort of life experience that we can possibly experience – love, betrayal, death of a loved one, friendship, play, work – you name it, he experienced it.
In every one of those tests, faced with the possibility of obeying the Divine Word in him or following fallen human nature, he chose to follow the Word of God and so he never sinned.
In doing this he regrafted the nature of man to the Word of God as it was in the beginning. (This, of course, assumes that the human nature he began with was not grafted to the Word when he started the process, i.e. his human nature was what we would call “fallen”.) Through this process of “re-identifying” humanity with the Word the image of God in mankind was restored. The fallen human nature was exchanged for the Divine nature, the Word. This exchange happened “in Christ”, in his own being. The Fathers called this “The Divine Exchange”.
6. By the end of his life on earth this fallen human nature he had perfectly converted back into the image of God grounded in the Word. Human nature was now totally sanctified, grounded in the Word of God.
Thus the words of Jesus in John 14:30 would have deep meaning:
John 14:30.
“I will not speak with you much longer, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me, …”
Satan has a hold on us when there is areas of our life that are not sanctified – not grounded in the Word of God and tested in that Word. Satan had no hold on Jesus because every area of life had been aligned with God’s Word and tested. And in every test Jesus had remained true to the Word. Thus every area of human life was again regrounded in the Word of God – a conversion in the inner man had taken place.
7. This perfect man he was then able to offer as a sacrifice for sin on our behalf, dealing weith the two aspects of the sin problem, our guilt and our fallen nature. Thus he paid the penalty for sin (1 John 3:5) and put to death the old fallen Adamic nature once and for all (2 Corinthians 5:14).
Romans 8:3
“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ….”
* Christ came in “the likeness of sinful flesh”, i.e. in the same sort of stuff we are made of.
* In that “likeness” he was an “offering for sin”.
* As a result “he condemned sin in sinful man”.
In other words the power of sin in our lives has been overcome through what Christ did on the Cross.
There is a sense in which the Cross was the final victory. Though Christ had, throughout his life, worked a process of conversion in his inner being, it was only with the Cross, the death and resurrection, that this conversion was fixed eternally and able to be made available to others. The Cross was the crux.
8. Now, Christ having been raised from the dead, this new humanity-in-the-image-of-God is offered to us as a gift. We too can be converted in our inner nature by believing and receiving the Word of God.
T.F. Torrance:
“Since, in Jesus, God has come into our human being and united our human nature with his own, divine nature, then atoning reconciliation takes place within the personal Being of the Mediator. His person and work are one. What he does is not separate from his personal being. I.e. the work of Christ does not take place outside of Christ but within him, within the incarnate constitution of his person as Mediator. Redemption is thus linked with the incarnation...
“In Jesus Christ, the Son of God became incarnate within our fallen, guilt-laden humanity. Through his own atoning self-sacrifice and self-consecration, he did away with our evil and healed and sanctified our human nature from within and thus presents us to the Father as those redeemed and consecrated in himself.”
At the heart of this is a concept that grows out of the idea of Christ as Mediator – the idea of:
THE DIVINE EXCHANGE.
The Church has from the beginning taught this:
(The following notes are largely taken from Derek Prince, “The Atonement”.)
“At the Cross an exchange took place, divinely ordained and predicted. All the evil due, by Justice, to come to us came on Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus earned by his sinless obedience, might be made available to us….
“As our mediator Christ took all the evil that was coming to mankind due to sin and exchanged it in himself for all the righteous goodness of God so that we could enjoy God’s favour…”
“Jesus on the Cross said, “It is finished.”
In Greek this is a single word in the perfect tense and means, “to do something perfectly”. “To perfectly perfect.” “To completely complete.” The perfect tense suggests that the work and its effects will remain completely effective from that time on. It will not diminish or fade in its intensity or effectiveness. It will not change or become partial. What is done is done and it cannot be changed.”
This is the effect of the work of Christ – it is to finish something, and the Church understands that work to be the work of mediating a New Covenant between God and man. Included in that Covenant is the total conversion of our fallen human nature into the image of God, a Divine Exchange. In a sense it was an unfair exchange – but to our advantage.
The heart of the Gospel: Isaiah 53:4-6.
“Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
“The central verse: v6—this is the problem of the human race. Here is the diagnosis of the Bible. We have not all committed gross sin. But there is one thing each of us has done: we have turned to our own way, which is not God’s way. The best modern word for that is rebellion. The root problem of humanity is rebellion against God. We are all in the same category; we are rebels. We without exception have gone our own way. But the marvellous message is this: God has laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all.
“Hebrew: iniquity = avon. It not only means iniquity but all the evil consequences of iniquity the punishment of iniquity, and the evil consequences that iniquity brings on those are guilty.
“Thus the Lord laid on the suffering servant the iniquity of us all, the punishment of our iniquity and all the evil consequences of iniquity.
“This leads us to a fundamental truth—a key that unlocks all the treasures of God’s provision. At the Cross an exchange took place, divinely ordained and predicted. All the evil due, by Justice, to come to us came on Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus earned by his sinless obedience, might be made available to us.”
In the view that we are taking here (the Orthodox View of St. Athanasius) we would want to go a little further. This exchange took place – not only at the Cross, but all through the life of Christ. At every point of temptation or trial Christ exchanged a fallen human response for obedience to the Word of God that was within him, his Divine nature. In this way our humanity was again reconnected to the Word of God, fallenness was exchanged for obedience. This in no way minimises the work of the Cross, nor the great glory of it, but it gives the whole of Christ’s life great spiritual significance for us. The beauty of this we shall see in later chapters.
Derek Prince in his book then goes on to outline nine specific aspects of the exchange or the substitution and five specific things we are delivered from. To Dr. Prince’s nine exchanges we will add a few.
The exchanges comprise a complete provision for us as Christians in every area of our lives. God has made sure that we will lack nothing in this life through his provision in Christ.
1. Forgiveness of sins.
Confession: Jesus was punished that I might be forgiven.
Isaiah 53:5
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
2. Righteousness in place of sin.
Confession: Jesus was made sin with my sinfulness that I might be made righteous with his righteousness.
2 Corinthians 5:21
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
There is a difference between sins and sin. The sinless Son of God took on himself the total sinfulness of the entire race.
The opposite of sinfulness is righteousness.
Jesus was made sin with our sinfulness that we might be made righteous with his righteousness.
We never attain the righteousness of God by trying to be good. The only way to apprehend the righteousness of God is by faith.
3. Life in place of death.
Confession: Jesus died my death that I might share his life.
Romans 6:23
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
There is an enormous difference between what Jesus gives us and what we deserve:
Wages are earned for work and are justice. The free gift cannot be earned.
4. Blessing in place of curse.
Confession: Jesus took the Curse so that I can have the blessing of Abraham – fullness in all things – in every area of life.
Galatians 3:13,14
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.”
Every curse that might have come on us came on Jesus instead that all the blessings due him might be made available to us.
The blessing of Abraham: Genesis 24:1.
“Abraham was now old and well advanced in years, and the LORD had blessed him in every way.”
How is this relevant to us:
Well, Paul tells us in Galatians that even Christians can come under a curse.
If we try to live our lives on the basis of law – rules and regulations – we come under a curse – because the essence of law is that you have to, keep all of it to fulfil it and because of our fallen natures we can’t.
If we try to live this way we come under a power of Witchcraft.
Galatians 3:1-3.
“You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?
* There are two different courses – the way of faith in Christ, believing what you have heard, or the way of human effort, keeping the Law.
* If a person follows the second way, keeping the Law, they are “bewitched” i.e. come under a curse of witchcraft.
* Paul is writing here to Christians — even Christians can be bewitched, i.e. come under a curse pf witchcraft.
* The attempt to be righteous by keeping the law, i.e. legalism, is witchcraft.
5. Abundance in place of poverty.
Confession: Jesus took my poverty so that I can have his abundance.
2 Corinthians 8:9
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”
2 Corinthians 9:8
“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in all good works.”
Greek: “all” - five times, “abound” - twice. But it is only received through grace.
Poverty is a curse. The alternative to poverty is riches but Prince prefers the rendering “abundance”.
God offers us abundance, i.e. having enough for our own needs and something left over for others.
There are three levels of provision: insufficiency, sufficiency, abundance.
God wants us to have abundance.
This passage (2 Corinthians 8-9) is dealing with the subject of money. That is clear in the context. Normal rules of interpreting scripture would require us to interpret these promises in the context they are found to find the true meaning.
6. The new man in place of the old man.
Another aspect of the Cross: not what the cross can do for us but what it can do in us.
The old and new man are two of the most important characters in the New Testament.
Confession: My old man, the rebel, the corrupt one, was crucified in Jesus that I might be delivered from that evil and corrupt nature and that a new nature might come into me through the word of God and take control of me.
Romans 6:6
“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”
The old man: the sinful nature we have inherited by our descent from Adam. Every descendant of Adam is born with a rebel within. This fallen nature of sin has in every area been corrupted by the sin in it.
The old theologians used to call this “Total Depravity”. By this they did not mean that we were so totally corrupt that we could not do any good, but rather they meant that there is not one part of our nature that is not touched by sin and in some way corrupted. We are depraved in every area of our being – just some areas are more depraved than others.
The old man is absolutely corrupt morally, physically and emotionally. Corruption is irreversible. The only way to change a person is to make him a new creation. God’s plan is to replace the old man with the new man. “You are a new creation – the old has passed away behold the new has come.”
God has only one remedy for the rebel--he executes him. But the message of mercy is that the execution took place in Jesus on the cross.
In order to be freed from slavery to sin we must do more than receive forgiveness for our past sins; we must deal with the rebel inside. Here is where the cross comes in: our old man was crucified with Christ.
7. His wounding for our physical healing.
Confession: Jesus was wounded that I might be healed.
Isaiah 53:4
“Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
Jesus was wounded physically so that we might be healed physically.
Griefs: Hebrew literally means “sicknesses”.
Sorrows: Hebrew literally means “pains”.
Notice the tense: “we are healed” literally “Healing was obtained for us” i.e. on the Cross.
When the Bible speaks about atonement it never puts healing in the future. As far as God is concerned healing has already been obtained. We are healed.
His wounding was also for our emotional healing.
Isaiah 53:4,5
“Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
“Wounds”: both in the physical and the emotional realms.
There are various emotional wounds and healing for all of them is provided through the Cross. But shame and rejection are two of the commonest and deepest emotional wounds that humanity suffers.
8. His Glory in place of our shame
Confession: Jesus bore my shame so that I can experience his glory.
Hebrews 2:10
“In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.”
Hebrews 12:2
“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Shame: the opposite is glory.
Jesus endured our shame that we might share his glory.
Shame is one of the most common emotional problems of Gods people. Believers are ashamed to let others know they have a problem. Shame shuts you up in a prison.
He endured shame right through his life: As far as the people in Nazareth were concerned he was illegitimate and they kept reminding him of the fact. In fact the priests resorted to reminding him of this too, “Moses – we know where he came from but we don’t know where this man came from”. This is a direct slur on his parentage. They wouldn’t have said this if they had accepted Joseph as his father but they knew that was not the case.
On the Cross Jesus endured shame—such shame as we can hardly imagine.
There was no form of death more shameful than crucifixion. It was the lowest form of punishment for the most debased criminals. Naked, mockery. What he endured was shame.
9. Acceptance in place of rejection.
Confession: Jesus endured my rejection that I might have his acceptance.
Isaiah 53:3.
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Rejection can be described as the sense of being unwanted and unloved. You are always on the outside looking in. Other people are “in”; somehow you never are.
On the cross he was rejected: We hid our faces from him. Hung between heaven and earth – the earth rejecting him and heaven not accepting him.
Jesus was rejected throughout his life:
Already mentioned at Nazareth.
Bethlehem – Joseph’s home town. Courtesy would have demanded that his family give him lodging but they refused to do to because of his wife and illegitimate child.
His hometown rejected him – tried to stone him.
Everyone rejected Jesus - including the Father. God rejected him because he became sinful with our sinfulness.
Ephesians 1:4,5
“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will…”
* We are chosen. We are accepted in the Beloved. This is the ultimate acceptance.
Greek: accepted = to make graceful or gracious, be highly favoured. Being highly favoured is even better than being accepted.
* "adopted". In Roman law a child was not considered to be fully a "son" and thus the heir of the father just because of natural birth. A second step was required wherein the father "adopted" the son, who then became his legal heir.
10 Jesus has given us a renewed mind.
Confession: Jesus took on my rebellious, ignorant, corrupt mind so I could have the mind of Christ.
Romans 12:2
“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”
1 Corinthians 2:16.
“We have the mind of Christ.”
11. Jesus took our grief.
Confession:
Jesus took my grief so that I can have the oil of gladness.
Jesus took my despair so that I can have a garment of praise.
Isaiah 61:2-3.
“…to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion and bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes
The oil of gladness instead of mourning
And a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Salvation History. Chapter 17. Christ Our Substitute.
Chapter 17. Christ Our Substitute.
In the last chapter we looked at the idea that Christ is the mediator of a New Covenant. This is foundational to understanding both his person and his work, and was the key to the formulation of the Churches teaching as summarised in the Nicene Creed.
Having established that Christ is Mediator of a New Covenant the next thing that we need to consider is the question: How did Jesus remove the obstacles to relationship with God? In other words, how did he deal with sin? How did he bring reconciliation (atonement) between God and man?
There are two issues here:
1. The acts of wrongdoing we commit, i.e. our sins (plural).
2. The Fallen nature of sin we have as a result of Adam's sin.
In this chapter we will look at the provision of God for our sins, our wrong acts. In the next chapter we will touch on the provision of God for sin (singular), i.e. the sinful nature.
THE PROBLEM:
Mankind was created for relationship with God. However the entry of sin, rebellion against God, broke this relationship. We are separated from God by our sin. Sin is wrongdoing and all wrongdoing incurs (legal) guilt.
If separation were all that hindered relationship then perhaps God could simply forgive and relationship could be restored – but the situation is not that simple. With the entry of sin there was a fundamental change in the nature of mankind that bars the way to relationship. This change is called various things in the Bible, the primary way of referring to it is to call it “death”. Acts of wrongdoing have a penalty and that penalty is death. Somehow the penalty of death needs to be removed before the acts of sin can be forgiven.
This is the root problem God had to face: How to punish the sin yet forgive the sinner.
We see the connection of sin and death firstly in the Garden of Eden when God gave the command to Adam:
Genesis 2:17
“…you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
The sentence of death was not immediate in a physical sense, but a process of death entered into man’s experience that led to eventual physical death.
It would seem that, even if in the animal world there was death, this was not God’s original intention for man. He seems to have had a higher purpose for mankind. The translations of Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2) possibly point to God’s original intention for mankind.
Sin activated a process of death that leads to death. The Apostle Paul talks about this in:
Romans 6:23.
“For the wages of sin is death.”
The use of the word “wages” is significant. When a man earns wages he earns them a little at a time over a long period. He does not earn them all at once. The Apostle is telling us that as we sin over time we accrue a payment of death that we must one day collect.
James also talks of this process in:
James 1:14.15.
“…each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has been conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.”
Death is the penalty for man’s sin. But death is not just an event which we call “physical death” rather it is a process that we live in as a result of sin. The apostle Paul explains it slightly differently in:
Galatians 6:7,8.
“…A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction…”
So death is a power of destruction that generates a harvest of destruction which we experience – both in this life and the next. The word "destruction" could also be translated "corruption". The Greek word describes the body of a dead animal lying in the field rotting away.
What Paul is saying is that, when we sin, we sow into our lives a process that is analogous to a rotting corpse being slowly destroyed. When we sin death is immediately present - and the aftermath of death, corruption, is put into process in our lives.
So God is not faced with a simple matter of dealing with the (legal) guilt of sins, our guilt for wrong acts; he is also faced with the destructive power of death as a result of sin. Death is the legal penalty for sin. This death is with us from the moment we sin and is part of the separation we experience from God. It is a penalty which must be paid.
The story of the Garden of Eden vividly pictures this. Adam and Eve, after God had exposed their sin, sent them out of the Garden, the place of his presence. They could no longer remain in fellowship with God but were banished into the world now caught in a curse of death and destruction through their actions.
So God had to not only find a way of forgiving man’s sin, he also had to deal with the legal requirement that sin be punished by death, and deal with that death in a way that allowed mankind to be freed from it's destructive power.
John Stott:
“The Cross is at the centre of Christian faith. Evangelical Christians believe that, in and through Christ crucified, God substituted himself for us and bore our sins; dying in our place the death we deserved to die, in order that we might be restored to his favour and adopted into his family. This belief is a distinguishing mark of the World-wide evangelical Church; it takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel.”
In many places the Bible states this belief. We shall look only at three here briefly:
Isaiah 53:5,8.
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him..
…We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
This is speaking prophetically of the coming “Suffering Servant of God”. Clearly the suffering he was to undergo was for other people.
* We have all done our own thing, and gone wrong in doing it.
* This “doing our own thing is called “transgression” or “iniquity”. It is sin.
* This sin has a “punishment”.
* The Servant, Jesus, suffered because of our sin. But this suffering was not just a by-product of our sin, i.e., because he came to a world with sin in it and so suffered. No, his suffering was clearly so we would not suffer – we would have “peace”. In other words he stood in our place and took our punishment for us. He substituted himself for us.
* This peace must be understood in the full Old Testament way meaning, “to have an intimate relationship”, i.e. peace (shalom) with God.
Jesus clearly had this passage in Isaiah in mind when he made the following two comments:
Mark 10:45
“For the Son of Man came…to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Mark 14:24
“This is the blood of the (New) covenant, which is poured out for many.”
* Jesus clearly saw his life purpose to be one of self sacrifice on behalf of others, culminating in a death, a shedding of blood, with was to be for other people.
* This self-sacrifice was a price, a ransom, implying those he did it for were in some way in bondage.
* The result of his self-sacrifice would be a New Covenant, i.e. a new relationship with God for those for whom he gave his life.
* The price is not directly stated but is hinted at by the word “blood”. This is a reference to the Old Testament sacrificial practice where the blood of the animal signified that it had died as a substitute for the offerer. Jesus is implying he was going to die so that others could have a relationship with God.
The implications of these verses are spelled out clearly in the Apostolic writings:
1 Peter 3:18.
“For Christ died for (our) sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”
* Christ’s death was “for sin”.
* It was a substitution – “the righteous for the unrighteous”. In other words he didn’t deserve it himself.
* The result was so that we could have a relationship with God.
Christ’s death, taking the punishment due for us as our substituted, satisfied the claims of God’s justice so that we could be forgiven and enter into a new relationship with God.
(Most of what follows are notes taken from John Stott’s book: “The Cross of Christ”.)
“No two words in the theological vocabulary of the cross arouse more criticism than “satisfaction” and “substitution”. In the combination "Satisfaction through substitution” they seem even more intolerable.”
Two questions are raised:
1. How can we believe that God needed some kind of satisfaction before he was prepared to forgive, and
2. That Jesus provided this satisfaction by enduring as our substitute the punishment we deserved?
Are not such notions unworthy of the God of the Bible; primitive superstitions, immoral?
Satisfaction and substitution are not Biblical words, therefore we need caution, but each is a Biblical concept. “Satisfaction through substitution” can be presented in a way that is honouring to God and which lies at the very heart of the Church's worship and witness. Let us then look at these two questions.
SATISFACTION FOR SIN.
It is asked, “Why should forgiveness depend on Christ's death? Why does God not simply forgive us without the necessity of the cross? God asks us to forgive, why can't God practice what he preaches and be equally generous? Nobody's death is necessary before we forgive each other. Why should he need some form of satisfaction?”
The fact is this, the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from being exact. It ignores the elementary fact that we are not God.
We are private individuals, and other people's sins against us are personal injuries.
God is not a private individual, nor is sin just a personal injury. Rather God is the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him and against the law.
The crucial question we should ask is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all?
The Problem:
There are two factors that bring the problem into focus.
1. Human Sin.
"The emphasis of Scripture is on the Godless self-centredness of sin. Every sin is a breach of the first commandment. It is a proclamation of self-dependence, autonomy, to claim the position occupied by God alone. Sin is not a lapse from convention; its essence is hostility to God. It is rebellion."
The Bible takes sin seriously because it takes man seriously. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man, by pushing off responsibility for our actions.
To say that somebody is "Not responsible for his actions" is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions.
Emil Brunner:
“If responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears.”
C.S.Lewis writing on “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” argues thus:
He bemoans the modem tendency to abandon the notion of “a just retribution” and replace it with humanitarian concerns for the “criminal reform” and for “society-as-a-whole” deterrence. Lewis argues this means:
“Every lawbreaker is deprived of the rights of a human being - because the humanitarian theory removes from punishment the concept of “desert”. This concept is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as ‘deserved’ that a sentence can be just or unjust. When we remove this link we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether. Instead of a person - a subject with rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a case. By what right may we use force to impose treatment on a criminal, either to cure him or to protect society, unless he deserves it? To be cured against one’s will, of states that one may not regard as a disease, is tyranny. But to be punished because we deserve it is to be treated as a human person in Gods image.”
In other words human sin has consequences before God’s law as we are lawbreakers, we are responsible. If humans have sinned and if they are responsible for their sins then they are guilty before God. Guilt is the logical deduction from the premises of sin and responsibility.
2. The Holiness of God.
The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between Divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone, nor our guilt alone, but also the Divine reaction in love and wrath towards guilty sinners. How could God express his holy love without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love?
That God is Holy is foundational to Biblical religion. So is the corollary that sin is incompatible with his holiness. Closely related to Gods holiness is his wrath, which is his holy reaction to evil.
Definition: God’s wrath is his personal Divine revulsion to evil and his personal vigorous opposition to it. It is uncontaminated by those elements which make human anger sinful, i.e. being arbitrary or uninhibited. God's anger is always principled and controlled, not pique or vengeful, not spasmodic outbursts but a continuous settled antagonism, aroused only by evil, expressed in its condemnation. It is free from personal animosity or vindictiveness.
Wrath is not a contradiction of Gods love. Indeed while God is angry at the offence he is simultaneously loving the offender. Common to holiness and wrath is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. Sin cannot approach God, God cannot tolerate sin. God hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it and refuses ever to come to terms with it.
Emil Brunner:
“Where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored them will be no understanding of the central concept of the gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the mediator. Only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy.”
Inadequate doctrines the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of man and God. If we reinterpret sin as a “lapse”, or a "sickness", instead of a “rebellion”, and God as "indulgent" instead of "indignant', then naturally the Cross appears to be superfluous.
3. The Root Problem:
Forgiveness is for God the profoundest of problems. Sin, on our side, and wrath, on God’s side, stand in the way. God must not only respect us as the moral beings we are, but he must also respect himself as the Holy God he is. Before the Holy God can forgive us some kind of "satisfaction" is necessary. The demands of his holiness must be met somehow.
Definition: "Satisfaction": The meeting of the demands of the holiness and law of God. I.e. The way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to himself must be fully consistent with his own character. He must satisfy himself in every aspect of his being including both his justice and his love.
Thus the primary obstacle to forgiveness is to be found in God himself. He must satisfy himself in the way of salvation he devises; he cannot save us by contradicting himself. He cannot, in his love, forgive us by denying the fact that his justice and holiness says sin must be punished.
St. Anselm: “Cur Deus Homo?” Argues thus (paraphrased):
1. The real problem was that man owed something to God and this was the debt needing to be repaid. This debt, sin, is “not rendering to God what is his due” and is not so much to do with sins as with the submission of our entire will to him. Thus, "sin" is to take away from God what is his own (our complete submission and obedience), and thus to dishonour him.
2. To be forgiven we must repay what we owe. But we are incapable. Our present obedience is already required thus cannot make satisfaction for our past sins (failure to obey).
3. Neither can another man satisfy for us, as they already owe complete obedience for themselves.
4. Thus there is no one who can make this satisfaction except God himself, but no one ought to make it except man.
5. Therefore it is necessary for a “God-man” to make it.
6. Christ, who is God and man, performed a unique work - he died not as a debt because he was sinless but freely for the honour of God.
Self-satisfaction in fallen humanity is unpleasant. But when applied to God it means that He must act according to the perfection of His nature or name. The law to which he must conform, must satisfy, is the law of His own being not something outside Himself. What God does must be consistent with who He is. This inward necessity does not mean that God must be true to only a part of himself, nor that he must express one of his attributes at the expense of another, but rather he must be completely and invariably himself in the fullness of his divine being. His justice and his mercy must equally be satisfied. The work of the redemption of sinners must jointly manifested them.
SUBSTITUTION:
The idea of someone substituting for another’s sins is often rejected today as barbaric, intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous. But how could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgement, and his love in pardon? Only by providing a Divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgement and the sinner the pardon.
We sinners still suffer the personal, psychological and social consequences of sins, but the penal consequence, the deserved penalty of alienation from God, has been borne by another in our place, so that we may be spared it.
1. How are we to understand this substitution?
The best way to understand these is by considering the Old Testament sacrifices. The interpretation of Christ's death as a sacrifice is embedded in every important part of the New Testament teaching. Sacrificial language and pictures are widespread throughout the New Testament. The Letter to the Hebrews portrays Christ as having fulfilled the Old Testament shadows. The New Testament understanding is built on the Old Testament.
What did the Old Testament sacrifices signify? Do they have a substitutionary meaning?
Sacrifices were offered in a wide variety of circumstances in the Old Testament. The diversity warns us against imposing on them a single simple significance. But there does seem to be two basic and complementary ideas of sacrifice in the Old Testament:
1. The first group of sacrifices express the sense human beings have of belonging to God by right. These see man as a creature while in them God is revealed as the Creator on whom man is dependent for physical life.
2. The second group express the sense of alienation from God because of sin. These see man as a sinner and pictures God simultaneously as Judge and Saviour who provides atonement for sin.
Both kinds were essentially recognitions of Gods grace and expressions of dependence upon that grace.
The second group of sacrifices is the foundation of the former. Sin must be dealt with before we can fully worship our Creator.
The idea of substitution is that one (person) takes the place of another.
Such an action is universally regarded as noble particularly where pain or death are involved. Thus it is not surprising that this commonly understood principle of substitution should have been applied by God himself to sacrifices.
There are five main types of offering in Leviticus.
The cereal offering was atypical and was only offered in conjunction with other offerings.
The rest were blood sacrifices. The worshiper laid his hands on the animal - certainly identifying himself with it and solemnly designating the victim as standing for him. Some people see also a transferral of sins in this act. Then the substitute animal was killed in recognition it the penalty for sin was death, the blood - symbolising that the death had taken place - was sprinkled and the offerer's life was spared.
The clearest statement that the blood was substitutionary is found in: Leviticus 17:11.
“The life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”
* The blood is a symbol of life. This is a very ancient idea. The emphasis was not on blood flowing in the veins, i.e. of life, but on blood shed, i.e. life ended, usually by violent means.
* Blood makes atonement. The reason is in the life - this word repeated. One life is forfeit; the other is sacrificed instead. Thus sacrifice is vicarious (on behalf of another).
* God ordained this process to be so. It is not man's idea. The language used in the Bible makes it plain that the Cross was a substitutionary sacrifice.
2. Who is this substitute?
Was he just a man? Was he simply God?
The possibility of substitution rests upon the identity of the substitute.
Three Possibilities:
1. If he was simply man how could one man possibly or justly stand in for other human beings? If he was only a man, different from us and separate from God, he must be an independent third party. With this view we must present the cross as either Christ's or God’s initiative. Thus God and Christ are divided - either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. Both ideas denigrate the Father. He is pictured as being reluctant to suffer himself so he makes Christ a victim. Thus he is seen as reluctant to forgive, a judge, full of wrath. This ignores the fact of God’s love. The Bible portrays God as being totally willing. Jesus did bear our sins, but God was active and present in Christ doing it, and Christ was willingly doing his part. Their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrificing of love.
2. If Christ was only God this eliminates the contribution of Christ, ascribing everything to God. If God has done everything necessary for our salvation does that not make Christ redundant? But there is truth here - it was God himself, giving himself for us, in his own Son.
The doctrine of the Trinity sheds some understanding here.
The Church teaches that each person of the Trinity is an individual but they also completely and eternally interpenetrate and permeate each other so that where one is the others are also fully present.
Thus when Christ was on the Cross the Father was fully present with him, in him, suffering with him. The Father was not an impassive observer somewhere in heaven. No verse actually says. “God died on the cross”. This is because God is immortal therefore cannot die. Thus Christ became man in order to die. Also we cannot say, “God died” because “God” in the New Testament always means “the Father”, and the person who died on the Cross was not the Father but the Son.
If he was simply God he would not represent mankind. We would be untouched by what he did.
3. God was in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and on that amount was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them. The New Testament never attributes atonement to Christ or to God separately, but to both, God acting in through Christ. The Father and the Son cannot be separated.
2 Corinthians 5:19.
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…”
* Christ is the agent of reconciliation.
* God took the initiative to reconcile and did it through Christ.
* It affects the whole world.
* It is past tense. Reconciliation in the New Testament is a work which is finished before the gospel is preached. Reconciliation was finished in Christ's death. * We receive the reconciliation as a gift.
We see then, in the cross, there are not three actors but two: God and ourselves. The mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering. God through Christ substituted himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath through divine self-sacrifice. Seen in this way the objections to substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here since the substitute for the law breaker is none other than the divine law maker himself. There is no mechanical, strictly legal transaction since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions. And what is achieved is no merely external change of legal status since those who believe are united to Christ by his Spirit and become radically transformed in outlook and character. Judgement has been committed to the Son. He, as judge, also took the punishment. Thus there is no immorality in the substitution. The words, “satisfaction” and “substitution”, need to be carefully defined and safeguarded but they cannot be given up.
The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation.
The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God.
The essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
Man. in sin, claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God, in atonement and forgiveness, accepts penalties that belong to man alone.
The doctrine of substitution is the scandal of the Cross. Our proud hearts rebel against it.
* We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the Cross.
*We insist on paying for what we have done. We cannot stand the humiliation of allowing someone else to pay.
* The notion that this “somebody else” should be God himself is just too much to take. We would rather perish than humble ourselves.
Only the Gospel demands such an abject self-humbling on our part for it alone teaches Divine substitution as the way of salvation. Other religions teach different forms of self-salvation.
Brunner:
“All other forms of religion and philosophy deal with the guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a cheap conclusion. In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him. Man is thereby not stripped absolutely naked.”
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE CROSS.
Salvation has many pictures, or images, the Bible uses to try to illustrate some of what it means. The five primary images are propitiation, redemption, justification, reconciliation and victory. These images of salvation are incompatible and we cannot integrate them neatly together.
However underlying them is certain themes:
1. Each highlights a different aspect of human need. These metaphors do not flatter us but expose our need.
2. They emphasize that the saving initiative was taken by God in his love.
3. They all teach that Gods saving word was achieved through the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. In Christ, God has borne our sin and died our death to set us free from sin and death. So substitution is not a theory of the atonement, it is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself.
Note: I warmly recommend to you John Stott’s book, The Cross of Christ. It is a very clear statement of the Christian doctrine of Atonement.
In the last chapter we looked at the idea that Christ is the mediator of a New Covenant. This is foundational to understanding both his person and his work, and was the key to the formulation of the Churches teaching as summarised in the Nicene Creed.
Having established that Christ is Mediator of a New Covenant the next thing that we need to consider is the question: How did Jesus remove the obstacles to relationship with God? In other words, how did he deal with sin? How did he bring reconciliation (atonement) between God and man?
There are two issues here:
1. The acts of wrongdoing we commit, i.e. our sins (plural).
2. The Fallen nature of sin we have as a result of Adam's sin.
In this chapter we will look at the provision of God for our sins, our wrong acts. In the next chapter we will touch on the provision of God for sin (singular), i.e. the sinful nature.
THE PROBLEM:
Mankind was created for relationship with God. However the entry of sin, rebellion against God, broke this relationship. We are separated from God by our sin. Sin is wrongdoing and all wrongdoing incurs (legal) guilt.
If separation were all that hindered relationship then perhaps God could simply forgive and relationship could be restored – but the situation is not that simple. With the entry of sin there was a fundamental change in the nature of mankind that bars the way to relationship. This change is called various things in the Bible, the primary way of referring to it is to call it “death”. Acts of wrongdoing have a penalty and that penalty is death. Somehow the penalty of death needs to be removed before the acts of sin can be forgiven.
This is the root problem God had to face: How to punish the sin yet forgive the sinner.
We see the connection of sin and death firstly in the Garden of Eden when God gave the command to Adam:
Genesis 2:17
“…you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
The sentence of death was not immediate in a physical sense, but a process of death entered into man’s experience that led to eventual physical death.
It would seem that, even if in the animal world there was death, this was not God’s original intention for man. He seems to have had a higher purpose for mankind. The translations of Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2) possibly point to God’s original intention for mankind.
Sin activated a process of death that leads to death. The Apostle Paul talks about this in:
Romans 6:23.
“For the wages of sin is death.”
The use of the word “wages” is significant. When a man earns wages he earns them a little at a time over a long period. He does not earn them all at once. The Apostle is telling us that as we sin over time we accrue a payment of death that we must one day collect.
James also talks of this process in:
James 1:14.15.
“…each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has been conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.”
Death is the penalty for man’s sin. But death is not just an event which we call “physical death” rather it is a process that we live in as a result of sin. The apostle Paul explains it slightly differently in:
Galatians 6:7,8.
“…A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction…”
So death is a power of destruction that generates a harvest of destruction which we experience – both in this life and the next. The word "destruction" could also be translated "corruption". The Greek word describes the body of a dead animal lying in the field rotting away.
What Paul is saying is that, when we sin, we sow into our lives a process that is analogous to a rotting corpse being slowly destroyed. When we sin death is immediately present - and the aftermath of death, corruption, is put into process in our lives.
So God is not faced with a simple matter of dealing with the (legal) guilt of sins, our guilt for wrong acts; he is also faced with the destructive power of death as a result of sin. Death is the legal penalty for sin. This death is with us from the moment we sin and is part of the separation we experience from God. It is a penalty which must be paid.
The story of the Garden of Eden vividly pictures this. Adam and Eve, after God had exposed their sin, sent them out of the Garden, the place of his presence. They could no longer remain in fellowship with God but were banished into the world now caught in a curse of death and destruction through their actions.
So God had to not only find a way of forgiving man’s sin, he also had to deal with the legal requirement that sin be punished by death, and deal with that death in a way that allowed mankind to be freed from it's destructive power.
John Stott:
“The Cross is at the centre of Christian faith. Evangelical Christians believe that, in and through Christ crucified, God substituted himself for us and bore our sins; dying in our place the death we deserved to die, in order that we might be restored to his favour and adopted into his family. This belief is a distinguishing mark of the World-wide evangelical Church; it takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel.”
In many places the Bible states this belief. We shall look only at three here briefly:
Isaiah 53:5,8.
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him..
…We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
This is speaking prophetically of the coming “Suffering Servant of God”. Clearly the suffering he was to undergo was for other people.
* We have all done our own thing, and gone wrong in doing it.
* This “doing our own thing is called “transgression” or “iniquity”. It is sin.
* This sin has a “punishment”.
* The Servant, Jesus, suffered because of our sin. But this suffering was not just a by-product of our sin, i.e., because he came to a world with sin in it and so suffered. No, his suffering was clearly so we would not suffer – we would have “peace”. In other words he stood in our place and took our punishment for us. He substituted himself for us.
* This peace must be understood in the full Old Testament way meaning, “to have an intimate relationship”, i.e. peace (shalom) with God.
Jesus clearly had this passage in Isaiah in mind when he made the following two comments:
Mark 10:45
“For the Son of Man came…to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Mark 14:24
“This is the blood of the (New) covenant, which is poured out for many.”
* Jesus clearly saw his life purpose to be one of self sacrifice on behalf of others, culminating in a death, a shedding of blood, with was to be for other people.
* This self-sacrifice was a price, a ransom, implying those he did it for were in some way in bondage.
* The result of his self-sacrifice would be a New Covenant, i.e. a new relationship with God for those for whom he gave his life.
* The price is not directly stated but is hinted at by the word “blood”. This is a reference to the Old Testament sacrificial practice where the blood of the animal signified that it had died as a substitute for the offerer. Jesus is implying he was going to die so that others could have a relationship with God.
The implications of these verses are spelled out clearly in the Apostolic writings:
1 Peter 3:18.
“For Christ died for (our) sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”
* Christ’s death was “for sin”.
* It was a substitution – “the righteous for the unrighteous”. In other words he didn’t deserve it himself.
* The result was so that we could have a relationship with God.
Christ’s death, taking the punishment due for us as our substituted, satisfied the claims of God’s justice so that we could be forgiven and enter into a new relationship with God.
(Most of what follows are notes taken from John Stott’s book: “The Cross of Christ”.)
“No two words in the theological vocabulary of the cross arouse more criticism than “satisfaction” and “substitution”. In the combination "Satisfaction through substitution” they seem even more intolerable.”
Two questions are raised:
1. How can we believe that God needed some kind of satisfaction before he was prepared to forgive, and
2. That Jesus provided this satisfaction by enduring as our substitute the punishment we deserved?
Are not such notions unworthy of the God of the Bible; primitive superstitions, immoral?
Satisfaction and substitution are not Biblical words, therefore we need caution, but each is a Biblical concept. “Satisfaction through substitution” can be presented in a way that is honouring to God and which lies at the very heart of the Church's worship and witness. Let us then look at these two questions.
SATISFACTION FOR SIN.
It is asked, “Why should forgiveness depend on Christ's death? Why does God not simply forgive us without the necessity of the cross? God asks us to forgive, why can't God practice what he preaches and be equally generous? Nobody's death is necessary before we forgive each other. Why should he need some form of satisfaction?”
The fact is this, the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from being exact. It ignores the elementary fact that we are not God.
We are private individuals, and other people's sins against us are personal injuries.
God is not a private individual, nor is sin just a personal injury. Rather God is the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him and against the law.
The crucial question we should ask is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all?
The Problem:
There are two factors that bring the problem into focus.
1. Human Sin.
"The emphasis of Scripture is on the Godless self-centredness of sin. Every sin is a breach of the first commandment. It is a proclamation of self-dependence, autonomy, to claim the position occupied by God alone. Sin is not a lapse from convention; its essence is hostility to God. It is rebellion."
The Bible takes sin seriously because it takes man seriously. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man, by pushing off responsibility for our actions.
To say that somebody is "Not responsible for his actions" is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions.
Emil Brunner:
“If responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears.”
C.S.Lewis writing on “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” argues thus:
He bemoans the modem tendency to abandon the notion of “a just retribution” and replace it with humanitarian concerns for the “criminal reform” and for “society-as-a-whole” deterrence. Lewis argues this means:
“Every lawbreaker is deprived of the rights of a human being - because the humanitarian theory removes from punishment the concept of “desert”. This concept is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as ‘deserved’ that a sentence can be just or unjust. When we remove this link we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether. Instead of a person - a subject with rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a case. By what right may we use force to impose treatment on a criminal, either to cure him or to protect society, unless he deserves it? To be cured against one’s will, of states that one may not regard as a disease, is tyranny. But to be punished because we deserve it is to be treated as a human person in Gods image.”
In other words human sin has consequences before God’s law as we are lawbreakers, we are responsible. If humans have sinned and if they are responsible for their sins then they are guilty before God. Guilt is the logical deduction from the premises of sin and responsibility.
2. The Holiness of God.
The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between Divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone, nor our guilt alone, but also the Divine reaction in love and wrath towards guilty sinners. How could God express his holy love without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love?
That God is Holy is foundational to Biblical religion. So is the corollary that sin is incompatible with his holiness. Closely related to Gods holiness is his wrath, which is his holy reaction to evil.
Definition: God’s wrath is his personal Divine revulsion to evil and his personal vigorous opposition to it. It is uncontaminated by those elements which make human anger sinful, i.e. being arbitrary or uninhibited. God's anger is always principled and controlled, not pique or vengeful, not spasmodic outbursts but a continuous settled antagonism, aroused only by evil, expressed in its condemnation. It is free from personal animosity or vindictiveness.
Wrath is not a contradiction of Gods love. Indeed while God is angry at the offence he is simultaneously loving the offender. Common to holiness and wrath is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. Sin cannot approach God, God cannot tolerate sin. God hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it and refuses ever to come to terms with it.
Emil Brunner:
“Where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored them will be no understanding of the central concept of the gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the mediator. Only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy.”
Inadequate doctrines the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of man and God. If we reinterpret sin as a “lapse”, or a "sickness", instead of a “rebellion”, and God as "indulgent" instead of "indignant', then naturally the Cross appears to be superfluous.
3. The Root Problem:
Forgiveness is for God the profoundest of problems. Sin, on our side, and wrath, on God’s side, stand in the way. God must not only respect us as the moral beings we are, but he must also respect himself as the Holy God he is. Before the Holy God can forgive us some kind of "satisfaction" is necessary. The demands of his holiness must be met somehow.
Definition: "Satisfaction": The meeting of the demands of the holiness and law of God. I.e. The way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to himself must be fully consistent with his own character. He must satisfy himself in every aspect of his being including both his justice and his love.
Thus the primary obstacle to forgiveness is to be found in God himself. He must satisfy himself in the way of salvation he devises; he cannot save us by contradicting himself. He cannot, in his love, forgive us by denying the fact that his justice and holiness says sin must be punished.
St. Anselm: “Cur Deus Homo?” Argues thus (paraphrased):
1. The real problem was that man owed something to God and this was the debt needing to be repaid. This debt, sin, is “not rendering to God what is his due” and is not so much to do with sins as with the submission of our entire will to him. Thus, "sin" is to take away from God what is his own (our complete submission and obedience), and thus to dishonour him.
2. To be forgiven we must repay what we owe. But we are incapable. Our present obedience is already required thus cannot make satisfaction for our past sins (failure to obey).
3. Neither can another man satisfy for us, as they already owe complete obedience for themselves.
4. Thus there is no one who can make this satisfaction except God himself, but no one ought to make it except man.
5. Therefore it is necessary for a “God-man” to make it.
6. Christ, who is God and man, performed a unique work - he died not as a debt because he was sinless but freely for the honour of God.
Self-satisfaction in fallen humanity is unpleasant. But when applied to God it means that He must act according to the perfection of His nature or name. The law to which he must conform, must satisfy, is the law of His own being not something outside Himself. What God does must be consistent with who He is. This inward necessity does not mean that God must be true to only a part of himself, nor that he must express one of his attributes at the expense of another, but rather he must be completely and invariably himself in the fullness of his divine being. His justice and his mercy must equally be satisfied. The work of the redemption of sinners must jointly manifested them.
SUBSTITUTION:
The idea of someone substituting for another’s sins is often rejected today as barbaric, intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous. But how could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgement, and his love in pardon? Only by providing a Divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgement and the sinner the pardon.
We sinners still suffer the personal, psychological and social consequences of sins, but the penal consequence, the deserved penalty of alienation from God, has been borne by another in our place, so that we may be spared it.
1. How are we to understand this substitution?
The best way to understand these is by considering the Old Testament sacrifices. The interpretation of Christ's death as a sacrifice is embedded in every important part of the New Testament teaching. Sacrificial language and pictures are widespread throughout the New Testament. The Letter to the Hebrews portrays Christ as having fulfilled the Old Testament shadows. The New Testament understanding is built on the Old Testament.
What did the Old Testament sacrifices signify? Do they have a substitutionary meaning?
Sacrifices were offered in a wide variety of circumstances in the Old Testament. The diversity warns us against imposing on them a single simple significance. But there does seem to be two basic and complementary ideas of sacrifice in the Old Testament:
1. The first group of sacrifices express the sense human beings have of belonging to God by right. These see man as a creature while in them God is revealed as the Creator on whom man is dependent for physical life.
2. The second group express the sense of alienation from God because of sin. These see man as a sinner and pictures God simultaneously as Judge and Saviour who provides atonement for sin.
Both kinds were essentially recognitions of Gods grace and expressions of dependence upon that grace.
The second group of sacrifices is the foundation of the former. Sin must be dealt with before we can fully worship our Creator.
The idea of substitution is that one (person) takes the place of another.
Such an action is universally regarded as noble particularly where pain or death are involved. Thus it is not surprising that this commonly understood principle of substitution should have been applied by God himself to sacrifices.
There are five main types of offering in Leviticus.
The cereal offering was atypical and was only offered in conjunction with other offerings.
The rest were blood sacrifices. The worshiper laid his hands on the animal - certainly identifying himself with it and solemnly designating the victim as standing for him. Some people see also a transferral of sins in this act. Then the substitute animal was killed in recognition it the penalty for sin was death, the blood - symbolising that the death had taken place - was sprinkled and the offerer's life was spared.
The clearest statement that the blood was substitutionary is found in: Leviticus 17:11.
“The life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”
* The blood is a symbol of life. This is a very ancient idea. The emphasis was not on blood flowing in the veins, i.e. of life, but on blood shed, i.e. life ended, usually by violent means.
* Blood makes atonement. The reason is in the life - this word repeated. One life is forfeit; the other is sacrificed instead. Thus sacrifice is vicarious (on behalf of another).
* God ordained this process to be so. It is not man's idea. The language used in the Bible makes it plain that the Cross was a substitutionary sacrifice.
2. Who is this substitute?
Was he just a man? Was he simply God?
The possibility of substitution rests upon the identity of the substitute.
Three Possibilities:
1. If he was simply man how could one man possibly or justly stand in for other human beings? If he was only a man, different from us and separate from God, he must be an independent third party. With this view we must present the cross as either Christ's or God’s initiative. Thus God and Christ are divided - either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. Both ideas denigrate the Father. He is pictured as being reluctant to suffer himself so he makes Christ a victim. Thus he is seen as reluctant to forgive, a judge, full of wrath. This ignores the fact of God’s love. The Bible portrays God as being totally willing. Jesus did bear our sins, but God was active and present in Christ doing it, and Christ was willingly doing his part. Their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrificing of love.
2. If Christ was only God this eliminates the contribution of Christ, ascribing everything to God. If God has done everything necessary for our salvation does that not make Christ redundant? But there is truth here - it was God himself, giving himself for us, in his own Son.
The doctrine of the Trinity sheds some understanding here.
The Church teaches that each person of the Trinity is an individual but they also completely and eternally interpenetrate and permeate each other so that where one is the others are also fully present.
Thus when Christ was on the Cross the Father was fully present with him, in him, suffering with him. The Father was not an impassive observer somewhere in heaven. No verse actually says. “God died on the cross”. This is because God is immortal therefore cannot die. Thus Christ became man in order to die. Also we cannot say, “God died” because “God” in the New Testament always means “the Father”, and the person who died on the Cross was not the Father but the Son.
If he was simply God he would not represent mankind. We would be untouched by what he did.
3. God was in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and on that amount was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them. The New Testament never attributes atonement to Christ or to God separately, but to both, God acting in through Christ. The Father and the Son cannot be separated.
2 Corinthians 5:19.
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…”
* Christ is the agent of reconciliation.
* God took the initiative to reconcile and did it through Christ.
* It affects the whole world.
* It is past tense. Reconciliation in the New Testament is a work which is finished before the gospel is preached. Reconciliation was finished in Christ's death. * We receive the reconciliation as a gift.
We see then, in the cross, there are not three actors but two: God and ourselves. The mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering. God through Christ substituted himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath through divine self-sacrifice. Seen in this way the objections to substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here since the substitute for the law breaker is none other than the divine law maker himself. There is no mechanical, strictly legal transaction since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions. And what is achieved is no merely external change of legal status since those who believe are united to Christ by his Spirit and become radically transformed in outlook and character. Judgement has been committed to the Son. He, as judge, also took the punishment. Thus there is no immorality in the substitution. The words, “satisfaction” and “substitution”, need to be carefully defined and safeguarded but they cannot be given up.
The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation.
The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God.
The essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
Man. in sin, claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God, in atonement and forgiveness, accepts penalties that belong to man alone.
The doctrine of substitution is the scandal of the Cross. Our proud hearts rebel against it.
* We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the Cross.
*We insist on paying for what we have done. We cannot stand the humiliation of allowing someone else to pay.
* The notion that this “somebody else” should be God himself is just too much to take. We would rather perish than humble ourselves.
Only the Gospel demands such an abject self-humbling on our part for it alone teaches Divine substitution as the way of salvation. Other religions teach different forms of self-salvation.
Brunner:
“All other forms of religion and philosophy deal with the guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a cheap conclusion. In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him. Man is thereby not stripped absolutely naked.”
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE CROSS.
Salvation has many pictures, or images, the Bible uses to try to illustrate some of what it means. The five primary images are propitiation, redemption, justification, reconciliation and victory. These images of salvation are incompatible and we cannot integrate them neatly together.
However underlying them is certain themes:
1. Each highlights a different aspect of human need. These metaphors do not flatter us but expose our need.
2. They emphasize that the saving initiative was taken by God in his love.
3. They all teach that Gods saving word was achieved through the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. In Christ, God has borne our sin and died our death to set us free from sin and death. So substitution is not a theory of the atonement, it is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself.
Note: I warmly recommend to you John Stott’s book, The Cross of Christ. It is a very clear statement of the Christian doctrine of Atonement.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Salvation History. Chapter 16: Christ as Mediator of a New Covenant.
Chapter 16: Christ as Mediator of a New Covenant.
As we have seen, mankind was created into a covenant relationship with God. Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, the Fall, mankind is now out of relationship with God. The covenant relationship has been broken. Mankind has “fallen” from the relationship originally planned for him by God.
As we have seen, there were a whole lot of flow-on effects from the Fall as the destructive power of sin worked in the universe. It is to these effects of the Fall and how Christ has reversed them we turn now.
The first thing Christ has done is made it possible for us to have a relationship with God again.
God still desired the relationship with man and so he acted to provide a new way for man to relate to him, a “New Covenant” relationship. This covenant relationship was brought into effect by Christ and is received by us as a gift.
Thus the fundamental thing Christ did in reversing the effects of the Fall was make a way for us to enter into covenant relationship with God again. It is to this we shall turn now. In later chapters we shall look at other things Christ did for us, but this is fundamental.
Note: What we are about to look at is central to the whole understanding of Christianity. There are a couple of points you may find a little difficult to understand at first – but grapple with them. It will be worth it in the end.
There are three key ideas that we need to grapple with if we are to understand the work of Christ and these will be the focus of the next three chapters:
1. Christ as Mediator of a New Covenant.
2. Christ our Substitute.
3. The Divine Exchange
BACKGROUND:
At the time of Christ there was a dominant way of thinking, a world-view, that had begun in Greece about 500 years before with the Philosophers. As part of that world-view, the Greeks had come to some fixed beliefs about God (largely as a result of the work of Aristotle).
1. God, i.e. the infinite absolute being, (if he exists) must be one. Monotheism was a philosophical necessity for the Greeks in the days of Christ. If there was an infinite absolute being there must be only one of them as it is a logical impossibility to have two infinite absolute beings. This was considered to be axiomatic.
2. Dualism: By Greek definition, Spirit is good; matter is evil.
3. God is perfect. Because God is spirit, he is perfect.
This had two corollaries:
(i) God could not come into contact with that which is imperfect in case he became contaminated, i.e. less than perfect, i.e. less than God – which is a logical impossibility. This physical world is imperfect, evil, so God could not come into contact with earth.
(ii) The idea of perfection they had was static. In their thinking, change meant moving either from a lesser to a greater perfection or from a greater degree of perfection to a lesser. Such a movement in a perfect God was unthinkable, so God was deemed to be “the Unmoved Mover”. God could not do anything, because if he did that would imply change. Change would mean that God had moved from some degree of imperfection to perfection, or from perfection to a degree of imperfection. This was thought to be impossible for God who, by definition, always was, is and always will be, perfect. By definition, then, God could not speak or act in any way. One wonders if he could even think!
These three ideas were axiomatic to the Greeks. It is relatively easy to see that the Gospel message would be "foolishness to the Greeks". The Gospel tells of a God who:
1. Acts, speaks, feels, thinks and
2. Who came to earth – not only coming to earth but became a man – a physical being thus corrupt and evil.
3. Created a material world that is fundamentally “good”, not evil.
To Greek thinking this was foolishness.
To counter the influence of Greek philosophy the Church had to do some hard thinking. The crux of the debate centred around the person of Christ because the Christian message meant that, in Christ, God (perfection) and matter (imperfection) came together. The events of the Gospel revealed Jesus as being both God and man – which was an impossible combination if one started from the assumptions of Greek thought. The whole future of the Christian message hinged on resolving the question of who was Jesus.
Many theories were put forward over a 400 year period about the exact nature of Christ. Basically all of the theories were trying to grapple with the concepts of Greek philosophy but many of them fell into one or other of two wrong solutions:
* Either the solution minimised the humanity of Christ in some way so that he was said to be “not really a man” but rather some form of divine being, or
* It minimised his divinity so that he was seen to be “only a man and not really God”.
These wrong solutions were the result of a wrong approach they started with Greek philosophy and tried to reconcile the Gospel to it. Greek philosophy simply did not allow God to come into contact with earth so the reality of one or the other had to be denied. Such an approach never works. When we try to adapt the Gospel to the prevailing world-view we will always go wrong. Instead the gospel must critique the prevailing worldview. This is what happened in the history of the Church.
The whole debate came to a head in the 4th Century through a teaching originated by a man called Arius. Arius had adopted some ideas from Greek philosophy and mythology and grafted them on to the Gospel. Accepting the fundamental dualism of Greek thought, he argued that “Christ was homoiousios with the father” - the word “homoiousios” meaning “of like substance”. Thus his position was that Christ was not actually God in his essential being but was only in some way “like” God.
This amounted to a complete denial of Chrisitanity if followed through. It was axiomatic that “Only God can save” and if Christ was “not really God” then we are not saved by Christ. Christianity would therefore be just another religious myth - and as such could be discounted.
The definitive solution to the problem came at a Whole Church Council at Nicea in 325AD, primarily through the work of a man called Athanasius.
Athanasius recognised that the typical approach was never going to work so he began from a different starting point – not from the assumptions of Greek philosophy but beginning with the work of Christ.
For Athanasius the work of Christ and his person/nature were inseparable and he claimed we could only understand the Christ’s person/nature through an understanding of his work. As a result he arrived at some different conclusions and managed to resolve many of the fundamental theological and philosophical problems of Greek thinking which had eluded resolution for over 900 years.
Athanasius solution was accepted by the whole Church and was enshrined in the creed now known as the Nicene Creed – which is the only Creed which has been accepted by the whole Church, East and West.
This creed was the subject of debate over another 80 years but was finally ratified along with the understanding behind it at another Whole Church Council at Chalcedon in 451AD. By this time Athanasius was dead but three men known as the Cappadocian Fathers took up his position. They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, his Brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa and their friend Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus. Support came from the Western church through Pope Leo, Bishop of Rome.
The Creed summarises a position known as the Orthodox position as it was the definition of Orthodox doctrine for the whole church.
But we need to remember that there is a particular understanding of the work of Christ behind the words of the Creed.
THE THEOLOGY BEHIND THE CREED:
So where did Athanasius start from?
Over the 2000 years since Christ came, many attempts have been made to explain his work. The Bible itself has many pictures, or metaphors, drawn from daily life and nature, to attempt to shed some light on the meaning of this event.
The problem with this approach is that we tend to end up taking one illustration of the work of Christ as the whole explanation. The result is that other aspects of his work are neglected - we over-emphasise one picture to the detriment of others. As a result we miss out on seeing the real meaning of Christ's work. What we end up with is a perversion of truth through overemphasis.
The Western Church has traditionally taken this approach, and has concentrated on the legal picture of the work of Christ, i.e. justification. This is because the Western, or Latin, Church was influenced greatly by the interests of secular Roman thinkers – who were very interested in law. So the legal picture of Christ’s work, justification, became the dominant idea in the Western Church.
This has left the Western Church – both Catholic and Protestant - with a disturbing tendency to be legalistic at the very roots. This is hardly avoidable if the key concept one is working with is a legal one.
This is very subtle but very real and most of you will have encountered and reacted to this legalism without knowing exactly what you are reacting to - because it is so subtle. At the same time you will probably have fallen prey to the same legalism without realising it. I did, and do, repeatedly.
Because our whole Western society has roots in Roman law and Christian thinking affected by Roman law we tend to trying to solve problems through a legal approach. Most of the rest of the world tends to solve problems through a relational approach, following more of an Eastern Church model, which is covenant based.
The Eastern Church has taken quite a different approach and it is to this that many Western scholars are now returning, sometimes called the "Ontological" approach. This was the approach of Athanasius.
For Athanasius the only way to understand the person of Christ was through his work. The work of the gospel was the key to understanding who Christ was in his person.
Athanasius started from this fundamental point: The purpose of Christ coming to earth was to establish a New Covenant between God and man.
Everything else was part of the process of doing this or a result of doing this. All the other pictures of the work of Christ are explanations of part of this. But this idea, mediation, is the key idea. So the key idea to understand in the work of Christ is the idea of Mediator.
Key Texts:
Hebrews 8:6.
“But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.”
Hebrews 9:15
“For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance- now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”
Now here we need to jump out of our way of thinking into the Jewish mind for a moment to understand what the writer is saying.
When we Westerners hear the word “Mediator” these are the ideas that we come up with:
1. Two parties are in dispute (or, at war) and cannot get an agreement.
2. A Mediator is called in to arbitrate between them.
3. The Qualifications of the Mediator: He must be an independent, neutral, third party (So he has no bias).
So when we hear the phrase “Christ is mediator” what we typically hear, in our heads, is “Christ came as an independent and neutral third party to bring God and Man together”.
It is right here that the Hebrew idea of mediation and ours’ are completely different – right at this point of being an “independent neutral third party”. That is exactly not the idea of Hebrew mediation. And if we don’t see the difference then we totally misunderstand the whole Christian doctrine of the person and work of Christ.
The Bible, or Hebrew, concept of mediation is different from ours’ in that it does not envisage an independent third party bringing two warring parties together rather it sees the mediator as being one who embodies in himself the two parties at war. He is thus not a third party but is, in himself, both parties.
(It is for this reason that no European or American will ever be able to mediate peace between Jews and Arabs. To be able to do so requires the mediator to embody both Jew and Arab. Peace will only come to the Middle East when Jesus returns, because he is the true son of Abraham. As such he embodies all that is Jewish and all that is Arab and so will be able to negotiate peace between them.)
This understanding of Mediation is the starting point of Athanasius’ doctrine and the foundation of the Doctrine behind the Nicene Creed.
The first mediator in the Bible perfectly illustrates this. Adam was created to be priest and king in creation. As priest he partook of the nature of the physical realm – he had a physical body, but he also had breathed into him the Divine Spirit so that he was able to partake of the spiritual realm. In himself he embodied both the physical and the spiritual and so was able to be priest of Creation for God, to be God’s image. As mediator, fully understanding both the physical and spiritual realms, he was appointed king of the earth. He was thus a king-priest.
Since Adam fell there had never been a true mediator, a true priest, until Christ came. This is the message of the book of Hebrews: the Aaronic priesthood, though appointed by God, was actually not up to the real task of Priesthood so God planned to replace them with the true priesthood, of which Christ is High Priest.
For this reason Paul calls Jesus by two significant titles in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 – the “last Adam” and the “second man”. The title “second man” is now understandable – only Christ and Adam have been men in the true, full sense: uniting as priests, as mediators, in their own person the physical and the spiritual realms in the fullest possible way and hence being able to rule as king. The rest of us are less than men: fallen and spiritually dead. It is only as we receive Christ we become again, “Priests unto God.”
Christ is mediator of a New Covenant between God and man, and through man of all creation. One aspect of his work of mediation was justification, another was reconciliation, another was redemption and so on, but Athanasius saw that the overriding idea that summed up all the other pictures of Christ’s work was that of Mediator. So instead of following the Western Church and seeing what was only a partial picture as the whole and thus missing the point Athanasius made a better, more comprehensive starting point.
So Christ is a mediator, not in the modern, Western sense of a third party drawing two warring parties together, but in the sense that he, in Himself, embodies the two parties of the New Covenant. He is both God and Man; thus he effects the reconciliation within his own being. He is only able to do the work of mediation because he is, in himself, already the mediator, uniting God and man in the one person.
This is the key idea – he can only be mediator because in himself he already embodies both parties. If he did not embody both parties he would be an “independent third party” and thus could not be mediator at all. Do you see the total difference between our idea and God’s idea of mediation?
He came to be mediator between God and man. This purpose governs who he had to be in his person: He had to be both God and man in one person.
This was the conclusion Athanasias came to and it was enshrined in the Nicene Creed and accepted by the whole Church as being the Orthodox and correct way to understand Christ.
CHRIST IS THE POSSESSOR OF TWO NATURES - DIVINE AND HUMAN.
The whole Christian claim rests on the belief that, although Jesus was a man in history, he was also fully God in his essential nature and so was able to perfectly reveal the person and nature of God and to do the works of God necessary for man’s salvation.
Some key Bible texts teaching this understanding of Christ’s nature:
John 1:1-2,14.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning…
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
“The Word”:
* Was “in the beginning”, i.e. before creation. Thus the Word is not created or made but is an eternal reality.
* Is a person – pronouns “he” and “him” are used of the Word to show this.
* “Was with God”, i.e. living in relationship with God for all eternity. This implies that there is a distinction between God and the “Word”. Something cannot be “With” something else if it is the same thing. The Word is somehow different from God.
* “Was God”, i.e. in some way there is an identity between “the Word” and God so that they are the same.
* “Became flesh” i.e. became a man. But “became” implies he existed as a distinct personality before he “became” man.
* “And dwelt amongst us”, i.e. this miracle of God becoming man was observed by other people who lived alongside Jesus in his earthly life, including John himself. These people are witnesses to the fact that it is true.
John is saying here that Jesus is the Word of God is, or the way God reveals himself, or makes himself known. This "Word" is himself actually God, but in some way is different from God and lived with God in eternity but at a particular point in time became a man in Jesus Christ. The “Word” is a Person in his own right; He is a “He”. Thus Jesus Christ is essentially “in himself” God and so is a perfect revelation of the person and nature of God.
John 1:1-2,14 told us that Jesus “was God” and he “became flesh”, i.e. a man. From this we understand that Jesus had two natures – he was fully God and he was fully man. He was not “less than God” because he was a man, nor was he “less of a man” because he was God. Rather both natures were preserved intact in his person.
Philippians 2:5-8.
“(Jesus) Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death- even death on a cross!”
A. Christ is God.
* "being" – Greek: hyparchon: A stronger form of the verb "to be'.
It means, "Being originally".
It speaks of what was and is unchangeably his – he is God.
* "in very nature" – Greek: morphe: Means "Permanent form, essential nature". His essential nature was that of God. This is a plain assertion of Christ's divinity. It implies that when he became man he did not stop being fully God, divine.
This is how Jesus is the same as God – he is God in his essential nature.
B. Christ became a Man.
“made himself” – the process we are about to read was not something that happened to him outside of his own will and decision. “Made himself” tells us that he actually worked this whole process himself. This implies he existed before the process began, i.e. before he was conceived as a man.
“taking” – implies he existed before he took on human form and that this act of “taking” was a conscious act of free will on his part.
"form/nature of a servant" – Greek: morphe: essential nature - this was not a piece of play acting, but reality - Jesus became truly man in his essential nature. From then on he never ceased to be man. Jesus is still a man today. The incarnation of Christ resulted in a permanent change in the nature and structure of the Godhead (the Trinity).
"Made" - part of Greek verb gignesthai: The idea here is that of "becoming", it describes a changing phase that is completely real but is not part of the original essence of the person. It suggests that humanity was not part of Christ's essence originally, but he assumed it. It does not imply the state is impermanent once it has occurred.
"likeness" - The Greek means "It is exactly the same stuff". It does not mean the English sense of "like but not really the same". Jesus was, and is, a real man in every way.
"appearance" – Greek: skema: The word applies to the outward appearance that can change. Paul is saying here: though Christ's outward appearance changed he remained essentially what he always was - God.
The clear meaning is that:
God, in Christ, became man without ceasing to be God. Christ is now permanently and essentially both God and man.
This understanding that Christ is both God and man was based firmly on the experience of Salvation that the NT writers and early Church Fathers had.
Their logic went something like this:
1. Jesus was and is clearly a man. (This is a simple fact of history.)
2. Only God can save us, i.e. forgive sin (This is an axiom that is beyond debate).
3. But in our experience Jesus saves us from our sins (This was the undisputed fact of their experience).
4. Therefore Jesus is God (The Logical conclusion).
5. Hence Jesus has two natures – he is both God and man.
T.F.Torrance, The Incarnation.
“If, in fact, Jesus is not God then Jesus was acting merely on his own like any other creature. Then there is no salvation in Christ. But Jesus is presented in the Bible as acting out of an unbroken oneness with God, which is the very ground of his significance. He and the Father are one. That is why Jesus’ acts are saving acts: they are divine acts…
“If Christ is not God then he is a mere man on the cross, and God is wholly alone in his deity. We could not believe in such a God who, with the finest man of the human race, did not lift a finger to help. To leave Jesus as only a man on the cross would leave us in darkness and despair with a horrible God. But make Jesus God himself and the whole picture is transformed - then Jesus is the Word and Hand of God stretched out to save us...
“If there was no unity of God and Christ it would mean for mankind there is no real bridge in being or nature between man and God. It would mean that Jesus and all he stands for is irrelevant for the ultimate destiny of man and that the ultimate issues belong to God alone - whose love fell short of identifying himself with us. God may well turn out to be different to what we thought. There would be a dark God behind Jesus we cannot see - a god of fear…
“But Jesus insists that he and the Father are one - the work of Jesus is the work of God, there is no dark hidden God behind Jesus, but Jesus is the open heart of God.”
Christ must be God – otherwise:
1. He does not reveal God. He is just another prophet like the OT prophets. He would thus reveal things about God but God himself would not be revealed. But the Bible claims that God is revealed in Christ.
2. He cannot save – for only God can save. Only God can forgive sin. If Christ was not God then he could not save us from our sins. But the Bible tells us that he saves us from our sins.
It is clear from these verses that Jesus had, in himself, perfectly preserved both the nature of God and the nature of man.
Thus the Bible and the Creeds state clearly that:
Christ is the possessor of two natures - divine and human. He is both God and man
Question: How much of a man did Christ Become?
The Fathers of the Church debated this also. Their response, affirmed at the Church Councils, is clear:
Christ became a real man, fully identifying with the Adamic race in every way
The key word used at Nicea by Athanasius was the Greek word, “Homoousios” which means “of the same substance”. Thus the Orthodox position was that Christ is “of the same substance as the Father”, i.e. he is in his essential nature exactly the same as God.
But Athanasius’ view was that Christ is not only homoousios with God – he is also homoousios with mankind, i.e. he is, in his human nature, authentically human.
Torrance:
"The king pin idea of the Creed was the homoousion - the affirmation of:
(1) The oneness-in-being of the Father and the Son.
(2) The oneness-in-being of the Son with mankind.
Thus the Son as mediator fully participates in both Godhead and Humanity."
Athanasias developed this understanding from the idea of mediation – the mediator has to embody in himself both parties requiring mediation.
Side Note:
The historical debate was thus between two positions:
(i) That of Arius who said Christ was “homoiousious” with the Father.
(ii) That of Athanasius who said Christ was “homoousious” with the Father.
As you can see the difference in Greek is very small – but of profound importance.
The letter “i” in Greek is written simply as a dot, and its name is “iota”. This has led to proverbial sayings such as:
“There is only a dot between them”, or,
“There is only an iota between them”.
These sayings originated from this historical debate at Nicea and generally mean that the difference between two positions is very slight, almost negligible, not worth arguing over. Indeed this was the position the Roman Emperor took several times and as a result Athanasius was banished five times into exile because the emperor though he was just being difficult.
But Athanasius considered that dot to be of fundamental importance – the difference between truth and error. If Arius was right then Christianity was just a myth, but if Athanasius was right then Christ is the power of God to save men from their sins. Eventually the whole Church came to agree that Athanasius was right.
CHRIST TOOK ON (“ASSUMED”) OUR SIN NATURE:
The mediator has to embody in himself both parties requiring mediation.
This leads inevitably to the next question: Who are the two parties that need mediation?
The answer is clear:
(i) God in his perfect holiness and,
(ii) Man in his sin.
It is these two parties that the mediator has to mediate for, thus he has to embrace in his essential nature these two parties: the perfect God and the sinful man.
For this reason Christ took on himself fallen humanity – so that he could reconcile it to God.
St. Athanasius put it this way: “Whatever is not assumed is not healed”.
By this he meant that if Christ had not assumed our fallenness then we could not be healed from it. But we can – and will be – healed from it.
So not only did God become a man; he assumed fallen humanity – he became a “fallen” man. This is totally unacceptable to Greek thinking –God, in Christ, didn’t just take on matter – an idea which would be bad enough – he took on “evil matter”, the fallen, sinful nature of mankind.
About this the Church, since Athanasius, has always agreed.
It is affirmed in Scripture.
2 Corinthians 5:21
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
There is general agreement that this here is not the idea of Christ simply taking the punishment for our sins, i.e. our acts of wrongdoing. It rather indicates he took on the very fallen nature of sin that we need redemption from.
While the Church has agreed Christ took on our fallenness, there has been debate about when he actually assumed the fallenness of humanity.
(I repeat: It is not disputed that he assumed our fallenness. That he took on our fallenness has always been the view of the Church. The only question is this: “When did he assume our fallenness?”)
To this question two answers have been given:
1. The answer of Athanasius and the Fathers at the two Church Councils was that he took our fallenness on himself in the incarnation, i.e. at conception. This is still the view of the Eastern Orthodox Church today. This implies that in his human nature from conception, and right through his life, he (like us) struggled with a fallen human nature.
T.F. Torrance, though a Western Christian, is representative of an Eastern view:
“Since, in Jesus, God has come into our human being and united our human nature with his own, divine nature, then atoning reconciliation takes place within the personal Being of the Mediator. His person and work are one. What he does is not separate from his personal being. I.e. the work of Christ does not take place outside of Christ but within him, within the incarnate constitution of his person as Mediator. Redemption is thus linked with the incarnation...
“In Jesus Christ, the Son of God became incarnate within our fallen, guilt-laden humanity. Through his own atoning self-sacrifice and self-consecration, he did away with our evil and healed and sanctified our human nature from within and thus presents us to the Father as those redeemed and consecrated in himself.”
2. The Western Church, some time after the Councils, moved to a view that said he assumed our fallenness only while he was on the Cross. This would imply that during his life on earth he did not have a fallen human nature. Rather he assumed our fallenness only when he was on the Cross as part of his final Passion. This is the generally held view of both Catholic and Protestant Churches.
Derek Prince, “The Atonement” is representative of a Western View:
“At the Cross an exchange took place, divinely ordained and predicted. All the evil due, by Justice, to come to us came on Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus earned by his sinless obedience, might be made available to us.”
I have not studied when the change in the West came or exactly why. However I suspect the influence of Greek philosophy on Western theologians. The ideas of God held by the philosophers (as listed above) would tend to produce such a shift. One of the facts about the Nicene Creed was that it was – at every point – a contradiction of some tenet of Greek Philosophy. This contradiction centred on Christ: In Christ, the perfect, sinless God took on sinful humanity. Thus Christ is the absolute contradiction of Greek philosophy which said God, being perfect, could not come into contact with corruption. The Fathers at Nicea clearly understood this but Greek philosophy later again infiltrated the Church at several points and this appears to have been one of them. Secular Rome at the time was in the grip of Greek philosophical ideas and they seem to have crept back into the Church at this point.
My own suspicion is that the change in the Western Church came with Augustine, but I have not done enough research to confirm this. Augustine, though a great theologian, was a student of Greek philosophy before he came to Christ. He was a Neo-Platonist. As a Christian theologian his avowed intent was to bring a reconciliation between Christian theology and Platonic thought. The doctrine of Athanasius on the Incarnation would be at odds with Augustine’s Platonic Philosophy and so he would have looked for another solution. The idea that the Son of God would have taken on himself sinful humanity in the incarnation would have been too much for Augustine.
A verse that is relevant to this discussion is:
Romans 8:3
“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ….”
* It is clear here that the issue is our “sinful nature” and that Christ took on himself. This is not talking about sins, i.e. acts of wrongdoing, but about the nature of sin.
* The word “likeness” does not mean the English sense of “like but not the same as”. Rather the Greek means, “It is like, that is, exactly the same as…” So the meaning is that “God …sending his own Son as a sinful man…”
* The language used, “sending”, sounds more like a reference to the incarnation, his birth, his coming to earth, than to the Cross.
It is the view of this author that the Orthodox view (of St Athanasius) is correct, that Christ took on himself our fallen humanity in the incarnation.
If you are in the least interested in this debate the following are some points in favour of this view worth your consideration. But if you are not interested you can skip through them:
(1) Reiteration of a point made in the last chapter.
(i) Jesus, through the miracle of the virgin birth, did not inherit the legal curse of the sin of Adam.
Here is where we need to understand some Jewish background. Two things are important.
* Under Jewish understanding the spiritual inheritance of the child is derived from the mother, but the legal inheritance, of property, comes from the father. Thus a person is considered a Jew, i.e. a child of the covenant, if the child’s mother is a Jew, even if the Father is a Gentile, but if the mother is a Gentile the child is a Gentile, even if the Father is a Jew. This is still true today and is the criteria used for automatic citizenship in the nation of Israel of international Jews.
* Covenants are legal contracts to do with inheritance. Biblically speaking legal inheritances are ALWAYS passed down from the FATHER the SON. The legal responsibilities, privileges and costs come from the FATHER'S family, not from the mother's. Daughters received a dowry, sons received the inheritance.
Jesus, through the virgin birth, had no human father. God was his Father. He was conceived by a creative act of the Holy Spirit. Thus he was not of Adam’s seed, he was indeed “the seed of the Woman”.
Thus there are two effects of the virgin birth, these seem contradictory to us but are not so in God’s economy:
* Jesus inherited his Father's legal rights and position, not his mother's; thus he inherited God’s standing as far as the Law was concerned. The legal inheritance of the broken covenant of Adam was bypassed and Christ was not liable to death under the Law of God. He was guiltless, holy, righteous.
* However Jesus inherited the spiritual inheritance of his mother, a fallen, corrupt human nature in need of redemption.
2. It is hard to imagine how Christ would have taken on our sin nature at the Cross.
For this to have happened it would have had to be by Divine Declaration, i.e. declaration by God the Father that it was so. This seems to be the view of Derek Prince (quoted above).
But the problem with this is that “declaration” is a legal term defining a legal state. Law deals with guilt and innocence, i.e. with actions, but not with essential nature. A legal declaration can never change the essential nature of something. The best a legal declaration can do is proclaim guilt or innocence, i.e. theologically all a declaration about sin could effect is justification or condemnation.
So we are left with the essential nature of Christ remaining unchanged on the Cross – only the guilt of sin is removed. A declaration can never change essence.
But here the words of Athanasius are important, “Whatever is not assumed is not healed.”
I.e. if Christ did not assume, take on our sinful nature then we cannot be set free from it. All declaration does is deal with guilt, so this scenario would leave us with the frustration of never being able to be free from the power of sin.
3. However it is easy to see how if it happened at the incarnation - Jesus would have inherited it from Mary.
Jewish belief is that we inherit our spirituality from our mother, not our father, so this would make sense.
The Catholic Church recognises this difficulty and so has put forward the doctrine of “The Immaculate Conception of Mary”. This is not a doctrine about the conception of Christ, but rather about the conception of Mary. Catholic Theologians have recognised that if she was "fallen" then her children would be also, including Christ. Thus to overcome this they suggest Mary herself was “unfallen” because she was “Immaculately conceived.” The problem with this is that it just pushes the problem one step further back. How was it that she was immaculately conceived? Was her mother sinless? And so the problem reappears.
4. Looking at the question from the viewpoint of Mediation:
It would be no good if Christ embodied God and “non-sinful” man – because:
* No such men exist and if they did they would not be in rebellion against God so would not need reconciling.
* The reconciliation of such “non sinful” men to God would not help sinful men who are lost in their sin and rebellion.
Such a mediation would achieve absolutely nothing in restoring sinful man to relationship with God.
Many Western scholars are coming back to the Eastern/ Orthodox view because it really makes more sense.
The primary objection made by Western scholars to the Eastern view (at least it seems to be to be the case) is that if Christ assumed fallen human nature he also would need to be saved, so how could he be saviour?
Athanasius starts from a different point and says: The Mediator has to embody both parties requiring mediation. This is a necessity of Mediation. It follows from this that if he did not embody sinful man, one party in the needed mediation, then he could not be mediator so he could not save us. So Athanasius would immediately come to a different conclusion from the Western view.
As I have argued above in point 1, there is a difference between the inherited nature of sin and personal acts of sin. It seems to me that the Western argument here is confusing the consequences of personal acts of sin, i.e. guilt and separation from God, with the consequences of inherited fallenness, i.e. personal corruption.
In the final analysis two All Church Councils agreed with Athanasius' position and decreed it to be "Orthodox Doctrine". Opposing viewpoints were deemed to be "heretical". One would have to conclude from this that the Western view is heretical.
The arguments become convoluted and difficult either way. If the question bothers you, you may need to study up on it. My feeling is that the Eastern Orthodox view is correct and so I will proceed with that assumption. As we shall see in later chapters it delivers great depth and beauty to our salvation.
THE WORK OF THE MEDIATOR:
Athanasius starting point was the fact of the Gospel – Christ saves us from our sins – this the fact of Christian experience. But he argued from there. He combines the idea of mediation together with the facts of the gospel.
1. Only God can save.
This is axiomatic – only God can save. But Christ saves us from our sins. Therefore he must be God. If Jesus is not God then we are not saved, for only God can save.
T.F.Torrance:
“If Christ were not one with the Father, all he did would have no ultimate significance for us, and God himself would be utterly indifferent to the suffering of mankind.”
2. Only man can be saved.
As Mediator of Salvation then Christ had to take on full human nature. It was the nature of the man who needed to be saved that he has to take on if he was to save him.
The Gospel says:
3. Only God can save, but he saves as a man.
T.F.Torrance:
“We are to understand the incarnation as God becoming man, acting as man for our sake. Not God IN man, but God AS man.”
In Christ, God is not just inside a man (as the Holy Spirit is in us) motivating and directing him. Rather, in Christ, God has become man.
4. Christ became fully man, perfectly identified with us in our humanity, in order to save us.
Christ came to bring into being a New Covenant between God and Man - to re-establish the relationship broken through the Fall of Adam. Being already God he had to take on human nature in order to effectively be the mediator.
5 Christ mediated a New Covenant between man and God, thus making it possible for us to relate to God again.
Here again we have to see the final difference between our view of mediation and the Hebrew/Bible view.
We tend to think of a Mediator as one working with the two warring parties bringing them to an agreement on things that each one of them should do in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. In this scenario the two parties do the things required to make reconciliation, the mediator himself does nothing. He is only a broker of words.
This is as far removed from the Bible concept of mediation as you can be.
In the Bible the Mediator actually completely fulfils all of the requirements for reconciliation for both parties himself. He does the work for them. In actual fact the warring parties do nothing to create the reconciliation – they simply receive it as a gift from the mediator. It is for this reason that he has to embody in himself the two warring parties. Only such a mediator can fully understand the point of view of both parties in such a way as to make proper allowances.
Hebrews 4:15.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet was without sin.”
He was already God so he fully understood the “God side” of the equation.
He became fallen man so that he might understand our side of the equation.
Things were required of man – but look at God’s grace:
Covenants have two parties and both parties have things they must do to make the covenant operational. God could do the things necessary from his end, but man was incapable of doing the things required of him from his end. Thus God himself became man to do the things required of man to fulfill the covenant terms and conditions.
T.F.Torrance:
“For Athanasius, the mediating action of Christ was twofold - God to man and man to God, and that both divine and human activity must be regarded as issuing from one person. In order that there be perfect mediation it requires that both sides in the mediation be fully reconciled and fulfil all that is required of them. Because man is already fallen, God took on himself fallen humanity in order that he might fulfil our part of the mediation, thus providing a perfect salvation for us.”
Athanasius:
“As Mediator, Jesus ministered the things of God to man and the things of man to God. Christ fulfilled both the divine and human sides of the covenant.”
Now we understand this to be true: the New Covenant was completed by Christ. It is completed, sealed - Christ has fulfilled all of the requirements of the Covenant both from the divine side and the human side. The New Covenant was established by Christ 2000 years ago – it is fully operational. He did it all. It required absolutely nothing from any other man to make it fully operational. It requires nothing from me – or you - to make it operational for us.
The Covenant is already sealed. It was sealed by Christ acting as God for God and acting as man for man. The human responsibility for completing the covenant was undertaken by him. He was our representative. He acted for us.
Jesus thus fulfilled the covenant from both sides - he is “our God”, and he is “God's people.”
We shall look at some of the things each party had to do in later chapters but here we will close with an astounding implication of this:
The Covenant is complete, sealed, all that was required of both parties, God and man, to make the covenant fully operational s done by Christ as Mediator.
This means for us to enter into this covenant relationship with God there is nothing more that we need to do – in fact there is nothing we can do – to make this relationship work. All the work of reconciliation has been done.
This means that for us to enter into this covenant relationship we can only receive it as a gift.
And to maintain the relationship all we can do is receive it as a gift. This is faith – to receive from God, through Christ, a relationship with him that we have not had to do anything to obtain.
This is Athanasius’ position and it was accepted by the whole Church as being the correct doctrine.
(T.F.Torrance has written several books on this subject including “Trinitarian Faith”, “The Mediation of Christ” and “The Incarnation”. For the life of me, I can’t remember where these particular quotes came from. However I warmly recommend his books.
“The Mediation of Christ” and “The Incarnation” are quite readable.
“Trinitarian Faith” is quite heavy going, but well worth the effort.
Amazon usually stocks them.)
As we have seen, mankind was created into a covenant relationship with God. Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, the Fall, mankind is now out of relationship with God. The covenant relationship has been broken. Mankind has “fallen” from the relationship originally planned for him by God.
As we have seen, there were a whole lot of flow-on effects from the Fall as the destructive power of sin worked in the universe. It is to these effects of the Fall and how Christ has reversed them we turn now.
The first thing Christ has done is made it possible for us to have a relationship with God again.
God still desired the relationship with man and so he acted to provide a new way for man to relate to him, a “New Covenant” relationship. This covenant relationship was brought into effect by Christ and is received by us as a gift.
Thus the fundamental thing Christ did in reversing the effects of the Fall was make a way for us to enter into covenant relationship with God again. It is to this we shall turn now. In later chapters we shall look at other things Christ did for us, but this is fundamental.
Note: What we are about to look at is central to the whole understanding of Christianity. There are a couple of points you may find a little difficult to understand at first – but grapple with them. It will be worth it in the end.
There are three key ideas that we need to grapple with if we are to understand the work of Christ and these will be the focus of the next three chapters:
1. Christ as Mediator of a New Covenant.
2. Christ our Substitute.
3. The Divine Exchange
BACKGROUND:
At the time of Christ there was a dominant way of thinking, a world-view, that had begun in Greece about 500 years before with the Philosophers. As part of that world-view, the Greeks had come to some fixed beliefs about God (largely as a result of the work of Aristotle).
1. God, i.e. the infinite absolute being, (if he exists) must be one. Monotheism was a philosophical necessity for the Greeks in the days of Christ. If there was an infinite absolute being there must be only one of them as it is a logical impossibility to have two infinite absolute beings. This was considered to be axiomatic.
2. Dualism: By Greek definition, Spirit is good; matter is evil.
3. God is perfect. Because God is spirit, he is perfect.
This had two corollaries:
(i) God could not come into contact with that which is imperfect in case he became contaminated, i.e. less than perfect, i.e. less than God – which is a logical impossibility. This physical world is imperfect, evil, so God could not come into contact with earth.
(ii) The idea of perfection they had was static. In their thinking, change meant moving either from a lesser to a greater perfection or from a greater degree of perfection to a lesser. Such a movement in a perfect God was unthinkable, so God was deemed to be “the Unmoved Mover”. God could not do anything, because if he did that would imply change. Change would mean that God had moved from some degree of imperfection to perfection, or from perfection to a degree of imperfection. This was thought to be impossible for God who, by definition, always was, is and always will be, perfect. By definition, then, God could not speak or act in any way. One wonders if he could even think!
These three ideas were axiomatic to the Greeks. It is relatively easy to see that the Gospel message would be "foolishness to the Greeks". The Gospel tells of a God who:
1. Acts, speaks, feels, thinks and
2. Who came to earth – not only coming to earth but became a man – a physical being thus corrupt and evil.
3. Created a material world that is fundamentally “good”, not evil.
To Greek thinking this was foolishness.
To counter the influence of Greek philosophy the Church had to do some hard thinking. The crux of the debate centred around the person of Christ because the Christian message meant that, in Christ, God (perfection) and matter (imperfection) came together. The events of the Gospel revealed Jesus as being both God and man – which was an impossible combination if one started from the assumptions of Greek thought. The whole future of the Christian message hinged on resolving the question of who was Jesus.
Many theories were put forward over a 400 year period about the exact nature of Christ. Basically all of the theories were trying to grapple with the concepts of Greek philosophy but many of them fell into one or other of two wrong solutions:
* Either the solution minimised the humanity of Christ in some way so that he was said to be “not really a man” but rather some form of divine being, or
* It minimised his divinity so that he was seen to be “only a man and not really God”.
These wrong solutions were the result of a wrong approach they started with Greek philosophy and tried to reconcile the Gospel to it. Greek philosophy simply did not allow God to come into contact with earth so the reality of one or the other had to be denied. Such an approach never works. When we try to adapt the Gospel to the prevailing world-view we will always go wrong. Instead the gospel must critique the prevailing worldview. This is what happened in the history of the Church.
The whole debate came to a head in the 4th Century through a teaching originated by a man called Arius. Arius had adopted some ideas from Greek philosophy and mythology and grafted them on to the Gospel. Accepting the fundamental dualism of Greek thought, he argued that “Christ was homoiousios with the father” - the word “homoiousios” meaning “of like substance”. Thus his position was that Christ was not actually God in his essential being but was only in some way “like” God.
This amounted to a complete denial of Chrisitanity if followed through. It was axiomatic that “Only God can save” and if Christ was “not really God” then we are not saved by Christ. Christianity would therefore be just another religious myth - and as such could be discounted.
The definitive solution to the problem came at a Whole Church Council at Nicea in 325AD, primarily through the work of a man called Athanasius.
Athanasius recognised that the typical approach was never going to work so he began from a different starting point – not from the assumptions of Greek philosophy but beginning with the work of Christ.
For Athanasius the work of Christ and his person/nature were inseparable and he claimed we could only understand the Christ’s person/nature through an understanding of his work. As a result he arrived at some different conclusions and managed to resolve many of the fundamental theological and philosophical problems of Greek thinking which had eluded resolution for over 900 years.
Athanasius solution was accepted by the whole Church and was enshrined in the creed now known as the Nicene Creed – which is the only Creed which has been accepted by the whole Church, East and West.
This creed was the subject of debate over another 80 years but was finally ratified along with the understanding behind it at another Whole Church Council at Chalcedon in 451AD. By this time Athanasius was dead but three men known as the Cappadocian Fathers took up his position. They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, his Brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa and their friend Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus. Support came from the Western church through Pope Leo, Bishop of Rome.
The Creed summarises a position known as the Orthodox position as it was the definition of Orthodox doctrine for the whole church.
But we need to remember that there is a particular understanding of the work of Christ behind the words of the Creed.
THE THEOLOGY BEHIND THE CREED:
So where did Athanasius start from?
Over the 2000 years since Christ came, many attempts have been made to explain his work. The Bible itself has many pictures, or metaphors, drawn from daily life and nature, to attempt to shed some light on the meaning of this event.
The problem with this approach is that we tend to end up taking one illustration of the work of Christ as the whole explanation. The result is that other aspects of his work are neglected - we over-emphasise one picture to the detriment of others. As a result we miss out on seeing the real meaning of Christ's work. What we end up with is a perversion of truth through overemphasis.
The Western Church has traditionally taken this approach, and has concentrated on the legal picture of the work of Christ, i.e. justification. This is because the Western, or Latin, Church was influenced greatly by the interests of secular Roman thinkers – who were very interested in law. So the legal picture of Christ’s work, justification, became the dominant idea in the Western Church.
This has left the Western Church – both Catholic and Protestant - with a disturbing tendency to be legalistic at the very roots. This is hardly avoidable if the key concept one is working with is a legal one.
This is very subtle but very real and most of you will have encountered and reacted to this legalism without knowing exactly what you are reacting to - because it is so subtle. At the same time you will probably have fallen prey to the same legalism without realising it. I did, and do, repeatedly.
Because our whole Western society has roots in Roman law and Christian thinking affected by Roman law we tend to trying to solve problems through a legal approach. Most of the rest of the world tends to solve problems through a relational approach, following more of an Eastern Church model, which is covenant based.
The Eastern Church has taken quite a different approach and it is to this that many Western scholars are now returning, sometimes called the "Ontological" approach. This was the approach of Athanasius.
For Athanasius the only way to understand the person of Christ was through his work. The work of the gospel was the key to understanding who Christ was in his person.
Athanasius started from this fundamental point: The purpose of Christ coming to earth was to establish a New Covenant between God and man.
Everything else was part of the process of doing this or a result of doing this. All the other pictures of the work of Christ are explanations of part of this. But this idea, mediation, is the key idea. So the key idea to understand in the work of Christ is the idea of Mediator.
Key Texts:
Hebrews 8:6.
“But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.”
Hebrews 9:15
“For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance- now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”
Now here we need to jump out of our way of thinking into the Jewish mind for a moment to understand what the writer is saying.
When we Westerners hear the word “Mediator” these are the ideas that we come up with:
1. Two parties are in dispute (or, at war) and cannot get an agreement.
2. A Mediator is called in to arbitrate between them.
3. The Qualifications of the Mediator: He must be an independent, neutral, third party (So he has no bias).
So when we hear the phrase “Christ is mediator” what we typically hear, in our heads, is “Christ came as an independent and neutral third party to bring God and Man together”.
It is right here that the Hebrew idea of mediation and ours’ are completely different – right at this point of being an “independent neutral third party”. That is exactly not the idea of Hebrew mediation. And if we don’t see the difference then we totally misunderstand the whole Christian doctrine of the person and work of Christ.
The Bible, or Hebrew, concept of mediation is different from ours’ in that it does not envisage an independent third party bringing two warring parties together rather it sees the mediator as being one who embodies in himself the two parties at war. He is thus not a third party but is, in himself, both parties.
(It is for this reason that no European or American will ever be able to mediate peace between Jews and Arabs. To be able to do so requires the mediator to embody both Jew and Arab. Peace will only come to the Middle East when Jesus returns, because he is the true son of Abraham. As such he embodies all that is Jewish and all that is Arab and so will be able to negotiate peace between them.)
This understanding of Mediation is the starting point of Athanasius’ doctrine and the foundation of the Doctrine behind the Nicene Creed.
The first mediator in the Bible perfectly illustrates this. Adam was created to be priest and king in creation. As priest he partook of the nature of the physical realm – he had a physical body, but he also had breathed into him the Divine Spirit so that he was able to partake of the spiritual realm. In himself he embodied both the physical and the spiritual and so was able to be priest of Creation for God, to be God’s image. As mediator, fully understanding both the physical and spiritual realms, he was appointed king of the earth. He was thus a king-priest.
Since Adam fell there had never been a true mediator, a true priest, until Christ came. This is the message of the book of Hebrews: the Aaronic priesthood, though appointed by God, was actually not up to the real task of Priesthood so God planned to replace them with the true priesthood, of which Christ is High Priest.
For this reason Paul calls Jesus by two significant titles in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 – the “last Adam” and the “second man”. The title “second man” is now understandable – only Christ and Adam have been men in the true, full sense: uniting as priests, as mediators, in their own person the physical and the spiritual realms in the fullest possible way and hence being able to rule as king. The rest of us are less than men: fallen and spiritually dead. It is only as we receive Christ we become again, “Priests unto God.”
Christ is mediator of a New Covenant between God and man, and through man of all creation. One aspect of his work of mediation was justification, another was reconciliation, another was redemption and so on, but Athanasius saw that the overriding idea that summed up all the other pictures of Christ’s work was that of Mediator. So instead of following the Western Church and seeing what was only a partial picture as the whole and thus missing the point Athanasius made a better, more comprehensive starting point.
So Christ is a mediator, not in the modern, Western sense of a third party drawing two warring parties together, but in the sense that he, in Himself, embodies the two parties of the New Covenant. He is both God and Man; thus he effects the reconciliation within his own being. He is only able to do the work of mediation because he is, in himself, already the mediator, uniting God and man in the one person.
This is the key idea – he can only be mediator because in himself he already embodies both parties. If he did not embody both parties he would be an “independent third party” and thus could not be mediator at all. Do you see the total difference between our idea and God’s idea of mediation?
He came to be mediator between God and man. This purpose governs who he had to be in his person: He had to be both God and man in one person.
This was the conclusion Athanasias came to and it was enshrined in the Nicene Creed and accepted by the whole Church as being the Orthodox and correct way to understand Christ.
CHRIST IS THE POSSESSOR OF TWO NATURES - DIVINE AND HUMAN.
The whole Christian claim rests on the belief that, although Jesus was a man in history, he was also fully God in his essential nature and so was able to perfectly reveal the person and nature of God and to do the works of God necessary for man’s salvation.
Some key Bible texts teaching this understanding of Christ’s nature:
John 1:1-2,14.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning…
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
“The Word”:
* Was “in the beginning”, i.e. before creation. Thus the Word is not created or made but is an eternal reality.
* Is a person – pronouns “he” and “him” are used of the Word to show this.
* “Was with God”, i.e. living in relationship with God for all eternity. This implies that there is a distinction between God and the “Word”. Something cannot be “With” something else if it is the same thing. The Word is somehow different from God.
* “Was God”, i.e. in some way there is an identity between “the Word” and God so that they are the same.
* “Became flesh” i.e. became a man. But “became” implies he existed as a distinct personality before he “became” man.
* “And dwelt amongst us”, i.e. this miracle of God becoming man was observed by other people who lived alongside Jesus in his earthly life, including John himself. These people are witnesses to the fact that it is true.
John is saying here that Jesus is the Word of God is, or the way God reveals himself, or makes himself known. This "Word" is himself actually God, but in some way is different from God and lived with God in eternity but at a particular point in time became a man in Jesus Christ. The “Word” is a Person in his own right; He is a “He”. Thus Jesus Christ is essentially “in himself” God and so is a perfect revelation of the person and nature of God.
John 1:1-2,14 told us that Jesus “was God” and he “became flesh”, i.e. a man. From this we understand that Jesus had two natures – he was fully God and he was fully man. He was not “less than God” because he was a man, nor was he “less of a man” because he was God. Rather both natures were preserved intact in his person.
Philippians 2:5-8.
“(Jesus) Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death- even death on a cross!”
A. Christ is God.
* "being" – Greek: hyparchon: A stronger form of the verb "to be'.
It means, "Being originally".
It speaks of what was and is unchangeably his – he is God.
* "in very nature" – Greek: morphe: Means "Permanent form, essential nature". His essential nature was that of God. This is a plain assertion of Christ's divinity. It implies that when he became man he did not stop being fully God, divine.
This is how Jesus is the same as God – he is God in his essential nature.
B. Christ became a Man.
“made himself” – the process we are about to read was not something that happened to him outside of his own will and decision. “Made himself” tells us that he actually worked this whole process himself. This implies he existed before the process began, i.e. before he was conceived as a man.
“taking” – implies he existed before he took on human form and that this act of “taking” was a conscious act of free will on his part.
"form/nature of a servant" – Greek: morphe: essential nature - this was not a piece of play acting, but reality - Jesus became truly man in his essential nature. From then on he never ceased to be man. Jesus is still a man today. The incarnation of Christ resulted in a permanent change in the nature and structure of the Godhead (the Trinity).
"Made" - part of Greek verb gignesthai: The idea here is that of "becoming", it describes a changing phase that is completely real but is not part of the original essence of the person. It suggests that humanity was not part of Christ's essence originally, but he assumed it. It does not imply the state is impermanent once it has occurred.
"likeness" - The Greek means "It is exactly the same stuff". It does not mean the English sense of "like but not really the same". Jesus was, and is, a real man in every way.
"appearance" – Greek: skema: The word applies to the outward appearance that can change. Paul is saying here: though Christ's outward appearance changed he remained essentially what he always was - God.
The clear meaning is that:
God, in Christ, became man without ceasing to be God. Christ is now permanently and essentially both God and man.
This understanding that Christ is both God and man was based firmly on the experience of Salvation that the NT writers and early Church Fathers had.
Their logic went something like this:
1. Jesus was and is clearly a man. (This is a simple fact of history.)
2. Only God can save us, i.e. forgive sin (This is an axiom that is beyond debate).
3. But in our experience Jesus saves us from our sins (This was the undisputed fact of their experience).
4. Therefore Jesus is God (The Logical conclusion).
5. Hence Jesus has two natures – he is both God and man.
T.F.Torrance, The Incarnation.
“If, in fact, Jesus is not God then Jesus was acting merely on his own like any other creature. Then there is no salvation in Christ. But Jesus is presented in the Bible as acting out of an unbroken oneness with God, which is the very ground of his significance. He and the Father are one. That is why Jesus’ acts are saving acts: they are divine acts…
“If Christ is not God then he is a mere man on the cross, and God is wholly alone in his deity. We could not believe in such a God who, with the finest man of the human race, did not lift a finger to help. To leave Jesus as only a man on the cross would leave us in darkness and despair with a horrible God. But make Jesus God himself and the whole picture is transformed - then Jesus is the Word and Hand of God stretched out to save us...
“If there was no unity of God and Christ it would mean for mankind there is no real bridge in being or nature between man and God. It would mean that Jesus and all he stands for is irrelevant for the ultimate destiny of man and that the ultimate issues belong to God alone - whose love fell short of identifying himself with us. God may well turn out to be different to what we thought. There would be a dark God behind Jesus we cannot see - a god of fear…
“But Jesus insists that he and the Father are one - the work of Jesus is the work of God, there is no dark hidden God behind Jesus, but Jesus is the open heart of God.”
Christ must be God – otherwise:
1. He does not reveal God. He is just another prophet like the OT prophets. He would thus reveal things about God but God himself would not be revealed. But the Bible claims that God is revealed in Christ.
2. He cannot save – for only God can save. Only God can forgive sin. If Christ was not God then he could not save us from our sins. But the Bible tells us that he saves us from our sins.
It is clear from these verses that Jesus had, in himself, perfectly preserved both the nature of God and the nature of man.
Thus the Bible and the Creeds state clearly that:
Christ is the possessor of two natures - divine and human. He is both God and man
Question: How much of a man did Christ Become?
The Fathers of the Church debated this also. Their response, affirmed at the Church Councils, is clear:
Christ became a real man, fully identifying with the Adamic race in every way
The key word used at Nicea by Athanasius was the Greek word, “Homoousios” which means “of the same substance”. Thus the Orthodox position was that Christ is “of the same substance as the Father”, i.e. he is in his essential nature exactly the same as God.
But Athanasius’ view was that Christ is not only homoousios with God – he is also homoousios with mankind, i.e. he is, in his human nature, authentically human.
Torrance:
"The king pin idea of the Creed was the homoousion - the affirmation of:
(1) The oneness-in-being of the Father and the Son.
(2) The oneness-in-being of the Son with mankind.
Thus the Son as mediator fully participates in both Godhead and Humanity."
Athanasias developed this understanding from the idea of mediation – the mediator has to embody in himself both parties requiring mediation.
Side Note:
The historical debate was thus between two positions:
(i) That of Arius who said Christ was “homoiousious” with the Father.
(ii) That of Athanasius who said Christ was “homoousious” with the Father.
As you can see the difference in Greek is very small – but of profound importance.
The letter “i” in Greek is written simply as a dot, and its name is “iota”. This has led to proverbial sayings such as:
“There is only a dot between them”, or,
“There is only an iota between them”.
These sayings originated from this historical debate at Nicea and generally mean that the difference between two positions is very slight, almost negligible, not worth arguing over. Indeed this was the position the Roman Emperor took several times and as a result Athanasius was banished five times into exile because the emperor though he was just being difficult.
But Athanasius considered that dot to be of fundamental importance – the difference between truth and error. If Arius was right then Christianity was just a myth, but if Athanasius was right then Christ is the power of God to save men from their sins. Eventually the whole Church came to agree that Athanasius was right.
CHRIST TOOK ON (“ASSUMED”) OUR SIN NATURE:
The mediator has to embody in himself both parties requiring mediation.
This leads inevitably to the next question: Who are the two parties that need mediation?
The answer is clear:
(i) God in his perfect holiness and,
(ii) Man in his sin.
It is these two parties that the mediator has to mediate for, thus he has to embrace in his essential nature these two parties: the perfect God and the sinful man.
For this reason Christ took on himself fallen humanity – so that he could reconcile it to God.
St. Athanasius put it this way: “Whatever is not assumed is not healed”.
By this he meant that if Christ had not assumed our fallenness then we could not be healed from it. But we can – and will be – healed from it.
So not only did God become a man; he assumed fallen humanity – he became a “fallen” man. This is totally unacceptable to Greek thinking –God, in Christ, didn’t just take on matter – an idea which would be bad enough – he took on “evil matter”, the fallen, sinful nature of mankind.
About this the Church, since Athanasius, has always agreed.
It is affirmed in Scripture.
2 Corinthians 5:21
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
There is general agreement that this here is not the idea of Christ simply taking the punishment for our sins, i.e. our acts of wrongdoing. It rather indicates he took on the very fallen nature of sin that we need redemption from.
While the Church has agreed Christ took on our fallenness, there has been debate about when he actually assumed the fallenness of humanity.
(I repeat: It is not disputed that he assumed our fallenness. That he took on our fallenness has always been the view of the Church. The only question is this: “When did he assume our fallenness?”)
To this question two answers have been given:
1. The answer of Athanasius and the Fathers at the two Church Councils was that he took our fallenness on himself in the incarnation, i.e. at conception. This is still the view of the Eastern Orthodox Church today. This implies that in his human nature from conception, and right through his life, he (like us) struggled with a fallen human nature.
T.F. Torrance, though a Western Christian, is representative of an Eastern view:
“Since, in Jesus, God has come into our human being and united our human nature with his own, divine nature, then atoning reconciliation takes place within the personal Being of the Mediator. His person and work are one. What he does is not separate from his personal being. I.e. the work of Christ does not take place outside of Christ but within him, within the incarnate constitution of his person as Mediator. Redemption is thus linked with the incarnation...
“In Jesus Christ, the Son of God became incarnate within our fallen, guilt-laden humanity. Through his own atoning self-sacrifice and self-consecration, he did away with our evil and healed and sanctified our human nature from within and thus presents us to the Father as those redeemed and consecrated in himself.”
2. The Western Church, some time after the Councils, moved to a view that said he assumed our fallenness only while he was on the Cross. This would imply that during his life on earth he did not have a fallen human nature. Rather he assumed our fallenness only when he was on the Cross as part of his final Passion. This is the generally held view of both Catholic and Protestant Churches.
Derek Prince, “The Atonement” is representative of a Western View:
“At the Cross an exchange took place, divinely ordained and predicted. All the evil due, by Justice, to come to us came on Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus earned by his sinless obedience, might be made available to us.”
I have not studied when the change in the West came or exactly why. However I suspect the influence of Greek philosophy on Western theologians. The ideas of God held by the philosophers (as listed above) would tend to produce such a shift. One of the facts about the Nicene Creed was that it was – at every point – a contradiction of some tenet of Greek Philosophy. This contradiction centred on Christ: In Christ, the perfect, sinless God took on sinful humanity. Thus Christ is the absolute contradiction of Greek philosophy which said God, being perfect, could not come into contact with corruption. The Fathers at Nicea clearly understood this but Greek philosophy later again infiltrated the Church at several points and this appears to have been one of them. Secular Rome at the time was in the grip of Greek philosophical ideas and they seem to have crept back into the Church at this point.
My own suspicion is that the change in the Western Church came with Augustine, but I have not done enough research to confirm this. Augustine, though a great theologian, was a student of Greek philosophy before he came to Christ. He was a Neo-Platonist. As a Christian theologian his avowed intent was to bring a reconciliation between Christian theology and Platonic thought. The doctrine of Athanasius on the Incarnation would be at odds with Augustine’s Platonic Philosophy and so he would have looked for another solution. The idea that the Son of God would have taken on himself sinful humanity in the incarnation would have been too much for Augustine.
A verse that is relevant to this discussion is:
Romans 8:3
“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ….”
* It is clear here that the issue is our “sinful nature” and that Christ took on himself. This is not talking about sins, i.e. acts of wrongdoing, but about the nature of sin.
* The word “likeness” does not mean the English sense of “like but not the same as”. Rather the Greek means, “It is like, that is, exactly the same as…” So the meaning is that “God …sending his own Son as a sinful man…”
* The language used, “sending”, sounds more like a reference to the incarnation, his birth, his coming to earth, than to the Cross.
It is the view of this author that the Orthodox view (of St Athanasius) is correct, that Christ took on himself our fallen humanity in the incarnation.
If you are in the least interested in this debate the following are some points in favour of this view worth your consideration. But if you are not interested you can skip through them:
(1) Reiteration of a point made in the last chapter.
(i) Jesus, through the miracle of the virgin birth, did not inherit the legal curse of the sin of Adam.
Here is where we need to understand some Jewish background. Two things are important.
* Under Jewish understanding the spiritual inheritance of the child is derived from the mother, but the legal inheritance, of property, comes from the father. Thus a person is considered a Jew, i.e. a child of the covenant, if the child’s mother is a Jew, even if the Father is a Gentile, but if the mother is a Gentile the child is a Gentile, even if the Father is a Jew. This is still true today and is the criteria used for automatic citizenship in the nation of Israel of international Jews.
* Covenants are legal contracts to do with inheritance. Biblically speaking legal inheritances are ALWAYS passed down from the FATHER the SON. The legal responsibilities, privileges and costs come from the FATHER'S family, not from the mother's. Daughters received a dowry, sons received the inheritance.
Jesus, through the virgin birth, had no human father. God was his Father. He was conceived by a creative act of the Holy Spirit. Thus he was not of Adam’s seed, he was indeed “the seed of the Woman”.
Thus there are two effects of the virgin birth, these seem contradictory to us but are not so in God’s economy:
* Jesus inherited his Father's legal rights and position, not his mother's; thus he inherited God’s standing as far as the Law was concerned. The legal inheritance of the broken covenant of Adam was bypassed and Christ was not liable to death under the Law of God. He was guiltless, holy, righteous.
* However Jesus inherited the spiritual inheritance of his mother, a fallen, corrupt human nature in need of redemption.
2. It is hard to imagine how Christ would have taken on our sin nature at the Cross.
For this to have happened it would have had to be by Divine Declaration, i.e. declaration by God the Father that it was so. This seems to be the view of Derek Prince (quoted above).
But the problem with this is that “declaration” is a legal term defining a legal state. Law deals with guilt and innocence, i.e. with actions, but not with essential nature. A legal declaration can never change the essential nature of something. The best a legal declaration can do is proclaim guilt or innocence, i.e. theologically all a declaration about sin could effect is justification or condemnation.
So we are left with the essential nature of Christ remaining unchanged on the Cross – only the guilt of sin is removed. A declaration can never change essence.
But here the words of Athanasius are important, “Whatever is not assumed is not healed.”
I.e. if Christ did not assume, take on our sinful nature then we cannot be set free from it. All declaration does is deal with guilt, so this scenario would leave us with the frustration of never being able to be free from the power of sin.
3. However it is easy to see how if it happened at the incarnation - Jesus would have inherited it from Mary.
Jewish belief is that we inherit our spirituality from our mother, not our father, so this would make sense.
The Catholic Church recognises this difficulty and so has put forward the doctrine of “The Immaculate Conception of Mary”. This is not a doctrine about the conception of Christ, but rather about the conception of Mary. Catholic Theologians have recognised that if she was "fallen" then her children would be also, including Christ. Thus to overcome this they suggest Mary herself was “unfallen” because she was “Immaculately conceived.” The problem with this is that it just pushes the problem one step further back. How was it that she was immaculately conceived? Was her mother sinless? And so the problem reappears.
4. Looking at the question from the viewpoint of Mediation:
It would be no good if Christ embodied God and “non-sinful” man – because:
* No such men exist and if they did they would not be in rebellion against God so would not need reconciling.
* The reconciliation of such “non sinful” men to God would not help sinful men who are lost in their sin and rebellion.
Such a mediation would achieve absolutely nothing in restoring sinful man to relationship with God.
Many Western scholars are coming back to the Eastern/ Orthodox view because it really makes more sense.
The primary objection made by Western scholars to the Eastern view (at least it seems to be to be the case) is that if Christ assumed fallen human nature he also would need to be saved, so how could he be saviour?
Athanasius starts from a different point and says: The Mediator has to embody both parties requiring mediation. This is a necessity of Mediation. It follows from this that if he did not embody sinful man, one party in the needed mediation, then he could not be mediator so he could not save us. So Athanasius would immediately come to a different conclusion from the Western view.
As I have argued above in point 1, there is a difference between the inherited nature of sin and personal acts of sin. It seems to me that the Western argument here is confusing the consequences of personal acts of sin, i.e. guilt and separation from God, with the consequences of inherited fallenness, i.e. personal corruption.
In the final analysis two All Church Councils agreed with Athanasius' position and decreed it to be "Orthodox Doctrine". Opposing viewpoints were deemed to be "heretical". One would have to conclude from this that the Western view is heretical.
The arguments become convoluted and difficult either way. If the question bothers you, you may need to study up on it. My feeling is that the Eastern Orthodox view is correct and so I will proceed with that assumption. As we shall see in later chapters it delivers great depth and beauty to our salvation.
THE WORK OF THE MEDIATOR:
Athanasius starting point was the fact of the Gospel – Christ saves us from our sins – this the fact of Christian experience. But he argued from there. He combines the idea of mediation together with the facts of the gospel.
1. Only God can save.
This is axiomatic – only God can save. But Christ saves us from our sins. Therefore he must be God. If Jesus is not God then we are not saved, for only God can save.
T.F.Torrance:
“If Christ were not one with the Father, all he did would have no ultimate significance for us, and God himself would be utterly indifferent to the suffering of mankind.”
2. Only man can be saved.
As Mediator of Salvation then Christ had to take on full human nature. It was the nature of the man who needed to be saved that he has to take on if he was to save him.
The Gospel says:
3. Only God can save, but he saves as a man.
T.F.Torrance:
“We are to understand the incarnation as God becoming man, acting as man for our sake. Not God IN man, but God AS man.”
In Christ, God is not just inside a man (as the Holy Spirit is in us) motivating and directing him. Rather, in Christ, God has become man.
4. Christ became fully man, perfectly identified with us in our humanity, in order to save us.
Christ came to bring into being a New Covenant between God and Man - to re-establish the relationship broken through the Fall of Adam. Being already God he had to take on human nature in order to effectively be the mediator.
5 Christ mediated a New Covenant between man and God, thus making it possible for us to relate to God again.
Here again we have to see the final difference between our view of mediation and the Hebrew/Bible view.
We tend to think of a Mediator as one working with the two warring parties bringing them to an agreement on things that each one of them should do in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. In this scenario the two parties do the things required to make reconciliation, the mediator himself does nothing. He is only a broker of words.
This is as far removed from the Bible concept of mediation as you can be.
In the Bible the Mediator actually completely fulfils all of the requirements for reconciliation for both parties himself. He does the work for them. In actual fact the warring parties do nothing to create the reconciliation – they simply receive it as a gift from the mediator. It is for this reason that he has to embody in himself the two warring parties. Only such a mediator can fully understand the point of view of both parties in such a way as to make proper allowances.
Hebrews 4:15.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet was without sin.”
He was already God so he fully understood the “God side” of the equation.
He became fallen man so that he might understand our side of the equation.
Things were required of man – but look at God’s grace:
Covenants have two parties and both parties have things they must do to make the covenant operational. God could do the things necessary from his end, but man was incapable of doing the things required of him from his end. Thus God himself became man to do the things required of man to fulfill the covenant terms and conditions.
T.F.Torrance:
“For Athanasius, the mediating action of Christ was twofold - God to man and man to God, and that both divine and human activity must be regarded as issuing from one person. In order that there be perfect mediation it requires that both sides in the mediation be fully reconciled and fulfil all that is required of them. Because man is already fallen, God took on himself fallen humanity in order that he might fulfil our part of the mediation, thus providing a perfect salvation for us.”
Athanasius:
“As Mediator, Jesus ministered the things of God to man and the things of man to God. Christ fulfilled both the divine and human sides of the covenant.”
Now we understand this to be true: the New Covenant was completed by Christ. It is completed, sealed - Christ has fulfilled all of the requirements of the Covenant both from the divine side and the human side. The New Covenant was established by Christ 2000 years ago – it is fully operational. He did it all. It required absolutely nothing from any other man to make it fully operational. It requires nothing from me – or you - to make it operational for us.
The Covenant is already sealed. It was sealed by Christ acting as God for God and acting as man for man. The human responsibility for completing the covenant was undertaken by him. He was our representative. He acted for us.
Jesus thus fulfilled the covenant from both sides - he is “our God”, and he is “God's people.”
We shall look at some of the things each party had to do in later chapters but here we will close with an astounding implication of this:
The Covenant is complete, sealed, all that was required of both parties, God and man, to make the covenant fully operational s done by Christ as Mediator.
This means for us to enter into this covenant relationship with God there is nothing more that we need to do – in fact there is nothing we can do – to make this relationship work. All the work of reconciliation has been done.
This means that for us to enter into this covenant relationship we can only receive it as a gift.
And to maintain the relationship all we can do is receive it as a gift. This is faith – to receive from God, through Christ, a relationship with him that we have not had to do anything to obtain.
This is Athanasius’ position and it was accepted by the whole Church as being the correct doctrine.
(T.F.Torrance has written several books on this subject including “Trinitarian Faith”, “The Mediation of Christ” and “The Incarnation”. For the life of me, I can’t remember where these particular quotes came from. However I warmly recommend his books.
“The Mediation of Christ” and “The Incarnation” are quite readable.
“Trinitarian Faith” is quite heavy going, but well worth the effort.
Amazon usually stocks them.)
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