The Heart of the Gospel

Prince Paris had carried off Princess Helen to Troy. The Greek expeditionary force had taken ship to recover her, but was held up halfway by persistent contrary winds. Agamemnon, the Greek general, sent home for his daughter and ceremonially slaughtered her as a sacrifice, to mollify the evidently hostile gods. The move paid off; west winds blew again, and the fleet reached Troy without further difficulty.

This bit of the Trojan War legend, which dates from about 1000 b.c., mirrors an idea of propitiation on which pagan religion all over the world, and in every age, has been built. The idea is as follows. There are various gods, none enjoying absolute dominion, but each with some power to make life easier or harder for you. Their temper is uniformly uncertain; they take offense at the smallest things-or they get jealous because they feel you are paying too much attention to other gods and other people and not enough to themselves, and then they take it out on you by manipulating circumstances to your hurt.

Pagan Propitiation

The only course at that point is to humor and mollify them by an offering. The rule with offerings is the bigger the better, for the gods are inclined to hold out for something sizeable. In this they are cruel and heartless, but they have the advantage, so what can you do? The wise person bows to the inevitable and makes sure to offer something impressive enough to produce the desired result. Human sacrifice, in particular, is expensive but effective. Thus pagan religion appears as a callous commercialism, a matter of managing and manipulating your gods by cunning bribery. And within paganism propitiation, the appeasing of celestial bad tempers takes its place as a regular part of life, one of the many irksome necessities that one cannot get on without.

Now, the Bible takes us right away from the world of pagan religion. It condemns paganism out of hand as a monstrous distortion of truth. In place of a cluster of gods who are all too obviously made in the image of man, and who behave like a crowd of Hollywood film stars, the Bible sets the one almighty Creator, the only real God, in whom all goodness and truth find their source, and to whom all moral evil is abhorrent. With him there is no bad temper, no capriciousness, no vanity, no ill will. One might expect, therefore, that there would be no place for the idea of propitiation in biblical religion.

But we do not find this at all: just the opposite. The idea of propitiation-that is, of averting God's anger by an offering-runs right through the Bible.

Propitiation in the Bible

In the Old Testament, it underlies the prescribed rituals of the sin offering, the guilt offering ("trespass-offering" in the KJV), and the day of atonement (Lev. 4:1-6:7; 16:1-34); also, it finds clear expression in such narratives as that of Numbers 16:41-50, where God threatens to destroy the people for maligning his judgment on Korah, Dathan, and Abiram: "Then Moses said to Aaron, 'Take your censer and put incense in it, along with fire from the altar, and hurry to the assembly to make atonement for them. Wrath has come out from the Lord; the plague has started.' . . . So Aaron . . . made atonement for them. . . . And the plague stopped" (vv. 46-48).2

In the New Testament, the propitiation word group appears in four passages of such transcendent importance that we may well pause to set them out in full.

The first is Paul's classic statement of the rationale of God's justification of sinners.

"But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested . . . even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by his blood, to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the shewing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:21-26 rv).

The second is part of the exposition in Hebrews of the rationale of the incarnation of God the Son.

"It behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people" (Heb. 2:17 rv).

The third is John's testimony to the heavenly ministry of our Lord.

"If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:1-2 KJV).

The fourth is John's definition of the love of God.

"God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:8-10).

Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central. The love of God, the taking of human form by the Son, the meaning of the cross, Christ's heavenly intercession, the way of salvation-all are to be explained in terms of it, as the passages quoted show, and any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards.

In saying this, we swim against the stream of much modern teaching and condemn at a stroke the views of a great number of distinguished church leaders today, but we cannot help that. Paul wrote, "Even if we or an angel from heaven"-let alone a minister, bishop, college lecturer, uNIVersity professor, or noted author-"should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!" ("accursed" KJV and RSV; "outcast" neb; "damned" phillips- Gal. 1:8). And a gospel without propitiation at its heart is another gospel than that which Paul preached. The implications of this must not be evaded.

Not Merely Expiation

If, however, you look at the RSV or NEB versions of the four texts quoted above, you will find that the word propitiation does not appear. In both the 1 John passages, NEB has "remedy for the defilement" of our sins; elsewhere, these versions replace the thought of propitiation by that of expiation. What is the difference? The difference is that expiation means only half of what propitiation means. Expiation is an action that has sin as its object; it denotes the covering, putting away, or rubbing out of sin so that it no longer constitutes a barrier to friendly fellowship between man and God. Propitiation, however, in the Bible, denotes all that expiation means, and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby. So, at any rate, Christian scholars have maintained since the Reformation, when these things first began to be studied with precision, and the case can still be made compellingly today.3

But in this century a number of scholars, notably C. H. Dodd, have revived the view of the sixteenth-century Unitarian Socinus, a view that had already been picked up in the late 1800s by Albrecht Ritschl, a founder of German liberalism, to the effect that there is in God no such thing as anger occasioned by human sin, and consequently no need or possibility of propitiation. Dodd has labored to prove that the propitiation word group in the New Testament does not carry the sense of appeasing God's anger but only denotes the putting away of sin, and that therefore expiation is a better rendering; and the RSV and NEB at this point reflect his view.

Does he make out his case? We cannot here go into the technicalities of what is very much a scholars' discussion; but, for what it is worth, we give our own verdict. Dodd, it appears, has shown that this word group need not mean more than expiation if the context does not require a wider meaning, but he has not shown that the word group cannot mean propitiation in contexts where this meaning is called for. This, however, is the crucial point: in the epistle to the Romans (to take the clearest and most obvious of the four passages) the context does call for the meaning propitiation in 3:25.

For in Romans 1:18 Paul sets the stage for his declaration of the gospel by affirming that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." "The wrath of God is dynamically, effectively operative in the world of men and it is as proceeding from heaven, the throne of God, that it is thus active."4 In the rest of Romans 1 Paul traces out the present activity of God's wrath in the judicial hardening of apostate hearts, expressed in the thrice-repeated phrase "God gave them up" (vv. 24, 26, 28 KJV).

Then in Romans 2:1-16 Paul confronts us with the certainty of the "day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his works: . . . unto them that . . . obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation . . . in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ" (vv. 5-6, 8, 16 rv).

In the first part of Romans 3, Paul carries on his argument to prove that every man, Jew and Gentile alike, being "under sin" (v. 9), stands exposed to the wrath of God in both its present and future manifestation. Here, then, are all of us in our natural state, without the gospel; the finally controlling reality in our lives, whether we are aware of it or not, is the active anger of God. But now, says Paul, acceptance, pardon, and peace, are freely given to those who hitherto were "wicked" (4:5) and "God's enemies" (5:10), but who now put faith in Christ Jesus, "whom God set forth to be a propitiation . . . by his blood." And believers know that "much more then, being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through him" (5:9 rv).

What has happened? The wrath of God against us, both present and to come, has been quenched. How was this effected? Through the death of Christ. "When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son" (5:10). The "blood"-that is, the sacrificial death-of Jesus Christ abolished God's anger against us and ensured that his treatment of us forever after would be propitious and favorable. Henceforth, instead of showing himself to be against us, he would show himself in our life and experience to be for us. What, then, does the phrase "a propitiation . . . by his blood" express? It expresses, in the context of Paul's argument, precisely this thought: that by his sacrificial death for our sins Christ pacified the wrath of God.

It is true that a generation ago Dodd tried to evade this conclusion by arguing that the wrath of God in Romans is an impersonal cosmic principle of retribution in which the mind and heart of God toward men do not find true expression-that, in other words, God's wrath is a process external to the will of God himself. But it is now increasingly admitted that this attempt was a gallant failure. "It is inadequate," writes R. V. G. Tasker, "to regard this term [wrath] merely as a description of 'the inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral uNIVerse' or as another way of speaking of the results of sin. It is rather a personal quality, without which God would cease to be fully righteous and his love would degenerate into sentimentality."5 The wrath of God is as personal, and as potent, as his love; and, just as the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus was the direct manifesting of his Father's love toward us, so it was the direct averting of his Father's wrath against us.

God's Anger

What manner of thing is the wrath of God that was propitiated at Calvary?

It is not the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered, and conceited anger that pagans attribute to their gods. It is not the sinful, resentful, malicious, infantile anger that we find among humans. It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the demands of God's moral law ("be holy, because I am holy" [1 Pet. 1:16]), and of that righteousness which is expressed in God's acts of judgment and reward. "We know who it is that has said, 'Justice is mine: I will repay'" (Heb. 10:30 neb).

God's wrath is "the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness"; it issues in "a positive outgoing of the divine displeasure."6 And this is righteous anger-the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature. So far from the manifestation of God's wrath in punishing sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for him not to show his wrath in this way. God is not just-that is, he does not act in the way that is right, he does not do what is proper to a judge-unless he inflicts upon all sin and wrongdoing the penalty it deserves. We shall see Paul himself arguing on this basis in a moment.

Propitiation Described

Note, now, three facts about the propitiation, as Paul describes it.

1) Propitiation is the work of God himself. In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates his wrath by his own action. He set forth Jesus Christ, says Paul, to be a propitiation; he sent his Son, says John, to be the propitiation for our sins. It was not man, to whom God was hostile, who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn his Father's wrath against us into love. The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of his unkind Father by offering himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message-it is a sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian, idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God himself who took the initiative in quenching his own wrath against those whom, despite their ill-desert, he loved and had chosen to save.

The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ's so to deal with the wrath that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure.7

Paul and John both state this explicitly and emphatically. God reveals his righteousness, says Paul, not only in retribution and judgment according to his law, but also "apart from the law," in bestowing righteousness on those who put faith in Jesus Christ. They have all sinned, yet they are all justified (acquitted, accepted, reinstated, set right with God) freely and for nothing (Rom. 3:21-24). How does this take place? "By grace" (that is, mercy contrary to merit; love for the unlovely and, one would have said, unlovable.) By what means does grace operate? "Through the redemption [rescue by ransom] that is in Christ Jesus." How is it that, to those who put faith in him, Christ Jesus is the source, means, and substance of redemption? Because, says Paul, God set him forth to be a propitiation. From this divine initiative the reality and availability of redemption flow.

Love to one another, says John, is the family likeness of God's children; he who does not love Christians is evidently not in the family, for "God is love" and imparts a loving nature to all who know him (1 John 4:7-8). But "God is love" is a vague formula; how can we form a clear idea of the love that God would reproduce in us? "This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9). Nor was this done as God's acknowledgement of some real devotion on our part; not at all. "Herein is love, not that we loved God but that"-in a situation where we did not love him, and there was nothing about us to move him to do anything other than blast and blight us for our ingrained irreligion-"he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." By this divine initiative, says John, the meaning and measure of the love that we must imitate are made known.

The witness of both apostles to God's initiative in propitiation could scarcely be clearer.

2) Propitiation was made by the death of Jesus Christ. Blood, as we hinted earlier, is a word pointing to the violent death inflicted in the animal sacrifices of the old covenant. God himself instituted these sacrifices by his own command, and in Leviticus 17:11 he says why: "For 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." When Paul tells us that God set forth Jesus to be a propitiation "by his blood," his point is that what quenched God's wrath and so redeemed us from death was not Jesus' life or teaching, not his moral perfection nor his fidelity to the Father, as such, but the shedding of his blood in death. Along with the other New Testament writers, Paul always points to the death of Jesus as the atoning event and explains the atonement in terms of representative substitution-the innocent taking place of the guilty, in the name and for the sake of the guilty, under the axe of God's judicial retribution. Two passages may be quoted to illustrate this.

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law"-how?-"by becoming a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). Christ bore the curse of the law, which was directed against us, so that we might not have to bear it. This is representative substitution.

"One died for all," and through Jesus' death God was "reconciling the world unto himself." What does this reconciliation involve? "Not counting men's sins against them" but causing them in Christ to become "the righteousness of God"-that is, accepted as righteous by God. How is this nonimputation brought about? Through the imputing of our trespasses to another, who bore their due. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us." It thus appears that it was as a sacrifice for sinners, enduring the death penalty in their stead, that "one died for all" (2 Cor. 5:14, 18-21). This is representative substitution.

Representative substitution, as the way and means of atonement, was taught in typical form by the God-given Old Testament sacrificial system. There, the perfect animal that was to be offered for sin was first symbolically constituted a representative by the sinner's laying his hand on its head and so identifying it with him and him with it (Lev. 4:4, 24, 29, 33), and then it was killed as a substitute for the offerer, the blood being sprinkled "before the Lord" and applied to one or both of the altars in the sanctuary (Lev. 4:6-7, 17-18, 25, 30) as a sign that expiation had been made, averting wrath and restoring fellowship.

On the annual Day of Atonement, two goats were used. One was killed as a sin offering in the ordinary way, and the other, after the priest had laid hands on its head and put Israel's sins "on the head" of the animal by confessing them there, was sent away to "bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited" (Lev. 16:21-22). This double ritual taught a single lesson: that through the sacrifice of a representative substitute God's wrath is averted and that sins are borne away out of sight, never to trouble our relationship with God again. The second goat (the scapegoat) illustrates what, in terms of the type, was accomplished by the death of the first goat. These rituals are the immediate background of Paul's teaching on propitiation; it is the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial pattern that he proclaims.

3) Propitiation manifests God's righteousness. So far from calling into question the morality of God's way of dealing with sin, says Paul, the truth of propitiation establishes it and was explicitly intended to establish it. God set forth his Son to propitiate his own wrath "to declare His righteousness [justice] . . . that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Rom. 3:25-26 KJV). The word "declare" implies a public display. Paul's point is that the public spectacle of propitiation, at the cross, was a public manifestation, not merely of justifying mercy on God's part, but of righteousness and justice as the basis of justifying mercy.

Such a manifestation was needed, says Paul, "because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God." The point here is that though human beings were, and had been from time immemorial, every bit as bad as Romans 1 depicts them, God had not at any time since the flood made it his principle to deal publicly with the race as it deserved. Though people since the flood have been no better than their forebears were before the flood, God had not reacted to their impenitence and irreligion and lawlessness by public acts of adverse providence. Instead, he "has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy" (Acts 14:17).

This "passing over" of sins in "forbearance" was not, indeed, forgiveness, but postponement of judgment only; nevertheless, it prompts a question. If, as happens, humans do evil, and the Judge of all the earth continues to do them good, can he be as concerned about morality and godliness, the distinction between right and wrong in the lives of his creatures, as he formerly appeared to be, and as perfect justice would seem to require? Indeed, if he allows sinners to continue unpunished, does he not himself come short of perfection in his office as Judge of the world?

Paul has already answered the second part of this question by his doctrine of "the day of God's wrath" and "righteous judgment" in Romans 2:1-16. Here he answers the first part by saying in effect that God, far from being unconcerned about moral issues and the just requirement of retribution for wrongdoing, is so concerned about these things that he does not-indeed, Paul would, we think, boldly say, cannot-pardon sinners, and justify the ungodly, except on the basis of justice shown forth in retribution. Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgment has been inflicted for our ungodliness-but on Jesus, the lamb of God, standing in our place. In this way God is just-and the justifier of those who put faith in Jesus, "who was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification" (Rom. 4:25).

Thus the righteousness of God the Judge, which is set forth so vividly in the doctrine of divine wrath in the first part of Paul's letter, is set forth again in Paul's doctrine of how divine wrath was quenched. It is vital to his argument to show that the truths of salvation and damnation alike manifest the essential, inherent retributive justice that belongs to the divine character. In each case-the salvation of those who are saved, and the damnation of those who are lost-retribution falls; punishment is inflicted; God is righteous, and justice is done.

The Death of Christ

What we have said so far may be summed up as follows. The gospel tells us that our Creator has become our Redeemer. It announces that the Son of God has become man "for us men and for our salvation" and has died on the cross to save us from eternal judgment. The basic description of the saving death of Christ in the Bible is as a propitiation, that is, as that which quenched God's wrath against us by obliterating our sins from his sight. God's wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness; it shows itself in retributive justice. But Jesus Christ has shielded us from the nightmare prospect of retributive justice by becoming our representative substitute, in obedience to his Father's will, and receiving the wages of our sin in our place.

By this means justice has been done, for the sins of all that will ever be pardoned were judged and punished in the person of God the Son, and it is on this basis that pardon is now offered to us offenders. Redeeming love and retributive justice joined hands, so to speak, at Calvary, for there God showed himself to be "just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus."

Do you understand this? If you do, you are now seeing to the very heart of the Christian gospel. No version of that message goes deeper than that which declares man's root problem before God to be his sin, which evokes wrath, and God's basic provision for man to be propitiation, which out of wrath brings peace. Some versions of the gospel, indeed, are open to blame because they never get down to this level.

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems-problems of our relation with ourselves and our fellow humans and our environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem-the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relation with his Maker. And unless we make it plain that the solution of these former problems depends on the settling of this latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses of God-for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems-fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest-but equally no reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin against God.

By sin the New Testament means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God.

Space forbids us to embark here on a demonstration that the themes of sin, propitiation, and pardon are the basic structural features of the New Testament gospel, but if our readers will thoughtfully go over Romans 1-5, Galatians 3, Ephesians 1-2, Hebrews 8-10, 1 John 1-3, and the sermons in Acts, you will find that there is really no room for doubt on this point. If a query is raised on the grounds that the word "propitiation" appears in the New Testament only four times, the reply must be that the thought of propitiation appears constantly.

Sometimes the death of Christ is depicted as reconciliation, or peacemaking after hatred and war (Rom. 5:10-11; 2 Cor. 5:18-20; Col. 1:20-22); sometimes it is depicted as redemption, or rescue by ransom from danger and captivity (Rom. 3:24; Gal. 3:13; 4:5; 1 Pet. 1:18; Rev. 5:9); sometimes it is pictured as a sacrifice (Eph. 5:2; Heb. 9:1-10:18), an act of self-giving (Gal. 1:4, 2:20; 1 Tim. 2:6), sin bearing (John 1:29; Heb. 9:28; 1 Pet. 2:24), and blood shedding (Mark 14:24; Heb. 9:14; Rev. 1:5). All these thoughts have to do with the putting away of sin and the restoring of unclouded fellowship between man and God, as a glance at the texts mentioned will show; and all of them have as their background the threat of divine judgment, which Jesus' death averted. In other words, they are so many pictures and illustrations of the reality of propitiation, viewed from different standpoints. It is a shallow fallacy to imagine, as many scholars unfortunately do, that this variety of language must necessarily imply variation of thought.

A further point must now be made. Not only does the truth of propitiation lead us to the heart of the New Testament gospel, it also leads us to a vantage point from which we can see to the heart of many other things as well. When you stand on top of Mount Snowdon in Wales, you see the whole of Snowdonia spread out around you, and you have a wider view than you can get from any other point in the area. Similarly, when you are on top of the truth of propitiation, you can see the entire Bible in perspective, and you are in a position to take the measure of vital matters that cannot be properly grasped in any other terms. In what follows, five of these will be touched on: the driving force in the life of Jesus; the destiny of those who reject God; God's gift of peace; the dimensions of God's love; and the meaning of God's glory. That these matters are vital to Christianity will not be disputed. That they can be understood only in the light of the truth of propitiation cannot, we think, be denied.

The Driving Force in Jesus' Life

Think first, then, of the driving force in the life of Jesus.

If you sit down for an hour and read straight through the Gospel according to Mark (a very fruitful exercise: may I urge you here and now to do it), you will receive an impression of Jesus that includes at least four features.

Your basic impression will be of a man of action: a man always on the move, always altering situations and precipitating things-working miracles; calling and training disciples; upsetting error that passed as truth and irreligion that passed as godliness; and finally walking straight and open-eyed into betrayal, condemnation, and crucifixion, a freakish sequence of anomalies, which in the oddest way one is made to feel that he himself controlled all along the line.

Your further impression will be of a man who knew himself to be a divine person (Son of God) fulfilling a messianic role (Son of Man). Mark makes it clear that the more Jesus gave himself to his disciples, the more of an awesome enigma they found him-the closer they came to him, the less they understood him. This sounds paradoxical, but it was strictly true, for as their acquaintance with him deepened they were brought closer to his own understanding of himself as God and Savior, and this was something of which they could make neither head nor tail. But Jesus' unique twofold self-consciousness, confirmed by his Father's voice from heaven at his baptism and transfiguration (Mark 1:11; 9:7) came out constantly. One has only to think here of, on the one hand, the breathtaking naturalness with which he assumed absolute authority in everything he said and did (see Mark 1:22, 27; 11:27-33), and on the other hand his answer to the high priest's double question at his trial, "Are you the Christ [Messiah, God's Savior-King], the Son of the Blessed One [a supernatural and divine person]?"-to which Jesus categorically replied, "I am" (14:61-62).

Going on from this, your impression will be of One whose messianic mission centered on his being put to death-One who was consciously and singlemindedly preparing to die in this way long before the idea of a suffering Messiah took hold of anyone else. Four times at least after Peter had hailed him as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus predicted that he would be killed and rise, though without the disciples' being able to make sense of what he said (8:31; compare vv. 34-35; 9:9, 31; 10:33-34). At other times he spoke of his being put to death as something certain (12:8; 14:18, 24), something predicted in Scripture (14:21, 49), and something that would win for many a momentously new relationship with God. "The Son of Man [came] to give his life as a ransom for many" (10:45). "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" (14:24).

Your final impression will be of One for whom this experience of death was the most fearful ordeal. In Gethsemane, "horror and dismay came over him, and he said . . . 'My heart is ready to break with grief'" (14:34 neb). The earnestness of his prayer (for which "he threw himself on the ground," rather than kneel or stand) was an index of the inward revulsion and desolation that he felt as he contemplated what was to come. How strong was his temptation to say "amen" after "take away this cup from me," rather than go on to "nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt" (14:36 KJV), we shall never know. Then, on the cross, Jesus bore witness to inward darkness matching outward darkness with his cry of dereliction, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (15:34 KJV).

How should we explain Jesus' belief in the necessity of his death? How should we account for the fact that what drove him on throughout his public ministry, as all four Gospels testify, was the conviction that he had to be killed? And how should we explain the fact that, whereas martyrs like Stephen faced death with joy, and even Socrates, the pagan philosopher, drank his hemlock and died without a tremor, Jesus, the perfect servant of God, who had never before showed the least fear of man or pain or loss, manifested in Gethsemane what looked like blue funk, and on the cross declared himself God-forsaken? "Never man feared death like this man," commented Luther. Why? What did it mean?

Those who see the death of Jesus as no more than a tragic accident, no different essentially from the death of any other falsely condemned good man, can make nothing of these facts at all. The only course open to them, on their principles, is to suppose that Jesus had in him a morbid, timid streak that from time to time let him down-first, inducing in him a sort of death wish, and then overwhelming him with panic and despair when death came close. But since Jesus was raised from the dead, and in the power of his risen life still taught his disciples that his death had been a necessity (Luke 24:26-27), this so-called explanation appears to be as nonsensical as it is painful. However, those who deny the truth of atonement have nothing better that they can say.

But if we relate the facts in question to the apostolic teaching about propitiation, all becomes plain at once. "May we not urge," asked James Denney, "that these experiences of deadly fear and of desertion are of one piece with the fact that in his death and in the agony of the garden through which he accepted that death as the cup which his Father gave him to drink, Jesus was taking upon him the burden of the world's sin, consenting to be, and actually being, numbered with the transgressors?"8

Had Paul or John been asked this question, there is no doubt what they would have answered. It was because Jesus was to be made sin, and bear God's judgment on sin, that he trembled in the garden, and because he was actually bearing that judgment that he declared himself forsaken of God on the cross. The driving force in Jesus' life was his resolve to be "obedient to death-even death on a cross" (Phil. 2:8), and the unique dreadfulness of his death lies in the fact that he tasted on Calvary the wrath of God that was our due, so making propitiation for our sins.

Centuries before, Isaiah had spelled it out: "We considered him stricken by God. . . . The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. . . . The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . . For the transgression of my people he was stricken. . . . It was the Lord's will to crush him . . . the Lord makes his life a guilt offering" (Isa. 53:4-10).



O Christ, what burdens bowed Thy head!

Our load was laid on Thee;

Thou stoodest in the sinner's stead,

Didst bear all ill for me.



A victim led, Thy blood was shed;

Now there's no load for me.

The Holy One did hide His face;

O Christ, 'twas hid from Thee:



Dumb darkness wrapped Thy soul a space,

The darkness due to me.

But now that face of radiant grace

Shines forth in light on me.

We have been full on this, because of its importance for understanding the basic Christian facts; the next sections can be shorter.

What of Those Who Reject God?

Think, second, of the destiny of those who reject God.

Universalists suppose that the class of people mentioned in this heading will ultimately have no members, but the Bible indicates otherwise. Decisions made in this life will have eternal consequences. "Do not be deceived" (as you would be if you listened to the universalists); "God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows" (Gal. 6:7). Those who in this life reject God will forever be rejected by God. Universalism is the doctrine that, among others, Judas will be saved, but Jesus did not think he would. "The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born" (Mark 14:21). How could Jesus have spoken those last words if he had expected Judas finally to be saved?

Some, then, face an eternity of rejectedness. How can we understand what they will bring on themselves? We cannot, of course, form any adequate notion of hell, any more than we can of heaven, and no doubt it is good for us that this is so; but perhaps the clearest notion we can form is that derived from contemplating the cross.

On the cross, God judged our sins in the person of his Son, and Jesus endured the retributive comeback of our wrongdoing. Look at the cross, therefore, and you see what form God's judicial reaction to human sin will finally take. What form is that? In a word, withdrawal and deprivation of good. On the cross Jesus lost all the good that he had before: all sense of his Father's presence and love, all sense of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, all enjoyment of God and of created things, all ease and solace of friendship, were taken from him, and in their place was nothing but loneliness, pain, a killing sense of human malice and callousness, and a horror of great spiritual darkness.

The physical pain, though great (for crucifixion remains the cruelest form of judicial execution that the world has ever known), was yet only a small part of the story; Jesus' chief sufferings were mental and spiritual, and what was packed into less than four hundred minutes was an eternity of agony-agony such that each minute was an eternity in itself, as mental sufferers know that individual minutes can be.

So, too, those who reject God face the prospect of losing all good, and the best way to form an idea of eternal death is to dwell on this thought. In ordinary life, we never notice how much good we enjoy through God's common grace till it is taken from us. We never value health, or steady circumstances, or friendship and respect from others, as we should till we have lost them. Calvary shows that under the final judgment of God nothing that one has valued, or could value, nothing that one can call good, remains to one. It is a terrible thought, but the reality, we may be sure, is more terrible yet. "It would be better for him if he had not been born." God help us to learn this lesson, which the spectacle of propitiation through penal substitution on the cross teaches so clearly; and may each of us be found in Christ, our sins covered by his blood, at the last.

What Is Peace?

Think, third, of God's gift of peace.

What does the gospel of God offer us? If we say "the peace of God," none will demur-but will everyone understand? The use of right words does not guarantee right thoughts! Too often the peace of God is thought of as if it were essentially a feeling of inner tranquility, happy and carefree, springing from knowledge that God will shield one from life's hardest knocks. But this is a misrepresentation, for, on the one hand, God does not featherbed his children in this way, and anyone who thinks he does is in for a shock, and, on the other hand, that which is basic and essential to the real peace of God does not come into this concept at all.

The truths, after which this account of God's peace is feeling (though it misrepresents them, as we said) is that God's peace brings us two things: both power to face and live with our own badness and failings, and also contentment under "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (for which the Christian name is God's wise providence). The truth that this account ignores is that the basic ingredient in God's peace, without which the rest cannot be, is pardon and acceptance into covenant-that is, adoption into God's family. But where this change of relationship with God-out of hostility into friendship, out of wrath into the fullness of love, out of condemnation into justification-is not set forth, the gospel of peace is not truly set forth either.

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God's peace that does not start here can do other than mislead. One of the miserable ironies of our time is that whereas liberal and radical theologians believe themselves to be restating the gospel for today, they have for the most part rejected the categories of wrath, guilt, condemnation, and the enmity of God, and so have made it impossible for themselves ever to present the gospel at all, for they cannot now state the basic problem that the gospel of peace solves.

The peace of God, then, primarily and fundamentally, is a new relationship of forgiveness and acceptance-and the source from which it flows is propitiation. When Jesus came to his disciples in the upper room at evening on his resurrection day, he said, "Peace be with you"; and when he had said that, "he showed unto them his hands and side" (John 20:19-20 phillips). Why did he do that? Not just to establish his identity, but to remind them of the propitiatory death on the cross whereby he had made peace with his Father for them. Having suffered in their place, as their substitute, to make peace for them, he now came in his risen power to bring that peace to them.

"Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29). It is here, in the recognition that, whereas we are by nature at odds with God, and God with us, Jesus has made "peace through his blood shed on the cross" (Col. 1:20), that true knowledge of the peace of God begins.

The Dimensions of God's Love

Think, fourth, of the dimensions of the love of God.

Paul prays that the readers of his Ephesian letter "may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge" (Eph. 3:18-19). The touch of incoherence and paradox in his language reflects Paul's sense that the reality of divine love is inexpressibly great; nevertheless, he believes that some comprehension of it can be reached. How?

The answer of Ephesians is, by considering propitiation in its context-that is, by reviewing the whole plan of grace set forth in the first two chapters of the letter (election, redemption, regeneration, preservation, glorification), of which plan the atoning sacrifice of Christ is the centerpiece. See the key references to redemption and "remission of sins" and the bringing near to God of those who were far off, through the blood (sacrificial death) of Christ. (1:7; 2:13). See also the teaching of chapter 5, which twice points to Christ's propitiatory sacrifice of himself on our behalf as the demonstration and measure of his love for us, the love that we are to imitate in our dealings with each other. "Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (5:2). "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (5:25).

Christ's love was free, not elicited by any goodness in us (2:1-5); it was eternal, being one with the choice of sinners to save that the Father made "before the foundation of the world" (1:4 ESV); it was unreserved, for it led him down to the depths of humiliation and, indeed, of hell itself on Calvary; and it was sovereign, for it has achieved its object-the final glory of the redeemed, their perfect holiness and happiness in the fruition of his love (5:26-27), is now guaranteed and assured (1:14; 2:7-10; 4:11-16, 30). Dwell on these things, Paul urges, if you would catch a sight, however dim, of the greatness and the glory of divine love. It is these things that make up "his glorious grace" (1:6 ESV); only those who know them can praise the name of the triune Jehovah as they should. Which brings us to our last point.

The Glory of God

Think, lastly, of the meaning of God's glory.

In the upper room, after Judas had gone out into the night to betray him, Jesus said, "Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him" (John 13:31). What did he mean? "Son of Man" was his name for himself as the Savior-King who before being enthroned must fulfill Isaiah 53; and when he spoke of the present glorifying of the Son of Man, and of God in him, he was thinking specifically of the atoning death, the "lifting up" on the cross, which Judas had gone to precipitate. Do you see the glory of God in his wisdom, power, righteousness, truth, and love, supremely disclosed at Calvary, in the making of propitiation for our sins? The Bible does; and we venture to add, if you felt the burden and pressure of your own sins at their true weight, so would you.

In heaven, where these things are better understood, angels and men unite to praise "the Lamb, who was slain" (Rev. 5:12; see 7:9-12). Here on earth those who by grace have been made spiritual realists do the same.



Bearing shame and scoffing rude

In my place condemned He stood;

Sealed my pardon with His blood:

Hallelujah! What a Saviour! . . .



He left His Father's throne above,

So free, so infinite His grace;

Emptied Himself of all but love

And bled for Adam's helpless race.

Amazing Love! How can it be?

For O, my God, it found out me! . . .



If Thou hast my discharge procured,

And freely in my room endured

The whole of wrath divine,

Payment God cannot twice demand,

First at my bleeding Surety's hand,

And then again at mine.

Turn then, my soul, unto they rest;

The merits of thy great High Priest

Have bought thy liberty.

Trust in His efficacious blood,

Nor fear thy banishment from God,

Since Jesus died for thee!

These are the songs of the heirs of heaven, those who have seen "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face [that is, the person, office, and achievement] of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6). The joyful news of redeeming love and propitiating mercy, which is the heart of the gospel, spurs them to never-ending praise. Are you among their number?