Satisfying the law
Satisfying the law
Another way of explaining the moral necessity of the divine ‘satisfaction’ at the cross has been to exalt the law. Sin is ‘lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4), a disregard for God’s law and a disobedience of it. But the law cannot be broken with impunity. Sinners therefore incur the penalty of their law-breaking. They cannot simply be let off. The law must be upheld, its dignity defended, and its just penalties paid. The law is thereby ‘satisfied’.
A popular illustration of this truth is the story of King Darius in the book of Daniel (chapter 6). He appointed 120 satraps to rule Babylonia, and set three administrators over them, of whom Daniel was one. Further, such were Daniel’s exceptional qualities and distinguished service that the king planned to promote him over all his colleagues. This aroused their jealousy, and they immediately began to plot his downfall. Watching him like hawks, they tried to find some inconsistency or inefficiency in his conduct of public affairs, so that they could lodge charges against him. But they failed, ‘because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent’ (v. 4). So they turned their scrutiny upon his private life; their only hope, they reckoned, was to find him guilty of some technical fault in connection with his regular religious devotion. They managed to persuade the king to ‘issue an edict and enforce the decree that anyone who prays to any god or man during the next thirty days’, except to the king himself, would be thrown into the lions’ den (v. 7). With incredible naivety the king fell into their trap. By putting the decree into writing he even made it unalterable, ‘in accordance with the laws of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be repealed’ (vv. 8–9).
The publication of the decree reached Daniel’s ears, but did not lead him to change his routine. On the contrary, he continued three times a day to pray to his God. His practice was to do so kneeling in his upstairs room, whose windows opened towards Jerusalem. There he was visible to passers-by, and there his enemies duly saw him. They went back to the king immediately, and reported Daniel’s flagrant breach of the royal decree. ‘When the king heard this, he was greatly distressed; he was determined to rescue Daniel and made every effort until sundown to save him’ (v. 14). But he could find no solution to the legal problem he had created for himself. His administrators and satraps reminded him that ‘according to the law of the Medes and Persians no decree or edict that the king issues can be changed’ (v. 15). So Darius reluctantly bowed to the inevitable and gave the order for Daniel to be thrown into the lions’ den. The law had triumphed.
Many are the preachers (myself among them) who have used this story to highlight the divine dilemma. Darius respected Daniel and laboured long to find some way of saving him, but the law must take its course and not be tampered with. So God loves us sinners and longs to save us, but cannot do so by violating the law which has justly condemned us. Hence the cross, in which the penalty of the law was paid and its sanctity vindicated. As one recent exponent of this view, I cite Henry Wace, Dean of Canterbury from 1903 to 1924:
A law which has no sanction, in the technical sense of that expression – in other words, a law which can be broken without an adequate penalty, is no law at all; and it is inconceivable that God’s moral law can be violated without entailing consequences of the most terrible kind. The mere violation of one of his physical laws may entail, whether men intend the violation or not, the most lasting and widespread misery; and can it reasonably be supposed that the most flagrant and wilful violation of the highest of all laws – those of truth and righteousness – should entail no such results?7
Again, ‘God cannot abolish that moral constitution of things which he has established.’ It is true that Dean Wace went on to qualify these statements, by reminding us that the moral world is not ‘a kind of moral machine in which laws operate as they do in physical nature’, and that ‘we have to do not simply with an established order but with a living personality, with a living God’. Nevertheless, he refers again to ‘the penalty necessarily involved in the violation of the Divine law’.8
I am not wanting to disagree with this language, and indeed I continue to use it myself. It has, in fact, good scriptural warrant. For Paul quotes Deuteronomy with approval to the effect that every law-breaker is ‘cursed’, and then goes on to affirm that ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:10, 13). If therefore Paul was not afraid to use an impersonal expression like ‘the curse of the law’, we should not be either.
The fourth-century Latin Fathers such as Ambrose and Hilary regularly expounded the cross in these terms. Going further than Tertullian, who was the first to use the legal terms ‘merit’ and ‘satisfaction’ of the Christian’s relation to God, they interpreted texts such as Galatians 3:13 in the light of ‘the satisfactio of the Roman public law, which means the endurance of the law’s sentence’.9 The sixteenth-century Reformers developed this further. They rightly emphasized that Jesus Christ’s personal submission to the law was indispensable to our rescue from its condemnation. They also taught that his submission took two forms, his perfect obedience to it in his life and his bearing of its penalty in his death. They called the first his ‘active’ and the second his ‘passive’ obedience. These adjectives are inexact, however, since Jesus’ obedience unto death on the cross was just as ‘active’ (i.e. voluntary and determined) as his obedient submission to the moral law. His obedience to the Father’s will is one and the same, whether in his conduct or mission, his life or death. The value of continuing to speak of Christ’s ‘double’ obedience is that we then distinguish between his fulfilling the demands of the law and his enduring the condemnation of the law. Both kinds of submission to the law were essential to the efficacy of the cross.
Nevertheless, we need to be alert to the dangers of law-language and to the inadequacy of likening God’s moral law either to the civil laws of the country or to the physical laws of the universe. True, a part of the glory of a constitutional monarchy is that even the monarch is not above the law but under it, being required to obey its provisions and (if in breach of them) to bear its penalties. Darius provides a good example of this. Yet the decree he made was rash and foolish, since it contained no religious conscience clause, and so led to the punishment of a righteous man for a righteous deed which the king had never intended his decree to make a punishable offence. We cannot think of God as caught in a technical legal muddle of this kind. Nor is it wise to liken God’s moral laws to his physical laws and then declare them equally inflexible. For example, ‘if you put your hand in the fire it will be burnt, and if you break the ten commandments you will be punished’. There is truth in the analogy, but the concept of mechanical penalties is misleading. It may be true of the laws of nature, even though strictly they are not ‘laws’ which bind God’s action but a description of the normal uniformity of his action which human beings have observed. The real reason why disobedience of God’s moral laws brings condemnation is not that God is their prisoner, but that he is their creator.
As R. W. Dale put it, God’s connection with the law is ‘not a relation of subjection but of identity...In God the law is alive; it reigns on his throne, sways his sceptre, is crowned with his glory’.10 For the law is the expression of his own moral being, and his moral being is always self-consistent. Nathaniel Dimock captures this truth well in the following words:
There can be nothing...in the demands of the law, and the severity of the law, and the condemnation of the law, and the death of the law, and the curse of the law, which is not a reflection (in part) of the perfections of God. Whatever is due to the law is due to the law because it is the law of God, and is due therefore to God himself.11