6 The Self-substitution of God
6
The Self-substitution of God
We have located the problem of forgiveness in the gravity of sin and the majesty of God, that is, in the realities of who we are and who he is. How can the holy love of God come to terms with the unholy lovelessness of man? What would happen if they were to come into collision with each other? The problem is not outside God; it is within his own being. Because God never contradicts himself, he must be himself and ‘satisfy’ himself, acting in absolute consistency with the perfection of his character. ‘It is the recognition of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it,’ wrote James Denney, ‘which ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who cannot digest it.’1
Moreover, as we have seen, this inward necessity does not mean that God must be true to only a part of himself (whether his law or honour or justice), nor that he must express one of his attributes (whether love or holiness) at the expense of another, but rather that he must be completely and invariably himself in the fullness of his moral being. T. J. Crawford stressed this point: ‘It is altogether an error...to suppose that God acts at one time according to one of his attributes, and at another time according to another. He acts in conformity with all of them at all times....As for the divine justice and the divine mercy in particular, the end of his (sc. Christ’s) work was not to bring them into harmony, as if they had been at variance with one another, but jointly to manifest and glorify them in the redemption of sinners. It is a case of combined action, and not of counteraction, on the part of these attributes, that is exhibited on the cross.’2
How then could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgment and his love in pardon? Only by providing a divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgment and the sinner the pardon. We sinners still of course have to suffer some of the personal, psychological and social consequences of our 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. I have not come across a more careful statement of the substitutionary nature of the atonement than that made by Charles E. B. Cranfield in his commentary on Romans. Although it summarizes the conclusion towards which this chapter will argue, it may be helpful to quote it near the beginning, so that we know the direction in which we are heading. The quotation is part of Dr Cranfield’s comment on Romans 3:25. He writes:
God, because in his mercy he willed to forgive sinful men, and, being truly merciful, willed to forgive them righteously, that is, without in any way condoning their sin, purposed to direct against his own very self in the person of his Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they deserved (p.217).
The vital questions which must now occupy us are these: who is this ‘Substitute’? And how are we to understand and justify the notion of his substituting himself for us? The best way to approach these questions is to consider the Old Testament sacrifices, since these were the God-intended preparation for the sacrifice of Christ.