The Passover and ‘sin-bearing’
The Passover and ‘sin-bearing’
We turn now from the principle of substitution, as it is seen in what the Old Testament says about blood sacrifices in general, to two particular examples of it, namely the Passover and the concept of ‘sin-bearing’.
It is right for two reasons to start with the Passover. The first is that the original Passover marked the beginning of Israel’s national life. ‘This month is to be for you the first month,’ God had said to them, ‘the first month of your year’ (Exod. 12:2). It was to inaugurate their annual calendar because in it God redeemed them from their long and oppressive Egyptian bondage, and because the exodus led to the renewal of God’s covenant with them at Mount Sinai. But before the exodus and the covenant came the Passover. That day they were to ‘commemorate for the generations to come’; they were to ‘celebrate it as a festival to the LORD – a lasting ordinance’ (12:14, 17).
The second reason for beginning here is that the New Testament clearly identifies the death of Christ as the fulfilment of the Passover, and the emergence of his new and redeemed community as the new exodus. It is not only that John the Baptist hailed Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29, 36),9 nor only that according to John’s chronology of the end Jesus was hanging on the cross at the precise time when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered,10 nor even that in the book of Revelation he is worshipped as the slain Lamb who by his blood has purchased men for God.11 It is specially that Paul categorically declares: ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival...’ (1 Cor. 5:7–8).
What then happened at the first Passover? And what does this tell us about Christ, our Passover lamb?
The Passover story (Exod. 11 – 13) is a self-disclosure of the God of Israel in three roles. First, Yahweh revealed himself as the Judge. The background was the threat of the final plague. Moses was to warn Pharaoh in the most solemn terms that at midnight Yahweh himself was going to pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn. There would be no discrimination either between human beings and animals, or between different social classes. Every firstborn male would die. There would be only one way of escape, by God’s own devising and provision.
Secondly, Yahweh revealed himself as the Redeemer. On the tenth day of the month each Israelite household was to choose a lamb (a year-old male without defect), and on the fourteenth evening to kill it. They were then to take some of the lamb’s blood, dip a branch of hyssop in it and sprinkle it on the lintel and side-posts of their front door. They were not to go out of their house at all that night. Having shed and sprinkled the blood, they must shelter under it. For Yahweh, who had already announced his intention to ‘pass through’ Egypt in judgment, now added his promise to ‘pass over’ every blood-marked house in order to shield it from his threatened destruction.
Thirdly, Yahweh revealed himself as Israel’s covenant God. He had redeemed them to make them his own people. So when he had saved them from his own judgment, they were to commemorate and celebrate his goodness. On Passover night itself they were to feast on the roasted lamb, with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, and they were to do so with their cloak tucked into their belt, their sandals on their feet and their staff in their hand, ready at any moment for their rescue. Some features of the meal spoke to them of their former oppression (e.g. the bitter herbs), and others of their future liberation (e.g. their dress). Then on each anniversary the festival was to last seven days, and they were to explain to their children what the whole ceremony meant: ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’ In addition to the celebration in which the whole family would share, there was to be a special ritual for the firstborn males. It was they who had been personally rescued from death by the death of the Passover lambs. Thus redeemed, they belonged in a special way to Yahweh who had purchased them by blood, and they were therefore to be consecrated to his service.
The message must have been absolutely clear to the Israelites; it is equally clear to us who see the fulfilment of the Passover in the sacrifice of Christ. First, the Judge and the Saviour are the same person. It was the God who ‘passed through’ Egypt to judge the firstborn, who ‘passed over’ Israelite homes to protect them. We must never characterize the Father as Judge and the Son as Saviour. It is one and the same God who through Christ saves us from himself. Secondly, salvation was (and is) by substitution. The only firstborn males who were spared were those in whose families a firstborn lamb had died instead. Thirdly, the lamb’s blood had to be sprinkled after it had been shed. There had to be an individual appropriation of the divine provision. God had to ‘see the blood’ before he would save the family. Fourthly, each family rescued by God was thereby purchased for God. Their whole life now belonged to him. So does ours. And consecration leads to celebration. The life of the redeemed is a feast, ritually expressed in the Eucharist, the Christian festival of thanksgiving, as we shall consider more fully in chapter 10.
The second major illustration of the principle of substitution is the notion of ‘sin-bearing’. In the New Testament we read of Christ that ‘he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’ (1 Pet. 2:24) and similarly that he ‘was once offered to bear the sins of many’ (Heb. 9:28, AV). But what does it mean to ‘bear sin’? Must it be understood in terms of the bearing of sin’s penalty, or can it be interpreted in other ways? And is ‘substitution’ necessarily involved in ‘sin-bearing’? If so, what kind of substitution is in mind? Can it refer only to the innocent, God-provided substitute taking the place of the guilty party and enduring the penalty instead of him? Or are there alternative kinds of substitution?
During the last one hundred years or so a number of ingenious attempts have been made to retain the vocabulary of ‘substitution’, while rejecting ‘penal substitution’ (‘penal’ being derived from poena, a penalty or punishment). Their origin can be traced back to Abelard’s protest against Anselm in the twelfth century, and even more to Socinus’ scornful rejection of the Reformers’ doctrine in the sixteenth. In his book De Jesu Christo Servatore (1578) Faustus Socinus denied not only the deity of Jesus but any idea of ‘satisfaction’ in his death. The notion that guilt can be transferred from one person to another,12 he declaimed, was incompatible with both reason and justice. It was not only impossible, but unnecessary. For God is perfectly capable of forgiving sinners without it. He leads them to repentance, and so makes them forgivable.
John McLeod Campbell’s The Nature of the Atonement (1856) stands in the same general tradition. Christ came to do God’s will, he wrote, and in particular to bear men’s sins. Not in the traditional sense, however, but in two others. First, in dealing with men on behalf of God, Christ’s sufferings were not ‘penal sufferings endured in meeting a demand of divine justice’, but ‘the sufferings of divine love suffering from our sins according to its own nature’ (pp.115–116). Secondly, in dealing with God on behalf of men, the ‘satisfaction’ due to divine justice took the form of ‘a perfect confession of our sins’. In this way Christ acknowledged the justice of God’s wrath against sin, ‘and in that perfect response he absorbs it’ (pp.117–118). He was so much one with God as to be ‘filled with the sense of the Father’s righteous condemnation of our sin’, and so much one with us as to ‘respond with a perfect Amen to that condemnation’ (p.127). In this way ‘sin-bearing’ has dissolved into sympathy, ‘satisfaction’ into sorrow for sin, and ‘substitution’ into vicarious penitence, instead of vicarious punishment.
Ten years later The Vicarious Sacrifice was published, by Horace Bushnell, the American Congregationalist.13 Like McLeod Campbell he rejected ‘penal’ substitution. Yet the death of Jesus was ‘vicarious’ or ‘substitutionary’ in the sense that he bore our pain rather than our penalty. For ‘love is itself an essentially vicarious principle’ (p.11). Consequently, God’s love entered through the incarnation and public ministry of Jesus (not only his death) into our sorrows and sufferings, and ‘bore’ them in the sense of identifying with them and feeling burdened by them. ‘There is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary’ (p.35). This loving sacrifice of God in Christ – expressed in his birth, life and death – is ‘the power of God unto salvation’ because of its inspiring influence upon us. Christ is now able ‘to bring us out of our sins...and so out of their penalties’ (p.7). It is thus that the Lamb of God takes away our sins. ‘Atonement...is a change wrought in us, a change by which we are reconciled to God’ (p.450). But the ‘subjective atoning’ (i.e. the change in us) comes first, and only then ‘God is objectively propitiated’ (p.448).
R. C. Moberly developed similar ideas in his Atonement and Personality (1901). He rejected all forensic categories in relation to the cross, and in particular any idea of retributive punishment. He taught that penitence (worked in us by the Spirit of the Crucified One) makes us first ‘forgivable’ and then holy. Christ may be said to take our place only in terms of vicarious penitence, not of vicarious penalty.
The attempt by these theologians to retain the language of substitution and sin-bearing, while changing its meaning, must be pronounced a failure. It creates more confusion than clarity. It conceals from the unwary that there is a fundamental difference between ‘penitent substitution’ (in which the substitute offers what we could not offer) and ‘penal substitution’ (in which he bears what we could not bear). Here is Dr J. I. Packer’s definition of the latter. It is the notion
that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.14
The essential question, however, concerns how the biblical authors themselves employ ‘sin-bearing’ language.
It is clear from Old Testament usage that to ‘bear sin’ means neither to sympathize with sinners, nor to identify with their pain, nor to express their penitence, nor to be persecuted on account of human sinfulness (as others have argued), nor even to suffer the consequences of sin in personal or social terms, but specifically to endure its penal consequences, to undergo its penalty. The expression comes most frequently in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. It is written of those who sin by breaking God’s laws that they ‘will bear their iniquity (or sin)’ (AV and RSV). That is, they ‘will be held responsible’ or ‘will suffer for their sins’ (NIV). Sometimes the matter is put beyond question by the fact that the penalty is specified: the offender is to be ‘cut off from his people’ (i.e. excommunicated) and even, for example in the case of blasphemy, put to death.15
It is in this context of sin-bearing that the possibility is envisaged of somebody else bearing the penalty of the sinner’s wrongdoing. For example, Moses told the Israelites that their children would have to wander in the desert, ‘suffering for your unfaithfulness’ (Num. 14:34); if a married man failed to nullify a foolish vow or pledge made by his wife, then (it was written) ‘he is responsible for her guilt’ (Num. 30:15, NIV) or more simply ‘he shall bear her iniquity’ (RSV); again, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC the remnant who stayed in the otherwise deserted ruins said: ‘Our fathers sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment’ (Lam. 5:7).
These are examples of involuntary vicarious sin-bearing. In each case innocent people found themselves suffering the consequences of others’ guilt. The same phraseology was used, however, when the vicarious sin-bearing was intended. Then the notion of deliberate substitution was introduced, and God himself was said to provide the substitute, as when he instructed Ezekiel to lie down, and in dramatic symbolism to ‘bear the sin of the house of Israel’ (Ezek. 4:4–5). The sin offering was also referred to in terms of sin-bearing. Moses said of it to the sons of Aaron: ‘it was given to you to take away the guilt of the community by making atonement for them before the LORD’ (Lev. 10:17). Clearer still was the ritual of the annual Day of Atonement. The high priest was to ‘take two male goats for a sin offering’ in order to atone for the sins of the Israelite community as a whole (Lev. 16:5). One goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled in the usual way, while on the living goat’s head the high priest was to lay both his hands, ‘and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head’ (v. 21). He was then to drive the goat away into the desert, and it would ‘carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place’ (v. 22). Some commentators make the mistake of driving a wedge between the two goats, the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat, overlooking the fact that the two together are described as ‘a sin offering’ in the singular (v. 5). Perhaps T. J. Crawford was right to suggest that each embodied a different aspect of the same sacrifice, ‘the one exhibiting the means, and the other the results, of the atonement’.16 In this case the public proclamation of the Day of Atonement was plain, namely that reconciliation was possible only through substitutionary sin-bearing. The author of the letter to the Hebrews has no inhibitions about seeing Jesus both as ‘a merciful and faithful high priest’ (2:17) and as the two victims, the sacrificed goat whose blood was taken into the inner sanctuary (9:7, 12) and the scapegoat which carried away the people’s sins (9:28).
Although the sin offering and the scapegoat both in their different ways had a sin-bearing role, at least the more spiritually minded Israelites must have realized that an animal cannot be a satisfactory substitute for a human being. So, in the famous ‘servant songs’ in the second part of Isaiah, the prophet began to delineate one whose mission would embrace the nations, and who, in order to fulfil it, would need to suffer, to bear sin and to die. Matthew applies to Jesus the first song about the quietness and gentleness of the servant in his ministry,17 and Peter in his early speeches is recorded four times as calling Jesus God’s ‘servant’ or ‘holy servant’.18
But it is particularly the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, describing the servant’s suffering and death, which is applied consistently to Jesus Christ. ‘No other passage from the Old Testament’, Joachim Jeremias has written, ‘was as important to the Church as Isaiah 53.’19 The New Testament writers quote eight specific verses as having been fulfilled in Jesus. Verse 1 (‘who has believed our message?’) is applied to Jesus by John (12:38). Matthew sees the statement of verse 4 (‘he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases’) as fulfilled in Jesus’ healing ministry (8:17). That we have gone astray like sheep (v. 6), but that by his wounds we have been healed (v. 5) are both echoed by Peter (1 Pet. 2:22–25), and so in the same passage are verse 9 (‘nor was any deceit in his mouth’) and verse 11 (‘he will bear their iniquities’). Then verses 7 and 8, about Jesus being led like a sheep to the slaughter and being deprived of justice and of life, were the verses the Ethiopian eunuch was reading in his chariot, which prompted Philip to share with him ‘the good news about Jesus’ (Acts 8:30–35). Thus verses 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 – eight verses out of the chapter’s twelve – are all quite specifically referred to Jesus.
Careful students of the Gospels have detected numerous references by Jesus himself, sometimes only in a single word, to Isaiah 53. For example, he said he would be ‘rejected’,20 ‘taken away’21 and ‘numbered with the transgressors’.22 He would also be ‘buried’ like a criminal without any preparatory anointing, so that (he explained) Mary of Bethany gave him an advance anointing, ‘to prepare for my burial’.23 Other allusions may well be his description of the stronger man who ‘divides up the spoils’,24 his deliberate silence before his judges,25 his intercession for the transgressors26 and his laying down his life for others.27 If these be accepted, then every verse of the chapter except verse 2 (‘he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him’) is applied to Jesus in the New Testament, some verses several times. Indeed, there is good evidence that his whole public career, from his baptism through his ministry, sufferings and death to his resurrection and ascension, is seen as a fulfilment of the pattern foretold in Isaiah 53. Oscar Cullmann has argued that at his baptism he deliberately made himself one with those whose sins he had come to bear, that his resolve to ‘fulfil all righteousness’ (Matt. 3:15) was a determination to be God’s ‘righteous servant’, who by his sin-bearing death would ‘justify many’ (Isa. 53:11), and that the Father’s voice from heaven, declaring himself ‘well pleased’ with his Son, also identified him as the servant (Isa. 42:1).28 Similarly, Vincent Taylor pointed out that already in the very first apostolic sermon in Acts 2 ‘the dominating conception is that of the Servant, humiliated in death and exalted...’.29 More recently, Professor Martin Hengel of Tübingen has reached the same conclusion, arguing that this use of Isaiah 53 must go back to the mind of Jesus himself.30
So far my purpose in relation to Isaiah 53 has been to show how foundational the chapter is to the New Testament’s understanding of Jesus. I have left to the last his two most important sayings, which focus on the sin-bearing nature of his death. The first is the ‘ransom saying’: ‘for even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). Here Jesus unites the divergent ‘Son of man’ and ‘Servant’ prophecies. The Son of Man would ‘come with the clouds of heaven’ and all peoples would ‘serve him’ (Dan. 7:13–14), whereas the Servant would not be served but serve, and complete his service by suffering, specially by laying down his life as a ransom instead of many. It was only by serving that he would be served, only by suffering that he would enter into his glory. The second text belongs to the institution of the Lord’s Supper, when Jesus declared that his blood would be ‘poured out for many’,31 an echo of Isaiah 53:12, ‘he poured out his life unto death’.32 Moreover both texts say that he would either give his life or pour out his blood ‘for many’, which again echoes Isaiah 53:12, ‘he bore the sin of many’. Some have been embarrassed by the apparently restrictive nature of this expression. But Jeremias has argued that, according to the pre-Christian Jewish interpretation of it, ‘the many’ were ‘the godless among both the Jews and the Gentiles’. The expression therefore is ‘not exclusive (“many, but not all”) but, in the Semitic manner of speech, inclusive (“the totality, consisting of many”)’, which was ‘a (Messianic) concept unheard of in contemporary rabbinical thought’.33
It seems to be definite beyond doubt, then, that Jesus applied Isaiah 53 to himself and that he understood his death in the light of it as a sin-bearing death. As God’s ‘righteous servant’ he would be able to ‘justify many’, because he was going to ‘bear the sin of many’. This is the thrust of the whole chapter, not just that he would be despised and rejected, oppressed and afflicted, led like a lamb to the slaughter and cut off from the land of the living, but in particular that he would be pierced for our transgressions, that the Lord would lay on him the iniquity of us all, that he would thus be numbered with the transgressors, and that he would himself bear their iniquities. ‘The song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements’, wrote J. S. Whale, ‘that the servant suffers the penalty of other men’s sins: not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth, fifth and sixth verses.’34
In the light of this evidence about the sin-bearing nature of Jesus’ death, we now know how to interpret the simple assertion that ‘he died for us’. The preposition ‘for’ can translate either hyper (‘on behalf of’) or anti (‘instead of’). Most of the references have hyper. For example, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8), and again ‘one died for all’ (2 Cor. 5:14). Anti comes only in the ransom verses, namely in Mark 10:45 (literally ‘to give his life as a ransom instead of many’) and in 1 Timothy 2:6 (‘who gave himself as a ransom for all men’, where ‘for’ is again hyper, but the preposition anti is in the noun, antilytron).
The two prepositions do not always adhere to their dictionary definitions, however. Even the broader word hyper (‘on behalf of’) is many times shown by its context to be used in the sense of anti (‘instead of’), as, for example, when we are said to be ‘ambassadors for Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:20), or when Paul wanted to keep Onesimus in Rome to serve him ‘on behalf of’ his master Philemon, that is, in his place (Philm. 13). The same is clear in the two most outspoken statements of the meaning of Christ’s death in Paul’s letters. One is that ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us’ (2 Cor. 5:21), and the other that Christ has ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13). Some commentators have found these assertions difficult to accept. Karl Barth called the first ‘almost unbearably severe’35 and A. W. F. Blunt described the language of the second as ‘almost shocking’.36 It will be observed that in both cases what happened to Christ on the cross (‘made sin’, ‘becoming a curse’) is said by Paul to have been intended ‘for us’, on our behalf or for our benefit. But what exactly did happen? The sinless one was ‘made sin for us’, which must mean that he bore the penalty of our sin instead of us, and he redeemed us from the law’s curse by ‘becoming a curse for us’, which must mean that the curse of the law lying upon us for our disobedience was transferred to him, so that he bore it instead of us.
Both verses go beyond these negative truths (that he bore our sin and curse to redeem us from them) to a positive counterpart. On the one hand he bore the curse in order that we might inherit the blessing promised to Abraham (Gal. 3:14), and on the other, God made the sinless Christ to be sin for us, in order that ‘in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). Both verses thus indicate that when we are united to Christ a mysterious exchange takes place: he took our curse, so that we may receive his blessing; he became sin with our sin, so that we may become righteous with his righteousness. Elsewhere Paul writes of this transfer in terms of ‘imputation’. On the one hand, God declined to ‘impute’ our sins to us, or ‘count’ them against us (2 Cor. 5:19), with the implication that he imputed them to Christ instead. On the other, God has imputed Christ’s righteousness to us.37 Many are offended by this concept, considering it both artificial and unjust on God’s part to arrange such a transfer. Yet the objection is due to a misunderstanding, which Thomas Crawford clears up for us. Imputation, he writes, ‘does not at all imply the transference of one person’s moral qualities to another’. Such a thing would be impossible, and he goes on to quote John Owen to the effect that ‘we ourselves have done nothing of what is imputed to us, nor Christ anything of what is imputed to him’. It would be absurd and unbelievable to imagine, Crawford continues, ‘that the moral turpitude of our sins was transferred to Christ, so as to make him personally sinful and ill-deserving; and that the moral excellence of his righteousness is transferred to us, so as to make us personally upright and commendable’. No, what was transferred to Christ was not moral qualities but legal consequences: he voluntarily accepted liability for our sins. That is what the expressions ‘made sin’ and ‘made a curse’ mean. Similarly, ‘the righteousness of God’ which we become when we are ‘in Christ’ is not here righteousness of character and conduct (although that grows within us by the working of the Holy Spirit), but rather a righteous standing before God.38
When we review all this Old Testament material (the shedding and sprinkling of blood, the sin offering, the Passover, the meaning of ‘sin-bearing’, the scapegoat and Isaiah 53), and consider its New Testament application to the death of Christ, we are obliged to conclude that the cross was a substitutionary sacrifice. Christ died for us. Christ died instead of us. Indeed, as Jeremias put it, this use of sacrificial imagery ‘has the intention of expressing the fact that Jesus died without sin in substitution for our sins’.39