4. The cross and substitution (3:10-14)
4. The cross and substitution (3:10-14)
All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’ Clearly no-one is justified before God by the law, because, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’ The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, ‘The man who does these things will live by them.’ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged 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.
These verses constitute one of the clearest expositions of the necessity, meaning and consequence of the cross. Paul expresses himself in such stark terms that some commentators have not been able to accept what he writes about the ‘curse’ which Christ ‘became’ for us. A. W. F. Blunt, for example, wrote in his commentary: ‘The language here is startling, almost shocking. We should not have dared to use it.’1 Jeremias also called it a ‘shocking phrase’ and spoke of its ‘original offensiveness’.2 Nevertheless, the apostle Paul did use this language, and Blunt was surely correct in adding that ‘Paul means every word of it’. So we have to come to terms with it.
Several attempts have been made to soften it. First, it has been suggested that Paul deliberately de-personalized the ‘curse’ by calling it ‘the curse of the law’. But the expression in Deuteronomy 21:23 is ‘God’s curse’; it cannot seriously be entertained that Paul is contradicting Scripture. Secondly, it has been proposed that his ‘becoming’ a curse expresses the sympathy of Christ for lawbreakers, not an objective acceptance of their judgment. Here is Blunt’s interpretation: ‘It was not by a forensic fiction that Christ bore our sins, but by an act of genuine fellow feeling’, like a mother who has a son who goes wrong and who ‘feels his guilt to be hers as well’.3 But this is an evasion; it does not do justice to Paul’s words. As Jeremias put it, ‘became’ is ‘a circumlocution for the action of God’.
Thirdly, it is said, Paul’s statement that Christ became ‘a curse’ for us falls short of saying that he was actually ‘cursed’. But according to Jeremias, ‘curse’ is ‘a metonym for “the cursed one”’, and we should translate the phrase ‘God made Christ a cursed one for our sake’. It is then parallel to ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us’ (2 Cor. 5:21). And we shall be able to accept the two phrases, and indeed worship God for their truth, because ‘God was in Christ reconciling’ (2 Cor. 5:19) even while he made Christ both sin and a curse.
Luther grasped very clearly what Paul meant, and expressed its implications with characteristic directness:
Our most merciful Father, seeing us to be oppressed and overwhelmed with the curse of the law, and so to be holden under the same that we could never be delivered from it by our own power, sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter that denier; Paul that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor; David that adulterer; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross; and briefly, be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them.4
We need to feel the logic of Paul’s teaching. First, all who rely on the law are under a curse. At the beginning of verse 10 Paul again uses the expression he used three times in 2:16, namely ‘those who are of works of law’ (literally), which NIV elaborates as ‘all who rely on observing the law’. The reason Paul can declare such to be ‘under a curse’ is that Scripture says they are: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law’ (cf. Deut. 27:26). No human being has ever ‘continued’ to do ‘everything’ the law requires. Such a continuous and comprehensive obedience has been given by no-one except Jesus, So ‘clearly’ (v. 11) nobody ‘is justified before God by the law’, because nobody has kept it. Besides, Scripture also says that ‘the righteous will live by his faith’ (Hab. 2:4), and living ‘by faith’ and living ‘by law’ are two completely different states (v. 12). The conclusion is unavoidable. Although theoretically those who obey the law will live, in practice none of us will, because none of us has obeyed. Therefore we cannot obtain salvation that way. On the contrary, far from being saved by the law, we are cursed by it. The curse or judgment of God, which his law pronounces on lawbreakers, rests upon us. This is the appalling predicament of lost humankind.
Secondly, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. This is probably the plainest statement in the New Testament of substitution. The curse of the broken law rested on us; Christ redeemed us from it by becoming a curse in our place. The curse that lay on us was transferred to him. He assumed it, that we might escape it. And the evidence that he bore our curse is that he hung on a tree, since Deuteronomy 21:23 declares such a person cursed (v. 13).
Thirdly, Christ did this in order that in him the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles...by faith (v. 14). The apostle moves deliberately from the language of cursing to that of blessing. Christ died for us not only to redeem us from the curse of God, but also to secure for us the blessing of God. He had promised centuries previously to bless Abraham and through his posterity the Gentile nations. And this promised blessing Paul here interprets as ‘justification’ (v. 8) and ‘the Spirit’ (v. 14); all who are in Christ are thus richly blessed.
To sum up, because of our disobedience we were under the curse of the law. Christ redeemed us from it by bearing it in our place. As a result, we receive by faith in Christ the promised blessing of salvation. The sequence is irresistible. It prompts our humble worship that God in Christ, in his holy love for us, was willing to go to such lengths, and that the blessings we enjoy today are due to the curse he bore for us on the cross.