"God can't look on or have anything to do with sin"

It’s a common evangelical cliché and throw-away line. But is it fair to say that ‘God can’t look on or have anything to do with sin’? I’ve heard a couple of people (festively) attacking this notion recently, on the grounds of the incarnation.

The argument runs like this:

• Jesus is fully God as well as perfect man;
• During his ministry, Jesus associated himself with sinners – he talked with them, worked with them, ate and drank with them;
• Therefore, the idea that God is totally against sin is false (as what can we say but that Jesus is ‘having something to do with sin’ during his ministry?).

Now I think that this argument is flawed for a number of reasons (for instance, it seems to imply a deistic and unscriptural understanding of a god that isn’t actively involved in creation apart from when physically manifested in the person of Christ). But let us put this aside for the moment.

It’s surely true that Jesus associated himself with those widely recognised by the religious establishment (and pretty much everyone else) as being particularly sinful (see Mark 2:13-17). Equally, the New Testament endorses Jesus as God (Colossians 2:9 and so on). But does this mean that we must come to the conclusion of the third statement above? Or in what sense, if any, is it impossible for God to look on or have anything to do with sin?

Clearly, as God in the flesh, Jesus looked upon sinners, in the sense that he looked at them. But in his grace he came not to endorse their sinful lifestyles (or even to say that their sin didn’t really matter) but to bring them freedom and forgiveness and reconciliation in his kingdom. When Christians (perhaps thoughtlessly) say that the God of the Bible can’t look on sin, they’re not saying that he’s somehow blind to the sinful reality of the world, but rather that his character as moral arbiter of the Universe is to call sin evil and wrong. The great news of Christmas is that, in Christ, he’s found a way of reconciling us to himself in his own body without compromising his character.

There is one question that remains. It’s this: if Jesus really was fully God, why did no-one (as sinful beings) burn up and drop dead in his presence? John 3:17 says that, ‘God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.’ This is the same Son of God that, according to John 1:17, came into the world with grace and truth. In other words, the Father would have had every right to send Jesus the Son into the world to immediately condemn it (and by implication each of us – for, as members of the world, each of us is sinful). But he preferred to send him instead as an atoning sacrifice to make reconciliation to himself possible. Peter perhaps caught something of this when he said (in Luke 5:8): “Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man!” Jesus had every right to condemn Peter, yet lived amongst sinful people in order to be the perfect sacrifice to make atonement for sinners.

I think that part of the reason that this debate has come up is that, in certain circles, Christmas is presented in quite a flat and tired way: it's just a necessary preamble for all of the stuff that followed later. We feel unable to say what it means to have our God as Emmanuel, God with us. The implications of the incarnation as an event in itself are sidelined and flattened (perhaps because we can’t fit it otherwise into 2 Ways to Live). And that is wrong and a symptom of wider illness in evangelicalism.

It’s right to look for and meditate upon the wider significance of the incarnation. (Indeed, I’ve been personally struck recently by the number of times that Hebrews draws real pastoral application from the incarnation and the humanity of Christ). However, in looking to say that the incarnation represents more than just a pre-requisite for Easter, we surely cannot say that it is anything less.

A better covenant (Hebrews 8)

I arrived at Hebrews 8 today in supervision time with the Relay Workers. It's another chapter that shows the folly of legalism when compared with the utter supremacy of Jesus' sacrifice and all that it guarantees.

Covenants are legal agreements between two parties, and covenants between God and humans feature significantly in Scripture. Some of the covenants that God makes with humans are unilateral - in other words, they can't be broken by humans. This includes the covenant that God makes with Abram where he promises to give a land and descendants to him.

Other covenants have an element of performance built into them. The most significant of these is the covenant that God makes with the nation of Israel at Sinai. Although the heart of this covenant is faith, covenant blessings and covenant curses are given to Israel dependent on the extent to which they humbly submit to the LORD as their God (see Deuteronomy 28 and 30).

The sad story of the Old Testament is that Israel - themselves, remember, a mirror of humanity - failed to keep the covenant. Indeed, they ended up in exile because of this. And so Jeremiah (31:31-34) foresaw a new covenant - like the Sinai covenant, one that brought the possibility of blessing - but that was unilateral. Indeed, the very things that caused Israel to abandon their blessings - their lack of desire to keep the law, and the way that this showed itself in sin - are those things that are addressed in the new covenant: the law will be internalised, and sin will be forgotten forever.

The writer to the Hebrews was writing to a group of Jewish Christians who felt under pressure to abandon Christianity, keep making the Levitical sacrifices and return to Judaism. Perhaps they considered it necessary to keep making these sacrifices so that they would experience covenantal blessings. But Hebrews 8 shows that vast supremacy of the new covenant: what people hoped for through performance in the old covenant, Jesus has guaranteed through his sacrifice, resurrection and the giving of the Spirit. Christ's sacrifice for us and righteousness imputed to us guarantees our blessing forever (and so led Paul to write Ephesians 1:3).

As we reflected on Hebrews 8 earlier, we spoke of how the human heart causes us to want to write another covenant with God (where our blessing is based on legalism and performance). How ridiculous when Christ has guaranteed our blessings forever! How much better to glory in what has already been won and given to us!

The cross and society: a heart for social justice

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to do an occasional series on the cross and its implications wider than the call to evangelism and salvation of individuals who trust Jesus.

It's true that these are massive and glorious implications of Jesus' death on the cross and his resurrection. Yet I fear that one of the reasons that some feel uneasy about a penal and substitutionary understanding of Jesus' death on the cross (that Jesus took our punishment in our place and in our shoes) is that they perceive that it has nothing to say more widely than the salvation of the individual. One university chaplain I know claimed to hold exactly this position in relation to penal substitution. Yet over the past year or so, as I've been reading Scripture, I've noticed that a whole load of wider implications flow from holding this position, which I plan to survey in a series of posts. Here's the first one.

The cross and social justice

God presented [Christ] as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. [Romans 3:25-26, my emphasis]

Often evangelism and campaigning for issues in social justice seem to be set against each other as activities that Christians should engage in and pursue. Non-evangelical Christians often seem to have a much better record at being a voice for and campaigning for those who most often suffer injustice in the world today. I've also noticed that when evangelicals do speak about issues of social justice, it's almost inevitably spoken out with no reference to the cross whatsoever. It's as if we know we should care about the downtrodden and abused, but resort to a kind of proof-texting outside of a Biblical theology that points to Jesus' death and resurrection.

Yet one of the things that that a penal model of the cross says above all is this: God is bothered about ensuring that justice is done (see the quote from Romans, above). A penal understanding of the cross is based upon the (Scriptural) premise that a holy God demands that justice must be done. A holy God cannot just acquit guilty people of their sin (contra Allah of the Qur'an). This need for justice to be done flows from the very character of the God of the Bible - he would cease to be fair to his character if justice were not done. And so one of the things characterising the heartbeat of God is a heartbeat for justice to be done. By implication, through the cross we see that one of the things that God hates (we might state it even more strongly: something that he will ultimately not tolerate) is when injustice is done in his world and when evil appears to have the last say.

God's hatred of injustice that climaxes at the cross can be seen throughout Scripture. I've always found the description of God in Deuteronomy 10:17-18 moving: God cares about justice for those who, in Old Testament society, were the least likely to receive it. Perhaps today God would describe himself as the one 'who defends the cause of the abused child and the mentally disabled, and loves the asylum seeker and the dispossessed, giving them food and clothing'. Those who are unable to easily tend to themselves and those who are most likely to be abused are those who God speaks for. God passionately cares for justice. (See also a post I wrote on Jesus' parable of the unjust judge and the persistant widow, which I believe is all about God working justice for those of his people who are experiencing injustice today).

It's true that ultimately God's justice will be delivered, when Jesus returns and finally rights all wrongs in judgement of all. It's also true that being realistic about human sin means that we will never be able to eradicate all poverty or social ills. Yet God's passionate ache for justice that demanded a penal sacrifice of Christ endures today. God's heart still breaks as injustice goes on in the world.

I grant that the ultimate need of each individual in the world is to be reconciled to God through Christ. Evangelism is of vital importance - and I'm not wanting to dull anyone's commitment to proclamation of the gospel. My fear is rather that, as evangelicals, often we imply that we need not care about justice for the abused today because justice will one day be done, and we abdicate our responsibility to social justice in the name of evangelism. To do this is to see our own desires and passions diverge from those of the Lord. The cross reminds us that to be unbothered about injustice is to tolerate something that God himself hates.

So what?

The cross speaks of the God who will not let injustice have the last say in his universe. To share God's heart is to be stirred into action by the injustice we see. So why not, for starters, take a few minutes to...

Sign the Micah call
Lobby your MEP about renegotiating trade rules for Africa
Pray for the persecuted church

"Sin and God are correlative terms"

One of the sessions that we ran during our orientation before the 'English and Bible Camp' in Moldova was a session on what is the gospel. I was really keen that this session was stretching and went beyond the often quite reduced form of the gospel presented in some of these sorts of seminars.

One thing that emerged very clearly in the session was a lack of clarity on the nature of sin. It seems that many people have unintentionally adopted quite an 'Islamic' view of sin: that is, that people are mainly good (not mainly bad), and that sin is defined by the bad things we do - a set of black marks, if you like. Islam rejects any form of original sin and, given that humans were never in a relationship with God, the Islamic view of sin is not associated with rebellion against God. But to hold onto a quasi-Islamic view of sin will lead you to an anaemic form of Christianity.
Here are a few implications that I can see:

Atonement theology. Within Christianity, sin is presented as a wilful heart attitude in rebellion against God. I'm struck by the number of times that Jesus presents sin as a disease (think, for instance, of John 3:14-15 in context, and Mark 2:17) - there's nothing that we ourselves can do to free ourselves from this attitude of rebellion against God. As Will Metzger puts it, we find ourselves playing God: running our lives as if God did not matter; ignoring God; trying to be self-sufficient and self-made people - and also fighting God: wanting to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong. Sin and God are correlative terms. Rebellion is part of who we have become by nature. And so this leaves us with two interconnected but separate problems:

1. Somehow, we need to be forgiven by the holy and just God for our sinful actions that have flowed from our part hearts.
2. We need to be given new hearts so that we no longer keep rebelling against God.

Both of these things are necessary - we see that the death and resurrection of Jesus not only needs to bear God's wrath, but also to give new life. If the cross and resurrection dealt with only one of these problems, our atonement would be incomplete. Whilst we hold onto to a quasi-Islamic view of sin these things are not seen in clarity.

In our evangelism. We are likely to equate a guilty conscience in a person with conviction of sin. If a person admits that they are not perfect, we'll think that they recognise themselves to be sinful. But, as we've seen, conviction of sin needs to include an awareness of a wrong relationship with God, a sense of helplessness to do right, and therefore a consequent need of a new heart. We need the Spirit to show people that they are not only imperfect - but that they are sinful. The proclaimed gospel makes little sense if this point on sin is missed. Non-believers with a high view of humanity will miss the point of the gospel so long as they don't realise the gravity of the situation they are in. Rather, we must show them that God demands punishment for our sins and we can do nothing to avoid that punishment (because we keep sinning). We need to show them our complete hopelessness outside of Christ.

"I believe that much of our evangelistic and personal work today is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realize the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt (and not just psychological guilt feelings) in the presence of God." (Francis Schaeffer).

The holiness of believers and their sanctification. So long as we hold to a quasi-Islamic view of sin, we're likely to think that we're pretty good people. I'm likely to come to times of confession and look out for things that could be held as 'black marks' against my name. However, once I see sin as relational - as failing to love God and to treat him as God, my view of what is 'sinful' is expanded. I'm not only going to see trangressions as sin, but I'm also going to be aware of how I've failed to be like Christ and how I've failed to live with God as my God. I'm also going to be driven more regularly to the cross and I'll be more deeply amazed by the love that God has shown me.

Reflections from the ELF

Hello again from Hungary! I am currently sitting in the hotel lobby here at the Hotel Eger, where the European Leadership Forum is being held. As I write, we are in between seminars and it`s given me an opportunity to reflect on what has happened so far.

It`s clear that many people here have come from countries where the gospel is not bearing very much obvious fruit and where Christianity is in decline. There are some exceptions - evidently the church is growing in Romania and the Ukraine. In the UK there are encouragements. But, overall, the picture of Europe is one that is hard to the gospel.

Many of the sessions have spoken into this context. Stuart McAllister led a brilliant session on hope, in which he identified the different mindset that Christians should have to those around us, even when things are tough. He identified the overall mood of Europe as `europessimism´ or `comedic nihilism´. However, the Christian doctrine of creation and our eschatological convictions mean that we can have hope even in darkness. This ties in with my own recent thinking on the `theological optimism´ that Christians can have even in darkest times. In the same vein, Martin Haizmann reminded us that `Europe needs Jesus´ and this was accompanied by a honest and fresh session last night by Wayne Grudem on Scripture: this is where the freshness we need personally and the power to win Europe lies. I`ve been personally very encouraged by the exhortation to keep Scripture central as I know in my own experience that often when I`m feeling discouraged or nervous a lack of public commitment to Scripture is a great temptation. If Europe is to be won then our conviction that the Bible is God`s greatest tool in evangelism must remain steadfast.

My own seminar track, European Evangelists, has been very helpful. The highlights so far have been a session on Michael Ramsden on the need for integrity in the evangelist`s life, and Amy Orr-Ewing`s session this morning on God and violence. We had a very interesting discussion about the doctrine of penal substitution. Evidently Steve Chalke`s book The Lost Message of Jesus has just been translated into Romanian and many of our Romanian brothers and sisters are wrestling with its teaching. Amy gave a brilliant and winsome apologetic for the wrath-bearing sacrifice of Jesus at the cross, particularly defending it against the claim that God is blood-thirsty and violent.

Lots of food for thought then - I look forward to thinking about things more in the coming days plus also upon return to the UK.

"In this way, love is made complete among us..."

I was very struck this week by a talk on 1 John 4:7-21 at Lancaster University CU this week by verses 16-17.

The verses say this: 'God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement, because in this world we are like him.'

Of course this passage is in the context of the very famous verses about God's love: that God himself is the definition of love, demonstrated through sending the Son as our propitiatory sacrifice. Verses 16-17, however, remind us that God gave his Son not only to save us but so that we might be brought into loving community with him and with others. This is, of course, what God is doing in the world: gathering a people to be his very own for ever, in fellowship with him and treating others in accordance with his character. So often we speak about what we have been saved from; so rarely (it seems) we speak of what we have been saved to: a community of love.

I was also struck by what this means. When we find ourselves loving as God loves, then we can have confidence on the day of judgement. The community love that is made possible through Jesus' atonement and the Holy Spirit's work in our lives gives us deep assurance that we really do belong to God and are his.

I've written before about how evangelicals so often seem to fall short. We soak ourselves in Scripture but so often fail to live in loving community. I found the reminder that this is what we have been saved for as a new spur, with the Spirit's help, to love the unloveable.

2007: some thoughts for evangelism

Last year, I wrote some thoughts about what I felt the events of 2006 meant for Christian outreach. It's interesting to look back at these thoughts a year later.

Some of these themes and trends have continued over the past year. The postmodern mindset is perhaps more pervasive than ever - and so, on campus at least, is scepticism. And Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, was followed in 2007 by other atheistic dogma like Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great.

However, on reflection, there are some other trends that have occurred over 2007 that are perhaps more important for the future of Christian witness.

The Environment

It's true that issues such as global warming and our use of the planet have been on the back-burner for many years. However, the green agenda has come well and truly to the forefront of many people's minds in 2007. The IPCC's report in February 2007 was just the latest in a series of scientific reports that pointed to the grave realities of global warming and the need to care for the planet. Increasingly, green politics came into effect as well. All three major political parties in Britain now have developed environmental policies. Surveys throughout 2007 have shown that green issues are likely to be a vote-swinger for an increasing number of the British electorate.

Many non-Christians view Christianity - or, more particularly, the Bible's view of the environment - as part of the problem here. A twisted view of theology (twisting the Biblical command for humanity to 'fill the earth and subdue it') combined with modernist Christianity that confused Christian living with Enlightenment ideals (of human progress at all costs) has left Christianity tarnished. Increasingly, many younger people and a handful of older people fail to see the relevance of a God that would allow his creation to be spoiled.

Contemporary Christians face the challenge of clearly thinking about and articulating a Biblical view of the stewardship of creation. It will not do to have a simplistic eschatology where care for the environment is seen as tantamount to moving around deckchairs on the deck of the Titanic. Instead, we must speak about the God who is good, whose creation is good (if cursed by sin) but who has designed humans to be the climax of his creation and for relationship with him.

Community and the Atonement

I've been reading a number of Christian critiques of penal substitution over the past six months, which proliferated in 2007. I'm absolutely convinced that penal substitution is central to an understanding of the gospel. However, what a number of these critiques have pointed to is a very simplistic understanding of the implications of this view of the cross. It's often assumed that if one holds to a penal substitutionary understanding of the cross, that the implications are only for the individual and primarily for the eschatological future. It's therefore seen to be neccesary to drop or adapt our view of the cross to make it more appealing to a culture that wants to see Christianity engaging more in society (and with environmental issues - see above).

Convinced that I am that penal substitution is throroughly Biblical, I'm equally convinced that the implications are much wider than just salvation for the individual. Penal substitution has a lot to say about justice, community and society. It's my hope that we evangelicals understand this more clearly and begin to link our engagement with the world in the light of the cross.

In the light of this, I'm planning (eventually) to blog on the wider implications of penal substituion and the world.

Therapeuticism

My final observation about 2007 is the growth in therapeutic evangelism: the sort of evangelism that speaks of life being made more comfortable with Jesus. A quick glance at many of the evangelistic sermon texts preached around the world in 2007 shows that this is becoming ever more popular. We're losing the idea that the gospel is public truth for everyone.

I used to be warned by a church leader in Bristol not to reduce gospel preaching to 'spiritual air conditioning', speaking about a gospel that makes life that little bit more comfortable. We'll need to increasingly be on our guard to prevent ourselves slipping into this. Reading Will Metzger's book, Tell the Truth, will be a great start to prevent this!

What is the place of the OT Law for Christians today? (3)

Here's the third post in what I expect to be a series of many in working out what the role of the OT Law is for Christian believers today (Part 1 and Part 2 are older posts where I looked at the place of the Law in the unfolding Biblical story). Now before moving on, I want to dwell a bit further on the place of sacrifice in the Law. I think that perhaps this is the most underplayed theme in much of the writing about the Law.

As we saw in the section on Leviticus, the purpose of the sacrificial system as a whole was to enable people of Israel to maintain the relationship with the LORD that had already been established through the exodus and his covenant with them at Sinai. The sacrificial system was itself a form of grace – it provided a way of ritually cleansing the people from the sins that defiled them, thus enabling them to continue in covenant fellowship with God and each other.

The burnt offering, described in Leviticus 1, is of particular note. This is dedicated entirely to God and burned entirely for atonement for sin. It is entirely consumed by fire. The established principle is this: if you are to live in fellowship with the Lord, something must die in your place in atonement for sin. The four sacrifices that follow, described in Leviticus 2-5, have different but overlapping significance, and together with the Day of Atonement ritual (of chapter 14) synthesise a way in which Israel could be forgiven having transgressed the covenant with God in different ways.

This shows the place of grace from the LORD within the Mosaic Law. The sacrificial system clearly acknowledges the inevitability of human failure, yet sets such failure in the context of the much greater fact of God’s forgiveness and his ongoing mission to ‘bless the nations’ through the people of Israel. God never forgot that his people were human. He did not expect perfection from his people – rather I think the sacrificial system showed that he expected a commitment from his people to love him and each other in response to the grace that they had been shown and the rescue that had been performed. When they transgressed, they were to rely fully on the LORD's ongoing grace, shown in their commitment to the sacrificial system and the provision of grace that this represented.

When we hold such convictions about the place of the Law for Israel in the Old Testament, I think that this makes sense of many of the psalms that describe Israel’s relationship to God. For instance, Psalm 106 describes in detail the ways in which Israel had rebelled against the covenant God had made with them. Israel had failed both in the time of the psalm-writer (verse 6), and had failed here on numerous occasions throughout the history of the nation (verses 7, 13, 19-21, 24-25 etc.). The psalm also speaks of the punishment that Israel incurred for this rebellion (verses 15, 17, 26-27 etc.) Yet the psalm begins and ends – perhaps surprisingly to modern Christian readers – with the refrain ‘Praise the LORD’ in verses 1 and 48. The final verses of the psalm are of particular attention, following the long section about Israel’s ongoing rebellion:

44 But he took note of their distress
when he heard their cry;
45 for their sake he remembered his covenant
and out of his great love he relented.
46 He caused them to be pitied
by all who held them captive.
47 Save us, O LORD our God,
and gather us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name
and glory in your praise.
48 Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
Let all the people say, "Amen!"
Praise the LORD.

These verses unlock the rest of the psalm. The psalm is not primarily about Israel’s sin, or even the LORD's punishment of that sin, but rather it concerns the LORD's amazingly patient grace shown to his people in the light of that sin. The Old Testament is full of accounts of Israel’s sin, stupidity, grumbling and rebellion (a mirror of all humanity). Yet, in spite of this, God shows his incredible patience in preserving them, providing for them and maintaining his covenant. The sacrificial system was a visual and God-given reminder of his gracious provision in the light of ongoing and desperate human failure.

This brings us to a question which the Law apparently leaves unanswered. How could so much grace be shown by God under this covenant? In other words, how can a God, who frequently has pointed to his own holiness and righteousness, appear to just simply forgive sin? How can a fair judge let guilty people walk free? Even with the institution of the sacrificial system, Israel would have surely known that the sacrifices of bulls and goats were no just satisfaction for their sin. The answer lies in a future intervention by God, and becomes increasingly clear through the witness of the prophets. Perhaps Isaiah saw it most clearly when he wrote:

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
[Isaiah 53:4-6]

Even in the Old Testament, then, under the old covenant, the question of quite how a just God could be so gracious and so freely forgive is pervasive. Isaiah and the other prophets presumably understood that there could have been no covenant with Abraham and no covenant with Moses without God’s further future intervention. Perhaps, then, Israel’s worship would have had a future-oriented element to it, which is something that we seem to see reflected in many of the psalms.

Would love to hear your thoughts on all this - more soon as we look at the place of the Law for OT believers and the prophets' description of the covenant.

Preaching penal substitution to abused people

Having read an entry on the Scripture coherence of the theories of the atonement, where I cited a recent article by Don Carson, I received an email from a friend of mine.

The email had lots of threads of thought, but one section of it has been particularly thought provoking. Here, my correspondent wrote the following: 'The ex-addicts and alcoholics who ask me about the Christian faith will not get a talk on penal substitution. Many of these guys have grown up in abusive households, beaten and punished by their own fathers, or are struggling with addiction. How would you describe the gospel to them? I'll leave you to think on that one.'

It's quite a challenge, isn't it? The clear line of thought in the email is that penal substitution is an idea abhorrent to anyone that has experienced any kind of abuse.

I've given some thought to this over the past couple of days, and here is what I think. I'd love to hear what you have to say.

(1) There are many ways of explaining the same gospel. This is obvious when we read the New Testament. Whilst the central nucleus - the 'kergyma' - of the gospel is the same, the way in which this message is articulated varies tremendously. One of the things that I have been learning over the past few years is that the gospel is far from one-dimension. I love the description of the gospel being like a tapestry, with many threads that stretch all of the way from Genesis to Revelation, all through the central point of Jesus' death and resurrection. So there are plenty of things that could be said to one who had been abused - Jesus came to make you whole (yes!), Jesus came to set you free from sin (yes!) - all these things are true, but they are only true because Jesus died as a wrath-bearing sacrifice in our place. We cannot, for instance, be freed from sin, until the righteous demands of the law due to our sin have been met.

(2) The Bible writers obviously did not think that this was a reason to avoid teaching penal substitution. One example will suffice. In his first letter, Peter addresses slaves and tells them to submit to their masters, 'not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh' (2:18). Suffering and harsh abuse were evidently part of what these slaves were experiencing (see 2:20). Yet in the same section (2:21-25), Peter goes on to show how Jesus' suffering is an example for their own suffering. Jesus 'bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness' (2:24). In fact, one of the themes of the whole letter is that Jesus' sufferings help us make sense of the unjust sufferings that we often face.

(3) Fundamentally, I think that this is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of penal substitution which shows a shortcomings in trinitarian theology. My correspondent implies that penal substitution shows God the Father to be abusive in his punishment - something utterly abhorrent.

This is often a way in which penal substitution is caricatured: the Father abuses the Son. I addressed this objection in my recent talk on Isaiah 53. I think this misunderstanding boils down to a wrong view of the nature of the Trinity in the Godhead. For in Isaiah 53, like elsewhere, we see that the suffering endured by the Son or (in Isaiah 53 langauge) the Servant is voluntary. Additionally, both Father and Servant can look back and be satisfied (Isaiah 53:11) at what the cross achieves. It's not that the Son hates the Father for his actions in punishing him at the cross: 'for the joy set before him, he endured the cross' (Hebrews 12:2).

Perhaps most tellingly the Bible rules out any understanding of the atonement that minimises the suffering of the Father (and, by implication, the Spirit) at the cross. Romans 5:8, for instance, says, 'But God [the Father] demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were sinners, Christ died for us.' Or 'this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins' (1 John 4:10). The point that both Paul and John are making is that the giving of the Son was costly to the Father - that's how we know what love is. The Father did not enjoy seeing the Son made sin. So let us dismiss any idea that the Son alone suffered at the cross. Both the Father and the Son suffered at the cross.

I think to an abused person I would want to say this: Did you know that you were loved this much? Did you know that you had a Father like this, that would endure this agony for you?

(4) We need to be careful in the language and the analogies that we use in explaining the gospel. I'm currently reading Pierced for our Trangressions, a great book (thus far) looking to 'rediscover the glory of penal substitution'. One of the appendices is entitled 'A personal note to preachers' and warns of the danger of caricaturing the Bible's teaching on atonement. Several talk illustrations make Jesus out to be 'the fall guy'. May we never use such illustrations.

I'd be interested to hear what others think on this. How would you address my friend's questions?

Establishing the coherence of the Scriptural teaching on the atonement

Don Carson has written a great article on why the doctrine of penal substitution comes so readily under attack [HT: Mike Gilbart-Smith].

I particularly found the section I've quoted below helpful. Talking to some people recently, one does walk away with the impression that certain views of the cross can be freely ignored or dismissed as just conjectures from a particular viewpoint of history. Enjoy:

In recent years there has been a lot of chatter about various “models” of the atonement that have appeared in the history of the church: the penal substitution model, the Christus Victor model, the exemplary model, and so forth. The impression is frequently given that today's Christians are free to pick and choose among these so-called “models.” But for any Christian committed to the final authority of Scripture, this approach is methodologically flawed. It allows historical theology to trump Scripture. Surely the right question to ask is this: Which, if any, of these so-called “models” is exegetically warranted by the Bible itself? For instance, are there passages in which biblical writers insist that Christ in his death triumphed over the powers of darkness? Are there passages in which Christ's self-sacrifice becomes a moral model for his followers? Are there passages in which Christ's death is said to be a propitiation for our sins, i.e. a sacrifice that turns away the wrath of God? If the answer is “Yes” to these three options--and there are still more options I have not mentioned here--then choosing only one of them is being unfaithful to Scripture, for it is too limiting. Christians are not at liberty to pick and choose which of the Bible's teachings are to be treasured.

There is another question that must be asked when people talk about “models” of the atonement. Assuming we can show that several of them are warranted by Scripture itself, the question to ask is this: How, then, do these “models” cohere? Are they merely discrete pearls on a string? Or is there logic and intelligibility to them, established by Scripture itself?

One recent work that loves to emphasize the Christus Victor “model”--Christ by his death is victor over sin and death--somewhat begrudgingly concedes that penal substitution is found in a few texts, not least Romans 8:3. But this work expends no effort to show how these two views of the atonement should be integrated. In other words, the work in question denigrates penal substitution as a sort of minor voice, puffs the preferred “model” of Christus Victor, and attempts no integration. But I think it can be shown (though it would take a very long chapter to do it) that if one begins with the centrality of penal substitution, which is, as we have seen, grounded on a deep understanding of how sin is an offense against God, it is very easy to see how all the other so-called “models” of the atonement are related to it. The way Christ triumphs over sin and death is by becoming a curse for us, by satisfying the just demands of his heavenly Father, thereby silencing the accuser, and rising in triumph in resurrection splendor because sin has done its worst and been defeated by the One who bore its penalty. Moreover, in the light of such immeasurable love, there are inevitably exemplary moral commitments that Christ's followers must undertake. In other words, it is easy to show how various biblical emphases regarding the atonement cohere if one begins with penal substitution. It is very difficult to establish the coherence if one begins anywhere else.

Isaiah on Jesus the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 52:13-53:12)

Below appears the extended text of a talk I prepared for Lancaster University Christian Union as part of their series, 'The Gospel According to Isaiah'. In the end I cut the text down and so below is the 'unedited cut'! I was given the title 'Isaiah on Jesus the Suffering Servant' for Isaiah 52:13-53:12. I loved preparing the talk and learned loads myself too. What an amazing Saviour we have and how worthy of glory he is!

Since chapter 40 of his prophecy, Isaiah has been offering a word of hope to the people of Israel in exile. It begins, ‘Comfort, comfort my people’. After judgement comes comfort. And the comfort that God has spoken about is a return from exile, a return to Jerusalem from Babylon for his people. Their judgement is over. Turn to Isaiah 48:20-21, where this is described: ‘Leave Babylon, flee from the Babylonians! Announce this with shouts of joy and proclaim it. Send it out to the ends of the earth; say, ‘The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob.’ They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; he made water flow for them from the rock; he split the rock and water gushed out.’ The people of Judah can celebrate because they will not be abandoned forever – the LORD will redeem his people and bring them home to Jerusalem under the Persian king Cyrus, and that is great news!

However, a problem remains. It was human sin – rebellion and wickedness against God – that caused the people to go into exile in the first place. God has dealt with the result of this problem – he promises to bring them from exile, but the problem of human sin remains. And so verse 22 is a tantalising prophecy: ‘“There is no peace,” says the LORD, “for the wicked.”’ Hand in hand with praise for the greatness of the LORD is a contrast: the destined misery for the wicked. And of course this is not something that can be dealt with merely by geography. There were wicked people in the people of Judah before exile, in exile and when they came back from exile. And so 48:22 shows that God has not finished yet.

In other words, Isaiah’s prophecy from Chapter 40 onwards that there is good news of deliverance is bigger than a return home from captivity under Cyrus from Babylon. God has something greater in mind. There’s a greater ultimate deliverance that the LORD will bring. And he will bring it through a mysterious character known only as his Servant. You saw him introduced last week.

There are several prophecies about the work of the Servant in the book of Isaiah. But today’s passage is both the most famous and the most graphic about what the Servant will achieve. What we will see is that the Servant’s actions illustrate God’s greatest desires and show how God will ultimately fulfil his people’s greatest need.

The passage is split into five stanzas, and we’ll look at these in turn as we consider more about what God is achieving through the actions of his Servant.

52:13-15: The Servant’s suffering makes him worthy of great exaltation

In the first stanza, then, we read that the Servant’s suffering makes him worthy of great exaltation. Let’s re-read 52:13-15:

See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. Just as there were many who were appalled at him - his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness - so will he sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.

The first thing that we learn from this passage is that God’s Servant will be exalted or, to be specific, ‘raised, lifted up and exalted’. This in itself is an incredible thing to claim, because language speaking of exaltation has already been used in the book of Isaiah. Do you remember that during the first week of term, we looked at Isaiah 6, Isaiah’s vision of God? And this is how that vision opens: ‘In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted.’ And now this language of exaltation is used to describe God’s Servant. He will be exalted. In other words, God’s Servant is to become nothing less in glory than God.

That’s the first shock of this passage. God’s Servant will somehow be worthy of the same level of glory that the God of the Universe deserves. Think of the glory that he deserves: the one on whom we depend for our every breath! And yet the Servant will be worthy of the same level of glory.

Perhaps more surprising still is verse 14. All of us will be familiar with the ‘before and after’ photos that advertisers use. The ‘before’ picture features a large, overweight person or a bald man or a spotty face. The ‘after’ picture has someone who has lost stones of weight, no longer sullen-looking but happy and trim, or a full head of hair, or perfectly smooth skin. And if the ‘after’ picture of God’s Servant is something more glorious and amazing than anything that we can begin to contemplate, the ‘before’ picture of the Servant is at the other extreme. Look at sorts of words used in verse 14: appalled, disfigured, marred beyond human likeness. Somehow, the abuse and humiliation of God’s Servant will be such that – verse 15 – kings will shut their mouths because of him. In the ancient world, kings were supremely powerful and what they said happened, and yet through the Servant’s suffering, they will be completely overwhelmed by his glory.

Sometimes people receive glory and admiration for their suffering. The famous picture of a blood-drenched Terry Butcher will be familiar to some of you. He played on for England despite incredible personal pain from a head wound for England’s eventual victory a few years ago. More seriously, personal achievements against the odds in the face of illness or disease are celebrated in our media. But what sort of suffering by an individual could make them worthy of the same level of glory as the God of the Universe? For this we need to read on in the poem.

53:1-3: The Servant will be utterly despised by other humans

But before we get to unravelling how the Servant’s suffering leads to him being worthy of such great glory, we need to examine how Isaiah prophesies that things will appear at face value. Far from being considered worthy of great glory, the Servant will be utterly despised. Let’s re-read 53:1-3:

Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up like a tender shoot, a like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

‘Who would believe it?!’ That’s what verse 1 is saying. The arm of the LORD revealed like this! We would have never have dreamt that the arm of the LORD – God’s power and glory – would have been revealed in such a way as will be revealed through his Servant, says Isaiah. We would never dream that God’s power would be shown in such weakness. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Servant arrives, he will not look worthy of such glory.

And so Isaiah prophesies that the Servant will be like a ‘tender shoot’, something vulnerable to wind and birds and insects. Isaiah’s prophecy speaks of how the Servant will suffer right from the beginning of his life, suffering just like a root in dry ground. And far from appearing worthy of glory, when the Servant appears, he won’t be conspicuous because of his beauty or majesty. The Servant won’t be good looking, says Isaiah. He won’t have any majesty to attract us to him, in the way that we are magically attracted to the Royal Family, wanting to know all about them. The Servant – well, he will be plain, says Isaiah. He’s the sort of person that, if he walked into the room now, he’d turn no heads through being impressive.

And, says Isaiah, the glory that will rightly belong to the Servant will be surprising as it’s not as if he’ll be everybody’s favourite person. In fact, in verse 3 Isaiah prophesies twice that the Servant will be despised. People will go out of their way to avoid the Servant. He will be completely shunned.

So let’s summarise what we’ve seen so far. Firstly, says Isaiah, a Servant, an individual, will be sent by God and because of his actions will be worthy of the same glory as the God of the Universe. And this will surprise everyone because the Servant is, well, distinctly un-glorious. He’ll be weak and he’ll suffer and he’ll be despised by pretty much everyone. And so, says Isaiah, his ultimate victory and exaltation will come as something of a shock to everyone.

53:4-6: Yet the Servant’s suffering is for us, and brings us peace with God

The third stanza – the middle verse – of this poem brings us right to the heart of this prophecy, because it is here that we begin to see how this enigma of the Servant’s suffering and ultimate glory can be reconciled. Let’s re-read verses 4-6:

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Again, we see a juxtaposition here: Isaiah says that the onlooker will look at the Servant and decide that he is ‘stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted’. In other words, the Servant will suffer to such an extent that the onlooker will see his pathetic predicament and come to the conclusion that God was punishing him because of some great sin.

And yet in fact what is happening is sacrifice. The words used here to describe the actions of the Servant would have been very familiar to Jews who lived at the period that Isaiah wrote. The language used here is the same language as that used to describe the sacrifices that God had ordained centuries earlier for the people of God. Sacrifice is a key theme of the Bible; and this is because a holy God – a perfect and pure God – can’t tolerate sin, our evil and rebellion against him. Sin leads to death. And in his mercy, God allowed sacrifice – the death of an animal in the place of a human that deserved to die. An animal took the fate that a human deserved. The animal was the human’s substitute.

In the most important of those sacrificial ceremonies, known as the Day of Atonement, which you can read about later in Leviticus 16, two animals were sacrificed. One of them was burnt as an offering; and the priest laid his hands symbolically on the head of the other animal, known as the scapegoat. The scapegoat was then led out into the wilderness to die. Taken together, these sacrifices showed God’s holiness – that sin leads to death – and God’s mercy: that when the punishment has been taken, nothing else is left to pay. The animal was deliberately left out in the wilderness to die, never to return, to shown symbolically that sin had been dealt with completely.

And now this language of sacrifice is used to describe the Servant’s predicament. Look down at verses 4-6 again. ‘The punishment that brought us peace was upon him’ – just like the sacrificed animal in the Day of Atonement. ‘The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ – just like the priest laid on the scapegoat the iniquity of the people of Israel. Do you see what is going on here? The Servant is going to be a substitutionary sacrifice, just like the animals at the Day of Atonement.

What I am saying is this: to a holy God, a God who is completely just, sin must be punished. He would be unjust if he did not. That’s what the Old Testament sacrificial system shows. But an Old Testament believer would have had a problem. It’s this: the Old Testament Scriptures keep re-iterating again and again that humans are not the same as other animals. So in the very first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1, we read that the only beings made in the image of God are humans. So how could an animal really substitute for a human? A human is more valuable than an animal! It’s true that God promised in the Old Testament that trust placed in God’s provision of animal sacrifices would deal with sin, but they also would have surely kept reminding those making the sacrifices that what they really needed was a human sacrifice for sin, where a perfect human, somehow unblemished by sin, took the punishment of death in the place of other humans. In other words, they needed a perfect human substitute that would take God’s punishment in their place.

And do you see that is exactly what Isaiah is prophesying the Servant will do. ‘He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ We are healed spiritually – made right with God – because the Servant takes the punishment that we deserve. God can’t just forgive sin and magic it away. God is not omnipotent in the sense that he can do anything. God can only do those things which are consistent with his nature. And so can’t readily pardon guilty people, because he has revealed himself as a God of infinite fairness and justice. He is a holy God. He must punish sin. And through sending his Servant, this is what he does. Through sending his Servant, and placing his punishment on him, pouring out all of his wrath against the Servant as he is made sin for others, God has found a way of forgiving guilty people like us whilst remaining holy and pure.

53:7-9: The Servant will voluntarily and willingly suffer death for us

So far we’ve seen, then, that firstly the Servant’s suffering makes him worthy of great exaltation; secondly, that the Servant will be utterly despised by other humans; and thirdly that the Servant’s suffering for us brings us peace with God. But perhaps there’s one issue running through your mind: it sounds pretty harsh of God to crush the Servant. It seems that there’s the Servant, minding his own business, and then suddenly he finds himself crushed by God in a horrific way. God doesn’t exactly seem blameless here himself with all of this violence.

Well, if that’s your thought, then come back to verses 7-9:

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is silent before her shearers, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgement he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendents? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

These verses make two points: firstly, the Servant’s death was undeserved. We see that especially affirmed in the last sentence – ‘though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.’ But the other thing that these verses stress is that the Servant’s suffering was completely voluntary on his part.

Look back at verse 7. The Servant was ‘led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ The image here isn’t that the Servant had no choice. That’s sometimes what we can think when we read these verses. A sheep en route to the slaughterhouse doesn’t have much choice if the farmer as decided it must die – is this verse suggesting the Servant had no choice either? No. The emphasis is on the last phrase: ‘so he did not open his mouth.’ The point is this: the Servant would have had every reason to object, to refuse to take the punishment. Verse 8 says that ‘by oppressive and judgement he was taken away’ – in other words, he was condemned without justice. The implication of the verse is that he could have spoken and freed himself from the ordeal he was about to undergo. But he did not. Instead, he remained silent. He did not object. He was calm and submissive as he put himself forward for sacrifice.

Imagine that you are a Jew held in a prisoner of war camp in the Second World War. For some reason there is a skirmish against the Nazi prison officers, and one of these prison officers gets beaten from behind by one of the men in the chambers, who is there with his family who are cowering in the corner. The prison officer gets to his feet and storms out. A few moments later, a whole company of Nazi soldiers enter the room with the beaten prisoner officer. The commander barks instructions explaining that whoever beat their comrade will get shot. But the beaten officer doesn’t know who beat him. Eventually, he comes to a man next to you. He wasn’t involved in the skirmish – in fact, he was trying to calm everyone down. But the prison officer is sure that the innocent man was the one who beat him. And so he is arrested. Everyone expects him to protest. But he looks at the guilty man and his family and bites his tongue. He does not protest. He is voluntarily led out of the room and shot dead.

And that is the picture we have of the Servant here. He voluntarily stays quiet and takes the punishment. We must never think that the Servant had no choice as he faced the punishment of God’s wrath. He knew exactly what was coming, and yet whilst completely innocent of any charge, he willingly and voluntarily sacrificed himself for others.

53:10-12: The Servant is worthy of glory because of his unique death

Onto the final stanza. Perhaps the most shocking of all:

‘Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and to cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great and will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.’

You know someone's heart when you know their deep desires and what satisfies them. And these verses tell us what God desires and how that desire is achieved by his Servant. Verse 10 puts it this way: ‘It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer’ – more literally, and more shockingly, this verse might be rendered: ‘The LORD was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief.’ What? The LORD of the Universe was pleased to crush the Servant and cause him to suffer? The one true God was happy because of this violent mauling of the Servant? Yes.

Like the prophecy said earlier, we wouldn’t believe it had we not been told it was true. But here we see that God was pleased to crush the Servant. But before we start thinking that there’s a monster at the centre of the Universe, let’s realise that the LORD is only pleased because of what the Servant’s suffering achieved. He hated the action itself. But the Servant’s achievements are described in several ways in this stanza. Firstly – he was a guilt offering: again the language of sacrifice is used. The Servant’s death brings satisfaction for sin for a holy God. But secondly – note – ‘the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.’ In other words, the Servant achieves something that God has planned, that he wants to do, that he desires.

Verse 11 shows what it is that God is out to achieve: to justify many. The point is this: if the Servant has borne the sin of others in his death, then their sin has been punished. And if their sin has been punished, they bear it no more. And if they bear it no more, then they are without guilt before God, and if they are without guilt before God, then they are justified; that is, they are legally acquitted by God and declared righteous. And now we see what God has been up to in this great and awful work of the Servant. He is providing for the acquittal of sinners. We have all sinned and brought shame to the glory of the holy LORD God Almighty! Left to ourselves we will come under his terrible wrath and everlasting judgement. But that is not his desire. His desire is that the Servant should be crushed in the place of many, to bear our iniquities and justify ungodly people like us.

Amazingly, verse 11 points to the resurrection of this Servant. Somehow Isaiah prophesied that the Servant will see ‘the light of life’. And note a very precious thing here: the Servant too will be satisfied. It’s not only the LORD who administered the justice that is happy with the outcome of the Servant’s work. The Servant himself too will ‘be satisfied’. He will be happy with what all of his suffering and humiliation achieved. In fact, he will be delighted with it.

And all of this makes the Servant, just in case we have forgotten, worthy of the same glory as God himself. For he has achieved the will of the LORD, through his humiliation he has met the desire of the LORD: that through his death, he will justify many and bear their iniquities. And so look at the conclusion in verse 12. God says, ‘Therefore I will give him a portion among the great’ – he will be worthy of worship and praise and glory and adoration and honour and thanks. Yet he will divide the spoils. The Servant’s desire is that he shares his glory with the very people that he has justified, the very ones for whom he suffered, the very ones who mocked him and hid their faces from him and despised him. The Servant satisfies our longings at the cost of his own life: he justifies the ungodly; he makes us part of the family, the offspring, of God; and he shares with us the spoils of universal triumph – the promise of a restored relationship with our Creator forever.

Conclusion

Let me read some verses from Acts 8: the account of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. The Eunuch is reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah as he travels home from Jerusalem.

Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked.

"How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:
"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth."

The eunuch asked Philip, "Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

The incredible news of the New Testament is that the Servant has come! Jesus of Nazareth is the Servant. And he is not only the Servant, but the Son of God, God in human form, who fulfilled the prophecy we read about in Isaiah 53: the incredible news that people can be made right through his death on the cross in our place, taking the wrath of God the Father against sin. It is Jesus’ death on the cross – and his death alone – that can justify us, and can legally acquit us before God. It is that which makes Jesus worthy of glory and honour and praise; because he was slain.

Many of us here will not be hearing this truth for the first time. We’ll be used to the idea that Jesus bore the anger of God the Father against our sin on the cross. But let’s not skip over this. Let’s think about what the cross reveals. It reveals God the Father’s heart – who desired to crush the Son – not because he enjoyed it, but in order to bring many back to him. And the Son, the Servant, is glad about this. Jesus is not resentful at God the Father for sending him to the cross. In fact, as Isaiah prophesies, he sees the good pleasure of the Lord succeeding through his own anguish and is satisfied – not frustrated or bitter – but satisfied. And so if you want to know the heart of God and the heart of his Servant Jesus, look at the cross. It is there that we see God as he really is: holy and just – sin must be punished, even if it means the tortuous death of Christ – and yet loving: delighting to go to the cross and delighting to punish in order to justify sinners like us. This is no wishy-washy or nostalgic love. This is incredible, breathtaking love – love shown in an incredible action: one that we would not have believed if it was not written in front of us.

And we need to be reminded of these truths. Many in the world hate the cross of Christ. They hate what it says about sin and the fact that it must be punished. Richard Dawkins spoke of the cross of Christ as ‘vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent’. Even some of those from within the church can struggle with the Biblical teaching about the cross. One writer recently described the idea of God the Father punishing the Son for our sin as being akin to ‘cosmic child abuse’. And yet what we’ve seen the cross reveals tonight is a God of love: not of sentimental love, but of a real love, a love that has met our deepest need. A God who has found a way of justifying guilty people like us and not condemning us all to hell. God’s response to our guilt isn’t to say that it doesn’t matter, but to sacrificially pay the price necessary that we might be forgiven through his sacrifice. And this is incredibly humbling, it’s an incredible to our pride, but just think about the God that all this reveals.

One final word. And that’s to any here who any who haven’t yet personally placed their trust in Jesus. Isaiah 53 is incredibly humbling. It’s humbling because this passage shows that there is nothing that we can do to justify ourselves. There’s nothing that we can do to make ourselves right with God. And yet there is great liberty in what we read too. Although there’s nothing we can do, if we humble ourselves, we can receive the great blessings of what the Servant, Jesus Christ, suffered for us. And so tonight, will you come clean? Will you admit that you deserve God’s judgement, God’s hell, like all of us? Will you admit that the solutions you trust in – good deeds or religious activity or anything else – won’t work? Can you see how serious the problem of sin and God’s wrath against it is? Can you see the danger you are in? Then humble yourself and realise that God has done everything you need to have a restored relationship with him. He has taken the punishment for your rebellion against him onto himself so that you might be forgiven. That is why Jesus came.

Let me close with a quote from the Christian writer John Stott:

As I look at the cross I cannot tell which is more apparent – the relentless antagonism of God against our sin and rebellion, or the inextinguishable love of God towards guilty sinners. Both are fully satisfied at the cross. God has done everything necessary for my forgiveness. What then is there left for me to do? Nothing – except to acknowledge my rebellion against God, turn from it, and receive Jesus Christ into my life as my Saviour, committing myself personally to him, and asking God to take my sins away.

Let’s pray.