Rather than make this post 6,000 words long, I separated the section on Jesus death as an offering and made it a second post. I am going to consolidate them into a booklet, so please hammer me in the comments (of both posts) with any objections or questions you have.

Here’s what the Bible–I think obviously–teaches about the atonement:

It has always been true that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. In fact, God rewards even the wicked who repent and live righteously, forgetting all the wickedness they had ever done (Ezek. 18:21-23).

Way too many humans turned out to be among the wicked (Rom. 3:10-18, which is quoted from Psalm 14 & 53), so Jesus died to ransom us out of slavery to sin and wicked spirits (cf. Eph. 1:1-3), to condemn sin in the flesh (Rom. 8:3), and to empower us to live righteous lives (Tit. 2:11-15; 2 Cor. 5:15; Acts 3:26; all of Romans 6; etc., etc.). Then he rose from the grave, cleansed the temple in heaven with his blood (Heb. 9), so that by that blood we have bold, confident access to the throne of God’s favor (Eph. 3:12; Heb. 4:16).

In this way, as new creatures created in Christ Jesus to do good works (Eph. 2:10), patiently continue to do good and are rewarded with the eternal life that has always been the reward of the righteous (Rom. 2:5-8; Gal. 6:7-10).

Thus, I want to point out that Jesus did not die to make the judgment easier but to equip us to face it. It’s still hard (1 Pet. 1:17; 4:18-19), but with diligence we are well equipped to attain to the resurrection (Php. 3:8-15; 2 Pet. 1:9-10).

Around 1900 years ago, an anonymous Christian described this equipping:

As long then as the [Old Testament times] endured, [God] permitted us to be borne along by unruly impulses, being drawn away by the desire of pleasure and various lusts. This was not that He at all delighted in our sins, but that He simply endured them; nor that He approved the time of working iniquity which then was, but that He sought to form a mind conscious of righteousness, so that being convinced in that time of our unworthiness of attaining life through our own works, it should now, through the kindness of God, be vouchsafed to us; and having made it manifest that in ourselves we were unable to enter into the kingdom of God, we might through the power of God be made able. (Letter to Diognetus, ch. 9; brackets mine)

God’s Mercy

Whenever I write about the death of Jesus being primarily to equip us to do good works, which tends to freak out modern Christians, I try to add a comment about God’s mercy. Jesus did not die to make God merciful. God does not have to kill an animal or remember his Son’s death to forgive sin.

The mercy and lovingkindness of God is the primary feature of the character of God in the Old Testament. When he introduces himself to Moses, he proclaims:

Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.” (Ex. 34:6-7, WEB)

Through Ezekiel we are told:

Again, when I say to the wicked, “You will surely die,” if he turns from his sin and does that which is lawful and right, ¹⁵ if the wicked restore the pledge, give again that which he had taken by robbery, walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity, he will surely live. He will not die. ¹⁶ None of his sins that he has committed will be remembered against him. He has done that which is lawful and right. He will surely live. (Ezek. 33:14-1-6; see Ezek. 18:20-30 as well)

Psalm 136 points out the lovingkindness of God in every verse.

God is remarkably merciful with the righteous, not because Jesus died, but because lovingkindness is the main attribute of the God of Israel and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think, too, of Jehoshaphat’s army marching into battle with singers at the front crying out, “Give thanks to Yahweh, for his loving kindness endures forever” (2 Chr. 20:21).

Most Christians are familiar with the passage in Romans that says, “Blessed is the man whom the Lord will by no means charge with sin” (Rom. 4:8), but they are not familiar with the fact that this is a quote from Psalm 32 in the Old Testament.

Who is the man whom the Lord will by no means charge with sin? That man is the righteous man who believes God, whether under the Old Covenant or the New. In Romans, Paul uses Abraham as the example of a faithful man to whom God will not impute sin, and we receive the same benefit by having the faith of Abraham.

Jesus died so we could live even more faithfully to God than Abraham, in which case we can be the man (or woman) to whom God does not impute sin. God’s nature did not have to change in order for him to forgive sin, but our behavior had to change. Notice in Exodus 34:6-7 above that God will by no means clearly the guilty. We are warned by the apostle Paul not to be deceived about the fact that this is every bit as true in the New Testament (Eph. 5:5-7; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; Gal. 6:7-9).

Jesus died to free us from the power of sin. It is the very purpose of grace (Rom. 6:14). He concludes Romans 6 by saying:

But now, being made free from sin and having become servants of God, you have your fruit of sanctification and the result of eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 6:22-23)

For most modern Christians, these two verses contradict. Is eternal life the result of holiness (as Heb. 12:14 also says), or is it the gift of God? We don’t understand because we have not been taught that the primary gift we received by grace through faith was to become God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works (Eph. 2:8-10).

Christus Victor

Christus Victor is the name of a book published by Gustaf Aulen in 1931. An AI accurately summarizes the Christus Victor view of the atonement as:

 … the classic view, where Christ overcomes the hostile powers holding humanity in subjection while God reconciles the world to Himself, is the distinctively Christian idea of the atonement, prevalent in the New Testament, patristic writings, and the theology of Luther.

I don’t trust AIs even to summarize a book but, in this case, I know that summary to be accurate. I have read the book and discussed Aulen’s theory with others who know it. I found the book confusing, and Aulen’s theory incomplete, but I do need to give him credit for the title of this blog and for opening my eyes to just how Jesus overcame and overcomes “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”

Jesus Ransomed Us: How Jesus “Paid the Price”

I noticed a long time ago that the Scriptures do not use “paid the price” in the same way modern Christians do. Jesus did not “pay the price” for sin; instead he paid the price for us (1 Cor. 6:19-20; Tit. 2:13-14).

Almost every time “redeemed” or “redemption” is used in the New Testament, the word is more accurately translated “ransomed” or “released by payment of ransom.” For example, one of the most important verses in the New Testament is Ephesians 1:7 which, if translated hyper-literally, reads like this:

… by whom [Jesus] we have release by ransom through his blood, the release of transgressions, according to the riches of his favor. (Apostolic Bible Polyglot)

That website, StudyBible.info, gives the Strong’s number above every word. If you click on that number, you are taken to a page with at least 5 Greek lexicons defining  the word. If you click on the number above “release by ransom,” you will see that the word usually translated “redemption” primarily means “release by payment of ransom” in every lexicon.

The point of this is that Jesus’ death was not a payment to God to appease his wrath because it is repentance that averts wrath (e.g., 2 Pet. 3:9, but this idea is in every Bible story). Instead, it was a ransom in which Jesus offered himself in exchange for our freedom from “the rulers of this world.”

This is expressed in that wonderfully enigmatic (i.e., puzzling) verse that says:

… [the mystery] which none of the rulers of this world has known. For had they known it, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Cor. 2:8)

In the early days of the church, the parable of the strong man (Matt. 12:29) was understood to be about the atonement. Jesus allowed himself to be taken captive by the rulers of this world through death, but they did not realize that he was stronger than the devil. He bound the strong man, the devil, and he plundered his house, “taking captivity captive” (Eph. 4:8) and parading his captives in a triumphal resurrection (Col. 2:15).

When [the Lord] spoke of the devil as strong, not absolutely so, but as in comparison with us, the Lord showed Himself under every aspect and truly to be the strong man, saying that one can in no other way “spoil the goods of a strong man, if he do not first bind the strong man himself, and then he will spoil his house.” … Now we were the vessels and the house of this [strong man] when we were in a state of apostasy; for he put us to whatever use he pleased, and the unclean spirit dwelt within us. For [the strong man] was not strong, as opposed to [Jesus] who bound him, and spoiled his house; but as against those persons who were his tools, inasmuch as [the strong man] caused their thought to wander away from God: these did the Lord snatch from his grasp. (Irenaeus, c. AD 185, Against Heresies Bk. 3, ch. 8; excuse all the brackets that I thought we necessary to understand the wording.)

A friend who understands New Testament Greek explained to me that the “ransom” described in Ephesians 1:7 and other verses should be better understood as a rescue because the Greek word is used in the Greek Old Testament in stories about rescue.

The point is that Jesus’ death had nothing to do with God taking out his wrath against us on Jesus. God’s wrath is on the wicked, but though God is angry with the wicked every day (Ps. 7:11), he does not want the death of the wicked (nor the death of a substitute); he wants repentance (2 Pet. 3:9; Ezek. 18:21–23).

God’s wrath is not currently satisfied for all time. Salvation from his wrath is in the future, and it is obtained by living by the life of Jesus inside of us (Rom. 5:9-10; Gal. 2:20). If we do not “continue in the faith, grounded and settled therein” (Col. 1:23), we will still face that wrath (Eph. 5:5-7, note the “let no one deceive you”).

This does not mean that Jesus was not an offering to God. Instead, Jesus was an offering to God in a different way than we normally think.

Jesus Was an Offering for Sin

I promised to finish this post the first time I released it, but the end of the post was too long! I made it into a second post.