55. Tasting Death for Every Man

Tasting Death for Every Man

Also separation from God and sin go together. No sin, no separation from God. Yet here is the sinless One crying out in unspeakable agony: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Such a separation between God and the sinless Son of His love can never be accounted for, unless He actually did, in that awful hour of darkness, “taste death (separation from God) for every man” (Hebrews 2:9), as would be the case with one whose death was that of a substitute.

Mercy, therefore, not only was not injured, but it was wholly satisfied. For now the cry of mercy for the right to act righteously in forgiveness is fully answered and the way flung open to all who will receive it, for it has full access to the sinner on the basis of satisfied justice. The physical death of Christ, therefore, and the shedding of His blood, were after all but the visible signs and the outward symbol of that deeper death which He tasted in His holy Person for the race in the ruin of sin, and the physical heartbreak was but the shadow of a far more real heart-rupture which threatened to wrench the very Being of God when sin entered the universe, and which, in the cross, came to its utmost uncovering before an amazed and sin-scarred creation. The blood of Christ saves because the death behind it answers for all sin. The cross of Christ redeems because there is gathered into it that spiritually vital transaction on behalf of the sinner which opens the way before him to be separated from his sin. The death of Christ reconciles man to God because by it God-in-Christ thereby remains reconciled within Himself, through that substitutionary sacrifice which made forever impossible any antagonism between justice and mercy in forgiving the sinful. The death of Christ was a death behind the crucifixion of His physical body on the tree, and so it was more than a tragedy, it was a transaction by the Triune Godhead. It was such a transaction that the cross did the very thing His crucifiers tried to prevent. For they tried by the cross to be forever rid of His condemning life and teachings. But by that very death they both justified and climaxed His condemnation of them which His life and teachings had brought to such a fulness of revealing light. At this point we must check ourselves on the use of words as we speak of Christ’s death. He was not punished in the sinner’s stead. Punishment means personal demerit, and He had none. But chastisement may fall on the innocent for the benefit of the guilty. And so with divine accuracy the Word of God tells us that it was Christ’s chastisement, not punishment, which wrought out our peace (Isaiah 53:5). If the penalty falls on the sinner, it is punishment; but on the Substitute it is chastisement. It must be noted also that Christ did not become sin for us, but that He was “made (to be) sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21), for the holy Christ could only be made to stand for sin in our place, He could not become sin. This principle of substitution is of such wide application that the activities of life could not go on for a single day without its use. In law it is the “power of attorney.” In government it is the principle of “representation.” And it is at the very heart of business and family life. It is a principle that is not only in perfect harmony with law, but it inheres in the very nature of law. It operates daily in the realm of crime, for every time an innocent man steps up and voluntarily pays the fine of another who is guilty of law breaking, he is thus bearing the penalty of another man’s sin in his stead and as his substitute. And law, because of its very nature, is able to provide for, admit, and be fully satisfied with substitution. The only substitution the law cannot permit is that which would destroy the substitute.