58. Only God Can Act as Substitute

Only God Can Act as Substitute This requirement of a substitute thus demands the deity of Jesus Christ. Otherwise a holy and righteous God, whose acts must eternally be the expression of that which ought to be, could never have permitted the tragedy of the cross—and tragedy it would indeed be—much less proclaimed it as the only way of salvation. Rob Christ of His deity, and you do the same thing with God. In meeting the fifth requirement, Christ is fully able to answer for and represent both God and man, if He is both God and man. That Christ actually is both God and Man is shown by His ability to render wholly acceptable service to God as, on the one hand, He represents Him in maintaining His Law to the last jot and tittle in qualifying before Him on behalf of the sinless; and on the other hand, as He represents man in receiving the penalty of the Law on behalf of the sinful, For no one ought to answer for man’s sins but man; and no one can answer for them but God. So if Christ is to be identified with God so vitally that He will demand that God’s Law shall be maintained to the limit and man’s sin judged and condemned, He must be God; and if He is also to be identified with man so vitally that He can let the Law say to Him all it has to say to the sinning race, and thus fully answer for sin on man’s behalf, He must be Man.

Reason therefore demands the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. God must be His Father, else He cannot be God, just as a woman must be His mother, else He cannot be Man. Indeed, if He was not virgin born, the records prove that He was nothing other than a Jewish bastard, born out of wedlock, and stained forever with the shame of His mother’s unchastity. But logic and honesty agree with Scripture that He was the virgin born Son of God. So when the Bible calls Him the Son of God and the only Begotten of the Father, and calls Him also the Son of Man and the Seed of the woman, we are compelled to believe it because there is nothing else on which either reason or faith can lay hold. When one is said to be begotten by another, that is nothing else but sonship and fatherhood. So Christ is the only Begotten of the Father by generation and birth, and He could thus be nothing other than the Son of God. Then as the son of Mary He is the “Seed of the woman,” a fact unique in all racial history, for no other person ever born on this earth was anything but the seed of the man. This phrase describing Christ’s birth is wholly meaningless unless He was virgin born. So also the words: “The Son of man.”