60. Was Christ's Life Substitutionary?

Was Christ’s Life Substitutionary? At this point it must be noted that there is a conception which makes Christ’s life as well as His death substitutionary. The theory is that His perfect life, lived in substitution for our sinful lives, earned for us the reward of eternal life. But Scripture seems clearly to teach that His work of substitution was wholly confined to what He did on the cross, and that His life before men was to set forth His perfect fitness to act as an acceptable Substitute, thus providing such a basis for perfect faith in His work as would make doubt of its sufficiency forever impossible. For in neither Old Testament ceremonial pictures nor in New Testament doctrine does the idea of a substitutionary life seem to be indicated. The first picture of substitution is in the clothing of Adam and Eve. So by the law of the first occurrence of a given doctrine, this should give us a clue to the whole doctrine. In this picture it was clearly the blood, and therefore the death of the animals only, that furnished the skins which made possible the typical clothing of the sinning Pair. This clothing of them by God is the type of the God-given righteousness in Christ, by which alone we can stand in His presence unashamed and unafraid. The lives of these animals do not enter into this picture at all, but their death, by which alone they furnished the covering. So also did Christ accomplish the whole work of substitution by His death on the cross, with His life filling a different role in the transaction of salvation. This same thing was true in the sacrifice of the lamb by Abel. The life of the lamb had no substitutionary value before God, for it was clearly the death alone which made Abel’s offering acceptable. The same was true of the Passover lamb, from its first sacrifice in Egypt on. And while the life and character of the lamb enter into the picture here, it was wholly on the ground that it must first qualify as a type to picture the life and character of Christ, the coming Lamb of God, before it could be accepted to act as a typical substitute. It must be without blemish up to the very moment of sacrifice, or it could not qualify to be acceptable as a type of Christ. In other words, through its whole life it is watched for any defeat or flaw that would prevent its acceptance as a picture of Christ’s life, before its work as a substitute could even begin. Only thus could it come to pass that “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).

These types and all others relating to substitution seem to have but one voice for us. The Son of God, though of course eternally qualified in Himself to be our Substitute, was yet not historically and objectively qualified in the eyes of the universe until, having stood up under every phase of the test under which man went down, He was thus shown before every intelligence, under the inflexible scrutiny of the holy eye of God, to be wholly without blemish, and therefore fully qualified, as the spotless Lamb of God, to do His work on the cross as our Substitute. The testing of Christ’s life was of course not an attempt to break Him down, but rather a proof to the whole universe that He could not be broken down, as man was, thus settling every question that doubt could ever raise, and establishing our confidence forever in the superabounding sufficiency of His work for us. So it seems obvious that while He was engaged in the process of showing historically that He was qualified to be an acceptable Substitute, He could hardly have been doing the work of the Substitute before this proof was completed with His arrival in perfect fitness at the cross.

Scripture clearly bases everything Christ did to accomplish our complete salvation, including the gift of eternal life, on the shedding of His blood alone. For it is His own resurrection life that He gives us—nay, rather, that He actually is in Himself in us, which is our eternal life, and the shedding of His blood had to precede His resurrection. So He does not earn eternal life for us by a substitutionary life, but presents it to us on the basis of His substitutionary death (Romans 6:23).