131. Chapter 18 - The Death of Christ (Divine Purpose)

Chapter 18 - The Death of Christ (Divine Purpose) Matthew 26:28;Mark 10:45;Luke 24:46;John 19:30 According to the Scriptures

“Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). In this magnificent summary Paul reduces to nine words the central doctrine of the gospel: the atonement — the fact that Christ offered Himself as the propitiation for our sins by which we are reconciled to God. His summary is so sweeping that it includes the entire revelation of God: “according to the scriptures.” Isaiah 53:1-12 immediately comes into view, even as it was uppermost in the preaching of the first Christian messengers. Philip needed no other Scripture from which to begin his proclamation of “Jesus” to the Ethiopian eunuch. But other passages are also cited by the apostles in their preaching and by the New Testament writers. Ethelburt Stauffer points this Out: “In this way the pattern of the martyr psalm Psalms 21:1-13 runs through all the passion narratives like some brilliant trail. ‘Behooved it not the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into his glory?’ says Luke 24:26 as in confirmation….The ignominious raising on a cross is really a majestic elevation to glory (John 3:14; John 8:28; John 12:34). The sculptors of the early Church made these ideas their own, and like to represent the cross as a sign of triumph flying over the globe, or as brilliantly illumined by a martyr crown.” (New Testament Theology, English Translation, 1955, p. 130). The apostles and their inspired colleagues did not make “these ideas their own” by mere logical deduction, but they preached and wrote by divine inspiration. They, too, have given us “the scriptures.” Paul is very clear in his declarations that he is placing his own record of the revelation of the purpose of God in Christ alongside that of the Old Testament prophets as included in “according to the scriptures.”

According to the Critics The usual perversity of the modernist is seen in the persistent effort to remove all these passages from the Old Testament and the Gospels. They would invent the myth that Paul is the originator of the doctrine of the atonement. In December, 1949, The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis met at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. On the evening of December 29, a round table discussion was held on the topic: “The Jewish Messiah and the Pauline Christ” with Ralph Marcus (University of Chicago) as moderator, and Samuel S. Cohon (Hebrew Union College), Morton S. Enslin (Crozier Theological Seminary), and Paul Schubert (Yale University) as the other members of the panel. Surprisingly enough it was Samuel S. Cohon who confronted the other three with a denial of their contention that the Old Testament predicts merely a political messiah. In spite of his extreme radicalism Cohon seems to have been the last representative of pietism in Reform Judaism. He insisted that the Old Testament predicted that the Messiah would also offer spiritual redemption. The labored efforts of the speakers to strip the atonement from the Gospel narratives and to derive it from Paul’s writings alone, brought forth a dramatic challenge at the close from a man of faith in the audience. His final question was directed at M. S. Enslin: “I am going to pin you down with one quotation: ‘For the Son of man also came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many’” (Mark 10:45). By provoking a laugh from the unbelieving crowd, Enslin attempted to escape the dilemma: “All right. You have me pinned.” The moderator then closed the discussion.

Modern Admissions In recent years there has been a considerable movement among some radical scholars toward admission of both the necessity and the fact of the atonement. The current heilsgeshichte (“Sacred History”!) after the fashion of Neo-orthodoxy attempts to divorce ideas from facts and to discuss the ideas, while denying the historical verity of the facts. Even while admitting that such passages as Mark 10:45 and Luke 22:32; Luke 23:34, the accounts of the Lord’s Supper in the Synoptics, and John’s record of the instructions in the upper room, all declare that “Jesus goes to his death ‘for many,’” Stauffer declares that these ideas are “built into the idea of the passover” by the New Testament writers. On the contrary we find the clear declarations of the Scripture that God gave the Passover lamb as the type to prepare the hearts of the worshippers for the anti-type, the final sacrifice of His own Son. (New Testament Theology, English Translation, 1955, p. 131). The Radical View

Miller Burrows of Yale gives the typical modernistic interpretation of the purpose of the death of Christ: “the Cross by demonstrating Christ’s love, in which is seen the love of God himself, breaks down the sinner’s hostility and evokes his corresponding love. It does this, however, only because of the interpretation which faith puts upon it: ‘the love of Christ constraineth us because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died, and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again’ (2 Corinthians 5:14.). Here we have the heart of the Pauline doctrine of the atonement and the explanation of Paul’s frequent references to Christ’s dying for or on account of sin, and for or on behalf of us” (An Outline of Biblical Theology, 1946, p. 224). Again Burrows declares: “The idea of constraining love is the most specific and satisfying explanation offered. From this point of view the death of Jesus was a ‘price’ or ‘ransom’ for others, not because on the basis of retribution it provided a fund of merit for sinners to draw on, nor because it satisfied the demands of retributive justice, but because, being the result of the sins of others, it revealed the enormity of sin and at the same time showed how far God would go to reconcile sinners to himself” (An Outline of Biblical Theology, 1946, pp. 226, 227). Burrows advances the idea that the death of Christ for our sins is not the ultimate emphasis in John’ Gospel: “In John the emphasis is on the incarnation rather than the cross as the means of salvation. As the incarnation is for John not an emptying but a manifestation of glory and life, so Christ’s death is a voluntary throwing off of the partial and temporary limitations of his life in the flesh in order to he lifted up and glorified and to be where he was before (John 3:14.; John 8:28; John 12:23; John 17:5). At the same time this deliberate laying down of his life is regarded as the greatest possible demonstration of love (John 10:15; John 15:13; 1 John 3:16; 1 John 4:9, 1 John 4:19)” (An Outline of Biblical Theology, 1946, p. 225). The Deity of Christ This reminds one of the sharp exchange between two German theologians. A radical scholar had ridiculed the idea that Jesus was divine in any unique sense and had down-graded His whole influence on history. He said that it was only the death of Christ as a martyr and under such horrible circumstances which had given Him His place in history. A conservative scholar responded: “It was not the death of Christ; it was the death of Christ.” Both sublime elements of the gospel are central in the proclamation that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” The incarnation and the atonement are inseparable. All four of the Gospel writers set forth that both the deity of Christ and the fact He died for our sins are the foundation of our faith and our salvation: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Reconciliation

Alan Richardson of the University of Nottingham attempts to set aside the use of “atonement” and “propitiation,” but he does leave an actual work of reconciliation in the death of Christ. “Paul stresses the fact that it is the actual death of Christ which effects the reconciliation (Romans 5:6-10; Ephesians 2:13; Colossians 1:20); and he emphatically stresses that Christ’s death is an act of God on man’s behalf and is in no sense a human act of propitiation offered by man to God. God ‘reconciled us to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5:18); the rebels were obviously in no position to effect the reconciliation….It is God alone, God in Christ, who makes reconciliation….It does not say that God needs to be reconciled to man; St. Paul speaks only of man’s having to be reconciled to God. What it does positively affirm is that God had reconciled rebellious man, who was unable by anything that he could do to establish ‘peace’ or a right relationship with God” (An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (1958), pp. 216, 217).

Significant Admissions

Emil Brunner represents a partial return of radical theologians to the admission that the death of Christ is necessary as an atonement of man’s sin. He is not afraid to speak of the wrath of God. He boldly charges that the tendency to deny there is such a Person as God and to make God merely an idea vaguely identified with pantheism, is the basis for the radical abandonment of the atonement. “The rejection of the doctrine of the wrath of God — as ‘anthropopathic’ — is the beginning of the Pantheistic disintegration of the Christian idea of God. In the whole of the Scripture, in each of its parts, and in all the classic forms of Christian theology and of the Christian message, the full conception of the personality of God carries with it, indubitably, the recognition of the divine wrath” (The Mediator, English translation, 1934, pp. 445, 446). “The more seriously guilt is regarded, the more it is realized that ‘something must happen,’ just because forgiveness is not something which can in any way be taken absolutely for granted. The more real guilt is to us, the more real also is the gulf between us and God, the more real is the wrath of God, and the inviolable character of the law of penalty; the more real also the obstacle between God and man becomes, the more necessary becomes the particular transaction, by means of which the obstacle in all its reality, is removed” (The Mediator, English translation, 1934, p. 451).

Brunner speculates that we might have achieved atonement if our repentance were perfect, but this is like speculating that if man had never sinned, then no atonement would have been necessary. “If we could repent as we should no atonement would be needed, for then repentance would be atonement. Then the righteousness of God would have been satisfied. But this is precisely what we cannot do. We can only do this where we can ‘be righteous’ for to be ‘righteous’ and to repent mean the same thing. The point or ‘place’ at which this happens is Christ. We are baptized into His death. We are ‘buried’ with Him into His death. This is not sacramentarian mysticism but simple faith in the Word. We must let God tell us in the death of Christ what our position is. The fact that we take this Word from Him is itself faith, repentance, the state of being ‘buried’ and ‘dying’ with Him….The Atonement means our redemption and our life, as well as our humiliation and our death. Death and resurrection, judgment and liberation constitute the content of the word of reconciliation” (The Mediator, English translation, 1934, pp. 534, 535). The Opposing Views The critical question is: was the death of Christ (1) merely God’s great appeal to the human heart by His demonstration of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the sublime nature of God’s love? His method of bringing man to repentance? or (2) was it primarily connected with the forgiveness of sins, not merely winning man by its revelation of God’s desire to forgive sin, but upholding God’s holiness by expressing his condemnation of sin and by providing means of man’s redemption? The Social Aspect The former theory is Socinian in character. It emphasizes the profound truth that the death of Christ shows the love of God to the world and His willingness to forgive sin, and that this representation of His death is supremely appealing to the human heart. But when this theory asserts that this exhausts the function of the death of Christ, that it was only representative in function, to show that God is love; and that, out of pure goodness without any special work at all God forgives the sins of the penitent, it opens itself to the following objections: In the first place, the objection is “at once theological and ethical that it annihilates the moral order of the world altogether. God is conceived as an individual who deals with other individuals, each by himself, in a way of good nature and consideration; there is no principle in the forgiveness which he dispenses; no conception of a moral organism, the constitution of which must not be arbitrarily dissolved; of a moral system, the integrity of which must be maintained by and through all God’s dealings with men.” (James Denny, Studies in Theology, p. 129). Here modern theology seems to turn back on itself. It has a most splendid emphasis, in some ways, upon social service; it insists upon the wide social aspects of sin, but when it comes to forgiveness, the vision is suddenly narrowly contracted to the individual, and it is insisted that forgiveness is entirely individual in its aspect. The representation of God as a King or Judge forgiving, emphasizes in a powerful way the social aspects of both sin and forgiveness. While forgiveness is certainly first of all personal and individual in character, as is sin, yet it is also social; and if God forgives a man upon mere repentance alone, then He treats sin as if it were unreal; He absolutely disregards the moral elements, basic both in His own nature and ours. He disregards the social effects of such action, making in reality each man a law of forgiveness unto himself, and thus completely overthrows the entire moral order of the universe.

Christ’s Death: Vital Meaning In the second place, it robs Christ of any essential place in the work of redemption. The parable of the prodigal son is considered a complete representation of the gospel. God stands ready to receive the sinner without any propitiation, and Christ’s death is only necessary to reveal further this willingness. Many are at great pains to point out that sinners repented and were forgiven during the lifetime of Christ, and, since this was before His death and is not mentioned in connection therewith, therefore His death has no direct connection with the forgiveness of sins (C. R. Brown, The Main Points, p. 38).

If this is so, then His death is absolutely meaningless. It becomes a mere show, as Dale points out in the following illustration: “To take an illustration which comes a little closer to the subject at hand. If my brother made his way into a burning house to save my child from the flames and were himself to perish in his heroic exertions, his fate would be a wonderful proof of his love for me and mine, but if there were no child in the house, and if he entered it with no other object than to show his love for me the explanation would be absolutely unintelligible. The statement that Christ died for no other purpose than to reveal His love to mankind is to me equally unintelligible” (Dale, Atonement p. 38). Tymms, (Christian Idea of the Atonement p. 181) points out certain defects in this illustration, but, after all, if Christ’s death were merely to prove the Father’s love for us, and men are fully forgiven without any reference to His death, then both its necessity and purpose remain meaningless.

Under such an interpretation the death of Christ loses its attracting power. It is no longer foreseen as inevitable because of its purpose, nor considered voluntary as is asserted in the Gospels. It is merely the triumph of sinful men, inevitable because of a conjunction of events. His death has then no more significance than a mere martyrdom for the truth. Gethsemane’s agony is either a fear of physical suffering, an anomaly when we call the roll of Christian martyrs or it is a despairing grief over His premature death and the failure of His plans, which is tantamount to a denial of all His prophecies concerning His death and resurrection, the coming of His kingdom, and all His assertions that His death was voluntary. The same is true of Calvary if it be robbed of the wealth of significance with which it is clothed by the Gospel writers in that Jesus bore our sins, and, while guiltless Himself, underwent the condemnation of our sins.

Under such a view of Christ’s death, “He proclaims forgiveness, but He does not procure it; He is not the gospel, but only its supreme minister….If our religion is to come from the New Testament, Christ must have a place in it that no other can share. Not apart from Him, but in Him, the apostles declare with one voice, in Him we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of our trespasses….God’s forgiveness does not come to us independent of Christ, past Him, over His head, so that we cannot count Him as one of those who best knew and most fully proclaimed an unimaginable mercy, which would have been all that it is even had He never lived; it comes only in Him and through His death for our sins” (Denny, Studies in Theology, p. 129). The Gospel Impotent

Lastly, this theory robs the gospel of its power. The death of Christ is deprived of its deeper and more appealing significance. As Denny says, men may still go fishing with such a message, but the barb has been broken off the hook, and their efforts will be largely fruitless. Moreover, it weakens the power of the gospel because it is too lenient toward sin; it treats sin as if it were unreal. No room is left for a doctrine of propitiation; sin is forgiven just as if it had never occurred, on no other basis than mere repentance, which cannot even suggest reparation for God’s broken law. Tymms begs the question when he says that the “question is not ‘What does sin deserve?’ but, ‘Is God forced by His own righteous nature always to deal with us after our sins, and to reward us according to our iniquities?’” (Tymms, Christian Idea of the Atonement, p. 201). All admit that God has not dealt with us in a quantitative way after our sins, else had not Christ come and died, but the question is: Could God absolutely disregard sin and the moral order of the universe? The New Testament asserts most positively that He could not. Was Christ’s death necessary because of God’s righteous nature before right relations could he established between man and God? That is the question.

Tymms’ theory strikes at the finality of the gospel itself. If the premise “God is love” warrants the conclusion that all men are forgiven as man to man on the basis of repentance alone, then not only is the death of Christ meaningless and unnecessary, but the gospel itself is robbed of its finality; there is no longer any necessity for accepting the gospel message at all. The inherent weakness of this theory has been admitted by some of its greatest advocates. Bushnell says: “If the question arises, ‘How are we to use such a history (as that of the cross) so as to be reconciled by it, we hardly know how to begin. How shall we come unto God by the help of this martyrdom? How shall we turn it or turn ourselves under it, so as to be justified and set at peace with God?’” (Horace Bushnell, Atonement, p. 460). His only answer is: “Plainly there is a want here, and this want is met by giving a thought-form to the facts which is not in the facts themselves” (Horace Bushnell, Atonement, p. 463). In other words, the gospel without a real doctrine of the atonement is so woefully weak that the only hope is for the preacher to put into the facts a thought-form that they do not contain, and use “the altar terms” just as though he believed them. A more complete admission of the abject failure of this theory to meet either the demands of the New Testament or the needs of man would be difficult to frame.

Jesus’ Declarations

Even those who regard the New Testament as merely a human record of the Christian consciousness of early centuries, not to speak of those who believe in the finality of the gospel and the divine inspiration of its writers, must admit the importance of its specific statements concerning this great central doctrine of the gospel it proclaims. What did Jesus think of His death? Was it merely forced upon Him by a combination of circumstances or was it premeditated, foreseen, voluntary? Was it merely a demonstration of God’s love, or was it a bearing of the sins of the world? Was it the making plain of a means of salvation already existent or the procuring of salvation for those who would accept?

Christ Himself represented: (1) That His death was neither the incidental nor the inevitable consequence of His collision with the passions and prejudices of the Jewish people (John 10:17, John 10:18). (2) That laying down His life was a voluntary act (John 6:51; Matthew 20:28). (3) That to lay down His life was one of the ends for which He came into the world (John 12:27; Matthew 20:28). (4) That His death is immediately related to the deliverance from condemnation of those that believe on Him, to the remission of sins, and to the establishment of His sovereignty over the human race (John 6:51; Matthew 26:28; John 12:31, John 12:32). (5) He accepted the testimony of John the Baptist that He was the Lamb of God “that taketh away the sins of the world,” and He associated His death with the sacrifice of the Passover lamb (John 1:29; Matthew 26:28). (6) He described His death as being for others, and more specifically He said that He gave His life a ransom for others (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45; John 6:51).

Declarations of New Testament Writers

These statements might be accompanied by innumerable quotations from the New Testament, showing that the writers had this same conception: that Christ bore our sins, and that there is a direct relation between the forgiveness of sins and the death of Christ. “The blood of Jesus, his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:6, Ephesians 1:7). “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood” (Revelation 1:5, Revelation 1:6). “Christ was offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28). “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). Again the purpose of His coming is thus described: “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). Such clear and positive statements as these might be multiplied almost without number, for this doctrine permeates the entire gospel. Nor can such sayings as that Christ gave His life “as a ransom for many” be discredited by speculations as to its minute details that would reduce it to an absurdity, for it has long been an established canon of exegesis that the central thought of a parabolic saying is its message, and that a forced interpretation of its details always ends in absurdity. Moreover Dale declares that this doctrine of atonement “penetrates the whole substance of the apostles’ theological and ethical teaching, and is the very root of their religious life. If, instead of selecting passages in which it is categorically affirmed that Christ died for us, died that we might have the remission of sins, died as a propitiation for sin, we selected those that would lose all their significance if this truth were rejected, it would be necessary to quote a large part of the New Testament” (Dale, Atonement, p. 28).

Propitiation

It is evident from the testimony of the New Testament, then, first, that the death of Christ was not merely to represent God’s love to the world, but that it had a direct relation to the forgiveness of sins. If the parable of the prodigal son is a complete representation of the gospel, then it is remarkable, as Denny suggests, that Christ did not go back to heaven as soon as He had proclaimed it, or did not live to a ripe old age repeating it over and over in different forms. That “God is love” all are agreed. But all are not agreed in interpreting “love” in such a shallow and sentimental manner as to affirm that, therefore, he must deny His own righteousness in His dealings with sinful man. Denny declares that those who deny that Christ died for our sins oppose propitiation to love. “In opposing love and propitiation to each other they run directly counter to the whole teaching of the New Testament….God is love, say they, and therefore, He dispenses with propitiation; God is love, say the apostles, for He provides a propitiation” (Denny, Studies in Theology, p. 133). Again he says: “In the New Testament the propitiation is the content of love….That ‘God is love’ is in the New Testament a conclusion from the fact that He has provided in Christ and in His death a propitiation for our sins. The whole proof, the whole meaning, contents, substance and spirit of that expression are contained in propitiation and in nothing else” (James Denny, Studies in Theology, p. 131). Says Forsyth: “Is it possible to have any adequate sense of the actual love of God in Christ without an equally real sense of His actual condemnation of sin? Its condemnation in act, note, not in mere hatred, and its condemnation, not in our experience, but in Christ’s! ‘God is love’ has in the New Testament no meaning apart from the equally prominent idea of righteousness of God as author and guardian of the moral, holy law” (Forsyth, Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, p. 76).

Christ’s Experience and Ours In the second place, it is evident that the New Testament does not proclaim any quantitative or equivalent doctrine of Christ’s sufferings, but affirms that forgiveness is by the grace of God. It does not proclaim that forgiveness is actually secured by the death of Christ without any action on our part, but by the union of the two — Christ’s experience and ours. “The two polar experiences, joined in one spiritual and organic act of mystical union, form a complete type of Christian faith. The repentance is ours alone; the penalty is not, the judgment is not. The final judgment or curse of sin did fall on Christ, the penitential did not. The sting of guilt was never His, the cry on the cross was no wail of conscience. But the awful atmosphere of guilt was His. He entered it and died of it’ Our chastisement was upon Him, but God never chastised Him. The penalty was His, the repentance ours. His expiation does not dispense with ours, but evokes and enables.” Thus this doctrine is not open to the criticism that it renders faith and repentance unnecessary, for the two experiences, Christ’s and ours, are supplementary and not mutually exclusive. Christ’s death makes it possible for God to fulfill His eternal desire to forgive man and at the same time be true to His own righteous nature and maintain the moral order of the universe. It reveals to man not only God’s love, but also His hatred of sin, and impels man to accept God’s gracious offer to make Christ’s death, not the equivalent of the penalty of our sin, but to accept it as reparation for broken law, and impels him to accept this means of forgiveness through faith, repentance, and obedience.

God’s Grace This doctrine, then, is no denial of God’s grace, for “it is persistently overlooked that it is an act of grace and not of debt on God’s part to accept even the satisfaction and atonement for Christ for human forgiveness” (Forsyth, Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, p. 84). Christ’s death does not mean a placation of God, for God was already desirous of forgiving sin, but because He loved holiness at least as much as He loved man, it was necessary for him to maintain His own moral nature and the moral order of the universe while forgiving man. It is necessary to maintain, then, that the atonement is both penal and substitutionary, in spite of the fact that these terms have been abused. Forsyth says: “Atonement is substitutionary, else it is none. The suffering of Christ was penal to Christ’s personality, to His consciousness, but not to His conscience. It was not penitential. There was no self-accusation in it. He never felt God was punishing Him, though it was penalty, sin’s nemesis, that He bore. It was the consequence attached by God to sin — sin’s penalty” (Forsyth, Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, p. 85). Nor were the apostles involved in the artificial difficulty that sin cannot be both forgiven and punished. For they do not assert any quantitative or equivalent doctrine of Christ’s suffering, and they make it very plain that the union of both Christ’s experience and ours is necessary’ for forgiveness. “Of course, an expiatory amount of penalty purges the offense, and the debt being paid the culprit is beholden to no grace for his open door. But if we say that God, who had the right to destroy each sinner, offers pardon to those who really own in the cross the kind (not the amount) of penalty which their sin deserved, then the contradiction vanishes. Grace is still sovereign, free, and unbought. It is grace in God to accept an atonement which is not an equivalent, but a practical, adequate and superhuman acknowledgment in man of the awful debt foregone” (Forsyth, Atonement in Modern Religious Thought) p. 72). In the death of Christ, then, we see the supreme revelation of God’s hatred of sin, His love of man, and His sovereign grace. Christ’s death was a bearing of our sins and procured the forgiveness of sins for those who will accept God’s gracious offer.

Substitution The Epistle to the Hebrews offers the most profound discussion of the atonement. In this letter Paul gives a detailed contrast of the high priest in the Old Testament and of the perfect High Priest, Jesus; of the sacrifices of animals under the law and of the final and perfect sacrifice as Jesus gave Himself to die for our sins; of the tabernacle with its Holy Place and Holy of Holies and of the church and the final blessedness of heaven. The citations from the Old Testament set forth that death was the penalty for man’s sin; that the continual sacrifices were to remind the worshipper of his sin and of the required penalty; that the innocent animal being sacrificed was dying the death which was the just punishment of the man who had sinned against God. Inherent in the entire system of sacrifice is the idea of substitution. With powerful repetition the New Testament writers affirm that Christ “bare our sins in his body upon the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); that He died for us (John 10:17-19); that He gave “his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45); that Christ also was “once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28); and “when he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12).

Hebrews sets forth the basic proposition that “apart from shedding of blood there is no remission (Hebrews 9:22). The Scripture does not offer any explicit explanation as to why the shedding of blood is required. Some suggest the reason is given in Leviticus 17:11 : “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.” This passage shows how appropriate it is that the shedding of blood should be required, but the necessity of sacrifice — the reason why God did require it — is left a secret in the mind of God. Hebrews affirms that the shedding of blood was necessary for remission of sins, but the author stops at that proposition and does not declare why this is true, other than it is God’s will; it is His divine plan. A second elemental proposition is most emphatically stated: “For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Paul proves this proposition by the fact of the continued repetition of these sacrifices and by the necessity for the perfect sacrifice which Christ offered. But Paul does not explain why the blood of animals could not take away man’s sins. Again, we may reflect that man does not own the animals; they belong to God. Man does not even own his very life. This is the sort of reason which Christ gives for the stern prohibition against swearing (Matthew 5:33-37). We may reflect upon the fact that animals do not have spiritual life and hence make an imperfect sacrifice. But these are not given as reasons in the Scripture. We are not told why the blood of animals cannot take away sin. Again the mystery lies hidden in the mind of God. Someone has said: “Anything we can define, we feel superior to; anything we cannot define, we resent.” But this is the pattern of worldly wisdom. The simplicity of Christian faith does not expect complete understanding of God and His purposes and program.

It is not surprising, then, that the sublime mystery should be the necessity of the death of God’s Son for the sins of man. The fact of this necessity and of the actual offering of the perfect sacrifice of the One who was without sin is affirmed with solemn repetition. We view with awe and humility the death of Christ on the cross for our sins. We are moved by the infinite love of God and are drawn to Christ as we behold Him lifted up to death on the cross, lifted up to life from the tomb, and lifted up to heaven at His ascension. We believe with all the intensity of the human heart the declarations of Christ and the apostles that He bore our sins on the cross, that He died for us, that by His death we may gain forgiveness of our sins. But we do not understand why this was necessary, except that this is God’s will. Here, as elsewhere, we walk by faith and not by sight. But as we walk the Christian way of life, we thank God for the infinite glory and majesty of Jesus our divine Lord and Master dying on the cross for our sins.

“Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand... My sinful self my only shame, My glory all the cross.”