Christ on the Cross
On this Good Friday, Al Mohler discusses the meaning of the cross for the Christian. This discussion, here, is prompted by Anglican Dr. Jeffrey Philip Hywel John’s comments that the traditional understanding of the cross is “repulsive” and “insane.” Rejecting the apostolic preaching of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice, John argues:
The explanation I was given went something like this. God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.
As Mohler points out, this is pretty much the biblical understanding of the cross. However, John continues:
Well, I don’t know about you, but even at the age of ten I thought this explanation was pretty repulsive as well as nonsensical. What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we’d say they were a monster… the most basic truth about God’s nature is that He is Love, not wrath and punishment.
Mohler argues:
There are really only two options available for explaining what the Son of God was accomplishing on that cross. The first option is that taught by the church for centuries — that the meaning of the cross is objective, revealing God’s objective satisfaction in accepting the obedience of the Son, even unto death on a cross, as the payment for sin. This is what Dr. John now explicitly rejects.
The second option is to define the meaning of the cross in essentially subjective terms, arguing that Christ dies in order to effect a change in us, rather than in God. This is a foundational teaching of Protestant liberalism, but it creeps into far too many evangelical pulpits as well.
The ground of our salvation is the substitutionary atonement accomplished by Christ. Our response in faith to Christ is essential to our experience of salvation, but the work of our salvation us fully accomplished by Christ.
We are left with an unavoidable choice. We must stand with the Apostle Paul in seeing the cross as the place where God is shown to be both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Or, we must stand with Dr. John… in describing the New Testament’s teaching of the cross as “insane” and a form of “cosmic child abuse.” On this question there is no middle ground.