Ep. 113 | The Atonement of Christ
Speaker: Chicho Martin
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Summary
Chicho Martin shares the Biblical overview for the doctrine of the atonement of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.
Scripture Explored: Romans 3:21-26, Romans 3:10, Exodus 25:20-22, Exodus 24:3-8, Zechariah 9:9-11, Jeremiah 31:31-34, Luke 22:37, Isaiah 53, Leviticus 10:17, Galatians 2:20, Romans 6:23
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Music created by Chad Hoffman
Artwork created by Anthony Kuenzi
Speaker’s Bio
Chicho is a Christ-follower residing in Oregon's Willamette Valley. He's a family man who loves apologetics and books about theology/philosophy. His passion is sharing the truth of God's Word, and witnessing to atheists in particular. In small moments of free time, he enjoys playing his bass guitar or some video games.
Transcript
Intro:
Hey there, welcome to Pickled Parables. This podcast is presented by Parable Ministries as a Bible teaching resource. Thank you for joining us. Pickled Parables is a podcast about taking in and living out the Bible. Here we will study, contemplate, and testify to the Bible's incredible teachings and how it leads us to live better lives. To stay up to date with all things parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. We hope today's message finds you well.
Message:
Hello, and thank you for listening to Pickled Parables.
My name's Chich, and today's lesson is gonna be on the atonement of Christ.
What does it mean when Christians say that Jesus died for us, or that Jesus was an atonement for our sins?
But before we deep dive, let's open in a word of prayer.
Father God, thank you for this day.
Thank you for our listeners.
I pray for the ministry of Pickled Parables.
I pray for our brothers and sisters around the world.
Lord, that we would remain in your will, and we would accomplish great things for the gospel.
Bless this day.
Open our ears and our hearts to receive your word.
And may we be a light to our neighbors.
In Christ's name, Amen.
Today's lesson is going to be in Romans 3, 21-26.
But before I read that passage, let me set this stage.
Just a little earlier in this same chapter, Paul lays out our condition that there is no one righteous.
Starting in verse 10, he says, As it is written, There is no one righteous, not even one.
There is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away, they have together become worthless.
There is no one who does good, not even one.
Their throats are open graves, their tongues practice deceit.
The poison of vipers is on their lips, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood.
Ruin and misery mark their ways, in the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
Now we know the gospel of Christ is good news, but for context good news doesn't make much sense unless our situation is not good.
And so the Christian truth is that everybody has sinned.
We fall short of the glory of God.
God's wrath is justified against us.
But that's not the end of the story.
The good news is that Jesus came to save us from our sins.
And so now Paul shifts gears, delivering us to bad news, pairing that up with the good news.
Starting in verse 21, Paul says, But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify.
This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe.
There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood, to be received by faith.
He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.
He did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
But what exactly is this atonement?
How did Jesus' death cleanse us from our sin and restore our relationship with God?
To answer this, we need to understand what atonement means.
And there are a couple of ways in which the word is understood.
Looking at the etymology of the word, atonement can be broken down as follows, at-one-ment, which means having a state of harmony or oneness with God.
Now, it's not a matter of identity, as if we are the same as God.
That would be heresy.
But rather, it is focusing on the relational part, where Christ says that he and the Father are one, and that he desires his followers to be one with him just as he is with the Father.
Atonement refers to the unity that we have with God.
When we read God's word, we can see that Christ brought about atonement.
He brought this at-one-ment to pass.
But now we need to look at atonement in a more narrow sense that the writers of Scripture used.
The word atonement in Scripture means to cleanse of sin or to expiate sin, to purify or to annul guilt.
In Hebrew, the word for atonement is kippur, or k-p-r.
And you probably recognize this word as it's found in the name of the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.
This holiday was intended to purify the nation of Israel.
Jews would seek expiation, cleansing from sin, and thereby be in good standing with God.
The Yom Kippur animal sacrifices involved the Levitical priest entering the Holy of Holies with blood from the slain animal to sprinkle on the mercy seat, which was the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, which held the law, the Ten Commandments.
The priest did this as instructed by God to atone for the sins of Israel.
Leviticus 16.
The lid of the Ark is a cognate of kippur called a caporet.
And I'm not a Hebrew linguist, so I apologize if I'm mispronouncing these things.
The Greek equivalent in the subduigent and the New Testament is helas kastai, where we get the word helasterion, which is the Greek word that is used in the subduigent to designate the mercy seat cover of the Ark of the Covenant.
It's interesting to note that Paul says God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood in Romans 3.25.
So in the Greek, Paul is really saying God presented Christ as the mercy seat through the shedding of his blood.
In the Book of Exodus, we read God's instruction for how the mercy seat relates to the Ark of the Covenant.
Exodus 25 20-22 says, The faces of the cherubim should be toward the mercy seat.
Set the mercy seat on top of the Ark and put the testimony that I will give you into the Ark.
I will meet with you there above the mercy seat between the two cherubim that are over the Ark of the Testimony.
I will speak with you from there about all that I command you regarding the Israelites.
If you want to hear from God, meet him at the mercy seat.
It is in Jesus that we can know the Father.
Christ is the giver of the sacrifice for the cleansing of our sin.
Christ is the sacrifice that cleanses us.
And it is Christ where we are cleansed.
It is Christ's atonement, kippur, that brings about the atonement, our reconciliation to God.
And now to gain a deeper appreciation of what the Lord did for us, I want to look at the Old Testament sacrificial system and also look at Jesus' own attitude about his death and how it relates to God's covenant.
So, what was involved in the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament?
Levitical priests made atonement on behalf of the people of Israel via animal sacrifice.
If you read through Leviticus, early on you will see multiple statutes concerning how the people and priests are to carry out various sacrificial offerings.
The guilty party or the offerer brings the animal himself, presses his hand upon the head of the animal, slaughters it himself, and then the priest takes the blood and sprinkles it on the altar, either on all sides of the altar or sprinkled seven times before the veil of the sanctuary, and sometimes on the horns of the altar and at the base of the altar.
The offerer is instructed to lay his hand on the head of the animal and then kill.
Some scholars think that the gesture of pressing one's hand on the animal's head is, plausibly, meant to indicate the identification of the offerer with the animal, so that the animal's fate symbolizes his own.
In Leviticus 1-4, it says, You are to lay your hand on the head of the offering, and it will be accepted on your behalf to make atonement for you.
The animal dies in the place of the offerer as a substitution.
It could also be said that the animal receives the death penalty because of the sin transferred to it by the original sin-bearer from the laying on of hands.
In Leviticus 17-11, God says, The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for as life it is the blood that makes atonement.
And we know from Romans 6 that the wages of sin is death.
God can't turn a blind eye to sin.
It has to be dealt with, and death is the punishment.
However, through God's grace, a provision has been made for us to be cleansed.
God didn't just leave us to simply suffer in our sin.
With that in mind, let's turn to Jesus' words at the Last Supper where he eats the Passover meal with the 12 disciples.
In Mark 14, verses 20-24 we read, While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take it, this is my body.
Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many.
Jesus' expression, this is my blood of the covenant, harks back to Moses' words at the inauguration of the Old Covenant in Exodus 24, verses 5 through 8.
This is where God initiates his covenant with the people of Israel.
Beginning in verse 3, it says, When Moses went and told the people of the Lord's words and laws, they responded with one voice, Everything the Lord has said we will do.
Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said, He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel.
Then Moses sent out young Israelite men, and they offered burq offerings and sacrificed bowls as fellowship offerings to the Lord.
Moses took half the blood and set it in basins, the other half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.
He then took the covenant scroll and read it aloud to the people.
They responded, We will do and obey everything the Lord has commanded.
Moses took the blood, sprinkled it on the people, and said, This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.
This phrase, the blood of the covenant, also appears in Zechariah 9, 9-11.
Rejoice greatly, daughter zion, shout, daughter Jerusalem.
See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war horses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from the sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.
Lastly, Jesus understood that he was inaugurating by his death the new covenant prophesied by the prophet Jeremiah 31, 31-34.
The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt.
This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord.
I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God and they will be my people, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.
Jesus' selection of the Passover festival as the time of the climax of his ministry on earth was no accident.
Just as the Passover lamb's blood was smeared above the doorposts of Jewish homes to save the Jewish people from God's judgment in Egypt, so Jesus' blood, soon to be poured out for many, would bring salvation.
Jesus intended to bring about a covenant that would be greater than the covenant his people had known.
A new chapter in human history was unfolding.
His death would be a substitutionary death on our behalf.
Jesus saw his death as really cleansing us of our guilt before God, and it would bring peace and freedom from sin.
Jesus considered himself to be the suffering servant from Isaiah.
In Luke 22:37, Jesus says on the night of his arrest, It is written, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me.
Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.
Allow me to read chapter 53 of Isaiah.
Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain, like one from whom people hide their faces.
He was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely, he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.
He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away, yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living.
For the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and to cause him to suffer.
And though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.
By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore, I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
There are four points I would like to touch on.
Number one, the suffering servant has no sin.
He is blameless, like a spotless lamb, he is pure.
Number two, the Lord's servant bears the guilt of others.
He does not carry any guilt of his own, but rather carries the burden of others.
Number three, he undergoes brutal punishment and suffering, and it is God's will that this is so.
Number four, is that the suffering servant does all this to intercede on our behalf.
He stands in our place, as our substitute.
Just as a lamb would be brought to die in the place of a sinful person bringing their sacrifice, so Jesus himself bled in our place.
He poured out his own blood instead of us being put to death.
Interestingly, the Levitical priests could, in a sense, bear the sins of the people and make atonement for them.
Leviticus 10:17 says that you may bear the iniquity of the congregation to make atonement for them before the Lord.
But the priests, unlike the suffering servant, Isaiah, do not do so by vicarious suffering.
The priests themselves don't suffer in the place of the people.
They offer up something other than themselves, as the object of punishment and suffering, such as a ransom payment or the sacrifice of a dove or a lamb, not themselves.
This suffering servant is clearly going farther than any priest had ever gone, because we see that he is wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.
Upon him was the punishment that made us whole.
The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all, stricken for the transgression of his people.
The closest we ever get to seeing anyone else bear the punishment of other sins is the prophet Ezekiel.
In the fourth chapter, God symbolically lays the punishment of the nation of Israel upon him, but again, it's just symbolic.
But the suffering servant in Isaiah, he goes through real punishment and suffering.
He bears substitutionally the guilt of other persons.
He suffers what theologians call the penal consequences of alien guilt.
So, the penalty of guilt that's not his own.
Earlier, I had mentioned the ritual of the offerer laying his hands on the animal sacrifice as a way of identifying with the sacrifice.
If that is true, then how much more should we cling to Christ?
We lay our hands on the Christ, who is the Lamb of God that takes away our sin.
Come to Jesus, lay your burdens on him.
He willingly suffered punishment beyond our wildest imaginations because he loves us so.
His death counted as our death.
He took our punishment and now that punishment is fulfilled.
God can declare us not guilty in his courtroom.
Galatians 2.20 puts it together very nicely.
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Here are a couple of modern-day analogies that we can look at when we think about substitution.
In baseball, you can have somebody sub in for someone else, but the batting average of the original player doesn't mix with the batting average of the subbed player.
They each have their own independent stats.
In the world of finance, you can have a proxy that goes to a shareholders meeting on your behalf, and their vote is representative of your vote.
You talk to your proxy about how you want your finances being handled, and whatever they decide to do at that shareholders meeting counts as you making that decision.
So then Christ takes both of these analogies to the nth degree.
He stands in our place, punished for our sins.
We transfer all of our guilt and sins onto him, and he in turn transfers all of his righteousness onto us.
And when he dies on that cross, we died with him, and all that's left is his righteousness that has now been applied to us, which is why we can have at onement with the Father.
Christ is our proxy, He is our substitute, He is the mediator between God and man, He is our High King, Our High Priest, He is the Lord.
You might find this odd, but there are actually people within Christendom who have a hard time accepting that God would be willing to punish an innocent person.
Why can't God just forgive sin, like how a friend forgives another when wrong is done?
Well, God can't just blink at sin.
A judge has to carry out the law of the land, and God, the moral law giver, the standard of right and wrong, he has to deal with sin.
If God had established a system of justice among human beings, which forbids the punishment of an innocent person, he himself is not forbidden.
What if he's willing to take on a human nature in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, and give his own life as a sacrificial offering for sin?
Who is to forbid him?
Suppose this justice system that God has created prohibits the punishment of an innocent person in the place of another, but it doesn't prohibit the punishment of a divine person.
Christ puts his own life forward as a sacrifice, as an offering, and no one's going to stop him.
He is free to do that as long as it's consistent with his nature.
And what could be more consistent with our God's gracious nature than that he should be willing to take on our frail humanity and give his life to satisfy the demands of his own justice?
The self-giving sacrifice of Christ exalts the nature of God by displaying his holy love.
As Romans 6 puts it, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Well, if you're still listening, I just want to say thank you for joining me today on this little excursus through the Atonement.
obviously, there's a lot of information here and I just barely scratched the surface.
It has been a joy to join you today.
May the Lord keep you and may you stay in his will.
God bless.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to Pickled Parables. If you enjoyed this message, please rate us, subscribe and share with your friends. If you're interested in more things like this, check out our secondary podcast called My Dusky Bible. To stay up to date with all things Parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. Parable is a volunteer organization and we would deeply appreciate your prayers. Thank you for joining us today. We'll catch you later.
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