Dever / Lawrence It Is Well

Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2443-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The idea of Christ's substitutionary atonement for sinners is central in both the Old and New Testaments-from the Passover to the prophets to the words of Jesus and the apostles. In It Is Well, pastors Mark Dever and Michael Lawrence demonstrate how the atonement is clearly taught throughout Scripture. Starting with Exodus 12 and moving through other key Old Testament passages into the Gospels and the epistles of Paul and Peter, the authors offer careful expositions on fourteen crucial texts. As they speak to important issues such as what happens when there is no substitute for sin, why God forsook Christ, Jesus' perspective on his substitutionary work, and the necessity and benefits of the atonement, they show how much the doctrine applies to the Christian life. It Is Well not only encourages pastors to preach this essential doctrine for the strengthening of the church, but it helps individual believers understand and exult in the richness of God's love in Christ. Part of the 9Marks series.

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dever, Mark

Lawrence, Michael

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

Leviticus 16

MARK DEVER

What if you were a ruler known as a “good guy,” but you didn’t take any action against bad guys? What does it mean to say that I oppose murder but then refuse to punish murderers? What does it mean to bear the responsibility to punish? For that matter, does anyone bear responsibility to punish? During the reign of one Roman emperor, it was said, “It is indeed bad to live under a prince with whom nothing is permitted, but much worse to live under one by whom everything is allowed.”

Christians believe that all such authority is rooted in God himself. So we find King David’s last words recorded in 2 Samuel 23: “When one rules over men in righteousness, when he rules in the fear of God, he is like the light of morning at sunrise on a cloudless morning, like the brightness after rain that brings the grass from the earth” (vv. 3–4).

Part of that good authority must be the responsibility to enforce at least the enforceable parts of what you understand to be good. Now, the responsibility to punish evil ultimately belongs to God. He alone is able, ultimately and fully, to fulfill it. But in limited ways it is also shared with parents, judges, public officials, and pastors, with anyone who is entrusted with authority. So what happens when you or I do something bad? If we are children, our parents may punish us for it. If we are adults, then maybe the punishment would come from someone else—our employer or the sheriff’s office.

Of course, this is where our atheist friends may sink into their grim confidence that there is truly no one who can right wrongs or reward rights. Where Christians hear echoes of truth in the assumptions we all have of life—assumptions of right and wrong and the rightness of rewarding good and punishing evil—atheists argue that those assumptions are nothing more than reflections of our own groundless hopes and desires. Right and wrong, they would say, are nothing but a social construction, relationships of power. That is how right and wrong are talked about today. “Moral” and “immoral” are mere customs that may or may not be enforced. The cash value of this way of thinking is that we can sin and get away with it. But according to the Bible, what is our situation? And what is God’s responsibility in the face of wrongdoing?

It must be great, given who God is. More powerful, more knowledgeable, and more righteous than any other authority, God knows perfectly both who and what merits punishment, as well as what punishment each wrong merits. At the center of this discussion, however, is something much more important than the mere believer-in-God perceives. The Christian understands that at the center of this discussion of right and wrong, punishment and rewards, stands the cross of Jesus Christ and all that flows from it. The Christian’s idea of right and wrong, our understanding of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness, of restoration—all this comes from the cross.

What Christ accomplished at Calvary is celebrated in a great profusion of images in the New Testament. He redeemed those in bondage, reconciled the alienated, propitiated God’s wrath, and satisfied his justice. On the cross Christ defeated Satan and broke the power of death. One image among this joyous proliferation is under particular attack today—the idea of penal substitution; that is, the idea that the penalty we deserved was given to someone else, to another who did not deserve it but who took it voluntarily for us.

Now this very idea, which lies at the heart of the Christian message, is one that has long been denounced by non-Christians. For centuries, Christians have defended their message against those who have attacked it at this very point. About a century or two ago, however, these same objections began to be raised by liberal Christians, and now in the last few years they have even been taken up by some who call themselves evangelical Christians. These objections against the idea of Christ making atonement for us as a substitute must be answered.

However, our task here isn’t fundamentally a defensive one. We’re not trying to negate these doubts and denials. We want to go around them and behind them and beneath them to the text of the Bible itself. What does the Bible—Old Testament and New—say about the idea of God’s pardoning sinners? Of God’s punishing of sin? Of God’s using a substitute to do that? Is that merely a Western, mechanical, overly legal view of Christ’s work on the cross?

Well, of course, today there are questions about the whole idea of retributive justice. Here enters the idea of penal substitution. These days, there is much argument regarding retributive punishment versus restorative punishment, and some argue that all punishment should be restorative. It’s thought distasteful by some to have God involved in anything that would be some kind of gross spiritual economics of substitution—one person taking another person’s penalty, freeing him from receiving his just deserts. Here’s what one prominent evangelical in England wrote just a few years ago:

The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement “God is love.” If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil.1

That was written not by a non-Christian assailing Christianity or by someone who overtly denies the authority of Scripture. It was written by someone who repeatedly and for years has spoken at evangelical Christian conferences and is perhaps the best-known Baptist minister in England.

As we noted earlier, these are not new objections. Faustus Socinus, one of the founders of modern-day Unitarianism, put forward in 1578 the objection that the doctrine of Christ’s being substituted for us would put God in violation of the teaching that we are to forgive those who wrong us; a kind of divine hypocrisy would ensue. The Bible, however, disagrees with that. In fact, Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, stated specifically that God has a right to, and in fact should and does, act differently than we do in this matter. Paul says in Romans 12:19 that we are not to take revenge, and the reason is precisely that we should not expect God not to take revenge. Do not take revenge, Paul says, because God most certainly will.

The fact is that penal substitution is not alien to the Bible. Covenantal substitution is deeply embedded in the story of the Bible, and each chapter of this book seeks to prove that this idea of penal substitution is no alien, artificial construct foisted upon the Bible but is woven deeply into the narrative of Israel. In fact, if you deny this, you cannot understand the most basic parts of the Bible. The Bible dissolves into nothing more than a reflection of things you like to think are true. If you want to hear the message of the Bible, you must understand this.

In the last chapter we were considering the idea of something suffering a penalty for someone’s benefit and how that was graphically displayed in the Passover lamb being slain for the deliverance of the firstborn of the households of Israel. Now in the wilderness, God makes this principle even clearer by putting another special day—this one not in the spring but in the fall—on the perpetual calendar of Israel. This was a day that would teach them about atonement, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is prescribed in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, chapter 16.

Leviticus is a book of laws and sacrifices that God gave the Israelites in the wilderness after they had just been brought out of Egypt. They were on the way to the Promised Land. He gave them the laws because they reflected his holy character, and then he gave them the sacrifices because he knew that they wouldn’t keep the laws. Here we want to look at the chief sacrifice of all the sacrifices, the Day of Atonement.

Central to this discussion of God’s justice are two issues: (1) the relationship is the challenge, and (2) substitution is the solution.

1) The Relationship Is the Challenge

Moses writes this in Leviticus 16:1–2: “The LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they approached the LORD. The LORD said to Moses, ‘Tell your brother Aaron not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, because I appear in the cloud over the atonement cover.’”

We must begin here by knowing that the Lord is holy. That means that he is completely good and right. He is not like us. He is sublimely, perfectly pure. He is in no way morally compromised—ever. His very character defines what it means to be lawful, desirable, and righteous. He is glorious and sinless and unique, and he expresses himself in his holy goodness and grace and wrath.

There is no natural way for us to realize how unlike us God is, so Leviticus 16 begins with this holy God reaching out and communicating to...