Wrath, love, justice, mercy

We live in confused times. We are confused about matters such as abortion, assisted suicide, race, sex, and sexuality, to name a few. So many of these confusions come from a distorted anthropology. We misunderstand the nature of humanity and thereby mistake our meaning and purpose. These mistaken views also trace back to wrong perceptions concerning God. How we understand the Lord—the Maker and Ruler of Men—affects how we view the men God made and rules.

The recent online debate about penal substitution might not seem connected to these confusions. Yet it all points to a greater whole. For a notable portion of the vitriol projected at the doctrine comes from this: Penal substitution runs afoul of sacrosanct, modern understandings of God and of man.

First, it offends our view of God. We have turned Him into a doting, affirming doormat. We did so in part by creating a false choice—either God is loving or God is wrathful. Yet God’s love and His wrath exist in a complementary relationship. God’s wrath is a manifestation of love—love for righteousness, love for those wronged by sin, love for His glory. Wrath thereby vindicates who and what God loves through punishing who and what threatens or demeans the objects of God’s love. This ordering of wrath in accordance with love is far from arbitrary. Instead, it flows from God’s perfect character and perfect will. It is a just love that displays the majesty of a holy Deity.

Second, penal substitution offends our understanding of man. We want to think of human beings as basically good. The Fall fades into a slip and a minor one at that. Thus, our need for a savior modifies into an optional request for some assistance in what otherwise is a self-help journey.

We make this moral move through dishonesty. We are dishonest about what sin is, redefining God’s Biblical and natural standards to fit contemporary tastes and idols; for Biblical commands and God’s natural law offend our sense of self-actualization. Even when we retain some modicum of such standards in general, we excuse away sin in particular through a therapeutic psychology of victimhood; for the concept that sin has enslaved us denies our cherished view of self-determination. The thought, then, that such drastic claims as “the wages of sin is death” could be true for all humanity strikes us as overwrought at best and sadistic at worst.

Taken together, our disordered view of God and of man calls Scripture a lie, not the Word of God.  For the story of redemption is the tale of a depraved humanity needing a substitutionary sacrifice to atone for evil. That point stretches back to the Garden of Eden, when animal blood was spilt to make coverings for a fallen Adam and Eve. It includes the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. It of course finds its fulfillment at Calvary, its application in part through Holy Communion, and its consummation at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb.

In making Scripture a lie, the rejection of penal substitution again makes the cross a scandal. That we have sin that needs atoned for; that God would require death as the means of that atonement—it all strikes us as antiquated and even barbaric. Thus, we no longer see in full the essential purpose of Christ’s incarnation, the paradoxical beauty of the cross, and the glorious triumph in the empty grave.

In the doctrine of penal substitution, we confront the wickedness of the world and of ourselves. We see abortion and assisted suicide for the murders they are. We see all forms of racial antagonism as offending God by denying where His image resides. We see contemporary assumptions about sex and sexuality mangling God’s created order and, with it, damaging individuals, families, and societies.

We cannot save ourselves from our madness. We need another to do that. We need another to satisfy justice on our behalf and to remake us from the image of contemporary idols to the image of the Son of God. For all of that, we need mercy and grace. We need the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Then we can drop our cultural, anthropological confusions. Instead, we can sing with clarity and with joy the great words of John Newton,

“Let us wonder; grace and justice
join and point to mercy’s store;
when thro’ grace in Christ our trust is,
justice smiles and asks no more:
he who washed us with his blood
has secured our way to God.”