Last week, I wrote about how being saved by Jesus’ blood makes you God’s Beloved and the importance of living in the truth of your worth to Him. Although I write a lot about God’s love, I think it’s really impossible to fully understand God’s love for you unless we understand God’s justice and wrath.
This truth was driven home for me through several conversations I’ve had lately with friends voicing concerns about the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, sometimes abbreviated as PSA (I know those are the same initials as a popular medical test, but bear with me here so I don’t have to write it out every time). If you’re familiar with PSA as a concept but not as a term, it’s the theological idea, long foundational to evangelical theology, that Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin, to atone (cleanse, purify, and cover) for our sin, as a substitute for us. In so doing, the idea goes, Jesus took on the wrath of God reserved for us because of our sin and bore that wrath so that we would be spared, so that afterward God would impute, or invest, Christ’s righteousness upon us.
This doctrine has come under question lately, generally and even among people I know and love, for a couple of reasons. First, people say the concept of PSA doesn’t seem to reconcile with the concept of a God who is love. After all, why would a God who is love pour wrath out on people anyway, and least of all on His own Son? Secondly, they argue (somewhat crassly) that pouring out wrath on Jesus during the crucifixion constitutes a form of “cosmic child abuse,” as it involves God harming His own Son, which contradicts their belief in a loving God who would not do such a thing. Finally, critics of PSA say that there’s not really biblical support for the idea.
Why does such an issue even matter? Is this merely an irrelevant theological debate, akin to the stereotypical question of “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin”? On the contrary, this question is absolutely critical to how we live. As I previously stated, it is crucial for us to fully comprehend the extent of Jesus’s and God’s love for us by understanding what Jesus actually did on the cross. We also have to fully appreciate the depths of what Jesus did to understand the magnitude and cost of our sin. Satan would love for us to underestimate our sin and Jesus’s immense love demonstrated through His sacrifice. Finally, to truly understand, know, and love God, you must know who He is—not just a part of Him, but all of Him, His nature, and His character. Understanding God’s wrath, our sin, and PSA helps us with all these things, so it’s really important.
First, we have to understand that God is a just God. God’s justness is as much a part of His nature as love. He is completely 100 percent love and completely 100 percent just and holy. His unity of justice and love is true in a way that no other being in creation can claim, because He created all things. Only God is completely God, and in His goodness He is set apart from the rest of His creation. God can only be just, and only He can do perfect justice. We can attempt justice, but as broken people, our justice will always be imperfect. Just as perfect love is defined by God’s nature and character, so is perfect justice. He is the standard. When we believe God to be unjust, therefore, the error lies in our perception of what is just, not in God’s nature.
God is also a God who exercises wrath. Wrath, by definition, refers to God’s settled opposition to and hatred of sin in all its forms, including everything that is unholy. God loves people but hates sin. (Sin, by the way, is the decision of man and angelic beings to rebel against God’s perfection and order and attempt to assume His rightful place on the throne of their lives—a decision made by Satan and his minions, Adam and Eve, and us.) If you don’t think the delineation between loving people and hating sin can exist, again, the problem there is not God; it’s your conception of whether such a delineation can exist. It can, and it does.
Wrath is not an original characteristic of God’s nature and character, like love or justness. It is a responsive characteristic. This means that God exercises wrath because sin exists in creation, among human beings, in the angelic realm (demons), and in the created order. Wrath is an outworking of God’s justness in a sin-filled creation.
Because God is just, He must exercise His wrath and punish sin, whether in the past, currently, or in the future. If God did not do so (such as wink at, overlook, or excuse sin), He would not be absolutely just, and He is absolutely just. All sin, whether child molestation and murder or simple greed and envy, is by definition a deviation from the perfection and holiness with which God created everything. Therefore, all sin is subject to punishment by God and to His wrath. And the punishment for sin is death, physical and eternal (Rom. 3:23).
Most of us have a problem with God’s wrath because, as humans, we do wrath very poorly and mostly sinfully. We often perceive a wrathful God as an arbitrary being who flies off the handle and punishes people reflexively, similar to how we might have done that time with our little one in the grocery store that we still feel really embarrassed about.
That’s not the wrath of God at all. I was reading John 2 the other day, the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple. John 1 tells us that Jesus reveals to us the full nature and character of the Father, which means we learn God’s nature, in part, by watching Jesus. When Jesus sees the moneychangers in the Temple, He doesn’t fly off the handle, yelling and screaming and turning over tables like some drunken sailor on liberty. The passage tells us that he took the time to fashion a whip, a tool he used to drive the livestock from the Temple. His actions, an exercise of wrath, were deliberate, intentional, and thoughtful.
This example teaches us about God’s wrath—He is measured and thoughtful. I spent much of the fall in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and in them God is consistently and patiently warning Israel to repent and to turn back from their evil, and that if they do not, He will exercise His wrath. God is patient and forbearing, as a parent hoping His children will come to His senses. When they do not and persist in evil, only then does He bring the Babylonians in as a tool of His wrath to take the people into captivity.
In Romans 1, Paul discusses God’s wrath in the present. As people continue to sin despite God’s calls to repentance, He responds by turning them over to the consequences of their sin, removing His protective hand from them and allowing them to bear the weight of their iniquity. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men.” (Rom. 1:18). John foretells in Revelation that God’s wrath will be unleashed upon all creation at the end of time, as He readies for the ultimate judgment of all who oppose Him, despite His calls to repentance (Rev. 16).
In each of these instances, God’s wrath is thoughtful and intentional, not irrational. It is a consequence of people’s sin and comes at the end of God’s call to repentance and promise of mercy. God is a loving God who desires His people to turn to Him and away from evil, just as loving parents desire the same for their children. We refrain from consequences until it’s necessary to restore order and bring correction, and so does God. (God, however, also punishes evil in a way we who are evil cannot and have no authority to do.)
As Wayne Grudem notes, because of our sin, we are subject to the following consequences from a just God:
- We deserve death as the penalty for sin. (Rom. 3)
- We deserve to bear God’s wrath against sin. (Rom. 1).
- We are separated from God for our sin. (Is. 59:2; Rom. 3:23)
- We are in bondage to sin and the kingdom of Satan. (John 8:34; Rom. 6:16)
Jesus took on the consequences of our sin to fulfill God’s justice and declare us righteous. He paid the penalty, the price for our sin. Paul tells the Corinthian church, “For our sake, God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The only way that we could be declared righteous through Jesus is for Jesus, who lived as a man and yet lived with no sin, having no debt to pay for Himself, to take on the penalty and weight of our sin. This means that Jesus had to endure everything Grudem and Scripture talk about above as our just consequences, including death, God’s wrath, separation from God, and the weight of our sin.
This includes Christ enduring God’s wrath, which, for the reasons stated above, feels uncomfortable to some and has led to attempts to argue out of it. But these arguments ignore Scripture. In Romans 3:23-26, Paul explains:
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
The word “propitiation” here isn’t one we use in everyday language. According to Grudem, theologians D.A. Carson, Ligon Duncan, and others, the Greek verb used here, hilaskomai, “to make propitiation,” has the sense of “a sacrifice that bears the wrath of God and that makes God favorable to us.” This idea is repeated in 1 John 4:10. The concept of propitiation, of a sacrifice that bears God’s wrath in our place, may seem strange to 21st-century ears like ours. However, for first-century Christians who were accustomed to pagan religions, this term and concept were common. They would not have struggled with the concept in the same way we do.
Paul is saying that, in years past, like when the Jews atoned for past sins through the Mosaic sacrificial system, God had forgiven their sins. However, no penalty had yet been paid. It wasn’t that He wasn’t going to deal with those sins, wasn’t going to visit His wrath on them, or punish them. He is a just God, and there was no way that wasn’t going to happen. It was just going to happen in His timing—at the coming of Christ. When Christ came and died for us, God took care of sin at this time and glorified or exemplified His just and righteous nature as the one who would deal with sin in the lives of those He had chosen once and for all.
Paul reinforces this concept of the wrath of God being visited on Christ for our sake and on our behalf in Romans 8:3, reminding us that “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us.”
Christ atoned and paid the penalty for our sin, enduring God’s wrath, by taking our place as our substitute. As Grudem says, “It is important to insist on the fact that Christ bore the wrath of God in our place because it is the heart of the doctrine of the atonement. It means that there is an eternal, unchangeable requirement in the holiness and justice of God that sin be paid for.”
Finally, the idea that for God to visit His wrath upon Christ was an act of “cosmic child abuse” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Triune God. God is not two people, one forcing the other to do something against their will. God is Triune. When one has a plan and purpose, it is the plan, purpose, and will of each member of the Godhead. Jesus Himself declared that He was no one’s pawn—not Satan’s, and not His Father’s- For this reason, the Father loves me because I lay down my life so that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.” (John 10). Christ’s provision was God’s gift to us, and Jesus’s gift as well. It was a loving and willing sacrifice beyond measure.
The cross demonstrates how truly serious our sin is—not something to be trifled with, entertained, or managed, but hated the way God hates it, and put to death. The cross is not only the ultimate expression of God’s grace and love for you, that you were worth such a terrible price, but also of His righteousness and justice. You can count on God to love you, and you can count on Him to always do what it right and good.
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