BY BRUCE GREEN
OPINION —
How does God make the world right while maintaining His righteousness? How does He treat a person as if they’ve never sinned when in fact, they have sinned (over and over)? How can He treat the violator of His law the same as the one who keeps it and still maintain both the law and His integrity? This is the watermark in the background of Paul’s discussion in Romans 3:21-31.
We get an allusion to all this in v. 25 when Paul speaks of how, “in His forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” Paul recognized the exceptionality of God’s actions in not punishing the sins of people from the past.
So, how did God do this?
The short answer is that this was accomplished when “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement” (v. 25). But what does this mean?
In the Old Testament, we are introduced to the truth that sacrifices made atonement in the sense that they represented the principle of a life for a life—the life of the sacrifice in place of the life of the sinner. We see this principle as early as Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve are covered by God with animal skins—so something innocent died to clothe the guilty. (See this applied to Christ and us in Galatians 3:26-27). It is found later in Genesis 22:13 and in the Passover as well.
But it’s not harmful and can be helpful to step back and ask, “Why is this so?” Why did putting an animal to death clear things up with God? The answer is simple: because God said it did.
We do know that it involved a life-for-life arrangement and because that principle is so ingrained in us, we tend to stop there in our thinking under the assumption that this is in harmony with some deep and abiding legal principle of the universe. But there’s nothing axiomatic, obvious or mandatory that connects the death of an animal with the forgiveness of the guilty. After all, if you went out and robbed a bank, the judge isn’t going to tell you that sacrificing a few animals will put everything right.
If our answer is that the animal prefigured Jesus offering His life, it still doesn’t answer the question of what other judicial system operates by this principle? People are responsible for their own crimes. God is on record as saying this (Deuteronomy 24:16; Ezekiel 18:20). So we’re back to the truth that life for life brings atonement ultimately because God declares that it does.
And with this we learn something very important—atonement doesn’t have to make perfect legal sense to us and that’s certainly not the criteria we should use to judge it. In the end atonement isn’t legal—it’s relational. It is not ultimately about a Judge and criminals—it is about a Father and His children. Atonement exists because it expresses and satisfies His will and character—not because it meets the standard of some higher law that even God is subject to.
The glorious truth of the atoning cross of Jesus is that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19 NASB 1995). He did for us through Jesus what we could not do for ourselves so that we could have life with Him.
That’s what we need to know!
Find more of Bruce’s writings at his website: a-taste-of-grace-with-bruce-green.com.
