Читать книгу The Christian’s Highest Good - Douglas Vickers - Страница 7

The gospel of the grace of God in the redemption of sinners emanates from the council of the Godhead before the foundation of the world. Its design is grounded in the redemptive offices of the Persons of the Godhead as declared in the eternal Covenant of Redemption. That covenant implies that no more ultimate explanation of the course of human affairs exists than that of the sovereign will and decree of God, executed in his works of creation, providence, and redemption. And no more ultimate explanation spans human history than that of which the coming and the redemptive accomplishment of Christ is the watershed. At the turning point of the history of the church the apostle Peter stated to the incredulous crowd that it was “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” that the remarkable events they had witnessed had occurred (Acts 2:23). And when the newly assembled people of God raised their prayer for the disciples, Peter and John, who had been falsely arrested, they acknowledged that the authorities in their malevolence had done “whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:28). At the heart of the gospel stands the declaration that God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph 1:11).

But the covenantal structure of Christian thought and the sovereignty of God in salvation have been substantially betrayed in our time. While that is so, it is true, of course, that a serious and prominent examination of historic covenantal theology has been maintained in the context of Reformed theological witness. Among the most recent offerings, K. Scott Oliphint’s Covenantal Apologetics has set out to make a significant advance on the level of apologetic witness.28 Theologians Bryan D. Estelle, F. V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen have forced a new examination of the respects in which the Mosaic covenant, while it is to be understood as a form of administration of the covenant of grace, exhibits a works principle and, indeed, has been referred to by a long line of Reformed theologians as partaking of elements of the covenant of works.29 But in the contemporary evangelical-theological context, the church’s doctrinal formation finds its determinative nexus too often in its focus on man and his supposed capacities, intellectual and ethical, to the neglect of the biblical explanation of his fallen condition. For that reason, the objective realities of God’s implementation of his covenantal purposes in the salvation of the elect people he gave to his Son to redeem (John 17:6, 9) have not found a ready place or served as the orientation of thought. The biblical data that state that we are all the fallen children of Adam are only lightly handled. While the imputation to us of the guilt of Adam’s sin extends its disastrous deposit to the fact that we come into the world with a fallen nature, that fact does not find a ready place in the most common evangelical expressions.

Any purported explanation of the human condition that sets out to avoid the reality of our original sin sits oddly with the biblical data and historic confessional theology. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states the case: “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery,” and “The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.”30 An adequate explanation of the human condition is discoverable only in a theology that understands that God, in setting forth his remedy for sin, has “delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Col 1:13). The Christian has been moved by the grace of God from his condition of solidarity in Adam to a new solidarity in Christ (Rom 5:12–21). That is the outcome of the triune God’s execution of his eternal decree of redemption.

What was observed in the preceding chapter as the widening influence, in the history of thought in general and in the doctrines of the church, of the postulate of the competence of human reason in the discovery and formulation of truth has born its fruit in a contemporary man-centered, or anthropocentric, theology. Schleiermacher, whom we observed as the founder of modern theology in the early nineteenth century, has fathered a distant offspring. But Christian thought, to the extent that it is biblically responsive, is to be Christocentric. In that, it is theocentric. Its determining nexus and orientation is what has been revealed as the being, will, and purpose of God. For God has set forth Christ, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).

Why, then, it is to be asked, did Jesus Christ come into the world? Theological doctrine that is grounded in divine revelation permits and requires various responses to the question. We shall return to that question more fully in the following chapter. But at this point we observe that beneath a biblically sustainable answer lies the identity of Jesus Christ, both his essential identity and his official, or economic, or redemptive identity. When we refer to the essential identity of Christ we have in view his distinguishable identity within the triune Godhead. “There are three persons in the Godhead,” the Catechism states, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”31 It is not being said there that the essence of the Godhead is, in some sense that would remain to be defined, distributed among the divine Persons. It is being stated that the full essence of God resides fully in each of the Persons. The divine mind, the divine affections, and the divine will are wholly in each of the Persons. It follows that Jesus Christ, who came into the world to be the Savior of sinners in accordance with the determinate divine decrees was none other than the Second Person of the eternal Godhead. When he was in this world, a divine Person who took a full human nature into union with his divine nature, he did not divest himself of his eternal glory or of the full attributes of his divine Personhood; though he laid aside the signs or insignia of that glory.32 It follows, moreover, that when he was in this world, as to his divine nature our Lord was both in this world and in heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit, while in his human nature he was in this world (John 3:13).33 Now, as to his divine nature he is both in heaven and in this world, while as to his human nature he is in heaven.

The meaning of the descriptive term economic in reference to Christ’s redemptive identity refers in theological usage to the distribution of redemptive offices among the Persons of the Godhead. In short, it was the redemptive office of the Father to elect a certain, defined, and unalterable number of people to eternal salvation and to give them to his Son to redeem. It was the redemptive office of the Son to come into the world, to take a sinless human nature into union with his divine nature, to satisfy in that human nature all of the demands of the righteous law of God on behalf of the people the Father gave to him, and having done that, to bear in his death the penalty due to them for their sin. It was the redemptive office of the Holy Spirit to call to Christ those for whom he died, to convey to them the gifts and benefits that Christ purchased for them, to sanctify them, and to conduct them to glory. We speak, therefore, of the official identity of Christ, intending thereby reference to the redemptive office that he came into the world to discharge.

As to his essential identity, Christ came, he said, to declare God to us: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John 14:11), he said on a memorable occasion (declaring the perichoresis or circumincession of the Godhead),34 when he replied to Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “The Jews took up stones to stone him” when he made his definitive existential claim, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30–31). But the essential identity of Christ is rendered indistinct, if not completely lost, in forms of modern theology, such as that of Paul Tillich, to note an extreme example. Tillich concluded that God is to be “understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being.”35 It is, of course, appropriate to say, with Herman Bavinck, for example, that “God makes himself known as absolute being.”36 Bavinck continues: “He [God] makes himself known as the one who is in an absolute sense. . . . God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being not becoming.”37 But modern theology in the fashion of Tillich, in its argument that “The being of God is being itself. . . . or the ground of being,” concludes that “If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance,”38 and therefore, “It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.”39 It follows from such doctrinal propositions that the autotheotic nature of the Second and Third Persons of the Godhead, and the distinguishable properties of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, are not brought into the relief that the Scriptures and historic Reformed theology have ascribed to them.40 The essential identity of the Person of Jesus Christ is not, thereby, well preserved.

Our principal interest in the present work is in the biblical data regarding the redemptive office of Christ, who, as has been said, came into the world as the Second Person of the eternal Godhead to become Jesus Christ for our redemption. But as we shall see more fully, that redemptive office derives its significance from the eternal identity of God the Son whom the Father sent into the world. The apostle Paul, focusing his thought on the official or redemptive identity of Christ, makes the summary claim to Timothy that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15). The Lord himself said that he came to “lay down [his] life for the sheep” (John 10:15), for those whom, before the foundation of the world the Father had given to him to redeem (John 17:6). But before we look more directly at the import of what has just been said, we reflect on some common perceptions, in historic and literary opinion, of the identity of Jesus Christ.

Who Is Jesus Christ?

For two thousand years men have wrestled with the questions: “Who is Jesus Christ?” and “How are we to explain the presence of Jesus Christ in this world?”41 It would be a mistake, of course, to imagine that those questions have been universally engaged or have agitated the minds of all men at all times. The realities of the human state as it naturally exists as a result of Adam’s fall argue eloquently to the contrary. But to reflective minds the questions of the identity and the objectives in life of Jesus Christ have been, in one way or another and at various times, imperative.

Among cultivated minds the question of “Who is Jesus Christ?” has spawned an extensive literature, both before and since Albert Schweitzer’s classic work, originally published in 1906 under the title The Quest for the Historical Jesus.42 The inquiry continued through the heyday of neo-orthodoxy and Rudolph Bultmann’s so-called demythologization of the Scriptures, where the pre-existence, virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus were under heavy attack.43 For the common man, the slumber of sin and his subjection to Satan have substantially quieted the quest. The “strong man armed keepeth his palace and his goods [captives in the slumber of sin] are in peace” (Luke 11:21). “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom 3:18). That is true, even though there are in every person “intimations of immortality,” to use the poet Wordsworth’s phrase, a sensus deitatis, a sense of God that is suppressed when it rises unbidden to the level of consciousness (Rom 1:18). There is a memory in the race of men. There exists a memory of paradise that rises unrecalled to the mind. By virtue of man’s creation as the image of God, there is finally irrepressible in the soul the awareness of God and the semen religionis, the seed of religion, that constitutes man as essentially a religious being. For that reason man will necessarily and naturally worship some one or the other God. Either he will hold to a godly religion, in obedience to the true God of the Scriptures who has revealed himself, or he will worship a god made in his own image. He will, if he turns his back on the true God, become an idolater and he will fall to the level of the recalcitrant Israelites of old in their embrace of spiritual adultery.

But the questions persist, and the Holy Spirit disturbs the mind at his sovereign command. The church from earliest times struggled to settle its conviction on the very same points. The early heresies regarding the Person of Jesus Christ, and the ecumenical councils of the church that addressed them and reached a firm christological settlement, warrant careful attention. The issues under debate had to do essentially with what was to be understood in relation to the being of the divine Godhead, and in that context focus fell pointedly on the question of the identity of the Second Person of the Godhead, God the Son. Four principal controversies and four councils of the church deserve recognition and will be noted briefly, though they cannot detain us at length at this time.

Controversies and Councils

A clear and sustainable response to the question, “Why did Jesus Christ come into the world,” makes it necessary to proceed with some care on two fronts. First, as we have anticipated, we must consider the doctrinal basis of what is to be held regarding the divine personhood of Jesus Christ; and second, it is necessary to encapsulate in biblical terms the meaning and significance of his coming.

It has unfortunately to be said that confessing evangelicalism has historically, and notably at the present time, varied in its responses to the questions we have raised and it does not present a uniform confession in its statement of the evangel. For what was accomplished, it has to be asked, by the life and by the death of the man Jesus Christ who appeared among men for their eternal benefit? Is unique significance and efficacy to be attributed to his life as well as to his death? What, then, were the benefits that accrue to those for whom Christ lived and died, if, in fact, the extent of the efficacy that his life and death projected can be specified? If the apostolic deliverance in 1 Corinthians 1:30 is to be relied on as definitive, in what respect does the fact that Jesus Christ is our sanctification as well as our righteousness convey meaning to the way in which our questions are answered? In short, and quite apart from a fuller expansion of their biblical grounding, what are we to say of the place that must finally be occupied in our confession by the arguments to which we drew attention in the preceding chapter of such luminaries as Augustine versus Pelagius, Calvin versus Pighius, the Synod of Dort versus Arminius, the Amyraldians and their attempts at theological-doctrinal mediation, Whitefield versus Wesley, and their contemporary Reformed and evangelical offspring among whom the historical controversies find re-expression?

Considerations of personhood are necessarily prior to those of office and function. Being is prior to act and behavior. It is for that reason that the early church was at pains to settle the question of the identity and Person of Jesus Christ before, on the basis of its settlement on that level, it could proceed with its fuller confessional articulation. The heresy of Arianism, for example, argued that the Person of Jesus Christ did not possess a true and full divine nature. He existed before his birth in this world, it was claimed, but not from eternity. He was a creature of God, but he was not eternally divine. “Arius admitted that the Son was produced before all other beings, and held that He was God’s agent or instrument in the creation of them all.”44 But he did not exist in eternal consubstantiality with the Father. The heresy of Arianism was rejected by the church at the Council of Nicea in the year 325, and in the following years the worthy Athanasius argued strongly in support of what had then been agreed as the orthodox position on the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

But further debates on the question followed. Sabellius, a presbyter of the church in the third century, taught that what the orthodox church held to be the Second and Third Persons of the divine Trinity were, in fact, only two different powers of the one God, emanating from the divine essence.45 Other heretical doctrines troubled the church. Eutychianism argued that two natures did not exist as distinct natures in Christ, but that at the incarnation the human nature was absorbed into the divine. The result was that Christ existed as one person with one nature. An opposite error was held by the Nestorians who held that the two natures, divine and human, existed in Jesus Christ as what were, in effect, two separate persons.46 The debates continued at the Councils of Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 435, and a definitive conclusion on the doctrine of the Person of Christ was reached at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.47

At that time it was resolved that the two natures were united in the Person of Christ “without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation.”48 The first two of those defining characteristics state that there was no communication of properties from the one nature to the other. The divine nature remained divine, and the human nature remained human. Neither nature took on the properties of the other. At the incarnation there was no commingling of the eternal (divine) and the temporal (human). At the incarnation the Second Person of the Godhead took into union with his divine nature a created, finite, and temporal human nature. He now lives in the heavens in his divine and human natures, not having divested himself of his humanity at his resurrection and ascension. In his divine and human natures he ever lives to make intercession for those who are the subjects of the redemption he accomplished. In the context of the doctrine of the being and essence of God as it is held by the Christian confession, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are fully and eternally God in their own right. The Second and Third Persons of the divine Trinity, that is, are autotheotic. The full essence of the Godhead resides in each of the three distinguishable Persons of the Trinity. The realities of the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, and the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son are well-established elements of the orthodox Christian confession.49

Consider, against that background, what is to be said of the coming into the world of Jesus Christ. “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). And “God loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). He was not always and from eternity Jesus Christ. He came into the world to become Jesus Christ for our redemption. It is therefore necessary at that point to recognize the twofold mystery of his incarnation. Two divine miracles were involved. First, it was said to the virgin that “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35), intimating that as the human womb was prepared for the reception of divine impregnation the entailment of sin was broken, and the child to be born was without sin.50 The second miracle was the Holy Spirit’s act of impregnation of the sanctified egg of the mother and the consequent emergence of a created, finite, and temporal human nature. God the Holy Spirit did not create a fetus for implantation in the womb of the virgin. For Christ, as to his human nature, was born of the substance of the mother. If that had not been so, he could not have been truly human and thereby an acceptable and effective substitute for sinners. That necessity and fact indicate, first, that the divine Person who came into the world did, in fact, possess a full human nature, with all the faculties of soul and body that characterize humanity, yet without sin. And second, the actual impregnation of the egg of the virgin, that was necessary to establish true human nature, actually occurred.

The human nature that our Lord possessed, therefore, is to be understood and recognized as a created, finite, and temporal human nature. It was created, but only by impregnation; it was finite in that it was truly human and not divine; it was limited to the capacities of humanness in its scope and function, except, as we shall see, as it was supported in its human experience and act by the Holy Spirit; and it was temporal in an important respect. The deity of our Lord was, of course, atemporal, meaning that God exists in full essence outside of time, and that time itself is a created entity, created as a mode of finite existence. So, therefore, given what has been declared as the oneness and unity of the Persons of the Godhead, the divine nature of Christ is characterized by atemporality. But the human nature in view in the Person of Christ is, in its restriction to true human finitude, bound to the temporal character of finite existence.

But it is to be carefully guarded, as the Chalcedonian settlement implies, that the man Jesus Christ was not, as a result, a human person. The misstatement of the evangelical confession that Jesus was a human person must be scrupulously avoided. Jesus Christ was not a human person. As Berkhof has judiciously put it in his discussion of “The Unipersonality of Christ,” “The Logos assumed a human nature that was not personalized, that did not exist by itself.”51 The divine Second Person of the Godhead, in voluntary condescension as agreed in the predeterminate council of the Godhead, took into union with his divine nature a human nature with all the properties of humanness, “in true body and reasonable soul.”52 Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, that is, possessed the full faculties of human soul, intellect, affections, and will. And it was that human soul that, on the cross, he committed to the Father in his statement: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). It follows as an important point of christological confession, that in the Person of Christ there were two minds, a divine and a human, two capacities for affection, a divine and a human, and both a divine and a human will. When we ask who it was that walked the dusty roads of Galilee, who healed the sick and raised the dead and opened the eyes of the blind, we say that it was the eternal Son of God in human nature. Charles Wesley grasped the reality clearly in his well-known verse: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity.”53

The late nineteenth-century Reformed theologian at Union Theological Seminary, W. G. T. Shedd, observed in that con­nection: “When these two natures are united in one theanthropic person, as they are in the incarnation, the divine determines and controls the human, not the human the divine.”54 Shedd had previously stated that “it is the divine nature, not the human nature, which is the base of Christ’s person.”55 Further, “the divine nature constantly supports the human na­ture under all the temptations to sin that are presented to it. . . . It deserts the humanity so that it may suffer for the atonement of sin, but it never deserts the humanity so that it may fall into sin itself.”56 We shall return to the important matter of the presence and function of the Holy Spirit in the act of atonement that Christ performed on the cross. But it can be said in anticipation at this point that as it was in his human nature, not his divine nature, that Christ passed through eternal death on our behalf, in his doing so he was supported by the Holy Spirit.

The humanity and the divinity of Christ are declared by our Lord himself in his statement to Mary Magdalene immediately following his resurrection: “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17, italics added). In his commentary on Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, Charles Hodge observes that “Jesus Christ is a designation of the . . . historical person . . . to whom God stood in the relation at once of God and Father. Our Lord had a dependent [human] nature to which God stood in the relation of God, and a divine nature to which He stood in the relation of Father.”57 As to our Lord’s relation to the Father in his divine nature, the focus of Hodge’s well-taken point is on the fact that the relation between the Father and the Son is unique, and is uniquely different from that between the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not the Son of the Father. The Spirit and the Son exist in distinguishable Personhood.

The confusion on these highly important points in the evangelical and even in the purportedly Reformed literature might be instanced by a single reference to the work of Robert Peterson. In the first edition of his Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement Peterson observed properly that “God Became a Man for our Salvation.”58 But in his second edition, published under the title Calvin and the Atonement,” that reference was changed to read “God became a Human Being for our Salvation.”59 But it is to be held to the contrary that Jesus Christ was not a human being, or a human person. He was a divine being. Jesus Christ, as the pericope in Philippians 2:6–8 eloquently asserts, was God and man, fully man in all human faculties and in imputed covenantal responsibilities. But he was not a human person.

The question we have raised, therefore, is to be understood as referable to twofold levels: first, the eternal Son of God came into the world for the reasons and purposes that have been indicated; and second, the human nature that he assumed came into the world by the Holy Spirit’s miraculous act of impregnation. Jesus Christ was therefore without sin, so that by his being made “perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10) he was qualified to offer himself as the substitute for sinners in the discharge of his priestly office on the cross. As to the matter of his qualification, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes has summarized the issue in his valuable commen­tary by saying: “It is fitting that our Redeemer should have been made perfect through suffering: first, because his completely victorious suffering of temptation of every kind (Heb 4:15) was essential to his achievement of that perfection which qualified him to offer himself on the cross as the spotless Lamb of God in the place of sinners (1 Pet 1:18f.; 3:18); second, because his suffering and death at Calvary annulled the power of Satan and set free the ‘many sons’ who were destined for glory; and third, because his own experience of human suffering in the body he assumed has enabled him, as a compassionate high priest to aid and strengthen at all times those who are afflicted with trials and temptations.”60

The Priestly Office of Christ

The redemptive office of Christ expands its meaning to exhibit Christ as our prophet, priest, and king. Those offices, as they are clearly observable in the Old Testament record, are understandable as anticipations of the status and office that Christ would occupy in God’s redemptive plan. He came as the antitype of the types that had pointed to him. He came as the second Adam (1 Cor 15:45, 47) of which our first parent, Adam, was “the figure [type] of him that was to come” (Rom 5:14). And similarly, the high priest under the earlier form of administration of God’s covenant of grace, and the prophets in their office of communicating the will of God to the people, were types of Christ. The prophets represented God to the people; and the priests represented the people to God.61 Those two important representations are combined in the Person and work of Christ.62

Christ, the greater son of David, fulfills the office of king of which David was the type and anticipator. In that earlier administration of God’s covenant, Israel was both the nation and the church, “the church in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38). The church in that age, designated by God “a kingdom of priests,” was a “holy nation” (Exod 19:6), and now, since God’s redemptive purpose has been fulfilled in the coming of Christ, the church is in itself the “holy nation” (1 Pet 2:9) of which Christ is the head. And in his kingship over the church, which is now distinct from the nations of the world, he is the antitype of those earlier kings. He has inherited the throne of David, as it was said of old that “the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). The promise that God had given to Nathan the prophet regarding David was now realized: “I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever . . . and thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam 7:13–16). When Christ came, the promise was fulfilled: “But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Heb 1:8).

Regarding the priestly office of Christ the catechism states that “Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God, and in making continual intercession for us.”63 Two aspects of his discharge of that office are immediately important. First, Christ, as the antitype of the priests of old, was, in his offering “to satisfy divine justice,” both the offering and the priest who made the offering. He was himself “the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “The blood of goats and calves” could not definitively take away sin, “but by his own blood he [Christ] entered once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb 9:12). “Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things . . . but with the precious blood of Christ . . . who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (1 Pet 1:18–20).

The substitutionary aspect of the death of Christ in dealing with sin is explained in terms of the imputation of guilt and righteousness that was involved. We encountered the concept and doctrine of imputation at an earlier stage, when we observed that it is a serious fault of the doctrines promulgated by the New Perspective on Paul that, as Wright in particular clearly stated, to speak of the imputation that we now have in view as in no sense tenable.64 But the issue calls for careful attention and is a vital part of the transactions between the Father and the Son in the accomplishment of redemption.

The nub of the issue is that in his substitutionary atonement the guilt of the sins of the people for whom he died was imputed to him, or, that is, was placed to his account. The sinless Son of God died in his human nature for those whom the Father had given to him for that purpose. Sin had entered the world in human nature, and a sacrifice for the payment of the penalty of sin must be made in human nature. But how could that be done? Man himself could not pay the penalty for his sin. In all the capacities of his soul he was estranged from God and enslaved to Satan and sin, “dead in trespasses and sin” (Eph 2:1). Any man could only, therefore, unless the grace of God intervened, pay the penalty for his own sin in the eternal perdition that sin against a holy God warranted. Before man himself could have any standing before God the grace of God that creates new life within an individual by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit must first endow the soul with the gifts of saving faith and repentance. And then, with that newness of life can the sinner turn to Christ. But if, because of the disabilities under which he exists by nature, man himself is unable to pay the price of his own redemption, how could redemption ensue? At that point the issue of imputation enters.

When our first parent, Adam, fell by repudiating his covenantal obligations to God, the guilt of his sin was imputed to, or in the reckoning of God placed to the account of, all those who would descend from him by ordinary generation.65 That imputation was an immediate imputation. The word “immediate” in that statement of doctrine does not refer to immediacy in time; though the imputation did, of course, occur at the point in time immediately on Adam’s sin. But “immediate” in our present context refers to the fact that there was no mediating cause or entity on the grounds of which the imputation in the accounting of God took place. The imputation of sin, that is, was immediate and not mediate.66 The imputation was grounded only in the eternal will of God, entirely apart from any intra-mundane or temporal cause.

At the death of Christ, there occurred similarly what we may refer to as a reciprocal immediate imputation. The guilt of the sin of the people for whom Christ died was imputed to Christ, and the righteousness of Christ was imputed to them. When we refer to the righteousness of Christ in that context we do not have in view his essential righteousness that inheres in him by reason of his identity as the Second Person of the Godhead; or, that is, his righteousness as God by which we mean that all the actions, designs, purposes, and decrees of God are consistent with the essential and inherent holiness that he possesses in his eternal being. When we say that it is not Christ’s essential righteousness that is imputed to the repentant sinner, it is meant that the individual does not, for that reason, partake of the essence of the Godhead. There is no such thing, that is, as the divinization of man. The righteousness of Christ that is placed to the sinner’s account is a forensic righteousness; that is, the righteousness that comes from the perfect fulfillment of the demands of God’s law and commandments. The term “forensic” has to do with the situation that exists in relation to, and because of, law. Christ impeccably fulfilled the demands of the law of God. In that, he was forensically righteous. By reason that the forensic righteousness of Christ is thus imputed to the sinner who comes to Christ in faith and repentance, God looks on that individual as though he had himself fulfilled the demands of the law, and as though he himself had paid the penalty for his having broken the law. Such is the immeasurable extent of God’s grace and mercy that he has set forth in his Son.

By that reciprocal imputation the individual who has thus come to Christ has entered a state of justification before God. He was once ungodly, in that he had broken the law of God; “Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom 5:6); now he is regarded in the counsels of heaven as godly, for all the demands of the law have been met on his behalf. In that great exchange, God’s declarative, forensic statement of justification has set the individual free from the law of sin, condemnation, and death, and has transferred him to the state of righteousness, justification and life.67 A definitive transference has taken place. But the ground of the sinner’s status that has thus been so remarkably changed is that Christ, by the imputation of the sinner’s guilt to him, has been constituted guilty. And by reason of that constitution, God the Father could truthfully declare his Son guilty and lay upon him the punishment of sin. And similarly, by the corresponding act of imputation the sinner has been constituted righteous, so that God could truthfully declare him righteous. Such are the remarkable terms in which justification before God has been established.

In God the Father’s act of constituting his Son guilty, Christ was thereby “made sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). The Son of God was made sin, in that he was made guilty, not guilty of his own sin, but of the sin of those for whom he died. And being thus constituted guilty, the death that Christ died was his final act of active obedience to the law of God. For the law said that the guilty one must die. What a remarkable exchange the grace and mercy of God accomplished in that eternally meaningful act. But it is to be carefully observed also that in that divine act of imputation, while Christ was made to be sin, while our sin was laid upon him, he was not made or constituted a sinner.68 If he were held in that sacred moment to have been constituted a sinner, the meaning of the entire redemptive act on the cross would be vacated. For the substitution that was involved in Christ’s act of redemption was meaningful only because our sin was laid on him who was completely without sin. It was the sinless Son of God, the Second Person of the eternal Godhead who made the atonement for sin. But further, it was in his human nature in which he died for us that he was sinless.

The possibility of misunderstanding, at this important point, of the imputation involved in the substitutionary death of Christ has been addressed in particularly clear terms in a classic commentary that is worthy of extended statement: “God, declares Paul, made the Sinless One sin for us. It is important to notice that he does not say that God made Him a sinner; for to conceive of Christ as sinful, or made a sinner, would be to overthrow the very foundation of redemption, which demands the death of an altogether Sinless One in the place of sinful mankind. But God made him sin; that is to say that God the Father made His innocent incarnate Son the object of His wrath and judgment, for our sakes, with the result that in Christ on the cross the sin of the world is judged and taken away. In this truth resides the whole logic of reconciliation.”69

The meaning in its full extent is ineffable, in that any words that we can command by reason of the language capacity we have in our human finitude cannot possibly compass the meaning of what was involved. Christ died in his human nature. He could not die in divine nature. Indeed, his death in human nature was precisely necessary to accomplish eternal salvation for those who had sinned in human nature. But it was “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8) who was crucified, and ineffable though it is, it was the Person of our Lord who died for us in his human nature. And the Person of our Lord was, throughout his life and in his death, impeccably sinless.

In the transaction between the Father and the Son when Christ bore our sin on the cross, when he was made to be sin for us, the Father did not look on him as being in his own person a sinner. Mystery though it is, and ineffable the meaning in its ultimate divine relation, the eternal love between the Father and the Son was not, and could not, be broken, not even in the cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). The Father loved the Son even as he poured out his wrath against him, against the guilt of sin that he bore. The very godness of the Godhead, the eternal indwelling of the Son, with the Holy Spirit, in the Father, speaks its witness. Oh eternal love! That God himself, in the Person of his Son, should die for us who rebelled against him and his covenantal faithfulness. In the very death of the cross, God the Father looked upon the Son whom he loved and was satisfied that in his impeccable innocence the Son, in the perfect righteousness that he had sustained in his human nature, allowed the guilt of his people’s sin to be laid upon him. Therein he bore the Father’s wrath and saved the host that God, in his eternal jealousy and design, has elected to share his glory with him. The smile of the Father would soon return, and in his temporal death Christ the redeemer would give his human soul again to the Father. He would soon return to the heavens as the victorious high priest and intercessor for his people, glorified again, as he had prayed: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5).

Let us observe the meaning of the substitutionary death of Christ in summary terms. When he paid the penalty for sin on the cross, was Christ guilty? Yes he was guilty, not of his own sin, for he was sinless, but of the sin of those for whom he died. He was guilty because our sin was placed to his account. Our guilt was laid upon him. “The LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa 53:6). Did the Father then regard his Son as in his intrinsic personhood a sinner? No, because as a person he was not intrinsically guilty, for he was the eternally pure, sinless Second Person of the Godhead and, further, in his human nature that he had assumed he was perfectly sinless. The guilt that was laid on Christ was true and punishable guilt, but so far as the Person who bore the guilt was concerned, it was not an intrinsic guilt. It did not belong to him personally. It was an extrinsic guilt.