The Wrath of God Was Satisfied

It is a fact of Scripture that our God, because of His absolute goodness and justice, has established that sin must be punished, a penalty must be paid for violating His principles, but the good news is that someone has come to pay that penalty in our place.   Here's what Romans 3 says:
(4) do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?5But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,6who "will render to each one according to his deeds"...

We were - are - destined to encounter the wrath of God, punishment for our sin.   If a person will accept and receive the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ and His death on the cross, then that person can experience life eternal with God in heaven.  But, if someone rejects Christ, that person faces everlasting punishment.   When you consider God's view of sin and His absolute judgment for it, we can really appreciate, perhaps even more fully, what Jesus, in His love, has done for us.

In Isaiah 53, we see the picture of our Lord Jesus, the suffering servant, the coming Messiah, who would deliver us from the wrath of God, resulting from our sins:
3He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.4Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.5But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

There are very few Christian musicians that I appreciate more than Keith and Kristyn Getty.   Their reputation in the church is impeccable, and their position as modern-day hymnwriters has been established, and their songs and live performances have ministered to people in concerts and conferences around the globe.

You would probably never think to attach the word "controversial" to their ministry, but there has been a bit of discussion this week about a song that Keith wrote with his friend Stuart Townend - a song that has come to be used in churches frequently, that I'm even looking forward to singing this Sunday morning.   Attorney David French writes in National Review Online that, "When I was in Iraq — especially as casualties mounted, and the IED menace seemed overwhelming — I took great comfort in a contemporary hymn...'In Christ Alone'". He says "it bucks the contemporary worship trend of shallow, emotional lyrics in favor of a theologically rich presentation of the Gospel."

He reported that he read Dr. Timothy George's piece in First Things about a decision by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Committee on Congregational Song, objecting to the lyric, “Till on that cross as Jesus died/The wrath of God was satisfied.” The Committee proposed an alternative: “Till on that cross as Jesus died/the love of God was magnified.” Getty and Townend refused the change, and the Committee voted to exclude the song - the final vote was reportedly 9 to 6.

Using the committee decision as a backdrop, French and George highlight what they see as a departure in mainline Protestantism from teaching the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. French writes, "The core of the dispute is the mainline break with orthodoxy on the very nature of God and mission of Jesus. In orthodox Christianity, sin demands sacrifice. God’s wrath against sin — our sin — was atoned through Christ’s sacrifice." He says that, "mainline protestantism is increasingly rejecting it in favor of a doctrine that places Jesus not as Savior in the orthodox sense but more as an example of love and nonviolent resistance..."

George lays out a wonderful expression of a Biblical view of the wrath of God. He quotes from H. Richard Niebuhr, who depicted the creed of liberal Protestant theology, which was called “modernism” in those days, in these famous words: "A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

George writes,

However we account for the work of Christ on the cross—and none of our atonement theories is adequate to explain fully so profound a reality—it surely means this: that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and that this event involved his purposeful “handing over” and “delivering up” of his Son to a cursed-filled death at the Skull Place outside the gates of Jerusalem (2 Cor. 5:19; Rom. 8:32; Acts 2:23). As the early Christians understood Isaiah 53:4-5, Christ was pierced there for our transgressions, smitten by God and afflicted. But far from being a tragic bystander, Christ made there what the Book of Common Prayer calls “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” To quote another hymn, not so much in vogue these days, “Bearing shame and scoffing rude/In my place condemned he stood.” The full New Testament teaching about the cross involves both expiation, which means providing a covering for sin, and propitiation, which means averting divine judgment. The semantic range of the Greek words hilasmos/hilasterion includes both meanings. That is why the wrath of God cannot be brushed out of the story without remainder.

He quotes British scholar Tony Lane, who explains, "the love of God implies his wrath. Without his wrath God simply does not love in the sense that the Bible portrays his love." God's love is not sentimental; it is holy. It is tender, but not squishy. It involves not only compassion, kindness, and mercy beyond measure (what the New Testament calls grace) but also indignation against injustice and unremitting opposition to all that is evil."

I believe the Bible teaches that an acceptance of the concept of the wrath of God helps us understand the breadth of our salvation.   Because a holy and incredibly, infinitely good God stands in judgment against sin, and we were destined to eternal punishment without God because of our sin, we each have a need for a Savior.   Christ's substitution for us on the cross was the perfect sacrifice to avert God's wrath, an expression of His justice.   And, it is truly, in Him alone - "In Christ Alone" - we can have true salvation.