The Significance of Christ’s Propitiation (part two)
By Jay Wegter
God’s patience is beyond our comprehension; His plan to send Christ to earth to take on our nature was the great mystery kept secret in the bosom of God for long ages past (Rom 16:25-27). For centuries the animal sacrifices commanded by God had been pointing out that apart from the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin (Lev 17:11; Heb 9:22). The lesson in thousands of years of animal sacrifice was that the bestowal of pardoning mercy is predicated upon the satisfaction of justice. For several millennia God had been making this point. The Ark of the Covenant was a visual aid to communicate this lesson. The tablets of the law rested beneath the Mercy Seat. Law and mercy were at odds, and could only operate together if the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on the Mercy Seat. Someday the blood on the Mercy Seat would be the blood of God’s own Son when Christ would give His life and enter into the Holy Place made without hands—into heaven itself to represent us.
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption (Heb 9:11-15).
Thus, in the great hidden mystery of God, Immanuel (God with us) would come to make the ultimate and final, all-sufficient atonement with His own blood (Heb 10: 10-18). God in Christ would invade man’s realm of darkness and ruin in order to bring about a marvelous deliverance. In order to do so, the Son of God had to take our nature upon Himself in order to accomplish the deliverance (Heb 2:9-18). Our rescue could not be accomplished unless two things took place: the nature that sinned (our human nature) must be fully punished, and the nature that failed to supply obedience must obey perfectly. Christ did both in order to bring us to God (2 Cor 5:21). Christ is such a perfect Substitute that what He has done in His living and dying and rising counts as if the believing sinner himself has done it. The propitiation accomplished by Christ is the ‘Mount Everest’ of Holy Scripture, for from this aery summit we may survey the totality of God’s revelation (J. I. Packer). Propitiation is the ‘mountain peak’ that gives us a lofty enough vantage point to view God’s purposes. From this summit we see that through a massive guilt transfer God is making a new humanity in Christ. The scarlet cord of redemption which we trace from Genesis to Revelation leads all the way into the Holy of Holies. Christ is God’s great mystery; for in becoming a man, God in Christ redeems man and brings the elect into the very presence of God eternally (Rev 21:1-7; Heb 6:18-20; 1 Thess 4:14-18). In so doing, God is glorifying His grace forever— and He is doing so by imputing the sins of the elect to Christ in the work of propitiation and He is imputing the righteousness of Christ to the elect in justification. This is how we are ‘right with the Righteous One’. Propitiation controlled Christ’s life and mission—He came to lay His life down for His sheep (Jn 10:15). God gives Christ to be the propitiation for our sins (1 Jn 4:10), in order that He might deal decisively with the most formidable obstacle imaginable: our sin in the sight of our Holy God. The propitiation accomplished by Christ quenched and pacified the wrath of God toward us (Rom 5:9). And, thus the propitiation opened up the floodgates of blessing to believing sinners. Those in covenant with God through the blood of Christ now possess ‘precious and magnificent promises’ (2 Pet 1:4). This means that God is for us—He takes endless delight in exporting His love, light, life, blessedness, and favor to us in Christ. This is difficult for us to believe at times. For we are frequently disillusioned with ourselves: “How can God remain in a posture of Fatherly favor toward me when I fail Him so often?” The gospel answer is that Christ has won this status of sonship for us—He performed for us—He is our ‘eligibility’ for endless installments of grace from the Father (Rom 8:14-25). The propitiation wrought by Christ has removed every obstacle to the unimpeded flow and enjoyment of God’s love to the believer: We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the Day of Judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us (1 Jn 4:16-19).
This unending flow of love to us through Christ has a ‘perfecting’ effect upon us; for as we commune and fellowship with God, walking with Him as sons, we are conformed to the image of Christ; the perfect Son (1 Jn 4:17-18). So fully does propitiation remove the obstacles that stand in the way of the enjoyment of God and His love, that believers are called to spend the remainder of their endless existence ‘bathing’ in the unobstructed love of the Father.
That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God (Eph 3:16-19).
Our response (loving God and the brethren) to this exotic, ‘other world’ love (1 Jn 3:1) is reflexive—we do not manufacture agape love; it is the ‘reflex’ of God’s children as they receive their Heavenly Father’s love. That is the message of 1 John chapter four. But the ability to receive God’s love and pass it back to God and the saints is stipulated upon the finality of a perfect propitiation. Christ’s atoning work removes the barrier between sinner and holy God. Christ given to be our propitiation is the apex of God’s love to us (1 Jn 4:10). Christ’s work of substitution involves not only His assumption of the direct penalty for sin of death, wrath, and separation from God, but also the emotional and relational consequences of sin. In His vicarious death our Lord assumes our dis-relatedness and alienation in order that we might be reconciled to God. This means that in His death and suffering, He took upon Himself the legal, emotional, relational, and spiritual consequences of our sin. By becoming a curse for us; He has born the very division which sin produces (Gal 3:13). Therefore, He is our peace (Eph 2:14).