What do we mean when we say that Christ died for our sins? Did Christ die on the cross in a grand display of self-sacrifice in order that God might be moved to pity and mercy? Some people erroneously believe this to be true.

 Or is the death of Christ intended to be an appeasement of an angry God?    Or is the death of Christ a case of goodness on display? A supreme example of turning the other cheek to evil? Is his death on the cross-meant to reveal God as a suffering servant so as to provoke all men of good will to be like Jesus and live a life of self-sacrifice, goodness and righteousness? Some people mistakenly believe that this is the central meaning of the cross.

          Or does the death of Christ serve as a moral expedient on the part of the Creator in order to save the divine law from contempt? Christ’s death in such a case is a representation of the divine law Givers just displeasure of man’s failure to obey the law. He would therefore use this extreme means to uphold the dignity of God as the Law-Giver and at the same time serve to convince man that it is not wise to do wrong, but safe and wise to do right and obey God. Some people shallowly believe that this is what it means when we say Christ died for our sins.

          I submit that if Christ’s death on the cross was intended merely to be some sort of influence for good or expression of divine displeasure that it was not essential to man’s salvation for Christ to have died on the cross. God could have pardoned the sinner by some other arrangement. Would it have been necessary for God’s Son to suffer the terrible shame and agony of the cross to show God’s hatred for sin and rebellion? Was the glory of perfect blessedness of the second Person of the Trinity esteemed by God to be less important than man? Is it right that sinful man should be able to handle and abuse the eternal, holy glorious Son of God solely in order to make a point for God in the argument against sin?

For deity to be exposed to indignity and shame and contempt for any reason except that it was the one and only way for God to save fallen, sinful man is to say of God that his own glory should be subservient to that which he has created, that his own dignity, holiness and ineffable glory is of secondary importance and can be set aside at any time when it seems to be a fairly good way of executing his will. What preposterous nonsense!

          What nation sends her youth to war to be wounded and maimed and killed if there s any other way to achieve victory? What mother sacrifices her son to the cause of freedom for America if she thinks another way would have worked just as well? What father stands silently by and sees his son cruelly beaten, inhumanly tortured and unjustly executed just so a few of the people might have this example of goodness and self-sacrifice?  No my friends, unless there is about the death of Christ on the cross the element of absolute necessity it is a mockery of God’s glory and power. Unless God does something at the cross that is absolutely unique, utterly essential and which will add to his glory, it is unworthy of God, it then would be as the world says, foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18).

          To set forth the correct answer to the question, what do we mean when we say that Christ died for our sins? We must begin with the divine government.

          Let us begin by stating that the divine government springs from the very bosom of God, not as a matter of expediency but as an absolute necessity to exhibit the eternal principles of holiness, which belong to God’s essence.

          To illustrate we can think of our own government in America as the outflow of those majestic principles set forth in the constitution of the United States. The nature and integrity of our government is dependent upon fixed principles spelled out by our forefathers in the constitution.

          God is in and of himself the constitution of his own divine government. He must display in the divine government those attributes of deity that are eternal and unchangeable.

           God himself is the Governor of the universe by an inalienable right. His glory demands that he be the sovereign Lord above all other powers he has created. At least two elements must be included in the divine government: first, a rule of action – Law. This is implicit in the created universe, in the orderliness and harmony; it is explicit in the moral orderliness required by God in the law of God given in the Holy Scriptures, which brings us to the second element in the divine government, penal sanction to maintain and protect God’s pure and perfect holiness. By this I mean punishment for breaking the law.

          Punishment presupposes crime as well as injury, yet it is the crime that justifies the punishment in the moral sense of the community.

          Here is a man who enters another man’s house, steals his goods, defiles his wife and murders the husband when he attempts to stop him. The criminal is guilty of breaking the law, but the law is powerless and useless unless suitable punishment is invoked. Telling the criminal that he has broken the law does not satisfy the moral sense of the community.

Penal laws have their origin in the demands of justice; they are not evolved out of a policy of expediency. Even so, the fires of hell were not kindled to display the mercy of God. Hell is prepared for those who reject God’s rule and raise the flag of rebellion. To remove the penalty from the divine law is to wrest the scepter from the hands of Deity. It deprives God of his essential dignity and sovereignty and presents him before his creatures in the debasing posture of a suppliant at their feet. The scripture states, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Psa. 111:10)

          In giving the law Moses stated, fear the LORD your God, and be careful to observe all the words of this law.   (Deut 31:12)

          It needs also to be said that the primary design of the divine government to not the good of the subjects. It is intended to express his glorious supremacy and springs from the relations he sustains to his creatures. Of course happiness cannot be separated from obedience to the law of God. Man was created in such a fashion that his greatest happiness consists in adapting himself to God’s Law; his life must harmonize with the Law. We are to submit to God, his government, and his rule.

²⁸for in Him we live and move and exist, Acts 17:28   ³   Know that the LORD Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and ^not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Psa. 100:3

          But persuasion or the giving of advice does not obtain obedience. Obedience is obtained when authority is recognized and man accepts a sense of obligation. A police officer may try to persuade the thief not to rob or kill somebody, he may advise him that he will be making a mistake, but is the Billy club in his hand and the pistol at his side which lends authority to the policeman’s words; it is the threat of prison or the hangman’s noose that deters the willful criminal. He will only scoff and laugh at your advice.

          But for a proper understanding of Christ’s death on the cross we must note carefully the fact that all men are guilty of sin, condemned to eternal punishment, and utterly unable to find a place for hope or help.

          The apostle Paul sets forth the fact of man’s universal sinfulness in his letter to the Romans Rom. 3:10-20 as it is written,

  “There is none righteous, not even one;

¹¹ There is none who understands,

  There is none who seeks for God;

¹² All have turned aside, together they have become useless;

  There is none who does good,

  There is not even one.”

¹³ “Their throat is an open grave,

  With their tongues they keep deceiving,”

  “The poison of asps is under their lips”;

¹⁴ “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;

¹⁵ “Their feet are swift to shed blood,

¹⁶ Destruction and misery are in their paths,

¹⁷ And the path of peace they have not known.”

¹⁸ “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

¹⁹Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; ²⁰because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.

          The whole idea of repentance is to seek and secure pardon, and this is precisely what the penalty for sin has forever barred the sinner from obtaining. Sin is always attended by death. Banishment from God is occasioned by even the slightest sin. To see the impossibility of this happening we can see that even in human courts of justice a just judge cannot set aside the law and exonerate the criminal merely on the grounds that he evidences repentance. The law stands demanding satisfaction.  

          I once visited a police court and observed the proceedings for a time. Judge William F. Braziel was on the bench. In rapid succession he heard several cases of men charged with drunkenness. He had one sentence, which was uniformly and without respect of persons meted out, Thirty dollars or thirty days. When one of the men protested the sentence the judge told him that he made no exceptions. He said, “Go downstairs and ask around. I don’t make exceptions.”

          One man seemed particularly insistent that he had turned over a new leaf. He promised the judge that he would not get drunk again. But the judge refused to set aside the standard sentence.                  

          The Law cannot be set aside by repentance. Pardon cannot be granted without degrading the majesty of the Law and the divine government. Repentance like Cain or Judas, though it involved shame, remorse and fear, was nevertheless not true repentance because the Law remained unsatisfied and consequently there was no moral change such as would have been the case if regeneration and sanctification had taken place. Only acquittal satisfies the law.

          The Glory of the cross is to be seen in the doctrine of substitution. Substitution is undoubtedly an ultimate principle in the moral government of God. Mediation pervades the arrangements of providence as well as the economy of grace. But the grand difficulty is to find a representative who, without the entire destruction of himself, could exhaust the curse imposed by the Law.

          Where shall the sinner look for help? If he should look to his own fallen race, the descendants of Adam, all is bleak and destitute of hope. Every man is under the same curse as his brother. There is none who can redeem his fellowman or pay the ransom that would secure pardon for all others.  

He cannot look to the angels for help. Man and man alone is the guilty party, and it must be man who satisfies the Law.

          Should he search heaven and earth for a proper substitute there is not a single creature who can meet the

qualifications. God cannot absolutely pardon. He can only transfer the punishment to a substitute. He cannot set aside the law and its penalty. He can only redirect the penalty to an acceptable substitute.

          The sublime idea of the incarnation and death of the Son of God could only have originated in the mind of him who is wonderful in counsel and unseachable in his judgments.

In Isaiah 63:5 we read, ⁵  “I looked, and there was no one to help, And I was astonished and there was no one to uphold; So My own arm brought salvation to Me, And My wrath upheld Me.

          We find the same thing in Revelation 5:1-10 where John sees the One seated on the throne of God holding in his hand a book sealed with seven seals and there was no one to open the book in heaven or on earth. And John wept profusely because there was no one until he was told to stop weeping because the lion of the tribe of Judah had prevailed to open the book.

          In Jesus Christ we find a perfect Savior, a blessed substitute and Mediator of God’s grace. Here is a kinsman who is able to endure the wrath of God and recover from the blow. He is able to fulfill all righteousness and in dying conquer death.

          Isaiah wrote: ¹ Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

² For He grew up ^before Him like a tender shoot, And like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty

  That we should look upon Him,

  Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

  And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

⁴ Surely our griefs He Himself bore,

  And our sorrows He carried;

  Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,   Smitten of God, and afflicted. ⁵  But He was ^pierced through for our transgressions,

  He was crushed for our iniquities;

  The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed. ⁶ All of us like sheep have gone astray,

  Each of us has turned to his own way;     But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.

Isa. 53:1-6

    What we mean when we say that Christ died for our sins is that he alone could be and was the unique Savior. His death was and is utterly essential in order to satisfy the penal sanctions of the eternal and fixed law of God. Without the satisfactory substitutionary death of Jesus Christ there could be no remission of sins, no possibility of repentance and reconciliation.

          The makes the cross of Jesus Christ central to Christianity. This is what is means in our text ¹³For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.²⁰and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

Winston Churchill paid a great tribute to the young men of the Royal Air Force who mounted up with wings as eagles and with their sheltering wings guarded the land they loved. He said, “Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few”

But when we think of the cross of Christ, and him who died on it, what we say is this: “Never in the history of the universe has mankind owned so much to one.”

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The paper and sermon manuscripts from Pastor Todd W. Allen are made freely available for review and distribution. We only request that proper web page attribution be provided if distributed for any reason. Please be gracious to forgive typos and errors of expression. These notes are faithful approximations of what has been preached. May God be glorified in the preaching of His Word.

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