I favor penal substitution. The sacrificial language is clear throughout scripture. (Substitute) “The Lamb of God that takes away sin…” refers to the OT sacrificial system where the sins of people were “transferred” to the animal sacrifice to appease the wrath of God for one year.
Hebrews refers to this sacrifice as the shadow of Christs once for all sacrifice.
Paul’s of “justified by faith” as forensic (before a court) supports penal substitution.
I just see too many scriptures that support Penal Substitution to change my mind on it.
peace to you
This is how the sacrificial system works:
When a person sins, he becomes corrupt, and he therefore threatens to pollute the surrounding community and environment with his corruption (In a sense, he becomes dead, and therefore threatens to pollute the community with death). There are two options to get rid of the corruption: (1) cut off the corrupt person from the community through exile or execution, or (2) purify the person from corruption. The agent of purification given by God is the shed blood of an innocent sacrifice. There is something about the innocent blood that reverses, cleanses, heals, covers over, purifies or undoes the corruption in God’s creation. This is why the priests would sprinkle all of the holy objects with blood in order to purify them. As Jewish scholar Robert Alter says, “blood has a purifying function, serving as what Jacob Milgrom calls a “spiritual detergent.” (The Five Books of Moses. P.778) In fact some scholars vigorously argue that the offering generally designated as a “Sin Offering” in English translations is better translated “Purification Offering.”(The Five Books of Moses. P.556, IVP Old Testament Commentary). It is important to realize that after an offerer would slay his sacrifice, he would be completely covered in blood. If blood is a purifying agent for corruption, that corruption would definitely be washed away!
The sacrifice does NOT suffer the wrath of God in place of the offerer as a substitute. Furthermore, God’s motives for carrying out His wrath or restraining His wrath are different. In the Bible, God’s motive for exercising wrath is to purify and protect His good creation, not simply to carry out a legal duty to punish, or defend His honor. His goal is to “destroy those who destroy the earth (Rev 11:18)” in order to protect the earth and its inhabitants. God’s reason for withholding wrath from the offerer is not that He has exhausted His wrath on a substitute, but that the corruption His wrath would eliminate has been purified, and so His wrath is no longer necessary. The offerer’s avoidance of wrath is secondary to the offerer’s transition from a state of corruption to purification, and by analogy, from a state of death to a state of resurrection.
Furthermore, if a ritual sacrifice was supposed to communicate vicarious punishment, we might expect that the priest or another third party, as representative of God’s justice, would be the one to slay the sacrifice to demonstrate God’s wrath punishing the animal instead of the sinner. But this is not what happens. It is always the sinner himself that slays the sacrifice, before the anointed priest sprinkles the blood and arranges the pieces.
In every sacrifice, the offerers/sinners slay the sacrifice. Take a look at the list:
In a Burnt Offering (Lev 1:5, 1:11) the sinner slays the sacrifice.
In a Peace Offering (Lev 3:2, 3:4, 3:13) the sinner slays the sacrifice.
In a Sin Offering (Lev 4:4, 4:14, 4:24, 4:29, 4:33) the sinner slays the sacrifice.
In a Guilt Offering (Lev 7:2) the sinners slays the sacrifice.
On the Day of Atonement, the sinners (represented in the priest) slay the sacrifice.
In the Ordinance of the Red Heifer (Num 19:3) the sinners slay the sacrifice.
In the Passover (Ex 12:6), the sinners slay the sacrifice.
In the Declaration of Innocence (Deut 21:4) the elders who could be charged with sin slay the sacrifice.
That is 15 examples - a lot of data, representing nearly every sacrifice. There is a clear pattern here. The priest only slays the animal if it is a corporate sacrifice, in which he sums up the congregation in himself; he is the community of sinners. And he only does this after slaying a sacrifice for his own sins. The priest slays the animal as a representative of sinners in need of redemption, not as a representative of the one offended by sin or of the justice system.
As N.T. Wright notes, “the old idea of sin being transferred to the sacrificial animal seems not to work either; sacrificial animals had to be pure, and the one time that sins are clearly placed on an animal’s head the animal in question (the second goat on the Day of Atonement) is not sacrificed, but driven off into the wilderness. (N.T. Wright. The New Testament and the People of God. P.274.)
