Featured Romans 3:21-26 doesn't support penal substitution

"you have made no attempt to explain why the Lord Jesus refused the wine mixed with myrrh"

For purposes of discussion, I will agree with the interpretation that he refused the wine because it would have lessened the suffering necessary to make atonement for our sin. On the cross, Jesus needed to suffer all of our sin against himself out of obedience to the Father, thus making all of our sin into a display of his obedience. Our sin against God on the cross thus only served to portray the Sons' obedience to the Father on the cross.

Obviously, I agree that we do not owe God a monetary debt. That is the analogy. The currency we owe, as I have made clear, is obedience. The purpose of the car crash analogy is to say that when we sinned, something was broken. Sinners were broken. Sinners became dead in trespasses and sins. Payment must be made to fix the broken sinners. Payment must be made in order to raise sinners from death. The death of Christ is payment made (like I give you $5,000) and the resurrection is payment applied (like you take that $5,000 and actually use it to repair the car). Propitiation (you not being angry) takes place at the moment payment is made, which is why the Scriptures say that the death of Christ achieved propitiation.

Retribution does not accomplish that payment. The purpose of retribution is to stop sin. It is not to pay a debt. If the murderer of my daughter goes to the electric chair, that does nothing to restore to me the thing taken from me—my daughter. Do you see that? It is vital not to confuse restitution and retribution.

"pays in full the penalty that our sins have earned." This makes no sense. You don't pay something that you have earned. You either earn it or you owe it. If you have a check, it makes a vital difference whether you OWE money or have EARNED money. Do you see the contradiction you trying to operate under? Your atonement theory requires that two terms that mean the exact opposite mean the exact same thing—that is a serious problem. The Bible does not confuse restitution and retribution.

 

You say - "We cannot make the words "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" spoken by the Lord Jesus in mark 15:34 mean "My God, My God, You haven't forsaken Me" without making our Lord into a liar."

Jesus is not lying, of course. He, like the psalmist, is saying how he subjectively feels, which the psalm explicitly states is not how things objectively are."I feel completely forsaken of God because of my circumstances, but after meditating on God's faithfulness, I realize the truth that God had never forsaken me. He never turned his face away."

 

Penalty substitution advocates use 2 Corinthians 5:21, that “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in HIm,” to support the concept of double imputation, that our sin was imputed to Jesus so that his righteousness could be imputed to us. They want the verse to say something like, “He made him who knew no sin to be sinful (or guilty of sin by imputation) on our behalf so that we might receive the righteousness of Christ from him (modifications in italics),” but this is not what the text says. NT Wright’s commentary on this verse is very helpful. In the second part of the verse, the phrase “the righteousness of God” does not mean “the righteousness of Christ,” which would refer to the Messiah/Son’s legal status of righteousness. The “righteousness of God” refers, again, to God’s covenant faithfulness to bless all nations through Israel. When Paul says, “we become the righteousness of God,” he is saying that the people of God, the Church in Christ, has become an outworking, demonstration, and manifestation of God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises. Paul is not talking here about the imputation of Christ’s legal status of righteousness to us.

If Paul is talking about a demonstration or manifestation rather than an imputation in this second part of the verse, it follows that he is doing the same thing in the preceding half of the verse, in which he says “God made him who knew no sin to be sin”. Paul is not saying that our sin or guilt was imputed to Jesus, but that the sinless man Jesus was made into an outworking, demonstration, and manifestation of our sin. This certainly describes the cross. The cross is the greatest sin in human history, in which all sin against God and all sin against Man are inflicted upon the God-Man Jesus Christ. No sin that any of us has ever committed is greater than the sin we committed when we crucified Jesus. The worst aspect of any one of our sins is that it contributed to the death of God’s Son. On the cross, Jesus was made my sin. He was made into a demonstration of every human’s sin. Why? So that through Jesus’ resurrection, God would show His faithfulness to his covenantal promises to restore the earth from sin’s destruction.

So here is a paraphrase of the verse: God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be made a manifestation of sin on our behalf, so that we sinners could, in Christ, become the manifestation of God’s covenant faithfulness. As NT Wright says, “God made [the Messiah] to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might embody God’s faithfulness to the covenant.” (Paul and the Faithfulness of God p.20) NT Wright makes the argument also in Resurrection of the Son of God:

Remember the question that is always in the back of Paul’s mind, as well as his Jewish audience: “God, how are you going to prove yourself faithful to your promise to bless all nations through Israel, given that Israel is a nation of sinful human beings?” Paul’s answer here is that, just as God used a sinless person to demonstrate the sinfulness of humanity, so also God uses sinful human beings (in this case the church as the new Israel) to demonstrate His covenant faithfulness.” Humanity’s sin was proved through the cross, and God’s faithfulness is proven through the church.

A couple analogies: Consider the photograph of "Whipped Peter" that was printed in major newspapers preceding the abolition of slavery in the United States. It is a photo of a slaves brutally scarred back. You could say that Peter "became America's sin." Many people finally understood the horrors of slavery when they saw that photo, all the sin was summed up in that one image. Or think of Emmet Til, the young black boy who was brutally tortured and murdered, and whose photo was widespread as a testament to American racism. Emmet Til "became America's sin."

 

Congratulations.

Would you like to make a counterargument of substance?

 

Paul is not saying everything there is to say about the cross in the one verse of 2 Corinthians 5:21.

The purpose of the cross was not merely a demonstration, of course not.

"If I perceive that I have personally sinned against God, is there anything that Christ actually did on the cross that in some way can help me."

Yes, you can die and rise with Christ and by that become a new creation.

"If Jesus had not gone to the cross, and I asked God to forgive me of my sins, could God forgive me?

No. Forgiveness means the offer of restoration from a state of brokenness or deficiency. This offer is made through the resurrection of Jesus.

 

"Our sin is imputed to Christ, and He pays the penalty for it, and His perfect righteousness and obedience is imputed to us. Wonderful! Praise God for His mercy!"

This is a resurrection-less salvation that is foreign to Scripture.

Yes, the Holy Spirit applies the righteousness of Christ to us, but our sin is not imputed to Christ. That would make his sacrifice completely ineffective.

The Holy Spirit applies the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to believers.

I have read John Piper's "Future of Justification." He has the wrong definition of justice/righteousness. I disagree with Wright on many things, but here Wright is right.

 

"what exactly did that obedience achieve?"

Disobedience is a lack (debt) of obedience. Jesus pays our debt of obedience.

"it is a question of God's justice needing to be upheld"

Are you saying God has not punished sin? Let me repeat the paragraph from the Original Post:

Look at this brief sketch of judgment in the Old Testament: humanity is spiritually dead in their own sin, cast out of Paradise and God’s presence and consigned to physical death, a global flood, the scattering of all nations following the tower of Babel, fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, the ten plagues on Egypt including the death of all the firstborn, 40 years wandering in the harsh wilderness, the annihilation of the Canaanites, the persecutions under foreign powers and the wars of the Judges, and then exile to Assyria, then Babylon, then rule under Persia, then Greece, then Rome. Furthermore, when Paul begins his argument in Romans, he begins right off the bat saying that “the wrath of God is revealed (past tense and present tense) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” The following paragraphs of his argument in Romans 1 make all sorts of references to Genesis, making it clear that Paul is arguing about the wrath of God revealed against humanity since humanity’s original Fall. Remember also what we just studied in Galatians 3. The whole problem of Galatians 3 is that Israel is under a curse. So penalty substitution advocates have to argue that though Israel is in bondage to the curse of the law, having drank the cup of God’s anger to the dregs, and though the wrath of God has been revealed from heaven against all ungodliness of humanity, God also seems negligent in punishing sin. That makes absolutely no sense. There is no way that Paul or other Jews in the first century would be sitting around thinking, “Gosh, when is this softy, pacifist God going to start taking sin seriously and execute His punishments?” Yes, they were hoping that God would punish Rome, the current foreign empire they were under, but the narrative context for such punishment would be the elevation of Israel to reign over the world. Again, the real question against God’s justice is when He will restore Israel and the rest of the nations through her; any expected outpouring of wrath would fit within the pursuit of that goal.

Look at these strong statements from the prophets Isaiah and Daniel that God has been active in punishing Israel for her sins. In Isaiah 51:17, the prophet says to Jerusalem, “Arise, O Jerusalem, You who have drunk from the LORD’S hand the cup of His anger; The chalice of reeling you have drained to the dregs.” Jerusalem had drained the cup of God’s wrath down to the dregs. Is that compatible with the idea that God seemed to let their sins go unpunished? Similarly, in Daniel 9:11 (mentioned previously), Daniel confesses that, “Indeed all Israel has transgressed Your law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice; so the curse has been poured out on us, along with the oath which is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against Him.” Again, it makes no sense to have these verses in mind and then think that there is some major problem of God appearing negligent in punishing sin.

"If the death of your daughter's murderer does not help your grief..."

Punishment has a purpose. But it is not to make restitution. Punishment does not accomplish payment for an offense.

I do not know how many times I need to say this, but wages are earned, not paid. Have you ever had a job?

 

The problem with sin is that sin itself is destructive to God’s good creation. Sin is rebellion against God and His created order, and therefore is necessarily self-destructive. God does indeed punish sin, but the purpose of His punishments is NOT to ensure that sin results in destruction for sinners. Sinners, in the very acts of sin, are already destroying themselves. If God never lifted a finger to punish sin, sin itself would still destroy sinners. The purpose of God’s wrath is to restrain and/or to rectify sin.

It is impossible to rebel against God’s decrees without simultaneously rebelling against God’s created order established in the laws of nature, because as human beings, we are designed to love God and enjoy Him forever. That is our function. When we rebel against God’s decrees, we are simultaneously rebelling against our own design, our own function, our own created order, necessarily violating and destroying our created order in the act of sin itself.

What I am arguing is that we cannot be tempted to think of sin as just a trespass of a divine decree that has no destructive effects other than what God imposes as punishments. We cannot be tempted to think that without God’s imposed punishments, sin might actually be fun, happy and fulfilling, and this indeed is the view of sin that penalty substitution seems to present. But that is not how the Bible presents things. In the Bible, sin is a destructive lie. It is not some alternate true path to happiness that God dislikes and therefore punishes. It’s not as if God is saying, “Well, you could be happy and fulfilled living in that sin, but it would really make me angry, and so I am going to bring the wrath down on you.” No, it is absolutely impossible to find happiness in sin. Sin may allow us to temporarily hijack a limited amount of pleasure with stolen goods, but there is no true joy or fulfillment in that, and the misery of such self-destruction is always exponentially worse than the short-lived high.

 

There is nothing I disagree with here:

"I believe that our main problem is that we are by nature in opposition to a holy God and our main problem is the sin we have done and the sin we seem to be prone to do. And I believe that we are talking primarily about individual sin against God - not just the collective state of humanity."

As far as my school of thought, here are major theologians throughout history who describe the atoning work of Christ in ways I agree with. Notice how they formulate the atonement mechanism around the injustice of Jesus' death:

Augustine:

-It is not then difficult to see that the devil was conquered, when he who was slain by Him rose again. It is something more, and more profound of comprehension, to see that the devil was conquered when he thought himself to have conquered, that is, when Christ was slain. For then that blood, since it was His who had no sin at all, was poured out for the remission of our sins; that, because the devil deservedly held those whom, as guilty of sin, he bound by the condition of death, he might deservedly loose them through Him, whom, as guilty of no sin, the punishment of death undeservedly affected. The strong man was conquered by this righteousness, and bound with this chain, that his vessels might be spoiled, which with himself and his angels had been vessels of wrath while with him, and might be turned into vessels of mercy.

-What then is the justice that overpowered the devil? The justice of Jesus Christ—what else? And how was he overpowered? The devil found nothing in Christ deserving of death and yet he killed him. It is therefore perfectly just that the devil should let the debtors he held go free, who believe in the one whom he killed without his being in his debt. This is how we are said to be justified in the blood of Christ. This is how that innocent blood was shed for the forgiveness of our sins.

John Chrysostom gives a similar cross narrative to Augustine,

“It is as if Christ said, ‘Now shall a trial be held, and a judgment be pronounced. How and in what manner? He (the devil) smote the first man (Adam), because he found him guilty of sin; for it was through sin that death entered in. But he did not find any sin in Me; wherefore then did he fall on Me and give Me up to the power of death? . . . How is the world now judged in Me?’ It is as if it were said to the devil at a seat of judgment: ‘Thou didst smite them all, because thou didst find them guilty of sin; wherefore then didst thou smite Christ? Is it not evident that thou didst this wrongfully? Therefore the whole world shall become righteous through Him.’”

John of Damascus, who according to professor Tom McCall, “often serves as a sort of summary of mature Patristic theology,” in the 8th century says the same thing:

Since our Lord Jesus Christ was without sin (for He committed no sin, He Who took away the sin of the world, nor was there any deceit found in His mouth ) He was not subject to death, since death came into the world through sin. Romans 5:12 He dies, therefore, because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes Himself an offering to the Father for our sakes. For we had sinned against Him, and it was meet that He should receive the ransom for us, and that we should thus be delivered from the condemnation. God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant. Wherefore death approaches, and swallowing up the body as a bait is transfixed on the hook of divinity, and after tasting of a sinless and life-giving body, perishes, and brings up again all whom of old he swallowed up. For just as darkness disappears on the introduction of light, so is death repulsed before the assault of life, and brings life to all, but death to the destroyer.

Anselm of Canterbury, in the 11th century, says this aspect is part of the popular view of atonement in his day.

“That God, in order to set mankind free, was obliged to act against the devil by justice rather than mighty power. We reason that thus the devil, having killed Him in whom there was no guilt deserving death and who was God, would justly lose the power which he used to have over sinners.”

Now, Anselm brings up important and helpful qualifications in his treatise Cur Deus Homo as to how we should think about Jesus’ conflict with the devil, particularly that nothing is owed to the devil, but he never refutes the idea that the devil unjustly killed the Son of God.

Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, affirms the injustice of Jesus’ death as well:

“Christ's Passion delivered us from the devil, inasmuch as in Christ's Passion [the devil] exceeded the limit of power assigned him by God, by conspiring to bring about Christ's death, Who, being sinless, did not deserve to die. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. xiii, cap. xiv): "The devil was vanquished by Christ's justice: because, while discovering in Him nothing deserving of death, nevertheless he slew Him. And it is certainly just that the debtors whom he held captive should be set at liberty since they believed in Him whom the devil slew, though He was no debtor."

Martin Luther, in the 16th century, applies the loss of rights to the Law rather than the devil (Notice how inconsistent this quotation from Luther is with the previous quotation from his Commentary on Galatians):

“Thou hearest that Christ was caught in the bondage in which we all were held, was set under the Law, was a man full of all grace, righteousness, etc., full of life, yea, He was even the Life itself; now comes the Law and casts itself at Him and would deal with Him as with all other men. Christ sees this, lets the tyrant perform his will upon Him, lets the reproach of all guilt fall against Himself as one accursed, yea, bears the name that He Himself is the curse, and goes to suffer for this cause, dies, and is buried. Now, thinks the Law, He is overpowered; but it knew not that it had so grievously mistaken itself, and that it had condemned and throttled the Son of God; and since it has now judged and condemned Him, who was guiltless and over whom it had no authority, it must in its turn be taken, and see itself made captive and crucified, and lose all its power, and lie under the feet of Him whom it had condemned.”

As CS Lewis says, when our Lord was roaming around Narnia in the form of a giant, magical, not-safe-yet-good lion, he said,

“when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

The injustice of Aslan’s death triggers the reversal of death.

Moving on, even John Stott, a staunch penal substitution advocate, agrees that the resurrection was God’s reversal of man’s injustice:

“The resurrection was the divine reversal of the human verdict.”

And last on our list, NT Wright, makes a similar statement to John Stott about Jesus’ resurrection:

“Israel’s God, the creator, had reversed the verdict of the court, in reversing the death sentence it carried out. Jesus really was the king of the Jews; and, if he was the Messiah, he really was the lord of the world, as the psalms had long ago insisted.”