Thoughts on 2 Corinthians 5

Today's reading: Exodus 14; 2 Corinthians 5

There are a handful of things I could write about this morning out of Exodus 14 or 2 Cor. 5, but what I’ve landed on is a theory I have been playing around with in my head for a while now that 2 Cor. 5 gives a decent spring-board to. I want to do a more fully developed write-up on this at some point, but I also just want to get it out there to be able to collect other people’s thoughts on it to help me flesh out my thinking on it.

So word of warning, today’s post will be less devotional and more technical, so I won’t be offended if you don’t feel like diving down the rabbit hole with me.

But for those of you who do want to jump in, this is a bit of a primer on my thoughts on the mechanical aspects of substitutionary atonement.

On the Mechanics of Substitutionary Atonement

There have, historically, been a lot of different theories on the atonement, many of which have at least some amount of merit, but none of which is complete without at least some understanding of Jesus’ death as substitutionary. There are other passages that make the substitution even more clear and therefore even more necessary to any understanding of the atonement, but some of Paul’s words here in 2 Cor. 5 give us a clear enough picture that I’m going to call it sufficient for this post today:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

What is clear in the substitutionary aspect of the atonement is that Jesus died in our place to allow us to be reconciled to God. It was (and is) sin which alienates us from God, and death, from the beginning in Genesis, was declared to be the result of our sin, or the the “wages” of sin as Paul puts it in Romans 6.

The basic formulation you often hear then (and that I often use as well), is that all humanity is separated from God by our sin, and death is required to pay for that sin, so we have no way in ourselves to rectify the situation and restore the relationship with God. But God, in his great love for us, sent his only son, Jesus, down to earth to live the perfect, sinless life we were supposed to live, and to die in our place so we wouldn’t have to. Since Jesus never sinned, he has no sin of his own to pay for, so his death can pay for another person’s sins. But because Jesus is not only man, but also fully God, and God is infinite, his death can pay for an infinite amount of sin. And so we can know with confidence that, in Christ, every sin is forgiven and therefore relationship with God is restored.

And while I don’t take issue with that formulation in general, there is one potential monkey wrench to throw into the works…

My “problem” with substitutionary atonement

Deuteronomy 24:16 says:

Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.

It is explicit here in Deuteronomy that each person is responsible for their own sin.

Now, I have to acknowledge that you could very much argue this verse away in this context. That this is declaring that, within the judicial system, you cannot exact punishment on someone for someone else’s sin, but it is not necessarily saying that someone else would be disallowed from stepping in and taking the punishment on themselves.

However, Jeremiah and Ezekiel also reference this verse, or at least use very similar language, and when they do it is in reference, not to judicial judgment with Israel, but to God’s justice/judgment.

For the sake of this post not getting crazy long, I am going to stop here on this point and move on, but moving on under the assumption that, in God’s view of justice as we see it outlined in Scripture, you cannot just kill one person in place of another and call the offender’s debt to be paid.

But isn’t this what we are saying is happening in the atonement? Aren’t we saying that Jesus’ death pays for my sins so that my death doesn’t have to pay for them and I can instead be restored into relationship with God?

To me, this is a problem. To be clear though, it is a very limited problem. On the one hand, the substitution, as I noted at the beginning, is clearly taught in Scripture, so however it does or doesn’t work mechanically, it is a reality. On the other hand, I also have to fully recognize and admit that “the foolishness of God is greater than human wisdom,” so even if I feel confused on this point, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or isn’t truth. So even if what I propose as a “solution” isn’t correct, that’s fine, because the truth remains that Jesus died for our sins and by his death and resurrection we can be justified, and at the end of the day, that is enough.

My proposal on the mechanics of the substitution

My proposal for a solution to the problem I’ve outlined above comes from the analogy Jesus himself gives us in the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18. The parable, if you are unfamiliar, is about a servant who is forgiven an impossibly large debt by his master only to turn around and have a fellow servant who owed him a much smaller debt thrown in prison when he was unable to immediately pay, and Jesus ties God’s forgiveness of our sins to the forgiveness of the debt in his parable.

Looking at it through this lens, I want to propose that it is impossible to forgive a debt that you do not have the means to cover. If you owe me $20 and I forgive you that debt, it doesn’t just disappear, I am absorbing that debt, meaning I have sufficient funds in my personal account to be able to allow you to not pay me back. On the flip side, if you ask me to forgive you a debt that I don’t have the means to cover, and I need that money to be able to pay my own bills, for example, I am not able to forgive the debt because I don’t have the extra on hand to absorb the loss.

Now lets consider our sin to be incurring a debt against God’s justice, and death being the required repayment. God, perfect in justice, cannot simply sweep that debt under the rug because that would be a violation of justice to allow the guilty to go free without proper recompense. So the question is, can he absorb that debt? If he desires to forgive the debt, does he have sufficient “capital” to cover it? And I think the answer here is no, he doesn’t (or at least didn’t before the cross).

If the payment required to cover the debt of sin is human death, God has none of that in his “account.”

In a similar way that the author of Hebrews can say that Jesus had to be made perfect as our high priest (he was morally perfect, but it was not until he was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin, that he could be perfect in that role), so too God, though creator and author of all the exists, not being a human, and not having died, did not have the “funds” available to absorb the forgiven debt.

And this brings us to the solution in Jesus. Following the earlier formulation, Jesus is God incarnate, fully God and fully man. As a man, he lived a perfect, sinless life and died a death he did not need or deserve to die, and in so doing makes an “excess” of human death available to his (God’s) “account.” Plus, Jesus being God, is infinite, and in that sense he is able to accrue, in a finite amount of time, an infinite amount of human death to his own account.

All this means that God, in Christ, now has the means available to forgive/absorb the debt of human sin.

Functionally, this looks no different, but mechanically, it is actually very different under the hood. Instead of Jesus dying for my sins specifically (one man dying for another’s sins), he is taking the initiative to make available to himself the necessary means to be able to forgive and absorb the debts owed against him by others, and then, having accomplished that, makes that forgiveness available to us by faith.

So going back to the financial loan, if I personally want to forgive your debt, but don’t currently have the means to actually let you off the hook and absorb it myself, it is fully my prerogative to go get a second job, sell something valuable, or find some other means to raise the money, on my end, in order to forgive you the debt.

My suggestion then is that God, in his great love for us, desiring to forgive our sins and restore us in relationship to himself, would have been violating his own justice to simply wipe away our transgressions without sufficient payment available to cover the debt, and so took it upon himself to procure the needed “funds” by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.