Thoughts on Ezekiel 18

Today’s reading: Ezekiel 18; 2 Corinthians 13

It’s passages like this one, in Ezekiel 18, that have changed the way I think about the cross.

There are a handful of passages in the Old Testament that make it clear God holds each person accountable for their own sin, and therefore isn’t going to punish someone for the sin of another. But if that’s the case, then how is it that Jesus can take the wrath of God due for our sin?

First off, it is explicitly clear in the New Testament that forgiveness of our sins is only available through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to atone for sin, so that reality is undeniable. I also have to point out that the Old Testament passages, like Ezekiel 18 this morning, declare that God is not going to judge one person for another person’s sins, but they never explicitly say that someone could not volunteer to willingly accept such judgement. It seems to go against the spirit of the teachings in these passages, but they don’t explicitly preclude it, so it may simply be that I’m overthinking things and there really is no issue with the commonly taught conception of the atonement.

But if it’s true that one person cannot simply take someone else’s punishment/judgement in their place, then how is it that Jesus’ death on the cross can pay for our sins?

The way I have come to think of this is in terms of Jesus’ parable of the king who forgives his servant a debt he could never repay, which Jesus uses to speak about forgiveness for wrongdoing.

Thinking about it in terms of a debt, you can only forgive someone a debt if you have the ability to cover the loss yourself. If someone owes you money that you need and don’t have, you can’t actually forgive the debt and you need to make them pay. In that sense, given that the penalty for sin is death, the question is whether or not God has any death (specifically human death) available to Him to “cover” the debt of sin. The obvious answer to that, before the cross, is no, God does not have any human death of His own that He can use to forgive/cover the debt of sin. By coming to earth as a man and dying on the cross though, Jesus accumulated to His own account human death. Having human death of His own then, He can choose to use that to absorb the debt of others who owe Him the same thing.

I’ve found that some people struggle with thinking about it in terms of financial debt though because you can always choose to absorb financial debt, even if it means you go into debt yourself, so I’ve been trying to think of other ways to talk about it. I don’t know if anybody else will find this helpful, but this is the other example I came up with: Imagine I am building a house and agree to swap services with the only drywaller around, where I build him a website for his business and, in exchange, he drywalls my house. Once I build him the site though, before he drywalls my house, he wants out of the trade. I need walls in my house, so I can’t just let him out of it, but there’s not another drywaller around that I could hire and just “absorb” the cost myself. As it is, even if I wanted to let him out of the job, I really can’t because the house needs drywall. If I desire to let him out of the trade though, I do have the option that I could learn to do drywall myself, and therefore create the condition under which I can release him.

In terms of the atonement, God, being perfectly just, cannot simply sweep our sin under the rug without proper payment being made, but, desiring to forgive us and restore us to Himself, He created the scenario where He could forgive us.

Maybe this isn’t exactly how it works, but this, to me at least, would seem to preserve both the fact of Jesus having died on the cross to pay for our sins, as well as the teaching of Scripture that one person will not be held accountable for another person’s sin. It is not that Jesus died for my specific sins, but that Jesus, being God, and having no sin of His own to pay for, chose to die in order to “save up” human death in order to forgive the debts owed against Him by others.