A Deeper Magic

No.103: April 15, 2022

Dear Friends,

A Happy Good Friday to you!

This time of year a perennial debate inevitably flares up regarding the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, the idea that Jesus Christ bore the judicial wrath of God in place of condemned sinners. I am well aware of the many attempts throughout the centuries to deny this doctrine. It seems for some people to conflict with the love of God, and it involves uncomfortable ideas of sacrifice and bloodshed and wrath. One pastor described the doctrine as “Cosmic Child Abuse.” “God the Father beats the innocent Son out of anger” doesn’t sound like a very moral or wholesome idea when it is framed in those terms.

Nevertheless, I remain unmoved by these arguments. I believe one can only deny this doctrine by simply ignoring vast swaths of Scripture and intentionally and illegitimately revising key biblical concepts of sacrifice and atonement. It is the teaching of the Bible that Jesus willingly takes the place of sinners and bears the judgment of the Father on their behalf. And far from being something that puts God in a bad light, a miserly light, a reluctant light, as though he is acting in a fit of rage and anger, it is the ultimate revelation of God’s love. It is the very definition of love. This is what John tells us:

This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10).

I struggle to imagine how John could have said it any more clearly. No amount of lexical sophistry can change it.

Even so, sometimes even those of us who embrace this blessed doctrine can be a bit sloppy sometimes. One of my favorite hymns for Good Friday begins like this:

Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted, see him dying on the tree!

It’s an allusion, of course, to Isaiah 53, that glorious prophetic song of the Suffering Servant. Isaiah says that “we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.” It’s an evocative arrangement of words, that. Stricken, smitten, and afflicted. We sing these words and we cherish these words as we think about Christ on the cross.

But, I suggest, we also tend to slightly misunderstand these words.

Here’s the relevant passage:

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

Like one from whom men hide their faces

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he took up our infirmities

and carried our sorrows,

yet we considered him stricken by God,

smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace

was upon him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

We all like sheep have gone astray,

each of us to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

This passage is about a mistaken assessment of the Messiah. We “despised and rejected” him.” We “hid our faces.” We “esteemed him not.” We “considered him” stricken by God. Isaiah is saying that these assessments have it all wrong.

It may come as a surprise, but Isaiah’s point here is that he was not stricken by God—at least not in the ordinary, natural way we understand it.

The setup of this passage is that the suffering Messiah undergoes such shame, such agony, such suffering that it is perfectly natural to assume he has been cursed by God. And that’s a pretty natural reaction. It is exactly the conclusion of Job’s friends: if this is happening to you, you must be suffering for some grave, deeply held sin! The world sees it that way, too. You must have done something bad in a previous life. Karma is obviously out to get you. What did you do to make God angry?

You must be stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.

“But”—but, but, but, but, BUT—Isaiah immediately says, “he was pierced for our transgressions.” Our iniquities. Our chastisement.

Notice that constant inversion in the text, a constant replacement—or substitution!—between “he” and “we.” He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God. It looks for all the world that this Servant is suffering for his own impiety of some kind; Isaiah tells us that that is not what is going on at all.

He’s not suffering for his own sins. He’s suffering for ours.

In one sense, then, in the death of Christ it is not he who is stricken, smitten, and afflicted; it is we who are stricken, smitten, and afflicted. He is standing in our place. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. That is, the text insists on our sinfulness and his own personal innocence.

But if we leave it there it can be a misleading simplification of this great mystery. For it seems to separate the Messiah from his people, the Savior from those he redeems, the innocent from the guilty; it can, as in Gnosticism, seem as though he isn’t really suffering. It can seem as though our iniquities are not really “laid on him,” like he abstractly carries our sins to the cross in a knapsack and just drops them off. But the thrust of the passage points in the opposite direction, for what happens to the Servant results in decisive benefits for his people. It is axiomatic: his punishment=our peace. His wounds=our healing. Yes, it is we who are stricken (because it is our punishment), but that is because it is he who is stricken (even though innocent). For this to be true, there must be some sense in which our iniquities really are laid on him; that somehow our sins become his; how else can the “peace” that comes from his punishment be our peace, and not just his own? There is an inescapable two-way transaction happening here. He takes our sin, we get his innocence. He suffers our punishment, we get his peace. He takes our wounds, we get his healing. He tastes our death, and gives us his life.

There must be some union, some connection, some “deeper magic”—as C.S. Lewis put it—that enables this kind of substitution, this reality where what happens to him happens to us. His being stricken is our being stricken; his smiting is our smiting; his affliction is our affliction.

There is a deeper magic. There is precedent for one man to represent many; indeed, it was so from the very beginning. Adam’s sin meant that “all sinned” (Rom. 5:12), and in this kind of representation Paul says Adam was a “type of the one to come.” There is another Adam, another representative. A “son of Man,” a “seed of the woman,” a “Second” and “Last” Adam who would again stand in this kind of representative solidarity with many.

And this union is the central marvel of the gospel. Paul never tires of it. We have died with him, we have been raised to life with him, we have been seated in the heavenly realms with him. We are co-heirs of the kingdom with him. The gospel of Jesus Christ is that through his sacrificial death on the cross and his resurrection on Easter morning whatever is true of Jesus is true of us, because what was true of us became true of him. He “became sin for us” that we might become the “righteousness of God.” He took to himself everything that we are, all our iniquities, and gave us his perfect and unblemished obedience to God. He took our death and gave us everlasting life. Oh, what a glorious mystery!

You know what? If that all sounds like Penal Substitutionary Atonement, that’s because it is.

Thanks for reading. I leave you this Easter weekend with only one more thing. Enjoy!

Andrew King @drandrewmking

“The man on the middle cross said I can come.”