Lent 24 post 20

 1 Peter 2.19-25

‘Your sins are forgiven'

It’s all very well to say the words, but how can it be true? Did Exodus not tell us, ‘God does not leave the guilty unpunished' (Exodus 34.7)? Did God himself not say, ‘I will not acquit the guilty' (Exodus 23.7)? How, then, is forgiveness possible?

Sin has consequences that have to be borne. Guilt cries out for justice to be done. Deliberate evil demands some kind of punishment. Wrongdoing needs to be put right in some way. If those are among our deepest human instincts, how can God’s holiness hold lesser standards?

Yet Exodus also showed us God’s compassion, while Psalm 103 rejoiced in God’s reigning love and forgiveness. We must hold both holiness and love together, for they are both definitive of our God, and they are not in competition with each other.

This vision of God’s holy love will deliver us from caricatures of him. We must picture him neither as an indulgent God who compromises his holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh, vindictive God who suppresses his love in order to crush and destroy us. How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins?

(John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p155)

Answer, by bearing the consequences of our sin himself. As we saw, Moses asked God to ‘carry’ (i.e. forgive) the sins of Israel, and God agreed to do so. What Moses could not have imagined then was the ultimate cost to God not only of bearing the sin of Israel, but of ‘tak(ing) away the sin of the world.’ He would find out, however, in the conversation on the Mount of Transfiguration, when Moses, Elijah and Jesus would speak of the ‘exodus’ that Jesus would ‘bring to fulfilment at Jerusalem' (Luke 9.31), that greater ‘exodus' redemption accomplished when Jesus ‘(would bear) our sins in his body on the cross' (1 Peter 2.24).

Suffering for Christ and like Christ

Peter is talking here to Christian slaves of unbelieving masters. And he points out that if the slaves get beaten for some wrongdoing, there is nothing Christianly commendable about that. That’s simple, if brutal, justice. You get what you deserve. But if you suffer unjustly while doing good, ah, that is pleasing to God. Why? Not because God takes sadistic pleasure in your suffering, but because such suffering is like Christ's.

But Peter cannot talk about the suffering and death of Christ merely as an example (though it certainly is that). Jesus did not die merely to model how somebody could endure injustice and cruelty without fighting back. No, he suffered ‘for you' (.21). And in those two words, Peter condenses a profound atonement theology that he then expands through several quotations from Isaiah 53. ‘Christ cannot be an example of suffering for us to follow unless he is first of all the Saviour who’s sufferings were endured on our behalf' (I. Howard Marshall, 1 Peter, p91).

To say that Christ bore our sins means that he bore their consequences and guilt, doing so in our place, for us. But who is this Christ? This is the Lord God himself, incarnate. The One who told Moses that he would ‘carry’ sin is the One who now does exactly that in the person of the Son of God. God the just Judge submits to being the unjustly judged. And, in bearing his own sentence, God accomplishes ultimate justice, for himself and for us. Holy love poured out in saving fullness and atoning power, amazing and wonderful.