Substitution
In the story of Abraham and Isaac there is a verse filled with rich gospel imagery:
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. (Genesis 22:13)
Abraham turned and what did he see? A lamb wearing a crown of thorns! A ram caught by its horns in the thicket. The lamb was offered “INSTEAD OF HIS SON.” An innocent one dies instead of another—as a substitute. That’s what happened at the cross.
Many people today struggle with the idea of a substitute making atonement. How God a loving God demand such a thing? That sounds like a pagan notion, they insist. Christ’s atonement, though, is radically different from paganism. In paganism it is always humans who must do something to placate the offended gods, perhaps offering sacrifices or performing rituals. Human beings must do something to appease the divine. But the gospel is completely the opposite of paganism. In fact, the gospel declares that there is nothing we can do to compensate for our sins or turn away God’s holy wrath. We can’t beg or bribe him to change his mind. We deserve nothing but judgment, yet God, based on his sheer mercy and grace, has taken the initiative to make things right. He himself is the one who offers to himself what is required.
I Jn 4:10–This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God was the one who provided the atonement, not us. This is the opposite of pagan ideas. God’s love is the source, not the result, of the atonement. God doesn’t give grace because of the atonement, but provides the atonement because of grace. God doesn’t love us because Jesus died, but Jesus died because God loves us.
John Stott (in his classic masterpiece, The Cross of Christ), writes:
“It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship” (p. 175).