What is penal substitutionary atonement and is it biblical?

Few things are as important to think about and understand and be prepared to defend as what Christ actually did on the cross. We can defend the truthfulness of the Christian worldview and that God exists and all of that, but if Christ didn't actually die to save sinners and accomplish that on the cross then all that other stuff really doesn't matter. What's Paul's declaration in I Corinthians 15? If Christ is not raised then we are still in our sins. Now, he kind of leaves out a step there because what he's saying is when Christ died and rose from the dead he actually paid for sin for sinners.

If that didn't happen, if Christ didn't do that work on the cross, then we're just wasting our time with all this other worldview stuff and with going to church and caring about how we live; we should just live for ourselves. We're to be pitied, in fact, he says. All of that hinges on what Christ did on the cross, and of course if the cross and the resurrection are actual historical events. But they're only important as historical events because of what happened on them and in them.

Let's talk about something called penal substitutionary atonement. That's a really big term. Often you'll hear it called the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement. That word theory is not used like, "Oh well, it's a guess." It's used in terms of saying it's a systematic understanding of the atonement and multiple aspects of it from a biblical point of view. It doesn't mean it's just an educated guess, it definitely has biblical support. That's what we're going to look at today.

First let's actually define what it is. Penal substitutionary atonement. We'll take that from the end. Atonement means to pay for sin, to atone for it, to take away wrath, those types of ideas. Substitutionary means in place of another, a substitution. It's kind of like on The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon and his friends go to the Chinese restaurant and the guy say, "No additions, no subtractions, no substitutions." No substitutions, you can't swap something for something else in that restaurant. That's what a substitution is, one thing in place of another.

So far we're talking about atoning for sin in the place of another and then we have penal. That word deals with punishment. For instance, Australia was a penal colony for Britain, that's where they sent prisoners. Penal substitutionary atonement refers to someone being the substitution to take the punishment for sin and turn away God's wrath. That is what we say Jesus did at the cross, he was our penal substitutionary atonement. That's a really big term and I'm trying not to use it too much but it's actually a really important thing to understand.

Now, some people say that God punishing an innocent person in the place of other people is actually immoral or it's cosmic child abuse. We've talked about that a little in the past. What I want to focus on today is actually how we can make the case for supporting penal substitutionary atonement from the Old Testament. Now, yes this is something we're talking about that happened in the New Testament. Jesus' work on the cross was definitely a New Testament work. I want to show you how it's actually supported, it's not a new type of thing because it happened in the Old Testament too.

Basically, fundamentally what we're looking at is two types of things. One is that God does judge sin. He has wrath towards sin; he has a punitive type of justice. Now, yes there are other facets to justice but some people today would even deny that there is a retributive aspect to God's justice, that he punishes sin and sinners yet what do we see in the Old Testament? You can't read the first three chapters and not see that…