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…

Do you ever wonder why you can give a great explanation to someone and yet they still won't come to agree with your point?

I'm one of those people who has this kind of innate, implicit view that if I just explain something well enough, people will agree. They'll see it my way. There's a certain kind of pride that's behind that I think, that God's been working on my heart on over the years, to where I frequently now realize I don't see things the right way. I don't have the right answer all the time. That's important for all of us to recognize.

But even when I am convinced by scripture and multiple sources that I do have the correct belief on a certain issue, I still hold this view that if I just explain it well enough, people will agree. It doesn't work like that. You know this. I know this. We all know this, but sometimes we forget that in conversation.

Today what I want to do is spend a little bit of time talking about some possible reasons why, even in the face of a compelling explanation, sometimes people will still not agree. There are two categories we're going to look at today. One is that the presuppositions someone holds may prevent them from seeing the evidence the way you see the evidence. The other category we'll look at is simply hardness of heart. We'll talk about God's involvement with the heart and that aspect to.

First, presuppositions. What is a presupposition? It is a position you hold that comes before other positions you hold, hence the “pre” and “supposing,” presupposition. These are foundational beliefs. They're kind of like the things that are bedrock for how we see the rest of the world and understand evidence and interpret people's explanations and all of that.

I have the presupposition that gravity exists. Now that used to be a conclusion for me. At some point I had to be convinced that gravity existed, but now that I do, if you ever tell me that a person can just float or that gravity doesn't apply over here, I'm just going to reject that out of hand. I'm not going to go, get out of my chair, walk into the hallway to see someone who supposedly is defying the law of gravity.

Now maybe they're doing that from a hovercraft or some type of jet pack, but that doesn't suspend gravity; that's countering it. But if you were to tell me that gravity just doesn't exist over here in this place, I just wouldn't believe you.

In the same way that if you were to tell me that there's a square circle on this piece of paper across the room, I'm not going to get up. I'm not going to go look at it. My presuppositions about what it means to be circular and square, namely that you can't be both circular and square at the same time, just rule out the possibility of a square circle. It doesn't fit in my worldview. It doesn't accord with my presuppositions.

This happens when we talk about religion too. For instance, you may give great evidence for the resurrection. You may point to the fact that we have multiple sources that all independently give us details and tell us about the resurrection. You may say that it's the best explanation ever proposed, that all the other hypotheses fail, and that they're actually quite laughably silly when you analyze them. You might go through each individual step about how the church started out of the resurrection, how the tomb was empty, how people saw him after his death and were willing to die for that claim. You might go through all of that and the related embarrassing testimony about the resurrection. Someone will still say, "Yeah, but it didn't happen."

When you push a little more, you might get to a reason why. They might say, "It can't happen." When people start saying things can't happen, we're getting in the realm of presupp…

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have casualties.

Ideas have consequences. We're familiar with that phrase. But something I read this last week, and I wish I could remember where so I could cite the source, was that bad ideas have casualties. They actually have human fallout. People get hurt. This isn't that new of a concept, but I think it's just nice and succinctly put.

It's also been said that when words lose their meaning, people lose their lives. That sounds really dramatic, we might think, but it's true. I want to unpack that today.

Behind this is the idea that how we think influences how we live, even when it comes to Christian matters. J.I. Packer has said wrong ideas about God lead to wrong ideas about how to live. What is implicit and even explicit in this statement is that theology and life are not separate spheres. In fact, how we think about God, even if we don't realize it, will directly impact how we live our lives.

But it's not just thinking about God that will impact our lives; it's how we think about everything. A friend of mine who I've had on the podcast, Hunter Levine, made an interesting statement to me recently. He said that most parents, it seems like, are more concerned about the number of F words in a movie or a TV show their children may watch than the actual worldview behind the TV show.

You know what? I think he's right. I'm not saying that foul language and that type of thing isn't a concern, but what I am saying is perhaps what is much more dangerous are the actual ideas that are communicated to us through media and through culture and even through friendly conversations that we aren't aware of, that directly contradict a biblical worldview. Because, remember, these ideas are going to influence us, and bad ideas will have bad effects in our life.

Let's look at some examples of this. There has been a trend in recent years to change how suicide is talked about. It's not okay in some circles now to talk about someone killing themself. That sounds too explicit. That seems to make it seem like they did something wrong. We're softening that. "They ended their life." "They took their own life." In some circles, that's not even okay to say it like that.

What is this trying to do? It's trying to make suicide some more acceptable, when it shouldn't be. It should never be acceptable when someone gets to the place where, for some reason, they believe their best option is to kill themself. It's not okay. We don't do people a service when we make that seem more palatable. No, it should seem extremely unpalatable and we should have extreme concern and compassion for people who ever feel like that is an option for them. That's one small example: softening the language around suicide.

What about euthanasia, the killing of older people? Sometimes this is voluntary, where older people may say, "I don't want to keep living. I'm living in a lot of pain." A doctor will prescribe medicine or some other person will administer medicine that is given with the intent of killing the person. Sometimes it's also involuntary, where the person is killed against their wishes simply because they're old, they're taking too many resources, something like that.

In the middle here sometimes is this idea that dignity, when it comes to death, is "going out on your terms." This is the same idea that's behind the common arguments today for abortion, where it's "a woman's right to chose." We see with euthanasia it's my right to die on my terms. That's also somewhat implicit in the suicide conversation. With abortion: my body, my choice. Now it's not actually her body. It's not her body that's being killed; it's a separate body. That's another conversation for another day.

Behind all of these is the same actual…

Today, we're going to talk about how to discuss God with Mormons.

It's common to hear confusion about the differences in Mormonism and Christianity. Some of this confusion even comes from Christians and Mormons. What you already may have noticed is that I'm making a distinction between Christianity and Mormonism, which is often part of the confusion. Is there actually a difference? Yes, there is,o and here's why.

When Mormons claim to be Christians, or even when Christians claim that Mormons are Christians, they're mistaking a fundamental fact, which is the very reason Joseph Smith started Mormonism. He was trying to find which religion was the true one, which denomination was the right one. What God the Father and Jesus Christ (Note: This is a correction. Originally, I had incorrectly said that “an angel from God” had appeared to Smith.) appeared and told him they were all an abomination. There are Christian denominations today with the same beliefs that also existed in the 1800s, when Joseph Smith started Mormonism. The same beliefs and the same Gospel and the same scriptures. It's disingenuous for someone to claim that Mormons and Christians are the same, because supposedly, we're an abomination. We hold beliefs that are corrupted fundamentally, such that Joseph Smith needed to start a new church. You can't have it both ways. It can’t be fundamentally corrupted and an abomination and also be the same thing. So I just wanted to address that at the beginning.

One of the major points of confusion when we talk about Christianity and Mormonism is that the two religions use the same terms. We'll use the term God and Trinity and God-head and Jesus, but all of these terms actually find rather different definitions in their two respective religions in how they're used. The one I want to talk about today is simply God.

Mormonism believes that there is more than one God. There is not just one being that is God and that's it. There are actually multiple Gods. In fact, there's this phrase that's kind of common as a summary of Mormon belief, from Mormons, in fact. It goes like this,

”As man now is,

That's kind of catchy, but let's run through it.

“As man now is, God once was,” so man is man now. He's human. That means, on their belief, that God used to be human. In fact, they think God the Father has a body of flesh and bones, not that he's just pure spirit like Christians do. So that's the first part. “As man now is, God once was,” so God used to be like us, which is very different from what we see in scripture, as we'll look at in a minute. Then, “as God now is, man may be.” So God is divine and exalted and glorified and deified and all of those things, and they're saying we may be able to be like that. Now, they would say that happens, in part, through the atonement of Jesus, who they actually believe is a separate being, not one being with God the Father. We'll get to that in a minute also. Nevertheless, do you see a difference here? That God, on their view, used to be a man, and man could become God, which implies that there's the possibility of multiple Gods.

But what does scripture say about that? Well, let's look at Isaiah 43:10, where Yahweh, the Lord, says to his people,

”Before Me, no god was formed, nor shall there be any after Me."

I think that's pretty straightforward. No god before Yahweh, no god after Yahweh. It's a done deal. But practically, in conversation, it's not going to end here, and there are a few ways this conversation might go. If you're talking with a Mormon and you say, "Hey, do you believe, like the Mormon church, that there are multiple Gods, that, in fact, you might become a God one day?" They'll most likely say yes, if they're b…

People who argue against God are only able to do so because God exists.

Last week, we talked about how if God does not exist, morality does not exist. There's no such thing as a moral obligation or a moral value or duty if God does not exist. Moral laws require a moral law-giver.

At the same time, we also pointed out that a person can deny the existence of God and still do moral actions. Now, there wouldn't be such thing as a moral action if God didn't exist, but you can deny that God exists and still do moral actions. You could foreseeably, for instance, deny that authors exist but still read books. Where did the books come from? Who knows! You could still learn to read and read a book and deny the existence of authors. It's a bad position. It's inconsistent, but none the less, you could do it.

I want to talk about a broader instance of this type of problem today. I want to talk about how the person who argues against the existence of God or even says, "God does not exist," is only able to do that because God exists. Let's flesh that out together today.

The first thing to point out is we're not going to look at this situation the same way as a non-christian. We should not make ourselves look at this situation, look at the evidence as a non-christian would. Now, it's helpful to understand where they're coming from, but when we want to look at the situation as Christians, we know much more than the non-christian does. We have been given God's word which tells us about so many things we could not know otherwise. This is one of them.

We know from scripture that we were created to glorify God. Our bodies were created not to live for ourselves but to glorify him. Isn't it interesting that the person who is denying this existence of God is actually behaving contrary to how they were designed to be? They can only make that denial because of how God created them to be. He created us to have an intellectual sense. He created us to be able to make choices, different from animals do in that way. We're able to evaluate evidence and come to a well-reasoned conclusion and make a choice about what we're going to do. He created us with those faculties to use them for his glory, not our own. Isn't it interesting that the non-christian takes this gift, takes, in fact, how we were designed to act and flips it upside down, so instead of using it to glorify the creator, he uses it to glorify the creature, himself.

He's only able to do that because of how God created him. He takes the gift that God has given him, of all these attributes that come from being created in the image of God and uses them for an ignoble purpose, not a noble purpose. That's the first example. Our very selves were created to glorify God, and yet, we often don't do that. We flip it upside down, and we use it to glorify ourselves, not God.

The second thing that is true when a non-christian or atheist argues against the existence of God is they're doing it in God's universe. They wouldn't even be here if God hadn't created them. The very fact that they're able to argue against the existence of God is only because God has created them in this world. They're standing on God's ground, in God's solar system, in God's universe, breathing God's air and arguing against him with their very God-given breath. That is just so ironic, I think.

It also points out the fact that so much of who we are as people, apart from the regenerative work of Christ has been corrupted by sin. People often say, "Why isn't God more obvious?" Well, are you going to answer that as a Christian from a biblical point of view, or are you going to answer it from a non-christian point of view? Biblically speaking, God is incredibly obvious. Romans 1 says that He has used the natural world to…

Do you know any smugglers? You're probably thinking, "That's kind of of weird. I don't know any smugglers." Right? Honestly, I don't know any either. In fact, when I think of smuggling, I think of Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, where Han Solo was a smuggler. He hides Princess Leia and Luke underneath the floorboard in his ship, where he used to hide the cargo or contraband that he'd hide from the Empire... because he was a smuggler.

That has really nothing to do with what we're talking about today. Today we're going to talk about people who smuggle in ideas, often undetected by us, in conversation. Here's what I mean. When we talk about morality, most often that's where this type of thing occurs. Someone might say, "I don't need God to be moral. I just do things that help other people." Or someone might even say, "I don't think morality exists. It's bad to force your moral views on people."

Both of these individuals who make statements like this have smuggled in a moral concept, and we need to be able to pick up on that. We need to catch on to the smuggling of morality into the conversation. Did you notice where it happened? Let's go back through it quickly and I'll point it out.

When someone says, "I don't need God to be moral. I just do what helps other people," they're implicitly saying that helping other people is a moral good. It's a good thing. In the second example, “morality doesn't exist; it's bad to force your moral views on people,” Where did this idea of bad come from? Isn't that a moral idea? They've smuggled in their moral views. In fact, I would suggest to you that no one can actually consistently live in this world and deny that morality exists, or say that it's just up to the individual. At some point they will try to apply their moral views to someone else. They will act like morality is not subjective, like it's not just up to me to decide, but they will act as though it's objective, a fact of reality, something that's true for everyone.

Let's talk about some problems with this view that “I don't need God to be moral. I just do what helps other people.” The first thing to point out is non-Christians can do moral things. They can. They can do good actions. They can hold the door for someone. They can hop on a grenade to save their comrades in war. They can do those types of things. But they can never be as moral as they should be because it is immoral to not worship God. Not worshiping is actually a sin. Not placing faith in God is a sin. You might think that sounds extreme. Well God has commanded us to worship him. He has commanded everyone to repent, so not doing that is sinful. Non-Christians cannot be as moral as they should be.

But, more than that, they can do moral actions. They can still do good things. We need to be clear on that. Denying the existence of God doesn't mean you won't end up doing moral things. You'll be inconsistent when you do it, which is something we'll get to in a minute, but nonetheless, everyone actually knows what morality is. Everyone knows morality exists, and in general, people all believe the same things, by and large, to be moral — at least the big ones. Breaking a trust is considered to be immoral. Murdering is considered to be immoral. Why? People just seem to innately know this, but the reason is actually because God has created us in his image and these things are written on our heart, Paul tells us in Romans. That's the first point: not worshiping God is immoral. However, the non-Christian can still do moral actions.

The second is that, as I've already pointed out, morality often gets smuggled into conversations. This is something we always have to be on the lookout for. Someone will be saying, "Well, morality doesn't exist. It's wrong when you …

This week, I am pleased to welcome my friend Hunter Leavine to the podcast; we have just written and have released a book on gender for parents (which you can get here). On the episode we discuss why we wrote the book along with some thoughts on why the church struggles to discuss these topics in our culture today.

Brian: Hunter, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who you are, what you do, how you got here?

Hunter: Yeah, absolutely. I'm the student director at City Church Tallahassee. I'm also married to the kids director at City Church as well, so my household's life kind of revolves around the next generation of people within the church.

Brian: Nice. How did you get involve with City Church?

Hunter: I actually got invited by a friend when I was 16 years old, so I didn't grow up in a church, necessarily. We were kind of in and out. My family moved around a little bit, and by the time I was in middle school, we had pretty much given up on going to church altogether. A friend reached out to me, and invited me at 16 years old. It was a church plant about 100 people, and I'd been there the past eight years. I’ve seen it grow too. We just had our Easter service last week, and that was about 5,000 people.

Brian: Awesome. So you came to the church, grew up in the church, and now you work at the church?

Hunter: Yes. It's kind of an interesting scenario too to be working youth ministry. I always joke and tell our parents that the youth ministry when I first got involved at City Church was actually me pretending to be a college student with two friends. We were the only high schoolers in a church plant, and now I'm married to a kids minister. It's kind of an interesting thing to be a part of now kind of in retrospect.

Brian: Nice. So you and I have written a book on gender and it's part of a series called "Building Foundations.” Could you tell us about the series and the book at a high level?

Hunter: Yeah, let's start off with the idea behind the series. Over the course of a child's life, it's important to build biblical foundations for them. That's what they're going to live off of the rest of their life, hopefully. So as parents are working with their children, the idea is to strategically teach them God's word as they grow up, and also be proactive.

If you think about the idea of a foundation, you want to be really proactive, you want to do it well the first time, because if you don't do well laying the foundation, then you have to go back to it, it's going to be costly, it's going to take time, it's going to be confusing. One of the things that we're really passionate about, especially at City Church (and this is a resource created for City Church first and foremost to help our families) is to help parents lay the best foundation they can as they disciple their children in God's word.

Brian: So how does the gender part of the series come into play with that?

Hunter: I think it's really an important topic. Obviously, it's starting to be talked about more and more on the news, and 30 years ago, it probably wasn't something that people even thought about, and I think that was because mostly culture would reinforce what scripture would say when it comes to gender. So parents, I don't think, had to be as proactive, they didn't think they had to be as intentional when it came to teaching their children about gender because what they were going to see on TV and what they were going to experience throughout their life and in the desk next to them is going to reinforce what the Bible teaches.

But now we live in a world where that's not necessarily the case. What they see on TV, and hear in music, and hear on the playground is going to be completely different in a lot of ways than what scripture teaches, and so …

Have you ever heard someone say that there are verses missing from the Bible? Perhaps this has even been someone in your church, and they might be comparing your NIV translation to their KJV. They're saying, "Look, these new Bible publishers, they're taking verses out of the Bible. They're distorting. They're corrupting God's word."

Is this true? You yourself might even have been looking at a passage that your pastor was preaching out of and you might have realized at some point, "I don't actually have that verse in my Bible." Or maybe you're reading around and you see where somewhere in your Bible it goes from verse 10 to verse 12, and the question is: Well where's verse 11?

All of these types of questions are related to something called textual criticism. That sounds really complicated, but we're just going to talk through this together to explain why different Bibles might have different verses in them. If you're able to get a Bible, I would suggest that you get one right now and turn to about Matthew 18. If you're in your car like so many people are that listen to podcasts, like I often am, you'll totally be fine with your Bible, but if you do have it, turn to Matthew 18. It will be helpful as we look at a couple of things.

We've talked about this before, but the Bible we have now is actually the result of a lot of work by a lot of people. Our Bible has a history. As Christians who affirm that the scriptures are the word of God, they're the very breath of God breathed out to us, we need to know their history. Part of that is what we're going to cover today. We certainly can't cover the whole history of the Bible in a 14-minute podcast, but we can cover part of it.

Initially, people like Paul wrote down on a manuscript, either personally or using a scribe or someone to write on their behalf, a letter, let's say, to the church in Galatia. That letter was sent to the church, and they found it to be helpful, and they copied it, and they sent it other places, and people borrowed it, and those people copied it. Copies were made of copies were made of copies were made of copies. Then this got translated into Latin. It also got translated into Syriac and different languages like that.

Then we came along and we said we needed an English translation. We took some Greek manuscripts and we translated into English. Today we do the same thing. Our English translation today, let's say the most recent version of the NIV, is not a translation of the previous NIV, which is not a translation of the RSV, which is not a translation of the KJV. It doesn't go back like that. It's not a telephone game in that way.

Every time we make a new translation, every time we want to try to faithfully take God's word and put it into modern language, we go back to the earliest and best manuscripts. What this speaks to is that there is a question as to which manuscripts we should use. We have over 5,800 copies of partial manuscripts or full books of the New Testament. We're always striving to go back to the oldest and best.

The reason for this is sometimes manuscripts got changed as they were copied. Now you may have noticed that, if you had to copy something, you may have inadvertently drifted your eyes down to a different line and written some words there, and then gone right back up. You might not have realized it, so you actually inserted something from a different place in the text.

Or perhaps, if you were copying something so frequently that you knew it so well, you might have included something from another part of the document in a previous part because it kind of fit.

Scribes did the same types of things. What we see is sometimes, in Matthew, a scribe accidentally, or maybe intentionally just trying to be helpful, included…