The Death of Christ and the Love of God

Many Christians view the death of Christ as a demonstration of God’s wrath. The idea is that Jesus took upon himself all of our sins and received divine punishment, including death on a cross. Some even think of God the Father as the one who killed God the Son. And since he poured out his wrath on his Son, there is no wrath left to be poured out on believers.

But the Bible doesn’t say, “God the Father killed God the Son.” Instead the blame for Jesus’ death is always placed on sinful humans. (For support, see this post.) God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are completely united in the mission to save human beings and the Son willingly gave up his life in the process (Jn 10:18).

So what does the death of Christ reveal?

Paul writes, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). The death of Christ is primarily a revelation of the love of God not the wrath of God.

Donald M. Baillie (1887-1954) does an excellent job of clearing up confusion on this topic in his 1948 book titled God was in Christ so I will quote from him at length below. If you don’t want to read a long quote, skip to the key points at the end.

Throughout the whole of this New Testament material there is no trace of any contrast between the wrath of God and the love of Christ, or of the idea that God’s attitude to sinners had to be changed by the sacrifice of Christ from wrath and justice to love and mercy. There is ample use of the terminology of the Jewish sacrificial system, but it is highly doubtful whether even in the Old Testament period the purpose of the sin-offerings was to change God’s attitude in that sense. A great deal of confusion has been caused by the fact that the English word ‘atonement’ has moved away from the sense it had when the Bible was translated, viz., reconciliation. The Hebrew word which lies behind it originally mean ‘covering’ or ‘wiping out’, and it may have included the idea of an ‘expiation’ that had to be made before the sinner could be acquitted, but it certainly did not imply anything like propitiation of an angry God. For, as scholars have pointed out, it is always God Himself who is regarded, in the Old Testament, as having appointed the ritual of sin-offering, in His desire for reconciliation. That is highly important. Man has, of course, to provide the offering (the victim or other material) and to carry out the ritual, but it is God that has provided the means of reconciliation, taking this merciful initiative because He does not desire the death of a sinner but his restoration.

But when we come to the New Testament, we can go much farther than this. For the Greek word (καταλλαγῆ) to correspond with the Old Testament ‘atonement’, means simply ‘reconciliation’. Moreover, the New Testament does not speak of God being reconciled to man, but of man being reconciled to God, and of God as the Reconciler, taking the initiative in Christ to that end. There are indeed three passages, one Pauline and two Johannine, where we find another word in the English Bible: ‘propitiation’. As regards the Johannine passages, it is clear that the word (ἱλασμός) does not mean anything like the appeasing of an angry God, for the love of God is the starting-point: ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 Jn 4.10; cf 1 Jn 2:2). The Pauline passage has been much discussed by commentators. ‘Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation (ἱλαστήριον) through faith, by his blood. . . . ‘ (Rom 3:24-25). Professor C. H. Dodd, who has made a careful study of the word, assures us that the rendering ‘propitiation’ is misleading, being in accord with pagan usage but foreign to Biblical usage, and that the real meaning of the passage is that God has set forth Christ as a ‘means by which guilt is annulled’ or even ‘a means by which sin is forgiven’. It is just possible that the Greek word ought to be given the meaning that it regularly bears in the Septuagint (and which also appears in Heb. ix, 5), and that we should translate it simply as ‘mercy-seat’ or ‘place of forgiveness’.

But however we translate those terms borrowed from the Jewish sacrificial system, it is quite plain that in the New Testament they undergo a transformation of meaning because of the really extraordinary setting which is now given to them. We saw that even in the Old Testament usage the pagan meanings had been left behind because it was God Himself who was regarded as having mercifully appointed the ritual of expiation, though man had of course to supply the victim. But this is the amazing new fact that emerges when we come to the New Testament: that God even provides the victim that is offered, and the victim is His own Son, the Only-begotten. In short, ‘it is all of God’: the desire to forgive and reconcile, the appointed means, the provision of the victim as it were from His own bosom at infinite cost. It all takes place within the very life of God Himself: for if we take the Christology of the New Testament at its highest we can only say that ‘God was in Christ’ in that great atoning sacrifice, and even that the Priest and the Victim both were none other than God. There is in the New Testament no uniformity of conception as to how this sacrifice brings about reconciliation, and indeed some of its interpretations of the meaning of the Cross are in terms drawn from quite other realms than that of the sacrificial system. But in whatever way the process of salvation through the Cross is conceived, God’s merciful attitude towards sinners is never regarded as the result of the process, but as its cause and source. It all took place because God so loved the world. Its background is the eternal love of God. This does not mean that there is no place for the idea of the ‘wrath’ of God, or that ‘the Wrath’ from which we are saved is something impersonal and apart from God in New Testament thought, as Professor Dodd suggests. But his wrath must not be regarded as something which has to be ‘propitiated’ and so changed into love and mercy, but rather as being identical with the consuming fire of inexorable divine love in relation to our sins. ‘The wrath of God’, writes Brunner, ‘is not the ultimate reality; it is the divine reality which corresponds to sin. But it is not the essential reality of God. In Himself God is love.’ And the revelation of God in Christ is ‘the place where the love of God breaks through the wrath of God.” (186-89)

Key Points

Here are the key points:

• “It is highly doubtful whether even in the Old Testament period the purpose of the sin-offerings was to change God’s attitude.”

• It is always God who provides the means of reconciliation in the Old Testament (e.g., the sacrificial system), but his people had to supply the offering. In other words, the entire system of reconciliation was God’s idea. It flowed out of God’s love, God’s desire to be with his people.

• In Christ God has taken the initiative to reconcile us to himself. Paul writes, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:18-19). Although we offended God, God “reconciled” us to himself.

• The Greek word translated as ‘propitiation’ does not mean appeasing an angry God, “for the love of God is the starting-point.” Propitiation refers to the means by which sin is forgiven. It is possible that the Greek word should be translated as ‘mercy-seat,’ which is the place of forgiveness, because that is how it is translated in the Septuagint and Hebrews 9:5.

• “The amazing new fact that emerges” in the New Testament is this: God supplies and offers the victim and that victim is his own Son. In the Old Testament, God was telling his people, “Here’s the way to be reconciled to me. You must make the offering.” In the New Testament, God says, “I will make the offering. I will be the offering.”

• “God’s merciful attitude towards sinners is never regarded as the result of the process, but as its cause and source. God didn’t become loving after Jesus died; God’s love was the reason why Jesus came into the world and died on a cross. It all took place because God so loved the world. “Its background is the eternal love of God.” Do you get it? The background is divine love not divine wrath.

• God’s wrath did not have to be changed into love and mercy by the death of Christ because God’s love is the starting point. As John writes, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:10). “In himself God is love.” Wrath is how divine love is expressed when sin infects God’s creation.

Les Bridgeman

I have served as a high school Bible teacher and counselor in Asia and the U.S. I am passionate about understanding and teaching the Bible. Here’s a link to my book page.