The Radical Reconciler by Chris Wright

Author:Chris Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783599455
Publisher: IVP
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Friday

‘He bore our sins’

Bible reading: 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, p. 155)

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).

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