O God, is for ever and ever” (Heb 1:8).
Regarding the priestly office of Christ the catechism states that “Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God, and in making continual intercession for us.”63 Two aspects of his discharge of that office are immediately important. First, Christ, as the antitype of the priests of old, was, in his offering “to satisfy divine justice,” both the offering and the priest who made the offering. He was himself “the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “The blood of goats and calves” could not definitively take away sin, “but by his own blood he [Christ] entered once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb 9:12). “Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things . . . but with the precious blood of Christ . . . who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (1 Pet 1:18–20).
The substitutionary aspect of the death of Christ in dealing with sin is explained in terms of the imputation of guilt and righteousness that was involved. We encountered the concept and doctrine of imputation at an earlier stage, when we observed that it is a serious fault of the doctrines promulgated by the New Perspective on Paul that, as Wright in particular clearly stated, to speak of the imputation that we now have in view as in no sense tenable.64 But the issue calls for careful attention and is a vital part of the transactions between the Father and the Son in the accomplishment of redemption.
The nub of the issue is that in his substitutionary atonement the guilt of the sins of the people for whom he died was imputed to him, or, that is, was placed to his account. The sinless Son of God died in his human nature for those whom the Father had given to him for that purpose. Sin had entered the world in human nature, and a sacrifice for the payment of the penalty of sin must be made in human nature. But how could that be done? Man himself could not pay the penalty for his sin. In all the capacities of his soul he was estranged from God and enslaved to Satan and sin, “dead in trespasses and sin” (Eph 2:1). Any man could only, therefore, unless the grace of God intervened, pay the penalty for his own sin in the eternal perdition that sin against a holy God warranted. Before man himself could have any standing before God the grace of God that creates new life within an individual by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit must first endow the soul with the gifts of saving faith and repentance. And then, with that newness of life can the sinner turn to Christ. But if, because of the disabilities under which he exists by nature, man himself is unable to pay the price of his own redemption, how could redemption ensue? At that point the issue of imputation enters.
When our first parent, Adam, fell by repudiating his covenantal obligations to God, the guilt of his sin was imputed to, or in the reckoning of God placed to the account of, all those who would descend from him by ordinary generation.65 That imputation was an immediate imputation. The word “immediate” in that statement of doctrine does not refer to immediacy in time; though the imputation did, of course, occur at the point in time immediately on Adam’s sin. But “immediate” in our present context refers to the fact that there was no mediating cause or entity on the grounds of which the imputation in the accounting of God took place. The imputation of sin, that is, was immediate and not mediate.66 The imputation was grounded only in the eternal will of God, entirely apart from any intra-mundane or temporal cause.
At the death of Christ, there occurred similarly what we may refer to as a reciprocal immediate imputation. The guilt of the sin of the people for whom Christ died was imputed to Christ, and the righteousness of Christ was imputed to them. When we refer to the righteousness of Christ in that context we do not have in view his essential righteousness that inheres in him by reason of his identity as the Second Person of the Godhead; or, that is, his righteousness as God by which we mean that all the actions, designs, purposes, and decrees of God are consistent with the essential and inherent holiness that he possesses in his eternal being. When we say that it is not Christ’s essential righteousness that is imputed to the repentant sinner, it is meant that the individual does not, for that reason, partake of the essence of the Godhead. There is no such thing, that is, as the divinization of man. The righteousness of Christ that is placed to the sinner’s account is a forensic righteousness; that is, the righteousness that comes from the perfect fulfillment of the demands of God’s law and commandments. The term “forensic” has to do with the situation that exists in relation to, and because of, law. Christ impeccably fulfilled the demands of the law of God. In that, he was forensically righteous. By reason that the forensic righteousness of Christ is thus imputed to the sinner who comes to Christ in faith and repentance, God looks on that individual as though he had himself fulfilled the demands of the law, and as though he himself had paid the penalty for his having broken the law. Such is the immeasurable extent of God’s grace and mercy that he has set forth in his Son.
By that reciprocal imputation the individual who has thus come to Christ has entered a state of justification before God. He was once ungodly, in that he had broken the law of God; “Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom 5:6); now he is regarded in the counsels of heaven as godly, for all the demands of the law have been met on his behalf. In that great exchange, God’s declarative, forensic statement of justification has set the individual free from the law of sin, condemnation, and death, and has transferred him to the state of righteousness, justification and life.67 A definitive transference has taken place. But the ground of the sinner’s status that has thus been so remarkably changed is that Christ, by the imputation of the sinner’s guilt to him, has been constituted guilty. And by reason of that constitution, God the Father could truthfully declare his Son guilty and lay upon him the punishment of sin. And similarly, by the corresponding act of imputation the sinner has been constituted righteous, so that God could truthfully declare him righteous. Such are the remarkable terms in which justification before God has been established.
In God the Father’s act of constituting his Son guilty, Christ was thereby “made sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). The Son of God was made sin, in that he was made guilty, not guilty of his own sin, but of the sin of those for whom he died. And being thus constituted guilty, the death that Christ died was his final act of active obedience to the law of God. For the law said that the guilty one must die. What a remarkable exchange the grace and mercy of God accomplished in that eternally meaningful act. But it is to be carefully observed also that in that divine act of imputation, while Christ was made to be sin, while our sin was laid upon him, he was not made or constituted a sinner.68 If he were held in that sacred moment to have been constituted a sinner, the meaning of the entire redemptive act on the cross would be vacated. For the substitution that was involved in Christ’s act of redemption was meaningful only because our sin was laid on him who was completely without sin. It was the sinless Son of God, the Second Person of the eternal Godhead who made the atonement for sin. But further, it was in his human nature in which he died for us that he was sinless.
The possibility of misunderstanding, at this important point, of the imputation involved in the substitutionary death of Christ has been addressed in particularly clear terms in a classic commentary that is worthy of extended statement: “God, declares Paul, made the Sinless One sin for us. It is important to notice that he does not say that God made Him a sinner; for to conceive of Christ as sinful, or made a sinner, would be to overthrow the very foundation of redemption, which demands the death of an altogether Sinless One in the place of sinful mankind. But God made him sin; that is to say that God the Father made His innocent incarnate Son the object of His wrath and judgment, for our sakes, with the result that in Christ on the cross the sin of the world is judged and taken away. In this truth resides the whole logic of reconciliation.”69
The meaning in its full extent is ineffable, in that any words that we can command by reason of the language capacity we have in our human finitude cannot possibly compass the meaning of what was involved. Christ died in his human nature. He could not die in divine nature. Indeed, his death in human nature was precisely necessary to accomplish eternal salvation for those who had sinned in human nature. But it was “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8) who was crucified, and ineffable though it is, it was the Person of our Lord who died for us in his human nature. And the Person
