Penal Substitution Bible Quotes

Second, Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational 'picture-language'. This consists of parables, analogies, metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other, as in the Bible itself (from which this language is first learned), and all pointing to the reality of God's presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it. Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing,8 and no doubt much remains to be said. Already, however, the discussion has produced one firm result of major importance — the recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are 'models', comparable to the thought-models of modern physics.9

Now we come up to our second question, my answer to which has been hinted at already. By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us? I reply: through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible, which in truth are instruction, from God.

Here is a point that must be noted most carefully. Paul does not say that God punished Jesus. He declares that God punished Sin in the flesh of Jesus. Now, to be sure, the crucifixion was no less terrible an event because, with theological hindsight, the apostle could see that what was being punished was Sin itself rather than Jesus himself. The physical, mental, and spiritual agony that Jesus went through on that terrible day was not alleviated in any way. But theologically speaking—and with regard to the implications that run through many aspects of church life, teaching, and practice—it makes all the difference. The death of Jesus, seen in this light, is certainly penal. It has to do with the punishment on Sin—not, to say it again, on Jesus—but it is punishment nonetheless. Equally, it is certainly substitutionary: God condemned Sin (in the flesh of the Messiah), and therefore sinners who are “in the Messiah” are not condemned. The one dies, and the many do not. All those narrative fragments we saw in Luke and John come into their own. “This man has done nothing wrong.” “Let one man die for the people, rather than the whole nation being wiped out.” But this substitution finds its true meaning not within the normal “works contract,” but within the God-and-Israel narrative, the vocational narrative, the story in accordance with the Bible.

I hope you are seeing what’s at stake here. The problem with affirming Christus victor and the ransom motif or any other facet of the atonement to the exclusion of penal substitution is that we render impersonal what Christ did on the cross. He conquered the powers and the principalities and death itself. He achieved justice for the socially downtrodden and persecuted. He did anything and everything, all the wonderful and multitudinous things the Bible says he did, but he didn’t do the one thing that would make me right with God. He didn’t take my punishment.