Chapter 1 Section 2

2. How many sayings of Jesus on the atonement there are and where they are found.

It is true that there are fewer sayings than we might have wished. However, the amount of information in them  is marked by variety, fullness and range in meaning. They are to be weighed rather than counted. Their wide implications need to be traced rather than simply counting them in a series. Much more important than the mere number is their comprehensiveness, force and fullness of meaning. On examination they will be found to contain, if not expressly at least by implication, almost every blessing that is connected with the atonement. The apostles do not so much develop it as apply it to the various ideas and practices found in the churches. So, for example, the legalism of Judaisers brought out one application in Galatia and the incipient gnosticism in Colossse and Asia Minor, another. We cannot, in this book, investigate all the applications of this great teaching woven into the New Testament letters. Here we are simply going to look at the Lord's own sayings on the subject, something that needs a careful investigation.

Before the event no-one could have predicted what the exact nature of Christ's testimony to his sacrifice might be. Nor could it be predicted in what precise form it would be presented to his hearers. Usually he alludes to it in connection with some fact in the story, some Old Testament type or some particular title or name that he claimed for himself with its roots in prophecy. All of the sayings are pointed and memorable. They embed themselves in your mind by alluding to something otherwise very ordinary. He spoke of the atonement in line with his hearers' openness and lack of prejudice or love of truth and ability to receive it. The story of Nicodemus is an example. What was said to him had the happy effect of preparing his mind to understand the nature of Messiah's death so that he would not take offence when the hour came.
We often think at certain points that an allusion to Christ's atoning work would be appropriate. We expect it. It is a surprise to see with what reserve such a central teaching is announced. It seems strange, for example, that while parables such as that of the Pharisee and tax collector or the two debtors that Jesus spoke about in the house of Simon the Pharisee, clearly teach acceptance by grace they make no allusion to the atonement. Some, opposed to the teaching that Christ died in the place of sinners, think they can find support for their views in this fact. However, a little reflection should be enough to satisfy us that Jesus had reasons for his silence. The idea of a suffering Messiah had been forgotten. His priestly office mentioned in Psalm 110 was ignored. Apart from people like Simeon and Zechariah, John's father, most were unfamiliar with the idea.
More than that, the people needed first to learn, as they did from John the Baptist, that the Law is spiritual, one of the burdens of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Jesus found it absolutely necessary to awaken a spiritual sense of the things of God; to awaken conscience and preach repentance because the kingdom was near. He needed to attack their hollow and merely external forms and their neglect of the weightier matters of the law. He needed to explode their empty trust in being Abraham's descendants and their futile expectation that they would take part in Messiah's rule just because they were Jews. He had, in a word, to turn them away from thinking only of how they looked in men's eyes, caring only about how the outside of the cup or dish looked. Before they would be ready to hear about the atonement they needed to see their need as sinners, recognise their defects and be awakened to a desire for pardon.
Only then could he announce God's kingdom as having come and begin to explain its nature and excellence, the character of its subjects and its other aspects. He had to show what his God given mission was and prove it by his many miracles. He had to show his more than human dignity, his divine Sonship, his sealing and sending, his unique position in the world as the Great Deliverer and the object of promise, the long-desired one Moses wrote about and who Abraham longed to see. He aimed first at confirming people's faith in him as the promised Christ, attaching them to his person by a bond that would be strong enough to bear pressure, while yet avoiding the danger of offending them with something that any Jewish mind would be offended by. He wanted, first of all, to bind his disciples to him and deepen their faith in him. This was his first and most basic aim as he spoke to his disciples from day to day.
At this point a new difficulty presented itself. The disciples, now attached to his person and accepting him as Saviour, did not want to hear about his death. They would not believe it. They could not take it in. At the time when Peter, in the name of the rest, declared his belief that Jesus was Messiah and the Son of God (Matthew 16:16) we might have expected full submission to every part of Christ's teaching. Surely the Lord's own explicit statement about his death given at this auspicious time would be accepted without demur. On the contrary, Peter began to rebuke Jesus for what he had to say about his death. That is how much their own ideas had possessed them and how hard it was for Jesus to direct their thinking into a new channel. The way they saw it, the kingdom is eternal and he would enter into it at once without any atoning death for a basis and reason. They dreamed of places of authority, rank and honour in the kingdom. Constantly they were pre-occupied, even at the Last Supper, with who would be prime-minister and who would hold the most power. Even true disciples mingled alien ideas with their understanding of the kingdom. And so, to keep his cause free from the risk of the political commotion that an open announcement of his Messiahship would have given rise to, in a community where the true idea had been lost, and conscious that he must die at the hand of that very community, we find that our Lord spoke sparingly and with reserve about the atonement. Indeed, on one occasion he made his disciples get into a ship and be gone when otherwise the excited crowds would have taken him by force and made him king.
People who who were thinking like that were hardly ready to hear about the atonement. These two ideas - the Messiahship and the possibility of his death - seemed to them highly incompatible. They were unwilling to consider even for a moment that the conqueror could himself be conquered. They ruled out any enquiry and so proved themselves unqualified for further teaching. They did not come to him with teachable minds and ask for the information that he would willingly have supplied. It was possible, therefore, for him to leave a record in their memory only in a more indirect and incidental way. He did it by means of his sermons in Galilee and in Jerusalem (as recorded in John 6 and 10) and more obviously when he introduced this truth in connection either with events in his own life or difficulties in theirs. However, it must be allowed on all sides, that while the disciples felt their life was bound up with him, they pushed out of their minds by means of their own explanations the unwelcome fact of his death, even though he frequently mentioned it. Even though it formed the only topic of conversation on the Mount of Transfiguration between Moses, Elijah and Christ, the disciples contrived, somehow, to explain away the fact. When the Lord took them aside and solemnly announced what was at hand, they were very sad indeed but, as if they had found out some way out, were soon found engaging in their old dispute again. The abject dejection into which they were thrown by his actual death, shows how ill prepared they were for it and how little they understood its meaning. All this goes to show that as the disciples were unable to listen calmly and without prejudice when the topic was raised until they were in a position to look back on the event as an accomplished fact, so Christ's teaching could not possibly be given then with the fullness and freedom that it could be after his resurrection.

Chapter 1 Section 1

Where to find the sayings of Jesus and how we will investigate them

1 The four Gospels - where to find the sayings of Jesus

The four Gospels are written in a way that is just right for showing us why Christ died. It will be enough here just to briefly note the elements found in them.

It was impossible for one writer to adequately describe the riches of Christ's life and so God gave us a four-faced mirror to adequately reflect the God-man. This is one reason why the apostles were allowed to get so close to him during his earthly public ministry. God intended that they should be eye witnesses and ear witnesses who would, in due time, faithfully record Jesus' deeds and words. This comes out at certain points even when they had not fully realised this (see Matthew 26:13 Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her; Acts 1:21). For thirty years the precious record waited on their lives, so often in danger, until the appointed time, when it could be committed to the church in writing. By that time the church was ready to welcome it and appreciate it as God's Word. What was eventually written down had shared with the church orally by the apostles for nearly a generation. The Gospels themselves were produced either by eye witnesses or by those who knew the eye witnesses and were approved by them. The fact that the apostles were still leading the churches when the Gospels first appeared ensured at least two things. First, the authenticity and faultless accuracy of the records. Second, their unimpeded circulation. They were accepted as books written by people who were called to the task and competent to execute it by putting the material in the form it is in now. Down the years Christians have continued to reverently preserve these records as part of God's Word.

• Matthew's Gospel was received by the church as the work of an eye witness. It has its own distinctiveness. The fact that it opens with a family tree that begins with Abraham and its apparently rather Jewish interests suggests that it was written with Jewish believers in mind. He describes the life of Jesus in the light of Old Testament prophecies about Messiah. He avoids detail, much more than Mark and John at least. He puts together an important set of facts and sayings, however, often pointing out where prophecy has been fulfilled.
• Mark's Gospel has long been said to be John Mark's record of the preaching of Peter. It does not merely give us the gist of Matthew but is a separate Gospel in its own right. It is often thought to be the first Gospel published and this is likely. It begins in the style of Peter's sermons as found in Acts (see Acts 10 for example) and focuses on Jesus's great deeds. It reveals what a powerful impression Jesus made. There is little teaching and little attempt to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy.
• Luke's Gospel is like Mark except that here it is Luke and Paul rather than Mark and Peter. It was prepared by someone from Paul's circle and with his approval. Its connection with Paul comes out in many ways. For example, Luke's genealogy makes no attempt to distinguish Jew and Gentile and goes right back to Adam.  Or take the way he reports the Song of Simeon, the insufficiency of deeds or the connection between salvation and faith (see 2:32, 17:10, 7:50).
• The fourth Gospel, by John, the disciple Jesus loved and his apostle, was written long after the others had died and was intended to supplement what they had written. John's main aim was to show that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (20:31). This is done in a way not attempted before that focuses on the Lord's own consciousness. John was particularly suited and gifted to work in this way. Unlike Matthew and Luke, he does not begin with a family tree or Jesus as a baby nor does he begin with Jesus' public ministry as Mark does. Rather he goes back to the Lord's divine pre-existence and eternal Sonship before coming to the story of what happened and what Jesus said.

This brings us to the matter of the facts of Jesus' life and the things he said.

The facts. As to the facts, the story is basically simple and straightforward. The necessary interpretation and commentary comes mainly from the Lord's sayings and the comments we find in the New Testament letters. Without this interpretation, the story of Jesus' suffering can give rise to nothing more than sentimental feelings or idle sympathy, something the Lord rejected (see Luke 23:28). The facts and sayings are so connected that on their own they cannot be understood. The story would be an insoluble puzzle without the commentary. The historic incidents of the Lord's suffering supply what we may call the realism of the atonement. They exhibit it in concrete personal form. The teaching is given in the New Testament letters. There the curtain is lifted so that we can see God's thinking or the plan of redemption that the stories embody in historical reality. It is when we combine God's thought and action, his plan and its fulfilment, that the way they coincide serves to confirm both. The teaching makes the story clear. The Gospels can only be studied properly when they are read in the light of God's plan. Without that you only skate on the surface, happy just to see Christ as an example or slipping in some petty and random ideas of your own, even though the stories are dominated by this idea of sacrifice on behalf of others. When the story is read by those able to trace the cause of the Lord's sufferings as well as the sufferings themselves, they are able to learn the true teaching from the facts. The Gospels, in a word, exhibit on a foundation of fact, both the conditions of the atonement and all its different parts. The more the story is examined, the more the correspondence between sayings and facts, predictions and fulfilments, is seen.
When we closely examine the story in the Gospels, we find these writings very well adapted to the design for which they were composed. They must be read with this design in mind. They aim to bring out, in line with a definite plan, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth is the suffering Messiah, who all the prophets wrote about. For this reason, their story is so arranged that it will bring out, either directly or indirectly and without labouring the point, the co-incidence between fact and prophecy.
We can divide Old Testament prophecy of the humiliations of the Messiah into three sorts:
1. Those announcing a suffering Guarantor
2. Those showing the voluntary subjection of Messiah to the sufferings faced
3. Those setting forth how those sufferings serve to lead others to put their trust in him for salvation.
There is a most impressive coincidence between fact and prophecy.
But further still, the Gospels are structured, careful analysis will show, in a way that brings out all the most important elements of the atonement in terms of the historical reality. This confirms that an infinite Intelligence is behind their composition. No merely human version of the Lord's life can come near it. The essential qualities required in an atoning Guaranotr are chiefly the following four. In each case we see them developed on the basis of fact. The sufferings must be
1. Faultless and entirely in keeping with the character of the one to whom satisfaction is required to be made.
2. Very painful and shameful
3. Of unlimited worth or value in light of the dignity of the sufferer
4. In accurate correspondence with God's declarations
All four points come out in the facts as recorded in the Gospels in a most remarkable way. By way of example think of
1. The declarations of Pilate and his wife, of Herod and of Judas. These all come out quite naturally.
2. The scorn and mockery inflicted on the sufferer, the indignities he suffered, the false charges that condemned him and the way the sentence was carried out.
3. Christ's dignity is confirmed by those touches in the story where his priestly prayers and sacrifice are covered, including the way he blessed the dying thief beside him. In the most simple way, the Gospel writers record his royalty when his enemies were thrown back in his presence and he protected his disciples; the notice that, in God's providence, Pilate placed above his head on the cross and the words of the centurion at the cross "Truly this was the Son of God".
4. The final point is the one most fully illustrated in the original threat of death, the curse of which being hung on a tree was the obvious evidence and emblem and in the details of the arrest, trial, crucifixion and shame, sufferings and death, as foreshadowed and foretold in the Old Testament and as recalled in those brief records supplied by the Gospels; not to mention little incidents occasionally introduced, such as his thirst and none of his bones being broken.

The sayings. As to the sayings, they are expressions of the Lord's own consciousness. They are accurately given, having been lodged in the memories of the apostles. These sayings undoubtedly give us Jesus' own thoughts on the subject of his atoning death. They announce the design, aim and motive behind his actions. Every Christian will readily admit that they are spoken truthfully, without overstatement, on the one hand, or defect, on the other. They give us not only an objective outline of his work in its nature and results but also a glimpse into the very heart of his activity. In this light these sayings are invaluable. They disclose Jesus' inner thoughts and convey the absolute truth on the subject of the atonement, in accord with a knowledge of his function that was known only to himself. Only in his own mind did he fully and adequately know such things. Here, then, we have perfect truth. Here we may affirm, unless we are ready to give up everything to uncertainty and doubt, that we have the whole truth as to the nature of the atonement, as well as in reference to the design and scope for which Christ gave himself up to death for others.

Chapter 1 Analysis

1. Where to find the sayings of Jesus and how we will investigate them
1 The four Gospels - where to find the sayings of Jesus
2 The number of sayings about the atonement and their context
3 Have all his sayings about the atonement been recorded?
4 Our method for understanding the implications of these sayings
5 The importance of biblical ideas regarding Christ's death

Contents (simple)

Contents
Introduction

1. Where to find the sayings of Jesus on the atonement and how we will investigate them
2. The truths that lay behind the teaching about the atonement
3. The elements that make up the atonement.
4. The consequences of Christ's death, his atonement
5. The way the atonement relates to other important matters
6. The effectiveness of the atonement or who it was made for
7. The application of the atonement
8. Heaven and hell and the atonement

Introduction

It is important to see that the subject of the atonement is the central truth of Christianity and the great theme of the Bible. The main reason the Bible was written is to show us the only way that people can be brought back to God. The Bible teaches it in a very simple way. Because it is in the Bible we must believe it.

Our method in this book is to look at the subject as it is taught in the Bible. We are not going to present a point of view and then try and prove it from a series of texts. This is a problem with books on the atonement.  They tend to be abstract arguing only from the way God usually works. Such arguments have their place but only if we can also show what the Bible actually teaches.

What we want to look at, then, is what Jesus actually taught. We are not chiefly interested in what human teachers have said but rather what Jesus has said. We want to turn from human feeling and reasoning to what Jesus himself says.

What we want to do in this book is to gather together everything Jesus says about his atonement - why it was necessary, what it involves, how it comes about. We feel that this aspect of the subject has not been given the attention it deserves. Surely we must all agree that what Jesus himself says about this must be most important.

As you will see from the contents page we have divided the book up into eight sections. These eight sections are then further divided up chapter by chapter. In these eight sections we will cover

1. Where to find the sayings of Jesus and how we will investigate them

2. The truths that lay behind the teaching. Here we will look at things like sin, the need for atonement, harmonising love and justice, Jesus' unique position in the covenant, the fact he is God.

3. The elements that make up the atonement and how it involves bearing sin and sinless obedience.

4. The consequences of the atonement for the individual Christian, including both his being accepted by God and his being renewed in his nature by God.

5. The way the atonement affects other things such as the defeat of Satan, the gift of the Holy Spirit, etc.

6. Who the atonement was made for.

7. The application of the atonement.

8. How man's endless happiness is decided by hi accepting or rejecting the atonement. The influence of the atonement on morals and religion.