Election and Christ - by John MacArthur

Excerpted from here. Our comments in bold.

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Dr. MacArthur is regarded as a great Bible teacher, but the below excerpt is very nearly incompetence. This sounds harsh, but he's simply parroting a Calvinistic/Reformist doctrinal perspective without offering biblical documentation.

His central idea is that Jesus substituted Himself for us and took our punishment, which did not happen. Rather, He died to spill His blood to wash away our sin. 

We are pretty certain that no Christian views Jesus' blood as insufficient to save a man. Nothing needs to be added to the blood; nothing needs to supplement His death. The blood is enough.

Nothing else. Period. Nothing else is needed, including the punishment of Jesus.

If God's wrath against the sinner is totally appeased by Jesus' blood when he repents, why would Dr. MacArthur think that His wrath must land somewhere else? This is the crucial question, and why we believe the Father did not punish Jesus for our sin.

Read this carefully: If the Father punished Jesus for our sin, then He didn't forgive at all, He simply redirected his wrath and carried it out anyway.

We've got to land solidly on this, dear reader. Propitiation is appeasement/satisfaction of God's wrath. If He punished Jesus His wrath wasn't appeased by Jesus' death. The blood wasn't enough. The sacrifice did not propitiate. 

If that's true the Father went out looking for someone to punish because His wrath didn't go away. It landed on Jesus.

This is an evil idea. It is deception to believe the Father punished Jesus. It violates the character of God to not be satisfied with Jesus' sacrifice. 

Jesus had already did everything needed to satisfy the Father. Appeasement negates punishment. Appeasement ends the matter. When someone is appeased, it's over. The blood is enough.

All of the following statements are based on this pernicious idea that the Father punished Jesus. All the following are bare assertions, and in our opinion, quite false.

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(...)

In what sense, then, was He “made . . . sin”? One simple sense: On the cross Jesus was guilty of nothing, but the guilt of His people was imputed to Him—charged to His account. (No, this did not happen.)

God treated Jesus as if He personally had committed every sin of every person who would believe. (No, he did not.)

God treated Him that way, though in fact He committed none of them. God exploded the full fury of His wrath for all the sins of all who will ever believe against Jesus, and exhausted His wrath on Him. (No, this did not happen.)

He did it on our behalf, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (Ahh, true.)

That’s why Jesus had to live all those years in perfect obedience: He needed to fulfill all righteousness, so that His life could be imputed to us. We’re not righteous; we all know that. (We are righteous by faith.)

On the cross Jesus wasn’t a sinner, but God treated Him as if He was. (Dr. MacArthur repeats his false assertion.)

And although you’re not righteous,  (We are righteous by faith.)

He treats you as if you are—because on the cross God treated Jesus as if He had lived your life, so that He could treat you as if you had lived His. (No, he did not.)

That’s imputation. (No, this did not happen.)

That’s substitution—perhaps the greatest expression of God’s grace to us. Jesus came and became poor to exchange His life for yours, in order to fulfill the elective plan of God, that He might do the will of God perfectly and in the end give back to God the very love gift that the Father had given to Him.

(At this point in our many reviews of Dr. MacArthur's teaching, we can only regard him as a false teacher.)