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This is a very surprising presentation. Dr. MacArthur gets everything correct for most of his article, ably explaining, with biblical documentation, the various issues surrounding the sacrifices and the atonement. But for some reason at the end he wanders off into speculation and undocumented claims.
We will jump back in towards the end, at the point where Dr. MacArthur goes off the rails.
This series was first published in February of 2017. -ed.
The apostle Paul was deadly serious about keeping the message of salvation pure. He had no hesitation to pronounce damnation on anyone who would dare to change or contaminate the gospel.
There are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed! (Galatians 1:7–9)Paul didn’t believe the gospel was the exclusive domain of theological scholars and academia. Implicit in his severe warning was his expectation that everyone who read his epistles should be able to discern between a true and a false gospel. The gospel he preached wasn’t a mystery, nor was it clouded in confusing rhetoric. He stated it clearly and simply:
Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you . . . that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared. (1 Corinthians 15:1,3–5).Today, we’ll examine the first two elements of this gospel: Christ’s atonement and his burial.
Atonement
Paul wanted to highlight not merely the historical fact that Christ died. He is much more specific: “Christ died for our sins.” It is the language of atonement.
Paul’s statement echoes precisely what the apostle John wrote in 1 John 2:2: “[Jesus] Himself is the propitiation for our sins.” That word propitiation speaks of an appeasement. Specifically, it signifies the satisfaction of divine justice. Or to say the same thing differently, a “propitiation” is a sacrifice or offering that placates the wrath of God against sinners.
Many people find such a concept repellent. It certainly challenges the popular notion of a grandfatherly god who is always benign and lenient toward sin. In recent years a handful of well-known writers and teachers on the evangelical fringe have emphatically rejected the biblical claim that the death of God’s own Son on the cross was a propitiation—labeling the idea “cosmic child abuse.”
Indeed, this is practically the whole crux of liberal religion: It stresses the love of God to the exclusion of His righteousness and His wrath against sin. Liberals therefore typically take the position that Christ’s death on the cross was nothing more than a noble act of exemplary martyrdom.
But Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 15:3 is not that Christ died because of our sins. Paul isn’t suggesting that Christ’s death had some vague, mystical, ethereal connection to human fallenness. The point is that Jesus voluntarily “died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (ESV; emphasis is added). He is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament sacrificial system illustrated. He is the answer to the conundrum of how a truly righteous God can forgive the unrighteousness of ungodly sinners.
“The wages of sin is death,” and “without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Romans 6:23; Hebrews 9:22). This principle was clearly established and vividly illustrated in the daily spectacle of Old Testament sacrifices. In Leviticus 17:11 the Lord told the Israelites, “The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.”
So animal sacrifices graphically illustrated several vital truths: the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the inflexibility of judgment under the law, the incomprehensibly high cost of atonement, and both the justice and the mercy of God.
But it was clear that animal blood had no real or lasting atoning value. “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Blood sacrifices were offered daily (Exodus 29:38–42). Countless Passover lambs were also slaughtered annually each spring. Bulls and goats were sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, each fall. Work in the temple was never finished. Levites, musicians, and guards were on duty “day and night” (1 Chronicles 9:33). And priests in the Old Testament literally never got to sit down on the job. There were no chairs among the furnishings of the temple. “Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10:11; emphasis added).
It was clear that all the sacrifices and ceremony did not provide a full and complete atonement for sin. They were symbolic. How, after all, could mere animal blood placate the divine justice that demands the death of a sinner? There was a reason animals needed to be slaughtered repeatedly, daily—endlessly. It underscored the truth that the blood of a common animal is no real substitute for a guilty human life.
So Old Testament saints were left with a perplexing mystery: If animal sacrifices provided no true and final atonement, what else could possibly make God propitious to sinners? After all, God Himself said, “I will not acquit the guilty,” and anyone who does justify the wicked is an abomination to Him (Exodus 23:7; Proverbs 17:15). So how could God ever justify the ungodly without compromising His own righteousness?
The answer is that Christ willingly died in place of those whom He saves. (Here Dr. MacArthur swerves. He is misrepresenting the nature of Jesus' sacrifice.
The OT sacrifices, as Dr. McArthur quite correctly explained, were killed to spill their blood as an atonement for sin. That blood covered over the sin, but did not remove it. That's what "atonement" means, to cover over.
Dr. MacArthur quoted the actual Scripture that tells us that blood is required: without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness Ro. 6:23. But the Bible doesn't ever tell us that the shed blood is substitutionary in the sense that the sacrifice stands in the place of us or receives our punishment for sin.)
He is their Substitute—and unlike all those animal sacrifices, He is the perfect propitiation. Finally, here was a sufficient sacrifice. In Peter’s words, “Christ . . . died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Paul agreed: “[God] made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The point here is that Christ took the place of sinners on the cross. He died as their proxy. He absorbed the wrath of God against sin in their stead. He took the punishment we all deserve. (No, He did not. God did not punish Jesus. There is no Scripture that tells us this. Period.
His death was sacrificial, not substitutionary. The scapegoat is a good example from the OT. The priest placed his hands upon the scapegoat, confessed the sins of Israel, and sent it out into the wilderness. It was not regarded as sinful. It was not punished. It did not substitute for Israel.
This is a type of Christ. He carried our sins to the cross like a person takes out the garbage:
He. 13:13 Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.
"Bore" is pheró, which means to bear, carry, bring forth... Jesus bore, carried, brought forth our sin outside the camp.
Col. 2:14 having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.
Took it" is airó, which means lift up, take away.
Jesus was the vehicle who lifted up and carried our sin like a load of cargo to nail it to the cross. He was not punished by the Father. The Father did not regard Him as guilty.)
All of that is essential to Paul’s meaning when he says, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” This is the principle of penal substitution, and it is vital to a right understanding of the gospel. Christ bore the penalty of our sins. That’s how “Christ died for our sins.”
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