Payne:

Secondly, we proceed to notice the nature of that satisfaction which was rendered to God as the moral Governor of the world. As we proceed, it will be found that the various parts of this great subject illustrate each other. The statements concerning the necessity of the atonement, for instance, partially explain its nature; an exhibition of its nature proves, on the other hand, its necessity. In like manner, the nature of that satisfaction which it is now proposed to investigate, must have received some elucidation from the account just given of the displeasure, on the part of God, which rendered the satisfaction necessary. The correctness of this statement will more fully appear in the course of the following remarks.

The previous definition of the atonement exhibits it in the light of a moral satisfaction. It was stated to be a satisfaction for sin, rendered to God as the moral Governor of the world. Now a moral satisfaction is one entirely sui generis. We must be especially cautious not to identify it in our conceptions with a pecuniary satisfaction. The common and popular phraseology on this subject exposes us to the danger of doing this. Sin is frequently described as a debt, and the atonement as the payment of this debt; and, if we were careful to recollect that these are symbolical or figurative terms, we should not be misled by the phraseology. But the misfortune is, that words which are really figurative, and which are employed for the sole purpose of illustration, have been under. stood and explained literally. Sin has been represented as a real debt, and the atonement as a real payment of that debt; and the unhappy result is, that darkness of the densest kind has been made to envelop the whole subject. There are individuals who imagine that Christ rescues his people from the claims of Divine justice in precisely the same way in which a generous friend delivers a debtor from captivity, by advancing the necessary sum on his behalf. Now I would not affirm that it is impossible for such persons to be saved by an humble hope in the mercy of God, through Jesus Christ; but I can have no hesitation in expressing the opinion, that they do not understand the atonement. A pecuniary satisfaction, and a moral satisfaction, differ essentially in their nature, and pro. ceed on radically different principles. Perhaps no man has set this difference in a clearer light than the late Mr. Fuller, whose words I quote :–“I apprehend,” says this excellent writer,

that very important mistakes have arisen from considering the interposition of Christ under the notion of paying a debt. The blood of Christ is, indeed, the price of our redemption, or that for the sake of which we are delivered from the curse of the law; but this metaphorical language, as well as that of head and members, may be carried too far, and may lead us into many errors. In cases of debt and credit among men, when a surety undertakes to represent the debtor, from the moment his undertaking is accepted, the debtor is free, and may obtain his liberty, not as a matter of favour, at least on the part of the creditor, but of strict justice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Smalley:

SERMON I.

JUSTIFICATION THROUGH CHRIST, AN ACT OF FREE GRACE.

_____________

Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in CHRIST JESUS.
–Romans 3: 24.

The point labored in the preceding part of this epistle, is the impossibility of salvation for any of mankind, on the footing of mere law, or of personal righteousness. The apostle hath proved that both Jews and Gentiles were all under sin; and hence he infers, as the necessary consequence, that, “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in the sight of God.” This point being established, that the original way of life was how forever barred against the race of fallen man, the apostle proceeds, for the comfort of sinners, to open to view the gospel method of justification through a Redeemer. See the context, verse 21, and onward. “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all, and upon all them that believe; for there is no difference. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

It is of the last importance that this new way of access into the divine favor, and of obtaining eternal life, should be rightly explained. By many it has been so misunderstood as either to make void the law, or to frustrate the grace of the gospel, or both. Some speculative inaccuracies also, it appears to me, respecting justification through the atonement and righteousness of Christ, have been inadvertently adopted by many, if not most, of the orthodox, of which men of erroneous sentiments have availed themselves to very pernicious purposes.

The great difficulty respecting this subject, to which I design to pay particular attention at present, is, how to reconcile the full satisfaction of Christ, with the free grace of God in the pardon of sin and the justification of sinners. It is proposed, agreeably to the words before us,

1st. To explain gospel justification.
2d. To consider how this is through the redemption of Christ. And,
3d. To show that still it is of the free grace of God.
But on the last of these heads I mean mainly to insist.
I. I shall endeavor very briefly to explain what we are here to understand by being justified.

Read the rest of this entry »

[comments below]

Bellamy:

Remark 5. Some of the peculiar principles of the Antinomians seem to take their rise from wrong notions of the nature of satisfaction for sin. They seem to have no right notions of the moral perfections of God, and of the natural obligations we are under to him, nor any right apprehensions of the nature and ends of moral government, nor any ideas of the grounds, nature, and ends of satisfaction for sin; a right sense of which things, tends powerfully to promote a holy fear, and reverential awe of the dread Majesty of heaven and earth; a sense of the infinite evil of sin: brokenness of heart, tenderness of conscience; a humble, holy, watchful, prayerful temper and life, as well as to prepare the way for faith in the blood of Christ. But they seem to have no right apprehensions of these things. They seem to consider God merely under the notion of a creditor, and us merely under the notion of debtors; and to suppose, when Christ upon the cross said, ”It is finished,” he then paid the whole debt of the elect, and saw the book crossed, whereby all their sins were actually blotted out and forgiven; and now, all that remains is for the Holy Spirit immediately to reveal it to one and another that he is elected; that for him Christ died, and that his sins are all pardoned; which revelation he is firmly to believe, and never again to doubt of; and this they call faith. From which it seems they understand nothing rightly about God or Christ, the law or gospel. For nothing is more evident than that God is, in Scripture, considered as righteous Governor of the world, and we as criminals, guilty before him; and the evident design of Christ’s death was, to be a propitiation for sin, to declare and manifest God’s righteousness, that he might be just, and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus. (Rom. iii. 9–26.) And the gospel knows nothing about a sinner’s being justified in any other way than by faith, and by consequence, in order of nature, not till after faith. The gospel knows nothing about satisfaction for sin, in their sense; but every where teaches that the elect, as well as others, are equally under condemnation and the wrath of God; yea, are children of wrath while unbelievers, (John iii. IS. 36. Eph. ii. 3. Acts iii. 19.)

Again; while they consider God merely under the character of a creditor, and us merely as debtors, and Christ as paying the whole debt of the elect; now, because Christ obeyed the law, as well as suffered its penalty, therefore they seem to think that Christ has done all their duty,so that now they have nothing to do but firmly to believe that Christ has done all: they have nothing to do with the law,–no, not so much as to be their rule to live by,–but are set at full liberty from all obligations to any duty whatsoever; not understanding that “Christ gave himself to redeem his people from all iniquity, and purify them to himself, a peculiar people, zealous of good works,” and not understanding that our natural obligations to perfect obedience are not capable of being dissolved, ( Matt. v. 17,) and not understanding that our obligations to all holy living are mightily increased by the grace of the gospel. (Rom. xii. 1.) Indeed, they seem to understand nothing rightly, but to view every thing in a wrong light; and instead of considering Christ as a friend to holiness, as one ” that loves righteousness and hates iniquity,” they make him “a minister of sin,” and turn the grace of God into wantonness. All their notions tend to render their consciences insensible of the evil of sin: to cherish spiritual pride and carnal security, and to open a door to all ungodliness.

Joseph Bellamy, “True Religion Delineated,” The Works of Joseph Bellamy (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853), 1:290-291. [Some spelling modernized and underlining mine.]

Read the rest of this entry »

Ridderbos:

How explicitly Paul speaks of “to ransom,” “to redeem,” may appear finally from a quartet of other passages where in the Greek the ordinary word for “to purchase” as a business term (agorazo, exagorazo) is employed, namely, 1Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23, where it is said: “You were bought and paid for,”43 and Galatians 3:13; 4:5, where it is said that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us,” and again, that he was born under the law “that he might redeem them that were under the law.” All these passages relate the salvation thus described once again with Christ’s death on the cross. When Büchsel writes: “Intentionally it is not said . . . at what cost [the Christians were bought],” this can be accepted only if it is definitely established that this price was the death of Christ 4G (cf. 1 Pet. 1:19). No other price or payment had in any case been spoken of. That we must so understand these passages–which have a paraenetic purpose and do not expressly describe the redemptive work of Christ–is clearly evident from Galatians 3:14; 4:5. There Christ’s curse death on the cross is designated as the manner ill which he has bought us. This is also the significance of Christ’s being “under the law” in Galatians 4:5.

Finally, the question arises here again as to the sense in which one will have to understand this representation of the salvation accomplished by Christ as redemption. Time and again scholars of every sort have laid stress on the fact that it is nowhere said to whom the price is paid. The main consideration here for most of them is the idea, correct in itself, that one must not think of a kind of business transaction between Christ and God, of which believers would then be the stake. To this extent one can consider it significant that it is not said that Christ paid the price to God. Yet on the other side, one should take no less care to see that the objective character of what is here called “to redeem,” “ransom,” etc., is not compromised. One runs this risk, in our view, when it is posited that there is “no question here in fact of a case at law with God,” or that Paul gives no answer to questions as to the significance of the necessity and the possibility of such a legal case with God and that, for Paul, in the cross of Christ God is not the Recipient but the One who is acting. Altogether objectionable is the notion that Paul did not consider Christ as in reality burdened with the curse of God, but speaks in Galatians 3:13 from the legalistic standpoint that he himself had rejected; in Christ it would then (on this viewpoint) appear that the curse of the law is not the curse of God and in this way the idea that God deals with men on a legalistic basis would be carried ad absurdum. The deliverance from the curse of the law would then mean only “a release from a false conception of God’s attitude.”

However much we have to guard against a pedestrian notion of “buy,” “price,” “pay,” as though the salvation Christ has accomplished were a matter of a business transaction, this does not alter the fact that the whole thought of redemption and ransom rests on the awful reality of the curse of the law (Gal. 3: 13; 4:5), a curse that one may not understand as an independent, blind force detached from God, but as the fulfillment of the divine threat against sin (Gal. 3: 14). There is here in fact, however inadequate human words may be, a case at law between God and men, both Jews and gentiles. In this Christ makes his appearance as the Mediator, who gives the ransom for all (1 Tim. 2:6). His death is the costly price in this case. Here again the great presupposition is that God himself has sent and given his own Son to that end (Gal. 4:4, 5). Just as in the passages that speak of Christ’s atoning death (see above), this is the great secret that has now been revealed, the content of the gospel. In it Christ represents God with men (1 Tim. 2:6). As the one sent of God, he takes the curse upon himself and he dies, burdened with it, in place of men on the cross. He pays the price for them, he therein unites in himself God’s saving will toward the world and his wrath against the sin of the world. In the complex of ideas concerning redemption the thought of substitution is here perhaps still clearer th an it was in the concept of Christ’s atoning death. It constitutes the fixed content of the ransom concept. For this reason the expression “became a curse for us” not only means “in our behalf,” but “in our place” as well (cf. 1 Tim. 2:6; Tit. 2:14). Although it is not thus said that Christ redeems his own from God, yet God is the one whose holy curse is executed on Christ in their place. Justice is not thrust aside, but justice is satisfied. Although we meet with no word for “satisfaction” in Paul, the idea of substitutionary satisfaction is materially present here. Salvation consists in the possibility, given by God and realized by Christ, that justice is victorious in love and love in justice. And all this one should view not in the first place as the substance of Paul’s personal experience or as the consequence of a severe, juridically conceived scheme of salvation, but as the apostolic unfolding of the meaning of the event, crossing all human expectations and calculations, of the death of Jesus Christ the Son of God. It is this eschatological fact of redemption which–in conjunction with the kerygma of the primitive church and in the light of the Old Testament, only now rightly understood – forms for Paul the propelling force for all his thoughts and causes him – not only as theologian, but as witness of revelation legitimated by Christ himself–to trace on all sides the salvation of the Lord realized in it.

Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI.: William B. Eerdmans, [1975]), 195-197.