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“And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (11: 52). As the previous verse gives us the Holy Spirit’s explanation of the words of Caiaphas, this one contains His amplification: as v. 51 informs us of the nature of Christ’s death, v. 52 tells us of the power and scope of it. The great Sacrifice was not offered to God at random. The redemption-price which was paid at the Cross was not offered without definite design. Christ died not simply to make salvation possible, but to make it certain. Nowhere in Scripture is there a more emphatic and explicit statement concerning the objects for which the Atonement was made. No excuse whatever is there for the vague (we should say, unscriptural) views, now so sadly prevalent in Christendom, concerning the ones for whom Christ died. To say that He died for the human race is not only to Ry in the face of this plain scripture, but it is grossly dishonoring to the ‘sacrifice of Christ. A large portion of the human race die un-saved, and if Christ died for them, then was His death largely in vain. This means that the greatest of all the works of God is comparatively a failure. How horrible! What a reflection upon the Divine character! Surely men do not stop to examine whither their premises lead them. But how blessed to turn away from man’s perversions to the Truth itself. Scripture tells us that Christ “shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.” No sophistry can evade the fact that these words give positive assurance that everyone for whom Christ died will, most certainly, be saved.

Christ died for sinners. But everything turns on the significance of the preposition. What is meant by “Christ died for sinners”? To answer that Christ died in order to make it possible for God to righteously receive sinners who come to Him through Christ, is only saying what many a Socinian has affirmed. The testing of a man’s orthodoxy on this vital truth of the Atonement requires something far more definite than this. The saving efficacy of the Atonement lies in the vicarious nature of Christ’s death, in His representing certain persons, in His bearing their sins, in His being made a curse for them, in His purchasing them, spirit and soul and body. It will not do to evade this by saying, “There is such a fulness in the satisfaction of Christ, as is sufficient for the salvation of the whole world, were the whole world to believe in Him.” Scripture always ascribes the salvation of a sinner, not to any abstract “sufficiency,” but to the vicarious nature, the substitutional character of the death of Christ. The Atonement, therefore, is in no sense sufficient for a man, unless the Lord Jesus died for that man: “For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us” (I Thess. 5: 9, 10). “If the nature of this ‘sufficiency’ for all men be sifted, it will appear to be nothing more than a conditional ‘sufficiency,’ such as the Arminians attribute to their universal redemption–the condition is: were the whole world to believe on Him. The condition, however, is not so easily performed. Many professors speak of faith in Christ as comparatively an easy matter, as though it were within the sinner’s power; but the Scriptures teach a different thing. They represent men by nature as spiritually bound with chains, shut up in darkness, in a prison-house. So then all their boasted ‘sufficiency’ of the Atonement is only an empty offer of salvation on certain terms and conditions; and such an Atonement is much too weak to meet the desperate case of a lost sinner” (Wm. Rushton).

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