This article is the twenty-first installment in our series "Christian, What Do You Believe: The Belgic Confession of Faith." Find the whole series here.
Jesus’ death is a historical fact. As the Apostles’ Creed puts it, Jesus “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” Many critics of Christianity would agree. But what does this statement mean? What did Jesus’ death accomplish? These are not abstract, theoretical questions. We all feel the guilt of sin and the shame of failure. And Scripture is blunt: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Can the cross change that?
The Belgic Confession applies the teaching of the incarnation to the meaning of the cross.
Why Did Jesus Die?
A common contemporary answer is that Jesus died as a moral example. In this view, Jesus suffered “to reveal the divine love, so as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance.” Christ’s death is, in fact, a sign of God’s love (John 3:16). Jesus entered our suffering and practiced trust and obedience so that we might follow in his footsteps by taking up our cross. But this reality doesn’t answer the question, why the cross? If God wanted to show his love to sinners, why crucify his Son? The moral example model also doesn’t address God’s just wrath against sinners or the reality that sin earns the reward of death. And it doesn’t speak to our troubled consciences when we fail to consistently follow Christ’s example.
The ancient church, with its Christus Victor model of the atonement, helps us better understand the meaning of Jesus’ death. Christ’s finished work on the cross is “a victory over those demonic powers which have enslaved humanity” and “an act whereby God is reconciled in and through his reconciliation.” Christ “cancel[ed] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” by “nailing it to the cross.” In this way “he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:14, 15). Jesus frees us from Satan’s tyranny.
But the Bible’s most prominent answer is that Jesus died as a substitute for sinners. God is just and cannot pardon sin without exercising judgment. God is also merciful. He delights in showing kindness to the undeserving. For these reasons, God’s Son assumed the nature in which the disobedience was committed and in which the blessing was needed. He became human to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law for us. He became “sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Peter 2:24). Christ is the scapegoat upon whose head the sins of the people were placed and to which guilt was transferred (Lev. 16:21–22), and the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Substitutionary atonement honors the character of God who is both just and merciful.
What Does Christ’s Death Mean for Believers?
Believers Should Rest Securely in Christ
If you are united to Christ by true faith your salvation has been accomplished in the cross. The work is finished. Christ was delivered up for your offenses and raised for your justification (Rom. 4:25; 8:32). Your sins have been judged. Your eternal life has been secured. Your inheritance, which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading is “kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4). “God, by raising Jesus Christ, showed that He accepted the death of His Son as a sufficient ransom for our sins, and will accept his perfect obedience as justification for all who believe in Him.” Because of Christ’s finished work on the cross, “No question of my ever being judged for my sin can now arise.”
Believers Should Be Assured of God’s Love
When we sin, we violate our friendship with God. We wonder if God could love unfaithful people like us. We suspect God loves us only when we are good. But we realize that we can never be good enough. It’s true, as John Calvin writes, that in God’s righteousness “he cannot love all the unrighteousness that he sees in us all. All of us, therefore, have in ourselves something deserving of God’s hatred.” Yet, “out of his own kindness [God] still finds something to love” in us. We remain his creatures. And he created us to live. But we can “be fully and finally joined with God only when Christ joins us with him.” When that happens, God doesn’t love reluctantly or illiberally. Instead, “God poured forth his mercy and goodness on us” (BC 20). Like a mighty waterfall God’s love falls on us unrelentingly. “God shows his love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Therefore, nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39). Believers love God because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). And God’s love for his people is stable even when ours fluctuates.
Believers Should Hate Sin
When we consider Christ’s suffering on the cross, we might ask, “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee?” The answer is disturbing: “Alas my treason, Jesus hath undone Thee!.” “Our sins were the judicial grounds of Christ’s suffering.” If Christ died for you, he died for the sins that you still commit. Christ willingly suffered all the pain and anguish of hell because he loves you too much to see you destroyed by your sin. Christ’s death gives you peace with God and puts you at war with the sin that held him there. We must hate the sin that put Christ to death. We must sincerely and passionately confess our sin and turn from it with all our heart.
Scripture emphasizes a double substitution or double imputation. Christ experienced our judgment and merited for us his righteousness. This is the message of the cross. “In my place condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah! What a Savior.” God’s most perfect love is truly amazing. “How can it be, that thou my God shouldst die for me?” It is so only because he is “perfectly merciful and also very just.”
Footnotes
Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 396.
Gustav Aulen, The Faith of the Christian Church (Philadelphia, The Muhlenberg Press, 1948), 223.
Comment on Romans 4:25 in the Statenvertaling.
James I. Packer, Mark E. Dever, In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007),“What Did the Cross Achieve?”, 79.
hn Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.3.
Johann Heermann, “Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended,” Trinity Psalter Hymnal, 337.
Daniel R. Hyde, With Heart and Mouth: An Exposition of the Belgic Confession (Grandville, MI: Reformed Fellowship, Inc., 2008), 272.
Philip P. Bliss, “Man of Sorrows! What a Name,” Trinity Psalter Hymnal, 352.
Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain,” Trinity Psalter Hymnal, 431.
