Sunday School | Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Introduction

As we're in a big long series looking at all the major doctrines of Christianity, and right now, we're almost halfway through the doctrine of Christology. We're looking at the life of Christ, and we've said there are things we want to understand about His incarnation, His teaching, His miracles, His obedient life. And which brings us to what's next? His death on the cross.

And so for the next few weeks, we're going to be talking about the work of Christ accomplished on the cross, which is of course central to all of it. And the lens we're going to look at it through is what we would call theories of atonement or atonement theories.

So, what I want you to know right out of the gate is that when Jesus died on the cross, a lot was happening. There are many different things that are going on, and if we're going to understand really what was accomplished and why that happened, it's such a thing, and it's such a bizarre thing. I promise you, if you were God, you never would have thought of the cross. Right? Like, if you're you, no one in their right mind would say, I have an idea. How about if I incarnate myself to be one of them? If you wanted to save the chipmunks in your neighborhood, it would not cross your mind to become a chipmunk, to live among them, and to do good to them, and to store up—I don't know. What are chipmunks like? To bring them extra acorns or something. And then allow them to rebel against you and beat you to death, and then kill you in the cruelest way that a chipmunk can kill you. It just would never have crossed your mind. And yet, it's exactly—not exactly. It's somewhat like what Jesus has done for us.

The Doctrine of Atonement Theories

So we talk about atonement theories. There have historically been, I would suggest to you, four different theories of atonement. Four different groupings or ways to understand what is happening on the cross. And I happen to think that all of the four, three of them are absolutely valid, completely true, and should be embraced as part of your understanding of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. One of them should be rejected. But I'm all in for the first three.

And the reason I frame it this way and start out with that is that it's often, I think, people experience it as like pick your favorite and hate the rest. And I don't think we get to pick our favorite and hate the rest. And I'll explain to you what they all are. I'm going to walk you through the three major, I think, orthodox understandings of the cross and why I believe it's not just that this one's the best and this one's okay, maybe it's okay. But I think they're all important. I think they're all valuable. I think they all add a different facet to our understanding. But sometimes they are pitted against one another for reasons that will become more clear as we go through.

Alright? So does anybody want to throw out, like I—I don't even know if you have any idea what I'm talking about yet. So, Blue Ridge fellows, don't get to play. What is a theory of atonement? Don?

Victory in Jesus.

Okay. So he just said victory in Jesus. If we're going to be a little bit fancier about that, we would say Christus Victor, which is exactly what Don is saying. So the victory of Christ, Christus Victor, Christ as Conqueror, Christ as Victor is one of those three atonement theories. I'll explain what that means in a minute. Another?

Substitutionary penal atonement.

Okay. Yeah. So that we usually flip the words around. So PSA, which stands for penal substitutionary atonement. Okay. Penal as in penalty, substitutionary as in one for another, atonement. Penal, substitutionary, atonement. That is another of the main atonement theories. And it's usually in the circles in which we run, it tends to be the favorite, the best known, and many would think the only one that there is.

What else could there possibly be? We'll talk about that. So penal substitutionary atonement, Christus Victor, the victory of Christ.

Anybody know the third? This is like absolutely the least well known. So third, atonement theory. Sam, you're a Blue Ridge fellow. You don't get to play. Oh, I mean, we'll go to you as a last resort if needed. Okay. What else? Anybody know?

Moral influence.

Okay. Do you call it? Moral influence. Moral influence. Yeah. I've heard it called moral exemplar, but moral influence. Okay. So, the idea is that on the cross, what Jesus was doing was giving us a model of how to live. He was demonstrating what Christians have since called the cruciform life, the cross-shaped life. Is that what you were gonna say, Sam? Yeah. Yes. It is.

So the three that we're going to talk about over the next couple weeks are penal substitutionary atonement, Christus Victor, and moral exemplar. These are giving us three different vantage points on the work of Christ as He hung and died for sinners. I think He was doing all three of those things.

The fourth one, the one that I don't like, because I don't think it's really accurate or biblically grounded, do you know what that one is?

Ransom theory, Bob.

Very good. And ransom, what does that mean?

Jesus paid the ransom to Satan.

This. That Jesus paid the ransom to Satan.

This is very unfortunately, if you're Tim Henderson, the view that is most clearly visible in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. If you guys know your Narnia tales, which you should because they're beautiful and wonderful and great, but the way that Lewis depicts the death of Aslan is in order to pay a debt to the White Witch so that she will release her claim on Edmund. Right? All of that is really a pretty artful depiction of the ransom theory. It's just not true.

Okay? Jesus wasn't dying to pay Satan. He was dying to defeat Satan. See, also Christus Victor. We'll maybe give that a little bit of time later on. But so those are the four main ideas expressed—penal substitutionary atonement, Christus Victor, moral exemplar, and ransom theory. We're going to deny or I will deny ransom theory and invite you to do the same.

We're going to start today talking about penal substitutionary atonement. How are we doing? You ready?

Okay. So, when we say penal substitutionary, this implies there is a penalty. There is a consequence. There is a cost. And you did something terrible and you need to pay for it, but wait—because someone could pay it in your place. Right?

The payment has to be made, but it doesn't need to be made by you. Now, if you are a faithful Jew growing up in a faithful Jewish community for like, you know, thousands of years, this was beat into your head. Okay? If you grew up in Israel, over and over and over what you saw is that this—it's a bloodbath. They're killing sheep. They're killing goats. They're killing bulls. Over and over and over the message is sin equals death. Sin equals death. Sin equals death. Sin equals death. But it doesn't need to be your death. Somebody else can die as a substitute in your place. This is the root of our understanding of penal substitutionary atonement.

Alright. Now go. If you got your Bible, go open it up to Leviticus 16. There's a lot of places we could see to understand what is this idea that Jesus is dying as a substitute in our place to absorb God's wrath against sin. I think the best way that we would ground it is probably going to be in Leviticus 16. This is the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, all of the sacrificial system that God is carrying out. And I want you to notice just one particular thing here. And we'll— and we'll— we'll kind of skim through this, but this is where an understanding of the Old Testament helps us to make sense of what we see happen in the new.

So if you go to Leviticus 16, and we'll just pick it up. We're going to kind of skip through it a little bit because it gets a little bit technical, but in verse five, God gives us instruction through Moses to the people of Israel. He is, he being the priest, is to take two male goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.

For the Lord's goat and the scapegoat, and the ram for the burnt offering. — Leviticus 16:5-6

Verse six, Aaron is to offer the bull for his own sin, making atonement for himself and his household. Right? Before he can even do it, he's got to get himself cleaned up. So kill a bull just for him, and then he's qualified to do the rest, which is this.

Verse seven, he said, take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. He used to cast lots for the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. You got two goats, and you're going to decide, okay, two things are going to happen. Something— the a thing is going to happen to this goat and the b thing is going to happen to that goat. And so basically, just like have him draw straws, okay? Whichever, you know, goat gets the short straw, this will happen to him.

In verse nine, Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat. Skip down to verse 15. He shall then slaughter the goat for the sin offering for the people, and take its blood behind the curtain and do with it as he did with the bull's blood. He shall sprinkle it on the atonement cover and in front of it, and in this way, he will make atonement for the most holy place because of the uncleanness and the rebellion of the Israelites, whatever their sins have been.

And then come down to verse 20. When Aaron is finished making atonement for the most holy place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he is to bring forward the live goat. Hang on. To lay— he is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites, all their sin, and put them on the goat's head. And he shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place, and the man shall release it in the desert.

A lot of things are happening here, but what I want you to envision is the ceremonies. The priest first, before he can even do this, he's got to kill a bull. This bull is going to be his representative, and all of his badness is imputed to or credited to or transferred to the bull. Then the bull is killed. So the priest gets to live, but his sin has been paid for—sort of paid for—by this bull.

And then he gets two goats, and the goats get divided up. One of them is going to die, and the other is going to be banished. And then they do a ceremony where, again, the sins of the people are imputed to the goats—the scapegoat, the one that's going to get banished, and then the goat that's about to get his throat slit. They both become representatives of the people, and they bear in their being the rebellion and sin of the Israelites. Then one of them is killed, and one is banished. And in so doing, you could say it's not that hard to see that God is communicating to the people that the consequence of sin is separation and death. That sin separates us from God, and that the wages of sin is death. And then these goats are killed or banished and sent off. And then the next year, do it all over again. And pretty much every day in between, they do some other version of that over and over to communicate to the people that the consequences of sin are separation and death.

And then, hundreds of years after this begins, thousands of years after this begins, Jesus shows up. And when He goes to a cross, He becomes just like these goats. He becomes the one who is Himself separated from God. He says on the cross,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — Matthew 27:46

Which is such a stunning thing to say for one who is, in his very nature, God. Who is unified with His Father from before time began. And He is, of course, unmistakably and unambiguously killed. He dies. And He suffers the consequence of sin.

Now, the author of Hebrews glues all this together. He's like, you want to understand what happened on the cross? Go—go in your Bible. Go to Hebrews. Come up toward the end of your Bible. Go to Hebrews 9. Hebrews is the second most complicated book in the New Testament. That's why I say, if you're reading through the New Testament, save Hebrews and Revelation for the end because Hebrews assumes an enormous amount of Old Testament knowledge, which if you don't have it, is going to make it a little bit hard to read. But Hebrews 9, verses 11 and following, is a reflection on Leviticus 16. He's explaining to us what was going on on the cross. It's like, well, that—remember what that was? It's that.

When Christ came as high priest, he is the high priest. When he came as high priest of the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not man-made, that is not part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves. He didn't need to make a sacrifice in order to be qualified to make another sacrifice. He just went in by—and he didn't need to bring any goats to the party. He was the bull, and he was the goat. He entered verse 12. If he did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the most holy place once for all, by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.

The author of Hebrews is saying that the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, the offering of the goats, was a foreshadowing. It was a picture to prepare us for the day that Jesus would come and, once and for all, absorb into Himself the consequence of sin and do away with it forever.

The Significance of Leviticus 16 and Isaiah 53

How are we doing? Make sense? That's the root of PSA.

Gary? Why then do we call Christ our Passover lamb? Because—why don't we call Him the scapegoat?

Yes. Okay. This is a great question. Probably next week, we'll see how far we get today. But if not next week, the week after, we're going to talk about Christus Victor and what was going on there. And in a way that might surprise many of you, it might take a little arm-twisting to admit, Passover is a Christus Victor phenomenon, not a PSA phenomenon. And so He is the Passover lamb. But Passover is about something other than, the day of atonement as we see in Yom Kippur.

And I'll try to—you can just think I’m wrong for another week. That's fine. I live in that space. But I will persuade you next week that it was, it's really a Christus Victor event. And I'll try to make that make sense to you.

He is the lamb, and he is the goat, and he is the bull. He's all of it.

Other questions so far? Okay.

Let me ask you this: Did the sheep and the goats, the bulls—did they pay for sin, or did they not?

Yes.

Supposedly.

How would you?

Yes.

What?

Yes.

Okay. Why does Hebrews say the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sin? What does that mean?

I assume it means for the long term.

Not for permanence?

Yeah.

It was a covering.

What does that mean?

Again, not long-term, but for that moment, it covered sin and allowed them to be in relationship.

I think it's fair. There it is—a covering. It’s a temporary—it’s a deferral. Right? I want you to think of it like this: Sin is not economic in its nature, but economics can give us a useful parallel.

If you had a giant debt and the debt collector comes knocking, and you pay the interest on the loan, that's going to buy you some time. It doesn't retire the debt. They can still come back. But if the interest is paid, we're good here, and we'll see you in twelve months. Right?

That's essentially what you're having in the day of atonement. It is paying the interest on the loan. It is debt deferral, but that mound of sin remains. When Jesus comes, He doesn't just pay the interest; He retires the debt. And that's the difference. The blood of bulls and goats is merely interest payment. It is debt deferral, but Christ retires the payment when He comes. He's genuinely in Himself absorbing the wrath of God, not just delaying it.

Makes sense? Catherine? I kinda see it as something to come between us and God's eyes because like He talks about, you know, people talk about maybe the—I don't know. I could be way off—but that when God sees us now, He sees the blood of Jesus covering Him. That's right. And so that's what He was—that was a foreshadowing of that. Like, He's looking—He's looking at them, and okay. He's ignoring the sin because He sees the sacrament. That's right.

And I do think that for a faithful Jew, what they were doing is they were obeying God. He said do this. And even if you don't understand why to do this, doing it because He said so is a pretty good reason to do something. So they're being obedient.

Okay, we're going to kill the sheep. But I think the wiser among them are those that pay more attention to it and realize, okay, He's going somewhere with this. Right? This is meaningful. There's something happening. And ultimately, the reason He has them pay the interest on the debt over and over again was to prepare them so that when He comes, they're ready to see, oh, this is that. This is that thing.

And of course the blood of bulls and goats can't do it because we've got to do it again. Hebrews is going to make a big point out of this to kind of Dan's point. Like Hebrews is very fond of the permanence as opposed to the temporariness of it. In Hebrews, you see over and over—they're like, yeah, we got to do it again; we got to do it again; we got to do it again. Because it sort of sorta works, but it doesn't really work. It only works for a little while.

You've all fixed something. Jerry would never do this, but most of us would like fix a temporary fix like a plumbing solution with a temporary thing. We'd be like, just wrap it with tape. That'll work for a week. Jerry'd be like, nope. No deal. Cut it out. Solder in new copper, make it all perfect. Right? Tape is the Libidical system, but the new copper pipe is the work of Christ. How's that work? Jerry? Is that good? Does that work? Okay.

I saw there are a couple other hands. What do we got here?

Bob? A little bit of, like, the difference between atonement and propitiation.

I would—

Wouldn't frame it that way. I would say atonement is actually writ large, and propitiation is an aspect of the atonement. So propitiate, to propitiate, simply means to satisfy the wrath of, to absorb the anger of. And that is what's happening under penal substitutionary atonement. It is a propitiating act.

And I'm going to actually take us to Romans three in just a second. But I do think that we should—our understanding of the atonement should be broader than propitiation because there's more going on than just that.

In fact, let me read that, and then I think Ray had his hand up. We'll give you guys a couple of chances to comment.

So in Romans three, twenty-three, Paul says this:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as— and what do you have there in verse 25? God presented Him as Propitiation. Propitiation.

Now, some will have as a sacrifice of atonement. Some will have a propitiation. Kelly? What do you have for NIV?

A sacrifice of atonement. Propitiation is ESV.

As all, I'm an NIV guy because it's so much easier to read, but if ever the NIV and ESV differ on a technical thing, the ESV is right. Overwhelmingly, the ESV gets it right. They just get it right in ways that are hard to understand. It is a propitiation. It is a satisfaction of wrath through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate His justice. And listen to the logic here.

Because in His forbearance, He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. What all those big words mean is that God had a huge problem on His hand. He had forgiven people, and He had forgiven people, and He had forgiven people. But the day came that all of that forgiveness needed to be paid for.

You could think of it like this: Jews in the Old Testament were saved on credit. Believers in the new era are saved on debit. Right? So I’ll be Jesus for just a brief heretical moment. And here I am dying on a cross. Everyone that came before me, their sins—the payment for their sin—was deferred. It was deferred. It was deferred. It was deferred. And then the payment came due. Right? They were saved on credit and anticipation. Not by the blood of bulls and goats. That was just interest payment—that was just deferral games. When Jesus came, all of the sin that God had overlooked, that He had forgiven, that He had refused to issue judgment for—all of that came due on the cross, and the payment was made. And then all of us who live now after this, on the other side of the timeline, our sin is forgiven looking back to the payment that was made.

When Jesus died on the cross, it was enough to pay for every sin that had been committed prior to His life and every sin that would be committed after His life. We, you and I, in 2025, are saved on a debit card back to the balance that He purchased. They were all saved on a credit card anticipating the payment that would be made.

Wow. Makes sense?

Retroact. What's retroact?

You mean for the Jews?

Yes.

So that's what it—yes.

Retroact. So when it says in verse 25, He did this to demonstrate in His justice because in His forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. And now He did it to be like, woah. I'm not just letting it go; it will be paid for. It will be paid for by me. He did this at the cross to demonstrate His justice at the present time so as to be just and also to justify those who have faith.

Cool.

Alright. If Leviticus 16 is the basis of it, if Hebrews 10 is the one that connects this work back to it, and Romans three is the kind of the explanation of it, I think by far the most powerful depiction of this is Isaiah 52 and 53. If you really want to understand penal substitutionary atonement, okay. We're probably going to take our time on this.

Go to Isaiah 52 and 53. This is what—if I could only have one passage on penal substitutionary atonement, it would be this. So Isaiah has four passages known as the servant songs. They're kind of the latter half of the book. Strange thing, strange quirk about Isaiah is it divides into two sections, 39 chapters and 27 chapters. The Bible breaks into 39 books and 27 books. And that latter part—the second half—really the book of the crucifixion of the Messiah. So it's the work of the Messiah. And the final, the climactic passage in Isaiah, not the final passage—that's till chapter 66—but this climactic depiction of the work of the Messiah, who's not really called Messiah in Isaiah, He's called the servant in Isaiah. This final passage of the servant starts at Isaiah 52, what is it? Verse 12? No, verse 13.

This is the single most unfortunate chapter break in the Bible. Chapter breaks are fake—they're added later. Isaiah didn't put a chapter break here. It's super stupid. But from chapter 52, verse 13 through chapter 53, verse 12—that chunk right there—is, I mean, top five most important passages in the entire Old Testament. You've got to have the fourth and final servant song.

The way it's arranged, if I had thought about this, I could have printed it for you. Maybe I’ll email this to you. You should look at it as a poem with five stanzas. And the way it works is that the outer two stanzas are like the frame of the poem, and then these middle two, like the next one's in, they're like the mat. And then the center one is like the heart of the whole thing. Okay? The whole thing, Isaiah 52 and 53, is designed to draw your eye to this center stanza.

This central part of Isaiah 53 is, I mean, the paragraph right here. I'll begin it in verse four.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds, we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. — Isaiah 53:4-6

And what we find in this central passage is not exaltation and not rejection but punishment. He is a substitutionary punished one. He is the one who takes the wrath that everyone else deserves. But what you'll notice, and you may have noticed even though we were reading the exaltation and the rejection, is that the central stanza is about his punishment. The central stanza cannot contain it, and it spills through the entire thing. The whole thing is marked—his exaltation is marked by punishment. His rejection is marked by punishment. But that central moment is where we see how substitutionary his punishment is.

This is, I'm telling you, we have there are friends who would deny penal substitutionary atonement in favor generally of Christus Victor, and we'll talk about why they're right about Christus Victor but wrong about PSA. It's tough for me to imagine how they can read Isaiah. I've read their literature on Isaiah 53, and they say, Yeah, that's not penal substitutionary atonement. And I'm like, man, I just don't know how you get there. You get there because you want to get there. It's unavoidably present in this passage. Jesus is our substitute. And the Lord places on Him. Just listen to the language again here. I'll give it to you the NIV. Just that center part.

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by His wounds, we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way, and here it is—the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

I don't know how you can honestly erase that. I mean, it's just what happens. Penal substitutionary atonement is just present and is true.

Conclusion

This is, I would say, central to our understanding of the cross, but it is not complete. Some—and I'll give you a forecast of where we're going—some that advocate for Christus Victor tend to do so as an alternative to penal substitutionary atonement. And that tends to make the PSA guys rain down disapproval on Christus Victor, almost in retribution. And what I'm suggesting to you is don't do that because Christus Victor is also true. It's crucially true. There's really important things we learn from that understanding of the cross. But don't get so hyped up about Christus Victor that you lose penal substitutionary atonement. And don't be so rah-rah penal substitutionary atonement that you're blind to the necessary beauty of Christus Victor. Both are true. I'll explain more about why that is in a minute.

So we got about five minutes. So, staying in Isaiah 53 or Leviticus 16 or just PSA in general, questions that you have about this aspect of the work of Christ. So, so clear you have no questions? Or is it so muddy that you're not even sure what to say right now? How are you feeling? Kelly Sue?

So, in Second Corinthians, when it says God made Him who knew no sin to be sin so that we could become the righteousness of Christ— is that what it is?

Yeah. Okay. So, let's say that a little louder. So go to Second Corinthians chapter five. Kelly's question.

Let's just we'll start at verse 17, and we'll kind of get a running start to the passage Kelly asked about.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Reconciliation, by the way, is a pretty good maybe it's not quite a synonym, but it's a it's a pretty good approximation for atonement. Sometimes, and if you want to be kitschy about it, atonement can be called at-one-ment. Right? The idea that you are bringing two unreconciled parties back together—that God is reconciling us to Himself. That there is a sense of what—that is what atonement accomplishes. It brings warring parties back together.

So verse 19:

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.

And then here's the line that Kelly quoted:

For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. — 2 Corinthians 5:21

That is massive language, right? That God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us. Now, the word here, gotta tell you, it could be more or less flagrantly. It could be that what Paul is saying is that God made Him who had no sin to be a sin offering for us. Sometimes this language is used not to say that He became wickedness but that He became the offering for sin—that is, like, grammatically and vocabulary-wise. That's a possible and plausible explanation. I don't think it's accurate. It's possible. I do think what it's saying is that He became wickedness. He became the very embodiment of sin—that God's judgment might be poured out on Him. And in that, yes, the moment, Kelly, that He would have becomes, if that's right, if the most pointed version of that is correct, that He became sin, what that is saying is that when the Father laid our iniquity upon Him, He became identified with that sin and then He was punished.

Not just what we did, but what we became. Right? We are not just good people who do bad things; we are bad people who do bad things. It runs deeper than just our skin. And so when Jesus—He didn't just carry what we had done, but He became what we are because He is a full and comprehensive substitute.

Kelly? And be loud, babe.

I think this passage also speaks to your question earlier in class about why—why the blood of bulls and goats doesn't cover our sins. We all were like, because it's temporary.

I think it's because you have to be made new. If your sins are going to be covered, you've got to be united with Christ and be a new creation, because of this.

That's great. Yes. And that's why we say there's a lot of things going on on the cross, right? There's a lot of things. We're going to see more again, in the next couple weeks, we'll see more aspects of it that is going on. And also, this—we talked about this last week—that Jesus didn't just die our death, but what else did He do? He lived our life. We have a double imputation: our badness to Him and His goodness to us. And there ain't no bull or goat that lived your life. Right? He came and lived it. You got to see His obedient life—is also the obedient one, the one that's being crucified in our place, right? There's a lot going on.

Want to add something? Maybe a question.

Yes.

Isaiah 53, when it talks about He will divide the spoils, when He's strong—are we them?

Yeah. So if you go back to Isaiah 53, that picture there goes beyond this—Isaiah 53. Let me see.... Yeah, I'll tell you as soon as I get to this passage. The question here is, when it says in Isaiah 53 verse 12,

Therefore I will give Him a portion among the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, — Isaiah 53:12

are we the strong? And the answer is: yes, we are. So Isaiah 53 is not just showing us that He will die in our place, it's certainly showing that, but it's also showing that He will be raised from the dead. This is when—when Paul's asking, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Christ was raised according to the scriptures. He's talking about this passage.

For He was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people He was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in His death, though He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in His mouth. — Isaiah 53:8-9

But in verse 10—though the Lord makes His life a guilt offering—it's because He's dead. And yet, He will see His offspring and prolong His days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in His hand. Because He's not dead anymore. After the suffering of His soul, that is His death, He will see the light of life and be satisfied.

And Isaiah shows us not just His death, but His resurrection. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. And then, in His resurrection, what you see out of Isaiah—really picks it up when you go to Ephesians 4.

This I think is an allusion back to the Isaiah 53 passage, where it says in verse 7,

To each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, when He ascended on high, He led captives in His train and gave gifts to men. — Ephesians 4:7-8

That, having ascended as King, conquering death, He then distributes to those that follow Him innumerable blessings. And that could be understood as spiritual gifts, but it's also eternal life, forgiveness, intimacy with Him, all these things purchased through Jesus’ death and resurrection by which He becomes king.

Closing Thoughts

Alright? Good enough? So, penal substitutionary atonement. Next week, we'll pick it up and take a look at Christus Victor and try to understand that aspect of it a little more richly. Thanks for coming.