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Chapter 7
The Sufficient Blood of Jesus
The devil, of course, hates the blood of Jesus and tries with all his might and wisdom to pervert the true teaching concerning the Atonement. The Liberals, for instance, deny that God has any wrath or anger towards sinners. “What a barbaric Dark Age mentality of an angry God!” they indignantly huff. And they teach that Jesus died on the cross, not to bear any punishment for sin, but to set us an example to imitate, of the self-giving love of a martyr dying for what is right and good. In reply to that position, we assert that while Jesus’ submission to His sufferings and death certainly was intended by God to be an example to us, yet the primary purpose of His death was to bear the punishment of our sins, and this fact is taught all through Scripture. Even those passages which teach the exemplary nature of His death set forth the main purpose of His death as being to voluntarily suffer the punishment of our sins to free us from that punishment:
The Liberal theologians deny the blood of Jesus altogether. But the devil is a little more subtle with other religious people and often he just adds to the blood. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has historically taught that while you are indeed saved by the blood of Jesus, it is not enough by itself and you need some works of your own as well. Many Christians today are following a similar path of adding to the blood of Jesus. As we have seen, some teach that while we are redeemed by Jesus’ blood, yet it was not enough by itself, and He had to die spiritually as well. Was Jesus Cast Out of His Father’s Presence? A related question is one we shall now deal with. The question is: Were Jesus and His Father ever separated? Many have taught that on the cross Jesus died spiritually and became sinful with the sin of humanity, and was therefore cast out of the presence of His holy Father as an accursed, unclean and loathsome thing. One man has written:
The same man writes, concerning Jesus:
Another man has taught that although the Father had seen the Son nailed to the cross, yet as soon as “sin touched Him, He turned His back on Him.” This same man taught that Satan “conquered” Jesus on the cross, and that Jesus was left “alone” because God had turned His back on Him. Yet another man, in the context of writing about the second death wrote:
The same man wrote that Jesus suffered
In 1 Corinthians 12:3, Paul shows us the source of this teaching:
That this whole teaching is a long way from the truth we shall now demonstrate. Can God Look Upon Sin? The argument that is most frequently used to try to prove Jesus was forsaken by His Father on the cross, is as follows: God is holy and cannot look upon sin (Hab. 1:13). On the cross Jesus was “made sin” (2 Cor. 5:21). Therefore His holy Father could not look upon Him and turned away from Him and forsook Him. The fallacy of this argument is two-fold. In the first place, the Scripture quoted to suggest that God cannot look upon sin is Habakkuk 1:13:
In this verse, the prophet Habakkuk is questioning God’s use of wicked Babylon to judge His people. The essence of his question is: How can the Lord, whose eyes are too pure to look upon evil and oppression, appoint the wicked Babylonians as His ministers of justice and punishment, to swallow up the people of Judah, who are, by comparison, more righteous than they? The statement made in the above verse is not that God is too holy to look upon sin in the sense of Him not being able to see it, but that God is too holy to behold evil and condone it. God is too pure to look upon iniquity without displeasure. God cannot look upon sin and allow it. The prophet’s point is not that God can’t allow Himself to see sin. His point is: How can a holy God who is too pure to behold iniquity without displeasure and wrath, apparently condone the sin of the wicked Babylonians and use them in His purposes.6 This verse does not teach that God is somehow unable to see sin, but that He does not condone it. He cannot look upon sin without disapproval – without wrath. The last half of the prophet’s question makes clear the meaning of the verse:
Clearly the prophet’s message is not that God is somehow incapable of looking upon sin itself, but that as the righteous Judge of the universe He cannot sanction or approve sin.
How could God perfectly and accurately judge men for their sin if He turned His back on sin and couldn’t see it? Secondly, the above line of reasoning wrongly uses 2 Corinthians 5:21:
This verse does not mean that Jesus was literally “made sin,” but that He became a sin offering. Jesus was entirely sinless on the cross, as the verse itself shows:
Jesus was at all times most holy. And He was always in the presence of His Father, as we shall now see. Jesus Was Never Abandoned By His Father The Bible quite plainly says Jesus was not separated from His Father. Peter, in Acts 2:25, describes Jesus in His sufferings on the cross:
Jesus was always in the presence of His Father. On the cross, He was beholding His Father. His Father was at His “right hand”! Peter was quoting here from Psalm 16:8 which is even more graphic:
While He hung on the cross, Jesus was in the presence of His Father. Throughout the time of His crucifixion, the Father was with Jesus, upholding and strengthening Him that He could endure it: “He is on my right hand, that I should not be moved.” Jesus endured inward pain as well as physical pain10 on the cross. He experienced the suffering of One who had been “despised and rejected of men.” He had come unto His own chosen people and “His own received Him not.” His was a real humanity, and He felt the same emotional pain that any man would have under such circumstances. However, unlike the men who forsook Him, His Father was with Jesus through it all, sustaining His Son by His loving presence and fellowship so He would endure. Acts 2:27b describes Jesus’ body in the tomb during the three days and nights:
In this verse, Jesus is called “thine [i.e., God’s] Holy One.” “Thine [not deserted and abandoned] Holy [not sinful and accursed] One”! In fact, Jesus was so perfectly holy that His body, by reason of His absolute holiness and sinlessness, could not see corruption – which is the result of sin – as it lay in the tomb (Acts 13:35-37). Acts 2:27a describes Jesus’ physical resurrection – how His soul was not left in hades:
“Hades” – or “sheol” as it was known in the Old Testament – is the general name for the place of departed spirits, both righteous and wicked.13 This verse has nothing to do with a so-called time of suffering in hell but simply means that God didn’t leave Jesus dead, but rather raised Him physically from the dead. That is what the verse means. This is proven by verse 31:
The Father Never Forsook His Son In the Gospel of John, we find an abundance of evidence that Jesus was never separated from His Father. In John 16, Jesus said:
Although the disciples forsook Jesus and fled (Matt. 26:31, 56), and He was crucified, yet He was not left totally alone because the Father was with Him! Jesus said He was!
Here Jesus said that when He was “lifted up” (i.e., crucified) the Father did not leave Him alone because Jesus always did those things that pleased Him; and when Jesus was on the cross He was right in the center of His Father’s perfect will. The Father always looked upon His Son as the holy Lamb of God shedding His precious blood. Jesus never ceased to be the dearly beloved of His Father. The Old Testament Types If Jesus were cast out of His Father’s presence on the cross, then you would expect that to be foreshadowed in the sacrificial types. However, whenever a priest made an offering to the Lord in the Old Testament, far from being cast out of God’s presence, he actually went into God’s presence in the tabernacle or temple to do it! The Old Testament priests would “draw near to God” in their service as priests:
The priests weren’t cast out of God’s presence with their offerings; they went into God’s presence! Furthermore, the sacrificial animal was always said to be killed “before the Lord”:
and the blood of the animal was said to be sprinkled by the priest “before the Lord”:
So the clear teaching of the Word of God is that Jesus was never separated from His Father. “I and My Father are One” The second reason why Jesus was never abandoned by His Father is that God is one, and you cannot split up the Godhead. In John 14:8-11, Jesus said, “I am in the Father, and the Father [is] in me...” The Father is in Jesus and all of the Father (and all of the Holy Spirit) is in Jesus because God is one, and Jesus is, and always was, God. The Father was not only “with” Jesus on the cross; the Father was in Him! There is one God who is infinite, eternal, uncreated Spirit. There are not three Gods, or two Gods – one in heaven and one on the cross – who can be separated, and one cast out of the presence of the other.
God is one divine Spirit who eternally manifests Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each one of these eternal manifestations possesses the whole of the divine nature. While each is distinct, yet there are not three divisions of God, because God is one indivisible, infinite Spirit. All of God is in the Father; all of God is in the Son; all of God is in the Holy Spirit – there is not a third of God in each – and all of God was in Jesus while He hung there on the cross. How could Jesus be separated from God when He IS God? All of God is equally and wholly in each manifestation of God. The Godhead cannot be divided. If Jesus became sinful on the cross, then all of God – including the Father and the Holy Spirit – became sinful! It was absolutely impossible for Jesus, in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” to be separated from God and abandoned by Him! Was Jesus separated from God on the cross? The Bible says that Jesus was God “manifested in the flesh”! Was the Father with Jesus on the cross? The Father was in Him!
God was “in Christ” when He was reconciling the world to Himself. Where was God? In Christ! Where was God when Jesus hung on the cross? In Christ! How could Jesus be separated from God when He is God? God is one infinite Spirit. He is not bound by time or space. God has no parts. He cannot be divided up! He is infinite Spirit. God does not live in space. He needs no space. He is entirely beyond space. God is infinite Spirit! If the Father and the Son were separated, that means there was a split through the infinite Godhead and God was just annihilated! That in turn means that nothing could exist anymore because God upholds and maintains all things, and if God has been annihilated nothing can possibly exist anymore. That is all quite ridiculous, isn’t it? Jesus cannot be separated from God when He is God!
In Christ “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” In Jesus’ body on the cross dwelt all the fullness of the entire Godhead – Father, Son and Holy Spirit! There is only one God. How could Jesus be separated from God when He is God? “Well,” someone says, “perhaps they were not separated in the strictest sense of the word, but perhaps Jesus was just ‘alienated’ from God.” Our answer is: that is exactly what spiritual death is – alienation from God, and from the life of God, and becoming sinful in nature. But the Bible teaches, as has been before proven, that Jesus was always “most holy.” If He were alienated from God in any sense, then He had a change in moral nature and became sinful, which is quite unscriptural. Separation in any sense was impossible in the very nature of things. If the Father and His Son were separated, Jesus was less than God on the cross. The logical conclusion is that Jesus was just a mortal man on the cross, and a sinful one at that! God cannot become sinful and be separated from God. If Jesus became sinful on the cross, then the entire Godhead just became sinful, because the fullness of God dwelt in Jesus. In the very nature of things it was impossible for Jesus to become sinful and be abandoned by God, if He Himself was God! If He were only a man, however, and not God, then it would be possible. And that is the logical conclusion of the whole error – for Jesus to have been spiritually dead and alienated from God on the cross means that He was less than God and just a man. That is the unavoidable conclusion of the error – to deny the true and full deity of Christ – and God says those who do that are not even saved!
“My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?”
The darkness of Mark 15:33 is usually said, by proponents of the spiritual death error, to be the result of the Father turning His back on His spiritually dead, sinful Son. However, as we have seen, if the Father had literally turned His back on His Son there would have been a lot more than just darkness! There would have been a loud bang as God was annihilated and the whole universe dissolved! Darkness, in Scripture, signifies judgment. The sin of the world was being judged at Calvary (John 12:31a). The pure and innocent Son of God was dying in the place of condemned sinners, bearing their judgment. At this stage we would point out that Mark 15:34 is the only verse in the whole Bible21 that would even remotely suggest that Jesus was abandoned by His Father.22 This “abandonment” was not necessary for the redemption of men. Even if we stopped now without explaining this verse, surely on the basis of the whole revelation of the Bible one could not believe that this verse teaches that Jesus, who was God, was abandoned by God! With all that has already been shown from Scripture, whatever this verse means, it could not mean Jesus became sinful and was cast out of God’s presence as an unholy, loathsome thing! The verse is not hard to understand when considered in the context of the rest of Scripture.23 The standard characteristic of teachers of error is that they will pick out a verse here and a verse there, and twist them to make them mean what they want them to mean, instead of going to the whole Bible and seeing what it says, and then interpreting each individual Scripture in the light of the whole revelation of truth.
When approaching the Bible, we must genuinely be prepared to be honest with the whole revelation. The myriad of assorted religious cults and false beliefs each using “bits” out of the Bible to prove their so-called “truths” is evidence of the grave danger of not doing so.25 “A Sweetsmelling Savour” In Mark 15:34, Jesus said, “My God.” These are words of faith and are not the words of a sinner. Some teachers have made much of the words “My God” as supposedly referring to Jesus’ abandonment by His Father, inasmuch as Jesus did not refer to God as His “Father,” but rather by the “more remote” term of His “God.” They should read Hebrews 10:9,
or some of the other Scriptures in which Jesus refers to His Father as being “His God.” It involves quite a degree of “wresting” to say that the words, “My God, my God,” in themselves teach that Jesus was separated from God. They are actually words of faith! Everything that happened at the cross contradicts the notion of Jesus being abandoned by His Father. While on the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). That was a prayer of compassion and of faith. Sinful men have neither genuine compassion nor faith. Furthermore, His prayer was heard, and God does not hear the prayers of those with sin in their hearts. At the time of His death, Jesus cried, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Was Jesus separated from His Father? No! He was in fellowship with His Father the whole time, and as soon as He died He went to be with His Father in paradise. All through His life, Jesus perfectly obeyed His Father, but dying on the cross was the pinnacle of His obedience. If Jesus ever pleased His Father by His obedience during His earthly life, then He pleased His Father when He obeyed Him even to the point of dying on the cross:
Dying on the cross was the height of Jesus’ obedience to His Father; consequently the Father’s delight and pleasure in His Son was at a “height” also:
Ephesians 5:2 tells us that Jesus’ sacrifice to God was “for a sweetsmelling savour.” Jesus’ death fulfilled the Old Testament types, none of which were ever said to be “repugnant” before God or so offensive He had to turn His head away from them; on the contrary, they were “of a sweet savour unto the Lord.” Jesus’ sacrifice was not a disgusting stench in His Father’s nostrils, but rather, God was delighted and pleased with the offering of the holy and precious Lamb. God’s attitude toward His Son on the cross was one of favor and love! If something as horrible as a separation within the Godhead occurred at Calvary for the sake of our redemption, then surely there would be at least one verse in the whole Bible teaching it! Yet whenever the Bible says we are redeemed, it says we are redeemed by the holy, precious blood of Jesus. Why was it necessary for a separation between the Father and the Son to occur? What would that have accomplished? All that teaching does is add to Jesus’ blood. That teaching implies that His blood was not enough, and there had to be something extra. But the blood of Jesus was sufficient to redeem man, and Jesus was never abandoned by God. There was no change in Jesus’ own personal moral character and nature on the cross, and there was no change in His relationship with His Father. Jesus was never personally sinful or guilty. Man was guilty. Jesus bore man’s punishment and not his actual sinfulness. Jesus was pure and holy on the cross, and was never cast out of His Father’s presence. The Truth of Mark 15:34 What then is the meaning of Jesus’ utterance, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” What was the nature of this forsaking? The meaning is simply this: The Father had to let His Son die. Jesus had to be allowed to die physically. The Father was letting His Son be crucified. The Father was letting His Son suffer at the hands of sinners. The Father was letting His Son die. That is the nature of the forsaking. All through Jesus’ life, His Father protected Him completely, to the extent that He could not even dash His foot against a stone. Why? Because Jesus was sinless. Sinful men had no authority over the righteous Son of God. Death had no authority over the sinless, pure Son of God. Death is the wages of sin and Jesus was sinless. Jesus could not have suffered and died physically at the hands of sinful men, without the Father, by a deliberate act, actually allowing Him to; and that is the nature of the forsaking. Psalm 22 When Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the utterance was not merely spontaneous,37 but He was knowingly repeating a quotation from a prophetic psalm, for the purpose of fulfilling Scripture.38 We shall now look at Psalm 22 from which He quoted.
This verse is an example of “Hebrew parallelism,” a poetic device in which there are two lines in a stanza, and the second line says substantially the same thing as the first except in a different way. In this verse, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” means the same thing as “why art thou so far from helping me...?” Each question asks the same thing except in a different way. Now, if Jesus had quoted the second line of the verse “why art thou so far from helping me...?” on the cross, instead of the first line, no one would ever have thought that it referred to God casting Jesus out of His presence as an accursed thing; and yet the two lines mean the same thing! Psalm 22:1 does not mean that God is forsaking David in the sense of casting David out of His sight as a loathsome, sinful, abhorrent thing, but it simply means that God is not “helping” him. It has nothing to do with a severance of David’s own personal relationship with God, but it means that God is allowing the righteous David to go through some things he otherwise would not have experienced. God is allowing David to be oppressed by his enemies. That is the nature of the “forsaking.” It has nothing whatever to do with dying spiritually or being made sinful. It has nothing to do with a disruption of David’s spiritual relationship with His God. David was righteous all through this “forsaking”; furthermore, he remained in fellowship with God (Ps. 22:24).40 Job, too, was righteous (Job 1:1, 8), and yet was “forsaken” by God in the same sense. He was not cast away as sinful and accursed, but he was allowed by God to undergo some very severe sufferings he otherwise would not have gone through. Psalm 22 describes how God, for the purpose of trying and testing David, allowed David to be subject to his enemies and to be oppressed by them. Then – in fulfillment of the psalm – at the cross, God, for the purpose of making the one and only sacrifice for sins, allowed His Son to be subject to His enemies and to be rejected by the Jewish leaders and crucified by the Roman soldiers. It means the same thing as the messianic prophecy in Isaiah 50:4-6:
Jesus gave His back to the smiters. They could never have had His back unless He willingly gave it. Jesus was sinless and deserved no death. He had to give His life. At any time, Jesus could have come down from the cross, but He chose to remain there. He had to die, if men were to be saved. Jesus was always in complete control of His life – before, during and after laying it down:
There is one God. The Father allowed His Son to die; at the same time, the Son willingly laid down His life. That is the nature of the forsaking. The Father gave His Son (John 3:16), and Jesus gave His life (Matt. 20:28). There is not even a hint in Psalm 22:1 of David or Jesus being made sinful and getting cast out of God’s presence as objects of His loathing. People only think that because that is all they have heard taught. No one would ever have derived that idea from the verse itself without any “help”!45 Jesus’ Faith in the Midst of His Sufferings Psalm 22 describes how God gave David and then Jesus over to suffer and be humiliated at the hands of sinful men. But in the midst of the suffering, David’s great faith and confidence in his God is evident:
The psalm, far from being an expression of abandonment or alienation, is actually a psalm of great faith in a living and ever-present God. Verses 19 to 22 describe David’s and then Jesus’ faith in the midst of it all:
Other Scriptures show Jesus’ faith in the midst of His sufferings and agonies:
Jesus was not abandoned by His Father. In the very midst of it all, He said, “Lord, you’re my strength!” (Ps. 22:19)49 Even though Jesus had to drink this cup of suffering to pay the penalty for our sins, yet in the midst of it all He was steadfast and unmoved, and He set His face like a flint in His trust in His God that He would not be ashamed in the end, but that God would raise Him from the dead and exalt Him, restoring Him to His former glory at His Father’s right hand.50 Finally, Psalm 22 itself states that neither David nor Jesus was abandoned by God. Verse 24 says:
What could be clearer? The Father did not hide His face from His beloved Son. The shed blood of Jesus redeemed us. The death of His body on the cross redeemed us. It is the devil who adds to it. Let us not add to it. It’s all in the blood of Jesus; the precious blood of Jesus, the holy Lamb of God. |
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