Did God Really Die For Us?

A Respectful Response to the Sermon, “The Healing of Forgiveness” by Tim Keller

 In his beloved hymn “And Can It Be,” Charles Wesley exults in the amazing love revealed in the gospel, “that thou my God shouldst die for me.” There can be no doubt that when Wesley glories in such a theme as the sin-bearing love of God, his heart and soul are filled with glad and awful thoughts of the “heart-freeing” power of the cross of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

But when we ask what Wesley asks, “Can it be that God himself really died for me?” and consider the answers modern day evangelicals give us, it appears there is a real possibility that evangelicals have lost (or never owned) the radical truth Wesley seems to have intuited—that it is God (and not someone else in his human nature) who died for us, “taking away the sin of the world” by bearing it.

We grant that God cannot die in the literal sense of the term (as the ground of all Being). In what way, then, can we understand the cross as a revelation of an overwhelming truth, God dying for us? We can say yes, if we believe Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. But then, Reformed theology instructs us of Jesus’ “two natures” and that only in his human nature can Jesus be said to die.[i]

This idea, however, creates all kinds of problems. C. S. Lewis, for instance, finds this solution “immoral and silly,” since it implies that someone else died for our sins, and not God.[ii] Thus, Lewis believes that Jesus himself claimed to be God, markedly demonstrating this when he forgave the paralytic (Mark 2:1-12) and when he declares himself the judge of the world. Indeed, Lewis points to the reaction of the scribes that seems to indicate they shared this interpretation of Jesus’ words.

In his sermon “The Healing of Forgiveness” posted on YouTube some time ago [https://youtu.be/X1Glfn3KG_k], pastor Tim Keller agrees [saying], “They were absolutely right!” suggesting that these Jewish leaders were actually saying what Lewis believes—that Jesus was claiming to be God by saying those words (“your sins are forgiven”).[iii]   

It would be too much to state boldly that these two great teachers of the Church are clearly wrong about whether the Lord Jesus ever claimed to be God during his earthly ministry. But it should be rather easy to show that they are clearly mistaken about how they interpret what the scribes (“in their hearts”) are saying about Jesus. “Why is this man speaking blasphemies?” they ask. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2: 6-7). They can’t imagine a devout Jew, no matter how wonderful the deeds wrought through him, claiming to be Jehovah God; all they can do is charge him with being a blasphemer.

A simple reading of the text solves the problem of words (i.e., what Jesus meant by “which is easier to say, ‘be forgiven or be healed’”). The Lord is not arguing with his critics. His question segues into the greatest teaching of his life as to who he is: “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins… I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home” (Mark 2: 10-11, italics mine). The point Jesus makes should be crystal clear. “Yes, it is God who alone forgives sins, but he has chosen [Me] the Son of Man, to whom the Kingdom of God is given, and through whose full humanity, consecrated even until death on the cross, all its blessings (including the forgiveness of sins) are come” (Dan. 7:13-14, Ps. 2:7-8; Isa. 42:1-8). Would to God our response to this would be like the response of the crowd: “They were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

Keller exposits the text further by sharing an unexpected observation, namely, that this is the only place in Scripture where forgiveness is granted without repentance! Now if this is true, it would raise the wonderful question about the special quality of such forgiveness and more significantly the awful question of just who this Jesus is who grants it so freely and authoritatively. But before we can even begin to think, we are assured by Keller that there is no such forgiveness (without repentance), not even in this story. You see, he explains, just as the Lord knew the thoughts of his critics, he knows the heart of the paralytic, which (according to Keller) must have been at least part way to repentance (aware of his need for grace and mercy) for the Lord to have granted forgiveness—since repentance must be present.

What has happened to Keller’s Reformed theology, its sovereign grace and the sinner’s inability to will the good? The word repentance is probably the most frequently misused word in religion, claims New Testament scholar and theologian James Denney, because it is applied to the “self-centered regret which a man feels when his sin has found him out.” This, he protests, “has no relation to God.” “Repentance is an adequate sense…of what our sin is to [God], of the wrong it does to His holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love. Repentance is possible only as God makes himself known in the atoning death of Christ.  “All true penitents are children of the Cross.”[iv]    

This essay attempts to respond to Charles Wesley’s hopeful faith that God has indeed taken away the sin of the world in death—by bearing it himself. We have agreed that God has done this in and through the death of his beloved Son. But we have also struggled to find words and themes appropriate to the realities of the mystery of the Son of God. Following are two approaches suggested by two themes from Scripture.

For this believer, the proclamation of a New Covenant to be created between God and Adam’s race (“house of Israel”), is the most wonderful instance of “God dying for us” (Jer. 31:34-34). We see the theme of repentance is at the heart of everything here. The aim of all the prophets was to call for Israel’s repentance with the double message of weal and woe, blessing and curse. If Jeremiah (the weeping prophet) is to be the judge of the result of their efforts, it was total failure: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer.13:23).

God apparently agrees. God’s people did not love him; they were idolaters, and they failed to love their neighbors as themselves. God knew they would not and could not change. So, what did God do about this? He accepted that reality!  Another way of stating that fact is: He totally gave up any expectation that he would ever get from his people what he had every right to expect—love and obedience. In other words, God died to the demands of his holy righteousness. He gave up all his righteous claims of his people. He created a new relation, a new covenant with the world, starting with a radically free forgiveness of all sin and sins, and granting humankind a new heart full of love, joy, faith, and peace as a gracious and costly gift, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who by his sacrificial death became the Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world. God dies to the attempt to get his beloved people to love and serve him on the basis of a commandment written on stone—in favor of something entirely new: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33-34). Augustine experienced this reality and put it to words crisp and clean: “Lord, give what thou demandest, then demand what thou wilt.”[v]

Another approach to our theme is suggested in the Synoptics by what appears to be a wide-spread tradition about an incident that occurred during the crucifixion of Jesus. “And the veil of the Temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom.” Mark includes this with Jesus’ last cry (Mark 15:37-38). Luke adds “as the sun was darkened over all the earth” (Luke 23:44-46). Matthew links the Lord’s cry with an earthquake rending the rocks (Matt. 27:50-51). It is significant that all three of the evangelists connect the portent with Jesus’ loud cry, giving up his spirit. Can we doubt that these three witnesses to the gospel are agreed in proclaiming their heart-rending belief that the crucifixion and death of Jesus brought into effect what Paul declared to be a new creation: “All things have become new, the old has passed away!” (2 Cor.5:17).  As the divinely provided propitiation, the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world. Nothing now alienates the fallen world of Adam from the holy love of God, who through the regenerating gift of the Holy Spirit, awakens souls to the power creating them in the image of their Lord to realize their new life as God’s beloved sons and daughters (John 1:9-14).

The stark image of the Tabernacle in the wilderness—with its two rooms, the veil separating the holy God who dwells above the mercy seat of the ark (its golden cover), alienated from sinful man awed by dreadful fear—that image still haunts us. Now incredibly, the way is open to everyone to come into the Holy of Holies where God dwells, “just as they are.” What has happened! Death, for one thing, has been experienced in one way or another by both man and God. “God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin that we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor.5:21). The bearing of sin destroyed death and its power (death cancels all obligations, per Denney). Jesus’ death is the death of the redeemed—as with Jesus who died under the law died to it, so we are no longer under law.

 Now if sin is forgiven and remembered no more by God as the covenant proclaimed (Jer. 31:31-34), is it too much to conclude that sin no longer exists as far as God is concerned? There is no more wrath and judgment to be exercised by God. He is dead to it. What remains is for the Lord Jesus to fulfill his promise to us: to reveal the Father to us and in us, so that we might experience what Jesus himself did: “You are my son, my beloved” (Luke 10:21-22).

[i] Bloesch, Donald, God the Almighty: Power, Wisdom, Holiness, Love (InterVarsity Press, December 2005), 209. “Luther posed a significant challenge to the biblical-classical synthesis… ‘If I believe that the human nature alone suffered for me, then is Christ worse than no Savior to me?’” (p.92).

[ii] Lewis, C.S., Mere Christianity (New York, HarperOne, 2001), 54.

[iii] Keller, Timothy, “The Healing of Forgiveness”; https://youtu.be/X1Glfn3KG_k..

[iv] Denney, James, The Death of Christ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 298-299. This edition includes the pivotal addendum chapters later published as The Atonement and the Modern Mind

[v] (NPNF1: Vol. I, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book 9, Chapter 29, §40).