Justice and Substitutionary Atonement

From Lesson 130 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

What does justice mean? Biblically speaking, what is justice all about, because if we’re not clear on this, we’re going to perceive the execution of Jesus Christ in terms of the normal person on the street at the time? He was a criminal, sorry, He got what He deserved.

“They presuppose a view of justice,” and you may want to underline the next phrase, “that originates in the holiness of God,” it doesn’t originate in the legislature of man. It originates in the holiness of God, “a view of justice that today has almost totally disappeared from human consciousness.” In a secularized society this view of justice is totally obsolete; it’s ridiculed, laughed at, if it’s ever even remembered. We want to get straight in our heads what justice is all about. Then we can understand the cross. We can’t understand the cross if we don’t understand justice. The cross has justice in mind; it is the most fantastic revelation of justice in the history of the universe. But woe to us to understand what’s going on if we can’t understand what justice is all about to start with.

We want to look at the Old Testament idea of justice, page 74 of the notes; the next part is going to be the application of justice and the linkage between the justice and the Messiah. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start with the Old Testament view of justice. Then later we’re going to tie this in and link it to the Messiah and His relationship to justice. We want to start by noticing something. Let’s go to Genesis 3, right after the fall occurred, and put ourselves in our imagination, in our mind’s eye, let’s travel back to the garden and think of ourselves as observers to this process. Gen. 3:21, “And the LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.” What had to happen before God got the skin? He had to kill an animal, and He made, actually the Hebrew word is skin or leather, He made leather…, the first leather jacket that was ever made was made by God. An animal had to die here.

Had Adam and Eve ever seen death? No. They evidently were close to the animal kingdom because what do we know about Eve? When an animal started talking to her she carried on a conversation, so men and animals were pretty close. There is some residue of that in the animal kingdom today. This is why we have animals, we call them pets. People bond with their pets. My boy is a veterinarian, he bonded with his dog, he just had to put his dog down because he had cancer and it’s a big emotional thing, even though he’s a veterinarian; it’s his dog, he bonded with this dog over many, many years, they went through all kinds of life’s experiences together. So this is trauma for him, but he’ll be a good veterinarian because he understands how people bond with their pets, it helps him to understand when he’s working on their pets.

Animals and men will bond, and when Adam and Eve saw this horrible thing happen, maybe God showed it to them, maybe He didn’t, but let’s imagine that they had to stand there and watch God in a carnate form, He walked in the garden, He had some sort of a body there, He grabs this animal, kills it, blood comes out all over the place, a big mess, rips off the skin, works with the pieces of this animal carcass and hands it to them, drip, drip, drip. This is a bloody mess here. This is what the Bible is talking about. Now you can’t tell me that Adam and Eve who were just created in a perfect environment weren’t slightly shocked by this thing that went on here. And if PETA was around, whatever the pet animal rights group is they’d freak out at this happening.

The whole point is that the animal… did the animal sin? No. How’d the animal get involved in this thing? Let’s imagine us as observers to this event. We know God is loving, we know He’s just; we’re very thankful that He called to us after we sinned and asked us where we were, because we were hiding. He had to initiate to us, that’s grace; He had to call us to Himself, and we thought everything was cool and then He turns around and He kills this animal. And we have to watch this bloody mess; we have to see an animal writhe in death, not a pleasant scene. Then He hands us this tunic and we have to wear it. And every time we wear it, every time we put the leather tunic on, what do we remember? Where it came from. So we have death on our mind every time we put our coat on. This is the picture.

Now turn to Gen. 4:3-5, the two brothers, sons of Adam and Eve. “So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. [4] And Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering; [5] But for Cain and for his offering he had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell.” In the Bible categories if we remember from the creation narrative there’s a word for life, it equals nephesh. Plants do not have nephesh, only animals have nephesh. And when God asks us to come into His presence, He asks us, in the Old Testament to bring a sacrifice, a nehpesh. He’s not going to accept anything else, and if we had time we could go to Jude 11 and what is apostate religion called? The way of Cain. [“Woe to them! For they have gone the way of Cain, and for pay they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam, and perished in the rebellion of Korah.”] Do you know what that means, “the way of Cain?” Bloodless religion.

Let’s do a little cataloging in our minds here. Bloodless religion. What’s bloodless religion? Any religion that seeks to come to God apart from an atoning blood sacrifice. This is controversial. If our generation preached a clear gospel, which it doesn’t, we wouldn’t have people coming to Jesus because they don’t feel good, and Jesus is going to make you whole psychologically. Jesus is going to hold your hand, and Jesus is going to make you feel better; Jesus is going to get your girlfriend back, Jesus is going to make you wealthy and all 1008 apostate reasons for accepting Jesus Christ. There’s only one reason why we come to Jesus Christ, it’s because of the blood atonement and the cross; that’s the core of the gospel.

This civilization was founded contractually on the basis of the Noahic Covenant. What was the first act of worship at the beginning of civilization, an act of worship viewed and observed by the forerunners of every nature, culture and people group? Every race, every people group, every linguistic subset of the human race is represented here in Noah and his family. Gen. 8:20, “Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Blood! Destruction! And a person who’s first coming to the Scriptures can be shocked by this. What the heck did the birds do? They sat in their cages, they accompanied this family all through the flood, and the thanks they get is these human beings will kill them. What’s the deal here, where’s justice here?

Somehow this blood atonement for sin satisfies God’s justice. So let’s see if we can understand God’s justice. The first truth about God’s justice, on page 74 I give some verse references. We want to go to Num. 5, we’re going to go to the Mosaic Law Code to see if we can get a sense of defining how the Bible approaches justice versus how we today approach justice.

Num. 5:5-10, this is the law code given through Moses by God to the nation Israel. Let’s make some observations. I want you to think as we read through these verses, if the next assignment was: as a result of these verses tell me what’s the underlying idea about the source of justice in these verses. “Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, [6] ‘Speak to the sons of Israel, ‘When a man or woman commits any of the sins of mankind, acting unfaithfully against the LORD, and that person is guilty, [7] then he shall confess his sins which he has committed, and he shall make restitution in full for his wrong, and add to it one-fifth of it, and give it to him whom he has wronged. [8] ‘But if the man has no relative to whom restitution may be made for the wrong, the restitution which is made for the wrong must go to the LORD for the priest, besides the ram of atonement, by which atonement is made for him.

Against whom is the sin? It looks like it’s against the person, the victim of the crime. But it’s introduced in verse 6 by what? Before we get to talking about the victim of the crime, whose been wronged before we get to the victim? The Lord. What does it say in verse 6, “When a man or woman commits any of the sins of mankind, acting unfaithfully against the LORD,” observe that, just an observation.

What is the preface in all these passages? Before you get into the details of the code, who is the sin against? Yahweh. Because who gave the code? Where was the legislature? Mount Sinai. So God was the legislative function. Now in place of the state what do we have in the Old Testament? Jehovah, God gave the law, therefore when there’s a transgression, who is it against? It was against the lawgiver, the lawmaker. That’s why in the Old Testament we have God as the source of law and the one who is sinned against.

That’s why in Psalm 51 there’s this problematic verse. I mean David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and then he knocked off her husband. We’ve got a little problem here, we’ve got adultery and we’ve got murder. But when David confesses, what does he say? “Against Thee, Thee only, I have sinned,” that doesn’t mean David is insensitive to the victim, but what he’s saying is that when I think of my sin, I think of it vertically, I think of it in terms of the God who established right and wrong. So, “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight, so that Thou art justified when Thou dost speak, and blameless when Thou dost judge.” It’s a conviction borne of a conscience sensitized to God and what attribute of God is this? It’s His holiness.

What is the key word that you see repeated here over and over, verse after verse? Restitution. So somehow this concept is wed to the idea of justice in the Scripture—restitution. Restitution means trying to restore the damage done to the godly order. God has created a certain order. Crime violates that order. And that order has to be healed and repaired.

The idea we’re trying to get across here is there’s a restitutionary component to justice. Let’s put these two ideas together and see what we come up with. Point three, law of the Old Testament says that sin or injustice is against God; that means God is the standard of justice. It’s His nature that is the standard of justice. Men’s law may reflect that standard or may not. Secondly, God isn’t satisfied with leaving debris around, He wants the situation repaired.

The problem, however, is that when we get to this point of justice, sin against God, restitution, we put these two things together and now what we conclude is… conclusion, that justice demands restitution for the ruined life. This is the heart of what’s coming up in the blood atonement. You’ve got to get this background right.

It’s God’s holiness that demands restitution, the restitution has to come from a source somewhere, it can’t come from us because we’ve lost it, so it has to come from a source external to us. This was the lesson that God was teaching Adam and Even in the garden. Animals are nephesh, that is they are life, that’s the Hebrew word that equals life. Man has nephesh. What’s the difference between nehpish animal and nephesh man? The Bible gives a distinction. Nephesh man is made in God’s image, so our life is qualitatively different from the animals. But that is not to say that the animals don’t have analogous souls to ours; it’s not made in God’s image, I mean, your dog doesn’t have devotions in the morning. But the dog or cat or pet or whatever, is a form of life, it’s a form of nephesh, and it’s close enough to us, instead of your flower pot, the nephesh in the animal is close enough that we can partially bond with it, and we can understand something. This is why people have pets, there’s an attraction there. What’s the attraction? Because there’s an analogue nephesh going on, we can bond with that a little bit. The animals are nephesh which means now they are models of human life, and we just quote that, not complete, not made in God’s image, but they’re close enough, they’ closer than daisies and tulips, to human life. Therefore God picks out animals to be the revelatory objects to teach us something.