Profaning the Sacrifice of Christ--Ransom Theory

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Sounds like I�m underwater. I don�t know what�s going on. Must be that bullet-proof coffee or something, I�m not sure. Must be my earpiece, must be my eyeglasses.

Something like that. Well, what�s going on with travel schedule for NOCO? Worldview Weekend, Branson, Missouri, coming up in April. That�ll be fun. MacArthur�s going to be there through a live screen, is that what you call it?

Live stream, screen feed, something like that. I wish John was there, that�d be fun, to be in the green room and to drink Evian water and green M &Ms with John MacArthur, I think that�d be pretty nice.

So, that is coming up, and Reformation Montana is coming up in late June. That�s actually in Montana, let you know that. Big Sky Country, and so that�ll be fun up there with the guys. Other things to be announced at another time.

The Sacrifice of Christ Must Not Be Profaned

Well, I�ve been going through Malachi, and it has spiraled into a little mini-series, a few episodes on sacrifice of Christ and how we must avoid profaning His sacrifice. So, the context, at least for me as I thought about this very important topic, is that what you think about matters.

What you ponder is important. The object of your faith, especially Jesus Christ, His life, everything He did on earth, His death, His resurrection, what He�s doing now, what He did in eternity past, He�s the most important thing to think about, in my opinion.

And so, these people in Judah would bring sacrifices that were not worthy, and they would be passed off by the priest. The priest would give a little wink, give a little nod, and then go ahead and accept those sacrifices, and they were blemished, and the Lord God was not pleased.

God had given them specific instructions in Deuteronomy and Leviticus on what to take and what not to take, and it was all laid out. It was not a matter of they didn�t know or was ignorant. They were prescribed worship exactly, and that�s just the way it works with God.

We�re not left to our own devices, our own imagination. Will this please God? Will that please God? I wonder if, you know, back in the pagan god days, well, you know, the vegetables aren�t growing. There�s a plague.

The gods must be mad at us. So, what can we do? Well, we offered up some fruit. That didn�t seem to work. We offered up some barley. That had no effect. We offered up some girls, young virgin girls. That didn�t assuage God, and maybe we should offer up some babies to the god of Molech, and that doesn�t work either.

So, he�s mad, but we don�t know why he or she is mad. That was the mindset of the pagans. For God, the only God, the true and living God, God who speaks, he�s told us exactly what he wants. You know, the heart is desperately wicked, deceitful above all else.

Who can know it? We just cannot know it, and so the person who trusts in his own heart is a fool, and the person who worships God on his own terms, his meaning the person�s own terms, is also a fool. So, God has told us clearly, if you�re Israel back in the Old Testament, as a nation, as a theocracy, clear instructions for worship.

Nadab and Abihu clearly disobeyed God, and they paid the consequences for said disobedience, Leviticus 10. So, what have we been doing here on this No Compromise series on Friday afternoons? I talked about the death of Christ, thinking about it properly so we don�t profane it in a figurative sense as we think about what Jesus has done.

We don�t want to have the death of Christ as solely the love of the Son. The love of the Father was antecedent to sending Jesus, as Sinclair Ferguson talks about. We talked on another show about how Christ�s death would be adequate for his people�s sins.

If you have an inadequate view, that would be a blemishing view, a profaning view. We talked about the sin of presumption, the Roman Catholic view. It�s tied directly to the adequacy-slash-inadequacy view of what Jesus did.

If you profane the sacrifice of Jesus by teaching it as not needed, that would be bad. Just a bunch of moralistic sermons devoid of proclaiming Christ. And then last time, last Friday, we looked at if you teach Jesus as a felt-need solver only, primarily loneliness and relationships and those kind of things versus the most important need that anyone has is forgiveness.

And then, of course, once you�re a Christian, you want to progress in your sanctification. So, today on No Compromise Radio, by the way, you can write us info at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Tell your friends.

24 minutes goes by quickly. I got an email just a short time ago and said they want the show to be longer. So, two reasons why it�s not longer. One, it�s a 24-and-a-half-minute slot here on WVNE 760.

Still very thankful that VNE plays No Compromise Radio. Quite a, I don�t know, I think there�s a risk there. There�s a gamble there. They�ve never told me to stop teaching certain things. And so, I guess if I was going to try to be big shot, I�d say the day they tell me is the day I�m off.

But I don�t think that�d be the case. Maybe they would have a good case for something if they said that. So, we try to be fair. We try to be biblical. We try to be provocative. It is radio after all. And so, it�s not just a sermon.

I have a no-co mode, the beast mode. That�s what we need. I need some graphics. Who�s out there that�s a graphic person? Fix me up some graphics regarding, I�d like three things for you graphic folks out there.

I�d like a no-co mode, right? I�d like one of those gold grills. I don�t really want these, but I mean just pictures of them. A gold grill that says no-co, you know, that you put it in some smiling teeth.

And what else do I want? I want some knuckles, human knuckles. And just below the knuckle, in that spot there in your fingers, when you make a fist, like for a fist bump, that flat part there, I wanted to say in those four digits, no-co.

Okay, with some cool NorCal kind of font. Is there a NorCal font? If there�s not, there should be the NorCal font. But then they would have some proprietary ownership of the said font. So, what we�re doing today is we�re looking at thinking about the death of Christ properly.

And it is such a central, it is the central, yes, historical act, but also theological occurrence. And we�ve got to get this right. And so, of course, no wonder the enemy would attack this. No wonder that it�s bantied back and forth, bantered back and forth.

What�s a banty? I want to know what a banshee is and now what a banty. I know. So, we�re going to talk about substitutionary atonement, penalty substitution, penal substitution. If you�re a regular listener to No Compromise Radio, you know I talk about this a lot.

There�s all kinds of attacks on the centrality of this doctrine. I think that the death of Christ showed more than penalty substitution. But at its heart, it did teach that very thing. Sinful men, sinful women, sinful young people have what percentage chance of being in the presence of a thrice holy God, left to their own meritorious works?

The answer is a big, fat goose egg. There�s no possible way. How does God accept sinful people? And we have to admit that the Bible, as Leon Morris would say, takes sin seriously. See, here�s what we do if we�re not thinking properly.

We say, well, sin�s not so bad. God�s not so holy. And the chasm between sin and holiness, it kind of shrinks a little bit. So, if sin�s way down on the floor and the holiness of God�s way up in the ceiling, you just lower the ceiling down to about four foot, and then you raise sin up, the humanity of man, the wonderfulness of man, the brotherhood of man, those kind of things, and you raise it up.

And so, instead of this chasm, this gap that cannot be bridged except for God�s work, it�s about close enough for us to jump. Maybe we can just quite get there on our own, especially, especially if we do religious deeds.

Helping people might be one thing, but baptism, that might, little by little, inch by inch, might get us up there. Leon Morris says something that�s just amazing to me. He says that you need to see sin as a barrier separating man from God, okay?

A barrier, here�s the quote, here�s the quotable Twitter quote, a barrier that man was able to erect but is quite unable to demolish. So, man erects the barrier, but he can�t demolish it. He can�t jump over it.

So, we need help. We need assistance. We need a rescuer. We need a Savior, and that Savior�s name is Jesus Christ. And He dies with the language of substitution for us, 1 Corinthians 15, in our place, on our behalf, instead of, huper, He dies instead of us.

He is the one who is the substitutionary atoner for our sins. Now, there�s a man named Christian Piatt, P-I-A-T-T, and he writes a blog over at Pathos, Pathos, Pathios, Pathios, maybe Pathios sounds better.

I don�t even know, really, how to say it. P-A-T-H-O-S, Pathios, Pathios, Pathios. It doesn�t matter, because it�s bogus. Why Blood Atonement Theology Weakens God is the article. And Christian says, not Christian in Pilgrim�s Progress, but this particular Christian, Jesus forgave sin while He�s alive.

So, why do we need the bloody atonement when Jesus could save people, forgive sins, in other words, while He was still alive, right? Your sins are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven. And he says, that sounds like present tense to me.

So, if He could forgive sin without dying, why did He have to die at all? Is it a matter of volume? So, Christian is saying, maybe there are so many sins, He can�t just say it fast enough. He�s got to do some grand cataclysmic event called death on the cross.

Christian goes on to say, God called for an end to human sacrifice well before Jesus. So, God said, don�t do any more human sacrifices. And he says, the story of Abraham is interpreted in many ways. Well, yeah, of course.

But what�s the one interpretation that�s right? What�s God�s interpretation? Including the idea that God was testing Abraham�s faithfulness. Another perspective, however, is that this was a message to non-Jews of that era, who still practice human sacrifice, that such offerings were not necessary.

Do you know, I�ve read Genesis, I�ve read Deuteronomy too, Genesis 22 for a long time. And I didn�t know that that was the case. These non-Jews that were looking around up there on Mount Moriah, they said, you know, sacrifice is no good anymore.

We don�t want that. God says he doesn�t want that. It�s fascinating. And then Christian says, the gospel claims that violence does not redeem. And he talks about retribution and ancient tribal laws. And so, in conclusion, Christian Piatt says, so to believe Jesus had to be crucified for us to be forgiven means that had we not killed Jesus, God could not have saved us.

To me, this seems to be a more bold position to take than suggesting Jesus died for a reason other than the forgiveness of sins. Yikes. Well, he is in a long line of wrong thinking, profaning the sacrifice of Christ.

Three Wrong Views of the Atonement

Now, there�s lots of different views of what did Jesus do on the cross? What did he accomplish? Did he accomplish anything? And maybe the three key views, and by the way, Phil Johnson has a great article on this, and some of the stuff I�ll read is stemming from Phil�s distillation of the three wrong views of the atonement and their hazard to the gospel, to use Phil Johnson�s speak.

I wish I could write like Phil. I wish I could speak like him, but I wish I could write like Phil. You know what? That�d be pretty nice. That�d be nice. I think I�d be at a beach. It can be. I don�t know.

Where would I be? All right. The first wrong view that�s historically wrong, biblically wrong, is something called ransom, the ransom view, and it is a ransom theory. So, the theory goes like this. When Jesus has come to give his life a ransom for many, Mark chapter 10, the ransom was given to Satan, and so you got to pay off Satan.

Satan�s got a claim on Jesus, and he is going to accept this ransom paid by Jesus for sinners. Now, the Copelands of the world, Kenneth Hagin of the world, some Word Faith folks, they really like to teach this.

And people are sinful. We would agree with that. And so, sinful people don�t believe in God. They have not as their father God. They have Satan as their father. And so, God says, the father says to Satan, here�s my son, and he is a ransom.

And so, accepted by Satan, Satan gets down to hell, and he was caught off guard that Jesus could break the chains of death and be resurrected from the dead. Death could not hold Jesus. And so, oftentimes, this theory talks about Jesus is the bait, and God is the fish hook, and, or the, you know, let�s put it this way.

The humanity of Jesus is the bait. The deity of Jesus is the fish hook, and Satan swallows it hook, line, and sinker. That�s why it�s called sometimes not just the devil ransom theory, or the ransom theory, or the classical theory, but it�s called the fish hook theory.

And so, this is a wrong view. Why? Because Satan doesn�t have any claim on a sinner. Who is the one who needs to be satisfied when it comes to the atonement? It�s not Satan. It is God said of, said in Isaiah 5310, the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief if he would render himself as a guilt offering.

So, the payment in Isaiah 5310 is not Satan. So, that Satan theory, the ransom theory, the classical theory, is a bogus theory. Well, there are all kinds of theories. You could go get a list of them. You know, one of the things you could do is maybe you go to GotQuestions, and the folks over there seem to have some pretty good answers, and some good questions, by the way.

And I want to say they�re from maybe the Dallas dispensational kind of camp. I don�t know. I might be wrong. The moral influence theory. Peter Abelard is the one who is the author of this theory. And here�s the thing.

This is, this meaning the atoning work of Jesus, was love to the nth degree. It epitomized love. Now, certainly, obedient to death, even death on a cross. I will not say that there was no love of God shown at the cross.

That would be dumb for me to say. But this view wants to evacuate penalty substitution and be at the top of the list, that this is such an expression of love that it woos sinners. When sinners consider the death of Christ, when I survey the wondrous cross, you know, I think to myself, I have to follow that pattern of love, loving God and loving other people.

But what it doesn�t do is deal with sin, right? It might exalt love, but then it effectually, functionally denies God�s justice. You look to the cross and you see love. And so, then you respond with love.

You�re going to be better because you�ve looked at Jesus�s death as an example. But don�t we need Christ�s death to do something? Don�t we need our sin paid for? Don�t we need a propitiation to take place?

Don�t we need pardon? Yes, we do. God is a wrathful God. God is a just God. And yes, God is a loving God as well. But He�s doing all of these attributes. He is all these attributes simultaneously. And so, you can�t pardon sinners with just us looking and then saying, you know, we�re going to respond with love.

And that�s what we�re going to do. I mean, I guess you could look at other people who were crucified. And if they were crucified and, you know, said on the cross, why don�t you take care of my mother, you know, this, that, and the other, then what about them?

Jesus redeemed sinners. He is not the one saying, follow my example. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because he was sin bearing at the time. Without the shedding of blood, true or false, there�s no forgiveness.

The answer has to be true. And so, you�ve got the ransom theory. You�ve got the moral influence theory. And then the other main one, again, there are more wrong views. And they keep popping up all the time, of course.

But the last one is called the governmental view or the Grotius view. Grotius to the max, right? Moon Zappa. Remember Moon Zappa? We have Grotius, Hugo Grotius, G-R-O-T-I-U-S. And so, you�ve got a bunch of Arminian stuff going on in Holland in the late 1500s, early 1600s.

And Jesus dies on the cross, not because of penalty substitution. Because Grotius, I think, knew that if you do have a substitution, you�re going to have limited atonement. You�re going to have particular redemption.

If it�s true substitution, then the intention of the atonement will be for the elect only. And we�re going to talk more about that in another show. But I think he was trying to get around that particular facet of the death of Christ.

And so, what he would say is when you look at the cross, what it does, it shows you that God�s government is in action. That God has wrath and that wrath is against sin. And God is a ruler and God is a chief.

God is a head of a government. He�s a prime minister. And he�s got a law. That law is the soul that sins shall die. And instead of you dying, he is going to have the death of Christ instead. And so, Leon Morris said, because God did not want sinners to die, he relaxed that rule and accepted the death of Christ instead.

He could have simply forgiven mankind had he wanted to, but that would have not had any value for society. The death of Christ was a public example of the depth of sin and the lengths to which God would go to uphold moral order of the universe.

Government. This view is expounded in greater detail, Morris says, in a bunch of Latin words. So, sinium. And so, we have Christ�s atonement demonstrates God�s view of the law, a high view of the law, and his attitude towards sin.

God�s question says this view falls short, and that it does not teach that Christ actually paid the penalty of the actual sins of any people, but instead his suffering simply showed mankind that God�s laws were broken and that some penalty was paid.

And you have people like Albert Barnes would teach this, finny youth with a mission. So, there�s all kinds of competing views. But at the center that we can�t lose, because you will be profaning the death of Christ, is that Jesus died as a substitute, penalty substitute, for our transgressions in our place to pay for our sins, vicariously satisfying everything that God�s law stated, paying the penalty for your sin.

Not to the devil. That�s not the way to think about it. You go to Galatians 3, 1 Peter, I�ll read you some of these substitutionary verses where Jesus takes our place. The charges against us, Jesus accepts and pays for.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. 1 Peter 2 .24. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

1 Peter 3 .18. Spurgeon said, If God had said in the infant sovereignty of his absolute will, I will have no substitute, but each man shall suffer for himself. He who sinneth shall die. None could have murmured.

It was grace, and only grace, which led the divine mind to say, I will accept a substitute. There will be a vicarious suffering, and my vengeance shall be content, and my mercy shall be gratified. And so we have Christ as our substitute.

Spurgeon goes on to say, No, no, not Spurgeon. Horatius Bonar. If Christ be not the substitute, he is nothing to the sinner. Of course, Christ�s death was an example of love. Of course, the atonement of Jesus demonstrated God�s high regard for his law.

Of course, Jesus had victory over the cosmic and human agents. But at the center, you�ve got to have penal substitution. Packer, yet with penal substitution at the center, he also maintains that Christus Victor and other scriptural views of the atonement can work together to present a fully orbed picture of Christ�s work, highlighting the middle, the centerpiece, substitutionary atonement.

So my name is Mike Ebendroth. I�ve got a question for you. Do you believe in substitutionary atonement? Do you believe that Jesus died in the place of sinners like you and was raised from the dead? You must believe.

Repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God�s Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We�re right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.