One of my favorite songs is “In Christ Alone” by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty. When I was a worship leader this is one of the songs I chose most frequently, because it draws the worshiper into the depths of God’s love and the power of his salvation in a way that few other songs can. I have been singing this song for twenty years, and it still brings me to tears. The song is very rich in theology, but there is one line that I always change because it expresses a popular idea that is unbiblical. In the second verse we find the words, “Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The idea here is that for God to be holy, he must express wrath against sin, but because God is merciful he delayed that wrath until Jesus took all these sins upon himself and then God poured out his wrath on his Son, and so “the wrath of God was satisfied.” This is a very popular way of understanding why Jesus had to die, but is it biblical?

The Wrath of God in Scripture

To be sure, there are plenty of verses that speak of God’s wrath, including 1 Thessalonians 1:10, where Paul says Jesus “delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess 1:10), but neither this verse nor any other says that this deliverance happened because God placed his wrath on Jesus instead. In fact, in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 God’s wrath is not satisfied; it is still coming! Paul is speaking here of the second coming of Jesus, when “sudden destruction will come upon [the disobedient] as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thess 5:3). Jesus delivers us from this wrath not by taking it upon himself but by transforming us into “children of light, children of day. … For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him” (1 Thess 5:5, 9-10). It is only popular theology that causes us to think that God transferred that wrath from us to his Son. What Paul says here is that by becoming “awake” or by becoming “children of day” we are delivered from the coming wrath. Elsewhere Paul speaks of Christians as objects of mercy rather than objects of wrath (Romans 9:22-23). We receive “eternal life,” whereas those who reject the truth receive “wrath and fury” (Romans 2:7-8). According to John the Baptist, those who get baptized “flee from the wrath to come” (Matthew 3:7//Luke 3:7). In none of these passages is that wrath transferred to the Son. The wrath simply is not experienced because we have changed from being self-seeking to being righteous.

This is explained most clearly in Ephesians 2:1-7 :

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Nowhere does this say that the way God did this is by turning his wrath toward his Son. This is something we simply assume. But if we look at the text more closely, we see something quite different: though we were “by nature children of wrath” (2:3), this is not what God felt toward us. Verses 4-5 say, “Because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses.” God did not feel wrath toward us, but “great love”! Our nature may have been “children of wrath,” but God viewed us differently, even while we “dead in our trespasses,” that is, before Jesus died on the cross. There was no transfer of wrath onto his Son. There was love for us and love for his Son, and so God delivered us from our spiritual death just as he delivered his Son from his physical death.

The Father’s Role in the Crucifixion

In fact, not only is the idea that God transfers his wrath to his Son never taught in Scripture, but it goes against the way Scripture repeatedly speaks of the Father’s role in the cross. Not once is the cross described as a place where God punishes his Son. In fact, crucifixion was not a divine punishment; it was a Roman punishment for those rebelling against the empire. The Romans, or rather “the rulers of this age,” crucified Jesus, not understanding what God planned to do with this (1 Cor 2:6-10). God allowed Jesus to die so that Jesus could defeat Death (see my post on Death as mythical creature in the Bible), not so that God could punish Jesus. Whenever we read about the Father’s role in the crucifixion, it is one of handing Jesus over rather than punishing:

• “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
• “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” (Rom 3:23-25)
• “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)
• “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:31-32)
• “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 Jn 4:10)

In every passage, God’s role was to give up his Son, not to punish him. Likewise, Jesus describes his own death not as an opportunity for God to take out his wrath, but as a “ransom” (Matt 20:28//Mark 10:45), that is, a payment by God to redeem us from the enemy. We do not see God’s wrath in any of the passages that speak about the cross; instead we repeatedly see God’s love for us and for his Son.

Sometimes people will read wrath into the term “propitiation” in Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 4:10, but the word simply refers to the removal of any barriers to the relationship, not to how they are removed. These passages allude to the sacrificial system, so Jesus should clearly be understood as a sacrifice, but here again our misunderstanding of the Jewish sacrificial system causes us to wrongly import the idea of wrath here. Sacrifices in the Jewish world were not substitutes. If you were guilty of a sin for which the punishment in the Torah is death (murder, adultery, rape, bestiality, striking your parents, witchcraft, etc.), you could not say, “I’m sorry. Here is a lamb to die in my place.” That’s not how sacrifices worked. There was no substitute for a human being who deserved death. The idea that sacrifices were substitutes emerged only recently from those who wanted to read their unbiblical understanding of Jesus’ death back into the Old Testament sacrificial system. Biblically, sacrifices were an offering of something valuable in order to restore one’s relationship with God, and they were offered only for the sins where the punishment was not death.

“The Wages of Sin Is Death”

But doesn’t Paul say, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), meaning that death should be the punishment for every sin? Paul is speaking here of human mortality as a product of sin, a discussion he began in the previous chapter:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. [Rom 5:12-19]

It’s not that Jesus was being punished by God for our sins. We read Paul too individualistically here. He is speaking of a corporate issue. Humanity (as a whole) had sinned, and so humanity was experiencing its just desserts – mortality. Romans 5 emphasizes not the fact that Jesus had died, but the fact that Jesus had committed an “act of righteousness” or “obedience” that was more powerful than Adam’s act of disobedience. “For the wages of sin is death” (i.e., human mortality is the result of our sinfulness), “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nowhere here does Paul express the idea that Jesus had to pay those wages for us. Instead, chapter 6 lays out a different path:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. [Rom 6:1-4]

It is not that Jesus paid the wages for us, but that we died to sin and can now experience the gift of life. “Our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom 6:6). “For one who has died has been set free from sin” (Rom 6:7). In light of Paul’s larger discussion, Romans 6:23 is not about Jesus paying our wages, but about us having put sin to death:

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. [Rom 6:20-23]

This well-known verse reads very differently when we see it as the conclusion of the preceding verses. Death is the wages you previously received as sinners, “but now that you have been set free from sin,” life is what you receive thanks to the work of Jesus.

Without the Shedding of Blood, There Is No Forgiveness of Sins

Other verses are sometimes also mistaken to imply that God punished Jesus. For example, Hebrews 9:22 says, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins,” but the fuller context reveals that the author of Hebrews is not connecting this shedding of blood with punishment:

For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. … And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. [Heb 9:13-14, 17-22]

The shedding of blood is not about punishing the animal, but about providing blood, which has the power to “purify.” Jesus’ death was absolutely critical for our salvation, but it was not because God needed to punish someone. It was because Jesus’ blood was the offering God made to restore our relationship to him.

Conclusion

Over the course of Christian history our ideas have changed. The earliest Christians understood Jesus’ death as a ransom. This view prevailed for the first thousand years of the church. In the eleventh century, Anselm introduced the (very medieval) idea that humanity owed God a debt of honor and that Jesus “satisfied” this debt by becoming a man and honoring God in the greatest way possible. In the sixteenth century, John Calvin modified the idea to suggest that a righteous God would have wrath toward sinful humanity and so Jesus satisfied God’s wrath. From this came many of our songs and teachings that emphasized the cross as satisfaction of God’s wrath. But the idea is not in the Bible, unless we start importing unbiblical ideas into the verses mentioned above.

N.T. Wright notes that our theology of the atonement tends to twist John 3:16 as if to make it say, “God so hated the world, that he killed his only Son.” John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 and 8:31-32 and Ephesians 2:1-7 and 1 John 4:10 and many other verses make it clear: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. He did not hate the world or have a wrath toward us that needed to be satisfied, and he did not punish his Son. He offered his Son to gain the world, and then he redeemed his Son from death. And on that cross, as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified!

Sometimes we need to course-correct our theology and our songs to bring them back in line with the Bible. Sometimes we need to read the Bible more carefully to see where we are importing ideas that aren’t actually expressed in the text and that go against what the text is saying. This is one of those places.