Jonathan Leeman on the Atonement

Today's article extract is by Jonathan Leeman entitled 'The Devil's favourite Domino.'

'Enacting of a penalty speaks to—or better, declares—the value or worthiness of the thing being protected. If no penalty follows the transgression of a law, we learn that whatever the so-called law is guarding must not be worth much. If the penalty for transgression is severe, we learn that it is precious. Penalties teach. I discovered at a young age, for instance, that lying to my parents yielded a stronger penalty than squabbling with my brother over a toy. The lesson I learned from these different penalties? The truth is more precious than toys. The very idea of a penalty may be repugnant to human beings, but a penalty is what gives meaningfulness to the law as a guardian of worth (or schoolmaster or tutor; cf. Gal. 3:24). If the law is the sentry guarding that which is precious, the penalty is the sentry’s pointy bayonet. It gives the law its prick, substance, meaning...

The penal in penal substitution, then, guards (and teaches us about) the infinite preciousness and value and worthiness of God. To say that Adam’s sin should not have resulted in death, to say that our sins do not result in God’s wrath, to shy away from mentioning God’s wrath in private or public, to say that penal substitution is overly obsessed with legal categories or overemphasizes the role of God’s law, to say that the significance of Christ’s death is diminished by bringing it into the realm of the law court, to say that the demands of God’s law do not have to be satisfied, to declare a forensic declaration of "righteous" merely a "legal fiction," to caricature the Son’s propitiation of the Father’s wrath as "divine child abuse"—all this is to miss the role of God’s law in protecting and declaring the worthiness of God; and therefore it is to belittle this ineffable worthiness and indescribable glory of God.

Let me ratchet it up one more notch: if the world, the flesh, and the devil desire, above all else, to diminish the godness of God, and to deceive us into thinking we can be "like God," there can be no more dangerous lie in the universe than to redefine the gospel in a way that subtly massages the penal out of penal substitution—kind of like when someone said to Eve, "You will not surely die." In a world of self-justifiers, it’ll always be the first domino the devil tries to topple.'

Read the complete article at:
http://sites.silaspartners.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID314526%7CCHID598014%7CCIID2340208,00.html