16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. 18 Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
How often do you hear or use the word propitiation in everyday conversation? Probably never, yet it is such an important word in Christian doctrine. Webster’s dictionary defines propitiation as “an atoning sacrifice.”
The actual word propitiation is only found 4 times in the ESV - Romans 3:25, Hebrews 2:17, 1 John 2:2 and 1 John 4:10. Interestingly enough, the NIV doesn’t use the word propitiation at all, but it does speak of an atoning sacrifice, so if we were to define propitiation Biblically, we would say it is a sacrifice, a covering, a payment and appeasement for sin, which fully satisfies the righteous demands of God. It is the act of propitiation which turns away His wrath as we are reconciled to Him.
The word itself may only appear 4 times in the Bible, but it is a principle and a doctrine we see throughout Scripture.
The most vivid picture of propitiation in the Old Testament is seen on the Day of Atonement. The high priest would take the blood of the sacrifice behind the veil in the Tabernacle, and later the Temple, placing it on the mercy seat. In the mercy seat were the tablets of stone inscribed with the Law of God. As the Lord looked at the mercy seat, with the blood sprinkled on it, the blood covered the Law, and His righteous judgment was appeased. We know this offering was not permanent because the high priest had to repeat the offering every year on the Day of Atonement. It did however point to the propitiation Christ would eternally secure as He fully satisfied the righteousness of God, appeasing His wrath and atoning for sin.
This helps us to answer the question we hear so often: Why did Jesus have to die?
That may be the most important question we face because no one can truly understand the Christian faith without knowing the answer to that question.
Why did Jesus have to die?
Some, who acknowledge Him as a real person who lived some 2000 years ago say Jesus was executed because He was a troublemaker, a first-century rabble-rouser who got on the wrong side of the law and ended up paying with His life. No doubt He was a troublemaker (at least in the eyes of the religious authorities of that day), but that doesn’t really answer the question, because it does not explain the divine motives at work in the death of Jesus.
We will never understand the Christian faith without understanding the cross of Christ, and we will never understand the cross until we see God’s hand at work in the death of Jesus.
Christians understand that the cross is at the very heart of our faith, and without the cross we have no faith at all. What happened on Calvary was the most important event in world history. No event can be compared to it, and it is the key to understanding the message of the Bible.
So why did Jesus have to die?
There are three answers to that question in Romans 3:23-26.
“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. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
The first answer to the question as to why Jesus had to die, is in verse 25: “Redemption is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.”
There’s that word propitiation again. A simple definition is to turn away wrath by the offering of a gift. As we look at the cross, it means that the death of Jesus turns away God’s wrath.
The wrath of God is something we don’t hear about enough these days. So much of modern “gospel” preaching is anaemic because many churches preach less than the whole truth to guilty sinners. If all we say to the lost is “God loves you,” we are in danger of making them think that their continued rebellion doesn’t matter to God. If God loves you just the way you are, (and that is the message so many hear) then their sin doesn’t matter, as there is no need for people to be convicted of their sin and how it has separated them from God. Lost sinners need to be warned about the impending wrath of God.
The symbolism of the Old Testament Day of Atonement is important. On any other day, whenever God looked down, He saw the Ten Commandments inside the Ark. The Ten Commandments stood as a testimony against the sins of the nation of Israel. But on the Day of Atonement God saw the blood of the sacrifice that covered the sins of the people of Israel.
The sacrificial system had one major problem though. It provided temporary forgiveness because it was based on the blood of animals. It could not and did not bring complete forgiveness – compete atonement.
But when Jesus died on the cross, the blood that He shed was like the blood on the Mercy Seat. It turned away the wrath of God and covered the sin of the entire human race for all time.
How could that be? In the Old Testament it is the blood of bulls and goats, in the New Testament it is the eternal blood of Jesus Christ which has eternal value in the eyes of God. As Jesus hung on the cross, all the wrath of God was poured out on Jesus. He became sin for us. All the sins of the whole world were poured out on Him. So to call the death of Christ a propitiation means that God’s righteous wrath against sin was now satisfied through the death of Jesus.
So when a sinner accepts Jesus as Saviour, God accepts that sinner on the basis of the sacrifice Jesus made when He died on the cross.
Because He is an infinite God of infinite holiness, all sins committed against Him are infinite in their magnitude. Only a gift of infinite value could turn away the infinite wrath of God. And only God Himself could make such an infinite gift. That’s why our own efforts to turn aside God’s wrath are doomed to failure. We think that going to church every week or taking Holy Communion once a month or saying our prayers or being good or stopping a bad habit will somehow turn away the infinite wrath of God. There is nothing we can do which will turn God’s wrath away.
The wonder of propitiation is that the offended party (God), who has every right to be angry at sinners – He Himself, offers the means to turn away His own wrath, so making it possible for guilty sinners to be forgiven.
The cross is the place where grace and wrath meet. When we come to God through Christ, we come to a loving Father and not to an angry God.
The second answer to why Jesus had to die was to demonstrate God’s justice.
In Romans 3:26 Paul says that God presented Jesus as a propitiation “to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
At the very heart of the Gospel is the question, why would God put His own Son to death, especially to save people who had rebelled against Him?
Or to put it another way, if God is both all-powerful and infinitely gracious, why doesn’t He simply offer forgiveness to anyone who says, “I’m sorry?”
The answer is that sin must be punished. God’s character and nature demands it.
Because God is holy, He cannot allow sin to go unpunished. His justice demands that every sin be punished - no matter how small it may seem to us. If He were to forgive sin without proper punishment, He would cease to be holy and just. God would no longer be God because He would have denied His own character. That could not happen. All offences against God must be punished. That’s why sinners can’t simply say, “I’m sorry” and instantly be forgiven. Someone has to pay the price.
In our society we understand the principle of justice. As the old saying goes, do the crime and you’ll do the time (or at least, that’s how it should work!) You can’t simply let people off just because they say they’re sorry and they promise they won’t do it again.
And the exact same principle applies in the spiritual realm. Sin must be punished, because the justice of God demands it. But because He loves us so much, He has put in place a plan to end the separation from Him. There had to be an alternate plan in place whereby God would remain holy and just, but still provide a way of forgiveness for guilty sinners. Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a place where grace and wrath could meet. And that place is the cross of Jesus Christ.
This is the paradox of salvation. God is a God of love, and because of this He offers to forgive sinners. But He is also a God of holiness and justice, who must not and cannot overlook sin. How could God love sinners and yet not overlook their sin? The answer is found in the most famous verse in the Bible. “For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son…”
God sent Jesus to die for sinners. In doing so, the just punishment for sin was fully met in the death of Jesus, and sinners who trust in Him are now freely forgiven.
This is the heart of the Gospel: God’s holiness demands that sin be punished, while at the same time God’s grace provides the sacrifice. What God demands, He provides. Salvation is God’s plan from start to finish. It is conceived by God, provided by God, and applied by God. The theologian Michael Horton says “We are saved by God, from God, for God.”
The third answer to our question is, Jesus died so that we can be justified by His grace. (Romans 3:24) It’s all about grace - an undeserved gift.
There is nothing in us that causes God to feel compelled to save us. No good works, no inner beauty, no great moral standards, no intellectual merit of any kind. When God saves us, He does it despite the fact that we don’t deserve it.
That’s what grace is really all about. Grace is what I need but do not deserve. God declares us righteous when we have nothing but the stain of sin in our lives. This is the doctrine of free grace. God saves people who don’t deserve it. God saves people who actually deserve condemnation instead. God saves us in spite of ourselves and contrary to what we deserve.
When He saves us, He doesn’t do it because of any potential He sees in us.
We’d all like to think that there must have been something in us worth saving, but human pride dies hard. Our problem is that because of sin, without the grace of God, the only potential we have is the potential for eternal damnation.
Jesus has made propitiation for you. He has turned away the wrath of God. He shed His blood and what was a place of judgment is now a mercy seat for you, if you would come to God through Jesus.
It is one of the great ironies that the practice of offering blood sacrifices continues to this day. Many cultures continue to sacrifice animals, and tragically, even human beings are offered in a pointless attempt to appease non-existent gods.
But the one true God was pleased only with the sacrifice of His own Son. There is no other way to the Father. If you have yet to turn to Christ in repentance and faith, your sin has not been appeased in the eyes of the Father. The propitiating sacrifice of Jesus does not apply to you, and you remain accountable for your sin and will stand in judgment because of sin. This is so tragic and so unnecessary.
Jesus provided for our salvation, but we simply have to come to Him in repentance and faith if we are to receive this salvation.
We know the words of John 3:16 so well, but the next two verses refer directly to these words and they both qualify and emphasise the conditions of what Jesus said in verse 16. “For God so loved the world” is only half of the story, and when we stop there, we will not see our need to be saved from the condemnation we deserve.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:16-18)
There it is in the second half of verse 18. Reject the propitiating sacrifice of Christ, and you remain lost.
Because of sin our we owe a debt we cannot pay. We stand condemned in sin and the penalty for that sin is eternal death. But the good news, the Gospel is that Jesus Christ has provided a payment for our sin as He offered Himself as the propitiating sacrifice for sin. The question we each need to answer is this: Have you repented of your sin and responded to His gracious offer for salvation by faith?
There is no other way of being saved. Apart from Jesus Christ you remain accountable to God for your sin, but because of His great love for you, He has offered you the gift of salvation through His Son’s death.