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Before we get to today's episode, I want to invite you to Ligonier's 2026 National Conference, happening on April 9th through 11th. Gather with thousands in Orlando, Florida to hear gifted Bible teachers address fundamental questions facing Christians today, questions about God, our identity and life in an increasingly hostile society. Go to ligonier.org 2026to register and learn more. The fact that my debt is paid and my crime is punished by a substitute shows that in the cross we see perfect justice with perfect mercy. Take away the substitution, you take away the grace of God. Take away the very heartbeat of what the Christian faith is all about.

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As a teenager newly exploring the Christian faith, I remember asking a Christian why Jesus had to die. Wasn't there a less brutal way, a less severe way, to save sinners after spending their life in church? Do you know what their answer was? Simply, I don't know. How would you answer that question? Well, that is what R.C. sproul will examine today on Renewing youg Mind, helping each of us to give a full and faithful answer to that question. Dr. Sproul reminded us yesterday that the atonement of Christ was absolutely essential. And as we approach Good Friday and spend time reflecting on the cross and perhaps providentially having the opportunity to speak with unbelievers about Christ and His saving work for sinners, it's important that we consider the cross of Christ rightly. And that's why we're featuring this important series this week. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the drama of redemption and the absolute necessity of the atonement.

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In our first session, we looked briefly at the dimensions of man's sin against God in terms of why an atonement is necessary. And if you recall, I put three things on the board that make it necessary for an atonement to take place. And I wasn't trying to be cute with a three point sermon or anything like that, but was trying to focus attention on this threefold need that we have so that we can develop it in some kind of symmetrical pattern. And so I'm going to put a chart on the board now where we consider the three actors in the drama of redemption. Man, God the Father and God the Son, in his incarnate work as Messiah and Redeemer. So we'll say man, God and Christ. And if you recall now, the three elements of need with respect to sin was that sin is first of all as a debt, second of all an act of enmity, and third, what did we call it? A crime Right now When we say that man incurs a debt by virtue of committing sin, we have to go back to understand the role of God as creator and as sovereign over the universe. Whenever we speak of God's sovereignty, we are discussing his authority. And you notice that the word authority has what other word in it built in? Author. As the author of all things, he has authority over all that he creates, a kind of sovereignty. And what that means basically is that God intrinsically and absolutely has the right to impose obligations. Maybe I'm spelling out the obvious. I don't want to labor the point too long, but I notice that in our culture there's much confusion over the nature of authority. But when we talk about duly constituted authority, we're talking about that person or office that has the right to impose obligation. If I am under someone's authority and they issue a command to me, that is a morally sound command, of course, that then they have the right to impose obligation, and I am responsible to carry out that obligation. And if I fail to carry out that obligation, then I must face punitive sanctions. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about authority. And so God has the authority to impose obligations to his creatures. And he does that in terms of the demands that he makes. In terms of our obedience, you shall be holy, for I am holy. God does not rule by referendum. He does not rule by plebiscite. He does not simply give 10 suggestions or 10 recommendations, 10 to Israel. He gives commandments thou shalt or thou shalt not, which we call apodictic law, flowing from a sense of absolute authority and sovereignty. Now, if God imposes obligations upon us that we fail to perform, we incur debt and God now is the creditor. Now, what do you suppose is the role of Christ when the Bible speaks of indebtedness and that we are debtors? Incidentally, Jesus speaks on this theme and describes our situation as being debtors who cannot pay their debts. It's one thing to be in debt and to be on some kind of debt retirement program whereby we are paying off our debt a little bit at a time. But the indebtedness that we have here with respect to obedience to God is impossible for us to pay back any installment plan. Why? What is the obligation ethically that God imposes upon his creatures? How righteous, how moral are we called to be by divine mandate? Sinless, Perfect. Okay. Remember Lady Macbeth after she committed the murder? She's trying to wipe out that spot, but the spot is indelible. She can't get Rid of it. The problem with our obligation at this point is that if I am called and responsible to be perfect, and I sin once, now what must I do to be perfect? How much interest payment can I make in addition to the principal in order to make up for the blemish? What do I have to do to become perfect after I have once been imperfect? I can't. It is impossible. We get around it in our culture by saying, well, everybody gets a second chance. Right? Right. Everybody deserves a second chance. Well, let's look at that for a second. Who says anybody deserves a second chance? Does justice require that everybody get a second chance? A second chance is grace. A second chance is mercy. And mercy and grace are things that are never deserved. So it's nonsense to talk about everyone deserves a second chance. But even if that nonsensical hypothetical condition, contrary to fact principle were true, what good would it do us? How long ago did we use up our second chance? So it's not the problem like that. We are almost impeccable moral creatures with this one tiny little blemish marring a perfect record. Rather, the Scriptures describe us as being woefully inadequate in terms of our performance of obedience to God. Not that we're just tainted here and there with a peccadillo now and then so that we incur a debt that is impossible for us to pay. If somebody came into me and said, okay, Orsi, your financial balance says that you owe $10,000, and we'll set up a program by which you can pay off your debts eventually I could handle that. But what would I do if somebody said you owe $10 billion and you got three days to pay it? Is it possible? Would it be possible for me to pay it? Jack, you're shaking your head no. Now, I'm going to ask you this. Would it be possible? It's possible I could come up with $10 billion in three days. I mean, you wouldn't want to bet one nickel on it. But it's certainly within the realm of possibility as remote astronomically. The odds are stacked against me that I'm ever going to do it. But it's possible. But even that analogy falls because with respect to our indebtedness to God, indebted would be infinite and there's no way we can pay. So what does Christ? What is the role that he functions here in terms of his work as our Redeemer? The New Testament has a word for it, that Christ is our surety. Christ is our surety. Now, that's an economic Term as debt is an economic term. When the Bible speaks in this kind of language, it borrows language from the economic world. And Christ is our surety means the one who co signs the note, he is the one who stands there backing up our indebtedness, taking upon himself the requirement of what must be paid. Now, in the level of enmity, we don't disobey God because we love him so well. We disobey God because we have an inborn hostility toward Him. The Bible says that we are by nature enemies of God. We have a natural antipathy in our fallenness towards the reign of God over us. So with respect to enmity, God is the injured party or the offended? The offended party. It's not that God has manifested enmity towards us, but we have been the ones who have violated Him. God has never broken a promise. He's never violated a covenant. He has never sworn a vow to us that he failed to pay. He has never treated a human being in this whole world unjustly. He has never violated me as a creature. He's never violated you. So he has kept his side of the relationship perfectly. But we have violated him. He is the injured party, not we. Now we go over this and we say, well, that's simple. We learned that in Sunday school. And I want to say, oh yeah. I find people every day who are angry, deeply angry against God because deep down in their bones they feel that somehow God has not given them a fair deal. How could God allow this to happen to me? Is the complaint. How could God let this? Because the unspoken statement there, how could God allow this to happen is what if God were really good? If God were really just, he would recognize my merit and treat me accordingly. He would give me more than I have. God's not fair. That's the complaint that's deeply lodged in our bones. But we have to understand from a biblical perspective that it is God who is the injured party, not us. But wait a minute. We say, wait a minute. Hey, that's crazy. God doesn't suffer. We're the ones that suffer. God doesn't have to go through the veil of sorrows that we're called to go through in this world. God has perfect felicity. He's eternally happy. We're periodically happy, but for the most part, miserable. So how can we talk about God's being the injured party? Because God is the one who is violated and he is perfect. He does not deserve any of this violation that we heap upon Him. Can I ever say to God, hey, God, I Suffer in this world unjustly. I may suffer at your hands unjustly. You know that there's injustice abounds in this world between people among people, where one rips off another one or lies to another one or cheats another or harms another one. And so on a horizontal level, there's all kinds of injustice in the world. And the Christian community is called to work for the promotion of justice among people. But how much injustice goes vertically from God to man? Even if Tim violates me and makes me a victim of his unjust activity, I can say to God, God, avenge me of this, vindicate me, restore me, redeem me from this man's unjust activity toward me. But can I say God, the fact that you allowed him to commit an injustice to me is unjust on your part. In terms of our vertical relationship, is that possible? Is that legitimate? There's nothing that could ever happen to me in this world that could give me a just reason to assault the integrity of God. In terms of our relationship, God is the injured party, not us. Now, the role that Christ plays in our redemption is called the mediator. And what does a mediator do? Where does the mediator stand? In the middle. All right, he stands in the middle. And it's not a very popular place to be because in human elements of estrangement, the mediator usually catches flak. From which side? Both sides. It's just like being an umpire or a referee between two combatants. Now, when we talk about mediation, we are talking about two concepts that are crucial to biblical Christianity. First of all is the theme of reconciliation. The purpose of mediation, the purpose of getting a mediator involved, for example, in an industrial contract dispute between labor and management, where the two sides are unable to come together and you hire a mediator to come in, what you want that mediator to accomplish is reconciliation. If there is no need for reconciliation, there's no need for a mediator. Now, what does reconciliation presuppose? What is the absolute prerequisite for. For reconciliation to be necessary? A prior relationship. Okay, and what has to happen to that prior relationship before we need to talk about reconciliation? It has to be ruptured. It has to be broken. There has to be estrangement of sorts. And so that the Scriptures speak of a ruptured personal relationship, a relationship that has been broken between two parties, between two persons, God and man. Now, there is estrangement there, and reconciliation is necessary. And Christ comes as the mediator. Now, this creates quite a difficulty right off the top. For this reason, the relationship is broken. Who's mad at whom here? Who's mad in this relationship? Who's estranged? Are we estranged from God? From a biblical perspective, are we mad at God? Yes. Okay. We exercise and manifest our enmity by our continual disobedience. Now, is it really proper to talk about God's being estranged from us, that God is angry with us? Is it proper to talk like that? Let me ask it again. Is it appropriate to talk about God's being angry with man? What do we do with the fact that the Bible speaks frequently of the wrath of God? Yes, there's a sense in which that is using human language to describe God. But the point is, God is sorely displeased with this offense. And God the Father, being the injured party, is angry with our sin. But why do we have a problem with that? One of the grave distortions of the biblical concept of the atonement is this. Some people look at it this way. Well, there's God the Father, who's mad as a hornet at man. But God the Son identifies so closely with our fallenness and with our need, and that his love and patience and long suffering seems to be so much more compassionate and enduring than that of the Father that the Son sort of sides with us in our need and acts as our mediator to calm down the Father who's angry. And so we see a tension or a split within the Godhead itself, as if the Father has one agenda and the Son persuades him to change his mind. The Father is angry and he says, I'm going to punish everybody and send them to hell. And the Son says, please don't do that. Punish me instead. Let me stand in their place. Let me not only mediate the discussion, but let me absorb the. The anger. Pile it on me, not on them. Let me be the lightning rod, and you can bounce your wrath off of me. Now, you may think that's a ridiculous scenario, but that's a serious objection raised by sophisticated theologians at a very technical level. But not only that. It's a very widespread, prevalent picture among Christians. I've wondered frequently why it is that evangelical Christians tend to be Unitarians of the second person of the Trinity, why there's so much warm passion, love, affection for Jesus, but the Father is almost totally ignored in Christian study, in Christian devotion, in Christian liturgy. How can that be? Maybe there's still this sense that, okay, Jesus we can relate to, but the Father. We still have to look out for the Father because he's the angry one. Right? But whose idea was it? For us to have a mediator who sends the mediator? Does the mediator come on his own and come to the Father and say, look, I'm tired of listening to all your expressions of anger. I'm going to go down there and I'll take it. I'll take the heat off of these people and get you calmed down if you'll just let me receive your wrath. God so loved the world that he gave. He gave, that he sent. Those are the two words that you find the two verbs biblically, again and again and again. The Father sends the Son, the Father gives the Son for our redemption. All right, let's look at this final point, the crime dimension here. God functions as the governor and the judge. God is ultimately the judge of all matters of justice. He's the ultimate standard of righteousness, and his own character is the ultimate standard of justice. But he functions personally as the judge of heaven and earth. Christ in the drama of the atonement functions not as the judge. He is given, elevated to the role of judge in his ascension, and that's very significant. But in his descension to this world, he comes under judgment. And his role here is as priest, victim. He comes to be judged. If I owed God the death penalty because I sinned against him, and Jesus just walked down the street and said, I will die for him, and laid down his life and died for me, would God be under any obligation whatsoever to accept that payment? None whatsoever. There first must be a judgment by the Governor of the universe that he will in fact accept a substitutionary payment for my debt and crime to be covered. And so what you have here is a prior decision of the Father. That is sheer grace, because a penal debt has been acquired by us. And the only way my penal indebtedness can be paid off by somebody else is if the law supreme court first decides to accept a substitute for me. Is that clear? And what God does here is that he says, justice will be done, the price will be paid, the debt will be paid in full, both from a pecuniary sense and a penal sense, I will judge the crime. The crime will be punished, the debt will be paid, so that God does not negotiate at all his justice. But at the same time, the fact that my debt is paid and my crime is punished by a substitute shows that in the cross we see perfect justice with perfect mercy. Take away the substitution, you take away the grace of God. Take away the very heartbeat of what the Christian faith is all about.