JESUS WAS PUNISHED FOR OUR SINS

Theme: “Jesus Christ was punished for our sins so that we would not have to suffer God’s eternal wrath for them.”

If anything is central to Christianity, this is! Jesus Christ, who, as we saw in the previous lesson, lived a perfect life, willingly allowed Himself to be punished in our place for our sins.

Some people discount the wrath of God, thinking that maybe today since we are under grace in the New Testament, there is no more wrath of God.  That’s tempting to believe – unless you actually read the New Testament!  God hates sins as much as He ever has.  Every man has the choice of receiving the gift of righteousness through Jesus Christ or remaining unrighteous and enduring God’s eternal wrath.  (We will see proof that “damnation is forever” in a later lesson.)

In this lesson, we will look at some Scriptures that discuss the work that Jesus did on the cross:

1 Peter 2:24:
Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree [this means the cross], that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness – by whose stripes you were healed.

Jesus took our sins. You ask, how could He take sins that had not even been committed yet?  It’s hard to understand with our natural minds, but God is not limited by time, and He was able to punish Jesus for all the sins He knew ahead of time that you would commit.

We see here that Jesus was not just punished for “sin on the earth” in general.  He was punished for our sins. You have to include your sins in that, because “your” is part of “our”!  Jesus was punished 2000 years ago for everything that you ever did, or will do, wrong.

2 Corinthians 5:21:
For He has made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Not only did Jesus take our sins, but by doing so, He partook of spiritual death.  He “became” sin!  What is spiritual death all about?  Being separated from fellowship with God. When Adam sinned, he died spiritually and lost his ability to fellowship with God. Jesus had to experience the same thing.  God had to turn His back on Jesus and break fellowship with Him.  Though the Bible does not state this expressly, I would imagine that being separated from His Father would have been the most miserable part of the punishment for Jesus.

So Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). God had to forsake Jesus, to turn His back on Him, because He is holy and cannot stand to behold sin.  He had to break fellowship with Him just as He broke fellowship with Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Habakkuk 1:13:
You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness…

Romans 3:23-25:
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith…

The word propitiation is not one that we use in everyday speech – what does it mean?  One translation (per Strong’s Concordance) is an atoning victim.  That is what Jesus was – an atoning victim who was punished for our sins, not His own, since He never sinned.  We see this word in these verses also:

1 John 2:2:
And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for our sins, but also for the whole world.

1 John 4:10:
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Again, the Bible makes it clear that Jesus Christ was the “atoning victim” who paid for our sins in our place so that we don’t have to.

If you ever feel like you have nothing to praise God for, how’s that for a start?  Your sins are forgiven, eternally paid for, and you get off scot-free, all because Jesus loved you enough to be punished in your place for your sins.

Galatians 3:13-14:
Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

We see here that because Jesus was punished for our sins, He had to be cursed. There was a specific punishment prescribed in the Law of Moses, sometimes referred to as the “curse of the Law”.  In Deuteronomy 28, starting with verse 15, we can see the terrible curses God said would come on those who did not keep all the words of the Law. These included sickness, mental illness, emotional problems, poverty, and various other equally undesirable consequences.  Because Jesus took our sins, He had to be cursed for them.  He had to die in poverty without even His clothes on, made sick in His body and in emotional and physical agony.

The good news is that He was made a curse for us so that we would not have to bear the “curse of the Law”. (The Law itself was not a curse – Paul said in Romans 7:12 that the law’s commandment was holy and just and good – the curse of the Law was the curse contained in the Law for breaking it.)  Thank God, you do not have to suffer the curse of the Law – any part of it – because Christ has redeemed you from it!

Romans 8:3-4:
For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin:  He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Because your sins have been atoned for, when you accept this and become a believer, God credits you with having lived Jesus’ sinless life and fulfilled all the requirements of the Law! Praise God!  What an exchange – your sins for His righteousness! He got what you deserved for your sins, and you got what He deserved for His sinlessness!

That is why no Christian needs to fear the Great White Throne Judgement to come. Jesus will sit on a great white throne (see Revelation 20:11-15) and condemn sinners to eternity in the lake of fire which is the second death. They will suffer God’s wrath for sin forever.  (Anyone who doubts that there is still such a thing as the wrath of God under the New Covenant should read the book of Revelation!  God hates sin, but He won’t judge anyone for it whose name has been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.  Yours is there if you have received His Son.)

You would have to include a fair part of the New Testament in this lesson to list every Scripture about Jesus and His atonement for you and what it did for you! But one of the most concise statements of what Jesus did on Calvary was written by a man who could never have seen Jesus in the flesh – because he lived hundreds of years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem!  This, of course, was the prophet Isaiah, who wrote the following prophecy about Jesus:

Isaiah 53:1-12:
Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form of comeliness; and when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows [pains] and acquainted with grief [sickness]. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him.  He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs [sicknesses] and carried our sorrows [pains]; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace [including well-being and health] was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way; And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.  He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation?  For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.  And they made His grave with the wicked – But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief [made Him sick].  When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed; He shall prolong His days. And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.  He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.  Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out His soul unto death, And He was numbered with the transgressors, And He bore the sin of many, And made intercession for the transgressors.

Isaiah’s words are so clear, there is little need to elaborate upon them.

So the Bible is absolutely clear that Jesus Christ was punished in our place.  It is not that our sins didn’t merit God’s wrath – they did. However, Jesus already suffered God’s wrath for our sins in our place so that we will not have to suffer it ourselves.
 

Question 5-1: Since Jesus “became sin”and God is holy, did Jesus cease to be a member of the Trinity during the time He was punished on the cross?

No, Jesus never ceased to be part of the Trinity.  He always was and always will be God. He did not cease to be God just because He was on the cross and had taken on our sins.  Like most issues involving the Trinity, this has to be believed more than understood, since it is difficult to comprehend intellectually.
 

Question 5-2: Since “God is one,” how can you say that the Father and Jesus were ever separated from each other?  How could the Trinity cease to be in communication?

The key to this is to understand that the Trinity consists of three divine Persons, all of whom are God. The individual Persons in the Trinity can relate (or in this case, not relate) to each other.  For example, when Jesus was baptized, the Father’s voice spoke from heaven and the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus. This is why we have to reject “Oneness Pentecostal” (also known as “Jesus-Only”) doctrine as inaccurate; this doctrine basically says that there is one person in the Godhead instead of three.  While we would stop short of declaring this doctrine cultish (there are quite a few born-again Christians who subscribe to this doctrine), we would have to say it disagrees with the demonstration of three Persons in the Godhead.

Jesus was God but had to be subject to human limitations.  The Father was still omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, but Jesus had to be limited in all these areas to truly walk the earth as a Man. So one member of the Trinity was limited for that time while the others were not.  Jesus had to fellowship with God through prayer the same way we do.  Although He was divine, His fellowship with God had to be on human terms.  This included the fact that sin bars the way to fellowship with God. When Jesus accepted our sin, He had to accept being out of fellowship with God the same way any sinner on earth is today.
 

Question 5-3: Since Jesus was made sin for us, is it accurate to say that he died spiritually on the cross and had to be “born again” by the Spirit as other men have to be?

It would appear so.  There are many Christians who actually consider such a thought blasphemous, because they say that Jesus, as God, could never die like that. Yet the Scripture declares that He “tasted death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9). We will still die physically (if Jesus tarries), so that is not the death He tasted to redeem us from it. Besides, some men will go up in the Rapture and will never die physically. Jesus had to taste spiritual death – being separated from God – for every man, since this was a consequence of sin and our sins were imputed to Him.

Acts 13:33’s quote of the Psalmist’s statement:  “You are my Son, Today I have begotten You” is in the context of the resurrection, not the virgin birth at Bethlehem.  One could also point out that Adam was not subject to physical death until he sinned – he would otherwise have lived forever, but the day he sinned he died (spiritually, not physically).  Therefore, to fully atone for our sins, Christ would have to have experienced this same spiritual death in our place as a consequence of sin.  Also, He could not have died physically without dying spiritually since if He retained His righteousness, He would still be exempt from physical death.

Having said all this, people do make arguments the other way, and this issue has unfortunately divided some Spirit-filled believers from each other.  This is not an issue that is worth “going to the mat” over. It has less Scripture relating to it than many other important issues, and it probably has little bearing on how you’re going to live your life tomorrow.  If anyone wants to insist that Jesus never died spiritually, I would not spend time arguing about it.

[On to Lesson 6:  The New Birth][Basics Index][Bible Study Index][Home]