Answering The TOUGHEST Objections to Penal Substitution

Welcome to the Tuesday livestream. Today, we're going to talk about serious, I mean serious and sober objections to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Not like last week, when I dealt with ridiculous rhetorical nonsense and misrepresentations of the doctrine. But we're gonna talk about real objections, serious questions that sober-minded people have about how Jesus saves us on the cross.

So here's a couple of the questions we're gonna deal with. Let me give you a little preview of tonight's stream. We're gonna deal with: Is it unjust for God to punish the innocent? Therefore, how could he punish Jesus? If Jesus is innocent, wouldn't it be unjust? Wouldn't the cross be an unjust thing? Human law here's another objection. Human law knows nothing of dying in someone else's place when they have a death sentence and then you die in their place. Isn't that barbaric? Another objection is, if Jesus pays for my forgiveness, then it's not really forgiveness because it's, it's, it's been a debt has been paid, you know, whereas forgiveness would be canceling a debt. So that's not really forgiveness. That's another objection. Another one is, how could Jesus pay our sentence in one weekend when we have to pay for it for eternity? So how is it that this is a fair exchange where Christ is dying for me in my place?

So maybe you're like, "What is penal substitution anyway, Mike? What are you talking about?" And that, that's the question, right? Is penal substitutionary atonement the right, that's the right understanding of the cross? But is it like, logical? Is it rational? And can it withstand sort of philosophical scrutiny? That's the question we're digging into today.

But what is the doctrine of penal substitution? It is the doctrine, and in quote, I'm quoting here, I'm gonna give you two definitions very close to one another. I want you to hear it twice and think about it. This is from the book *Pierced for Our Transgressions*. I like this, this definition. They say, "The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment, and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin." So we had a penalty upon us, and he suffered that penalty in our place. Hey, I'm just saying, Jesus died for me, you know, he paid for my sins. That is, of course, what most Christians automatically believe when they read the Bible. But a lot of people are fighting against it nowadays.

Another definition, shorter, slightly, is: "Penal substitution is the doctrine that Jesus suffered on behalf of sinners the death, punishment, and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin." So there's another definition for you right there.

Now, this just, just to remind us where we're at. This is part of a playlist, a series of videos I've done on penal substitution. I have not repeated myself in this playlist. Each video is tackling very different topics related to what Jesus did for us on the cross. And it's really important. This is a central doctrine to Christian faith, and it's under heavy attack right now. So I defended it in the first video in the series. The question was, "Church History and Penal Substitution," or "What Church History Tells Us About the Meaning of the Cross?" After that, I went to the Old Testament. Then I did two videos on that. Then I went to the New Testament, and we showed that the Bible thoroughly and fully, I mean, traps you into the doctrine that Jesus died in my place, suffering the penalty due to fallen humanity because of our sin. And then we dealt with the rhetorical stuff last week. This week, we're dealing with philosophical stuff.

Welcome to the Tuesday livestream. I'm Pastor Mike Winger. We do this every week. We deal with theology, apologetics. Sometimes it's, it's real, you know, pop-level stuff. Sometimes it's real deep. Today, we're going a little deeper, but I'm trying to make it accessible to you. Things that philosophers might debate, but I want it to be accessible to normal, everyday people.

Speaking of philosophers, it's a sad reality that in philosophy and, and in those who are in scholarly circles, they will often dismiss the doctrine of penal substitution casually. Now, I've heard this. This is just from my study. I've heard this from guys like William Lane Craig or Steve Porter, for instance, who says that, for instance, Richard Swinburne, who's a Christian philosopher, but he has a whole book on the atonement. But when he talks about penal substitution, he dismisses it in one sentence. One sentence. He doesn't analyze it through thoughtfully, thoroughly. He just dismisses it offhand. It's almost as though the mischaracterization of penal substitution is up even in the scholarly realm.

So then, for the last video, that, you know, last week's video, that deals with mischaracterizations, Paul Moser said this about the scholarly treatment of the doctrine of penal substitution. Listen to how he treats it. And now, and if you've been following the series, you know this doctrine now, you know it well, so you will catch misunderstandings. He says, "Unfortunately, some of the Christian tradition has offered a twisted reading of Jesus's role in divine forgiveness. The misguided reading implies that God's forgiveness of humans required that God punish and kill the sinless Jesus as the just payment for our sins. The source of this morally distorted claim isn't in the New Testament but rather in the theology that suffers from a wooden misreading of Isaiah 53." Brutally misunderstands the scripture here. You know, he's a scholar, he's a thoughtful man, he's a hugely, wonderfully intelligent man, but he's totally brutalizing the text. But I've dealt with that in a previous video, so we won't get into that.

What I want you to know is that it's frequent, even on the scholarly level, that this doctrine is just wiped away. Like, that's all they'll say about it is, "Oh, this is a ridiculous doctrine." Well, that's nothing new to us who read the New Testament and realize that the cross is, of course, foolishness to the world. Yes, but is it actual foolishness? No, it's not. And that's what I want to show you in this video.

So let's dig into our things. If you guys have questions, you can put them in the live chat. Um, just put a capital Q next to it, and we will try to load some of those questions at the end of the stream. I will answer your questions just off the top of my head to the best of my ability. And this is our last live stream of the year. That's the intention, that's the plan for this year. I have no other further videos planned for 2019, and I'll be working on other stuff.

So, first issue is: Penal substitution unjust? Because, and here's how the people will present their case, because they would say, "If God is perfectly just, he cannot punish an innocent person." Sounds good, right? Like, I mean, that sounds convincing. I think this is actually a strong objection to penal substitution. Well, this is not a new objection to penal substitution, but it, but it is a strong one. So let's talk about this. Let's unpack this. Is it unjust for Jesus to be punished on the cross, being innocent? And therefore, because God is just, he couldn't do it? Like, it's a, a logical impossibility for, for God to punish Christ?

Well, one response would be to say, simply, that Christ wasn't punished. And I've, and if you listen carefully back to the content I've shared in this series, you'll, you'll realize I was being very careful to word things frequently, at least trying to, so that I would make a differentiation between saying that Jesus suffered the punishment for our sins versus Jesus was punished. Because those are two different concepts. And this isn't something I'm making up, right? This was Hugo Grotius's view back 500, almost 500 years ago. And he was saying that Christ suffered the punishment for our sin, but that he himself was not punished. He was differentiating between those two issues. So one response to this is that Jesus wasn't punished as an innocent person. He simply suffered the punishment we deserve. One motive here could be to avoid saying that the Father was ever disapproving of the Son. The Father was never looking at the Son's actions or person with disapproval, but was always in approval of him. So then we could say he suffered punishment, but himself was not the target of punishment directly. And I'm sympathetic to that. I think we can say more about it than that, though. But, but I'm gonna say this: If you believe what that Hugo Grotius view, that's still, that you're affirming a penal substitutionary view. You would just not assign punishment as directed at the person of the Son, but rather experienced by the Son.

An alternative thought is that God could be, and this is gonna be a little complicated, so if I lose you here, don't worry, I'll just move on after this point. I'm gonna put it out there for those who, who can track with it, is that God is a, may well be a positive retributivist, but he may not be an unqualified negative retributivist. In other words, he may have some reasons why he doesn't always, there may be some overriding concern why he would allow the punishing of the innocent in order to achieve some greater justice. So there is, there is a justice within that this thing is achieving a just end. And that may be the case. That's a possibility. That's not where I'm actually landing, though. I just want to put it out there because you would still be a penal substitution person. I'm not gonna bother explaining all those terms. It would take me like 10 minutes just to unpack it, and that video is gonna get too long. And since I don't bank my own thoughts on that, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna labor on it. But it is available to you. In fact, I'll recommend a book to you guys if you're really interested in this stuff. There's one particular scholar, oh, there it is, who has covered this stuff in great detail and has done a lot of really wonderful work. I want to say stellar work, except I never use the word stellar. And this, this is William Lane Craig in his book *The Atonement*. It's a short, hundred-page book, but man, he crams in, you know, a couple years' worth of research on the topic of the atonement. He interacts with, and I'm not making money off this, like, just go Google it and get it yourself, but I'm recommending this as a fantastic source. That book, it may have a different cover, the version you get. That book encounters the philosophical issues as well as the, the scriptural issues, and it just handles it in a way that you'll see if you're, if you're concerned about the issues I'm dealing with today, it deals with those issues in great detail.

Okay, another reason why God could potentially punish the innocent would be that he simply has a proper moral motive for waiving that, that, that policy that you never punish the innocent because it would achieve the salvation of so many souls, because it would demonstrate God's love and God's holiness. And some people add that the general pardon of sinners without the cross might not even result in as many people getting saved. And here I'm cramming a big argument into a tiny little sentence, but I'll say this: If God were to save us apart from the cross, if there was no demonstration of the cross, well, then all those people who were driven to faith because their eyes were opened when they saw what Jesus did on the cross, they perhaps would never have come to faith. There's, there's an impact when I see that my sin was put on Jesus, man, where it just breaks my heart and invokes loving gratitude towards God. And so there could be these other overriding concerns.

But here's my answer. Here's my, where I'm gonna rest my case. Why could God punish, or Jesus experience punishment, be punished, even while he was yet innocent? And it has to do with a biblical doctrine called imputation. Imputation. And I'm gonna spend some time on this. We're gonna go over some other objections more quickly. But now, here in the beginning of the video, let's talk about imputation and how this changes, and hopefully, I think, if you're objecting to PSA, this answers your objection. Here's why it's just, in a moral sense, that Christ would suffer for our sins and be punished. Because if he's, if my sin that I've done is imputed to Christ, or another way to put it is, it's like reduplicated in Jesus. Like, I'm still guilty, it's not like I'm not guilty anymore, but he is also found guilty for what I have done. If this is a reality, then I am seeing him actually be punished justly. On one hand, because those are real sins that he's really being found guilty for, or punished for, I should say, because you necessarily have to have me found guilty. But he's being punished for them. On the other hand, it's, it's, it's pure. His life is pure. He didn't do anything to deserve it. He hasn't done anything to bring down this judgment upon himself. It's all because of me and you and our sin. And that looks like the cross. Like that looks like the biblical description, which we've already talked about here.

I want to say that our sin was imputed to Christ. It was not infused into Christ. And there's an important distinction here. If I think my sin was infused into Christ, then I think that he's actually a sinner, like he's actually sinned because my sins are kind of infused into him. But if they're imputed to him, this is legal terminology, and this is what scripture gives us. It gives us these, like, legal categories for understanding the cross. It shows that Jesus, he, our, my sins imputed to him, or it's given on his behalf as if he had sinned, not as a sinner, now, but as if he had sinned, as if he was a sinner. And then his righteousness was imputed to me. So as, as if I never sinned, it's as if I was righteous. And this is, there's actually a whole category of legal thought called legal fictions. You can look at this, look at this up on your own. It's also in Craig's book on the atonement. It sounds freaky when you hear legal fictions, because it's like legal making stuff up that's not really the concept. But some would consider corporations. Corporations aren't real people, but in court, they're treated like people. In fact, corporations can bear the guilt of the people in the corporation. So here's like a, an example of like legal fiction, allowing the corporation to suffer for the sins of the people in the corporation. There's that's an interesting way to put it. Also, like ships, boats are considered as persons in legal courts, and that is in order to achieve justice. They do that. It's a legal fiction. So an interesting idea here, it's an as if concept. Jesus was treated as if he had sinned.

So, so here we have our sin imputed unto Christ. Now, this brings up some more questions I want to deal with. And we're going deep dive in theology tonight. This is it. I hope you're excited about this. I am. I've been studying for a while, been excited about giving the knowledge dump on this particular topic. So I hope it's useful.

The question of, "When is it ever okay for the innocent to be punished for the guilty?" is the next question. Because you're like, "Well, if there is some time, some time when you can punish the innocent in place of the guilty, when is, when is this?" Francis Turretin offered us a theological answer to this question. After that, I'll look at a human legal understanding of the issue. But first, we'll look at the theological one. And he offered five reasons when it's okay, if these five qualifications, when it's okay for the innocent to be punished for the guilty. Number one, by the way, Francis Turretin was one of the Reformers back, five hundred years back. And he said, "A substitute one must be of the same nature as the guilty." And he's drawing this from the text of scripture, right? Jesus comes in my place from the Incarnation on. He's, he has our nature. And so, one, you've got to be the same nature as the guilty. Number two, "The substitute must be a volunteer rather than one who has taken against their will to be punished for the guilty." All right, because it's not proper substitution here, but in the biblical sense, without that voluntary behavior. Christ comes purposely on our way to die for us, of his own will. He says, "No man takes my life, but I lay it down." Yet many who misrepresent PSA, they want to act like Jesus wasn't freely offering himself in their bad analogies of it. Number three, he says, "That the person must have power over his own life so that he may determine whether or not to do this." So it's not enough that he's just willing, he has to actually have the ability to turn away from this or to move forward. So not only the will, but the power. Number four, "The substitute must have the power to pay the penalty, lest his punishment be of no effect." Now, this is where Turretin will argue that this is why Jesus needed to be God and man. Why he had to be God and man. This is what Anselm wrote about in *Why God Became Man*, his book. So this is, this is pretty, pretty important theologically for us. The idea is this: that the substitute can't just be a substitute. This is why they're like, a chicken or a bull or a goat wasn't good enough in this, in the scripture, right? "The blood of bulls and goats, it is impossible for them to really truly remove our sin." Jesus has to come, he has to have the ability to actually pay the full penalty. And so he needs to have that ability. And then, five, "The substitute must be sinless so that he does not need to be punished for his own sins in order for him to be punished for the other." He needs to be free from any punishment of his own sin. So Jesus had to be sinless. He's to be a sinless sacrifice. We see this prefigured in the Old Testament. We see it talked about in the New Testament. "He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him." In 1 Corinthians, that's our imputation verse, by the way. Yeah, think about it. Good stuff.

Okay, but people protest and they go, "Mike, that's cute. Okay, that's that's nice. You got your theology. You got your theological understanding of these things. You got Bible verses for it. But Mike, my complaint isn't that you don't have the Bible to support your doctrine. My complaint is humans all know this is not just. We just think the Bible's just unjust. The Bible is just giving us an idea of Jesus dying for us that is in itself a violation of what humans know about justice." So they'll say, "We have no experience of imputing the guilt of a wrongdoer onto an innocent person." That's what they're gonna say. And here we're gonna answer: Yes, we do, actually. We do. And, and, and this is where actually, excuse me, those who go against penal substitution just aren't doing their homework. And I say this not to embarrass them, but rather, it's just important that we realize that someone who says a claim like this, "Humans just don't do this. We have no concept of imputing the guilt of one person onto another." It just doesn't. This is not a thing. When they say this, they're just talking out of with no research or no, no real careful thought put into it. They're not actually looking at what humans do in law, in our, in our world. And so here we have this concept of vicarious liability. Vicarious liability. Okay, liability means you are, you're liable for some crime or some infraction of some kind. Vicarious liability is the idea that you're liable for what somebody else has done. That's vicarious liability. And we actually have vicarious liability show up in civil and criminal law. These are the two different categories of law, right? Civil law and criminal law. Both of them have categories of vicarious liability. So let's talk about those for a minute. This is stuff you're not gonna know unless you do your digging and your homework on it. The idea is this, though, and there's, there's a term for it called *respondeat superior*. That's the Latin term for it. And in discussions of law and stuff, they like to use Latin, just like they do in just discussions of theology. But this is the idea of *respondeat superior*. It is the liability or guilt of a subordinate is imputed to his superior, even though his superior is entirely blameless. I'm gonna read that again because each element is important. The liability or guilt of a subordinate is imputed, that's that biblical concept of imputation, to his superior, even though his superior is entirely blameless. So the superior is not guilty here. They're just imputing or being, having the guilt of the subordinate reduplicated in the superior.

Let me talk about this a little. In civil law, these are cases which typically involve employers being held liable for their employees' sale of illegal items, but it can also include things like assault and battery, fraud, manslaughter, and other crimes. So in civil law, you know, like somebody's, you go to CVS Pharmacy and, and someone sells you, illegally sells you pharmaceuticals, and even though the employer didn't have any knowledge of it, even though they're not blameworthy, like they didn't do anything wrong, they can still have it be vicariously liable, have *respondeat superior* or invoked against them.

Now, in cases in criminal law, it's, it's, maybe that may be the example I gave would actually be criminal law. I think it, I think it would. Um, I'm not always sure what the distinctions are because I'm not a legal theorist. But in cases in criminal law, it's the same. There's actually criminal law cases because this is the objection. It'll come, "Mike, sure, that's civil law, but we're talking about criminal law, like the death penalty. We don't have people getting the death penalty for someone else." Well, the concept is actually there in criminal law, and it's, it's there even when the employer is totally blameless, like there's no negligence, there's no failure to supervise the employee, yet they're found criminally liable. And then I'll give you a couple examples. This is from Craig's book on the atonement, because he did a lot of study on legal, from legal theorists and case studies and stuff. Not really a great book, it's not entertaining, all good. You got to know that, it's not fun to read unless you just love the information, which I did, so fun for me. Okay, so cases in criminal law, *Allen v. Whitehead* is a case where an owner of a cafe was found criminally liable because the manager of the cafe, not the owner, the manager, allowed prostitutes to gather there in violation of the law, and the owner's found criminally liable. In *Sheriff's v. Des Routzahn*, a bartender was criminally liable, right, because he'd sold alcohol to a constable or a cop on duty. But what happened in the case was the liability of the bartender was imputed to the owner of the bar as well. And so here's vicarious liability in a criminal law case. So these examples are actually really close to the doctrine of imputation, which basically means that the objection, "We know humans know of no such thing that's unjust," is empty. It's just empty.

Now, we can go deeper. What are, you know, when at least in human understanding, maybe we're wrong about our understanding of law, maybe we're wrong about our understanding of justice. That's always possible. But what conditions do we put forward for vicarious liability? Well, Dr. Craig gets into this in his book, and he says that in, in the Anglo-American justice system, the employer has to have certain, certain qualifications to be considered criminally liable. They opt out either the duty, the power, or the right to prevent the wrongdoing of the subordinate. Any one of those three things, the duty, the power, or the right, and they're at least potentially criminally liable for those things. Vicarious liability. Now, did Jesus have the duty to prevent us from doing the sins that we've done? I don't know. I don't think he had the duty. I wouldn't think that one applies. Did he have the power to prevent us? Yeah, he had the power. Does he have a right to prevent those things? He definitely has the right. And so even under our law system, there's some sense in which vicarious liability can be found.

Now, let me head off an objection, because you're probably already heading there, and you're in your mind, I know I would. You might say that this is saying that God is guilty or blameworthy for my sin. That we're actually saying that Jesus isn't, isn't just going to the cross to die for my sin, like he's actually guilty of something because he just let me do the sin. And that's not what we're saying. And in fact, can I say that's not what vicarious liability is about? That's not even what it means in law. So vicarious liability, also called strict liability, and I'm gonna bring that term in, strict liability, that's a legal term. It's important here. It's different than just plain liability. See, we're not saying Jesus is liable for us. We're saying he was vicariously liable, or strict liability. In strict liability, there is neither negligence nor blame associated with the person who is the superior. The *respondeat superior*, that superior person, they're not guilty and they're not blameworthy. When you, when you have blame put on you by the court, where you're considered to having to be, you know, in the position of, you did something wrong, well, you had either *actus reus* or *mens rea*. These are two Latin terms. One is *actus reus*, the active wrongdoing, or you did something wrong, or you had *mens rea*, or a blame or the mental state. So you had wrong actions or wrong or wrong mind. And if you didn't have either of those things, either the wrong actions, the wrong mind, then you're not liable. You have no guilt in that sense. And that's a strict liability situation. So your, there's some examples from law. They don't parallel perfectly to Jesus. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying humans have concepts like this. So don't act like we don't. That's all I'm saying.

Examples from law would be, if a lady listening to this, you were walking through the store and somebody puts some illegal item in your purse, and then you walk out, and then you were found in possession of a firearm or narcotics or something like that, you could be found strictly liable, strict liability, but there'd be no blame. Nobody would even think you did anything wrong. It's just that there is a legal category for giving you liability, even though it was something someone else did, even though you didn't know it was there. So the employer can be held liable, but is not being blamed for anything that they have done. And that's kind of the case here. So there, there is actually a legitimate case to say that in human law, we have the same categories as what we're appealing to in scripture for describing what Jesus did on the cross. These exist in human law independent of the Bible. That's really interesting.

Now, some would object here. Here's another objection. I'm gonna head you off, if I can. "Mike, how can you use human laws and, and say that this is what God is using? Like, God's using human laws?" And I want to say, "Slow your roll." Like, you haven't heard me. I'm not using human laws and saying God is using those things instead. I'm responding to an objection. The objection is, "Mike, vicarious atonement, vicarious liability of Jesus as expressed in the Bible, doesn't make sense. Imputation, that doesn't work because humans don't do that. Humans know that justice doesn't work that way." That's the objection. The response is, "Oh yeah, actually, we do know that, and justice does work that way. Therefore, I'm just getting rid of an objection to the justice of the cross." So in this case, Jesus was, was not disapproved of at any point. He has no blame, were they anything in his, in his, in his person, obviously, which would be an impossibility, right? Our sin was being disapproved of in Christ.

Let me read to you about some legal philosophers that were studied on this very topic by, by Dr. Craig. I can't, I can't recommend that book enough if you're interested in more detail. If this video doesn't do it all for you, then go get Dr. Craig's book, *The Atonement*. Craig refers to A.J. Ayer. Ayer has a theory of punishment. He's a legal philosopher, legal theorist. And his theory of what punishment is, he describes punishment this way: "Punishment does not require that the person punished is condemned or censured for the act or omission believed to be wrong. Censure could be either of the person who did the act or of the act itself." So he's a legal theorist. He's talking about these issues. But this, this means that when you say, "Was Jesus punished?" Well, yeah, you could, you could say Christ was punished, but this doesn't, you know, amount to any disapproval of Jesus on the cross. Rather, it's disapproval of our sin as the punishment is borne by Christ for those things. So since you're, according to Craig, since you're, could be either of the person who did the act or of the act itself. Similarly, on Feinberg's account, now this is another legal theorist, Feinberg, who says the following: "Punishment expresses the community's strong disapproval of what the criminal did. Indeed, it can be said that punishment expresses the judgment of the community that what the criminal did was wrong." So on the cross, we have God expressing his, his disapproval of sin, not of Jesus. I mean, that sounds a lot like, you know, like humans are understanding justice in a way that makes, makes the biblical explanation of Jesus on the cross, you know, marry well with that concept of punishment.

Craig has some criticisms with the critics. And he says, as I mentioned earlier, that philosophers and, and even guys who theologians, they will in one sentence, they will just dismiss penal substitution as unjust. Although I've just built a case that there's several reasons to think it is just. But his complaint against these philosophers and these theologians is that they don't even deal deeply with, with the idea of penal substitution. And you'll see this constantly. It's a shallow, shallow, stripped-down understanding of PSA that is rejected. They don't prove their criticisms, they just make statements.

Let me, let me read to you, and forgive me if this is a little complicated. I need these quotes because somebody out there, you needed just this information that I'm about to read to you. Someone else, you only half of this quote, and the rest is like, "What's he talking about?" That's fine. I'm just gonna put it all out there. I wanted to minister and help people where and meet them where they need it. Here's the quote. This is from Craig's book, page 59. He says, "In fact, it needs to be asked whether critics of the coherence of penal substitution have not fundamentally misunderstood expressive ISM with regard to punishment." Expressive ISM is is the idea of what, what are we accomplishing with punishment? Expressive ISM holds that there is a certain stigma attached to punishment in the absence of which the harsh treatment is not punishment. It is no part of expressive ISM that the censor expressed by punishment target a particular person. And, and expressive ISM is the popular theory of what punishment is amongst legal theorists. More information than you ever wanted to know, I get that. The point is that penal substitution stands on solid just grounds as being something that's compatible with at least how a lot of humans understand how law works, and even theorists of such things.

Okay, let's move on to another objection. I'll move a little quicker now. Some say God's justice is restorative, not retributive. God's justice is restorative, not retributive. This is something I've encountered a lot as an objection to penal substitution because in penal substitution, God is, you know, exacting justice on the cross in the sense of punishing sin or giving sin what it deserves. That's the idea. Repaying sin for what it deserves is what the Bible calls equity. It's when God does it, gives people exactly what they've earned. And, and the Bible does make actually a pretty big deal about that. And so some say, "Well, no, I'm like, you know, you're, you're forcing this justice thing on the cross, but God's justice isn't really about giving people what they deserve, it's about restoring people." I just want to say, like, that's not what the word justice actually means. Like, this is called equivocation, right? You're just changing the meaning of a word. And Ana does it. And that's one objection. Another objection is, it's an in-run right past scripture. You could look at several different passages. In Romans 2:5, it says that people are storing up wrath. I did this two weeks ago when I dealt with the New Testament and penal substitution in the book of Romans, in particular. Link in the video description for the series. And the biblical case, though, is clearly that wicked people deserve punishment. And throughout the text of scripture, we see God giving justice that's not restoring people. Now, it's restoring justice, it's restoring rightness in the world, but it's not restoring people. It's not like Sodom and Gomorrah were all restored by the justice that fell upon them. That's not the case. And so I think this is just a weird, unjust, unholy understanding of God's justice and holiness. I think, to put it bluntly, John Stott put it this way: "It is God himself in his holy wrath who needs to be propitiated. God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating. And God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins." And that has to do with dealing with God's justice.

Okay, another objection is this: that it kills forgiveness. It kills forgiveness because if you, if you take a penal substitutionary view, that Jesus was punished for my sin, then the idea is that if our sin is paid for by Jesus, then it's not really forgiven in the true sense of the word, right? Yeah, I forgive you, but you have to pay me for it. I forgive you, but you have to pay. That's not really forgiveness. The critics will say it's debt payment rather than debt forgiveness. And if you know, my actual answer would be, it's both. Well, it's both. Me and God is paying and forgiving. It's both of those things. But the analogy goes like this: to build their case stronger, they say, "So a mortgage company forgives the debt of a family." This is, um, this is just forgiveness, right? It's just forgiveness. The mortgage company forgave your debt. There's no debt. They don't say, "We'll forgive your debt when you pay your debt." That's not debt forgiveness. That forgiveness is, they just get rid of the debt. Except that I would actually counter and say, if you want to take this payment analogy, now, this is not a legal analogy. We really need a legal analogy here because that's what the Bible is giving us with justice. But let's take the payment analogy. When a bank forgives the debt to somebody of somebody, um, they're still out all that money. If you owed them five hundred thousand dollars, guess what? They paid five hundred thousand dollars. They loaned it to you, and they're out five hundred grand. It's not like the debt just disappeared. They paid it. So even in the case of debt forgiveness, like they're actually paying it and forgiving you. And so this analogy seems self-contradictory to me.

But there's, um, there's other stuff. And some say, "Well, it's not about payment, it's just about forgiveness. It's just God's forgiving us like a personal relationship. When I forgive you, I don't ask you to pay for it. I just let it go." Well, I, there may be a case to say that when I forgive somebody, I am sort of absorbing the sin and the pain and the suffering that they caused me. I mean, I'm absorbing out of myself in a sense when I do forgive them. So there's a sense in which that's, that's the case. If, if my wife were to commit adultery against me, and I forgave her, all the pain and the harm and the hurt of that would still be something I experienced. I just wouldn't exact it out of her. So there's almost a sense of vicariousness in normal human forgiveness. I almost, that's there in my head. It seems to be the case.

But I have a bigger objection to this. When you say it kills forgiveness, the problem is you're acting like God's forgiveness is merely person-to-person, right? It's only a personal, like, "Hey, you hurt my feelings." But the problem that the Bible's resolving in the cross is not just a personal enmity between you and God. It's the sin against a holy God who is judge of all the world. So there's like a legal category, a judicial, not personal category here, right? I'd be fine with a, with, if I, if I had committed murder and the person, a relative of the person I murdered, forgave me and said, "I forgive you, Mike, for that." I'd be like, "That's fine. You have the ability to do that." But what if that guy was the judge in my case, in my murder case, and then he goes, "I forgive you, so declare you pardoned or not guilty?" Well, then we would think his job as a judge, he evacuated, he failed, he's a terrible judge because that's not justice. And so we see that God is not only the personal offended party, but also the judge of the world. And that is a different issue. So he will punish sin.

So let's look at the next one. Oh, one last thing. When a criminal does finally pay their debt, they pay their debt to society through going to prison for a time, or through paying fines, or do some other kind of restitution, and they pay their debt to society. When society sees them again, we even use the phrase, "They've paid their debt." We look at it as though, "Okay, we've let it go. They've paid their debt. The issues dealt with and done. They're forgiven in the eyes of the law, right, by payment." Right? This is, this is consistent with penal substitution. It's just Jesus who's doing the payment for us. And so it's both. It's both justice and forgiveness together at the same time. I think that gets rid of this idea that it kills forgiveness. Like, you're just not, I think you haven't thought this through carefully, and you're not being biblical or reasonable.

What about the next thing? Some people say that the idea that God has to punish sin is simply not biblical. And they'll go on, like, as if God has to pay off justice. He can't forgive us. He has to pay off justice because justice is a mean god, and she's gonna exact her revenge, and you have to pay her off. And so they draw a picture like, like Jesus on the cross is paying some external justice thing out there in space. Now, this is a pagan view of God. This is a pagan, unbiblical, ungodly view of God. No. In fact, first off, God's dealing with his own justice. It's his character of consistent goodness and justice and holiness and love that is driving all these things. But also, penal substitution doesn't require that God has to punish sin. I mean, it may well be true that God has to punish him because of his own character, but the doctrine itself doesn't hang on that. You can believe in penal substitution even though you, you think, "I think God could forgive if he wanted to." Right? That goes back to like Hugo Grotius. That was his view. But I do think a case can be made that God does, he must punish sin, but it's driven from an internal justice being part of God's character, right? That so it's a self-driving. Nothing else is driving him. And God's not a slave to some external thing called justice. It's his own nature. He just is just. And he doesn't yield to it in some external sense. This is just how God chooses to deal with sin, and he says he'll do it, deal with it that way. So to say God doesn't have to punish sin is to disagree with God. He says he, well, to say God won't punish sin, I'll put it that way, he's to disagree with God. He says he will punish sin. He says it over and over again throughout the text of scripture. This is a silly objection, actually.

Some people say that in the Bible, in the Bible, actually God forgives. Here's another objection. In the Bible, God just forgives people, and he doesn't require any payment, right? So David with Bathsheba, he, he has adultery, he commits murder, and God forgives him, but he doesn't require some kind of payment. And other examples in the text of scripture where God forgives people and he doesn't require payment. My response to that, let's, let's actually go to the text of scripture here. Romans 3:25 says, "It tells us how God forgave David." Yeah, I reread all of Romans 3 and 4 because it's talking about the Old Testament saints and how they were forgiven, not just New Testament people. It says, "About Christ, 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." Wait, it wasn't divine forgiveness that caused him to cease from punishing sin in the past. It was divine forbearance, meaning patience. God was waiting. He didn't punish David in the fullness of what he did. He didn't punish lots of people because he was waiting. What? To show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be what? Just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So he could forgive people, but without relaxing the requirements of justice. What is this? This is the doctrine of penal substitution forced on us by the text of scripture. There's other passages as well that support this, but I've kind of gone over them somewhat already in the biblical side of things. I wanted us to deal with this objection briefly here. So this is how all these guys were justified in the, in the past. They were justified by Christ, and their sins were passed over at the moment, in lieu of, or in forbearance of the justice for their sin coming upon Christ in the day when Christ shows up and dies on the cross for us in our place.

Now, some would say, "Well, as a human, I forgive without exacting punishment." And I, you know, "And God calls me to forgive. He just says, 'I want you to just forgive people and let go of it.'" Yes, but there's two elements of this that I want to say, "Cuz they'll say, 'Well, God's therefore a hypocrite, cause he's gonna punish, but he doesn't want me to punish.'" Well, there's two reasons why you don't punish as a Christian. One, you're not God. So the whole concept, I'm forcing you, just think about here, the idea that God is the just judge of all the earth, and that in that place, he will, or must, depending on your view here, punish sin. I know I'm not, I'm not the just judge, so I don't have this thing hanging over me. I appeal to the just judge. This is Romans 13, where it says, you know, "Just bless those who curse you, help them out, be kind to those who are persecuting you, forgive them, because God's wrath is upon them, and God will repay them." This is Romans 13. You're gonna let it go because God will deal with it. In other words, it's none of your business. You're not the judge. God is. God will judge them. So you let it go. So I don't have that judge, just judge position forcing me to deal with their sin. Second reason why I can forgive in a way which God, I wouldn't say God doesn't, I should say where, let me explain why this is not hypocrisy, I'll put it that way, and that is that when I forgive people, I do it in light of Christ. The same reason why God forgives me. I see Jesus on the cross paying for me, and this is my motive. And this is the case scripture makes: "Forgiving one another as Christ forgave you." I look at the death of Christ paying for all sin, and I apply that to those who sin against me. And so I'm, I'm putting myself, in a sense, under the blood of Christ as I forgive others for the sins they've committed. So it's still my forgiveness of them still involves penal substitution, actually.

Some say penal substitution ends in either limited atonement or universalism. And this is an objection to it. And...

I would say this is not an objection to it. They'll say either, "Jesus, you know, because if he dies for me, that I then I'm saying, well, either he died for everyone and everyone's saved, or you know, that's universalism, or he only died for certain people because only certain people get saved, and that's limited atonement."

And I would say this is, this is a separate question because this actually doesn't challenge penal substitution in any way, shape, or form. This is just a red herring; it's a distraction. But it is interesting, and I have videos on limited atonement, which I guess I'll put a link to in the description later, to videos on the topic of limited atonement, where I deal with this, this, this in great detail.

The bottom line is this: the extent of Jesus's death on the cross is different than the application of Jesus's death on the cross. Universal extent, but the application is individual. Anyway, that it's gonna be way too theologically thick if I get into all the details of that. I just want to mention it so that you'll know I have a resource on that in limited atonement, and I will put that and only below.

Yeah, so no, it doesn't end in limited atonement or universalism, either one. That's not, that's not true; that's just a false dilemma.

Okay, next thought: sin can't be transferred. This is, I think I heard Greg Boyd mentioned this one. It's just, it's, it's, it's irrational, it's illogical, it's impossible to think of transferring sin from one person to another. You just can't do it.

And there's a couple options that we have here. One option in response to this is, "Yes, it can. Sin can be transferred. You're wrong." I mean, just say you're wrong. That would be one answer. I mean, how do you prove that this, this is, this can't be done? Sometimes people just make statements, and they have no evidence for it, no support. You just prove to me that sin can't be transferred with one possible objection.

But I would offer another possible objection, which is, "Your sin wasn't transferred to Christ; it was represented in him or reduplicated in a sense, in a fashion, in Christ." Or perhaps just the guilt of your sin. Maybe that's a more accurate way to put it. Jesus was the bearer of guilt, as the Old Testament talks about bearing guilt over and over again, and then relates it to Christ in the New Testament.

What else could this mean, that he was a bearer of guilt? He certainly wasn't bearing his own guilt. Whose guilt do you think he was bearing? You're just disagreeing with Scripture here. And yeah, we would say Jesus had this vicarious, which I already dealt with, vicarious sense of liability or, or guilt through representation. It wasn't actually the transfer of, in my sin wasn't transferred to Christ.

So yeah, that would be where I would sit on this issue if you're working through this. I don't think Jesus had my sin transferred onto him. I think he had a forensic or legal declaration. He was declared guilty, not actually guilty. See the difference? It's a forensic thing. That's the whole idea of liability and vicarious atonement and all that.

Okay, here's another objection. We're coming down to, to the, to the end of them actually pretty soon here, and then I'll go to your guys' questions. And this is a big one: Jesus's death on the cross is just not enough. Some would say, "How does the momentary punishment of Jesus, his death and suffering, how does that provide substitution for eternal punishment that we have coming in hell? How does Jesus's weekend of pain deal with my eternity of pain? What is, how is this, how is that make sense? How is this a just measurement of scales? How does that work?"

Here's one answer. One answer would be, I'm gonna offer several thoughts on this line, and I want to first ask you this: if this is your objection, I know this is going to sound weird, okay, but I'm gonna, I want to talk to you pastorally about this for a second. Self-assess just for a moment and ask yourself if you're angry right now, because this is really important.

If you're angry as you ask this question, "How could, how could, is it, is it this question, how could Jesus in that one act on the cross pay for an eternity, you know, what equals an eternity punishment? I don't understand that." That's a good question. I'm happier here if you're instead thinking, "How could Jesus do that? It doesn't make any sense." And if that's your heart and attitude, you're not gonna hear my answer in the first place, and that's my pastoral concern is that some people are angry about this issue, and they're not listening at all. So I'm hoping that you're hearing this.

So one answer would be that our punishment would be infinite, and Jesus, what Jesus experienced, can be said to be infinite for the following reason: Jesus has infinite value. Jesus has infinite value. So we're not looking at the length of the duration of the punishment of his sin, of our sin on Christ, excuse me. We're not looking at the length of that, that punishment. We're looking at the quality of the one who was punished, the quality of the one who was punished.

So Jesus has infinite value. A man may suffer forever, but perhaps a devouring man, right? Infinitely valuable. He's worth so much more than one of us that his suffering is of greater value in achieving justice. And most certainly, Jesus is of greater value than me or you. And so his blood, so to speak, is worth more than yours. And that might be one answer to this question.

Another answer to this question would be that not the person of Christ, but the degree of Jesus's suffering in that short period of time was the equivalent of a lot of an infinite period of time or an unending period of time. I mean, how could it be? And I don't know how to flesh all this out. This is just, think it through with me here. How intense was Christ's suffering on the cross?

Now, he was not separated from the Father, not ontologically, or the persons of the Trinity weren't this divided. That's not, you know, and most people who promote penal substitution will be careful to make sure people don't think that. But there was some sort of incredible suffering that Christ went through that we probably don't know, but we probably can't really fully comprehend. He may have had a loss of the awareness of divine love and the bliss of the relationship that God has always had within the Trinity. I say loss of the awareness of it, not loss of the actual relationship. And there is a difference.

Just like Jesus, he perhaps couldn't lift up a certain sized object, but yet he was still omnipotent. He didn't lose the omnipotence, but he lost his access, his free access to it. He didn't lose his actual relationship with the Father, but lost his cognizant awareness of it. How they put it in the Reformation time is they call this the beatific vision, that Jesus's degree of suffering included the loss of the beatific vision, or just the awareness of the beauty and the felicity of the relationship with the Father, between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So that there's some sense of incredible loss that we could never even comprehend.

It'd be like if the most beautiful marriage ever had this feeling of separation that was happening. Well, that would be different than for someone who had an ugly marriage to go through that. And so, yeah, something Jesus was doing was different there. The quality of Christ's suffering was a greater extent than perhaps one of us going through the same thing.

Now, here's another element. Now, I'm putting all these together. I think all of these are answers to the question, is that our punishment in hell would be ongoing, not because we must pay an infinite punishment, but because we never pay the punishment. Think of it this way: a man who is sentenced to prison for whatever crime, he goes to prison, and you go to see him a few years later, and you're like, "Man, why are you still in prison?" And he just says to you, "Because I haven't paid my debt." And perhaps the debt is such that he will never pay it. Perhaps it's, it's, it's such a huge debt, he will never fully pay the debt, so he stays in prison forever. That's one way of looking at it.

Whereas with Christ, when he goes to the cross, he's not, you know, ineffectually paying a debt; he's effectually paying it. He fully pays the debt. And what do you do when the debt's paid? You release the prisoner. You release the prisoner. So this is why Christ raises from the dead, because the debt's been paid. This is why you don't raise after the second, the second death, the judgment, because you never pay the debt. So consequently, there's an eternal punishment for those outside of Christ because they never pay the full debt, whereas Christ paid the full debt successfully because he was sinless and because the value of his person and the quality of his suffering.

So I think that would actually answer the question of how Christ's suffering over a shorter period of time could amount to a payment that would allow us to be released from an eternal punishment.

I'll add one more thought to this, which is that those in hell, we sometimes act like they're not continuing to sin. And so there are not only unsuccessful to pay for their own sin, but they're continuing to sin against God with just the continued heart thoughts, the things they yield their will to, wicked. So there may just be a continual ongoing payment because of continual ongoing sin against God. That may be the price as well. Now, I'm speaking here from a traditional view of the understanding of hell.

Now, I'll offer a few objections. I'm gonna go to your guys' questions. I say objections because very rarely do you hear objections labeled at the people who are objecting to penal substitution, and they almost sometimes seem to insulate themselves from them, perhaps. But here's some of my objections.

Some people will say, "Oh, it's Christus Victor, not penal substitution." I've mentioned this before, but I think I need to mention it again. Christus Victor, the idea that Jesus on the cross, Jesus isn't dying for my sin; he is gaining victory over the world, the flesh, the devil, and the systems of all this ungodliness in the world. And the problem is that doesn't make sense without penal substitution. It's penal substitution that provides us with a reason for Christus Victor making sense.

I mean, how else does the cross work? Satan sees Jesus on the cross, and he's just like, "Well, you died, and I really feel defeated now." Like, what does that mean? How does it even work? But with penal substitution, he robs Satan of any claim or any power he might have over humankind because they've been restored in relationship with God.

The moral influence theory supposedly is a replacement for penal substitution. Well, it was never meant to be that. Even Abelard didn't think that. Read Abelard again if you're into Abelard and his comments on Romans 4:25, I think it was, where he talks about what seems to look like penal substitution. And at any rate, moral influence can't stand alone without penal substitution. The idea is Jesus died to just give us moral inspiration to come to God. But what's inspiring about the cross if Jesus isn't actually paying for my sin? He just dies to die for no reason. That's weird and un-biblical, might I add.

It's not the inclusion of Christus Victor or moral influence that's the problem. I think Christus Victor, moral influence, are important parts of penal substitutionary atonement, of all of them being put together. But the denial of penal substitution is a huge problem because penal substitution gives us the reason for understanding all those things.

Like imagine moral influence without penal substitution. Here's what it would be like: your child's in a fire in a building that's on fire, and I run in, and I risk my life, and I get the child out, and I take him to the window, and I drop the child down. I die in the fire. I died to rescue. Boy, that's a moral influence, right? Except without penal substitution, there really is no fire because God's just gonna forgive you anyways. So the fire is not even there. Or your child is simply not in danger of the fire. There's no, there's no necessity of anybody dying here.

So it would be more like this: it'd be more like I, perhaps I go into the building, I get your child, like I give you the child. Oh my God, here, excuse me. There wouldn't even be a fire, so there wouldn't even, no danger to the child. So it's more like you're standing there with your child, here's you and your baby, and I see a building on fire, and I go run into it, and I say, "I want to show you how much I love you," and I die in the fire. I mean, that would be Jesus on the cross without penal substitution, just moral influence alone. It just doesn't make any sense. It's silly, actually.

Yeah, Christus Victor is not a rebuttal to penal substitution.

Yeah, my biggest objection, though, before I go to your guys' questions right now, is that when people want to come against penal substitution, they are coming against Scripture. The biggest opponents to penal substitution are also people who are popularly trying to get out there the idea that we should basically reject certain ideas in Scripture, certain concepts in Scripture, and certain teachings of Scripture. The reason why is because their views are not biblical, and that's something that we need to, we need to get, wrap our head around.

I've kind of mentioned it a few times now in this series, but when I hear Greg Boyd talk about his cruciform hermeneutic, when I hear Brian Zahnd talk about how he won't go traipsing around the Old Testament without Jesus, by which he means he's gonna just disagree with passages in Scripture, or when I hear even guys like Bill Johnson say that there are some truths that are more true, and that Jesus is more true than stuff that we read about sometimes in the Old Testament, I'm like, "Nah, man, this is where I think any Holy Spirit-filled individual is gonna immediately recognize that you guys are way off the reservation, and you are fighting on the wrong side."

Here's my pastoral point I went in with before I go to your questions, which I believe I've already got a few of them here. So those who objected to penal substitution, and if your objection was in here, you did it based upon what you really believed were real convictions. "This is really morally wrong, this cross thing." "Your description of the cross is morally wrong, Mike." But it seems morally defensible. It seems as though the objections themselves are thin, and when they're poked at, they fall apart. And that there is understandings in human law that help refute the human law style objections, and there's understandings in Scripture that refute the idea that this is some frivolous thing.

And so I want to say this: you should have just trusted the Bible all along. That's my pastoral point. You know, maybe, maybe you didn't have the time to do the research. Maybe you never would have seen this video, and you sat there thinking, in some ways, "I just feel like the cross might not be just, but I know the Bible teaches the cross. I think I'll just trust the scriptures because I'm probably wrong here. I'm definitely wrong here." I think we need to build a case for trusting the Word of God and not thinking that I have to pass everything God says through my approval system. I think that that's a dangerous and even foolish way of thinking, because we're just wrong about stuff all the time. When Scripture teaches it, it has authority.

All right, let's go to your guys' questions.

Practical Faith says, "All sinners deserve eternal punishment. If Christ took my sin, then how did it, and he not suffer eternally?" I answered that question. Could this have any implication on annihilationism? It could, but it wouldn't be a biblical implication. So let's suppose that I couldn't build a case, which I think I can. I think I built a good case for it, for Christ's non-eternal suffering, keep taking care of the eternal suffering of mankind. I think I built a good case for it. But let's suppose I couldn't, it would be then a philosophical case for annihilationism, the idea that we just die. There wouldn't be a biblical case. We would need a biblical case for annihilationism, not a philosophical one, if you want my opinion about it. I think the philosophical comes secondarily, to be honest here.

Richard Dickinson says, "How is Jesus's death a sacrifice when Jesus rose from the dead?" Well, I don't understand the objection here, Richard. I'm gonna, I'm trying to comprehend it here. Jesus bears our sin. I don't know. I can't imagine the psychological, I know it's a weird word to use, the emotional, the sense of suffering that is caused by the weight of the guilt of mankind's sin coming upon Christ. All of the sin ever committed by anybody. Can you imagine what that feels like? You ever felt guilt? You ever felt that sense? I can't even imagine the breaking of the sense of felicity that the Son had with the Father, the physical pain and suffering and torture and death, going through death, not a pleasant thing, doing so in our place. I think it was a sacrifice. Why, you know, he rose from the dead? Does that mean no, he didn't go through the suffering or didn't, didn't go through all that stuff? I don't think that's true at all. Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't follow the objection.

Josh Sauer says, "Mike, is it bad if my favorite part of the New American Gospel was seeing you in it? What was it like being interviewed, and do you have any thoughts on either of the films?" Okay, good questions. So you guys might be familiar with the film American Gospel. Pardon me, I'm just allergies make my nose plug up here. But the films American Gospel and then the new one, American Gospel: Christ Crucified, just came out, and I'm interviewed in it, just in a few clips, not in a whole lot of it, but in a few clips here and there. My interview experience, I was like super nervous because I always get nervous doing things I haven't done before, and I hadn't done something like that before. So I probably couldn't even use the first few of clips because I was just nervous, just being real. But, but yeah, it was fun. Um, yeah, I mean, in hindsight, it was fine.

I thought the moment, I will say this though about the films. The first film I saw, the one-hour version. I never got to watch the three-hour version. I meant to, and I just never did. I really loved the one-hour version, really liked it a lot, and would encourage you guys to see it. The new one, I have seen the full version, especially because I'm in it, and I wanted to look it and watch it. And I, I agree with most of what's in there, but there are a few points of Calvinism that do get brought up that I actually have videos refuting. So you're gonna find some areas of objection. But most of what's said in there, I really agree with, and I do think it's a good movie to watch and to guard us against the heretical, blasphemous rhetoric that we're hearing nowadays being espoused in the name of Christ. It just blows my mind.

Anyhow, Anna Bashir says, "How do I honor my father when he claims to be Christian but is not godly hardly at all? I disagree with a lot of his behavior and his attitude, how he treats people, lives his life. And because of this, my attitude toward him is not good. How can I honor him in this situation? Can I ever rebuke him, debate him on things like, like that?" Um, yeah, you can absolutely. You can rebuke him, you can debate him. I don't think there's any reason why you can't do that. And I think you can honor him while you're doing it, right? There's a way of bringing rebuke to an elder, right, where you, you do it in a different way because it's someone who's, you know, your father. You don't rebuke him in the same sense of just like someone who you disrespect.

There's a, there's a saying in the military that it might be clumsy here, but I think it's helpful, and it's, "Salute the rank, not the person." And, well, there's, it's clumsy, okay? It's clumsy. Don't take it wrong. I hope it doesn't come off wrong. But there's a way in which you could salute the rank. It's like, "Hey, man, you're in that position. Maybe you're a loser, maybe you're a terrible human being, but you're in that position. I'm still gonna honor the role that you have," right? Either as a human, as a person made in the image of God, or as my father. And I know I've had a long story with my own father where God had to do this with my own life too, for me to be able to love and respect and honor him. That was a work of the Holy Spirit in my life because of our, our history. Now we have, by God's grace, a good relationship. And, and so, yeah, you can salute in a sense the rank. So when you're saluting the rank, there's a way in which what you're doing is you're really honoring the one above the one you're honoring.

So my encouragement to you would be, honor your Father in Heaven by showing respect, even when it feels undeserved, to your father on earth, because it was ultimately your Father in Heaven who's calling you to do that. And you can still do those other things, disagree with him, you just do it in a respectful fashion. I hope that helps.

Taylor Fletcher says, "What would you suggest to someone that is feeling down on their faith and prayer, and could you also do more Mormonism videos?" Perhaps I will. Someone who's feeling down on their faith in prayer, I would, I would suggest that you, you, here's a few thoughts, and I forgive me, Taylor, if any of this doesn't apply to you. I'll just giving you my thoughts.

One thing I would encourage is that you remind yourself of the gospel, the simple, simple gospel. Just go back to those passages in Scripture that communicate to you the simplicity of Christ and what he's done for you, and that, like we're talking about today, he took the guilt of all my sin and got rid of it on my behalf, that when I put trust in him, I am washed and clean. I am justified as if I had never sinned. Meditate on that. Go back to that. Spend some time thinking about that. Pray about it. Thank God for it.

Second, I would encourage you to do a self-assessment and just ask, don't be paranoid about it, ask if there's obvious sin issues that you should deal with that might be contributing to how you're feeling. This is not to condemn you; this is to free you from it, right? Just ask about those questions, you know, just be honest with yourself, because sin has a way of causing us to be down and causing us problems, and you want to deal with those issues. Bring them to the grace of Christ, bring them to the cross of Christ, and then decide that you love God more than that thing.

Another thing I would encourage you to do is to assess your schedule and your time. Are you spending time in fellowship? Is it real fellowship, or is it just face fellowship, like where you go in your pen, say, "Oh, yeah," and I'm getting higher, you then you leave and you'll be yourself again after? No, you need like some Christian friends so you can connect with and talk to, and not that they would be, you know, like your psychotherapists exactly, but there just needs to be real fellowship. You know, maybe be involved in a small group, connect with real Christians who you could just spend some time with. I think that's a fruitful thing. Those are a few suggestions I would have. I'm sure there's more, and I pray that God blesses you, Taylor, and encourages you and reminds you of the truth, the truth that brings hope and joy to your soul.

Honest Conversation says they have a question. "I've heard people say that the disciples and apostles appropriated Yom Kippur and applied it to Jesus. This is a skeptic's take on how the doctrine came about. What say you?" Well, the interesting thing here is that the apostles, whatever they did, they did it in hindsight, right? So it would, the skeptic would have a case against Christianity here, if the disciples made up the story of Jesus, which maybe they're implying they made up the stuff about Jesus, and then said, "Look, it's like we read about the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, you know, and we're connecting Jesus to that."

Except here's the problem: the things about Jesus that establish the connections to, like the Day of Atonement, those things are historically true, whether you believe the Bible or not. And we can establish those as historical facts without looking at the Bible as inspired, without even having approached the Bible in that way. And so no, there's no way that they made up the idea that Jesus died and that it was actually around Passover time, not Yom Kippur, but Passover. Yeah, the connections were seen by them after the fact. That would be my main point, and I hope that helps. I think it, this is a hairy issue because if people get confused about it because they don't understand how the Scripture was perhaps written. I hope that helps.

Slovaks Tritt says, "What do you think of this? Jesus could pay for the sins of all the world because his value is greater than everything." I would, yes, I would agree. I would agree, and that was one of the, one of the reasons I gave, like three or four reasons why Christ's temporary payment would, would result in, you know, getting rid of an eternal suffering that we would experience.

Joel Johnston says, "Why the cross for Jesus's death? So why is the cross specifically, I think, is the question. The sin sacrifice was done on the altar with the blood being sprinkled afterwards. The cross doesn't, to me at least, reflect that symbolism." Well, we get that in Galatians. It says that, well, let me, let me give you two, two ideas of the cross.

One is in Galatians, it talks about in the, how in the Old Testament, anyone who's hanging on a tree is accursed. Now, probably what happened in the Old Testament was the person was stoned to death, does someone who dies from the death penalty, and then they will put their body on display. They would hang them, suspend them on a tree so that people could see that person, and they would only do it until nightfall. Then they would cut them too, because the idea is just communicate the extremity of these sins and, and how extreme the punishment for those sins is. The New Testament, so it says, "Cursed is anyone who's hanging on a tree." The New Testament takes this idea in Galatians, I think it's Galatians 3, and it connects it to Jesus on the cross. So he's hanging on a tree or fixed, it doesn't mean by a noose, it just means fixed onto a tree somehow. He's fixed up onto the wood as a display of the fact that he's taking the curse for our sin. So by Jesus going on the cross, there's a theological symbolism of him taking the curse of mankind, that is death for sin. And Galatians 3 goes to town on this. So it's actually a deep theological point connected to Jesus having a cross, being, dying on a cross.

There's another connection though, and that is that in the Roman world, the cross was the ultimate penalty. They would, they would call it the extreme penalty. It was the worst penalty that they would offer to those who had done the most vile crimes. Do you get what God trying to communicate through the cross now? That Jesus went through the ultimate punishment for all of our horrible crimes. So there's are two reasons why I think the cross reflects that.

Deshaun Jefferies says, "Oh, by the way, it's judicial. The cross means it's judicial. Whereas in the, in the, in the, if it was a sacrifice, like, like the stuff that happened in the temple, that might only look like it's sacrificial, but not might not connect to the judicial side of things, which Christ sacrifices both, but we want to make sure we have both." All right, Deshaun says, "Who is the 'I' in Matthew 26:31 Jesus refers to, if not the Father?" Let's look at the passage, Matthew 26:31. Let me bring it up for you guys too, and should be there now.

All right, Matthew 26:31, where it says, "Then Jesus said to them, 'All you will all fall away because of me this night, for it is written, "I will strike the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered."'" Yeah, so I guess I, sometimes, you know, your guys' questions have to be sure, but I think what you're getting at, Deshaun, is the question of, "Did God kill Jesus?" We talked about this last week, actually. Did God kill Jesus? And I would say humans did, and God. I mean, it was both. It wasn't one or the other; it was both. And here's another text where God says, "I will strike the Shepherd," and it is God. Yeah, I believe even in the Old Testament verse that's being quoted, that it was also God speaking, cited from Zechariah 13:7. Yeah, "Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me," declares the Lord of Hosts.

Yeah, so now it doesn't say, "I will strike" here in Zechariah, if I will take you there, okay? It just says, "Strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered, and then I will turn my hand against the little ones." So you're like, "Why does the New Testament say, 'I will strike'?" Well, the New Testament's not always giving a verbatim quote of the Old Testament. Sometimes it's giving an interpretation with the quote. Well, here in Zechariah 13:7, God says, "Awake, O sword, against my shepherd." So God is the one commanding this to happen. Then he says, "Strike the shepherd." Well, who is the sword that God said to awake? So God is the one who gets the credit for this, this statement here, which is why in probably Matthew 26:31, God is also given the credit. So yeah, I think it's both. I think God, you could say God killed Jesus, as long as you don't think that that means that Jesus isn't God. You need to understand the self-giving nature of the cross, or else it turns into nonsense.

Ethan Burgin says, "I've heard the idea that since God exists in many more dimensions, including dimensions of time, that is the way that we can account for Jesus's paying for all sins on the cross." Oh, because there's like, so like the multidimensionality of Christ means that he could pay for more. I have to admit, I don't even understand that concept. It's just over my head. The multidimensionality is something that goes with, you know, I get three dimensions, that was idea beyond that. I don't even understand the conversation, so I'm gonna bow out of that one.

Laura Nichols says, "Hey, Pastor Mike, my friend who left the church a few months ago struggled with this question: if grace covers all sin and it is paid for, why does she still sin?" Well, I mean, this might be a category confusion. So grace deals with sin being paid for. It doesn't, nothing about, "I've paid for your sins," means you'll never sin again, right? So this is justification versus sanctification. Justification is your just as if you never sinned. You're positionally in Christ. You're free from sin. But sanctification is this process by which you grow in your character and in your obedience to Christ.

And so, "Why do I still sin?" is a bit of a sketchy question because I kind of want to say, "You sinned because you want to." That's why. It's the same reason why I do, right? I'm with you. I'm stuck in the same boat because I'm messed up. That's why. I'm just messed up. That's why I need justification, man, 'cause I still have sin issues. I need forgiveness for free because I still have problems and struggles. I can grow in sanctification. I can continue to become more like Christ in my daily life, especially if I serve him more. And but there's a reason why Paul, writing to Christians, tells them to put off the flesh. Well, if Christians are perfect, why do they have to put the flesh off, right? If I'm, if I'm never gonna sin as a Christian, then why is he saying, "Walk in the spirit, and you won't fulfill the lusts of the flesh"? Wait a minute, you mean I might fulfill the lusts of the flesh? Yeah, oh yeah, you might. And you know it. You know what? If you're honest with yourself, daily battle for Christians.

But for your friend, my heart breaks 'cause she left the church a few months ago. It sounds like she chose the flesh. That's so sad. I hope, now I'm sure there's more to the story than that. There's always more to the story, right? But, um, but if you're struggling with sin and you think the solution is to just give in to sin entirely, this is, this is obviously only gonna make things way worse for you. This is utter foolishness. What would cause me to think, "I'll just give in to sin because I hate your dealing with sin"? What would cause that? Well, a sinful attitude. I mean, you just got to, you got to, you got to look at sin and say it's worthless. There's nothing in it. It's a total waste. It was paid for by Jesus. He's washed me, and I just want to walk in that. I want to live in that.

Steve the Philosophies has a question. He says, "What is the actual standard or test you are using to determine if these means of justice are logical or valid?" I mean, Steve, this is an interesting question. I don't know how to answer it as though there's one epistemological standard or test by which I'm evaluating. We're, it's a little more complicated than that. We're taking each claim one at a time, and we're evaluating them based upon their merits. We're saying, for instance, "Christ vicariously suffered." Okay, so then he's not being punished like an innocent person just being punished unjustly because there's a vicarious sense of liability there. An objection comes, "Well, humans know no such thing. We would never do that. That's barbaric." And then we go, "Wait a minute, in human law, we do it all the time. Oh, I guess humans do know such a thing." So that gets rid of that defeater. So we're just taking each objection one at a time, trying to understand them thoughtfully. I'm using logic and reason and moral reasoning and concepts of justice and Scripture and what it teaches.

Junior Mitchell 12 says, "If the sins of the world were imputed upon Jesus upon the cross, why isn't everyone saved? If he paid, why shouldn't that pay for people's unbelief as well? Is, is it because he chose some and not others?" These are great questions, Junior. I'm gonna put in the video description, give me like ten minutes after this, after this livestream ends, I'm gonna put a link to my second video on limited atonement, right? And I'll put on there, in fact, I'll only put the limited atonement, the second video, because I deal with exactly these objections, and they came up in today's video a little bit as well. I deal with John Owen's trilemma. I deal with exactly the same stuff you're talking about. So I will put that in there. It's in great detail. I deal with it. I'm gonna reference you to that other video.

Elisabeth Hernandez says, "Hi, Elizabeth, just reading the Bible during my own personal devos is not enough anymore. I need meat. I saw your video on tips for Bible teachers as I'm doing my first lesson in the next two weeks. It was very helpful. Any tips for personal devos? Not sure where to start. I always allows a student study or me to actually. I just want to get more out of my own devos without having to study for hours. Move tips for devotional study." Ask good questions in the passage. Or in another tip would be, cover sections. Like when you're doing Devo, when we say Devo, this is like Christian slang for you just spend some time devoted to reading the Bible in prayer and connecting with God. Cover, cover sections of Scripture. One verse by itself doesn't actually give you as much to think about. I would say cover a section, a passage that looks like this, kind of has a beginning and end. That actually can really help. Ask tough questions. Maybe get one or two commentaries that you can use even in your Devo time. That would be a fantastic idea. Those are it. Those are a few things to do. The more you do this, the more you think, "Why is this there? What's the point of this passage? What was Jesus trying to get across? What did it mean to the original audience?" Like those kinds of questions. "Why is that Old Testament passage being quoted here?" When you ask all these hard questions, you get more content, but it takes time. It takes time. Don't think you failed in devotions because you didn't get like a woo-hoo-hoo feeling, because definitely not the case.

All right, Mind Onion, if I keep going, I'm enjoying this. This is the last stream for this year, so I'm just enjoying the time with you guys. Go a little bit longer, answer some more of your questions. Mind Onion says, "Can it be a bad thing when corporation legal fictions take the guilt for people in the corporation?" Can it be? I suppose it could be, and it may be there's situations where it is a bad thing, but I wouldn't think it's a bad thing in its entirety. But I will say this, like, it would, it's always a bad thing would be a case against legal fictions in that sense, is that's just one example of legal fictions, and legal fictions is one way of helping us understand some categories related to the cross. But actually, what Mind Onion, what I focus on, Mind Onion, your real name, is what I focus on is the imputation of sin, because with imputation of guilt, vicarious liability, I don't think the legal fiction thing is actually very necessary. I think it's interesting, and so I share it with you guys. William Lane Craig in his book on the atonement, he gets into much more detail on that topic.

Through Human Eyes says, "Is it important to have a distinction between God's actions and people's? People crucified Jesus, not God. At several points, Jesus could have avoided the cross if people chose differently." Nope, Jesus actually, I would say you shouldn't do that. God often acts through people, and therefore you make a hard distinction between what people do and what God does. Now, sometimes there's a distinction, but you can't just say it's always there. So you can't be like, "Well, if someone did that," like, whatever, I'm trying to think of something, uh, Noah built the ark, okay? But God commanded Noah to build the ark. So I would give God credit for the building of the ark as well as Noah. You know, in this case with Scripture, it gives credit to humans and to God for what, for Jesus being crucified. Jesus himself, he actually said he must be crucified in the Gospel of Mark multiple times, "must be crucified." It has to happen. He's got to suffer and die at the hands of sinners. This like must happen as far as Jesus is concerned. So this is something that was foreordained by God. It was orchestrated by God. It was enacted by human beings, but at God's command. So I would say clearly both.

Stetson Scott says, "How was God punishing himself over what he knew would happen meaningful?" Meaningful because of, because if you're in the mix there, because the punishment belonged to you. It was, it was supposed to be yours. And so God takes it upon himself, showing his incredible love for you. I mean, he loves you. He cares about you. I mean, there's a, there's a sense in which, and this is gonna be a clumsy analogy, Stetson, but I hope it helps. Think of birth. You know, a woman knows that when she gets pregnant, she's gonna go through a lot of pain when she brings that child into the world. And there's a sense in which God went through a lot of pain to bring us into his presence and into relationship with him. And really, the relationship doesn't happen till after the birth, that the back and forth relationship. And so I think that there may be something we can learn from that analogy. God loves you, and he went through that for you, and he satisfied justice. There's another element that makes it meaningful as well as bringing mercy, as well as demonstrating love. So it is, it's the most meaningful thing I've ever heard of, in my opinion. Yeah, Lord loves you.

Caleb says, "I can forgive without blood sacrifice. Does that make me better than the God of the Bible?" No, you're also not the judge of the world. You can also forgive people with no concern for, you're also a sinner, so you're kind of like a hypocrite if you never forgive anybody, but you want them to forgive you. So these are all elements that would not apply in this discussion. Yeah, God's the just judge of the world. He's the rightful judge of the world. Like, what if you were the judge of a courtroom, and everybody who came in, all you did was say, "Yeah, you're free. Go ahead. You're acquitted. You're all acquitted." We would actually look at you, Caleb, and we'd think you were a horrible person. You know, you let a murderer go, you let a rapist go, you let an extortioner go. You actually need to punish those guys. That, that's right and proper. And so you could personally forgive somebody, but you're ignoring the judicial aspect of things that is important in our relationship with God.

John Engler says, "Hi, Mike, I'm wrestling with the 'wake up Olive' crisis at Bethel. How do we walk the line between trusting God for a miracle without doubting and surrendering to his will without being fatalistic?" You know what, John, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna abstain from talking about this issue. Maybe I should, but it just, if you guys are familiar with it, they're requesting for prayer that the Lord would bring back this, this child that has died. And I think the whole thing is, is just, it's just breaks my heart. The whole situation breaks my heart. And so I'm gonna abstain from talking, commenting on this particular topic.

All right, so Vasquez 31 says, "If a church is allowing a female pastor or leadership, should I leave? The word's clear on who is chosen by God to handle and preach his word in church gathering, in light of First Samuel 15:23." Yeah, Vasquez, I think that I don't like when people ask me if they should leave their church because I, I know, I know one thing about a church now, just one thing. That's all I know about the whole church. I don't know how long you've been there. I don't know how committed you are. I don't know what God's calling on your life really, because this church is, so I'm really bad at answering these questions. I think you should pray about it. Be calm, be thoughtful, ask the Lord for wisdom, and do what is honoring God. Don't do anything out of bitterness, irritation, frustration, or the idea that the grass is greener on the other side. Only do it out of a principle of obedience to God if you are gonna leave. And then think about how to do it in a gracious way that is, does the least damage to the body of Christ.

Drexler Newball, "Hi, Mike, my question is, is it biblical to bind the devil or rebuke evil spirits in our prayers?" Is it biblical to bind the devil? I don't think we're like commanded to do that. I, here's one of my concerns, okay? If I'm encountering an actual evil spirit, I think I can genuinely pray a spiritual warfare against that evil thing right then and there, and I can do so in the name of Jesus Christ. And you could rebuke in the name of Christ those things. I'm fully onboard there. My concern is that we just call everything the devil, and that we just rebuke everything, and that we end up not being, and the danger here isn't that you look silly. The danger is you're not taking personal responsibility for things that you are dealing with and that may have nothing to do with your question, Drexler. So in one sense, I want to say yes. In another sense, I want to say, make sure that you actually have spiritual discernment, and we're not just projecting our issues onto spirits.

All right, from Benjamin Handling, "What are your thoughts regarding the actual punishment? Do you accept the argument that Jesus was cut off from the Father and taking the punishment like we would be?" I don't think he was, he was ontologically separated from the Father. The, the Trinity was never broken, never. I am sympathetic to the view, and this is what Turretin said in, in, in his defense of penal substitution in the 1500s. I'm sympathetic to his view of the beatific vision. That's the phrase that they would use. The idea that Christ, and I showed this a little bit earlier, that he lost that full, full awareness, full present-tense awareness of the relationship of goodness and in joy that he had with the Father, the constant experience of the glorious wonder that it is to be the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relationship to each other. So there's an awareness of a thing versus the thing itself.

All right, last question for tonight from Honest Conversations. "Would you ever do a live stream going through your bookshelf, going through some of the tools you use, and some books that have impacted you and helped you grow as a teacher and theologian?" I probably am not going to do that, to be honest. And here's the reason: back there is nothing special. These are books I've collected over the years. Some of them I bought, some of them were just given to me because people just start giving me books when they see how much studying I do. And so I don't really want to go through them all as though I'm somehow endorsing them, because many times it is a mixed bag, man. It is a mixed bag, and a lot of books are like that. They're just a mixed bag. I have a hard time recommending books and even teachers sometimes because people will think, "Well, because I trust Mike, I can trust the thing he just recommended." And I feel a little bit hesitant to recommend too much stuff. I do here and there. I recommend stuff, but just going through all my books would kind of send a message that would perhaps not be, not be good. Yeah, here's, here's the book I'll recommend. Hey, "On Guard" by William Lane Craig. That's a good book. Check that out. Apologetics homework for, for December. For you, see, do I agree with everything in it? Not exactly, but I think it's got a lot of really great content that's really interesting stuff if you like the apologetic stuff. Yeah, there's a book for you. I hope that helps.

All right, you guys have a wonderful Christmas and celebrate the meaning of the Incarnation. You know, you know, in the Incarnation, Jesus is coming. Like this is, this is part of his substitution, his representing us as he comes in human form. So he is going to be able to take on human sin. Wow, to take on our guilt. Wow. There is the, the Christmas makes no sense without Easter, put it that way. Christmas doesn't make any sense without Easter. So I hope and pray the Lord uses you to reach your family, minister to them, be a light to them of the joy and the truth and the comfort that there is in Christ. And that you guys have a fantastic evening. God bless you.