“In the day that you eat of it you shall die,” so said God to Adam and Eve as he pointed out the test tree in Eden. And when they disobeyed his command and ate from it, dreadful punishment came on all parties involved. To eat or not to eat was morally significant and carried a severe penalty for disobedience, a penalty with numerous dimensions summarized by the word “death.”

Because God is holy, that disobedience produced in him a real anger or wrath, a concept mentioned over 500 times in the Old Testament, less frequently in the NT, although there is the well known verse in Romans 1, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness . . .” That wrath epitomizes the broken relationship that sin produced and could be only partially remediated by the pre-Christian sacrifices common to the ancient world, and prescribed in the OT, wherein sin was symbolically transferred to an animal.

The gathering body of Messianic promises in the OT culminated finally in the coming of Christ. The point of his life was to succeed in every facet where Adam failed, and then to die. In that death he suffered the complete penalty for our sin. The Father made him to be sin for us and in so doing allowed him to experience the desperate alienation of our condition as he forsook him there and death took him. The curse of sin on him was made plain as he hung on a tree fulfilling Deuteronomy 21:23.

There isn’t really any question when one looks fairly at the Bible that there is a penal aspect to the death of Christ. The penalty for our sin was imposed on him. There is no imputation, no justification without this. There is, however, some dispute over what actually happens relative to the Father. The controversy revolves around two words—expiation and propitiation. Expiation essentially refers to the death of Christ canceling sin. It certainly does that, but with this word it is understood to be an impersonal, sometimes mechanical process, based partly on old pagan attempts to bribe vindictive gods to get what was wanted. It seems to be almost like the idea of karma in Eastern thought. Propitiation, on the other hand, emphasizes the personal dimension of the work of Christ. The real wrath that God has toward sin must be averted or turned away or satisfied. The four major texts referring to propitiation in the NT (Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17; and 1 John 2:2; 4:10) all carry the idea that the death of Christ intervenes against that wrath and removes it from us. This is not mechanical, but personal. As death was personally imposed on Adam by God at the point of disobedience, so at the point of Christ’s obedience, the penalty is personally dealt with. It is personal at its imposition and personal at its removal. In that death righteousness and peace finally kiss (Psalm 85:10).

None of us fully understand what happened in the death of Christ. It’s not the way we would draw it up. The language of the NT seems to strain to carry the depth of meaning. But we may be glad for words like “propitiation”; they tell us that our impossible condition as the objects of God’s infinite, terrible wrath no longer obtains. Let the party begin!

Phil Meade, Kevin Farmer, Dana Arledge, Will Uminn