When, and how, did Christ take this guilt and this penalty upon him? With regard to penalty, we have no difficulty in answering that, as his whole life of suffering was propitiatory, so penalty rested upon him from the very beginning of his life. This penalty was inherited, and was the consequence of Christ's taking human nature (Gal. 4:4, 5—“born of a woman, born under the law”). But penalty and guilt are correlates; if Christ inherited penalty, it must have been because he inherited guilt. This subjection to the common guilt of the race was intimated in Jesus' circumcision (Luke 2:21); in his ritual purification (Luke 2:22—“their purification”—i. e., the purification of Mary and the babe; see Lange, Life of Christ; Commentaries of Alford, Webster and Wilkinson; and An. Par. Bible); in his legal redemption (Luke 2:23, 24; cf. Ex. 13:2, 13); and in his baptism (Mat. 3:15—“thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness”). The baptized person went [pg 762]down into the water, as one laden with sin and guilt, in order that this sin and guilt might be buried forever, and that he might rise from the typical grave to a new and holy life. (Ebrard: “Baptism = death.”) So Christ's submission to John's baptism of repentance was not only a consecration to death, but also a recognition and confession of his implication in that guilt of the race for which death was the appointed and inevitable penalty (cf. Mat. 10:38; Luke 12:50; Mat. 26:39); and, as his baptism was a prefiguration of his death, we may learn from his baptism something with regard to the meaning of his death. See further, under The Symbolism of Baptism.
As one who had had guilt, Christ was “justified in the spirit” (1 Tim. 3:16); and this justification appears to have taken place after he “was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16), and when “he was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Compare Rom. 1:4—“declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead”; 6:7-10—“he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him; knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once; but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”—here all Christians are conceived of as ideally justified in the justification of Christ, when Christ died for our sins and rose again. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”—here Meyer says: “The sending does not precede the condemnation; but the condemnation is effected in and with the sending.” John 16:10—“of righteousness, because I go to the Father”; 19:30—“It is finished.” On 1 Tim. 3:16, see the Commentary of Bengel.
If it be asked whether Jesus, then, before his death, was an unjustified person, we answer that, while personally pure and well-pleasing to God (Mat. 3:17), he himself was conscious of a race-responsibility and a race-guilt which must be atoned for (John 12:27—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour”); and that guilty human nature in him endured at the last the separation from God which constitutes the essence of death, sin's penalty (Mat. 27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). We must remember that, as even the believer must “be judged according to man in the flesh” (1 Pet. 4:6), that is, must suffer the death which to unbelievers is the penalty of sin, although he “live according to God in the Spirit,” so Christ, in order that we might be delivered from both guilt and penalty, was “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (3:18);—in other words, as Christ was man, the penalty due to human guilt belonged to him to bear; but, as he was God, he could exhaust that penalty, and could be a proper substitute for others.
If it be asked whether he, who from the moment of the conception “sanctified himself”(John 17:19), did not from that moment also justify himself, we reply that although, through the retroactive efficacy of his atonement and upon the ground of it, human nature in him was purged of its depravity from the moment that he took that nature; and although, upon the ground of that atonement, believers before his advent were both sanctified and justified; yet his own justification could not have proceeded upon the ground of his atonement, and also his atonement have proceeded upon the ground of his justification. This would be a vicious circle; somewhere we must have a beginning. That beginning was in the cross, where guilt was first purged (Heb. 1:3—“when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Mat. 27:42—“He saved others; himself he cannot save”; cf. Rev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”).
If it be said that guilt and depravity are practically inseparable, and that, if Christ had guilt, he must have had depravity also, we reply that in civil law we distinguish between them,—the conversion of a murderer would not remove his obligation to suffer upon the gallows; and we reply further, that in justification we distinguish between them,—depravity still remaining, though guilt is removed. So we may say that Christ takes guilt without depravity, in order that we may have depravity without guilt. See page 645; also Böhl, Incarnation des göttlichen Wortes; Pope, Higher Catechism, 118; A. H. Strong, on the Necessity of the Atonement, in Philosophy and Religion, 213-219. Per contra, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:59 note, 82.
Christ therefore, as incarnate, rather revealed the atonement than made it. The historical work of atonement was finished upon the Cross, but that historical work only revealed to men the atonement made both before and since by the extra-mundane Logos. The eternal Love of God suffering the necessary reaction of his own Holiness against the sin of his creatures and with a view to their salvation—this is the essence of the Atonement.
Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 252, 253—“Christ, as God's atonement, is the revelation and discovery of the fact that sacrifice is as deep in God as his being. He is a holy Creator.... He must take upon himself the shame and pain of sin.” The earthly tabernacle and its sacrifices were only the shadow of those in the heavens, and Moses was bidden to make the earthly after the pattern which he saw in the mount. So the historical atonement was but the shadowing forth to dull and finite minds of an infinite demand of the divine holiness and an infinite satisfaction rendered by the divine love. Godet, S. S. Times, Oct. 16, 1886—“Christ so identified himself with the race he came to save, by sharing its life or its very blood, that when the race itself was redeemed from the curse of sin, his resurrection followed as the first fruits of that redemption”; Rom. 4:25—“delivered up for our trespasses ... raised for our justification.”
Simon, Redemption of Man, 322—“If the Logos is generally the Mediator of the divine immanence in Creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation, i. e., the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations necessarily react on him who is their constitutive principle? 339—Remember that men have not first to engraft themselves into Christ, the living whole.... They subsist naturally in him, and they have to separate themselves, cut themselves off from him, if they are to be separate. This is the mistake made in the ‘Life in Christ’ theory. Men are treated as in some sense out of Christ, and as having to get into connection with Christ.... It is not that we have to create the relation,—we have simply to accept, to recognize, to ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ, as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.”
A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 33, 172—“When God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, he communicated freedom, and made possible the creature's self-chosen alienation from himself, the giver of that life. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond, and could introduce even into the life of God a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. Yet the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. The illustration is far from adequate; but it helps at a single point. There has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually, to isolate himself from God, while yet he is naturally joined to God, and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of the sin which has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of the creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator.
“If you could imagine a finger endowed with free will and trying to sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around itself, you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his connection with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt? Why, pain, decay; possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger. By what law? By the law of the organism, which is so constituted as to maintain itself against its own disruption by the revolt of the members. The pain and death of the finger is the reaction of the whole against the treason of the part. The finger suffers pain. But are there no results of pain to the body? Does not the body feel pain also? How plain it is that no such pain can be confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the whole organism feels, because all the parts are members one of another. It not only suffers, but that suffering tends to remedy the evil and to remove its cause. The body summons its forces, pours new tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of the ligature that binds it. So through all the course of history, Christ, the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the affliction of humanity and has suffered for human sin. This suffering has been an atoning suffering, since it has been due to righteousness. If God had not been holy, if God had not made all nature express the holiness of his being, if God had not made pain and loss the necessary consequences of sin, then Christ would not have suffered. But since these things are sin's penalty and Christ is the life of the sinful race, it must needs be that Christ should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary in laying upon him the iniquities of us all. Original grace, like original sin, is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts.” See also Ames, on Biological Aspects of the Atonement, in Methodist Review, Nov. 1905:943-953.