The Satisfaction of Divine Justice Was Necessary
When we speak of the death of Jesus being “necessary,” we must understand that this is not the same kind of absolute necessity as when we say that it is necessary that God is holy in Himself, or that He is necessarily infinite or self-sufficient or any other divine attribute. All that is in God must be, purely and simply. However, I think we can also see that God did not have to make a world at all. Much less was it necessary that He save us once we rebelled against Him.
If we think about the difference between what is absolutely necessary and unnecessary for God, there are implications for the nature of what He does toward the creature; and these implications will be as true about salvation as for anything else that He did not have to do. We can put it like this. Having freely chosen to save, God cannot save us in a way that violates His own nature: “for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).
And so the necessity that Christ saves in a certain way is what it is because of what it says about God. God’s justice could not abide if sin should go unpunished. So God can only save sinners in a way that actually makes right what sin has made wrong. That is really what “atone” means.
From a Reformed perspective, there are six different arguments that this kind of an atonement, namely satisfaction of divine justice, was necessary.
First, the justice of God per se. He says in the prophets, “the LORD will by no means clear the guilty” (Nah. 1:3). It is not merely that some impersonal searchlight called “justice” has been programmed to be on the hunt, but that the infinite-personal God sees sin and can never relent from destroying it and upholding His honor. Some will object that God should have been able to save without committing violence, without avenging himself. Turretin’s reply is worth considering,
“For if it was free and indifferent to God to punish or not to punish sin without compromising his justice so that no reason besides the mere will impelled God to send his Son into the world to die for us, what lawful reason can be devised to account for God’s willing to subject his most beloved and holy Son to an accursed and most cruel death?”1
Second, the nature of sin demands it. “Sin is lawlessness” (1 Jn. 3:4). Sin is the thing most opposed to God’s glory. It defiles God’s property; and everything is God’s property. So the Scriptures use this language: “[He] was delivered up for our trespasses” (Rom. 4:25). All sin lies about God, promising happiness outside of God, deflecting attention away from God’s glory, and in doing that, it is the slayer of souls. All sin is therefore murder. Each sin, the slightest sin, leads the soul into all other manner of sins, as a wick covering itself in the darkness causes the light to dim and we lose the rest of our way. So all sin is selfishness.
Third, the sanction of law requires satisfaction. Paul speaks of a “record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” (Col. 2:14).
Fourth, the preaching of the gospel implies it. This starts with God’s good will toward sinners: “Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation” (Rom. 3:24-25) and “he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near … he himself is our peace” (Eph. 2:17, 14).
Fifth, even the greatness of God’s love shows it. Since God did not spare his own Son, not only is justice shown in the inflexibility of the punishment, but also love in being willing to meet such demands. Substitution for the guilty was not unheard of in Antiquity, but how far would it go and on what basis? “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:7-8).
Sixth, the glory of all of the divine attributes demands that justice is satisfied. The Psalmist sets a cost of atonement by the worth of the one violated. He poses the problem in this way: “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit” (49:7-9).
Now we have two ways to understand that “costliness.” Either the ransom for man’s life costs so much because the man in need of redemption is worth so much; or else the ransom of man’s life costs so much because the God he has offended is worth so much. When we put it that way, things become clearer.
The necessity of God having to satisfy His own demands on us is sometimes put in the language of desperate timing. “At the right time,” Paul says in Romans 5. But why? What was so timely about Christ’s satisfaction of justice on the cross? The answer, according to Paul, was that it was war time. “Christ died for the ungodly … [and] while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:6, 10). All sinners begin at war with God. The gospel is the declaration of peace. Christ’s work on the cross was so powerful, and its beneficiaries (you and I) were so evil, that the cross becomes a saving, healing dagger that violently interrupts our war against God and plunges to the heart to plant God’s flag and says “Mine!” This was not our idea. The cross reconciled us while we were enemies!
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1. Turretin, Institutes, II:239
