My Sin for His Righteousness by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.
I mentioned back in November that I’d be reviewing this book soon. When I made that foolish statement, I didn’t anticipate that The Great Exchange is not a book suitable for skimming. It is, instead, packed full of goodies, requiring that I make frequent stops for digesting as I made my way through. So here we are, three months later, and I’m finally finished up with reading and moving on to reviewing.
In The Great Exchange, Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington show us what the apostles taught in scripture about the atonement, patterning their work after George Smeaton’s The Apostles’ Doctrine of the Atonement, a classic study written more than 130 years ago. There are two sections in this book: a first section summing up the teaching of the apostles on Christ’s atonement and placing this teaching in it’s historical context; and the second—the bulk of the book—examining the apostle-authored texts dealing with Christ’s atonement, moving from Acts through Revelation.
The authors are firmly convinced that the message of the cross is central to true faith.
The message of the cross—the historical gospel of the God-man, Jesus Christ, who personally visited the earth, which was created through him, with the mission of redeeming his own people with his own infinitely precious, bloody, substitutionary death—has been and must remain the solitary basis and the singular foundation of the Christian faith and worldview.
And you can’t read more than a few pages of The Great Exchange and not clue into how much these two gentlemen cherish the doctrine of the atonement. Over and over, page after page, they show us from numerous texts that the apostles are teaching us a precious truth:
…[T]he Great Exchange that results from the death of the perfect sacrifice is a twofold substitution: the charging of the believer’s sin to Christ results in God’s forgiveness, and the crediting of Christ’s righteousness to the believer results in his justification. More than being declared not guilty, in Christ believers are actually declared righteous. Redeemed sinners and the Christ have traded places.
There you have it—the great exchange of Christ’s atonement. If you desire to better understand and appreciate this great exchange—and we all should, shouldn’t we?—this book is the right place to start. It’s good theology coupled with writing that anyone can understand. I plan to add it to my short list of theology books for the lay person, but it would be well-suited for any pastor or teacher, too.
I have just a few very small complaints, too small to mention were this an ordinary book. But it’s not ordinary; it ought to be a classic based on the depth of content. It’s that depth of content that makes some of the awkward phrasing, like “equally as,” for instance, worthy of mention. There are also a few factual errors that I found as I read and studied along. The text says, for example, that the phrase “in him” occurs twice in 2 Corinthians 5:21 and it’s only there once. (It occurs once more in verse 19, and this is probably the second occurrence intended.)
In addition, there are more than a few places where statements are made that are undoubtedly correct, but that I’d like to see defended more explicitly. Let me show you what I mean:
As God, and as co-maker of the law, Christ was under no obligation on his own account to be under the law or to obey the law, and, as a result, he is capable of giving his voluntary obedience away.
I don’t disagree, but I couldn’t give the reasons why this statement is right. I wish the authors had given the reasoning behind this statement and several others like it, perhaps not in the text, but in endnotes or appendices.
I do hope The Great Exchange becomes a classic, because it is a wonderful tool for expanding the reader’s understanding of Christ’s work and increasing their love for Christ himself. You can read selected portions of it at the book’s website, where you will also find links to study guides. I highly recommend it, and if enough of you buy it, maybe they’ll take care of my quibbles in the second edition.