I’ve decided to participate with Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program again. This time the book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is chapter 3, The Perfection of the Atonement.

This chapter sets forth the perfection the atonement of Christ over against teachings that do harm to this doctrine. It all would have been easier to understand had I been more familiar with the specific erroneous teachings John Murray was referring to. I could have used a teacher to do some ‘splainin’, so take into account that I was flying blind for some of this bit o’ Murray.

First up we run into the Roman Catholic teaching that human beings must make some sort of satisfaction for sins. Christ’s satisfaction for sin, says Murray, “is so perfect and final that it leaves no penal liability for any sin of the believer.” While believers are indeed chastised, the purpose of their chastisement is sanctification, not satisfaction for their sins. 

Second, Murray sets the truth of the historic objectivity of the atonement against what I’m guessing is the teaching that the atonement in some way transcends history or is contemporary to us in that it is only actually completed when we participate with it. The truth is that the atonement was accomplished once-for-all-time in history independent of us.

Next Murray tackles the false doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass. There is finality to Christ sacrifice, he says. It is not repeatable or eternal. It is true that Christ continues his high priestly work in heaven, but that is intercession only—intercession that flows from (and is grounded in) his once-for-all-time sacrifice.

Then there is the mistaken idea that “vicarious sacrifice is a ‘law of being’.” What that means, I think (but here, too, I’m guessing), is that suffering in the place of someone else is natural to love itself. This means that human beings—along with heavenly beings, too, if I read right—can show the same sort of vicarious love that Christ did. We can, supposedly, “bear his cross, and be with him in his passion.” But not so, says Murray:

From whatever angle we upon his sacrifice we find its uniqueness to be as inviolable as the uniqueness of his person, of his mission, and of his office. 

And last, Murray takes on the Remonstrants who taught that Christ did not actually pay the debt of sin, but rather did something that God graciously chose to accept instead of full payment. Nope, he says, “Christ discharged the debt of sin…. Our debts are not cancelled; they are liquidated.”

That last statement was my favourite of the whole chapter. It’s a glorious thought: Our debts are not cancelled; they are liquidated. Yep. I like that.

Glossary for Chapter 3

• suprahistorical: [could find no definition for this, so I assumed it meant “above history” or “transcending history” or something like that]
• liquidated: paid in full