Have you noticed that the truths in this series of truths you should know are telling a story? It’s the ultimate story, the true story of God and his work in the history of his creation. As with most stories, this true story has conflict. It has a problem to be solved—a big problem with no easy solution. 

The Problem of Sin

You may remember the problem, because we discussed it in a previous post. It all started in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and everything changed. Sin entered creation and history, and now nothing is quite right in the world.

Humankind is corrupted by sin, and each one of us is alienated from God because of it. We are born “hostile to God” (Romans 8:7; see also Colossians 1:21). By nature, we are estranged from our creator. And he is alienated from us, too. God, in his holy righteousness, hate sin and must separate himself from it. And separating from sin entails separating from us, because sin corrupts every part of our being.

In this post, we’re focusing on the solution to God’s side of this two-way alienation. (We’ll deal with the fix for human hostility toward God later.) God’s perfectly holy, righteous and just response to sin is, to use the terminology of scripture, the outpouring of his wrath. God’s just nature requires that he give us our due, and what our sin has earned us is a death sentence (Romans 6:23). We all stand condemned to death, awaiting the execution of the judgment against us.

And there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t fix this problem. 

The Riddle of Forgiveness

Thankfully the story doesn’t end here (although had God chosen to simply leave all sinners to face his wrath, he could have). Instead of executing justice against all humanity, God made a plan to save people from condemnation. He designed a way to forgive their sins and reconcile with them.

Forgiving sinners required a plan of action because God can’t simply ignore sin. He is the perfect judge of the universe and he assures us that he “will not acquit the wicked” (Exodus 23:7). He will, he says, “by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:7), which is exactly what we ought to expect from a judge who always does what’s right.

And there’s the rub. If God never acquits sinners, how can he forgive them? How can he show them mercy, but also leave none of their sins unpunished? Mark Dever calls this “the riddle of the Old Testament,”1 but we could also call it the riddle of forgiveness.

God’s plan of salvation answers this riddle. Because of the work of Jesus, God can forgive human sin in a way that preserves his justice. As the eternal Son fulfills his mission, he provides a way for God to show mercy to justly condemned sinners without any sin going unpunished. 

Jesus Brings Peace

Christians call the work Jesus did to provide a way for God to save sinners atonement. The New Testament presents what Jesus accomplished when he died on the cross for sinners in several ways: It was sacrifice, redemption, reconciliation, and more. These word pictures are different ways to see this one complex work of God. Here, I’ve chosen to look through the lens of reconciliation, but at the end of this post I’ve listed a few resources that explain these other ways to view the atoning work of Jesus.

The Heart of the Gospel

The death of Jesus propitiates God’s wrath because it is a penal substitution. In his death, Jesus represented his people, and endured their death penalty. On the cross, God counted human sins to the sinless Jesus, and he bore the just punishment for them. He stood in our place and bore God’s wrath on our behalf. The term penal substitution comes from these truths: Jesus substituted for sinners and endured their penalty or punishment.

That Jesus endured the wrath of God against our sin on our behalf is the reason we can be pardoned. Our death sentence was not merely waved away, but it was carried out when Jesus died in our place. Propitiation through penal substitution makes it right for God to forgive sinners. It solves the problem of sin and answers the riddle of forgiveness. 

There is much more that could be said about Jesus’s saving death, but then this is just a blog post. His death is the centerpiece of God’s plan for his creation, the heart of the gospel, the sinner’s only hope, and the subject of the song of the redeemed throughout eternity: