What did Jesus’ death accomplish?
Probably the most common answer from someone who attends any evangelical church is something along the lines of “Jesus’ death paid the price for my sins.” This idea is central to our understanding of the gospel. It’s a theme in many of the songs we sing. It frequently gets mentioned when explaining communion. It’s a core tenet of what we believe.
It’s what theologians call “penal substitutionary atonement.” To get the basic idea, let’s define the terms.
The Basic Idea
“Penal” – You can see the connection to the word “penalty.” In this context, it refers to paying the penalty for sin. The most fundamental and succinct expression of this penalty is found in Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.”
“Substitutionary” – Very simply, one person chooses to pay the penalty on behalf of someone else. In this case, Jesus chooses to pay the penalty our sins incurred.
“Atonement” – This derives from an old English word, and you can see the basic meaning by splitting the word into its syllables: at-one-ment. It has to do with reconciling two parties so they can be at one.
So that’s the basic idea of penal substitutionary atonement. In his death, Jesus steps in on our behalf to pay the penalty our sins incurred so that we can be reconciled (at one) with God.
This is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith, and, to the surprise of some, it has been so since the beginning. It is a belief that appears in the early church fathers like Diognetus (see below) and Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 100–165) who said, “For the whole human race will be found to be under a curse…[Christ] for the whole human family to take upon Him the curses of all…He submitted to suffer these things according to the Father’s will, as if He were accursed” (Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 95).[1] In fact, writing in the A.D. 300s, in a work called the Proof of the Gospel, the early Christian Eusebius (most famous for his book on church history) expresses it like this:
“In this he shows that Christ, being apart from all sin, will receive the sins of men on himself. And therefore he will suffer the penalty of sinners, and will be pained on their behalf, and not on his own.”
“In his death, Jesus steps in on our behalf to pay the penalty our sins incurred so that we can be reconciled (at one) with God.”
Penal Substitutionary Atonement Is Not Everything
Even though this is a central aspect of what Jesus’ death accomplished, it’s not the only thing his death accomplished. It’s important to draw attention to this because most people who answer that Jesus’ death paid the price for their sins have little if any grasp of what else Jesus’ death did. This significantly reduces their understanding of Jesus’ death and what it means for them to be saved. So while penal substitutionary atonement is important, Jesus’ death did even more than that and God’s plan of redemption is greater than that. This bigger vision of redemption actually provides the necessary context for accurately understanding penal substitutionary atonement.
Penal substitutionary atonement primarily deals with sin as a legal problem. We have broken God’s law and deserve the penalty. Because of his great love for us, God the Father sends his Son, who is equally God himself, who pays the penalty for our lawbreaking on our behalf so that we no longer have to pay the penalty ourselves. Our legal problem is remedied. We can be forgiven. This is a great gift of grace, and we must believe it and celebrate it and live in the joy and freedom that comes from being delivered from our legal guilt and its penalty.
Yet the problems sin creates are more and deeper than that, and therefore redemption accomplishes significantly more than just remedying our legal problem.
Human beings were created to live in union with God our Creator and participate with him in his rule over and care for creation. We were made, if you will, to participate in the life of God.
“Human beings were created to live in union with God our Creator and participate with him in his rule over and care for creation.”
When we rebelled against our Creator, we severed this union. Like a plant ripped out of the soil, we tore ourselves apart from our very source of life and we began to wilt and die.[2] As a result, our relationships with our fellow humans were also fractured. Blame, shame, and disharmony now characterize our social life. So too our relationship with the natural world was thrown into disarray, so that chaos and disharmony typify that relationship as well.
Severing ties with God has disfigured and devastated everything about life on earth.
Not only that, but Scripture tells us there are other rebellious creatures as well—spiritual beings hostile toward God and therefore toward us. They are also at play in our demise and the ruining of God’s good world.
In view of all of this, God’s purposes in salvation have to be bigger and greater than just solving our legal problem. He aims to put his whole creation back to proper working order. And since we as his image-bearing creatures are designed to extend his good rule over creation and to do so in union with him, restoring us is essential to restoring all of creation.
“God’s purposes in salvation have to be bigger and greater than just solving our legal problem.”
So fixing our legal problem and granting us forgiveness (by means of penal substitutionary atonement) is a necessary step toward the restoration of all things. The aim is, however, not merely to forgive our sin but to re-unite us with himself, so like a plant repotted in the soil, life can flow into us again. Therefore, “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1, NASB). We have peace. Present tense. Accomplished fact. Reunited with God in a relationship of peace and harmony. We have been reconciled to God (Romans 5:10-11) and we have once again been made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, NASB).
Not only that, but someday, when God finishes redemption and we who are reunited with God through Christ come into our full glory as his sons and daughters, creation itself will be restored to proper working order. It will be “set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21, NASB).
The atonement Jesus achieved accomplishes all of this!
But wait, there’s more. By his death and resurrection, Jesus triumphed over all the rebellious spiritual powers who held us in bondage. In this way, God “disarmed the rulers and authorities, [and] He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through [Jesus]” (Colossians 2:15, NASB). And through Jesus’ death, God rendered powerless the devil who had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). These enemies of God and human flourishing will be vanquished once and for all when Jesus returns.
“These enemies of God and human flourishing will be vanquished once and for all when Jesus returns.”
All of this is the full and proper context into which penal substitution fits. It is one of the things Jesus’ death achieves, but it’s not the only thing. It may not even be the main thing in terms of the ultimate objective. But it is a crucial and necessary means by which God is working out the restoration of all things through restoring us back into harmony and union with himself.
So with that broader vision in mind and by recognizing the part penal substitution plays within it, let me offer a brief biblical account of penal substitutionary atonement.
Atonement is Substitutionary
To begin, let’s consider the idea of substitution and take note of the fact that redemption and atonement are portrayed as substitutionary throughout the Bible.
1. Passover
Passover is a good place to begin because it is part of the Exodus, the foundational event for Israel’s national identity as the people of God in the Bible, and because Jesus’ death is tied to Passover in the New Testament. Jesus dies during Passover, institutes the Lord’s Supper to commemorate and celebrate his death during a Passover meal, and Paul says “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7, NASB).
The original Passover is recounted in Exodus 12. God has been striking Egypt with various judgments that we usually call the ten plagues. The tenth plague will be the climactic judgment, in which God is going to strike down all the firstborn males in Egypt. To protect Israel from this judgment, God instructs them to kill a one-year-old unblemished male lamb or goat, brush some of its blood on the door frame of their house, and stay in their house all night while eating the roasted meat that evening. If they do this, the firstborn in their houses will be spared from God’s judgment on the land of Egypt.
“The tenth plague will be the climactic judgment, in which God is going to strike down all the firstborn males in Egypt.”
The blood of the lamb spares their firstborn from death. God explains it to them like this: “The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will come upon you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:13, NASB). In the years ahead when they celebrate the Passover, they are instructed to explain its meaning to their children in this way: “It is a Passover sacrifice to the Lord because He passed over the houses of the sons of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians, but spared our homes” (Exodus 12:27, NASB). The lamb dies as a substitute to spare the firstborn.
It should also be noted that the Passover leads to the Exodus which is the great act of redemption for Israel in the Old Testament. So the offering of the Passover lamb leads to Israel’s redemption.
2. The Old Testament Sacrifices[3]
The sacrificial system set forth in the book of Leviticus is also substitutionary. There are five main sacrifices given for Israel’s worship of God and three of them—the burnt offering, purification (sin) offering, and guilt offering—are explicitly tied to making atonement. The grain offering and peace offering are not directly tied to atonement, but they are almost always offered along with one of the other three offerings so that the entire system would be associated with atonement, as well as celebrating and maintaining their relationship with God.
What’s important for our purposes here is the way atonement is described as inherently substitutionary in Leviticus 17:11. The context here is explaining that Israelites must not eat blood because God has given blood for sacred purposes. God says,
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17:11, NASB).
When you slit the throat of a lamb or goat and its blood pours out, its life also ends. Hence the connection between life and blood. The word translated “life” and the word translated “souls” is the same word in Hebrew. The point of atonement is a life-for-life exchange. God in his mercy has given an animal’s lifeblood to make atonement for human lives. This is the way atonement worked in the old covenant sacrificial system, and it is inherently substitutionary.
“The point of atonement is a life-for-life exchange. God in his mercy has given an animal’s lifeblood to make atonement for human lives.”
3. Jesus’ Description of his Death
Jesus expresses this same substitutionary theme when he describes the purpose of his death:
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45, NASB) 
His death will be a “ransom.” This connects it with the language of redemption and atonement in the Old Testament. The Greek word translated “ransom” here is from the same word family used to translate the Hebrew word for redemption in the Old Testament in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). It is also one of the words used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew word for “atonement” (kpr). The reason for this is that the idea of “ransom” lies at the heart of the Hebrew notion of atonement. You can see this, for example, in Exodus 30:12 where the English word “ransom” is the Hebrew word for atonement, and in the Septuagint it’s the same word as that for “ransom” in Mark 10:45. All of this indicates that Jesus is thinking of his death in terms of redemption and atonement.
And he says his death is “for” many. The word “for” is anti in Greek, which in this context has the sense of “in stead of.” That is, Jesus’ death is in someone else’s stead—in their place. He is their substitute.
4. 1 Corinthians 15:3
Paul explores the meaning of Jesus’ death throughout his letters, but the basic expression of why Jesus died is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3. Paul writes, “I handed down to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (NASB).
Two observations from this verse are important for our purposes. First, notice that Jesus’ death for sin is “according to the Scriptures.” It is in sync with everything the Old Testament says about atonement and about the Messiah. It is the culmination of the long story of the Old Testament. Second, his death is “for” our sins. Here the word is hyper, which means “on behalf of.” His death was on our behalf, specifically on behalf of our sins. This is the language of doing something for somebody else that they can’t do for themselves, which is a form of substitution.
“His death is ‘for’ our sins.”
5. 1 Peter
Peter also expresses Jesus’ death in substitutionary terms. In 1 Peter 1:18-19, Peter describes Jesus’ death as a redemption or ransom, the basic idea of which is paying a price to set someone free. Peter says,
“You were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.” (NASB)
The language of “blood” and “a lamb unblemished and spotless” connects Jesus’ death to the Old Testament sacrifices discussed above, and the point is that Jesus died to pay whatever price was necessary to set us free—redeem us—from the penalty and power of sin. He paid it for us.
Peter also writes that Jesus “bore our sins in His body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24, NASB 1995). Once again, we see the obvious substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death: our sins, his body. These words may also imply not just substitution, but penal substitution because the Old Testament frequently uses the phrase “to bear sin” to mean that someone must bear the guilt and penalty for their sin. So in bearing our sin, Jesus bore our penalty, which leads to the next point.
“You were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”
Substitutionary Atonement Is Also Penal
Not only is atonement substitutionary throughout the Bible, but it is also penal, removing the danger of punishment. This is the entire point of atonement through the Old Testament sacrifices. It cleanses the people and the tabernacle but also provides forgiveness and thus removes the penalty. The Bible conveys this penal component elsewhere as well. Here are a few key examples.
1. Isaiah 53
The famous Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53 makes plain the penal nature of the substitution.[4] Isaiah 53 looks forward to a figure who will be “pierced through for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5, NASB). And by suffering this, “he endured punishment that made us well” (Isaiah 53:5, NET, emphasis added).
2. Romans 8:1-4
The apostle Paul emphasizes that Jesus’ death dealt with the penalty for sin in two key passages in his letter to the Romans. In Romans 8:1-4, Paul describes Jesus’ death as a “sin offering” (v. 3) by which God condemned sin. The word “condemned” is a legal term that means to pronounce judgment on and be liable to the penalty. This is why being in Jesus sets people free from being condemned. They do not have to pay the penalty themselves (Romans 8:1).
“Paul describes Jesus’ death as a ‘sin offering’ by which God condemned sin.”
3. Romans 3:23-26
Paul explains in detail how Jesus’ death takes our penalty in Romans 3:23-26.[5] In the preceding paragraphs of Romans, Paul builds a legal case against humanity showing that all people are guilty before God with nothing to say in their defense. They are guilty as charged. But God, in his grace, intervened so that although they are indeed guilty, they can be given a favorable verdict (“justified,” verse 24). And he did this in such a way that God himself can maintain his justice.
How so? God sent Jesus to purchase humanity’s “redemption” so they can be set free from the penalty and power of sin; and he sent him to be the “propitiation” for humanity’s sins. The word translated “propitiation” is used in the Septuagint on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 in reference to the lid on the ark, the place of atonement where the blood was sprinkled.
Thus Paul probably has in mind the idea that Jesus’ death was the ultimate Day of Atonement. We were all guilty and liable to the penalty of God’s wrath (Romans 1:18), but Jesus’ death ransomed us and cleansed us from all our sins as the full and final Day of Atonement. In this way, the penalty that sin justly deserved has been taken care of so that God can grant a favorable verdict to sinners. This is the glorious good news of penal substitution.
“The penalty that sin justly deserved has been taken care of so that God can grant a favorable verdict to sinners.”
4. Galatians 3:10-14
One other passage that helps fill in the picture of penal substitution is Galatians 3:10-14. Paul places Jesus’ death into the context of the curse of the Law. As part of God’s covenant with Israel, the Law of Moses promised life for keeping it and pronounced a curse for breaking it (see Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28). The Old Testament recounts again and again how Israel broke the covenant and eventually suffered the curse of exile. In time, however, they were allowed to return to their homeland, but they still languished under foreign oppression and God’s glory never returned to the temple. They were still suffering the consequences of the curse and still waiting for their redemption.
Paul’s point in Galatians 3:10-14 is that Jesus took on himself the curse of Law, enduring it in his death so that full and final redemption is now available. And Israel’s experience of the curse was a microcosm of the whole world’s experience, in which we all suffered the curse of exile from the garden and from God as pronounced in Genesis 3:14-24. So, by “becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:12), Jesus has redeemed any and all who come to him from the curse (penalty) of their unfaithfulness to God.
So we see that Jesus’ death on behalf of our sins was not random or arbitrary. It was the climax of the story of humanity and of Israel as recorded throughout the whole Bible.
“Jesus’ death on behalf of our sins was not random or arbitrary. It was the climax of the story of humanity and of Israel as recorded throughout the whole Bible.”
God graciously gave provisional means of substitutionary atonement until, moved by pure love, he himself came in the person of Jesus to provide the full and final means of atonement. Penalty taken care of. Curse dealt with. Freedom purchased. And now, any and all who come can be reconciled to God, reunited with the very source of life himself! And in this way, God will eventually restore all things.
Here’s the way one early Christian joyfully described it:
“In his mercy he took upon himself our sins; he himself gave up his own Son as a ransom for us, the holy one for the lawless, the guiltless for the guilty, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal. For what else but his righteousness could have covered our sins? In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be justified, except in the Son of God alone? O the sweet exchange, O the incomprehensible work of God, O the unexpected blessings, that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous person, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners!” (Epistle to Diognetus, 9.2–5)
This is the wonder and the glory of penal substitutionary atonement!
[1] For more, see Michael J. Vlach, “Penal Substitution in Church History,” TMSJ 20/2 (Fall 2009) 199-214, https://tyndale.tms.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/tmsj20i.pdf.
[2] This is what is means when Paul says we “were dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1).
[3] For more details, see my Listener’s Commentary on Leviticus, at www.listenerscommentary.com.
[4] Peter has this passage in mind in 1 Peter 2:24 which we mentioned above.
[5] This is a very condensed paragraph that we can only treat briefly here. For more details see The Listener’s Commentary on Romans.
For more from John, see johnwhittaker.net and the Listener’s Commentary
