1 Peter 2:24 Commentary and Bible Study

Sin is terrible, and it has a terrible permanency about it. It does not fade with time and God cannot just forget about it as if it had not happened. It has the power to accuse us for eternity and its power is undiminished after ten thousand years. By sinning against God, we have crossed a boundary from which there is no return. It destroys our relationship with God, brings us into a state of death, and stains us with the stain of guilt that no cleansing on earth can remove. If anyone thinks the Lord will change his mind in their case, they will find they have fearfully miscalculated. Are we stronger than the justice of God? for that is what stands in our way. Let eternity pass and men and women will find themselves no closer to a solution to this problem. That broken fellowship between their souls and God will still remain broken. This surprises some, for they reason that since human beings must constantly forgive each other for society to function, then God must also do the same? But there is a two-fold offence to sin: on the one hand there is a grievance against our fellow man, on the other hand there is a grievance against God. God commands us to forgive one another on condition of repentance, but this does nothing to alter our relationship to his law. He will never relax his law and, unlike us, he owes it to himself to uphold his justice in the created order. The Lord is merciful, but he can only express his mercy in a way that is consistent with his justice, and it is beyond the ability of any created mind to think how this could be done.But Christ has solved this problem in a way which we would never have dared to conceive. Even if we had been able to grasp that a way of salvation existed through an atonement made by the Son of God, we would never have believed that such a thing was possible and we would never have dared to ask God to do it. How could we ask the Father to punish his own Son as a substitute for guilty sinners? We would never have believed that God was willing to go this far, for we would have concluded that the value of wretched fallen human beings was infinitesimally small compared to the worth of the eternal Son of God. Surely the love that exists between the Father and the Son would never let this happen. But grace is beyond all understanding. Even the angels could not have imagined a plan like this. Christ ‘himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’, so that the Holy one who is filled with a perfect detestation of sin, became so closely associated with our sins through his identification with us, that he received our punishment in full. By doing so, in love, he set us free from the penalty which we deserve. How could Christ, who has never sinned in all eternity and whose nature is the very antipathy of sin, be willing to come in such close contact with our guilt? How could God allow our guilt to become an issue between the Father and the Son such that the Father poured out the full force of his wrath on the one he loves most of all? God’s grace is measured by what God was prepared to do to purchase our salvation. By this he set us free from guilt so that even the Father no longer counts us guilty. It is as if our sins had been committed by Christ and not by us; it is as if we had never crossed that terrible boundary that brought us into a state of death. He has made the return from death and hell possible.Peter gives us truncated reasoning here. It does not follow that because Christ has borne our sins on the cross that we have also died to sins. We might at conversion have been transported directly to heaven as purified souls. Instead we continue in this world for a time, but with an entirely different relationship with sin. The cross not only provides an atonement for sin, it is also the foundation of our sanctification. We are united with the crucified Saviour so that we could die with him to the world, and we are united with the risen Saviour so that we could begin to live a new life to God. Conversion involves a conscious death to sin for every believer, as we sincerely repent and agree to put sin to death for ever. Repentance and faith go hand in hand, and repentance is not genuine unless it is a death to sin. This means that the break we make with sin is not a partial or a temporary break, but eternal. What has died is beyond recovery and if we have died to sin, then master sin can have no further claim on us. Note that it is put this way round – we have died to sin, not sin has died to us – because our way of escaping from the tyranny of sin is through death. He has died to sin and we died with him. This voluntary death is the only viable way in which we can escape this master. It is true that after conversion we are also instructed to mortify sin and we must daily reaffirm our death to sin, but our initial escape was by dying with Christ. The stripes or wounds laid on him result in our healing. How clearly this expresses the principle of substitution: what is done to one produces a benefit for another, in the most direct sense. He is a representative person whose experience is fully delivers those he represents from having to experience the same thing.