Weekly Dose Of Lloyd-Jones

Every pastor, if he is faithful to Christ, must deal with false teaching and false teachers. Not only is it a biblical mandate (Ti. 1:10-11), it is a historical fact. Great men of God have always stood against those that oppose Christ with their "different gospels."

Martyn Lloyd-Jones is an example and here he deals with false theories of the atonement:

Another theory is commonly called the moral influence theory. Now this is the most popular of the theories; let me summarise it in this way. It says that God had no difficulty in forgiving us; as far as God was concerned there was no need to do anything. His love is so great that He always, at every point, is full of forgiveness; but the difficulty was to get mankind to believe that. So, they say, what really happened on the cross was a marvellous display of the love of God. I remember once listening to the sermon of a man who ridiculed the substitutionary atonement. ‘You must not say,’ he said, ‘that God was offering forgiveness because of the cross. God forgives even without the cross, but the cross was the proof of God’s love. God is telling us on the cross: “Though you have killed my only begotten Son, I will still forgive you.” ’ Christ’s death was a manifestation of the love of God. In the cross we see Him suffering in and with His sinful creatures and taking upon Himself the woes and griefs of human life. So the cross is meant to break us down; as we look at it our hard hearts are to be softened. The death of Christ is to do something to us alone.

Now that theory, again, as I think we shall see when we come to the positive theory, is entirely wrong, because it does not mention the justice of God at all. It says that nothing was necessary on God’s side—there was no obstacle there—but the trouble was only with man. So Christ is not a mediator, because He was dealing with man and not at all with God. The theory takes no notice whatsoever of some of the most glorious scriptural statements which we shall be considering together.

Another idea is that the death of Christ is just an example. He came into the world to live a perfect life. He kept the law, yes, and He wanted to leave a good example of obedience to God and His will, so He went as far as death. He was ready to do even that in order to do God’s will and thereby He provided us with an example. The answer to that is that we still have to save ourselves and we save ourselves by imitating His example. We are not saved by Him, it is not His blood that redeems us. Furthermore, what about those who lived before Christ?*

And here he states the biblical view:

Having considered some of the false theories with respect to the doctrine of what exactly happened when the Son of God died on the cross, we come now to a positive exposition of what I claim to be the biblical teaching. It is certainly the view of the atonement that was taught by all the Protestant Fathers. It was taught by Martin Luther and John Calvin and by the Reformers in Britain.

So what is it? The biblical teaching emphasises the supremacy of the substitutionary element in the atonement. It asserts that the Lord Jesus Christ suffered the penalty of the broken law vicariously, as the substitute for His people. That is, in a brief compass, a statement of what has been known as the reformed view of the biblical doctrine of the atonement. Now you will notice at once that there is a difference between this and those false theories which we have considered. This view has two main characteristics. The first is the emphasis upon the fact that Jesus Christ has done something as our substitute, and the second is the penal aspect—it states that the law pronounced a penalty which He, as our substitute, has borne in our stead.*

Soli Deo Gloria!

For His Glory,
Fernando


* Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1996). God the Father, God the Son (314). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.

*Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1996). God the Father, God the Son (317). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.