Christ's Death Redemptive Rather Than Legal

Ron Block is a musician with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He wrote the following thought-provoking words about Christ's death being redemptive rather than legal:

"[George] MacDonald spoke of . . . Law-centricity. He said we shouldn’t see God the Father as wanting to make us pay for our sins, and then Jesus, God the Son, standing up and saying, 'I’ll pay,' as if Jesus is grace and [the] Father is punitive and legal. That makes God a cosmic policeman, and Jesus the good guy who gets us off the hook. But Jesus said, 'He that has seen Me has seen the Father.' The Son is the express image of God the Father. If we want to know what God the Father is like, we look at Jesus.

"The gospel is that Jesus came to 'save His people from their sins.' It doesn’t say, 'He will save His people from the punishment due their sins.' It says He will save them from the sins themselves--that is, from being a sin-kind-of-people.

"Throughout the New Testament, believers who habitually sin are usually spoken of with shock by the writers of the Epistles.

"People always want to quote John, 'If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,' and 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,' but this same person wrote, 'I write these things to you that you may not sin.'

"Sin is to be the exception rather than the rule--and if a person reads that statement with a Law-consciousness I’m sure they are sighing right now. But read with an awareness of the power of Christ within us we read it with satisfaction--He will have His way in and through us.

"So if we see Jesus as coming not to fulfill some sort of legal, judiciary, positional righteousness on our behalf, but as a living, actual death and resurrection by which we died and were resurrected in Him--that’s totally different, and the two streams of thought will manifest in our lives differently.

"In one we see God as punitive, exacting, although loving in a certain way (as if there is any punishment that can make up for sin other than the sinner ceasing to do it).

"In the other, we see a God who wants to have His Spirit in us so that we live as He lives, with His very own righteousness at the helm of our lives, because that is the thing that will truly fulfill us. In seeing us fulfilled in that way God receives a sort of satisfaction, pleasure, fulfillment."