1 Peter 2:24
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness for by his wounds you have been healed.
I grew up in a home where my Mom and Dad believed in and practiced spanking as a form of discipline. The spankings were neither frequent nor severe, but they were effective!
But with each of us three boys, my father chose one particular moment to turn the tables on us. That is, when he thought we were old enough to understand what he was doing, he switched places with us when it came time for the spanking. He would take us into the bedroom, remove his belt and hand it to us. Then he would explain that while our disobedience deserved punishment, that this time, he would be taking our punishment for us. Then he would hand the belt to us, take off his own shirt exposing his bare back, and tell us to give him the punishment we thought we deserved.
As the oldest, I was the first to go through this, and I remember meekly flopping the belt across my father’s back; I just couldn’t bring myself to whip him with any enthusiasm. He actually grabbed the belt from me and slapped himself with it hard enough to make faint marks on his skin. Then he put his shirt back on and explained to me how Jesus had absorbed the punishment for all our sins because he loved us and offered us salvation through his grace. The teaching moment was powerful and effective; just what my father hoped for.
The same thing happened when my brother Joe had his turn with the belt. But when our late little brother John’s turn came, he was completely incapable of wielding the belt at all. So my father called Joe, who was in high school by this time, into the room and handed him the belt. My brother saw a unique opportunity and proceeded to smack my father hard enough to raise angry red welts on his back. After two or three lashes my Dad croaked, “That’s enough,” and the beating stopped. After explaining the purpose of the exercise to little John, my Dad walked by Joe and whispered, “You dirty dog!”
Peter writes:
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness for by his wounds you have been healed.
This is what my father was trying to teach us by making us spank him instead of the other way around. Simply put, Jesus took the punishment that each one of us deserves. And he did so in order that we would experience our own spiritual death and resurrection; death to sin and resurrection into a new life of righteousness.
Now, this understanding of the cross makes absolutely no sense unless we understand what Matt Chandler calls the “enormity of God’s holiness.” Chandler writes:
To discount the enormity of God’s severity, as if we aren’t really that bad and really deserve mostly kindness, is to discount the enormity of God’s holiness.
God is holy. Sin is not only a violation of his holiness; sin destroys everything it touches. Sin destroys our relationship with God; sin destroys our relationships with others; sin eventually destroys our bodies through death; and finally sin destroys our souls through spiritual death and eternal separation from a holy God.
God’s response to sin, therefore, is wrath. In a sense, God seeks to destroy sin before it destroys us. And he chose to do so through the cross.
Brian Coffey
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