Dr Paul Allen

He hath made Him to be sin for us,…that we might be made the righteousness of God.… 2 CORINTHIANS 5:.21 The modern view of the death of Jesus is that He died for our sins out of sympathy. The New Testament view is that He bore our sin not by sympathy, but by identification. He was made to be sin. Our sins are removed because of the death of Jesus, and the explanation of His death is His obedience to His Father, not His sympathy with us. We are acceptable with God not because we have obeyed, or because we have promised to give up things, but because of the death of Christ, and in no other way. We say that Jesus Christ came to reveal the Fatherhood of God, the loving-kindness of God; the New Testament says He came to bear away the sin of the world (RV mg). The revelation of His Father is to those to whom He has been introduced as Saviour: Jesus Christ never spoke of Himself to the world as one Who revealed the Father, but as a stumbling block (see John 15:22-24). John 14:9 was spoke...

“And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” ( 1 John 2:2 ) Most words in the King James Bible have one or two syllables. Our text verse, for example, has 21 such short words and only one big word; but that word, “propitiation,” has five syllables, and so has elicited many complaints from folks who don’t like to use dictionaries. What does “propitiation” mean? The Greek word is 'hilasmos' and occurs just two other times. These are as follows: “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” ( Romans 3:25 ). “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” ( 1 John 4:10 ). As an aside, note that these two verses contain two words of two syllables, three of three syllables, and 48 of one syllable. But both also include “...

The word vicarious is extremely important to our understanding of the atonement of Christ . The late Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said that, in his judgment, the single most important word in all of the Greek New Testament is the minuscule word huper. This little word is translated by the English phrase “in behalf of.” Barth was clearly engaging in a bit of hyperbole in making this statement, because many words in the New Testament are arguably as important or even more important than huper, but he was simply seeking to call attention to the importance of what is known in theology as the vicarious aspect of the ministry of Jesus . He made satisfaction for our debt, our enmity with God , and our guilt. He satisfied the ransom demand for our release from captivity to sin. However, there is another significant word that is often used in descriptions of the atonement: substitution. When we look at the biblical depiction of sin as a crime, we see that Jesus acts as the Substitute,...