Jesus certainly suffered on the cross. That suffering was sacrificial and it amounted to the dreaded forsakenness we hear in his cry of dereliction—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46) But can we say that Jesus suffered the wrath of God on the cross?
The Bible speaks of the wrath of God in strong and very vivid language. It’s a reality that is captured in more verses than I have time to mention and is both an Old Testament and New Testament reality. The wrath of God is what the perfect holiness of God produces in response to sin. To diminish the reality of God’s wrath is to diminish the reality of his holiness. Sometimes God’s wrath is depersonalized and emptied of any emotional component in discussion and redefined as anthropomorphism—God being described in human terms that are very limited and not to be taken too literally. Somehow in the mystery of God, perfect and passionate wrath coexists with perfect and passionate love. We see both most poignantly at the cross. This is a complex yet important reality.
In the garden Jesus prayed, “Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Matt. 14:36). What cup is Jesus referring to? Well, this is the cup of God’s wrath that he must drink at the cross. The Jewish people of Jesus’ day would have recognized this cup as a familiar Old Testament metaphor for God’s wrath in passages like Jeremiah 25:17, 49:12; 51:7; Psalm 75:8; Zechariah 12:2; Lamentations 4:21; Habakkuk 2:16; and others. It remains a metaphor for God’s wrath even to the last book of the Bible, Revelation 14:10. Jesus knowingly and willingly drank from the cup of God’s wrath. The suffering of Calvary was not the Father’s bare permission to allow the Son to suffer human punishment he did not deserve. The suffering of Calvary was the active and punitive wrath of God for everything sinful and unholy in us.
Paul uses the language of propitiation to capture this reality in Romans 3:25. Paul says, “God put forward (Jesus) as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” The Greek word here, hilasterion, has been interpreted as “a sacrifice of atonement” (NIV) and “an expiation” (RSV), but neither of these interpretations really captures what Paul is saying. Hilasterion refers to the propitiatory act of turning away wrath. Expiation deals with the removal of guilt, but propitiation deals with the turning away of God’s wrath. Jesus’ work on the cross was both. We see both in the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16. Atonement, justification, redemption, expiation, and reconciliation are different yet related terms used to describe what was accomplish in Jesus’ death on the cross, but none of them capture the reality of Jesus receiving the wrath of God. That reality is captured with precision only in the word propitiation from the hilasterion word group. Here’s the truly amazing thing, at Calvary God is both the subject and object of propitiation. He was the one on whom all the righteous wrath of God was directed and he was the one whose wrath was being settled. We were, as Paul says elsewhere, “children of wrath.” But God presented Jesus as a propitiation “to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Rm. 3:26.)
Thank God today for the reality of propitiation.
