This post is part of my series Life as a Calvinist in the SBC.

Well, I fell behind. This has been a busy week, not the least because my wife and I celebrated our eighth anniversary this week (I love you, Sandra!). There is a fair chance that tomorrow’s post will also need to be delayed, so we will see at least one, perhaps two, of the posts on the five points put off until next week.

The most hotly debated point in Calvinism is Limited Atonement. If someone describes himself as a four-point Calvinist, you can bet this is the missing point. The concern is understandable. God’s love for all people is clear from Scripture, as is the universal call of the gospel and God’s desire to save the lost. It can seem difficult to reconcile God’s love and offer of salvation with the Calvinist claim that Jesus’ work on the cross does not extend to every individual in the same way. Nonetheless, it has often surprised me that Limited Atonement has caught so much flack. Before jumping into a longer discussion, let me summarize the view.

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Penal substitutionary atonement is the view that Jesus Christ came to die in our place for our sins, satisfying the just wrath of a holy God. Because of sin, we all deserve judgment. Because of Jesus, we have the possibility of forgiveness. Forgiveness comes because Jesus took our place, bore our sins, carried our sorrows on the cross.

The great passage for this is found in Isaiah 53. Note in particular verses 4-6:

But some have challenged the penal substitutionary understanding of the cross. One of the arguments is that Psalm 49:7 makes it impossible for one man to die on behalf of another:

Context is key, and it does not take much more context to realize that Psalm 49:7 does not prohibit penal substitution. For starters, take a larger block, Psalm 49:7-9:

The Psalmist says that the reason one man cannot redeem another man’s life is because the price is too great. The ransom of life is costly and one man can never afford to pay for another. But faithful Christians have taught that this is one reason why the Son of God had to be our substitute. For a list of reasons, I could not pay for your sins. I cannot even pay for my own. But Jesus Christ is of infinite worth and value. While the cost is too great for me, the cost is not too great for the God-man. Thus the author of Hebrews goes to great length to show that Jesus Christ is more precious than anyone or anything else, that Jesus alone is able to be a complete and final sacrifice for us.

But there is another contextual clue in Psalm 49 that tells us the Psalmist is not tossing out the possibility of penal substitution. In fact, Psalm 49:15 anticipates that God himself will come and be a ransom for us:

No man can ransom another. I cannot even pay for my own sins. But thanks be to God that God himself has ransomed me! The Psalmist knew the price for his life, his sin, was great. But the Psalmist also knew he had a deliverer and that one day God himself would do that which was necessary to ransom men from sin and death. And so we say with Paul the words of Romans 7:24-25: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Far from disproving penal substitution, Psalm 49 affirms that God himself will ransom us from our sins.

Continuing to go through Read the Institutes in a Year, today’s reading was interesting as it relates to both the argument over imputed righteousness and the question of what Christ did at the cross.

Emergents seem to increasingly favor the idea that what Jesus did in his life and at the cross was little more than set an example for us to follow. He was living righteously simply to show us how to live righteously. His death did little more than show us just how much he meant what he had said. It all sets an example for us, it doesn’t actually cause anything to happen in us.

Here is what Calvin says in 2.1.6:

We must surely hold that Adam was not only the progenitor but, as it were, the root of human nature; and that therefore in his corruption mankind deserved to be vitiated. This the apostle makes clear from a comparison of Adam with Christ. “As through one man sin came into the world and through sin death, which spread among all men when all sinned” [Rom. 5:12], thus through Christ’s grace righteousness and life are restored to us [Rom. 5:17]. What nonsense will the Pelagians chatter here? That Adam’s sin was propagated by imitation? Then does Christ’s righteousness benefit us only as an example set before us to imitate? Who can bear such sacrilege!

To answer your question, Calvin, many people in the church today can bear it.