The Sin-Bearer

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. 1 PETER 2:24

If the last chapter asked how God can justify the ungodly, this one gives Spurgeon’s answer. It is the answer he gave in almost every sermon he preached, in one form or another, for forty years: Christ stood in the sinner’s place and bore the sinner’s punishment. The theologians call it penal substitution. Spurgeon usually called it simply the substitution, and he regarded it as the beating heart of the gospel. Take it away, he believed, and nothing was left worth preaching.

The question that tormented him

In All of Grace Spurgeon describes the years before his conversion, and the question that kept him from peace was not a question about his feelings. It was a question about the justice of God. He knew himself guilty. He believed God ought to punish sin. And he could not see how a just God could forgive him without ceasing to be just. He did not want to be forgiven unjustly. He wanted to know how God could be both just and merciful at once.

To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. ROMANS 3:26

The answer, when it came, came as a revelation. He saw that the Son of God had taken the place of His people, and borne in His own body the penalty their sins deserved. God did not lower the standard or blunt the sword. He turned it on Himself, in the person of His Son. Spurgeon was struck all his life by how unlike human invention this is. “The doctrine of the atonement,” he writes, “is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture.” Who would have imagined the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel? Fiction, he says, could not have devised it.

His own self, our sins

The fullest statement of his teaching comes in one of his late communion addresses, preached to a small company at Menton and published in Till He Come under the title The Sin-Bearer. He takes the words of Peter and presses every phrase.

It was His own self who bore them — not a deputy, not an angel, not a symbol. It was in His own body — not in imagination, but in flesh that bled. And it was our sins — yours and mine, not sin in the abstract. Spurgeon hears a kind of music in the pairing of those phrases. As truly as it was Christ Himself who suffered, so truly were they our own sins that He bore.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ISAIAH 53:5

He was impatient with attempts to soften this language into something vaguer. The texts, he insists, are too plain. Isaiah says the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Paul says God made Him to be sin for us. Peter says He bore our sins. In The Sin-Bearer Spurgeon says, modestly but firmly, that these Scriptures “either teach the bearing of our sins by our Lord Jesus, or they teach nothing.”

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:21

Borne away for ever

What gave the doctrine its comfort, for Spurgeon, was that the sin-bearing is finished. Christ bore our sins on the tree; He bears them now no more. The penalty has been paid, and a just God will not demand payment twice, first from the Surety and then from those for whom He stood. If our sins were laid on Christ, they cannot also rest on us.

He loved the Old Testament pictures of this. The scapegoat carried Israel’s sins into a land not inhabited. The Lord casts His people’s sins into the depths of the sea and behind His back. The iniquity of Israel is sought for and not found.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. PSALM 103:12

This is why the cross was, for Spurgeon, not only the ground of salvation but the place of daily comfort. He tells his hearers at Menton that there is no place for comfort like the cross. When conscience accuses, when Satan reminds us of what we have done, when we feel that our sins are too many, the answer is not to look at our sins but to look at the One who bore them. And he confesses that we speak of this too calmly. It is, he says, “the miracle of earth, the mystery of heaven, the terror of hell.”

A doctrine under attack

Spurgeon knew in his own lifetime that substitution was being questioned. Some thinkers of his day called it immoral for one to suffer in the place of another; others treated the language of sacrifice as a figure of speech for God’s general kindness. In The Sin-Bearer he answers them sharply. If we lose the cross, he says, and if we miss the substitutionary sacrifice, “we have lost all.” This conviction lay behind the Down-Grade controversy of his last years, which chapter twenty-two describes.

It is fair to add that Christians have always found many riches in the cross — Christ’s victory over the powers, His example of love, His reconciling of enemies — and that Scripture itself uses many pictures. Spurgeon did not deny any of them. He simply held that they all rest on the substitution, as rooms rest on a foundation. It is also fair to note that he held what is called particular redemption: that Christ died with the definite intention of saving His people. Many Christians believe instead that Christ died for all in the same way. Yet Spurgeon never allowed that doctrine to keep him from telling every hearer, without exception, that there was life in a look at the crucified One. The Sin-Bearer was offered to all.

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree. GALATIANS 3:13

What it does to the heart

Spurgeon never treated the atonement as merely a doctrine to be defended. He believed that anyone who really grasped it would be changed by it. Peter’s verse does not stop at the bearing of sin; it goes on, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness. The person who has seen Christ bearing his sins cannot easily go on loving them. The cross that frees us from sin’s penalty also breaks sin’s charm.

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:14

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Isaiah 53 aloud, and each time you meet the words our, us or we, pause and say the verse again with me and my.

2. Next time your conscience accuses you of a sin already confessed, answer it with 1 Peter 2:24 rather than with fresh resolutions.

3. Ask whether your picture of the cross is sentimental, or whether it includes the justice of God. Pray for a clearer sight of both.

4. Identify one sin you still secretly enjoy. Hold it up beside the cross, and ask how you can love what He bore.

5. Share with one person this week, simply and without jargon, what it means that Christ died in your place.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You bore my sins in Your own body on the tree, and I have spoken of it far too calmly.

You took my place at the bar and on the gallows. You took the curse, that I might have the blessing.

Let my sins trouble me no more as a debt, for You have paid it; but let them trouble me as a grief, for they cost You so much.

And make me dead to sin and alive to righteousness, for the love of the One who died for me. Amen.