The Cradle Of Christian Truth: Apostles’ Creed (Part 9)—Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Crucified, Died, and Was Buried

by on April 1, 2025 | Comment

One of the common questions that Christians face in conversations with unbelievers is, “How could a loving God send anyone to hell?” Although we certainly have to keep a clear focus on God’s love and how his mercy is truly available to sinners, there is another fundamental question in this whole issue. Namely, “How can a just, righteous, and holy God let sinful people into heaven?” I hope, although my confidence wanes at times, that people in general would recognize the unjust travesty of a judge who acquits everyone despite having unequivocal proof that they are all guilty. We know that justice requires the enforcement of righteousness.

Justice ought to be part of human life, and we ought to have a real sense of its goodness and necessity. We also know that consequences occur upon breaches of justice, which must factor into how God relates to us as his creatures, especially considering we are the creatures made in his image to reflect his goodness into creation.

In working through the Apostles’ Creed, we are in the section about believing in Jesus Christ, which summarizes his work as the Savior. We come to the lines about Christ’s suffering. Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” These sufferings comprise what we tend to call Christ’s ministry of humiliation as he bore the burdens of the penalty that belong to our sin. Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC) 27 outlines that “Christ’s humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried, and continuing under the power of death for a time.”

There is then a sense in which his humiliation encompassed his experience of all that it means to be human, especially enduring the facets of this world as it is affected by sin. Certainly, the next line of the Creed, that “Christ descended into hell,” is also included in his humiliation, but that phrase warrants its own separate treatment. Here we see the more basic premise that Christ suffered the penalty for sin for his people. This suffering on our account has traditionally been called his passive obedience. The main point is that, to forgive us, Christ suffered the consequences we should have endured for our sin.

Standards

Our modern world has lost our sense of realism. Sometimes we talk about realism in the spectrum of positivity and negativity. God created the world with true principles undergirding the way that it works. Reality inheres in creation itself and cannot truly be erased. On the other hand, the modern era has a sentiment of anti-realism. We sometimes refer to “nominal Christians.” What we mean is that they have taken the name or the label “Christian” but lack the corresponding reality of truly belonging to Christ by faith. In that situation, there is no reality backing the name. It is a situation of nominal-ism.

That outlook has spread like wildfire through modern society—namely, as people pretend that we invent reality through word games, constructing the truth by names that we assign to things rather than understanding the truth by recognizing what is real in creation. We can see this even in some of our most controversial issues of the day, such as gender identity. People have started talking about gender as “assigned” at birth. Nothing about that statement is helpful because, in reality, we recognize biological sex at birth. We are not putting a label on a person to construct reality; we are assessing what is truly there. The same nominalist problem stands behind why people claim that they can label themselves a different gender than accords with their biological sex. The modern outlook thinks life and morality is word games, not recognizing what is true.

The same problem occurs in the standards of justice. Although the prevailing practice of abortion is murder, one popular notion is to label it as “healthcare.” In a host of ways, we are witness to why Isaiah the prophet spoke, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isa 5:20). Since Isaiah addressed the same issue, we can take at least some comfort in knowing that the principal problems of the nominalist outlook have been with us and addressed for some time, even if they find new expressions in our day.

This discussion’s payoff is that God created the world with real standards of righteousness. The Ten Commandments, as a summary of God’s moral law, are not arbitrary rules, but a description of God’s own character. We are not supposed to murder because God is life in himself. We do not lie because God is truth. We do not covet because God is abundant and generous in his own character.

There is a realism behind what is good in terms of justice and just conduct because creaturely righteousness is a reflection of God’s own righteousness. God made the world so that his own character stands behind the truths of justice. That is why it is so problematic for wickedness to go unpunished. Justice is that God’s own character must be enforced among his image bearers, and he must enforce it in his relation to his image bearers. There are standards grounded in God himself concerning right and wrong.

Sin

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, the first section was about our condemnation for violating these standards of righteousness, culminating in 3:20: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” Then, Romans 3:21 begins describing the solution to our condemnation, showing that the fix for our unrighteousness is God’s righteousness:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

God’s righteousness is the solution to our sin inasmuch as salvation comes apart from the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. We are justified—declared righteous in God’s sight—by believing in Jesus and apart from our works. We cannot be righteous in God’s sight by our works because we are sinners. That brings us back to our opening anecdote, however, that good judges do not acquit the unrighteous. That then raises the issue of how God can be righteous and demonstrate his righteousness by giving salvation by faith in Christ.

So Paul continued, speaking of Jesus, “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” God himself was then concerned about this issue of justice. Because God is truly and purely righteous by nature, his immutable character will not allow him to wave off sin. He cannot forgive sin by sheer force of will. Justice will not allow it.

God put forth Christ precisely because he had been forgiving sin throughout the entire Old Testament period. As Paul put it, “He had passed over former sins.” The same problem would remain now if he had not put Christ forward as the satisfaction for our sins too. As long as justice was not satisfied for our sin, God’s own righteousness was in the dock, on trial against his mercy.

When Christ took our sin upon himself, taking our unrighteous record upon himself, he satisfied God’s justice on our behalf. As WSC 25 states, “Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God” (emphasis added). When Christ went to the cross, God looked upon that as our death, because Christ was dying in our place. As Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20–21, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” Sin stood in our way to heaven and in God’s way of approving us in his divine courtroom. When the sinless Christ died, he died on account of our sin, being identified with his people and taking their sin legally upon himself as his own to pay for.

Satisfaction

We have been untangling the problem related to God’s justice in connection with the forgiveness of our sin. To pull our thoughts together in relation to the Apostles’ Creed, we have been exploring the reason why Christ had to suffer under Pontius Pilate, be crucified, die, and be buried. We think often about the cross itself and how Christ’s death and suffering provides significance. Our deeper dive into the wider structures of the universe as God made it with principles of justice explains why we have to be so committed to this view of penal substitutionary atonement, that Christ bore the penalty for our sin as the substitute in our place.

Christ fulfilled the requirements of God’s justice for us. Righteousness involves the categories of debt. In any debt situation you can have the principal debt, which in a loan is the base amount that you borrow. But you can then have accrued debt, which in a loan accumulates because of the interest compiling further debt on top of the principal amount.

By virtue of being made in God’s image, we owed him the principal debt of perfect obedience to his law. That was the baseline obligation. On account of sin, we accrued a penalty debt, which is death. We still owe the principal amount of obedience but have accrued a liability to the penalty.

Christ has satisfied both debts for us by living the perfect life in our place and by being crucified in our place. That is why we emphasize that both the doing and dying of Jesus are crucial in salvation. This is why Hebrews 7 talks about Christ as the guarantor for his covenant people. By coming in our nature to act in our stead, he assumed all our debts for us, paying everything we owed to be reconciled to God and to enjoy everlasting life with him in the new creation. When we say, “Jesus paid it all,” we mean it.

It strikes me that, if we are paying attention to the Creed’s development, everything has seemed pretty upbeat until we get to these lines about Christ’s suffering.1 We of course know our need for salvation, but the Creed itself outlines amazing things about who God is and what he has done. Even the description of the virgin birth as such does not signal something wrong, even though we know Christ came to save us from our predicament.

These lines show us that Christians have known since our most ancient days that something is not right with the world. We live in an upside-down existence, broken by sin, alienated from God by our transgression of his justice. We deal with fallout of the fall every moment of our lives.

The other side of these lines in the Creed is that Christ addressed these problems. Jesus did not come to absorb suffering into the Godhead, or just to let us know that God sympathizes with humanity’s plight. Jesus came to defeat sin and death by taking our sin and its penalty upon himself and doing away with it at the cross. Our records before God are satisfied, our status is secure, our debts are paid in full, because Jesus Christ has done it all and secured our place with him in glory.

Note

  1. Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, Christian Essentials (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 57.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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