Last time I mentioned a bit about the accomplishment of redemption but mostly I focused on the application of redemption by the Spirit. Let us think now about the accomplishment of redemption. In some traditions (e.g., Roman Catholic and the Arminian) Jesus is said to have done his part, to have made salvation possible for those who do their part. This approach to redemption is a feature of nomism—that is, an approach to teaching about salvation that makes our salvation depend, in part or in whole, upon our cooperation with grace or our law keeping.¹ In the Reformed tradition and churches, however, we confess that Jesus did not merely make salvation possible but that he accomplished it for us. He did this in two ways: 1) by actively obeying God’s law in our place; 2) by actively suffering and dying for us.

Jesus Is God’s Obedient Servant

Of course you remember that God made Adam and Eve, as we say, “in righteousness and true holiness.”² Adam was fully able to do all that God asked of him. The Lord asked Adam to love him with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength and his neighbor (Eve and us) as himself (Matt 22:37–40). Mysteriously and tragically, instead of honoring the covenant with the Lord, Adam chose to enter into a covenant with the devil. He broke God’s holy law and plunged himself, Eve, and us into sin and death (Gen 2:17; 3:1–15; Rom 6:23).

Nevertheless, in his mercy, the Lord did not leave Adam and us under condemnation and without hope. He promised that he would send “the seed of the woman” (Gen 3:15). The seed would do battle with the serpent and win but at the cost of his own life. The whole story of the Old Testament is a series of pointers (types and shadows) to that great and decisive battle that culminated on the cross. Jesus of Nazareth, born of the virgin, conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1–2) is that promised seed (Gal 3:16). He came to do what Adam could have done but refused to do.

The prophet Isaiah called Jesus God’s “servant” (Isa 52:13–12). “Behold my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted” (Isa 52:13) but before he is to be lifted up he must suffer: “His appearance was so marred, beyond any human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind” (Isa 52:14). The prophecy of Isaiah compresses the life of Christ into a brief narrative, giving us, as it were, photos of what Jesus would do for us and how he would defeat sin and be glorified.

He had to suffer because he was, as Paul teaches us in Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:45, the final representative of humanity. All humans were in Adam even before we were born (Rom 5:12), both according to nature and according to law. We understand this principle from nature. In our house we have photos of our family going back to the late nineteenth century. When I look at those photos I can see a resemblance between them and us. We are related by nature. I inherited my height from my father and my hairline from my grandfather. Biologically, I am what I am because of who and what they were. In that sense I was in them. We inherited Adam’s sinful, corrupted nature after the fall.

We also have a legal relationship to those who went before us. We live by laws that were written and drafted sometimes hundreds of years before we were born. We did not vote on those laws and yet we are bound by them. None of us voted on God’s moral law. That law reflects his nature and we were made, as his image bearers, able to fulfill it. It is not the fault of the law that Adam sinned and if it is right for me to accept an inheritance from my family, then it is also right that I am obligated for the sin that Adam committed. The technical word for this is imputation. We are all familiar with this idea from law and banking. In finance, figures are imputed to a column. In law, when a judge declares someone not guilty, innocence is imputed or reckoned or counted to the person declared not guilty.

Because God does not change, his law does not change. In Malachi 3:6 the Lord reminded his church: “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob are not consumed.” Our theologians speak of God’s immutability. Because our good and righteous God does not change, the church knows that he is reliable and trustworthy. It is not he who changes or needs to change. It is we who need to recognize the greatness of our sin and misery and repent—that is, to turn away from it and to God, who promises to be there when we repent. Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” To Moses the Lord said, “I am.” He is not becoming. He is what he is.

Since God’s moral law is grounded in what God is, it too is unchanging. Our Lord Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments this way, “And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” The first commandment is a summary of the first table of God’s moral law and the second commandment is a summary of the second table. The essence of the law is immutable. This is the substance of what the Lord revealed to Adam before the fall. By obeying the commandment the Lord gave in the garden, Adam was loving God with all his faculties and his neighbors (Eve and us) as himself. When he freely and mysteriously traded the promise of eternal life promised by God for equality with God (Gen 3:1–5; Phil 2:6), he traded the truth for a lie and life for death.

Just as when we get a traffic ticket and pay a fine, the law remains in force. It is not as though, after we pay the fine, we may drive however we will. The law is still the law and justice must be satisfied. God said to his Old Testament church, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them (Gal 3:10; Deut 27:26). Partial obedience to the law is not enough. Obedience must be perfect as Paul says in Romans 2:13, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.”

As sinners, you and I are incapable of meeting that standard, but there is one who is capable and who, in our place, did meet that standard for us—Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son incarnate. Scripture says, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom 8:3–4). Paul says, “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men” (Rom 5:18). The two men here are Adam and Christ. Adam’s sin led to death but Christ’s obedience for us led to life for us (Rom 5:19). Our theologians call this Christ’s active obedience. It means that everything he did, all his obedience, from the moment of his birth until his death was for us, as if you and I had personally done all that he did.³ He actively obeyed and suffered all his life, and especially at the end, for us. In our place he fulfilled the demands of the law and he paid the penalty for our disobedience. He was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4) not in order to qualify himself or to clear our slate, as it were, but to satisfy the law and pay our penalty in order to “redeem those who are under the law” so that you and I “might receive adoption as sons” (Gal 4:5). Believers are in a covenant of grace—divine favor, merited for us by Christ. We are no longer slaves but sons and heirs of all of the benefits of the covenant of grace (Gal 4:7).

Next time we will consider what it means to say that Christ died for us as our substitute.

1. The noun nomism is derived from the Greek noun for law, nomos (νομος).
2. Heidelberg Catechism 6.
3. There have been Reformed theologians, some very orthodox and others less so, who, following Anselm, held that Jesus had to qualify himself to be the Savior so that his active obedience was for himself. Thus, they distinguish between two phases of his obedience, the first part, or the active obedience, and the last part, his suffering obedience. Only the second, they argue, is imputed to us. For more on this debate see R. Scott Clark, “Do This and Live: The Active Obedience of Christ,” in R. Scott Clark, ed. Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry: Essays by the Faculty of Westminster Seminary California (P&R Publishing, 2006), 229–65. Those Reformed theologians who rejected the chronological distinction and who taught that all that Christ did is imputed to us give a better account of Scripture.

Read the whole series so far.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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