If you think you need atonement, there’s something wrong…with you. You need to stop surrounding yourself with the wrong people. You need to cut out the haters. You need therapy. Because you are fine just the way you are.
Our culture’s biggest hurdle to grasping the doctrine of atonement is that we don’t use that word anymore. The whole idea is antiquated.
Even in a world where the only people you can judge are people who judge, we can’t seem to kick these old-fashioned ideas of guilt and shame, though we avoid those terms. Just look for the trail of fallen public figures who said something that fell off the narrow footpath of acceptable words on race, sex, or gender. Vengeance is swift and merciless.
We recognize sin, but not atonement. People are canceled, not redeemed.
When it comes to other people’s grievances, we only recognize half of the picture of atonement. Wrongs should be punished and people should be shamed. We don’t know how to repent because we don’t know how to forgive. People either deny and deceive, or defiantly steamroll. If you ever admit you’re wrong, it’s all over. There is no plan B, so just don’t get caught.
What is missing is atonement.
The word hasn’t vanished entirely. When I watch the Olympics, I’m amazed at how many return athletes describe their drive to get back as stemming from a desire for atonement. In the world of sports, it’s still acceptable to talk in these terms. What do these Olympians mean when they say that? Keep in mind these are athletes who have made it to the pinnacle of their field, the best in the world. They haven’t gotten there through sloughing off. What do they have to atone for?
It is precisely the grandness of the expectations that makes the fall so hard, which spurs a thirst to set things right. Olympians feel the weight of a whole country’s hopes and dreams on top of their own. They feel a burden of responsibility owed not just to themselves, but to a higher power. They feel a sense of obligation to satisfy their duty to their country. On the Olympic stage, you need to atone for past failures, for things you may have left undone.
When athletes set out to atone for failures, we get a window into our relationship with God. To atone means to make up for something. To make it right. We all let ourselves down and can hope for better. But when you talk atonement, you’re talking about someone else. You need to prove yourself to someone. You need to pay back a debt, to make right what you made wrong, all so that you will emerge vindicated.
That’s why we need to know Jesus, who is our atonement.
What is Jesus’ Atonement?
In order to understand Jesus’ atonement, we need to see the hole we have to be dug out of. What do we have to atone for?
Because God created us, he owns us. He sets the expectation for who we should be. We’re made to be like him, which means perfect. “Be holy for I am holy,” says God (Leviticus 21:8; I Peter 1:16). The expectation is nothing less than imitating God himself. Instead, we constantly let him down. As human beings, we’re made in God’s image and represent him in our thoughts, words, and actions. And every day we fail to meet his standards, we’re adding to this mound of failures to love, obey, and represent the greatest person in the universe.
We sometimes balk at the strangeness and severity of substitutionary atonement—that Jesus had to suffer and die on the cross for my sins. But we actually have categories for this sort of act, although God’s grace scandalously surpasses anything we witness.
The Bible uses two primary analogies when it talks about atonement—legal and financial. You are either a guilty defendant in a courtroom, or a debtor. In both settings, we allow space for substitutionary atonement.
If you are on the wrong side of the law, someone else does not step in (like Jesus) to be mocked, abused, physically beaten, shamed, tortured and killed. But many times, a case may be resolved outside of court by means of a settlement. The accused pays to settle the case. Afterward, no more charges or accusations can be made.
In that analogy, Jesus your substitute has paid your settlement with God. But there’s another way a case can be resolved where the guilty defendant walks away free. The aggrieved party can simply drop the case. What happens then?
Imagine you’re driving distracted. You jump the curb and hit a father and his son, crushing the father’s leg and killing the son. What would it take for the father to drop all the charges against you? His son won’t come back to life. The pain won’t go away. His leg will never work the same again. In dropping the charges, he, and he alone, will carry the loss and hurt the rest of his life. He gives up any claim to compensation. He absorbs all the damage himself in order to let you go free. He has substituted himself to atone for your sin.
Colossians 2:14 combines both of these metaphors (courtroom and debtor) when speaking about what Jesus did on the cross, “by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” When you picture Jesus’ body nailed to the cross, slowly dying, you need to see your sins up there, dying and being canceled. His atonement is “limited” in the sense that it only applies to God’s elect who receive that gift.
Jesus himself employs the analogy of a debtor in a parable in Matthew 18. There’s a servant who owes his master the 2024 equivalent of $12.6 billion. I love this parable for that detail alone. Here is a single human being who has managed to accrue more debt than 82 countries. That should give us pause when trying to calculate the magnitude of our sins. The master (God), with a wave of his hand, dismisses the entirety of the debt.
What happened there? A shrewd accountant can inform you that $12.6 billion does not vanish. Someone has to pay that bill. Someone has to absorb that debt. The master atones for his servant’s grotesque malfeasance by suffering all of the loss himself.
The good news of atonement goes beyond even that. In Jesus’ atonement, he not only takes our debt and punishment, but he credits to us his perfection. The theological term for this is “double imputation,” impute meaning to count to someone. If your boss imputes to you an extra week of vacation, your original allotment of vacation days no longer matters. You now have that week.
If Jesus were to finish out his parable in Matthew 18 to reflect all of what he did for us, the master would have canceled the debt, then given to that servant an additional trillion dollars to take home.
This additional “crediting to” takes Christians into new territory with God. It’s not a matter of getting a do-over, or a clean slate. God doesn’t merely tolerate you now—he loves, rejoices over, and delights in you. He gives you a spotless record and then transforms you from the inside out.
“He made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). You can hear both sides of the atonement there. Jesus gets your sin. You get his righteousness. It’s not just about what shows up in God’s bookkeeping, it’s about what happens inside of you. God makes you his perfect child and then you become more of what you already are.
So What?
What difference does it make if you understand this doctrine of atonement? Very little, if you only grasp it as a concept. You and I must know personally that we need and have received atonement in Jesus. You’ve got to see the depth of your problem and the heights of your solution. That’s full atonement.
For many people today who live without hope of atonement, there is but one solution: deny till you die. There’s hesitancy to acknowledge even a stray word, and understandably so. If you have no hope of atonement, your only hope is to never need atonement. You have to live perfectly, or at least pretend to. This plays conveniently into our fallen mentality that we are perfect.
Instead of seeking forgiveness, healing, and solutions, people back farther into their corners, and stock up more arms for the fight. Relationships dissolve. Churches and companies implode leaving victims trapped under the rubble. Threats, vengeance, and litigation abound.
When you know Jesus’ atonement, it will open you up to admit wrongdoing. You’ll reclaim the use of the “f” word: “I failed.” That failure isn’t the period at the end of your life. It doesn’t define you. In fact, you have a new life in Jesus where that failure doesn’t show up at all.
As you see the depth of Jesus’ atonement, you’ll have strength to meet your most glaring problems and throw them on Jesus. You will also have confidence to sift through even the most absurd accusations, looking for the grain of truth you can confess because you’re resting in your forgiveness and acceptance.
In Jesus’ atonement, you trade denial for confessing, and shame for confidence. John Piper referred to this bizarre frame of mind, that only a Christian can inhabit, as “gutsy guilt.” Martin Luther’s advice to Christians was to “sin boldly,” not in the sense of abusing Jesus’ grace, but because you have so much confidence in his atonement that shame never gets a foothold. You can look at your sin, repent to God and other people, then forget it and move on.
Without atonement, guilt (you’ve done something wrong) will attack you, and shame (you are something wrong) will bury you. When you put your faith in Jesus’ substitutionary work, you don’t have to choose between either truth or confidence. Guilt and shame aren’t merely figments of your imagination, lingering trauma from your family of origin, or the result of oppressive expectations from society. You do wrong things, and you are wrong in your heart. But Jesus died to deal with those problems. He takes your punishment and gives you a new record and a new heart.
A Christian who mines the treasures of atonement finds a far superior paradigm to dealing with guilt and shame than anything our world offers. You don’t shamelessly flaunt your sins as if they weren’t a problem. You don’t boast about your billions of dollars in debt to God. But you can boast in what a great God has done to cancel that debt on the cross.
Canceled debt is no longer a source of shame. Best of all, you can live in the joyful freedom of being God’s beloved child. You do and will live up to those greatest of expectations because Jesus atoned for your failures and made you “the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Justin N. Poythress serves as lead pastor of All Saints Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho. You can find more of his writing at justinpoythress.com
Read the other articles in our Calvinism for a New Generation series here:
Perseverance in an Age of Anxiety
Irresistible Grace in an Age of Individualism
Unconditional Election in an Age of Inclusivity