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On a cold New Year’s Day in 1937, J. Gresham Machen dictated a telegram from a hospital in North Dakota as he lay dying from pneumonia. Its simple message read: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”
When was the last time you heard a sermon about Christ’s active obedience? Do you regularly meditate on it? Could it be that most Christians do not even know what Christ’s active obedience is at all?
The phrase active obedience is part of a pair of phrases, the other phrase being passive obedience. This twofold description is intended to explain the work of Jesus Christ on behalf of sinners. Passive obedience refers to the suffering of Jesus throughout His earthly life and His receiving the punishment that sinners deserved from a just and holy God. He was not passive in these things, of course, but because He received them, they are referred to as passive obedience. Peter writes: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
But what about active obedience? This refers to the fact that Jesus not only suffered and died in place of sinners but lived a life of perfect obedience. One theologian put it this way: “If Christ had suffered only the penalty imposed on man, those who shared in the fruits of His work would have been left exactly where Adam was before he fell.” We need the removal of a curse but also the righteousness of a perfect life.
Jesus Christ clearly understood this. When John the Baptist expressed reluctance to baptize Jesus, “Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented” (Matt. 3:15). Jesus knew that He had been sent by God to do God’s will, to fulfill the law perfectly, to succeed where Adam had failed.
The Apostle Paul knew this and clung to it. In Philippians 3, he writes of forsaking any of his own righteousness to gain Christ, “[that I may] be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (v. 9). He contrasts the work of Christ with the sin of Adam: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).
It is especially appropriate to marvel at this truth when we reach the end of our lives. All of us have regrets. Each of us can look back and wish that we had been more faithful, more obedient, more holy. And yet if we are looking to Christ for salvation, we know that our debt is satisfied, our penalty paid. We are united to a Man of perfect obedience, whose righteous attainment is ours through faith. What good news is Christ’s active obedience—no hope without it.