Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Hebrews 9:13–14
“If the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
In identifying the persons of the Godhead in each action of our Creator outside (ad extra) Himself, we have noted that while each person works the same work, the order to Their operation reveals each person distinctly. Each external work of God proceeds from the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. Individual works may terminate, or reach their fullest expression, on a particular person, but all three persons still perform the same operation. For example, the incarnation terminates on the person of the Son because only the Son receives a human nature into union with His person, but Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all fashion and unite that nature to the Son. We have also seen that particular works are appropriated or attributed especially to one of the persons because that work shows forth that person with special clarity. Scripture especially appropriates the sending of the Son in the incarnation to the Father not because only the Father is active but because the coming of the Son in human flesh manifests in a special way His being from the Father.
Continuing our study of such things, let us now briefly consider the atonement. This statement from the Westminster Confession of Faith is a fine presentation of the basic biblical teaching: “The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience, and sacrifice of himself, which he, through the eternal Spirit, once offered up unto God, has fully satisfied the justice of his Father” (8.5). We need to be careful, however, not to imagine that the justice of only the Father was satisfied, for the outpouring of divine judgment is an external work of God. Consequently, the Son bore the wrath not of the Father alone while He hung on the cross but the wrath of the Holy Trinity—of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Scripture appropriates the outpouring of judgment especially to the Father in texts such as Romans 3:21–31, but that is because of the order of operation in the Trinity. Since the Son and the Holy Spirit are both from the Father, the Father is often spoken of as the source or initiator of God’s works, but it is still the same work of the entire Godhead. So the just punishment for our sin at the cross was from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit on the Son, who alone suffered—and then only in His human nature.
On the cross, the Father did not spare His Son but offered Him to satisfy His divine justice (Rom. 8:32). But the Son also offered up Himself through the Holy Spirit (Heb. 9:13–14). All three persons worked the atonement to save us from divine wrath.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
The atonement reveals both the love and justice of the entire Godhead. We see the love of the Father in not sparing His Son, the Son’s love in laying down His life, and the Holy Spirit’s love in being the One through whom the offering of Christ was given. We see the justice of God flowing from the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit as the Son bore the divine curse in His humanity. Let us praise each person of the Trinity for the love and justice revealed in the atonement.
For further study
- Psalm 22
- Isaiah 52:13–53:12
- John 10:11–18
- Hebrews 2:17
The bible in a year
- Numbers 17–19
- Mark 6:33–56