The Righteousness of God in Propitiation

Andy Osborne

Romans: The Gospel For All • Sermon • Submitted a year ago • Presented a year ago

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Introduction

Today we focus on one of the most important theological terms you can learn: propitiation. My goal tonight is that not only will you be able to define this word and know its meaning well, but that you will be struck by the doctrine behind it and will centre your life and your view of God around it.

It is in the word “propitiation” that “we reach the real heart—the heart of the heart, we may say—of Christianity;

J. I. Packer

Propitiation Explained

As we continue on our way through this glorious text, one of if not the most important Biblical passages on the subject of God’s atoning work through justification by faith, let us review quickly Paul’s argument,

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Therefore, God’s wrath is revealed to them rather than his righteousness.

The law condemns all men as sinners, both Jew and Gentile.

God has provided a way to reveal his righteousness to sinners by justifying them apart from the law.

Justification is God as a judge pronouncing us righteous before him. That is, he pronounces us to be in a state where we are able to enjoy free fellowship with him.

This way is redemption that is in Christ Jesus through propitiation.

In this way, God displays his righteousness by being both just and justifying, that is, he is righteous in punishing sin and he is righteous in justifying sinners.

In our text, we see Paul summerizing this argument so as it make it very clear for us.

There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, and we could say between religious and non-religious, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Those sinners are then justified by God’s free grace, a gift given out of love without any outside compelling force.

This justification by grace is given to us through redemption, a buying back from our sinfulness and guilt, that is found only in Jesus Christ. He is the provision that makes righteousness before God possible, and therefore it is only through him that justification and knowing God is possible.

God put Christ forward as a propitiation, which we are going to explain shortly, by his death on the cross.

This gift of grace is received by faith. That means that, in order to receive the gift of justification by the blood of Christ, we need to believe certain things:

We need to believe in the message of Christ.

Believe that I am a wretched sinner deserving only the wrath of God.

Believe that he is the Son of God.

Believe that he died for sin.

Believe he rose from the dead, ascended to heaven at the right hand of God, and will come again to receive his own.

We need to believe Christ, that is, we need to throw ourselves upon him. We need to look at these things that the text is saying about Christ and trust that he died for me. I have to look at my sin, see my great need for a Saviour, and look to Christ in belief that his blood covers my sin so that I may stand righteous before God and know him. That is how this free gift of grace is received.

All this is done to show God’s righteousness. Even though he passed over former sins in past, it was only to wait until the righteousness of God was fully revealed. In other words, the reason God did not judge the ancient world in another global flood and destroy all the wickedness in this world is because he desired to show his righteousness before he shows his wrath.

God is both just and justifier. He is both a forgiving God and one who does not let the guilty go unpunished. He both condemns sin and saves the guilty. This is the power and wondrous mystery of the Gospel.

What is Propitiation?

Now, I want to spend some time on the word “propitiation”. It is an important theological term, one every Christian should know because it is at the heart of the cross. Without propitiation, the cross loses it’s power and means very little in the Biblical view of the atoning work of Christ on the cross. In fact, we could very confidently say that without the doctrine of propitiation, which we find in verse 25, there is no Gospel.

Defining the Word

That is what propitiation is: It is an act that satisfies the holy wrath of God.

John Piper

The word “propitiation” is a deeply theological term that the Apostle Paul is borrowing from the pagan world. It was the word used for when a sacrifice was used to pacify an angry god. The gods of the pagan world were seen as easily upset by little things, or nothing. These gods needed to be appeased, and so a blood sacrifice, usually an animal but it could be your own child, were used to do this.

Obviously, we do not worship a god who gets angry for no reason. We don’t worship a god who is angry for trivial reasons, but we do serve a god who gets angry. He gets angry at sin, he hates sin and sinners. He destroys the wicked because he is a justly angry God. Anger is completely justified on God’s part, because his anger is only against evil and evil people.

Wrath for Sin

What the use of this word implies is that God’s anger needs to be appeased. For that to happen the wicked either need to be punished or the wicked people need to stop being wicked people. I don’t mean stop doing wicked things, I mean stop being wicked in their nature. A murderer is still a murderer decades after his last murder, and we’ve seen already that Paul has established we are all evil people, no one is excepted. The wrath of God is revealed against all our ungodliness and all our unrighteousness of sin. His wrath is real, and the things that you have done and the sin that you have lived in are what caused his anger.

His anger is not uncontrolled, but perfectly in line with the crime. Anger is not a sin, it is a sin most of the time for us because our anger is tainted by selfishness, pride, and injustice, but God’s anger is pure. His anger flows our of his goodness. He cannot stand evil because he is good. Goodness is all in him, and therefore evil is the worst of enemies that must be destroyed to the uttermost.

He is angry at the sin and the sinner. Sometimes people try to artificially divide the two, but you need to understand that we are inherently evil. Evil is not just something like a cancer that God wants to remove from us, evil is in our DNA. It’s who we are. Therefore, God is angry at sinners because sinners are his enemies. If this were not the case, why would he send sinners to hell? He sends them to hell because he is angry with them, he hates them!

Needs Atonement

Propitiation also assumes that God’s anger can be atoned for. That is, it is possible for God’s anger as sin to be appeased by a worthy sacrifice.

This was demonstrated in the sacrificial system in Israel. Sin offerings and burnt offerings were seen as a pleasing aroma that quenched God’s anger through the shedding of blood.

This atonement was different from the way pagans would atone or propitiate to a god. The pagans manipulated their gods, almost like a husband who knows his wife is angry with him might buy her flowers, clean the kitchen, and do other things to appease her. This kind of social manipulation doesn’t work with God. Instead, you had to abide by what his law said was an appropriate sacrifice. In other words, God set the terms and thus there was no manipulation since God is the one controlling how propitiation is done.

Propitiation is necessary to satisfy the wrath of God. It is uncomfortable to think of God’s wrath needing to be satisfied, but that’s exactly what the Scripture says. We need to be careful again we don’t picture God’s wrath as uncontrolled anger, but rather the just reaction to sin. Anger on God’s part is justified, though it is controlled and only in proportion to the sin. This anger against the evil we have brought into this world must be compensated, and that is what happened at the cross.

Jesus took that wrath on behalf on sinners so that we may share in his eternal life which is given freely to those who believe. It’s what theologians call the great exchange, while God views Christ, in his human form, as the sinner on the cross though he had not personally committed any sin, we are justified on Christ’s behalf. When Jesus rose from the dead, the wrath was spent, Jesus was alive and thus able to ascend to the right hand of God having already dealt with the wrath poured out on him at the cross, and he offers his righteousness freely to us. When a Christian steps before the Judgement seat of God, God finds only the righteousness of his Son.

In a word, propitiation in the Christian sense is Jesus enduring the wrath of God in punishment of sin on the cross so we could be justified, cleared of our sin in a spiritually legal manner, and the righteousness of Christ brings us into the closest kind of fellowship with God.

A Controversial Word

The idea of propitiation is controversial among many theologians because of the reference to God’s anger. We live in a day where much of modern Christianity has painted God as one who is always calm, never upset with anyone, hates no one and loves everyone. Some have even gone as far as to say that references to God’s wrath in the Scriptures are merely remnants of pagan views of their gods, which were often angry for no reason. This has caused some to reject the idea of propitiation altogether in favour of another highly theological term: expiation.

Expiation simply refers to God taking away our sins by Christ’s death on the cross, without the idea of God’s anger being put on Christ.

This is a very problematic, even heretical view of the cross, as well as being highly illogical.

First, if we are to reject the notion of God’s wrath, we have to remove it from everywhere else in the Bible that it occurs.

Psalm 7:11 ESV

God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.

The word ‘indignation’ means anger. God feels angry every day.

God is angry with his covenant people when they do not walk after him.

Psalm 78:21 ESV

Therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of wrath; a fire was kindled against Jacob; his anger rose against Israel,

Ezra 7:8 ESV

And Ezra came to Jerusalem in the fifth month, which was in the seventh year of the king.

The prophets often look forward in trembling to God’s coming wrath.

Isaiah 13:9 ESV

Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.

God’s people are told that unless they have circumcised hearts, they will experience God’s wrath.

Jeremiah 4:4 ESV

Circumcise yourselves to the Lord; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds.”

God is defined by his wrath

Jeremiah 10:10 ESV

But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation.

Even in our text, we have seen that the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. God is an angry God when it comes to evil. He is angry with evil people, sinners like us, because he is good and pure and cannot allow sin to continue unpunished.

This brings us to the logical question of propitiation. People who deny this doctrine are unable to satisfactorily answer several questions:

What happened to the wrath of God?

How was sin taken care of at the cross?

Why did Jesus have to die in order for sin to be expiated?

If he didn’t have to die, why does the New Testament focus so strongly on the cross?

How do we explain the use of the word “propitiation” in texts like this, when the word clearly has always meant satisfying the wrath of a deity?

A Warning against humanistic theologizing

What has happened with this doctrine in modern scholarship is an attempt to fit our theology with our current culture’s values, rather than fitting our theology with Scripture. Our view of God must be determined by what Scripture says, even when it makes us feel uncomfortable. We must be warned from this controversy to not let human ideas, feelings, or philosophy impact the way we read the Bible. When we see Paul using the word propitiation we should not be hesitant to use that word to accurately describe the cross and what happened there. God is angry with sinners, God’s anger was poured out on his Son. This is simply a truth we have to accept and direct ourselves to the Scriptures, not to human ideas.

God’s Righteousness Shown through Propitiation

At the core of the Gospel is the idea that God’s wrath needs to be satisfied and that this has been done on the cross. Without propitiation, we have no Gospel. What we see here is that God’s wrath was satisfied on the cross, and this is how the righteousness of God has been revealed. We cannot argue with it, we cannot try to correct it, all we can do is marvel at the fact that God chose to save us and paid the price of propitiation himself. Our text tells us that this makes God both just and justifier.

God the Just

First, it makes God just. He has spent his wrath, every drop of it, on Christ for the sake of his elect.

God’s character is justified.

God’s plan holds no compromise.

God the Justifier

Second, God is justifier. This means he is able to justify sinners while remaining a just God.

God’s love and justice agree and are not oppsed.

God is able to be who he says he is

Exodus 34:6–7 ESV

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

He is able to forgive iniquity and transgression and sin, but will by no means clear the guilty. He doesn’t unjustly clear the guilty, but rather makes atonement on behalf of sin.

Conclusion

One of the richest, most theologically dense passages in all of Scripture.

A subject that is useful for us to dwell on and which will help us in many of our situations:

Use this doctrine to fight your own guilty conscience.

Use this doctrine to overcome Satan’s attacks and accusations.

Use this doctrine to fight sin.

Use this doctrine to humble yourself.

Use this doctrine to bolster your faith.

Use this doctrine to draw near to God in prayer.

Use this doctrine for worship.

Use this doctrine in times of grief and times of joy.

Use this doctrine in evangelism.

Hold onto the doctrine of propitiation. Let it be your anthem, your joy and delight to meditate upon. Speak it to yourself in the morning and think on it when you go to bed at night. Fill your life with thoughts and words and actions based on this doctrine and you will find a joy and fulfillment in knowing God.

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