What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins?

The salvation of sinners has always been connected with blood-shedding and death. The reason is obvious. Sin's wages is death. The law of holiness and truth is, that the soul that sinneth, it shall die. Death, then, is God's just appointment to man, because he is a sinner. Man dies only because of sin. Death entered into the world by sin. The only way, therefore, of justly putting away sin was by death; and that no sinful man could die for the sin of another is clear, because he must die for himself. The Son of God, on whom death had no claim (because He knew no sin), was able to die for others. Nothing less than His death could save us, because we deserved death. Therefore, in matchless grace, Christ died for us — the just for the unjust. "He died for our sins;" and as the life of the flesh is in the blood, so the shedding of blood is spoken of, in Scripture language, as the laying down of life. Hence we are told that "it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul."

He died for our sins. Having suffered the judgment due to them, He gave up the life in which He bore them, and with the giving up of that life the sins of all who believe the Gospel are gone out of existence. Our sins that would have come up against us in the day of judgment are gone as completely as is the life of flesh and blood in which Christ bore them. Our sins can no more be found than can a Christ in flesh and blood be found.

In the death of Jesus our sins have all been dealt with. He has borne them sacrificially, even as the apostle Peter elsewhere says, "Who His own self bore our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24).

Every part of this wonderful verse deserves our most careful attention. His own self became the Sin-bearer, and no other. He bare our sins. Isaiah 53 had said He should bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, but it also predicted that He should be "wounded for our transgressions" and "bruised for our iniquities," and be stricken for "the transgression of My people," and His soul be made "an offering for sin." These sins were ours, for the verse definitely speaks of the work of Christ, not in its Godward aspect as propitiating Him, but in its believer-ward aspect as bearing his sins — his sins, and not the sins of everybody.

Moreover, He bore our sins in His own body. He was definitely our Substitute. We had sinned in our bodies, and having become a true Man, apart from sin, He bore our sins in His holy body as a sacrifice for sin. This He accomplished on the tree, for it was exclusively in His death that atonement was effected. He did not bear our sins during His life, but in His death, and we are healed by His stripes as Isaiah 53 had also declared.

This is substitution. Jehovah laid the iniquity of His people upon Christ, and judged it all upon Him. God only could do this. He only could separate sins from us and lay them on Another. This He did to the praise of the glory of His grace. For this we praise Him now, and, in millennial days, Israel will triumphantly celebrate this goodness of Jehovah; for not only will they bless Jehovah because He forgiveth all their iniquities and healeth all their diseases, but they will add, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us." (Ps. 103:3, 12.) They will see that their sins were taken by Jehovah from them and laid upon Christ, and that He was wounded and bruised for them. This is substitution; and the same principle of dealing with our sins is set before us in the New Testament. Our Lord said that His blood was shed for many for the remission of sins. In the Hebrews we are told that Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and if an ancient prophet declared "He shall bear their iniquities," the apostle to the circumcision says, "Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree … by whose stripes we are healed." (Matt. 26:28; Heb. 9:28; Isa. H. 11; 1 Peter 2:24.) Here we have substitution plainly set forth. Our sins laid upon Jesus, He Himself bearing them, and we healed by His stripes. Elsewhere we read that He "once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God;" "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures." So far we see how truly the Lord Jesus Christ has been our substitute as the bearer of our sins, and also of the righteous judgment for which they called.

What can be plainer than the testimony of scripture? "For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by (or, through) the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life" (Rom. 5:10). The Holy Spirit presents the efficacy of Christ's death unambiguously, that the believer may give to the winds his fears and treat his doubts as of the enemy. God's love is the source of the blessedness; Christ's death guarantees it as not only of grace but righteous. Only so is God just and justifying him that has faith in Jesus. Thus is the alienation met holily. Divine love laid the sins on the head of the sole adequate Victim; on Him, not on the sinner, was our evil judged unsparingly by God; and the glad tidings of that mighty work He sent far and wide, that through Christ's name everyone that believeth on Him should receive remission of sins (Acts 10:43).

To Paul was committed the ministry of reconciliation; a ministry that told of God’s overtures in grace to man in the Person of Christ. When Christ was upon earth, God was not imputing to men their trespasses; He was offering blessing in grace in Jesus. But men refused the grace of God in Jesus, proving that it was impossible to reconcile man in the flesh. This being so, God brought to light His hidden resources, giving His own Son to die on the cross, that through His death men might be reconciled. So that the basis of reconciliation has been laid in the death of the cross, where Christ who knew no sin, was made sin for us. Now that Christ has died, glorifying God in regard to the whole question of sin, God has sent out His ambassadors with the wondrous message, “Get right with God.” Men can now be reconciled by receiving the message of the Gospel, by accepting Christ who died on the cross to make us “God’s righteousness in Him.”

We have then to inquire how the blood of Christ becomes the ground of our justification? The blood speaks of a life poured out (for the life is in the blood; and it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul — Lev. 17:11), and consequently of death; and our question therefore is, How does the death of Christ become the meritorious ground of justification? The answer is simple. It becomes this, because of what it accomplished. The Lord Jesus "bare our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24); He "once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18); "He was made sin for us" (2 Cor. 5:21); He was "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29); it is He "whom God hath set forth a propitiation (mercy-seat) through faith in His blood" (Rom. 3:25), etc. Combining these passages, and others of a like nature which are scattered throughout the epistles, we discover at once the character of the Saviour's death. We learn that not only did He bear substitutionally our sins on the cross, but that also in that awful hour He stood before God under the whole weight of man's sinful condition and responsibility; that He came into the scene where the first Adam failed, and took up all the consequences of that failure, and made a full and everlasting settlement, in His death on the cross, of the whole question, both of our sins and sin, i.e. man's sinful condition. Hence we read that "when He had by Himself purged our sins" He "sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Heb. 1:3); and also, that "once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself;" and that He "was once offered to bear the sins of many." (Heb. 9:26-28.)

Our Lord died a sacrificial death, an atoning death, a vicarious death. He did not die for Himself. He took the sinner’s place on the cross, bearing the punishment due to sin, upholding God’s righteous claims and the holiness of His Person, making the way clear for God to righteously express His love in the offer of forgiveness of sins to guilty sinners. If not a single sinner were saved by His death, yet that death infinitely glorified God.

Meanwhile, before God turns to this account the value of the blood of Christ, He brings in, not all persons, but, as He says here, "you." "You that were sometime alienated, and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled." There it is applied to the Christian, even to the souls who now believe in the Lord Jesus Christ: God has reconciled them by the blood of His cross, which has made peace for them, instead of leaving them to make their peace with God. For He says, "Now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death:" not through His birth, nor through their baptism; not through His incarnation, but "in the body of his flesh through death;" and this because death alone, the death of Christ, gives God's holy judgment of sin in grace to the soul who believes. Infinite mercy that it should be so! The birth of Christ is just the introduction of the person who was to accomplish this truly divine work. It was the manifestation of Him who was God in human nature, which in Him was holy, though in it Adam fell, involving in his own ruin the race and all the creation of which he was chief; it was the manifestation of Him who, though a man, was none the less a Divine person. But now there is infinitely more; now in the body of His flesh, through death, He has effected our reconciliation. Had it not been so, even His manifestation in flesh must have been entirely fruitless for our deliverance. What a proof that in Him there was life without the smallest taint or smell of death! Nothing that was torn by beasts could be eaten, even according to the figures of the law; nothing that had a spot or blemish was capable of being made an offering for sin, even in type: how much more in the antitype! Yet He must die — the holy, harmless, undefiled. No otherwise could we have redemption, because in this way alone sin could be adequately judged — in death, the death of Jesus, the Son of God, and Son of man — in His death under divine judgment.

But Christ is dead. He has already poured out His soul unto death. Reconciliation, therefore, is made for every soul that now believes in Him. "You hath he reconciled." And this is the condition into which He brings us before God, "In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight." That is, the whole of our old being is regarded as to faith utterly gone under the judgment of the cross, and we are viewed according to our new nature, which nature we never see aright, save in the person of Christ. We are one with Him who is risen from the dead. There was no union when He was here upon earth before atonement. There was then seen one unbroken course of moral perfection in Christ; yea perfect Divine beauty; the expression of God Himself in all His ways here below. But the great question of sin with God was not settled; the greatest work of all was not yet done. There was still the hour impending which He so solemnly looked onward to ever and anon, especially when the disciples were occupied with His present power, and the anticipations of His kingdom. He told them, and them expressly, that He was going to suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, etc., and be slain, and be raised on the third day. No wonder then when He did die and the victory was won, when He stood in resurrection — in the power of this new and abundant life to bestow it on the guiltiest of sinners, that the Holy Ghost makes much of it! Do we? It is a serious question, be assured. Remember, it is not a matter only for today, but for ever. Remember that it is not a truth merely about our own souls, nor even about salvation; it is a truth about Christ, by whose death and resurrection God brings us into this astonishing place, "To present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight." It is not in our sight; for meet it is that we should know ourselves full of evil, judging, both in roots and fruits, the old man in us. We know painfully as a fact, of course, that the old man is there; but the comfort of faith is, that sin is judged in Christ; and it is well to bear in mind that, if it be not judged now, it never can be. If we who believe are not thus reconciled now, when or how are we to be? If we are, how blessed are we! Of course, we are not supposing souls which are still outside Christ; but I say, that for those who have looked to Christ, the work is perfectly done — not merely doing, but done — so that God Himself could not add to its efficacy. The atoning work is done; the reconciliation is accomplished "in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight." What infinite grace, to give us the knowledge of it now by faith, before the result appears at Christ's coming! Still there remains the other truth, that the precious blood of Christ includes, in point of title, the reconciliation of all things, whether in the earth or in the heavens.