Is Penal Substitution Biblical?

On Amazon people can post reviews of different books. One man writes the following about a book that has helped me with these blogs: ‘This book sets out to prove that the Bible says that on the cross Jesus was punished by God and took God’s wrath. Unfortunately the Bible says no such thing.’ Clearly this man would contest the claim that the Bible teaches penal substitution!

Many Christians do believe the Bible teaches this doctrine. Indeed they would say that penal substitution is pointed to in many places in the Scriptures, that it is a central theme in the Word, and that it is central to a correct understanding of the cross. Obviously it goes beyond the scope of this blog to weigh the merits of all the arguments for (and against) the claim that penal substitution is Biblical. However I hope the following reflections will be helpful.

In Café church we are doing a series on the cross. David (our intern) and I each took a passage from the Old Testament that anticipates the cross.
In Exodus 12 we have the Passover. The Apostle Paul teaches that ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed’ (1 Cor. 5:7). The Passover lamb was clearly a substitute—he died and the first born, in the homes where the blood had been applied, was spared death. But was the lamb a penal substitute—did he take the punishment that the people owed? It is obvious that the events of that night were an act of judgement upon the Egyptians but why were the Israelites also in danger of this judgement? According to Ezekiel 20:4-10 they had participated in the idolatry of their Egyptian masters—they too were deserving of God’s judgement! ‘Only by God’s gracious provision of a means of atonement, a substitutionary sacrifice, were they spared’ (Jeffrey, Ovey and Sach).
Isaiah 53 is an amazing passage that anticipates the cross. In Y-Zone one person asked, after hearing the passage, ‘which gospel is that from?’ It sounds as if it was written after the events rather than before! Listen to some verses from this chapter: he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him . . . the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all . . . it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer . . . the LORD makes his life a guilt offering . . . he bore the sin of many and made intersession for the transgressors. It would seem that this passage teaches that Jesus took on our sins and died for our guilt.
If we had chosen a third passage from the Old Testament to highlight its teaching on this theme we might have opted for Leviticus 16 and the events surrounding the Day of Atonement. In particular we could have looked at the scapegoat. The scapegoat in depicted as bearing the sin, guilt and punishment of the people, and of being sent into the wilderness (to die) in their place.

In the Gospels Jesus teaches about the cup he has to drink (Mark 10:38). Donald English points out that the cup ‘in a number of Old Testament passages, is about suffering and punishment, usually at God’s hand . . . [Jesus] is bearing for sinners what they cannot bear for themselves, the result of their sins in the wrath of God. This is the cup of the Son of Man.’ In a passage that speaks of the cup Jesus also explains to his disciples, ‘For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). Jesus was himself the price paid to set us free.

We could also look the epistles for teaching that seems to point to penal substitution. Notably Romans 4:25 (He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification), 1 Peter 2:24 (He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree . . .), 1 Peter 3:18 (For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God).