Jesus, Our Substitute

God our Father, we look to you now to help us as we study the Bible. We’re absolutely useless on our own. We can’t speak, or listen, or understand, or know, or believe without your help. And so we pray for your help. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

We’re going to turn again to Luke chapter 22, to the portion of Scripture that was read for us earlier—Luke 22 and beginning with verse 39. We have from the pen of Luke another portrait, if you like, of the Lord Jesus. Throughout the course of his Gospel, he’s given to us a number of pictures of Jesus. I made note of just four of them as they came to my mind when I was thinking this way, studying this week.

I suppose there is inherent in me a desire that I wish I could capture things in painting. I absolutely can’t. I used to cheat in art. I had one of my friends’ brothers do all my work for me—my homework—and then I would take it back. Because I really couldn’t draw a thing. I had to draw a glass of water. You never saw anything that looked less like a glass of water in your life, so Graham drew it for me. My teacher knew it wasn’t me and gave me zero out of five.

But anyway, I wish that I could capture these things. And one of the pictures, in Luke chapter 4, is Jesus as a rabbi seated there in the synagogue in Nazareth and the amazing wonder in the eyes and minds of the congregation as he looks out on them and says, “Today this scripture [has been] fulfilled in your hearing.”[1] It’s a remarkable picture. The picture of Jesus standing on the deck of the boat along with the newest disciples, and there we find him the master of the winds and the waves. He calms the sea.[2] Jesus the friend of children, taking little ones on his lap, using the occasion to speak to the muttering Pharisees concerning the nature of childlike faith and trust.[3] Jesus with his biceps clear for all to see, with the veins standing out in his forehead, the cleanser of the temple, as he says to the throng, “This was to be my Father’s house, a house of prayer, and you have made it a den of robbers. It’s time for you to leave.”[4]

A Weeping Christ

Those are just some of the portraits that we have in the Gospel of Luke, and you can add others to them as you reflect upon our studies. I mention them because none of them, nor all of them combined, come close to the striking impact which is given to us in the picture that Luke provides for us in this brief section. Because as we allow our eyes to go down these familiar verses now, we realize that we are pausing before a very unusual spectacle, and that is that we’re pausing before a distressed Christ, a crying Christ, a weeping Christ.

We’re about to see in the balance of the chapter that this same Jesus was deserted by his followers; he was disowned, and he was despised. But in this little section, we find him, in the words of Mark’s Gospel, “deeply distressed and troubled.”[5] His attempt to convey the depth of feeling on the part of Christ is conveyed to us in his use of language, which is then translated for us into English. He says that he was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”[6] Now, I don’t know if you have ever been there. I’m not sure that I have ever been there. But what we’re told by Luke is that Christ, the incarnate God, was there, overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

It was not that he had turned a corner in the road and been confronted by something that took him unawares. He had been moving purposefully towards this event. Indeed, from all of eternity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in a covenant of redemption, had planned, if you like, in children’s parlance, what each of them would do. And what the Father had planned the Son would go and procure, and what the Son would procure the Spirit would apply to the lives of those who pondered its truth.

And Jesus, in light of this, had been moving—as we’ve discovered in Luke’s Gospel—had been moving inexorably towards Jerusalem. In one version, it says that he “set his face [towards] Jerusalem.”[7] He had told his disciples about what would happen to the Son of Man. Speaking in the third person back in chapter 18, he said, “They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him.”[8] Now, those are some pretty graphic verbs, aren’t they? “Mock,” “insult,” “spit,” “flog,” “kill.” In John’s Gospel, John records how he says to his Father, “Father, should I ask you to relieve me from this hour?” And then he says, “No, Father. It was for this very reason that I came to this hour.”[9]

But now, in a familiar setting—having gone out, as usual, to the Mount of Olives with his disciples following him, sleeping out on the Mount of Olives this week, probably underneath the stars, talking with one another before they drifted off into unconsciousness—once again he goes to a familiar place, and suddenly he is engulfed by all these pent-up emotions. Suddenly everything that he has considered before him comes into his human psychology and grips him with immense passion. Now, we know that because we find him crying earnestly, and we know that because we are about to discover him sweating profusely. The extent of his exertion, the extent of his compassion, was so vast that, like an athlete at their very apex of commitment, someone looking at him would say, “Man! Can you look at that individual? The intensity that is involved in that scene!”

Incidentally, if we had nowhere else in the Bible to which we might turn to debunk the superficial triumphalism that masquerades as biblical Christianity—if we had no other place in the Bible to which we could go to debunk that notion—these verses will do us fine, thank you very much. No man or woman may stand before the pages of Scripture and say, “Where was God when my father died? Where was God when I contracted leukemia? Where was God when I went through these difficult days?” Oh, they may say it, but in view of this passage of Scripture, they should put their hands over their mouths. For the answer as to where God was in those circumstances is clearly conveyed in the text that is before us.

Jesus, confronted now with the imminent prospect of his ordeal: How is he going to handle it? How is he going to face the trial? Well, you will see from looking at the text that the answer to that is simple. It’s on the very surface of the text: he is going to do what he now urges his disciples to do—that is, he’s going to pray. “Pray,” he says to them, “[so] that you [won’t] fall into temptation”—the temptation to run away and hide; the temptation to quit; the temptation to think that in the death of this Galilean carpenter, all of salvation history has come to a grinding halt; the temptation to look at one another and say, “We thought that this was going to be the answer, but clearly it isn’t the answer. What a dreadful picture it is of our fearless leader hanging there upon the cross.” “Pray,” he says. “Pray.”

What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear!
[And] what a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer![10]

The disciples had asked him, of course, “in a certain place”[11]—at the beginning of Luke 11 we have it recorded for us—they’d said to him, “Lord Jesus, would you teach us how to pray?”[12] And do you remember? He had given to them a model or a pattern prayer. We often pray it together. We say it’s “the Lord’s Prayer,” and in every rightful sense it is. And on that occasion, he’d said to them, “When you pray, say this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,’” and then, immediately, “‘your kingdom come, [and] your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’”[13] “Learn,” says Jesus to his followers, “to make sure that it is the will of the Father that you are seeking at all times.” And here we find him practicing what he preached: “When you pray, say, ‘Your will…’” Now, look at what he says: “Father, if you are willing to take this cup from me, fine. Yet not my will, but yours be done.” So this is a good teacher. He practices what he preaches.

The time had come for Jesus to surrender himself as an eternal, expiatory sacrifice for sin.

I wonder, incidentally and in passing, whether the “certain place” to which Luke refers in the opening verse of chapter 11 may not actually be “the place” to which he now refers in the 22:40. It doesn’t matter, but it just was of interest to me. “And he was praying,” in chapter 11, “in a certain place. And they came, and they said, ‘Now, would you teach us to pray?’”[14] And here he goes back now to “the place”—to the usual place, to the place where it would be easy for Judas to find him. Not to a secret place! He has finished with all of that—escaping through the crowd.[15] He has finished with all of that running away “because his time ha[s] not yet come.”[16] Now he goes back down a familiar path. He goes to the usual place. And in that place the scene unfolds.

Now, when I took the first pass at this study, I had three headings. I still have them, actually, but they’re largely irrelevant, as I’m going to explain to you. As I looked and relooked at the passage, I simply wrote down three headings around which to gather my thoughts. The first heading was “What Compassion!” thinking of the fact that although he was about to endure all of this suffering, his primary concern was for his followers. “I want you to watch and pray,” he says.[17] And he finishes in the same way: “Come on, fellas, let’s keep praying here.” And then I wrote down “What Commitment!” What a commitment on the part of Jesus to the Father’s will! And then I wrote down “What a Contrast!”—the contrast between the sleeping disciples and the praying Christ.

Now, the way in which I routinely prepare material is that I have lots of scribbles on sheets of legal pad that accumulate over the days of the week, coming from different places. Most of it ends up, like a good suit, lying on the floor. Only sufficient material should be taken with you once you make a suit; you don’t need to leave all the bits and pieces hanging off. But when I went back to take it from the legal pad to my preaching notes, something happened to me. And that was that when I got to “What Compassion!” I never then finished all of the rest of the material that I had there. Therefore, I won’t finish it with you this morning.

And I’ll tell you what happened: When I began to think of the compassion of Christ and to say, “Now, I’ll tell the congregation, ‘This is an illustration of compassion,’” then I said, “Well, what is it that makes it such a drama of compassion? Well,” I said to myself, “it is the nature of what he is about to do. Well, of course, what he is about to do is die on the cross. Well, everybody knows that. Everybody knows that Jesus died on the cross.” But then, as I thought about it some more, I said, “I’m not so sure that I fully understand what I mean when I say Jesus died upon the cross. And maybe there’s just a possibility that if I don’t, others may not.” And so the balance of my time sets, as it were, the black backdrop against which the diamond of Christ’s compassion is made to shine.

An Eternal, Expiatory Sacrifice

What Luke, along with the other Gospel writers, tells us at this point in redemptive history is that the time had come for Jesus to surrender himself as an eternal, expiatory sacrifice for sin. Now, I’m not going to give you a quiz on eternal, expiatory sacrifice—at least not now. But you will know what this means within the next twenty minutes. The time had come for Jesus to surrender himself as an eternal, expiatory sacrifice for sins. He was about to bow himself into the hands of his enemies, he was about to be condemned, and he was about to be crucified.

Now, you will recall that we’ve stopped on Jesus purposefully for these last few weeks to remind ourselves that Jesus—who is the object of our consideration here in verse 39 and the first word in the verse—that in Jesus we’re dealing with the Son, who is coequal and coeternal with the Father and the Spirit; Jesus, who is fully God and fully man; Jesus, who is utterly without sin; and Jesus, who is beloved and uniquely precious to the Father. It is this Jesus who is about to be destroyed at God’s hands. Jesus is about to be destroyed at the hands of God.

Now, let me give you three verses that you can chew on in the hours of the afternoon or at your leisure. I’m not going to expound them; I’m simply referring to them. Isaiah 53:10, which reads, “It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.” “It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.” Romans 8:32: “He … did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.” “He … did not spare his own Son, but [he] gave him up for us all.” Two Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Now, loved ones, this is beyond belief. We use the notion that things are “unbelievable,” but this, I suggest to you, is unbelievable, because the innocent is about to suffer at God’s hands. Isn’t that true? That an innocent man is about to be crushed by God; an innocent man is being delivered up by God to sacrifice; an innocent man is being made sin on behalf of others. Says Macleod, the Scottish theologian, in graphic terminology, “Let’s not sentimentalise it. This is not some ‘green hill far away.’ It is the scene of the greatest atrocity in history. Calvary is, quite literally, a shambles. God’s Lamb is being slaughtered: on a garbage heap, outside the city, in darkness, by … brutal soldiery. And God is responsible.”[18] “God’s Lamb is being slaughtered …. And God is responsible.”

Now, ask yourself: What right did God have to crucify his Son? What moral right is there for an innocent man to be crucified? But here we have the sinless Savior! Luther, writing of this, says, “Christ is innocent as concerning his own person, and therefore he ought not to have been [crucified]: but … he sustained the person of a sinner and of a thief, not of one, but of all sinners and [all] thieves. … [He] took all our sins upon him, and for them died [on] the cross.”[19]

Now, when we read our Bibles, and when we think about these things, it’s not unusual, nor is it wrong, for us to say that in the cross, the love of God is declared. It is. But to say that does not get to the depths of it. It is right for us to say the Jesus is our Priest and our representative, but even that does not get to the heart of it. It is right to say that Jesus died on our behalf, that he identified himself with us. But all of that terminology still falls short of the absolute nature of what is taking place in the passion of Christ. Because here our Advocate does not simply end up in the dock. He ends up on the cross. Did you ever hear of such a thing?

In the Peterson event—which is an ongoing, sorry saga—on a virtual daily basis, we see at least a photograph of the man, the defendant, and his advocate, his defense lawyer. We’ve grown familiar with it. He is the defendant; he is the advocate. Can you imagine if, on Tuesday, we turn on CNN, and the roles are reversed? Or even more incredible, can you imagine if a judgment of guilty is found, and the death penalty is meted out, and it is the attorney who dies, not the defendant? That would be bizarre! That would be immoral! That would be wrong. Because the attorney didn’t do anything.

Jesus is our High Priest. But what kind of priest is this, who becomes the sacrifice? Priests offer sacrifices, but this Priest is the sacrifice. This Priest is on the altar. What is this? How do we explain this?

My Lord, what love is this
That pays so dearly
That I, the guilty one,
May go free![20]

You see, he died for sin, but not for his own sin. He had no sin. He died—says Paul to the Galatians in 1:4—he died “for our sins.” He was, in every realistic sense, made sin for us. He became, if you like, all of our rebellion, all of our lying, all of our cheating, all of our adultery, all of our filth, all of our ugliness. He became all of that on the cross. Otherwise, how could God crucify his Son? It wasn’t that he simply slipped in and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll do this for you.” It was that he became the very embodiment of all that sin is.

“Without substitution, the death of [Jesus] is unintelligible.”[21] It’s unintelligible! Unless what we have here is what is being described in 2 Corinthians 5:21, that he was made sin for us—not that he was made a sinner for us but that he was made sin for us—then how else do you explain it? What possible justification could God have for crucifying the innocent, unless in substitution he becomes all that we are in our sin and in our rebellion in order that, in the mastery and mystery of his grace, in him we might become the very righteousness of God?

You see, loved ones, if we thought about our singing a little more than we do, then we would sing a little better than we do. “And when I think…” “Think.” That’s the problem, number one.

And when I think that God, his Son not sparing,
Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.[22]

He goes to the garbage heap for all of my garbage? He goes to the cross for all of my rebellion, for all my filthy thoughts, for all my selfish preoccupations, for all my pride, for all my self-aggrandizement? He dies for that?

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood,
[And he] sealed my pardon with his blood.[23]

[How deep,] how deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That he should give his only Son
To make a wretch his treasure.[24]

The reason that some of you are unsaved is because you refuse to admit what you are: wretched, lost, pitiable, blind, and naked.[25] And Christ died for the wretched. And that’s why in our affluent, superficial religiosity, we have no interest in a crucified Christ.

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That he should give his only Son
To make a wretch his treasure.

How [deep] the pain of searing loss—
The Father turns his face away,
[And] wounds [that] mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.[26]

There is no story in all of human history like this. There is no notion in all of the religions of the world that comes close to touching this. This is imponderable. This is mysterious. This is majestic. This is glorious. This is all about God and the wonder of his grace.

How can a just God pardon sinners? Because all of our sin was transferred to Christ.

You see, when Paul writes, then, to the Romans, after he gets through all of his doctrinal section, masterfully penning all of this great, deep theological insight, what does he then say to them in Romans 12:1? “Therefore, I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”[27] On the strength of what? On the strength of the mercy of God expressed in his atoning death upon the cross. Who wouldn’t give their life away for such a Savior? Who wouldn’t give up their small ambitions for such a Christ? Who wouldn’t sacrifice all that they are and all that they have to go anywhere, anytime, for anyone with such amazing good news?

And before the awesome prospect of this, he says—to a group that he might as easily have said to them, “You know, I’ve had enough of you fellows. Three years is more than enough. I’ve taught you everything I can tell you. Away you go by yourselves! Go off somewhere and get something to drink and leave me alone! I’m on my own now.” But he doesn’t say that. He brings them with him. He brings them close. He brings three of them, and he says to them, “My soul is overwhelmed … to the point of death.” And when, after the resurrection, the lights go on, they suddenly realize that in the cross, Jesus was substituting himself for them. In the cross, he was changing places with us. In the cross, he was taking the guilt of our sin to himself. He was accepting the divine judgment which is justly and rightly against us.

Two Impossible Things

Let me conclude: In the cross, God, then, does two things which would be otherwise impossible. First, he pardons those who believe in Christ, although they have sinned and deserve only condemnation. He pardons sinners. How can a just God pardon sinners? Because all of our sin was transferred to Christ. This, you see, lays the ax at the root of every religious person’s endeavors to make themselves acceptable to God: trying a little harder, attending a little more, praying a little more intensely—whatever it might be—as if somehow or another we would be able by means of such mechanisms to finally tip the scales in our favor. No, you have to understand—we have to understand—that he pardons sinners. And if he didn’t, then we would be forever excluded from his presence. That’s the first thing: he pardons all who believe in Christ even though they have sinned, and sin, and deserve only condemnation. And he displays and satisfies his perfect, holy justice by executing the punishment that our sins deserve. Without this, we would be excluded from his presence forever. And without this, God would not be true to himself.

Here’s the gospel in a phrase: because Christ died for us, those who trust in him may know that their guilt has been pardoned once and for all.

Here’s the gospel, then, in a phrase: because Christ died for us, those who trust in him may know that their guilt has been pardoned once and for all. This is actually the answer to many of our fears. The reason that many of us are so fearful is because there is no room for thoughts of God within our minds. This is the answer to many of our family problems, and our marital difficulties, and our agonies over our children, and our depressions over our rebellion, and our potential divorces and chaos and shambles—that for twenty-eight years, now, in pastoral ministry, I’ve labored first with my own soul to recognize this, that most of my issues—most of my issues, not to make light of any of them—most of my issues are to be dealt with by a solid, experiential grasp of the gospel; and that when people come to me and say, “Oh, my problem is this,” or “My problem is that,” without ever making light of those problems—the issues of bereavement, the concerns of relationships, the longings after the well-being of our children, and so on… Loved ones, let me tell you something: this is the great issue of life. This is the issue of life. Is it well with you healthwise? Is it well with you financewise? Is it well with you familywise? Is it well with your soul? With your soul? Young person, listen to me! Is it well with your soul? Held in the grip of a habit? Disgusted with yourself? Trying constantly to repair the garbage and the damage? Here’s the good news: You can’t do it! You don’t need to. Someone else did it.

That explains, incidentally, why H. G. Spafford—and I find myself going here so often—but that explains why H. G. Spafford writes as he does after he gets the telegram from his wife from France that simply says, “Saved alone.” She was referring to the fact that she’d left with his daughters, to leave from New York to Le Havre. There had been a dreadful storm at sea, and the girls had been drowned—girls, incidentally and in passing, who had been taken by their father, H. G. Spafford, to hear Dwight L. Moody preach in Chicago some months before that, and each of the girls, in the mercy of God, had trusted Christ. But the word now comes: “I’m here, but the girls are gone.” And Spafford gets on a ship and makes his way across the ocean, now to join his wife. And history records that the captain of the vessel slowed at the point of the Atlantic where they had left a marker for those who’d been drowned. And Spafford looks over the side of the ship, and looks down into the ocean, and realizes that this ocean has swallowed up his daughters. And he writes, you know, “When peace like a river is mine, when sorrows like sea billows roll,” you know, “what can I say?” He says, “This is what I can say: it is well with my soul.”[28] What? What are you talking about? Your soul? What about your daughters?

Well, of course he was agonized over his daughters. But his great concern for his daughters was my concern for my daughters: their souls—not, ultimately, their intellects; not, ultimately, their status in life; not, ultimately, whether they’re well-known or obscure; but their souls! And so he writes the second verse:

My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!—
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to [your] cross, and I bear it no more;
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh, my soul![29]

What was he glorying in? He was glorying in the gospel. What was he realizing? He was realizing that when Jesus died upon that cross, he was the substitute for H. G. Spafford.

A significant number who are here this morning, I am convinced, have little more than an intellectual grasp of these truths. Our lives have not been touched and changed by them. Had they been, we would be radically different. Had they been, some of us would no longer be here, but we would be in other places in the world, concerned that into the Muslim world and all of their darkness and lostness there may be a light for the gospel; concerned that despite all of our business potential and all of our acumen for making resources, that we would give ourselves unreservedly to make this great news known.

As a boy in Scotland, the Sunday school teacher used to say, “Put your name in the verse.” “Put your name in the verse.” He was referring to John 3:16. And he would suggest to us as boys that where the word “whosoever”[30] comes, we should put our name in there and make what Jesus accomplished on the cross our own precious possession.

You ever put your name in the verse? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that James, Kevin, Michelle, Sally should not perish but have everlasting life.” What would we have to say before the bar of God’s judgment? Only one thing: Christ died in my place. That’s the gospel. Do you know it?

Father, seal your Word in our hearts, we pray. Bring those of us who are convinced intellectually of the existence of Christ and the significance of his death to a solid experiential grasp of its truth. For some of us who have been drifting and wandering and dillydallying in the precincts, stir our hearts afresh, we pray. Forgive us for our superficial songs, our indolence, our lack of passion in light of yours. And thank you for the wonder of it all: despite the fact that we are sinful and continue to sin, that

Because the sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God the just is satisfied
To look on him and pardon me.[31]

May this be our experience, Lord. And may it be the very divine impetus for making the glorious news well-known so that unbelieving people may become the committed followers of Jesus.

And may grace and mercy and peace from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one, now and forevermore. Amen.

[1] Luke 4:21 (NIV 1984).

[2] See Luke 8:22–25.

[3] See Mark 10:16; Luke 9:46–48; 18:15–17.

[4] Luke 19:46 (paraphrased). See also John 2:16.

[5] Mark 14:33 (NIV 1984).

[6] Mark 14:34 (NIV 1984).

[7] Luke 9:51 (KJV).

[8] Luke 18:32 (NIV 1984).

[9] John 12:27 (paraphrased).

[10] Joseph Medlicott Scriven, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1855).

[11] Luke 11:1 (NIV 1984).

[12] Luke 11:1 (paraphrased).

[13] Matthew 6:9–10 (NIV 1984). See also Luke 11:2.

[14] Luke 11:1 (paraphrased).

[15] See Luke 4:30.

[16] John 7:30 (NIV 1984).

[17] See Matthew 26:41; Mark 14:38.

[18] Donald Macleod, From Glory to Golgotha: Controversial Issues in the Life of Christ (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2002), 112.

[19] Martin Luther, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, ed. Erasmus Middleton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930), 242.

[20] Graham Kendrick, “Amazing Love (My Lord, What Love Is This)” (1989).

[21] Macleod, Glory to Golgotha, 114.

[22] Carl Gustav Boberg, trans. Stuart K. Hine, “How Great Thou Art,” (1885, 1949).

[23] P. P. Bliss, “‘Man of Sorrows,’ What a Name” (1875). Emphasis added.

[24] Stuart Townsend, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” (1995).

[25] See Revelation 3:17.

[26] Townsend, “How Deep.”

[27] Romans 12:1 (paraphrased).

[28] Horatio Gates Spafford, “When Peace, Like a River” (1873). Paraphrased.

[29] Spafford, “When Peace, Like a River.”

[30] John 3:16 (KJV).

[31] Charitie Lees Bancroft, “Before the Throne of God Above” (1863).