At the afternoon Communion service this past Sunday, I noted that, while I grew up loving Psalm 1, Psalm 2 bothered me. The Son’s quickly kindled wrath (2:11) scared me. I knew the cross of Christ had dealt with that wrath but I wasn’t clear how. So, I lived in fear that God’s wrath was lurking in a corner, ready to jump out and get me at some opportune moment. My childhood and teenage years were filled with this dread and would have probably continued if God hadn’t graciously dropped J.I. Packer’s Knowing God into my lap as a college student. In chapter 18 of that book, entitled “The Heart of the Gospel”, Packer lays out the biblical doctrine of propitiation, of how the atonement dealt with the wrath of God in terms of believers. It was life-changing and freeing! I can’t do justice to it in a blog post but let me give you a taste for your edification.

Here are four key Biblical texts that Packer uses as the foundation for his discussion:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26)

Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (Hebrews 2:17)

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)

Packer then asks a question and responds to it:

Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity?

In the faith of the New Testament it is central.

The love of God [1 John 4:8-10], the taking of human form by the Son [Heb. 2:17], the meaning of the cross [Rom. 3:21-26], Christ’s heavenly intercession [1 John 2:1-2], the way of salvation—all are to be explained in terms of it, as the passages quoted show, and any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards.

In saying this, we swim against the stream of much modern teaching and condemn at a stroke the views of a great number of distinguished church leaders today, but we cannot help that. Paul wrote, “Even if we or an angel from heaven”—let alone a minister, a bishop, college lecturer, university professor, or noted author—”should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!” (“accursed” KJV and RSV; “outcast” NEB; “damned” Phillips—Gal. 1:8). And a gospel without propitiation at its heart is another gospel than that which Paul preached.

The implications of this must not be evaded.

He goes on to define propitiation by quoting theologian John Murray:

The doctrine of propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath (the world) so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ’s so to deal with the wrath that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God’s good pleasure.

Again, these are only snippets from the chapter but it is clear that the wrath of God that Christians rightly deserved for sin was dealt with actually and finally at the cross. That God did not turn a blind eye to our sins and the wrath due because of them but instead, Jesus bore that wrath for us in His body on the cross so that we need fear it no longer. It does not lurk in a dark corner but has been forever removed from us. Oh, let such contemplations of the cross enliven and deepen our worship and our work.