United with Christ in His Death, His Name, and His Life
Preached July 8, 2015, by A. Z. Adams
Why This Topic Matters
This subject is not peripheral. It goes to the heart of the gospel because it goes to the heart of God. Many Christians have long wrestled with what appears to them to be an irreconcilable tension between the “wrath” of the God revealed in the Old Testament and the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ. In some presentations of the atonement, this tension is sharpened into something worse than tension: it becomes an apparent fracture within the Godhead itself. The Father is imagined as burning with retributive anger against mankind, while the Son steps forward to absorb that anger in our place, persuading the Father to spare us by punishing Him instead.
That picture distorts the character of God. It suggests an angry Father bludgeoning a merciful Son. It makes the cross appear to be the site of divine disagreement rather than divine self-disclosure. It leaves many people wondering whether the deepest truth about God is love or whether love is merely the temporary restraint of a more essential fury. But “this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). Since salvation is relational knowledge of God, any error that corrupts the image of God corrupts the very center of salvation.
If Christ is “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Heb. 1:3), if “no one has seen God at any time” but the only begotten Son “has declared Him” (John 1:18), then the cross must be read through the revelation of God in Christ, not Christ through our fears about wrath. The question is not merely, “How are sins forgiven?” The deeper question is, “What kind of God is the God who forgives?” The answer of the gospel is not that Jesus saves us from the Father. The answer is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Cor. 5:19).
What We Mean by the Wrath of God
I do believe in the wrath of God. But I do not believe that every biblical reference to wrath should be read as though it were describing God personally erupting in emotional hostility. Much of what Scripture describes as wrath is better understood as the righteous consequence built into a moral universe created by God, upheld by God, and violated by man. In that sense, wrath is real, judgment is real, punishment is real, but these do not necessarily disclose a contradiction in God’s heart.
A useful analogy is gravity. Gravity is a God-given law woven into creation. It is not evil. It is good. It stabilizes the world. It keeps oceans in their basins, trees in the ground, and men from drifting into chaos. Yet if I throw myself from a cliff, gravity will break me. In that sense, I may say, “God judged me,” because God authored the order in which my fall had consequences. But it would be misleading to imagine God personally pushing me from the cliff in order to gratify some appetite for destruction. The judgment lies in the violated order itself.
So also with moral reality. God made the world “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Paul says, “everything created by God is good” (1 Tim. 4:4). Creation was not made as a torture chamber but as a paradise. Yet in His foreknowledge, God encoded within His world corrective responses to transgression. Pain, loss, futility, and death enter as consequences of violating God’s order of life. These consequences are not arbitrary. They are merciful warnings before final ruin.
If a man touches fire and feels pain, the pain is not cruelty. It is mercy. Without sensation, he would not pull back until his hand was destroyed. In that sense, pain is a guardrail at the edge of annihilation. It says, “Stop now, before this becomes final.” The same is true morally. God put the guardrail of painful consequence at the edge of hell’s precipice so that man, feeling the sting of disobedience, might turn back before he is consumed.
This is why I say that much of what is called the wrath of God does not describe the essence of God any more than a fall from a roof describes the essence of gravity. Wrath is real. But it is often the name Scripture gives to the world’s moral recoil under the violated word of God.
God Rested, Yet His Order Continued
Scripture says, “By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested” (Gen. 2:2). This does not mean that God became absent, nor that “He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4). It means that He ceased from that initial mode of direct, creative intervention. He brought creation to completion and let stand what He had made. Like an artist satisfied with His workmanship, He said, in effect, “tov meod,” and withdrew His hands from constant remedial interference.
That resting matters. It means that God authored a world with durable structures, real laws, and meaningful consequences. The world was not left without Him, but it was ordered in such a way that it would respond to righteousness and unrighteousness according to the word He had embedded in it. Romans says that “His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made” (Rom. 1:20). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). The fabric of creation bears witness to its Maker.
Thus justice, sowing and reaping, moral consequence, and creaturely limitation are not intrusions into a previously random universe. They are features of a world ordered by the word of God. “Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7). “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). These are not merely later legal announcements. They are revelations of how life under God is constituted.
The Old Testament Must Be Read in the Light of Christ
Because God revealed Himself “in many portions and in many ways” through the prophets, but “in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (Heb. 1:1–2), the fuller revelation interprets the partial. Christ is not a softer appendix to a harsher deity. He is the full unveiling of the God who was there all along. “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). “The light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” is the light of “the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). “God was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16).
Therefore, when we encounter violent scenes, judgments, plagues, or acts of destruction in Scripture, we must ask carefully what is being described. Is this the direct personal intervention of God? Is this a Hebraic form of speech in which God is said to do what He permits? Is this angelic execution under delegated authority? Is this the consequence of the order of creation? Is this the work of hostile nations, or of demonic powers, operating within a world already bent by sin? Scripture itself gives us warrant to ask such questions.
Psalm 78 speaks of “a band of destroying angels” sent among Egypt (Ps. 78:49). Exodus says, “I send an Angel before you… do not provoke Him” (Ex. 23:20–21). Stephen says Israel “received the law as ordained by angels” (Acts 7:53). Paul says the law “was put into effect through angels by a mediator” (Gal. 3:19). Hebrews speaks of “the word spoken through angels” under which “every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty” (Heb. 2:2). Scripture itself refuses a simplistic flattening of all events into one undifferentiated mode of divine action.
There is also the biblical use of causative language. One text says Satan moved David to number Israel (1 Chron. 21:1); another says the anger of the Lord incited David (2 Sam. 24:1). Job says to God, “You incited me against him” even though the affliction is plainly carried out by Satan (Job 2:3). Biblical language often attributes to God what occurs under His sovereign permission, without thereby implying that He is morally identical to every proximate agent in the event. This matters enormously for how we speak of wrath.
Man’s Dominion and the Transfer of Rule
God made man to rule. “Let them rule… over all the earth” (Gen. 1:26). Psalm 8 says God crowned man “with glory and majesty” and put the works of His hands “under his feet” (Ps. 8:5–6). Yet man did not remain in filial trust. He chose autonomy. He reached for the knowledge of good and evil apart from communion with God. In so doing, he did not become more free; he came under another power.
Man was given dominion, but by sin he transferred himself and his domain into bondage. Scripture describes the present age in precisely these terms. Satan is called “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). The devil could say, regarding the kingdoms of the world, “it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 4:6). Whatever evasions men prefer, the New Testament is uncompromising: mankind’s rebellion was not merely private immorality; it was political and cosmic treason.
And yet God does not simply revoke His own word in a fit of impatience. “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). “God cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). He had subjected creation “to futility, in hope” (Rom. 8:20). Love took the risk of creaturely freedom. Love entrusted real dominion. Therefore, the restoration of the world would not come through God contradicting His own order, but through that order being righteously fulfilled and redeemed from within.
Creation Groans Under Man’s Rebellion
When man fell, nothing remained untouched. “Cursed is the ground because of you” (Gen. 3:17). “The creation was subjected to futility… in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption” (Rom. 8:20–21). Not only man, but land, labor, history, governments, and invisible powers became entangled in the long groan of rebellion.
This is why the atonement cannot be reduced to an abstract transaction in heaven. It addresses a disordered cosmos. It concerns guilt, yes, but also bondage, exile, defilement, death, alienation, false lordship, and a world held under the fear of condemnation. We had not merely broken a rule; we had become the kind of people unable to return. “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Isa. 59:2). “Through fear of death” men were “subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:15). We were “without strength” (Rom. 5:6), “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
Satan exploited this condition. He used deception to entice man into sin, and then used condemnation to keep man from returning. He weaponized justice. He stood not merely as tempter, but as accuser. He took what was good in God’s order and used it as a shield against mercy. Shame made Adam hide in the garden. Fear made man flee from the only One who could heal him.
The Problem of Justice
God could not simply pretend that sin had no consequence. The warning of Eden would come true: “in the day that you eat of it, dying you shall die” (Gen. 2:17, lit.). His word is not mockable. His order is not cosmetic. “The soul who sins shall die” (Ezek. 18:20). “What a man sows, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). The wages were due.
Think of justice here not first as courtroom mood, but as the moral architecture of reality. If gravity is one structural law of creation, justice is another. “An eye for an eye” is not the invention of a sadistic deity; it is the principle that violation has compensating consequence, that the universe is not morally indifferent. This principle was meant as a guardrail. But with man’s accumulated rebellion, that guardrail became a sentence. Humanity had piled up such debt under the violated order of God that only death stood at the end of the path.
So the crisis was double. First, man’s sin had released judgment upon himself. Second, the same guilt that made him need mercy also made him afraid to approach the source of mercy. He was threatened by punishment and without strength. He needed both release from judgment and a restored access to life.
Only a Man Could Set This Right
If dominion had been given to man, then the restoration of God’s reign in the earth would have to come through man. Love would not reclaim the world by brute contradiction of His own gift. A man had brought this disorder; a man must, in righteousness, open the way out. But not just any man. We were all blemished offerings. Malachi asks, “When you bring blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong?” (Mal. 1:8). Humanity was blind, crippled, compromised, condemned. No son of Adam could offer himself as the clean resolution to Adam’s ruin.
Thus the necessity of Christ. Not a second divine person shielding us from a hostile first person, but God manifested in flesh, entering the condemned field from within. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). He came “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3), yet “committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth” (1 Pet. 2:22). The ruler of this world came, and “he has no claim on Me” (John 14:30).
This is the great turning point. Satan had a just claim on those who had yielded themselves to his dominion. “You are slaves of the one whom you obey” (Rom. 6:16). He could hold men under death because men had submitted to the order of death. But he had no rightful hold on Jesus. Christ alone was the sinless man. Christ alone stood in history without guilt. Christ alone could face death without it having any lawful ground to retain Him. “I lay down My life… No one takes it from Me… I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again” (John 10:17–18).
What Happened at the Cross
The cross is where several things converge at once.
It is the place where man’s violence reaches its fullest expression. Peter says, “you nailed [Him] to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death” (Acts 2:23). Again, “you put to death the Prince of life” (Acts 3:15). Paul says, “if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). The Father did not become the executioner of the Son. God foreordained the event; sinful rulers and powers carried out the murder.
It is the place where Satan overreaches. In seizing the sinless One, he stretches his hand beyond justice into lawlessness. He kills the only Man over whom he has no rightful claim. In that very act, he is disarmed.
It is the place where justice is fulfilled, not abolished. Christ does not overthrow the moral order of God; He satisfies it in Himself. He does not pay the Father as though the Father were the hostile party. He does not pay the devil as though the devil were sovereign. He gives Himself up under the violated order of death, absorbs its full curse, and emerges beyond its claim. Thus He fulfills the law and breaks its misuse as a weapon of condemnation. Colossians says that God canceled “the written code… nailing it to the cross,” and there “disarmed the powers and authorities” (Col. 2:13–15). Paul says, “you also were made to die to the law through the body of Christ” (Rom. 7:4). “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:56–57).
It is the place where God’s love is manifested, not suspended. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). “In this is love… that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Whatever propitiation means, it cannot mean that the Son makes the Father become loving, because the sending itself proceeds from love.
Isaiah saw this mystery in advance. “He was pierced through for our transgressions… the chastening for our peace was upon Him” (Isa. 53:5). Yet men “esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (v. 4). That is exactly how flesh interprets the cross: as though God were simply crushing a victim. But the deeper truth is that the Servant is offering Himself, bearing the full weight of our disorder, and through that righteous suffering opening the way of return.
Christ the Only Justified Man
The decisive reality is this: Jesus is the only fully justified man. He is “Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). He “knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21). In Him alone the human vocation stands complete. In Him alone there is a human life entirely acceptable before God. In Him alone death meets a man it cannot own.
This means salvation is not merely that Jesus does something external on our behalf while we remain unchanged. Salvation is union. It is identity transfer. It is the sinner leaving his old condemned existence and coming under the name, body, death, and life of Christ. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17). “You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). “The one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17). “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20).
This is why the language of representation and participation matters more than the flattened notion of mere substitution. Christ does not save us so that we may remain ourselves unchanged, merely excused. He saves us by bringing us into Himself. He is not only the sacrifice; He is the new humanity. He is not only the righteous offerer; He is the identity into which the unrighteous must be transferred.
Baptism as Identity Change
This is where baptism becomes indispensable to the doctrine of atonement. Baptism is not an ornamental postscript to forgiveness. It is the appointed union with the death by which Christ dealt with sin. “As many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death” (Rom. 6:3). “If we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Rom. 6:5). “Our old man was crucified with Him… that we should no longer be slaves to sin” (Rom. 6:6). “He who has died is freed from sin” (Rom. 6:7).
Why must we die? Because our old identity is condemned. We cannot be saved as autonomous continuations of Adam. We cannot present our own name at the gates of life. Our history, our guilt, our allegiances, our old man under sin’s dominion—all of that must go under the sentence Christ bore. Baptism is the burial of that old identity into the death of Christ. It is not a bare symbol of something unrelated. It is the covenantal moment in which we renounce our own life and seek refuge in His.
One may put it this way: only Christ possesses exit rights from the dominion of darkness. He is the only man with a clear passage through death into life. Therefore, to be saved, we must be found in Him. We must come under His name, His death, His righteousness, His Spirit, His risen life. This is why Scripture speaks so strongly of being baptized into Christ, baptized into His death, clothed with Christ, hidden in Christ, one spirit with Christ. Salvation is not God agreeing to tolerate the old rebel. Salvation is God burying the rebel in Christ’s death and raising a new man in Christ’s life.
So remission of sins corresponds to removal of identity. The old man is not cosmetically improved; he is crucified. His guilt, his loyalties, his self-claim, his very name as an independent reality—these go under the blood. The new man emerges under another Lord. “You are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). “Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom. 14:8). We are not released on our own recognizance. We are transferred into the custody of Christ.
Not Free to Be Ourselves Again
This too must be said plainly. The gospel is not that Jesus breaks our chains so we can resume self-rule. He leads captivity captive (Eph. 4:8). He always leads us “in triumphal procession in Christ” (2 Cor. 2:14). Paul glories in being “a bond-servant of Christ Jesus” (Rom. 1:1). There is no salvation outside lordship because there is no salvation outside union.
Thus the condition of release from the dominion of sin is not lawless independence, but voluntary submission to Christ. Love restores what rebellion forfeited: sonship. God did not want a world ruled by coercion. He wanted a world ruled by trusting sons. The atonement therefore does not merely erase guilt; it establishes a people under a new Head, a new Name, a new citizenship, a new Spirit. Christ did not come to conquer the world through the mechanisms of worldly dominion. He came to establish an embassy of heaven on earth: His church. “Upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Yet the kingdom came “with power” (Mark 9:1), because in Christ a domain had appeared where Satan’s claim was broken and access to the Father restored.
Saved from Wrath by His Life
Romans 5 is decisive here. “While we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). “God demonstrates His own love toward us” in that death (v. 8). “Having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him” (v. 9). Then Paul adds the crucial further step: “if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more… we shall be saved by His life” (v. 10).
That is the full pattern. His death reconciles. His life saves. The cross is not an endpoint severed from resurrection and participation. Christ dies to remove condemnation and disarm the accuser. Christ rises to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), imparting the very life by which the reconciled now walk. He is not merely the one who clears a legal record; He is the one who becomes our life.
The Character of God Revealed
What then does the atonement reveal? Not a contradiction in God, but the consistency of God. Not a divine disagreement, but divine self-giving. Not a wrathful Father turned aside by a kinder Son, but the one God revealing His love in and through the obedient Son in whom the Father dwelt. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” stands behind the whole gospel witness. If Christ is the exact image of God’s nature, then Calvary is not the place where God becomes unlike Christ. It is the place where the depths of God’s own love, holiness, righteousness, and wisdom are unveiled.
Yes, wrath is real. Judgment is real. Hell is real. Sin really deserves death. The moral order of God is not playacting. But the answer to this crisis is not that God vents Himself upon another. The answer is that God enters the plight of man in Christ, bears the curse that man has incurred, fulfills the claims of righteousness, disarms the powers, and opens a living way back to Himself.
Therefore the ministry entrusted to the church is “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). Our message is not that the Father might perhaps be persuaded to tolerate sinners. Our message is: “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). The hostility is not in God’s reluctance to love, but in man’s alienation, guilt, bondage, and mistrust. The cross answers all of it.
Conclusion
The atonement is the triumph of divine love through righteous identification. Man disrupted God’s order, came under death, transferred himself into Satan’s dominion, and could neither escape judgment nor find his way back to God. The world groaned under this futility. Justice stood, not as an enemy to God, but as part of the moral order of the universe God had made. Satan exploited that order, using condemnation to keep men enslaved.
Then God came in Christ. The sinless man entered the condemned field. The ruler of this world found nothing in Him. Christ voluntarily went into death, bore the full curse due to sin, satisfied justice in Himself, exposed the lawless overreach of the powers, and rose beyond death’s claim. In that one act, both the debt of judgment and the barrier to fellowship were overcome. A living way was opened.
But the benefit of that cross is not received by detached admiration. It is received through union. We must die with Him, be buried with Him, and rise with Him. Baptism is therefore not secondary ornamentation but the appointed form of identity transfer. The old man goes under the curse Christ bore; the new man comes forth under Christ’s name and life. We are saved not by remaining ourselves while claiming His merit externally, but by being found in Him.
He is the only justified man. He is the only righteous man. He is the only sinless man. He is the only man death could not keep. Therefore He is the only man in whom mankind can be saved. And so the gospel summons us not merely to gratitude, but to surrender; not merely to assent, but to union; not merely to pardon, but to participation. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). And having put on Christ, we no longer belong to ourselves, but to the One “who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood” (Rev. 1:5).
That is atonement. That is reconciliation. That is identity change. That is salvation in Jesus Christ.