Well, let’s take our Bibles and, before we come to communion, we want to focus our minds and hearts on the truth of what Jesus did on Good Friday. I want to base my remarks on First John 2:1-2 and First John 4:9-10, a message I’ve called Satisfaction Guaranteed. We’re going to look at the word propitiation, for that’s what Jesus accomplished on the cross. He made propitiation for you and for me. I want to unpack that, and I want to bring us to a place where we marvel at the Father’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
Satisfaction Guaranteed. First John 2:1-2, “My little children, these things I write to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he himself…” Notice is, this is what He is to His people. “He himself is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but for the whole world.” First John 4:9-10, “In this, the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
I was just reading recently about a little fellow who grew up in church and went to Sunday School. Before long, he had learned the language of the church, Christianese. He had learned all those big words finishing with -tion. He had learned about justification, redemption, sanctification, reconciliation, glorification.
One particular week, when he was at public school, the teacher asked the class, “Does anyone know what the word procrastination means?” The little fellow put his hand up and said, “I’m not sure, but I know our church believes in it.” I like that.
One of the great -tion words of the Gospel is the word propitiation. I want to look at that with you for a few moments. We’ve just read in First John 2:1-2 and we’ve read in First John 4:9-10 that Jesus is, for His people, propitiation. That’s what he has done for us before God, and it takes us to the heart of the Gospel. It takes us to the very center of God’s work in Jesus Christ on the cross that Good Friday.
What did Jesus accomplish that Good Friday? What did Jesus set out to do and accomplish that Good Friday? I’ll tell you what. He set out, through His death, to satisfy the just demands of a Holy God and to placate His wrath directed toward you and me because we have fallen short of God’s glory, and we have all sinned. That’s what Jesus came to do.
You know what? At Easter, it’s so easy to focus on what man did to Jesus, to focus on the brutality and the violence, to think about the fact that He was arrested and punched and pushed around like a political football. He was beaten and scourged and hung on a cross in public shame. It would be easy to focus on that, and there’s certainly a place and a time to do that, but if you’re going to get to the heart of Good Friday, if we’re about to celebrate God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, we’re not going to focus on what man did to Christ. We’re going to focus on what Christ did for man. For God so loved the world, He sent His Son to do something for us that we could not do for ourselves, and that was to propitiate God concerning our sin, to assuage the holy demands of God against you and against me.
Paul says that the Gospel is the Word of the cross. If you and I are going to understand the Gospel, we need to understand the words that explain the Word of the cross. We need to understand words like redemption, reconciliation, propitiation, so let’s look at this one word, propitiation. It’s part of that divine dictionary. I want to say three things.
Number one, let’s look at the meaning of propitiation. Basically, it means to placate. It means to assuage someone’s anger. It carries the idea of turning away wrath, so that the person who is justly upset at you and me may be more favorably disposed toward us. Another good word for it would be satisfaction. The word propitiation means someone has been satisfied. Their concerns have been addressed. The debt has been paid. What is owed has been satisfied.
If you owe someone, even in today’s world, they might say to you, “I’m not going to be satisfied until that is paid. I am not going to be satisfied until you do that.” That’s what it’s going to take to make things right, and so that’s our word. When you hear the word propitiation, think of the word satisfaction, because in some ways it’s a great replacement. What Jesus Christ did for us on the cross was He satisfied the holy demands of God against sinners.
When you think of these great words, they often put us into a context, so if you think of the word reconciliation, that puts us into the world of diplomacy and how nations are reconciled and both parties meet. The word justification puts us into the courtroom, when the judge declares someone justified or just and they’re free to go, that the demands of the Law have been met. The word redemption takes us into the slave market. You and I were slaves to sin. We were bound by the cords of sin, Proverbs 5:22. But you know what? Jesus Christ came and redeemed us, freed us from the slave market of sin.
Now the word propitiation takes us into the temple, even into the world of pagan temples, because in Paul’s day and prior centuries before that, in pagan temples, people went to worship their god, and they knew that that god was angry with them. Many of these gods were capricious and unfeeling towards people and, therefore, the angry deity had to be appeased, propitiated, satisfied, and so they brought gifts, the work of their hands, the harvest. In some horrible situations, they brought their children to be sacrificed, as in Moloch, and so that’s our word. But the New Testament takes it and baptizes it with Gospel meaning and ties it to the sacrifice of Christ, in that He came to satisfy the just demands of God against you and me.
See, you and I deserve to go to Hell. You and I have broken God’s Law in thought and in deed. We are in arrears. We’re in the dark and we have been declared guilty. We have offended God, and God’s settled wrath against sin demands that you and I pay a price. But the marvelous thing is, in the Gospel, this is the earth-shattering reality of the Easter message, when properly understood, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. It was for God so loved the world that He gave His Son.
The marvel of Easter is this, the God who ought to be propitiated, satisfied, assuaged from His wrath against us, He’s the One that did the propitiating. He’s the One that satisfied His holiness in the giving of His Holy Son, who died for unholy people. That’s the basis and the basics of the Gospel, that the One who is just is also the Justifier of the unjust, Romans 3:28, and the means by which He did that was that He satisfied His own holiness with the ultimate sacrifice of love in the giving of the One who did no sin, but who was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
Adrian Rogers has said this, “They say in a court of law that when a guilty man is acquitted, the judge is condemned. The judge who acquits the guilty cannot justify his actions by claiming it to be an act of love.” The judge can’t acquit people in an act of love without satisfying the law, which has been broken. That’s the glory of the Gospel. On the one hand, we have a Holy God, who cannot look on sin, who must judge sin, who must eradicate sin from His world, but He’s also loving, and He’s got a warm heart towards those who have fallen.
On the one hand, you have His hot wrath, and in the other hand, you have His warm love towards sinners. You know what? He reconciles that reality in that He satisfies Himself. He propitiates Himself in the sending of His Son. Therefore, as a judge, He can acquit us, because Jesus Christ paid the penalty of our sin. He was wounded for our transgressions, and the chastisement, the punishment, of our peace was on Him.
Let me just qualify this and move on. This self-sacrificing act of Christ doesn’t change the character of God from an angry ogre to a loving God. The cross didn’t give God a makeover. The cross didn’t convert God into something He wasn’t. No, Romans 5 tells us God commended His love toward us in the sending of His Son. It was the love of God for sinners that sent His Son to die on the cross for us, so that his holiness can remain intact.
I had an old professor at the Irish Baptist College in Belfast, Dr. Ivor Oakley, and he said one day in a class… I immediately wrote it down. He said, “Christ didn’t die to make God love me. Christ died because God loved me and sent His Son to die for me.” That’s the meaning of propitiation.
What about the means? We’ve touched on it, but I want to kind of dig a little deeper. The means is the sacrifice of Jesus, the shed blood of Jesus, the atoning act of the cross. We see this in what we read here in First John 2:1-2, “My little children, these things I write so that you may not sin, but if you sin, if any man sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the righteous.” Jesus is righteous. You’re not. And Jesus, in an act of self-sacrifice gave Himself for you and me, so that our unrighteousness could be paid for. “For He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world.”
If you go to First John 4:9-10, that same thought is mentioned. In fact, we might want to tie that into Romans 3:25, where the idea of propitiation is mentioned. It’s not just a doctrine of John. It’s a doctrine of all the apostles. Here’s what Paul says, tying in the means. We now understand how the propitiation came about, how the satisfaction was made. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood.”
Why did Jesus die? So that a righteous God could be satisfied and, in being satisfied, could offer you and me forgiveness for free. That’s the marvel of the Gospel. It was the bloody death of Christ, the Just dying for the unjust, that assuaged and appeased the wrath of God. God’s wrath has been turned aside, away from us, onto Christ because Jesus became the lightning rod for God’s wrath. I like that image. Do you not? Jesus is the lightning rod. Every home typically has a lightning conductor, because when electrical storms come or lightning is in the area, it could seriously damage all the electrical items in the house, and so usually outside the home, grounded in the soil is a copper rod attached to your home, so that, should your home be struck by lightning or an electrical storm, that rod draws all of that power and that fire and that heat into the ground, and it’s absorbed. In a sense, your house experiences salvation, escape, redemption, where it’s not on fire and burned to the ground.
In a very real sense, that’s what Jesus did. That wooden cross, upon which He hung for our sin, absorbed the wrath of God. It was the shed blood that the life of Christ, given in atonement, that indeed allows us to know salvation.
Listen to First Peter 2:24, as Peter reminds us of this great fact. “He himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness, by whose stripes we were healed.” You need to imagine Jesus on that Good Friday in the darkness with the clouds perhaps raining, perhaps lightning. There’s an earthquake to follow. You need to see that cross as that lightning rod that draws the wrath of God away from us to Him.
What’s the message of propitiation? Here’s the message of propitiation. It’s a glorious one. It’s what we come to celebrate momentarily in the breaking of bread is that there is peace with God through faith, trust, and reliance upon the Lord Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross. Romans 5:1, “We have peace with God,” a present possession. It’s ours to enjoy. It’s ours to have a confidence in. It’s that which removes our guilt. It’s that which removes any fear that God would abandon us or leave us or some day judge one half of one sin and send us to Hell. No, we have peace with God because Jesus made peace through the blood of His cross. Jesus assuaged a holy, just God, who should judge us, but judged Him instead. To shelter beneath the cross is to find a safe space from the condemnation of God that is rightly directed toward us.
Think about what Paul says in Romans 8. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ.” Why? Because Christ became the lightning rod of that condemnation, and the ground that was soaked with His blood around Calvary absorbed all the wrath of a Holy God that should come in your direction and should someday land you and me in Hell, but it doesn’t. It won’t, because of Him who is our propitiation.
We cannot satisfy the just demands of a Holy God. We just can’t. Yet many of us try by keeping God’s Law, by loving our neighbor, by being baptized, by going through some religious rigamarole, hoping to offset the scales. While over here you’ve got the just demands of a Holy God, and it’s weighed against us, but maybe if we can put on each and every day some good deed, maybe we can balance the scales. What a lie. What a deception. What a blindness to the love of God in Christ to think that you’re going to satisfy our God, when He has already satisfied Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ.
This was Martin Luther’s challenge, wasn’t it? He was a monk in the Catholic Church, and he said if anybody could be saved by monkery, he could be, would be, and should be. But he had never any peace. He had never any sense that things were right with God, no matter how many prayers he prayed, no matter how often he fasted, no matter what law-keeping he did, no matter what service he rendered in the priesthood to God. He never got a sense that the scales had equalized.
I’ll let him speak for himself, “Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that He was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love. Yes, I hated the righteousness of God, which punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuringly, I was angry with God, and said, ‘As if I indeed is… Is it not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity, but by the Law of the Decalogue without having God add pain to pain by the Gospel, and also by the Gospel threatening us with His righteousness and His wrath?’ Thus, I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.”
He was bothered by the righteousness of God. He properly understood the depth of God’s holiness. And he understood that all his monkery, all his efforts to satisfy God were coming up short, and so he was terrified by the Law, terrified by the righteousness of God, until he was born again one day, because he had read the book of Romans and came to see the just shall live by faith, not by works. You’re not justified by your works. You’re justified by what Jesus did on your behalf, and faith lays hold of that gift.
Let me close with this. I’ve told you this story before. I heard it first through my friend, Mark Hitchcock, who was a friend of Dr. Stanley Toussaint, who initially was a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary, ultimately became a professor in the Bible Exposition Department. In conversation with Stanley Toussaint, Mark learns this, although later on, just before his death, Stanley Toussaint writes about this in an article in one of the seminary’s papers, about his early days at Dallas Theological Seminary. He was there for the last semester of Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, who was the founder of that great school.
Stanley Toussaint remembers it. On one particular day, he walked into the class and sat down. Lewis Sperry Chafer had taught a class before that class in the same classroom, and he was still kind of reveling in what he had taught. He had taught on what Jesus had done on our behalf in propitiating God’s holiness and our sin in His death and the shedding of His blood. No sooner were these students sat down for another class on a different subject when Lewis Sperry Chafer just, still beaming, still smiling, still rejoicing said to this class of young ministers, “Man, God is satisfied. Man, God is satisfied.” God is satisfied. Would you let that just sink in today? God is satisfied with what His Son did for you. What an act of love. What a self-emptying on the part of Christ.
It’s not by works of righteousness which we do, but by His mercy He saves us. Nothing in our hands we bring. Simply to the cross we cling. Could our zeal no respite know? Could our tears forever flow? Not for sin ever could these atone. Thou must save, and Thou alone.
If you’re going to be saved, sir, God’s going to have to save you. If you’re going to be saved, madam, God’s going to have to save you, and He’s all too willing to do it, for His Son propitiated the sins of the world, and if you’ll embrace that offer, God has got His hand extended out to you today, offering you the gift of eternal life and the knowledge of sins forgiven. Won’t you reach your hand out and accept that gift?
I just finished a book on the life of Haddon Robinson. The man who wrote it was his disciple and was mentored by him. He goes through many, many statements that Haddon Robinson made over the years that have still stuck with him. Here’s number 42. This is a statement by Haddon Robinson, “The message behind the Gospel is this. Be satisfied with the thing that satisfied God.” Amen. “Be satisfied with the thing that satisfied God.” Do you know who satisfied God on your behalf? Jesus.
Be satisfied with Jesus. I can tell you, He’s very satisfying. What a Friend. What a Savior. What a Guide. What a Lord. Will you be satisfied today with the thing that satisfied God? Would you put all your good works down? In fact, don’t just put them down. Throw them over your shoulder. Throw them away. You’ve got no hope, no refuge in those.
What needs to be done to make peace with God has already been done, done for you, done completely, done wonderfully, done fully. Be satisfied today with the thing that satisfied God, and that’s Jesus Christ shedding His blood for sinners. Satisfaction guaranteed. That’s true in the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen?
Amen.
Lord, we thank You for our time in the Word. We thank You for this foray into the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We come this Good Friday on this hallowed ground on this beautiful afternoon to recognize what Jesus did for us, in fact what God did through Jesus for us.
Lord, we thank You that Jesus didn’t come to make You into something You weren’t. Jesus came to reveal to us what You’ve always been, a loving, gracious, kind God, but who had to deal with a moral dilemma. Man has sinned and fallen short of Your glory, and in your holiness, You must judge that sin to remain righteous and holy. And yet, Your love and Your grace desires to forgive. We thank You that that gulf was bridged in the Gospel and in the act of Jesus Christ dying for us.
We thank You that You’ve not dealt with us according to our sins. We thank You that You’ve not rewarded us according to our iniquities, but You have dealt with sin in Jesus Christ, fully, completely, and wonderfully.
And so, we come to thank You on this Good Friday. We’re about to partake in a service that allows us to express that thanksgiving, and so, as we take this bread and take this cup, Lord, may we do it with a wonderful and heart of gratitude and with a fresh and renewed sense of the marvel of knowing You and the glory of the Gospel, that Jesus Christ gave Himself for us. For these things we pray and ask in His name, amen.