The Righteous for the Unrighteous

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God

1 Peter 3:18a

I want to ask you a very practical question. It gets deeper into our doctrine of the atonement. It takes some thinking, but it isn’t really that hard. It requires no big words, but it will require a big dose of honesty. The question is this: What would you have to believe about what Jesus accomplished on the cross in order for you to know that God’s love for you is the greatest it could possibly be for you? Let me say that again so that you really get the question:

What would you have to believe about what Jesus accomplished on the cross in order for you to know that God’s love for you is the greatest it could possibly be for you? This is the point of doctrine. Doctrine is not for dispute primarily. Doctrine is certainly not to distinguish ourselves from others. Doctrine is for life and death.

Doctrine. The work of Christ is final, particular, substitutionary, and brings us all the way home to God.

(i.) This work of Christ is final.

(ii.) This work of Christ is particular.

(iii.) This work of Christ is substitutionary.

(iv.) This work of Christ is reconciliatory.

This work of Christ is final.

The key word here is ‘once’ (ἅπαξ). This speaks of the finality of the atoning work of Christ. He said from the cross, “It is finished” (Jn. 19:30), and when He said that, the Greek expression makes it clear, in almost accounting terminology, that the debt has been paid in full. It is this glorious truth that makes us be able to sing “Jesus paid it all.” An actual accounting or a full reckoning—what do I mean by that? Paul offers another support by teaching that God has

forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Col. 2:13-14).

There was a debt that none of us could pay (cf. Ps. 49:7-9). How much of the legal debt? All of it. To speak of the debt as “its legal demands” gives no hint of it being only a part. That He cancelled it and set it aside means that the payment or punishment that you and I would have still hanging over us, awaiting us, in hell, has been in fact wholly put away, or paid for.

This work of Christ is particular.

By particular here I am not really even talking about the persons, though that is certainly implied by the “us” further down. I am only asking us all to consider that this sacrifice was ‘for sins’ (περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν). It was not for some general notion of sin, some abstraction. It was for particular sins, concrete sins, actual sins such as the real sins that each of us have committed: “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3); the “forgiveness of our sins” (Eph. 1:7).

Contrary to a straw man objection to this, such a particular punishment for particular sins does not require a one-to-one correspondence between our sins and Jesus’s experience. Mastricht speaks of “that same evil which burdened his people due to sin, if not in the same in kind, or rather in number, at least the same in weight and value.” The words following from Mastricht are worth noting, as they are often used by critics of particular redemption to oppose the notion of our specific sins transferred to Christ for punishment on account of the discontinuities, which all the orthodox acknowledge:

So that in this death, there was not so much a solutio, a payment, according to its true and proper name, wherein, according to the jurists, the idem, the same thing, is rendered that is in the obligation, which payment cannot be refused by the creditor, but rather a satisfactio, a satisfaction, wherein the tantundem, the same value, is rendered, and which can be rejected by the creditor.1

A simple illustration will help. We all know that when we have wronged somebody else, each thing we have done wrong is a distinct objective wrong, and a wrong must be made right. If someone was to hit you over the head, steal your wallet, and max out your credit card, and then lie about you to everyone you knew, what would you make of it if he later apologized “for the whole thing,” but did not pay you back and did not set the record straight with all your friends and family? Quite obviously, you would take it to be an insincere apology. He would also still be at war with you. What was wrong would not have been made right.

So Paul says that the wicked are “storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath” (Rom. 2:5), indicating an accumulation of amounts of guilt for amounts of discrete or distinct sins. It’s why Jesus can say things like He does to Caperneaum, that: “it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you” (Mat. 11:24), or to Pilate “Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin” (Jn. 19:11). In other words, it is not just that some sins are greater than others comparatively, but for that very reason, sins correspond to their guilt cumulatively.

This work of Christ is substitutionary.

At the heart of this passage is substitution: ‘the righteous for the unrighteous’ (δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων). The famous passage in Isaiah carries both the specific sense of sins in the plural and that it was in our place:

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed (Isa. 53:5).

The sense that Peter gives, though, of this substitution, also means to communicating a shocking contrast, as Francis Roberts put it, “That is, Jesus Christ being in himself most just and innocent, suffered as Surety substituted for us unjust.”2 Picture the worst criminal you can place into the dock in the very act of his crime, and then just as quickly replace him with the most innocent person you can think of—and in that incongruity you still would not have scratched the surface of this contrast: Light for darkness, purity for impurity, holiness for sin, Savior of the world for ruiner of your soul, your King for his betrayer.

Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep” (Jn. 10:15). Elsewhere Paul treats the church as if one person—so, collectively—but it is still particularly, about a bride: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). I am not so much concerned here with whether such a husband has died for every bride by referencing “his bride.” I would start everyone off more simply: Did He at least step in the place of His bride? Did He at least do that much? Did the bride not face a particular death, for which the Bridegroom substitutes Himself? Did not the sheep run headlong for an actual abyss, and the Good Shepherd place Himself in the pit in the place? In other words, was there an actual, concrete punishment for sin for which Jesus substituted Himself? And did He pay it all or are we left to pay even a part?

This work of Christ is reconciliatory.

This is what we call a purpose clause: ‘that he might bring us to God’ (ἵνα ὑμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ θεῷ). Now whose purpose is this? That is the first thing to have in mind. Clearly it is God’s purpose. We know that none of God’s purposes can fail. Here Peter addresses a divine purpose that is not simply an expression of God’s perceptive will, nor a general expression of what God approves, but rather of a mission of the Son. It is an expression of the decree sealed in the blood of the Son.

Notice also how it is not only the sovereignty of God but the glory of God that is at stake.

God is both first cause and final cause—or, if you prefer the E words, both efficient cause and end cause—of this design of reconciliation. In other words, not only is it God’s idea and energy that provides this grace of salvation, but it is God Himself that is gained by the sinner now redeemed. The sinner is reconciled to God because God did not aim only to clear the sinner’s record, but to secure the adopted child in familial love.

To use another illustration, if a husband and wife have resolved differences after an argument, or if a child gets around to apologize to dad or mom after an act of rebellion, would it be sufficient for either party if there was intellectual apprehension that thing done wrong was in fact wrong? Would it be enough for tempers to subside, or for the words of an apology to be complete, or the physical thing to be replaced? Not at all! These are all the means compared to the end of personal reconciliation. Only the full embrace of person to person will do. The things between the two were merely the obstacle.

It is the same between God and the sinner. Redemption, the call, justification, and so forth—these are only the removal of obstacles to our fellowship with God. But for that very same reason, neither are these elements of salvation abstract or left up to human will.

The cross brings us to God. The cross secures the adoption. The cross is not the key that turns the orphanage of the dead into an escape room to heaven. No—the cross invincibly obtains each rebel heart so that the Spirit will come and transform each one into the heart of a hope-filled child of God.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Exhortation. Recall that the flow of Peter’s thought here is grounding our suffering in the words of this verse as a further motive. Christ suffered for you. But since Peter had already said something similar in the previous chapter, what exactly is added to this? The answer is not in any substitution. We cannot substitute for other people. Our suffering cannot atone for anyone’s sins before God. Our suffering cannot even merit anything toward our own salvation. Our suffering also cannot reconcile the sinner to God in the sense of removing all of the obstacles that Jesus did by His work. And yet there is one sense in which our suffering can be a suffering directed toward that same end—namely, that we might bring people to God. It was in the passage from last time. And Paul said to the Colossians,

I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake (Col. 1:24).

As people see our endurance through suffering, there is the motive to show them Jesus, and in so doing to play a part in—to be a means by which—God brings them to Himself.

Use 2. Admonition. If you are not in Christ, then you belong to the unrighteous. If you are in Christ, by your own nature, you too (We) belonged to the unrighteous. God justified the ungodly (Rom. 4:5). You may say, I am ungodly. God knows it. You are exactly the candidate.

Paul goes further. It was not merely that we were all most unlike God, wretched, and wayward, but that “we were enemies” (Rom. 5:10). But how does he say it?

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

He substituted Himself—the righteous for the unrighteous, the perfect Son for the hate-filled traitor (our Greatest Friend put Himself in the place of God’s mortal enemy), and He laid down His life. Be reconciled to God, by faith.

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1. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, IV:408.

2. Francis Roberts, God’s Covenants: The Mystery and Marrow of the Bible, Volume 5 (Kansas, OK: Berith Press, 2024), 478.