51. Didn’t Jesus bear the guilt of our sins?
He bore the sins themselves, according to Scripture. He was never guilty of sin, nor did God transfer any guilt from us to him. Guilt as a concept to be distinguished (much less separated) from sin or conscience has a dubious legacy. As such, it has no place in the vocabulary of the New Covenant. God didn’t distill guilt from sin and somehow process it separately by atonement. Nor did He dissociate the penalty of sin from the sin itself and make Jesus bear only the penalty. In reality, Jesus endured the actual sins being inflicted on him, but not their penalty! The perpetrators themselves would tragically bear the penalty for those sins, when God’s patience wore thin, if they refused to change their minds and accept their King’s bearing of their sins. His bearing their sin is equivalent to his forgiving them their sin, which in turn is identical to not accounting their sin to them—different images all coming down to exactly the same thing. The only question remaining was whether they would accept this release or repudiate it and bear their own sins, only to expire by degrees in their coiled stranglehold. Our desperate need is for an atonement that can handle more than ‘guilt’, more than ‘penalty’, in fact nothing less than actual sin, including the harm it inflicts on other creatures. What God has put together let no theologian separate.
The Premial Atonement 