Penal Substitution Spin on Romans 5:8 — “…while we were yet sinners, Christ [was punished to death by God] for us.”

The penal substitutionary rendering of Romans 5:8 says, in effect, “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners [He punished Christ to death] for us.”  [5/06/10]

God sees the heart of the matter…and responds accordingly.

The Holy Spirit is the “charisma” (χαρισμα)—the effect and sign on earth of God’s favor (χαρις) from heaven.  God’s favor in answer to our trust (indeed, even as a ‘reward‘ for trust!) supervenes our mundane experiential level of wisdom/foolishness, sowing/reaping, etc.—the ‘natural’ plane of cause and effect.  [7/06/01]

Jesus’ Resurrection was his ‘commencement’—his ‘graduation’ into full sonship or sonhood, whereupon he was given full rights of a mature son to inherit the allotment of the universe (“all things”)—“all authority [/rights] in heaven and on the earth.”  Thus Acts 13 teaches that it was at his Resurrection when the Father pronounced him “born” as His Son and he came to his majority.  [8/7/01]

ADAM’S SIN vs. ABRAM’S RIGHTEOUSNESS

The heart of Adam’s sin was distrust.

The heart of Abram’s righteousness was trust.

Surface issues may change from time to time in both cases, but the heart of the matter nevertheless always lies open to God.  No amount of righteousness backlogged by a person who is a sinner at heart (i.e., a distruster) can win the just award (δικαιωμα) of agelong life.  Conversely, no amount of sin docked up by a person who is righteous at heart (i.e., a truster) can condemn them to the just award of agelong death.  The desire of God has always been to win back our trust so that we might live; He takes no delight in having to issue a death warrant.  God wants our heart!  Human exercises of religion outside of God’s appointed way of salvation all reduce to tawdry bribes from alienated hearts.  They are “dead works/activities/actions,” leaving us still fearful and ignorant of God’s real desire, which is that we trust.  But we cannot trust Him unless He has a public track record of benignity demonstrated in history and documented for our perusal.  In other words, in order to blast through the encrusted misconceptions of accumulated darkening traditions, God had to set up a covenantal relationship with a typical sampling of raw, decadent humankind in order to prove His point—to prove His benign intentions to and for the whole human race.  It might have been anyone—anyone who had trust, that is.  It turned out to be Abram and his historic descendants.  Seeing is believing!  This is absolutely true and God knows it.  Anyone worthy of trust must show themselves to be so.  Hence the indispensability of an historic record, a book, a Bible, in order to shout down the empty pretensions of all competitors, who amount to deceivers of the human race—”thieves and robbers” (John 10:8).

This explains why, at the perfect moment of history, God sent His own Son to stage a grand demonstration of authentic divine justice.  However, it must be emphasized that it was not the righteousness of the Son that was historically in question here (that virtue was sufficiently displayed throughout his life and ministry—he was the entirely innocent Lamb of God, incontestably).  What was at stake was the answer of Heaven to the sins of his foes (and even his friends!) against him and the ultimate injustice of his crucifixion.  The Answer was swift in coming—Resurrection from the dead!  This was God’s supreme proof of His own benignity.  It proves both that Jesus was truly right in all he said and did (including his bold claim that God was his birth Father and, conversely, that he was God’s only-born Son), but it further proves that God would have been just to destroy all His enemies then and there, on the spot, yet conspicuously stayed His hand! No one had so much as guessed that God’s own brand of justice was so munificent that it could both reverse the unjust sentence of death by a kangaroo court (in effect) after the fact in an unprecedented exhibit of re-creative power and yet leave mercifully alive the vicious perpetrators of this most heinous of all historic human enormities, at least for a while…for long enough to repent of their sin against God, now fully exposed to be so, and, accordingly, trust such a beneficent God anew!  This possibility was beyond all expectation, transcending all imagining in its magnitude of kindness.

Yet that’s not all!  God awarded His Son a superabundance of favor, the essence and substance of which is the gift (δωρεα) of His own Wholesome Spirit.  And this He gave away for free (δωρεαν) to all who would return to the true God, the Creator, in trust.  Therefore, this heart-righteousness on the part of humans could now, even at the present time, be revealed before the world by an endorsement from on high as evidence of God’s favor, even—nay, especially!—to sinners! Not only did God not wreak vengeance for what humans (Judeans and Romans alike) did at the Cross—that was a divinely foreknown conspiracy of human ignorance and Satanic fury of wrath—but He moreover gifted us who now newly trust Him with an outpouring of His own wholesome nature—His Spirit!—while we were “still infirm,” “still in accord with the [current] era” (Rom. 5:6)—“the present vicious age“ (Galatians 1:4)—for that matter, “still sinners” (Rom. 5:8)! Messiah, the completely innocent Son of God, in obedience to his Father, surrendered himself to be victimized by Satan and “died for the [still] irreverent“!  Favor beyond all calculation!  Such a divine strategy settled forever the true motive underlying God’s historic behavior toward our dying race, with all our violence and violations!

The disposition, the inclination, the tendency, the bias of this superabundant gift of the Spirit of wholesomeness into which we who trust get immersed is life and peace, whereas only war and death can be expected from following out the decadent inclinations of our mortal flesh.  This new tendency from God that now is housed within us is what constitutes us just before God so that he calls us “saints” (hagioi)—wholesome ones!  This means we are no longer habitual, hardened sinners (in effect, criminals)!  We have a new inclination of heart—”a new heart“—to do right, even if we incidentally do fail (which by definition is sin).  This inclination, tendency, bias, or disposition (φρονημα) is subordinate to God’s desire, and therefore at peace with His law.  So, to walk in accord with it leads to life.  And agelong life is the ultimate award of all who endure in trusting God—the God unveiled in the career of Jesus, the Messiah.  [9/3/01; 8/16/25]