If Jesus wasn’t truly condemned on the cross, then we are not truly justified before God. If Jesus did not objectively suffer the equivalent of hell in his body and soul, then there will be hell for us to pay. Praise God that there was hell to pay for Jesus when “in my place, condemned he stood….Hallelujah! What a Savior!”

Eighteen years ago, I heard a sermon on Matthew 27:46—Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At one point, the minister who was preaching this message said, “Jesus wasn’t really forsaken; he just felt forsaken by his Father in his soul.” I remember sensing anger welling up within me at those words. I thought to myself, “That’s a denial of the Gospel. If Jesus wasn’t really forsaken, then I have no grounds to believe that I will never be forsaken.”
Sadly, I have subsequently come to discover that there are quite a number of Protestant theologians who have shied away from asserting that Jesus was really and truly forsaken by his Father when he hung on the cross. Nevertheless, I want to explain what we lose if Jesus wasn’t, in fact, forsaken by God when he stood in our place.
What truly happened to Jesus on the cross?
Thomas Brooks, the seventeenth century English Puritan theologian, explained why we must never downplay what truly happened to Christ on the cross. He insisted,

The more we ascribe to Christ’s suffering, the less remains of ours; the more painfully that he suffered, the more fully are we redeemed; the greater his sorrow was, the greater our solace; his dissolution is our consolation, his cross our comfort; his annoy our endless joy; his distress in soul our release, his calamity our comfort; his misery our mercy, his adversity our felicity, his hell our heaven.[1]

Brooks then proceeded to explain exactly what happened to Jesus at Calvary, when he said,

Christ did actually undergo and suffer the wrath of God, and the fearful effects thereof, in the punishments threatened in the law. As he became a debtor, and was so accounted, even so he became payment thereof; he was made a sacrifice for sin, and bare to the full all that ever divine justice did or could require, even the uttermost extent of the curse of the law of God. He must thus undergo the curse, because he had taken upon him our sin. The justice of the most high God, revealed in the law, looks upon the Lord Jesus as a sinner, because he hath undertaken for us, and seizes upon him accordingly, pouring down on his head the whole curse, and all those dreadful punishments which are threatened in it against sin.[2]

Jesus experienced “an objective God-forsakenness” at Calvary.
Herman Bavinck, in his Reformed Dogmatics, stated the importance of understanding that Jesus did not merely undergo the feeling of forsakenness on the cross. Rather, Jesus experienced “an objective God-forsakenness” at Calvary. He insisted,

In the cry of Jesus we are dealing not with a subjective but with an objective God-forsakenness: He did not feel alone but had in fact been forsaken by God. His feeling was not an illusion, not based on a false view of his situation, but corresponded with reality.[3]

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The Bible is replete with warnings about jealousy, envy, and hatred that are manifested in gossip, slander, and division. A heart that is silently harboring any of these sinful motives will necessarily overflow with sinful words and responses, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45) The Gospel is the cure for this. When we realize how sinful we are and of how much Christ has forgiven us, we will be quick to pray for others and guard against speaking evil of them. 

One of the things that disturbs me most in life is having to drive down a backwoods road in Southeast Georgia behind a truck (and it’s always a truck!) going 20 miles under the speed limit with black smoke pouring out of the tail pipe. It’s not simply the fact that I know that the carbon monoxide is knocking a few hours or days off my life. Neither is it merely the fact that I can’t pass him on this particular stretch of road. What bothers me as much or more than both of those things is that it would literally take two minutes for the driver to check the dipstick to see if there was oil in his car, and it would take 30 minutes to change the oil.
Add to that the fact that it wouldn’t even take an entire minute for him to look at the speedometer, and in the rearview mirror, to see if he was selfishly holding someone up. Yet, as I confess my frustration, I find an analogy for my own life. Too often I find that I am the driver of the truck with the black smoke billowing out of my spirit. What I need more than anything is to pull over and do a spirit-check.
There’s an account in the Gospels in which Jesus has just sent the disciples into a city of Samaria in order to receive him while he was on his way to the cross. When the city rejected Christ, James and John come back with black smoke billowing out of their hearts. Luke tells us:
When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for him. But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them.And they went on to another village. (Luke 9:51-56)
Though James and John had reached back into the Scriptures in order to justify their response, Jesus rebuked them. It is actually quite possible for us to be actively engaged in gospel ministry and yet have a heart that is contrary to the gospel. It is possible for us to care about justice and yet have a bitter and vitriolic spirit. It is possible for someone to care about holiness while having a heart that is silently (or vocally) delighting in the fall of a brother or sister in Christ. The same brothers whom Jesus rebukes for wanting the destruction of others rather than the salvation of others will, in due time, reveal that they were also using Jesus to get to the top (Mark 10:37). If two of the choicest apostles of Jesus could need “a spirit-check,” I certainly need to pull over before I say, write, or do just about anything.
It’s interesting that in the account of Luke 9:51-56, James and John have not actually said or done anything to hurt someone. It is what they say to Jesus that reveals what spirit was in them. As the old saying goes, “the matter of the heart is the heart of the matter” or, as Proverbs reminds us, “Above all things keep the heart, for out of it flows the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23).
There are so many applications of this principle that even the world itself is not big enough to contain all the volumes that would have to be written. Here are four basic categories of application that I believe will help all believers:
1. Before You Draw Conclusions about Someone, Based on Something That They Have Said or Done, Check Your Spirit
I have many times taken something that someone has said and read it in the worst possible light.
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God has not left us ignorant of the sphere of warfare or of the enemy himself. Much biblical revelation from the first promise of Christ’s victory over the evil one (Genesis 3:15) is taken up with a revelation about the nature of spiritual warfare.

What impact would it have had on the church in our late-modern, scientific day and age if the author(s) of the Apostles’ Creed had included a statement about the reality of angelic activity and spiritual warfare in the Christian life? I envision such a statement as reading like this: “I believe in principalities and powers, spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places with whom we wrestle; I believe that Christ has conquered them by His death on the cross; I believe that I need the armor of God to overcome them in my warfare with them throughout the time of my sojourn here.” I desperately wish that this was a part of our weekly confession of faith, because in many theologically informed congregations where holiness, wrath, righteousness, justice, sin, grace, mercy, and forgiveness are unashamedly proclaimed, there is sometimes a noticeable lack of teaching about the reality of spiritual warfare in the believer’s life.
Though many ministers, in our day, have given inadequate attention to a biblical exposition of spiritual warfare, this was not always the case in the church. Among the Puritan ministers in seventeenth-century England, there was no such shortage of works on spiritual warfare. The more well-known works include Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, William Gurnall’s The Christian in Complete Armor, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christopher Love’s The Christian’s Combat, and Richard Gilpin’s Demonologia Sacra.
What accounts, then, for the disparity of emphasis among seventeenth-century Protestant pastors and pastors in more theologically minded churches in our day? First, many mature Christians rightly seek to avoid giving the sense that we are not responsible for our own sin. Far too many professing believers have dismissed their responsibility by functionally blaming Satan for their sin. In the epistle to the Romans, there is only one reference to Satan (Rom. 16:20), whereas there are fifty-seven references to sin. Our sin is a major theme of biblical revelation. We must keep in proportion what God keeps in proportion in His Word.
Second, it is all too common for believers to overreact to the unbiblical teaching they endured in churches in which the leadership approached the subject of spiritual warfare as something more akin to New Age, science fiction gnosticism than faithful biblical exposition. A wrong view of spiritual warfare leads to a wrong view of the Christian life. Nevertheless, the New Testament does include an abundance of teaching about the reality of spiritual warfare. The most full-orbed treatment comes at the end of Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus in his exposition of the armor of God (Eph. 6:10–20).
The Battlefield
At the opening of the letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul reminds believers in the church that God has already blessed them “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (1:3; emphasis added). At the close of the letter, he reminds them that the entirety of the Christian life is one in which they will be engaged in hand-to-hand combat “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12; emphasis added). “The heavenly places” is shorthand for the heavenly origin of the Christian life. It is also shorthand for the spiritual realm in which we fight against spiritual hosts of evil. The great Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper once captured the essence of this spiritual sphere when he wrote:
If once the curtain were pulled back, and the spiritual world behind it came to view, it would expose to our spiritual vision a struggle so intense, so convulsive, sweeping everything within its range, that the fiercest battle ever fought on earth would seem, by comparison, a mere game. Not here, but up there—that is where the real conflict is waged. Our earthly struggle drones in its backlash.1
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The unfolding of the history of redemption reveals how the Passover was a sign of God’s gracious covenant, in which He would provide the greater exodus from sin, Satan, and death by the sacrificial death of Christ. Believers confidently confess that “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Of all the Old Testament images that foreshadow Jesus, the Passover lamb was perhaps the clearest in foreshadowing Jesus’ saving work at Calvary. According to God’s own appointment, God promised to remove His judgment from His people when He saw the substitutionary blood of a spotless lamb painted on the doorposts of the Israelites’ homes in Egypt. The Passover was a sign of God’s covenant with His people in the Old Testament, indicating the way in which He would one day satisfy His wrath through the sacrifice of Christ.
After sin entered the world, Scripture immediately tells us that Abel gave an animal sacrifice to offer acceptable worship to the Lord (Gen. 4:4). The infinitely holy God only accepts as righteous those who come to Him by faith in the promised Redeemer, who would Himself be the atoning sacrifice for sin (Heb. 11:4). The blood of the substitutionary sacrifice is an essential element of Christian doctrine and practice. As the writer of Hebrews explains, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22). The blood of the God-appointed sacrifice typified the substitution of one party for another in the execution of God’s judgment. If “the wages of sin is death,” then only a substitutionary death can deliver a sinner from the righteous judgment of God (Rom. 6:23). This principle was signified clearly in the details surrounding the institution of the Passover lamb. Like its bloody counterpart, circumcision, the Passover lamb was an old covenant sacrament—a sign and seal of God’s gracious dealing with His people through atonement.
The Passover served as a sign of God’s covenant promise of redemption in Christ. The Lord gave instructions about the Passover at the time of the exodus that pointed to various aspects of the redemption that He would provide in Christ (Ex. 12; 1 Cor. 5:7). The Passover was instituted at the time of the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn. The Lord had graciously distinguished between Israel and Egypt with the first nine plagues. However, there was no distinction in this tenth and most terrible plague. If the Israelites did not follow the Lord’s instructions regarding the Passover, they would be subject to the same judgment as the Egyptians. This indicated that Israel, no less than Egypt, deserved God’s wrath and judgment because of their sin.
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Circumcision carried the promise of judgment for those who broke covenant with God. If someone rejected the covenant sign, he was rejecting the covenant Lord of the sign. If someone rejected the covenant Lord, he or she would incur the judgment of God. The act of “cutting” formed the signatory element of circumcision. The cutting away of the foreskin of the flesh denoted God’s promise to cut off covenant breakers from His presence, His people, and His blessing.

Early on in my pastoral ministry, I decided to preach a sermon series through Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Throughout the series, I dealt with the passages that referenced the old covenant sign of circumcision. After addressing the subject of circumcision several Sundays in a row, I was approached by a congregant who wanted to express his disapproval of me preaching “something of such a sensitive nature as circumcision” since young children were present. In response, I asked if he believed that I should faithfully preach God’s Word. He said, “Of course!” I then asked if he believed that I should faithfully preach from every part of God’s Word (i.e., Law, Wisdom, Prophets, Gospels, Epistles, and apocalyptic literature). “Absolutely,” he replied. Recognizing that he didn’t understand the prevalence of circumcision throughout Scripture or that God gave it as a sign of the covenant promise in the old covenant era of redemptive history, I explained that one would have to refrain from preaching a large portion of the Bible if he could not talk about the meaning of circumcision.
Misunderstandings about circumcision should come as no surprise to us. After all, even many in old covenant Israel failed to rightly understand the nature of the covenant sign of circumcision. Instead of trusting in the Christ to whom it pointed, they trusted in it as a badge of ethnic superiority. Instead of seeing it as the divinely appointed gospel sign of God’s covenant, they viewed it as a fleshly mark of merit. Several factors contribute to this ongoing misunderstanding of the nature of circumcision as a covenant sign in our day.
The first thing that contributes to misunderstandings about circumcision is that the Apostles largely spoke of it in negative terms when they referenced it in their preaching or included it in their epistles. This was necessary since the Judaizers (as well as other groups of Jewish false teachers) were spreading a false gospel among the members of the fledgling churches, insisting that circumcision was necessary for salvation (see Acts 15:1, 5; Gal. 2; 5:3; 6:11–15). To deal decisively with these errors, the Apostles spoke strongly against the need for circumcision. The Judaizers were telling the gentile Christians, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (see Acts 15:1). The Apostles made clear that this was a false gospel. As a notable exception, the Apostles also speak about the blessing of regeneration for elect Jews and gentiles using the term circumcision (see Col. 2:11–13).
The second contributing factor is that many people today have never been taught the typological function of circumcision in redemptive history. After giving Abraham exceedingly great and precious promises, the Lord commanded him to give the covenant sign of circumcision to all the males in his household on the eighth day (see Gen. 17:11–14).
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The Pharisee outlined his accomplishments; the tax collector summed up all of his actions when he confessed to God that he was “the sinner!” One was a prayer of self-congratulation, and one was a prayer of self-abasement. The end result: The Pharisee went home still in his sins, and the tax collector went home as justified before God because of the righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to him by faith alone.

The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14) is the most theological of all Jesus’ parables. It is the most theological because it deals with the subject that is of most importance to the life of the Christian—namely, how a man or woman, boy or girl is accepted before God.
The irony of this parable is that both of these men were going to the Temple to pray. On face value both of them seemed to be praying to the same God. Both men came to the same place of worship. Both were members of the same covenant community. Both were men of the working class. But that’s where the similarity ends.
Jesus loved to draw contrasts in order to drive home kingdom principles and truths. When he sets out these two men, he does so by appeal to their ethical, social and religious standing. The Pharisee was a respected, religious member of the covenant community. The tax collector was a despised and questionable figure in Jewish society. Throughout the gospel records, tax collectors are identified with “sinners”—a term usually reserved in Jewish society for those known for their sexual immorality.
By Human Standards the Tax Collector Was Not on His Way to Heaven, but the Pharisee Was
In his sermon, “Going Up, Going Down: The Story of Two Men at Church,” Sinclair Ferguson set out a series of reasons why we would have to conclude that the tax collector was not on his way to heaven, but the Pharisee was. By all human standards, the tax collector was disqualified from salvation on account of the following sinful characteristics:

The tax collector had been an unmerciful, money-extorting man.
The tax collector was unjust to the poor and the weak.
The tax collector probably was an adulterer.
The tax collector didn’t pray in what was the acceptable manner and form.
The tax collector probably hadn’t been to the Temple in years.

Whereas, here are some of the apparent moral virtues of the Pharisee:

The Pharisee is a man of discipline and prayer. He had given a tenth of all that he had. (Sinclair Ferguson explained, “If a church were made up entirely of Pharisees, its church budget would double, if not triple, if not actually quadruple.”)
The Pharisee is thankful for all things in his life.
The Pharisee is different from other people.
The Pharisee lives a far better life in society than the tax collector does.
The Pharisee is more like you or me than the tax collector.

Yet, it was the tax collector and not the Pharisee who went to heaven, because the Pharisee had a religion that had no place for mercy, whereas the tax collector saw his need for mercy.
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We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we are being pruned to bear more fruit. The Lord is removing the dross and refining the gold. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because they serve as a stage on which the deliverance and provision of God’s grace in Christ may be displayed in our lives.

Often, the most basic of God’s commands are the hardest for us to obey. We may ask ourselves whether or not we would have the faith to offer up a child to God—as Abraham did when he was called to offer up Isaac—while never really stopping to ask ourselves whether or not we have the faith to obey the most basic new covenant commands.
Take, for instance, Paul’s statement in 1 Thess. 5:18:
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you all.
When we consider such a command, we must ask ourselves the following questions: Am I thankful in all circumstances? What about when times are difficult? What about when I have experienced some particular trial? The Lord commands us to “count it all joy when we fall into various trials” (see James 1:2). How can I be thankful and joyful in the midst of a painful trial? The answer, of course, is found in all that the Scriptures teach us about trials. Here are ten reasons Christians can be thankful in trying circumstances:

We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we deserve eternal judgment and whatever we are experiencing short of that is a mercy.
We can be thankful in tryingcircumstances precisely because we have already been redeemed by Christ, blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, and sealed with the Spirit until the possession of the eternal inheritance.

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Christians today, no less than in Machen’s day, desperately need to come to terms with the fact that we are all theologians–whether good ones or bad ones. While we must be zealous to guard our hearts against embracing the ethos of the vitriolic doctrinal voices around us, we must equally avoid giving ear to those who, under pretense of love and charity, have functionally encouraged “a horror of theology.” As Machen rightly noted, “Every Christian must think about God; every Christian to some degree must be a theologian. The only question is whether he is to be a bad theologian or a good theologian.” 

The noisy gongs of acerbic and judgmental discernment bloggers, podcasters, vloggers and conference speakers are scattered throughout our social media feeds…and they’re here to stay. The uncharitableness with which such individuals speak online immediately ought to leave a bad taste in the mouth of Christ’s true lambs. After all, the fruit of the Spirit in the life of believers is an inextricable constituent of doctrinal truth. No amount of insistence that one is speaking the truth in love (when, in fact, he is speaking the truth in anger) will mask the fact that he is actually speaking in loveless pride. As Jesus said, “A tree is known by its fruit.” The bitter fruit of an acrimonious “truth speaker” will inevitably be the bringing forth of disciples more fractious than himself. Nevertheless, the root of the problem does not lie in a love of the truth and a desire to trumpet forth sound doctrine–it is rooted in pride and self-love.
In Scripture, God everywhere charges us to be lovers of biblical truth. The early believers “continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” (Acts 2:42). The Apostle Paul teaches us to be lovers of truth and practicers of love when he wrote, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:13). It is often, on account of a loveless defense of truth that many Christians succumb to the opposite error, namely, the embrace of the diminution of sound doctrine. One doesn’t have to scroll through his or her social media feed for long to come across an influential pastor or teacher warning his followers about the dangers of an overemphasis on sound doctrine. It sounds quite pious to sophisticatedly downplay truth in order to up play love. Nothing, however, could be more fallacious and factitious. It is impossible to love the truth and to speak the truth too much or too often.
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The eternally glorious Son of God was treated as a stranger among His own people (John 1:10–11). But He came to make us heirs of the world to come. He came to fulfill the hope of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. He entered that state of sojourning to secure redemption for His people. He identifies with the true sons of Abraham who also pass through this world as sojourners. 

After a decade of church planting and pastoring in the beautiful Southern coastal city of Savannah, Ga., my family and I moved on to a new place to begin a new ministry and a new season of life. As our time in Savannah came to a close, my heart began to fill with sadness over the fact that we were leaving behind beloved friends, a house we loved, and a delightful city. At the same time, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis’ statement about “pleasant inns” in his book The Problem of Pain. He wrote, “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. . . . Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”1

As believers, we are called by God to train our minds and hearts to firmly latch onto the biblical teaching that we are passing through this world as pilgrims and strangers. We can never allow ourselves to become comfortable here. We are merely sojourners passing through this world on our way to glory. From the first promise of redemption in the garden (Gen. 3:15) to the glorious heavenly vision of the City of God (Rev. 22), the totality of the Bible focuses on the pilgrimage for which God has redeemed His people.
When God called Abraham to leave his family and his homeland, he “went out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb. 11:8). “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise” (11:9). Moving from place to place, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob walked by faith in the promises of God. The Lord had promised Abraham that he would inherit the land; yet, the only land he ever possessed during his pilgrimage was a tiny plot that served as a burial place for him and for his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. The act of burial was the last great act of faith. It proved that he was looking for something better—the hope of the resurrection. Abraham never had a permanent home until he died. When he died in faith, he settled in “the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10).
Joseph also lived and died as a pilgrim and stranger on the earth. Abraham’s great-grandson spent the better part of his life as an alien in a foreign land. He was cut off from his earthly family until the end of his father’s life. He was instrumental in the rest of his brethren coming and dwelling in a foreign land. When he died, Joseph “made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones” (Heb. 11:22). By charging his brethren to take his bones up from Egypt and into the promised land (which would not occur until some four hundred years after he died), Joseph was teaching the Israelites that there was a better city—one for which God would raise him up, body and soul.
After Moses fled from Egypt into the wilderness of Midian, he married the daughter of the Midian priest Jethro and fathered a son with her. Moses named his firstborn son Gershom (literally meaning “stranger there”). Scripture teaches us the rich biblical theological meaning of this name in Exodus 2:21–22, where we read: “Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah. She gave birth to a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said, ‘I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.’”
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The rainbow is the sign that the Lord will preserve the present creation until the consummation of the covenant of grace when He will fully redeem His people from every tongue, tribe, and nation and bring them into the full enjoyment of a new creation. The sign of the Noahic covenant is therefore a gospel sign of the redeeming mercy of God in Christ (Isaiah 54:9–10).

Several years ago, my wife and I were driving back home from a trip out of town. At some point, we missed the exit sign on the highway leading to the town in which we lived. We drove for nearly thirty minutes before realizing that we were heading to the wrong city. We had completely missed the sign. Failing to see or to understand physical signs can result in unfavorable consequences; the same is true of failing to rightly understand God’s covenantal signs. This is evident today in the way many parade their sexual rebellion against God under the banner of a rainbow.
In redemptive history, the Lord established the covenant of grace with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Christ. With each administration of the covenant of grace, God gave various divine signs. He set apart the rainbow in the sky to serve as the sign of the Noahic covenant. The Noahic covenant was God’s pledge that He would sustain the created order (Gen. 9:9–13). Because of His promise not to destroy the earth, mankind could be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth (Gen. 9:1). In this sense, the Noahic covenant was a unique administration of the covenant of grace in that it contained a principle of common grace.
However, the Noahic covenant was ultimately serving the redemptive purposes of God. God was renewing the covenant promise He made to Adam when He inaugurated the covenant of grace (Gen. 3:15). In the Noahic covenant, God was setting the stage for the unfolding of redemptive history. Christ was in the lineage of Noah (Luke 3:23–38). Noah stood as a type of Christ, the head of a new creation (Gen. 8:13–19; 9:1–7). The ark itself served as a microcosm of redemptive history. The clean animals in the ark belonged to the Old Testament sacrificial system and typified the sacrifice of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (Gen. 8:20; Ex. 12; John 1:29; 1 Peter 1:19). Clean and unclean animals together represented the Jews and gentiles, for whose salvation Christ came into the world (Acts 10:9–48; 11:18).
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