A Christian is someone who has been renewed (regeneration), is being renewed (sanctification), and will be renewed (glorification). His sin has been dealt with judicially (justification), it is being dealt with progressively (sanctification), and it will be dealt with permanently (glorification). These nuances help us make sense of the presence of sin in the life of a Christian. While we saints remain in these bodies of sin in a fallen world, we continue to battle our own flesh and its non-reigning, extant sin—which is why Christians still do bad things. But one day, coming soon, we will do only that which is good, in glorified bodies and a renewed world that aren’t polluted by sin and corruption. 

There are generally two basic forms in which this question is asked. First, most Christians have at some point asked themselves, “If I’m a true Christian, why do I keep sinning?” Second, Christians and others have asked questions like, “How could Christians have committed such atrocities during the Crusades?” The two questions are different, but they have essentially the same theological and biblical answer. The answer requires us to understand what Scripture says is true of Christians in the threefold application of redemption. We must consider the Bible’s teaching about what has already happened to the Christian, what is happening to the Christian, and what has not yet happened to the Christian.
Already: What Has Happened to Christians (Regeneration, Justification, Adoption)
According to the Bible, when a person becomes a Christian, he has gone from death to life. He has experienced what we often call “regeneration.” This is foundational to our Christian identity. The Christian is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). He has been born again (John 3:3; 1 Peter 1:3). He was in darkness, and now he is in light (Acts 26:18; Eph. 5:8; 2 Cor. 6:14; 1 Peter 2:9). He was dead in trespasses and sins, and now he is alive together with Christ (Eph. 2:1–2; Col. 2:13). He was a slave to sin, and now he is a slave to righteousness (John 8:34; Rom. 6:1–23; Gal. 5:1). He had a heart of stone, and now he has a heart of flesh (Ezek. 11:19; 36:26). Regeneration and its fruit, conversion to Christ, signify a drastic change in identity. Regeneration does not, however, purge the effects of our fallenness from our souls and bodies. Regeneration imparts spiritual life into the soul, but one’s history before regeneration is not changed. This means that a Christian will hate his sin, but he still might be attracted to the same sins as he was before conversion. In the new birth (i.e., regeneration), we are effectually called, meaning that the Spirit not only calls us to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ by faith but also gives us the ability to respond to that call. When we place our faith in Christ, the Spirit unites us to Christ, from whom we receive the benefits of redemption, including “justification, adoption and sanctification, and the several benefits which in this life do either accompany or flow from them” (Westminster Shorter Catechism 32). In our union with Christ, justification, adoption, and sanctification are distinct yet inseparable benefits. In the act of justification, a person is pardoned of all sins and accepted as righteous in the sight of God only on account of the imputed righteousness of Christ received by faith alone (WSC 33). In the act of adoption, a person is received into the number and given a right to all the privileges of the sons of God (WSC 34). In the work of sanctification, a person begins to be renewed in his whole being after the image of God and is enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness (WSC 35). Whereas justification and adoption are acts of God, sanctification is a work of God. Justification and adoption are punctiliar, one-time events. Sanctification is a progressive, lifelong work. So while the Christian is declared righteous in God’s sight on account of the imputed righteousness of Christ, he has not yet been entirely renewed in his whole being. At least not yet. As Martin Luther said, the Christian is simul justus et peccator—at the same time righteous and sinful. Regeneration makes a man new, yet he is an undeveloped man—a man who is being sanctified but has not yet been perfected.
Already/Not Yet: What Is Happening to Christians (Sanctification—Mortification and Vivification)
Some people, upon conversion, find that many of their old affections and sinful patterns immediately dissolve. Others experience a more gradual renewal of their desires. Although there is a sense that we are sanctified at our conversion, in that we are set apart as holy to the Lord, sanctification as a process is experienced at different rates.
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Christ’s penal substitutionary death which demands the resurrection…because the resurrection is a demonstration of the legal verdict of righteousness pronounced on the incarnate Son, the resurrection is not an event we loosely tie to a legal atonement but is itself legal in nature as it is Christ’s justification. And because salvation comes to us via our union with Christ, we can declare that he “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus paid for all our sins on the cross and we are thereby forgiven.
Jerry Bridges wrote those words in his excellent work, The Discipline of Grace. As a pastor, I’ve recommended that book to many over the years and loaned out my personal copy so much that I’ve had to replace it repeatedly. But every time I read that line I cringe just a bit. I want to write in “and was raised from the dead!” I want his summary of the gospel to include the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. After all, Paul makes clear that Christ’s resurrection is no inconsequential matter, telling the Corinthians that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in yours sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). The resurrection is of absolute necessity to the gospel message. But I have to admit, this is an area in which I’m a bit sensitive.
An Increasing Awareness of a Truncated “Gospel”
My sensitivity stems from two things. First, I’ve pastored the same church in a college town for the last twenty-three years. With a transient town and students moving in and out, I’ve done my fair share of membership interviews over this time. In those interviews, I always ask the prospective member to share the gospel with me. To the best of our ability, it’s our church’s way of making sure that the person is a believer and is able to articulate the basic components of the gospel message. And more often than I like to admit, the resurrection is absent in these “gospel” presentations. The follow-up question that I’ve most frequently had to ask is, “Did Jesus remain dead?” Of course, without exception, the person answers by affirming that Jesus rose from the dead on that Easter Sunday morning, but for some reason the importance and necessity of the resurrection doesn’t immediately register.
The second reason for my sensitivity in this area comes from my days in graduate studies. The focus of my work in those years was on defending penal substitutionary atonement from the attacks of so-called “evangelicals” who began to argue against this understanding of Christ’s work around the turn of the century.[1] Their attacks ranged from claims that penal substitution is a picture of child abuse to arguments that it distorts intra-Trinitarian relationships. But one attack that always seemed to surface was that proponents of penal substitution ignore the resurrection because our understanding of the cross makes it unnecessary.
For example, Tom Smail wrote in his work on the cross,
The penal model as such does not quite know what to make of the resurrection. It gives birth to a spirituality that . . . is symbolized . . . by a preaching that is dominated by a one-sided preoccupation with sin and condemnation and the suffering of Christ as the price of our deliverance from it. The resurrection is seen only as the sign of the Father’s acceptance of the sacrifice, his affirmation of the sufficiency of what has been done to secure our pardon, and as a rather disconnected promise of life after death.[2]
Clark Pinnock ratcheted up the charge, claiming that the penal “idea of the atonement does not have much room for resurrection which can go almost unmentioned because it is not required.”[3]
Upon reading those attacks, I always wanted to dismiss them as attacks on straw men. “Of course defenders of penal substitution see the necessity of the resurrection,” I wanted to respond. We would never ignore it or let it go unmentioned. But then I would remember those membership interviews.
Given a moment’s reflection, you can see why detractors of penal substitution make this claim and why proponents of this precious doctrine often do allow the resurrection to go unmentioned in their “gospel” presentations. There is a certain logic to this “gospel” message that seems sound, coherent, and complete without noting the resurrection at all. Because God is holy and we are sinful, we bear divine condemnation. But God sent his Son into the world to live in perfect obedience and then die on the cross, bearing the condemnation that we deserved in our place. Therefore, if we repent of our sins and believe in him, we are credited with his perfect righteousness, and Christ’s death counts as the complete payment for our sins and removes God’s condemnation from us.
In this description, Christ’s death seems to account for everything. The problem, of course, is that without mention of the resurrection a gospel message is no gospel at all (1 Cor. 15:4), and Scripture will not allow such an empty proclamation to be called “good news.” Again, Paul declared, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17-18). He doesn’t say, “If Christ has not been raised, your sins remain forgiven and divine condemnation is removed, you just won’t get to experience resurrection.” Rather, he says if Christ isn’t raised, we’re still in our sins and will perish. Does this mean that Pinnock, Smail, and others are right, and it’s time to move on from penal substitution?
Of course not. To abandon penal substitution in light of its biblical support (see esp. Rom. 3:21-26; 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13) is no better than ignoring the resurrection. Rather, we need to understand the saving nature of the resurrection. We need to see that, far from penal substitution leaving no room for the resurrection, it is the penalty-bearing nature of Christ’s death that demands the resurrection if we are to be saved. But in order to see this, we need to understand three elements: (1) Christ as our representative substitute, (2) the condemnation involved in penal substitution, and (3) the legal nature of Christ’s resurrection. We’ll take these in turn.
Christ as Our Representative Substitute
In order to understand why penal substitution demands the resurrection, one must consider the representative nature of Jesus’s work. Some have attempted to place the concepts of representation and substitution in separate and exclusive categories,[4] but Scripture allows no such division. Believers are said to have “died with Christ” (Rom. 6:8) and are told that “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Christ represents believers in his high-priestly work (Heb. 5:1), and because he is our substitute, he bears divine wrath in our place and on our behalf. Thus, Jesus is a “representative substitute” for believers, as Packer noted fifty years ago.[5] This recognition must be our starting point in seeing how the cross and resurrection are necessary for our justification. The reason for this is because what Christ accomplishes in both his death and resurrection is appropriated to believers through our union with him. What is true of him becomes true of us, his people, because he is our representative.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Joy is not happiness. We think it is, but it’s not. How do we know? Because Peter makes it clear that it co-exists with grief (look up chapter 1 and read from verse 3, see what I mean?). Happiness changes with emotion, joy co-exists with emotions. Which of course should lead us to a conclusion: joy isn’t an emotion.

I’ve written before on how longing is the ground of joy, but a friend pointed out that I didn’t actually define joy in that piece. A fair criticism, that if I’m honest was because I was still trying to find a neat way of saying what I wanted to and feared that an around the subject rumination would take the length of four usual posts and perhaps not leave you wiser at the end.
So, foolishly, I’m going to attempt that now. As my jumping off point I want to start with 1 Peter 1.8-9.
Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Is your life characterised by a joy inexpressible that is filled with glory? Hearts around the world sink as they read the question. It probably isn’t because what you’re picturing is effervescent extroverts who act like they’re modelling for a Coke advert all the time.
Your life may not be characterised by a joy inexpressible that is filled with glory, but I do wonder if part the problem is our expectations. I pulled that quote out of 1 Peter without the context. He’s just told them that they’re going to suffer, they should expect to know grief, and they live in a time that is dying while (he hints) belonging to a time that has yet to be birthed. He is not writing to a bunch of happy clappy charismatics (though joy is for them too) who are so heavenly minded they’re no earthly use—he’s writing to people who know challenge, ostracism, difficulty, and the mind-numbingly cold embrace of grief.
The grammar of the Greek tells us that this is not a command, but a description. Thank goodness.
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