Audio Transcript

Well, if you’ve read and studied the Gospels, you notice that in the life of Christ there’s not a lot of detail about temple practices — in particular, animal sacrifices. We know that Jesus, as a small child, was presented at the temple with an offering of turtledoves or pigeons (that’s told to us in Luke 2:24). This was the offering of a poor mother, in lieu of a lamb sacrifice (as permitted in Leviticus 12:8). But this is a pretty rare connection between Christ’s life and temple sacrifices. In fact, later in his ministry, Jesus will forgive sin all by himself, bypassing the whole Jewish sacrificial system altogether. And that leads to a question from Karen, a listener to the podcast who wants to know why.

Here’s her email: “Hello, Pastor John, my name is Karen, and I live in Germany. Thank you for this podcast. My question concerns the act of forgiveness mentioned in the Bible. I have learned that without blood there is no forgiveness. Hence the sacrifices in the Old Testament and the dying of Jesus in the New Testament. I understand that. But what I don’t understand is the period between the two. When Jesus walked on earth, he often addressed people by simply telling them that their sins were forgiven. He didn’t prescribe an offering in the temple. And he had not shed his own blood yet. So how was that possible, under the assumption that blood is still needed for forgiveness?”

This may sound like a question with limited application or a question of interest to only a tiny number of Christians. But I want to show that it touches on the issue that is at the heart of Christianity. Every Christian needs to be aware of it for our own stability and courage and joy. So, hang on.

Forgiveness Requires Blood

The question starts with a biblical assumption from Hebrews 9:22, which says, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” That’s what it says. So God instituted in the Old Testament the way, the plan, that there would be animal sacrifices, and that sinners who looked to God and, by faith, identified with this killed animal would be forgiven for their sins. The death of the animal would be counted, so to speak, as the punishment for their sin.

For example, in Leviticus 4:15, if the people as a whole have sinned, it says, “The elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before the Lord, and the bull shall be killed before the Lord.” Then verse 20 says, “The priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven.” So that’s where Karen’s question starts. God regards sin as so evil and so destructive that in order to set things right there must be a death, a blood-shedding, in order for sins not to be counted — that is, to be forgiven.

“God regards sin as so evil and so destructive that in order to set things right there must be a death.”

Then the second premise of Karen’s question is that Christ has in fact shed his own blood for sinners so that, if we are united to Christ by faith, our sins are forgiven for his sake. His blood-shedding counts for us.

He became “a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). He bore our condemnation in his flesh (Romans 8:3). This is the center and the glory of the gospel. So Paul says in Romans 5:9, “We have now been justified by his blood,” or in Ephesians 1:7, “In him we have redemption through his blood,” or in Ephesians 2:13, “You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

So Karen’s question is, When Jesus walked the earth, he often addressed people by telling them that their sins are forgiven, but (she says) there was no offering in the temple, and Jesus had not yet died — how’s that possible under the assumption that blood is needed in order to have the forgiveness of God from all the sins that we do or that take place?

Animal Blood Was Not Enough

Now let’s clarify the question, first of all. Whether or not there were sacrifices being offered in the temple, Jesus pronounced forgiveness on his own authority, without any reference to those sacrifices. For example, in Mark 2:5–7, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” And the scribes say, “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

So Karen wonders about this relationship of forgiveness that Jesus pronounced to the God-appointed shedding of blood, when Jesus hasn’t yet shed his blood and he isn’t pointing people to the blood-shedding of the animals. And here’s one of the keys that unlocks this puzzle for Karen. In Hebrews 10:4 and 11, the writer says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. . . . Every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.”

So now we get the startling revelation that all those animal sacrifices actually in themselves accomplished nothing. Oh, we’re not between two really effective seasons here — Old Testament, New Testament. The forgiveness that God pronounced on faithful worshipers in the Old Testament was not ultimately owing to animal sacrifices.

The true saints in the Old Testament, they grasped this — they did, at some level. For example, David said in Psalm 51:16–17, “You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrary heart, O God, you will not despise.” And God said in Hosea 6:6, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” And Jesus quoted that verse, Hosea 6:6, twice to show how badly some of the Jewish leaders were misreading the Old Testament (in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7).

Every Sacrifice a Pointer

So now we can see that Karen’s question about forgiveness during Jesus’s lifetime really does apply to the entire history of Israel. The animal sacrifices were not achieving the forgiveness of sins — not ever. So what were they doing?

The answer is, they were pointing to Jesus — God’s final, once-for-all, decisive sacrifice for sins. They were foreshadowing the blood-shedding of Christ. So it says in Hebrews 9:12, “[Christ] entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.” So the reason all blood-shedding has ceased — animal blood-shedding has ceased; Christ’s blood-shedding has ceased once for all — is that Christ’s sacrifice was so complete, so glorious, so full, so decisive that it secured an eternal redemption.

“Christ’s sacrifice was so complete, so glorious, so full, so decisive that it secured an eternal redemption.”

If you have Christ, you have eternal forgiveness for all sins. Now I think Karen knows this, but what she may have overlooked (I don’t know) is that not only does the sacrifice of Christ extend forward as an eternal redemption but also backward in history as a redemption for all those saints who put their faith in God for his forgiveness — through the foreshadowing of the cross in the animal sacrifices. The cross worked effectively backward and forward.

And that’s what Paul makes clear in Romans 3:25. He says, “God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” In other words, the reason God was righteous to pass over — that is, forgive — the sins of all Old Testament saints, and the sins that Jesus forgave during his lifetime, was that God was looking to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So just as our sins two thousand years after Christ are covered by the blood of Christ, so Abraham’s sins were covered by the cross of Christ two thousand years before Christ existed. And so it was with all the saints in between.

Glorious Divine Achievement

So, Karen’s question is not of limited significance. It takes us to the very center of the gospel — indeed, the center of reality. It shows us that all forgiveness, and all the benefits that flow from forgiveness through all time — as far back as you can go, as far forward as you can go, all of it — all of that forgiveness is based on those few hours when the Son of God suffered and bled and died for sinners.

If we grasp how central, how profound, how glorious was that divine moment, that divine achievement, our lives will be more stable, more courageous and more joyful.

Audio Transcript

Today’s email is from a friend of ours, a listener named Matthew who lives in San Antonio. He has thought up a creative way to get us into the tricky thicket of end-of-life decisions. Here’s what he wrote: “Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. I know from listening to the podcast for years that you are very hesitant to speak to specific end-of-life decisions because they require so much wisdom from medical professionals and because every life is so different. But we have nearly endless medical advances we can take advantage of now to prolong life. So I’d like to ask my question strictly within a hypothetical I made up:

Imagine a forty-year-old, middle-class Texan who is a regenerate, Bible-believing Christian man and has been married to a godly Christian woman for eighteen years. He’s diagnosed with aggressive terminal cancer and has two options before him, neither of which he likes or favors, but one of which he must choose.

1. If he does nothing, he lives a relatively normal life for one more year.2. With aggressive treatment and three surgeries, he will live for four years, and those years will be less than pleasant.

He has modest life insurance. His gracious employer will continue to employ him and pay his salary, plus one year after he passes. So he will have two to five years of income. He has two kids, ages sixteen and twelve, and it’s unclear if they’re believers. What, if any, biblical principles would inform your own choice between these two options?

As I have reflected on this hypothetical, I think it sounds very plausible, very real. I’m sure it’s happening multiple times every day like this. I have seven observations or principles to take into account when facing these two scenarios that he laid out.

1. Pray for Healing

First, I would pray. I would ask my friends to pray in either the one-year scenario or the four-year scenario. I would ask them to pray for my healing. I would not ask for this, probably, if I were eighty-five, because in this fallen world the death of an octogenarian is more or less normal — that is, it’s God’s plan that we die rather than live forever in this age. But at forty, death is much more unnatural and intrusive, and therefore it is more fitting, it seems to me, to seek God for the miracle of healing.

The decision to pray for healing does not dictate whether I choose to get the aggressive treatment or not, because God can heal me without it, and he can heal me through it. So the choice to pursue aggressive prayer for healing does not decide which option I go with. I would pursue prayer for healing in either case.

2. See Prognosis as Probability

Then I would keep clearly in mind that both scenarios — the one-year and the four-year — are human probabilities, not certain destinies. If you choose the one-year scenario, you might feel miserable instead of good for the entire year. If you choose the four-year scenario, you might feel better than you ever dreamed you could for those four years, in spite of all the surgery and chemo. You are only dealing with human probabilities.

“Prayer is the glorious wild card, and God may answer in dozens of ways we don’t expect.”

And when you stir in prayer, you are opening yourself to the fact that God may turn the one-year scenario into a four-year scenario, and he may turn the four-year scenario into a one-year scenario. Prayer is the glorious wild card, and God may answer in dozens of ways we don’t expect. So when I say that both scenarios are only probabilities, I am saying that not only may humans be wrong, but doctors may be wrong. But God has infinite options at his disposal for how you spend those years.

3. Face Death with Trust

Next, I would remind myself that both death and suffering for the Christian can be for our good. They are evil in themselves in the sense that they are contrary to God’s original perfect design, but in God’s providence both death and suffering serve his children.

Death serves his children by introducing them to immediate fellowship with Christ, which Paul says is far better (Philippians 1:23). And not only that, but facing death joyfully, square in the face, may be a compelling witness to our family, to our children, and to others. It might bring them to Christ.

“Facing death joyfully may be a compelling witness to our family, to our children, and to others.”

Suffering, like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, can serve us by keeping us humble, deepening our reliance on the Lord Jesus, and enabling us to glorify his power in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7–9). Like death, suffering endured with deep, joyful, tearful confidence in Christ may be a compelling witness to our family and to others.

So, it’s important not to play death and suffering against each other, as though one is intrinsically more likely to be a blessing than the other. We don’t know that. Either one may be a greater blessing than the other in our lives and in the lives of our family.

4. Commend Christ’s Sufficiency

Both the one-year scenario (feeling good and dying early) and the four-year scenario (feeling bad and living longer) could be used by God for the salvation of our children, the strengthening of our wives’ faith, and the magnifying of Christ among medical professionals, church members, and lost neighbors.

We cannot predict with any certainty whether our willingness to face death early or our willingness to suffer long will have the greater force in commending the all-sufficiency of Christ to sustain us. We don’t know. God could use either one to save our children and others.

5. Fight Satan with Grace

Neither the one-year scenario nor the four-year scenario need be presumptuous, as though we are taking God’s prerogative into our own hands by choosing. We will need God’s help in both scenarios.

Satan will threaten us in the shorter scenario with fear, anger, and worldliness in how good we feel. He will cause us to focus on the coming day of our death next year. He will tempt us to be bitter and angry, and our faith will not survive without the sovereign help of the grace of God.

And if we choose the longer scenario, more life could mean more misery. Satan may have a field day causing our bodily and mental weaknesses to make it almost impossible for us to do the kind of spiritual warfare we have to do in order to persevere to the end. We will not make it through this suffering to the end without the sovereign grace of God sustaining us and carrying us.

6. Be Fed by Friends

In both scenarios, I would mobilize a team of trusted and loved Christian friends who would pledge, as much as they’re able, to walk with me through either scenario to the end. I have in mind not only daily prayer for me — that my faith not fail, the pain not overwhelm me, the absence of pain not result in my worldliness — but also that these friends would feed me the word of God regularly, whether through emails, mail, texts, phone calls, or visits.

As Matthew 4:4 says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” That’s especially true as we walk up to the edge of eternity. I will need the word of God. I need somebody to look me in the eye and say to me, in the name of God: “God has not destined [you, John Piper,] for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for [you] so that whether [you] are awake or sleep [you] might live with him” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).

7. Treasure Christ in Life

And finally, I would keep in mind that neither of these choices is a choice to hate life, or to commit suicide, or to allow anyone else to perform euthanasia on me. Life is a glorious thing — now and after death and, best of all, after the resurrection in the new world with Jesus.

But even so, I would cherish the gift of life now, and I would seek not to waste it. Whether for one year or four years, whether I’m feeling good or feeling miserable, whether death is tomorrow or years away, I would seek to treasure Jesus Christ above all things and to bring as many people with me as I can into the everlasting enjoyment of his presence.

The West is not as post-Christian as many imagine. No doubt there are places on earth, including Middle America, where it might feel like the wider culture is currently rejecting Christianity at an unprecedented rate. But the milieu that characterizes post-Christendom is still (despite itself) irreducibly Christian.

Imagine a cryogenically frozen Viking waking up in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, or a Mayan exploring contemporary Mexico, or Asterix and Obelix encountering German social democracy, or French laïcité. As “secular” as those places might feel to many of us, their values would seem deeply Christian to anyone who had not experienced them before.

Nevertheless, living in the world of late modernity obviously presents plenty of challenges for orthodox believers.

Is Christianity Losing?

Whatever we call the religious outlook of our societies — secularism, post-secularism, post-Christianity, or something else entirely — people are still skeptical toward Christianity and in some cases downright hostile.

The pagan gods of Mammon, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Gaia, and Dionysus still trouble modernity in varying levels of disguise. Renouncing them to follow Christ is still costly. It is still harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:23–24). The church still bears many flaws, and the cultural influence of Christianity has often served to magnify those flaws to those outside her doors.

An internal, psychological challenge compounds those external, cultural ones: some Christians feel like they are losing. In some countries, this is a question of sheer numbers. For a variety of reasons, including prosperity, fertility, and the privatization of postwar life, the percentage of people in church on Sundays has steadily fallen in many Western nations since the Second World War (while rising substantially in parts of the Majority World over the same period). Even in America (often seen as an outlier), over two-thirds of churches are in numerical decline. At the same time, there is a widely held perception that Christian convictions have become increasingly marginal in public life, which in many cases is clearly true.

Five Responses of Faith

That decline in numbers and of perceived relevance has met with varied responses from the Western church. Some of those responses (repentance, prayer, a renewed commitment to discipleship) are certainly positive. Others (fear, hostility, and the pursuit of influence or power by compromising morally or theologically) are plainly negative.

Some observers remain optimistic and argue that things are not as bad as they seem; others think they are a good deal worse. Some argue the church needs a radical change in strategy; others claim the challenge is not really a methodological one at all, and the church should essentially hunker down, get used to life on the margins, prepare to suffer for what she believes, pray, and trust that the God who brings life to the dead will do something new.

“The milieu that characterizes post-Christendom is still (despite itself) irreducibly Christian.”

So, how do we live by faith in a culture losing its faith? In my book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, I consider how the church responded to a similar crisis nearly 250 years ago — in particular the celebration of grace, the pursuit of freedom, and an articulation of Christian truth — and I suggest the last two centuries have only served to elevate the importance of these three responses. In this piece, I’ll mention five additional responses which, though perhaps obvious, are nevertheless vital for believers in an age like ours.

1. We Suffer Well

It’s hard to overstate the role that suffering has played in the expansion of Christianity. Unfortunately, a naïve version of this claim persists, which attributes to suffering almost magical powers to grow the church automatically (a view which will not survive contact with the history of Japan, say, or the Arabian peninsula). But from the Acts of the Apostles onwards, when Christians are marginalized, robbed, imprisoned, and even martyred, the gospel grows because nothing validates the confident hope of resurrection like suffering.

For Christians in the West, this has long been a challenge because believers have rarely been persecuted in ways that most unbelievers would recognize. But society is changing. Followers of Jesus here now increasingly do suffer, in various ways, for the sake of the name. And preparing for that potential mistreatment — in ways that neither overstate nor understate the current challenges, and equip the saints to respond without resentment, to turn the other cheek, to suffer joyfully — is vital to living by faith in a post-Christian culture.

2. We Counter-Catechize

Counter-catechesis is Alan Jacobs’s term for what the church has always had to do: train disciples what to believe and how to live in response to (and in dialogue with) the specific ways that their wider culture shapes their beliefs and practices. Ever since Jesus said, “You have heard . . . but I say . . .” Christian formation has taken into account the most pressing distortions and deceptions of the age, and applied the gospel to them.

When new distortions and deceptions spring up quickly, though, as they do in a media-saturated and highly fragmented world, the church aims at a moving target, shifting our focus continually to ensure that we are answering the questions our culture and our people are asking now. The number of pastors who admit they do not regularly and publicly teach on sex, gender, and sexuality testifies to the difficulty of this task.

To catechize faithfully, churches will need to address questions of autonomy, identity, sexuality, race, and morality, among others, provide clear and coherent answers to them from Scripture, and then show why the cultural answers do not provide the same explanatory power as the word of God.

3. We Model Humble Courage

In a social context where Christian orthodoxy can seem bigoted, dehumanizing, and grotesque, and where people have no shortage of ways to make their criticisms heard, believers are tempted to mimic the response of animals faced with danger: fight or flight. The former feels like humility, but risks timidity and cowardice. The latter feels like courage, but risks slander and pride.

However, the faithful option is humble courage. If we mistakenly think in terms of a spectrum with humility and timidity at one end and pride and boldness at the other, then we will end up justifying vices as virtues. Abusive and arrogant leaders will be defended as “brave” or “robust.” Compromise with immorality and idolatry will be lauded as “gentle” or “gracious.” The way of Jesus, by contrast, combines exemplary humility with astonishing courage, most powerfully as Christ goes to the cross. We must not allow our culture’s false dichotomies to prevent us from following his lead.

4. We Keep Repenting

It is always easier to see the need for repentance in bygone eras. Antisemitism, crusades, inquisitions, wars, slavery, and racism appear grotesque to us now, and we struggle to understand how previous generations of our brothers and sisters failed to see those evils as we do. The log in our own eye is harder to spot (Matthew 7:3–5).

So, in what ways have we been complicit in baptizing greed and materialism in the church? Or the lust for power? Or expressive individualism? Or a celebrity-obsessed, entertainment-driven consumer culture? Or the sexual revolution with all its tools for divorcing sex from marriage and children? Or obsession with technologies, embracing anything and everything out of convenience without regard for the consequences? Or demographic segregation, whether on grounds of race, class, wealth, education, or something else? Or political hypocrisy?

A repentant church is a faithful church — not to mention a church that stands a better chance of being heard when it calls the world to repent along with her.

5. We Keep Praying

The need for prayer goes without question in theory, but maybe not always in practice. The kinds of people who read articles like this — let alone the kinds of people who write them! — are often, I suspect, drawn more towards working out what we can do (devise strategies, write books, start initiatives, flood people with content) than asking God to do what only he can do (overthrow kingdoms, move mountains, crush gods, fill deserts with flowers). But even a cursory glance at the contemporary landscape reveals that our plans and programs are hopelessly inadequate for the task before us.

The West does not need to be roused from sleep but raised from the dead. Only a mighty work of the Holy Spirit will bring the renewal and revival we need. And prayer is our God-given means of seeking it. So, the church needs to pray for God to do something unprecedented: bring a post-Christian society to repentance and faith on a massive scale. Happily, as Tim Keller pointed out in How to Reach the West Again, every great new move of God was unprecedented until it happened. Come, Lord Jesus!