The Only Means of Atonement

Our Creator is full of compassion for broken sinners. But that reality doesn’t negate or override His perfect justice.

Throughout this series on divine compassion we’ve considered the compelling biblical truths of God’s mercy and forgiveness—especially how Christ revealed those divine attributes in His parable of the prodigal son. But to consider His compassion without explaining His uncompromising righteousness would be to misrepresent God’s character on the most egregious level.

It’s true that the prodigal’s father rushed to forgive his son unreservedly and unconditionally. But don’t imagine for a moment that when God forgives sin, He simply looks the other way and pretends the sin never occurred. It must be atoned for. Moses’s law was filled with bloody sacrifices precisely to make that truth inescapable.

This point is crucial, and ultimately pivotal, in understanding the story of the prodigal son. Remember that the main point Jesus was making in this parable was for the benefit of His audience—the Pharisees. He was addressing their faulty concept of God—that He delighted in their self-righteousness while being tepid about the forgiveness of sins. Their theology was so lacking any sense of true grace that they simply could not account for how forgiven sinners might stand before God, apart from a lifetime of religious effort. Like every false religion and idolatrous idea today, the Pharisees’ wrong view of what is required to make full atonement for sin lay at the root of their errant theology.

Don’t forget how the Pharisees had overlaid the truth of the Old Testament with their own elaborate system of human traditions, man-made rules, and useless ceremonies. They were convinced sinners needed to do good works to help atone for their own sins. They had even enshrined their own intricate system of finely detailed traditions as the chief means by which they thought it possible to acquire the kind of merit that could balance out the guilt of sin. That is why they were obsessed with ostentatious works, religious rituals, spiritual stunts, ceremonial displays of righteousness, and other external and cosmetic achievements. And they clung doggedly to that system, even though most of their rituals were nothing more than their own inventions, designed to paper over sin and build the façade of righteousness.

Here was the problem with that: Even authentically good works could never accomplish what the Pharisees hoped their ceremonial traditions would. That was made perfectly clear by the law itself. The law demanded no less than absolute perfection (Matthew 5:19, 48; James 2:10). And it was filled from start to finish with threats and curses against anyone who violated it at any point. The reason we need atonement is that we are fallen sinners who cannot keep the law adequately. Why would anyone ever think they could earn enough merit to atone for sin through their imperfect obedience to the law? That was the fatal flaw in the Pharisees’ system.

In fact, the law itself made perfectly clear that the price of full atonement was more costly than any mere human could ever possibly pay: “The soul who sins will die” (Ezekiel 18:4).

We Cannot Atone for Our Own Sin

Furthermore, and more to the point, the Old Testament never once suggested that sinners could atone for their own sin—either wholly or even in part—by doing good works or performing elaborate rituals. In fact, the dominant picture of atonement in the Old Testament is that of an innocent substitute whose blood was shed on behalf of the sinner.

The shedding of the substitute’s blood was perhaps the single most prominent aspect of atonement for sin. “Without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22). On the Day of Atonement, the blood of the sin offering was deliberately splashed onto everything in the vicinity of the altar. The priest “sprinkled both the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry with the blood. And according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood” (Hebrews 9:21-22)—the worshiper included. This was not to suggest that the blood itself had some kind of magical, mystical, or metaphysical property that literally washed away sin’s defilement. But the purpose of this bloody ritual was simple: The blood everywhere made a vivid—and intentionally revolting—illustration of the fearsome reality that the wages of sin is death. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17:11).

By definition, then, no sinner can ever fully atone for his or her own sin. And that is why Scripture so frequently stresses the need for a substitute.

We Need a Substitute

When Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac on an altar, God Himself supplied a substitute in the form of a ram to be slain in Isaac’s place. At Passover, the substitute was a spotless lamb. The main staple of the sacrificial system under Moses’s law was the burnt offering, which could be a young bull, lamb, goat, turtledove, or pigeon (depending on the financial abilities of the worshiper). And once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest sacrificed a bull and a goat, along with an additional burnt offering, as a symbol of atonement—a substitute who suffered for the sins of all the people.

Now it should be obvious to anyone that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4; cf. Micah 6:6-8). That’s why the ritual sacrifices had to be repeated daily. Everyone who ever seriously thought about the sacrificial system and weighed the real cost of sin had to face this truth eventually: Animal sacrifices simply could not provide a full and final atonement for sin. Something more needed to be done to make a complete atonement.

There were basically two possible answers to the dilemma. One approach was to adopt a system of merit such as the Pharisees’ religion, in which the sinner himself tried to embellish or supplement the atoning significance of the animal sacrifices with several more layers of good works. In the Pharisees’ case, this seems to be the very reason they made up their own long list of exacting rules and regulations that went so far beyond what the law actually required. They knew very well that simple obedience to the law couldn’t possibly be perfect and therefore could never achieve enough merit to atone for sin. So they artificially supplemented what the law required, thinking that their extra works would enable them to gain supplemental merit. The inevitable result was a system that promoted the most blatant forms of self-righteousness while diminishing the proper role of true faith.

The other approach was the one followed by every truly faithful person from the beginning of time until the coming of Christ. They acknowledged their own inability to atone for sin, embraced God’s promise of forgiveness, and trusted Him to send a Redeemer who would provide a full and final atonement (Isaiah 59:20). From the day when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and their race was cursed, faithful believers had looked for the promised offspring of the woman who would finally crush the serpent’s head and thus put sin and guilt away forever (Genesis 3:15). Despite some very strong hints (including Daniel 9:24 and Isaiah 53:10), the actual means by which redemption would finally be accomplished remained shrouded in mystery, until Jesus Himself explained it after His resurrection to some disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27).

Notice that Jesus did not mention anything about the actual means of atonement in the parable of the prodigal son. That, after all, wasn’t the point of the story. But our Lord did, nevertheless, directly confront the heart of every works-righteous religion—the insistence that all sinners need to perform certain works to atone for their own sin—and thus earn the forgiveness and favor of God. Next time we’ll consider how the parable of the prodigal son debunks that heresy.