In My Place...

I just started reading Mark Dever and JI Packer's book In My Place Condemned He Stood and have found it to be a book that stirs my heart with love for God and a longing to be more Christ like. The book is actually a collection of chapter and/or essays written by Dever of Packer on the nature of the atonement. Specifically it deals with the great truth of substitutionary atonement. Anyhow, in the introduction JI Packer republished "an analysis of insights basic to personal religion that faith in Christ as one's penal substitute yields. I found the list to be incredibly beneficial as I attempt to walk with the Lord day by day so I thought that I would republish it here for those of you who do not have access to the book.

1. God, in Denney's phrase, "condones nothing," but judges all sin as it deserves: which Scripture affirms, and my conciense confirms, to be right.
2. My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from God's presence (conscience also affirms this), and nothing I do can blot them out.
3. The penalty due to me for my sins, whatever it was, was paid for me by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in his death on the cross.
4. Because this is so, I through gaith in him am made "the righteosness of God in him," i.e., I am justified; pardon, acceptance and sonship [to God] become mine.
5. Christ's death for me is my sole ground of hope before God. "If he fulfilled not justice, I must; if he underwent not wrath, I must to eternity" (John Owen).
6. My faith in Christ is God's own gift to me, given in virtue of Christ's death for me: i.e., the cross procured it.
7. Christ's death for me guarantess my preservation to glory.
8. Christ's death for me is the measure and pledge of the love the Father and Son to me.
9. Christ's death for me calls and constrains me to trust, worship, love and to serve.

After Packer gives his list he gives a profound statement as to the importance of the above truths. Packer states, "Only where these nine truths have taken root and grow in the heart will anyone be fully alive to God." The doctrine of penal substiution is a great truth and desperately important for Christians who would grow in God. It is also a crucial truth for unbelievers who are in search of a deliverer. Without penal substitution there is no deliverance. Without deliverance there is no reconciliation with God and as a result the conscience will continue to be pricked with the question as to how sinful man is to become right with a holy God. The glory of penal substitution must be upheld. May we cherish the beauty of Christ our substitute all of our days!