An Exposition of Article Twenty-One of the Belgic Confession: The Atonement

We do not go to church to perform a ceremony appease the wrath of the angry God. We do not shed the blood of some poor animal and then consume it in flames as a burnt offering unto God. Nor do we sacrifice a virgin, or throw one of our children into a volcano as a form of human sacrifice. We do not perform some a ritual intended to purify us from our sins and to make God happy with us. Ministers of word ans sacrament are not priests, nor do we celebrate the Mass, offering the transubstantiated the body and blood of our Lord as an unbloodied sacrifice unto the Father so that God’s wrath toward our sins is turned away. We do none of these things. Why? Because we have a great high priest who has already turned aside God’s anger toward our sins! Therefore we assemble to hear yet again that Jesus has already, once and for all, satisfied God’s righteous anger toward our sins when he suffered for us upon the cross, because his sacrifice for sin paid our debt in full.

We are working our way through that section of the Belgic Confession which deals with the work of Christ (Articles Twenty and Twenty-One). Before we move ahead to consider Christ’s work as our high priest–who satisfies the justice of God on our behalf–we need to keep in mind the context in which Christ’s priestly work takes place. That context is human sin. If we do not consider the suffering and dying of our Lord in its biblical context–which is human sinfulness–then we really do risk misrepresenting or misunderstanding what Jesus does on our behalf. In the suffering and dying of our Lord we do not see a picture of human worth, as so many of our contemporaries seem to think. Rather, in the cross, we see the gravity of our sin and the horrible cost that our blessed Lord Jesus paid to redeem us from our sins.

To read the rest, Article Twenty-One: "We Know Nothing But Jesus and Him Crucified"