The Servant and the Lamb: Rethinking Substitution - Episode 179

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today, we are going to continue the conversation that I could not finish in my last episode, in episode 178, where I was talking about the frames of substitution, very broadly speaking.

[00:00:32] Basically, I brought out a whole bunch of different conceptual domains that fit under what some people will say is substitution. And my contention is that I would really prefer to keep the term substitution into a particular and narrow frame where we're talking about swapping out or replacement or instead of, or another way we could put that is in the place of.

[00:01:05] When we're talking about the idea of one person taking the place of another person in a situation so that the person who is taken out doesn't actually experience what the person who steps in experiences. And that is, like, the whole focus and the purpose and intent of a substitute.

[00:01:27] So a substitute teacher is teaching in place of the teacher. Or a stunt double is acting in place of an actor. And while we can have some crossover meaning where we can have in the place of as well as things like representation and filling the vocation that is similar, I argue that those are two separate conceptual domains because of the associated things that go along with it.

[00:01:59] A substitute teacher is the replacement for the teacher inside the actual classroom in the teaching situation. A stunt double is the replacement for the actor because he is going to take the consequence of any kind of danger. And we might say that the substitute teacher is also taking the place of the teacher in- the dangerous situation in front of a classroom full of kids, right?

[00:02:26] If one of the kids throws a spitball at the substitute teacher, they're throwing it at the substitute teacher, not the real teacher, right? I mean, I'm sure many of you are familiar with this as either parents or teachers yourself where a classroom full of kids is going to test the substitute in ways that they would not test the original teacher because they've already done that, and they've already learned the consequences there, right?

[00:02:53] So in the conceptual domain of replacement, I think it is really helpful if we're just keeping things to that and then keeping the idea of representation as a separate thing, because a substitute is going to take the other person out, and a representative is going to include the other person as part of what they're doing. It's a participatory and not an exclusionary frame.

[00:03:22] So with all of that being said, I described those frames, and then really the only example I was able to get into is the one about Joseph. And that's okay because he is really one of the main pictures that we have of this.

[00:03:37] And I talked a little bit about the history of people expecting the Messiah and being a little bit confused because they understood that they were expecting a Davidic Messiah, a kingly Messiah. But it was also clear when they read their Scriptures that the Messiah would suffer. And I'm not saying that King David did not suffer, but he did not suffer in the way that a lot of the Scriptures about the coming suffering Messiah actually suffered.

[00:04:10] And so the Davidic king does not complete the picture of the Messiah that the people were expecting and wrestling with.

[00:04:20] Now let's just stop here for just a brief moment to talk about the idea of typology and things like that, because I think this is not something really neglected a lot of times in church, but it's mentioned as something kind of assumed, and nobody really talks about how it works. Now, I'm putting that word "works" into quotation marks because I'm not trying to say that typology is some sort of mechanism or something like that.

[00:04:52] But there is a logic to what we see in history and in the narrative of the text, where we have these different figures in the Bible. And of course, they are historical figures. I'm not denying that. But the things that these people did in their lives and the functions and vocations they took up, and the incidents that they had to go through, and the way that they dealt with those things, but that sets up a pattern of what we should expect when we see the Messiah come on the scene in history. And so in the New Testament, we see many of the New Testament authors talking about things like Jesus being better than Moses, or Jesus being the final Adam, and ideas like that.

[00:05:39] So in the Old Testament, we have a bunch of threads that run through, and they point to and foreshadow and are a type of prophecy of Jesus. These typological patterns are not only for the future, but they obviously play out within history in the people in the past at the time.

[00:06:00] And so when you're looking into apologetics and the idea of Jesus fulfilling all of these hundreds of prophecies, right? And by that, we're talking about prophecies of foretelling. And I'm not saying that Jesus doesn't do this, but another way to see the coming of the Messiah and the pattern of the Messiah and how they would expect the Messiah to show up is through these typological patterns.

[00:06:27] And part of the reason why much of what Jesus did was so unexpected was because He pulled together various threads in Himself, because He is the culmination of the entire thing. He is not just the Davidic Messiah, He is also the Josephine Messiah. He is also our perfect prophet. He is also our high priest, and so on.

[00:06:54] And these were things that people didn't really understand were all going to come together in one person. Or if they did understand that, there are just too many of the pieces to hold together in order to come up with the picture of what Jesus would actually do when He was here on Earth. And so this is why we have Jesus explaining Himself to people in the synagogue and to His disciples and to Paul on the road to Damascus.

[00:07:22] All right. So all of that being said, what we're doing here in this little series, because we're focused on the work of Jesus and what He did, and we're trying to find out what these patterns are that lead up to Jesus, because these are the pictures that teach us the theology and the concepts and the purpose and the intent.

[00:07:44] And all of these things, they're wrapped up in the narrative patterns and the typology. So I hope that makes a lot of sense for you guys and why we're approaching these things the way that we're doing. This is a little bit different than a proof text approach.

[00:08:02] And please know that I'm not really using the term proof text in either a positive or a negative light. It's just a particular method that people use to go to a particular text, and they pull out the theology in that particular text. And certainly that is part of the exegetical process. We have to get our meaning from the actual words and the intent of the author in the text.

[00:08:28] This is why we have a historical grammatical methodology. We look at the history of what's going on. That includes the context of the time and the culture and the background and all of those things. We look at the grammar. We look at the actual words. What do those mean? But a lot of times when we go with this proof texting approach, we are focused really highly on lexicons. We are focused really highly on particular texts that we want to be showing something in a dogmatic fashion, as if the author himself were writing a systematic statement.

[00:09:10] And that's not necessarily what a biblical author was doing.

[00:09:15] I don't think many people will disagree with the idea that systematic theology happens in the context of philosophy and synthesis of the text from a philosophical perspective.

[00:09:30] And we simply can't assume that a biblical author was writing a text in that same kind of a framework with those intentions in mind. Because a biblical author is writing to real people in their own particular context, and they're explaining something to those people in a particular way within that context.

[00:09:53] And so these statements by the biblical authors are not systematic in the comprehensive synthesis, analytical kind of a way that we get in systematic theology.

[00:10:06] Now, when we're doing that kind of an approach and we're taking a systematic look at Scripture, then it is okay on some level to take the texts and use them in some fashion like that. Because again, the intent, at least I would hope the intent is, to draw the meaning from the text and from what the author is trying to say. And so again, all of our ideas have to come back to the text.

[00:10:32] But my contention is that in this methodology of using patterns and typology and narrative structure, what we're doing is we're looking at each individual author and their context and what they mean to their own people, and we're drawing out that meaning, and that forms this arc of narrative which shows us the path to Jesus and what Jesus is doing in history and what He's doing within the church and the body of Christ.

[00:11:04] So that is really my overall goal and the way that I approach things, and why last week I said that if we're gonna read something like the suffering servant in Isaiah, we really ought to be reading that within this larger pattern of Scripture. And the suffering servant is highlighted very well in the figure of Joseph.

[00:11:28] Now, that does not mean that what we have in the Joseph story is everything that we're gonna have in the suffering servant in Isaiah fifty-three. Now, these are not one-to-one matches, just like Joseph as a forerunner or a type of the Messiah is not gonna have all of the qualities or all of the pieces of the Messiah. But Joseph and his life and his situation that he's in, he's going to point forward to that life of Christ.

[00:11:58] But we have a lot to get through from Joseph through the Old Testament to get to Christ as well. And so that means that the pattern shows up in various ways, and in each place that the pattern shows up, we get additional information. And so we're building a profile along the way with more information that is revealed in different places by different authors.

[00:12:24] They are not contradictory, but they build a structure as they go. And so biblical theology is really taking the context of each individual piece of text very seriously, but also building that into a canonical story that leads to Jesus. At least that is the way I am approaching it. I believe that's the way Dr. Heiser approached it. That is the way the Bible Project approaches things, and so on. So it is a methodology where we have both the particular instances of context, but also not forgetting to look at the whole picture.

[00:13:05] All right, so we're gonna take this context that I talked about last week with Joseph and the suffering Messiah figure And we're gonna look at that as the continued pattern through Scripture. Joseph gives us the narrative pattern of the righteous sufferer who is rejected by his brothers, who suffers because of their sin, who is exalted by God, who forgives the guilty, and who preserves life.

[00:13:32] And I'm gonna suggest that there are other places that we see this, but because Isaiah 53 is a really prime example of it, we'll talk a little bit about that today, and hopefully get to some other texts and passages as well.

[00:13:47] So Isaiah 53, which I'm not gonna exegete the whole passage, because in last week's show notes, and I'll put it again in this week's, Spencer Owen, who does this great podcast called The Trauma Informed Church Kid, he did a really fantastic walkthrough of Isaiah 53. So I'll be drawing upon his work, but I'm not gonna repeat it all here. So I will link that in the show notes.

[00:14:12] But my proposition for you to consider is that Isaiah 53 takes the same kind of pattern that we have in Joseph and gives it prophetic, priestly, and representative depth.

[00:14:25] The servant suffers for the people. He bears their iniquity and their burden. He intercedes for transgressors, and he is vindicated by God. And you have to have all of the pieces there in the text, and not just isolate a particular phrase or verse. You have to see the thing as a whole.

[00:14:47] And Spencer does a really good job in his walkthrough of showing how the New Testament authors are using this passage. They are not using it in any kind of a way that is going to lead us down a penal substitutionary atonement path. So if we want to use Isaiah 53 as a representative text of somebody taking on the suffering of others and the wrath or judgment or penalty of God, then you're gonna have to do that without the New Testament's direct help. Because none of the New Testament quotes and allusions to this passage will get you to that point.

[00:15:27] They use it for very different reasons. They use it to show forgiveness and to highlight human evil and humans injustly abusing God's servant, who will indeed bear their iniquity, in the same sense that the priest or the scapegoat in Leviticus would bear the iniquity of the people. Neither one of those are bearing penalty or punishment because they don't die, they don't function as replacement substitutes, and so on.

[00:15:59] So if you want to use the text of Isaiah fifty-three to show Jesus as a replacement substitute punished instead of the guilty, then you're gonna have to build that without the benefit of using the way the New Testament authors actually use the text.

[00:16:17] All right, so going back to the Joseph narrative for a moment. Joseph gives us the grammar. He is innocent. His brothers are guilty. Joseph suffers because of their sin, and because of their betrayal, and their injustice toward him, and their deception. But God uses that whole situation and Joseph's suffering to preserve life.

[00:16:41] Joseph is sent ahead, not swapped out, and his suffering exposes and transforms the brothers.

[00:16:49] Without the whole situation that we have with Joseph and what the brothers experience in Joseph , then we would see no transformation of the brothers. But we do, and it is on account of the whole situation.

[00:17:03] And yet Joseph forgives without any kind of penalty transfer or need for them to pay a cost. And so Joseph, the previously rejected brother, becomes the exalted source of life.

[00:17:18] So importantly, just recapping last week, Joseph teaches us that a righteous sufferer can suffer because of the guilty and for the guilty without being a replacement substitute for them.

[00:17:32] And then if we move from Joseph to Isaiah fifty-three, we see many of these similar pieces. Both of them involve a righteous sufferer, both involve rejection, both of them involve suffering that is caused by other people's sin, and both of them involve God's purpose working through human evil. And that ends in the exaltation of the person who was suffering and provision of life for other people.

[00:18:03] So I'll just let you read Isaiah fifty-three yourself. But to parallel these ideas, Joseph is the beloved son and the brother rejected by the other brothers. Isaiah fifty-three, the servant is despised and rejected. Joseph suffers because of other people's sin. The servant in Isaiah is wounded because of transgressions. Joseph is cast down, humiliated, and falsely accused. The servant in Isaiah is oppressed, afflicted, and unjustly judged. The human evil in the Joseph story is that his brothers sold him. And the story in Isaiah is one of human rejection. The people esteemed him as being the way he was.

[00:18:53] There is a divine purpose explicitly stated in both. In the Joseph narrative, he says that God sent me. In Isaiah fifty-three, it says that it was the will of Yahweh to crush him. But as Spencer points out, the text isn't saying that God crushes the servant, but that the servant is crushed and that it is the will of Yahweh for this to happen. Like it's not a secret, and God will use it for good. Very similar to the Joseph story.

[00:19:26] Again, Joseph is exalted after his suffering and the servant in Isaiah is likewise exalted. In both, we have the preservation of life, we have remnant theology, and we have intercession.

[00:19:41] There's also notions of forgiveness in both. So I invite you to take both of those stories and actually read them side by side.

[00:19:50] I was just talking about proof texting. What we don't want to do with proof texting is just pick and choose which verses we want to highlight and then leave out the other ones. So as far as Isaiah fifty-three goes, it is necessary to read it within the whole narrative of the servant songs as a whole.

[00:20:12] We shouldn't start with the isolated phrases or the verses that we want to focus on, but rather the larger context. You will get the same kind of reading in the Psalms if you just pick and choose. If you only pick and choose certain verses in the Psalms, you could come away quite easily with this idea that God is evil and that He rejects people and that He ignores us and neglects us.

[00:20:40] But that is never the actual story of any of the Psalms, even though we have some really dark passages there. Every single Psalm has encapsulated within it the hope of God and His restoration. And so I would say that that's also what we have in the Servant Songs.

[00:21:00] In those places, we have a picture built where the servant is chosen. He is a light to the nations. He is the one who brings justice, the one who restores Israel, the one who suffers shame, and the one whom God vindicates. But if we swap out God with the actions of people and human evil in that story, we get a very different picture.

[00:21:26] And it is really crucial that we read carefully because we have phrases like, "We considered him stricken by God." But that doesn't say that God struck him. It says, " We considered him stricken. We considered him struck down by God and afflicted." So it looks like the servant is cursed or afflicted, but that is the perception of the people, and the entire passage overturns that idea.

[00:21:55] So again, this is the danger of proof texting. We have to look at the wider picture here. We can't read too quickly, and we can't overlook really essential details.

[00:22:08] When we're talking about ideas that are different than PSA, one of the main questions I will see over and over is, "Well then, what did Jesus do? If he didn't bear our penalty and bear the wrath of God or something like this instead of us, then what did he even do?" And this is where I would point you to the New Testament quotations of Isaiah 53.

[00:22:37] They're a fantastic way of looking at what Jesus did.

[00:22:41] We have Matthew eight, which is obviously before the cross, and Jesus bears disease by confronting it, by healing it, and by removing it. He doesn't become sick instead of the person he's healing. He simply heals them. And this is the context that Matthew uses Isaiah 53 in.

[00:23:04] First Peter two shows a really good example of unjust suffering and vindication in the pattern of Isaiah 53, and the people following after and participating in the work of Jesus. Jesus lives a life where he suffers unjustly, and this is an example for us to look at so that we can bear our own unjust suffering in a righteous way. We can entrust ourselves to the one who judges justly instead.

[00:23:38] The context of bearing sin or iniquity is very difficult for us to understand when we don't grasp the context of the priestly mediation in Leviticus, where the priests are dealing with things in a way where they are removing impurities and they are removing problems. The priest bearing the iniquity is not becoming guilty himself. And this is within the logic of sacred space and holiness, because if the priest who is bearing the iniquity is the guilty party and he is going directly into holy space, well, that is contra the whole idea and logic of holy space and the restoration of things.

[00:24:23] I mean, we have pictures of the priests needing to wash and purify themselves before they can go in and things like that. It just breaks down really quickly if we think that the animal or the blood of the animal or the priest is carrying guilt and sin into the place of holiness.

[00:24:42] We really have to take a close look at the upside down nature of what a lot of Scripture is doing. Because if you read it from a certain perspective with certain presuppositions, we have ideas that it might be saying something when really the text is saying something the opposite of what we might be thinking about.

[00:25:05] Isaiah fifty-three is a good example of it because if we think that the servant is being a substitution replacement for the people and God is legitimately putting his penalty and his wrath upon the servant, then we're just not reading it very carefully. Because what the text is doing is flipping that around and saying, " You think that the servant is guilty. You think that the servant being marred and afflicted is going to make the servant unable to serve God. But it's actually the opposite. Your affliction of the servant himself is going to show the injustice that you are living out your lives within."

[00:25:51] And so the whole situation is not condemning the servant. it's condemning those who are treating him unjustly. And yet by going through that process and going through the situation, the servant, much like Joseph, bearing all of these things, - is gonna come out at the end with forgiveness, even for those who mistreated him.

[00:26:15] The servant's death is not the satisfaction of justice, it is a miscarriage of justice that God is going to overturn in his vindication.

[00:26:25] And the line, again, I mentioned this before, of it pleasing God to crush him. It maps really cleanly onto the phrase that we talked about last week, where Joseph told his brothers, "What you meant for evil, God meant for good." It is not that God wanted you to do evil things to me, but God wills the saving outcome that is going to happen through the suffering.

[00:26:53] That doesn't make God the unjust actor. It doesn't make God the one who is pouring out his wrath on a substitute.

[00:27:02] Okay, so to wrap up this piece of the puzzle here. We have a couple of different pieces to this, human evil and divine purpose. Those two things combined do not make God the unjust actor or judge. And I think that Joseph helps us read Isaiah fifty-three faithfully because Joseph already teaches us how to hold these two things together.

[00:27:28] His brothers mistreated him, but God used that situation for a positive good. He worked through the evil without becoming the one who caused it. And Isaiah fifty-three gives us this exact kind of pattern. The servant is genuinely suffering. He is rejected by the people, and the judgment against him is unjust.

[00:27:52] But through all of that suffering, we have Yahweh's saving purpose that comes out at the end. We have the same pattern with Jesus. Jesus is handed over according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, and yet he is crucified by lawless men. The cross isn't an accident or something that God didn't know was gonna happen.

[00:28:16] But that doesn't mean that God is the one who set it up or who committed the injustice against Jesus. But when it happens, God is the one who vindicates him and saves people through Jesus.

[00:28:31] All right, so that sets up the theological center of many other passages that we could look at. And we are going to be diving into a few of those today. There's way more than even I could bring out in a few episodes. So I will be choosing some main ones to look at. And then after this episode, we will move on probably to actual patterns of substitution replacement, where that really does show up in Scripture, and we can look at those as critically as we're looking at this here.

[00:29:07] The next place we're gonna point to is another really big piece of what we need to see here, and this is with the Passover.

[00:29:16] I'm going to suggest that the Passover, and the lamb in particular, is not substitutionary because the lamb is not a replacement for anyone.

[00:29:28] I know that's a big claim. I know a lot of people are gonna disagree with me on that, but hold with me because I've got some points to make here. I'm gonna show you that the blood marks the house as a refuge. And as the situation happens with the Passover, the people are gonna participate in Yahweh's deliverance.

[00:29:50] So if the servant of Isaiah fifty-three is priestly and oriented toward removing sin and impurity from the people by doing what he's doing in his life and in his flesh, the Passover is going to be a picture of refuge and participation. Still not replacement, and I'm gonna call us to be cautious about flattening all sacrificial or suffering language into substitution.

[00:30:22] Okay, so let's get into the context of the Passover. I am going to say that I believe that the Passover is pretty clearly not substitutionary. Remember, we are keeping the term substitutionary to be about replacement and in the place of. And I fully realize that this might be very difficult for us to see or to really frame in a different light.

[00:30:49] We associate the Passover with Jesus and what He has done in His Passion Week, and rightly so, because He was doing all of these things in a particular time that would have meaning and would have a lot of theological backing to what He was doing.

[00:31:08] But I think there are some really obvious points that we ought to be able to look at here. If we come to the Passover, and that connection to what Jesus is doing, and we simply bring with us all of our presuppositions about punishment and penalty and debt and how God is going to necessitate a payment in order to pay for sins.

[00:31:32] If we're bringing that to the text, then we're gonna make connections between all of these pieces. But I don't think they make a whole lot of sense, and I think there are better ways to see it, and I hope that with your newfound understanding of the frames of substitution that I've offered, that you can see this for yourself.

[00:31:53] It is not that there are no connections. It is not that Jesus is not our Passover lamb, because He really is.

[00:32:00] But if we are presuming that the Passover should be treated as if it is obviously substitutionary, where the lamb dies and the Israelite firstborn lives in exchange, then that's how we're getting this idea that the lamb must have died instead of the firstborn, right? This is the replacement logic.

[00:32:23] But that's not actually what Exodus twelve says. It doesn't say that anywhere, in fact. The Passover lamb is not a replacement victim. Even though there is an escape from death, that does not mean, by necessity, that the lamb is killed instead of the people of Israel. It is not killed instead of the firstborn.

[00:32:48] It is not judged. It is not punished. It is not cursed, condemned, or treated as guilty. And I'll bring out a few of these points as to how we can see that. The lamb is slaughtered for a ritual meal, and its blood marks the household as a protected space.

[00:33:06] The category we should be seeing here is not substitution, but I'm gonna suggest it's something a little more like protective identification through ritual participation. Or put more simply, the Passover lamb is not a replacement for anyone, but it is the center of a deliverance meal, and its blood marks the household as a place of refuge.

[00:33:33] Okay, so there's a whole bunch of points I'm gonna go through here. Number one, the Passover lamb is not said to replace anyone. This is a very obvious point. In the Exodus narrative, we never have anything stating that the lamb is to be sacrificed instead of anyone else. The text never says it dies instead of Israel or the firstborn. It never has any guilt imputation transferred to the lamb. It is not said that the lamb is going to receive Israel's punishment or that the lamb bears Israel's sin, even though even if it did, that would be somewhat different.

[00:34:15] But we'll set that to the side. The lamb is just not judged in Israel's place. These are not the categories that Exodus brings us. So let's look carefully at what Exodus does give us. i'll let you go ahead and read the text yourself, but the Exodus gives us a few particular points.

[00:34:34] Number one, they're using a lamb without blemish. So that does recall in our mind the context of Leviticus and things, even though we don't have Leviticus yet. This is clearly also a household meal. The whole household is to partake, and if there is too much lamb for one single household, then multiple households are supposed to gather to eat the lamb.

[00:35:00] Of course, we have the blood on the doorposts and the lintel.

[00:35:03] We focus so much on the lamb that we often sideline a lot of the other points in the narrative. The people are supposed to stay inside the marked house. We have the context of judgment that is passing through Egypt.

[00:35:19] So here is our context of judgment. I'm not saying it's not there, but we have the context of being passed over or that the marked houses are protected. And I think very obviously, I hope everyone sees that Israel is leaving slavery as a delivered people. That's the whole kit and caboodle of the story here.

[00:35:42] And if you've been listening to my previous episodes lately, I hope you're recalling things from the flood. This is very much that kind of a picture of deliverance within a marked sacred space being delivered through judgment.

[00:35:59] And I'm gonna say, when we take this as substitution replacement and we build a really deeply main theology out of this... Like, there is nothing more core than the idea of PSA, at least for those who take this perspective, right? I'm sure that that doesn't mean that people who affirm PSA are sidelining any other kind of atonement theory or other things that Jesus is doing. But if you're presuming that PSA is the logic in Scripture, then it's exceptionally core.

[00:36:32] And yet, if substitution is the point here in Exodus, Exodus is remarkably quiet about that. The text never says the lamb replaces anybody. It never says guilt is transferred to the lamb. It never says the lamb is punished. It never even says that Israel is guilty of anything themselves. Israel is not the ones who are under judgment, but I'll get to that here in a minute.

[00:37:01] The destroyer who comes along is not killing the lamb instead. But we do have a meal, we have some blood, we have a doorway, we have a house, there's a boundary, and deliverance through the judgment that is flooding the land.

[00:37:17] Next point I'm gonna bring up is that the lamb does not receive the plague, we might say. The lamb is actually slaughtered earlier. The plague comes later at midnight. So yes, we do have animals who are killed within the plague that happens through the night, but it's not just lambs, and that kind of throws another wrench into the whole thing, right? Because animals aren't said to have atonement or anything like that. So why are animals included?

[00:37:47] But my point here is that the destroyer does not arrive at the house of the Israelite, see the firstborn, and decide to kill the lamb instead. The lamb is already dead. Its blood is already on the doorway. Its flesh has already been eaten or is in the process of being eaten. So the lamb does not receive the event that would otherwise have happened to the Israelite firstborn.

[00:38:12] So that just kind of removes the context of really direct substitution replacement, right? This is very important because substitution involves replacement. One undergoes the thing so that the other does not. And we will see that directly in places where we do have substitution replacement in Scripture. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen in places, and that's why we can say it's not happening here.

[00:38:44] The tenth plague is the death of the firstborn. The lamb is not a firstborn, first of all. The lamb is not killed by the plague or even during the plague. The lamb is not killed by the destroyer. The lamb is not killed at midnight in place of the child. Its death belongs to the ritual meal, not the plague event.

[00:39:06] So it's not even undergoing that judgment. The lamb's death is not the plague redirected. It is part of the rite that marks the household for protection.

[00:39:17] Another really important thing to look at, again, we are reading the text very carefully, or at least I'll have you read the text very carefully. I don't have time to read the whole thing. But the blood is called a sign.

[00:39:30] In Exodus 12:13, " The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are." So the text gives us this explanation for what the blood is doing and how the blood is functioning. The blood is a sign. It's not described as a payment. It's not described as evidence that a penalty has been inflicted or is being diverted.

[00:39:55] It is not described in any way that gives us any proof that a substitute has died. And what does the sign of the blood do? Well, the text tells us that as well. It identifies the house as belonging to those participating in Yahweh's deliverance.

[00:40:14] The blood isn't placed on a person. It is placed on the doorway of a house that contains a household. The protected unit is the whole household, and the doorway marks the boundary between inside and outside. So here we cannot say that the blood is functioning in any way as a transferred punishment, but it is a boundary marker of refuge.

[00:40:39] And so this brings us to my fourth point. The issue is inside and outside, not substitute victim. The logic of the Passover is spatial. The household must remain inside the marked house. No one is to go out until the morning. So we have a boundary. And inside that boundary we have refuge. Outside of it we have exposure to the danger.

[00:41:05] We also have the context of you're either participating in this or you're not. If you're not, then you're not going to be saved. And we've already again built this pattern that we saw with Noah. Noah enters the ark. Yahweh shuts him in. We see that in other places in Scripture as well.

[00:41:25] These are refuge patterns, not substitutionary patterns.

[00:41:31] Point number five. The lamb is eaten, not merely killed. And this is such an important point. The lamb's death is not isolated from the meal. In fact, the meal is central. The lamb is, of course, slaughtered. It is roasted. It is eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. And the household eats in haste, dressed for departure.

[00:41:56] That means that the lamb is a picture of something bigger than just its death. It is the center of a meal of deliverance, identity, readiness, and departure in obedience to Yahweh. The people are participating bodily here. They are not passive observers of a substitute dying somewhere else. They mark the house. They eat the lamb. They stay inside. And they prepare to leave.

[00:42:22] All of those pieces are gonna matter to what the meaning of the Passover is.

[00:42:28] And I think that this kind of ritual logic we have here shifts the frame from a potential legal exchange which isn't really there at all, it's not described that way, to liturgical participation in the rescue of Yahweh's people.

[00:42:44] Number six, and I've already mentioned this, the plague is judgment on Egypt and on Pharaoh and on Egypt's gods. Exodus 12 says this directly. Yahweh is gonna pass through Egypt, he's gonna strike the firstborn, he's gonna execute judgment on all of the gods of Egypt. So none of this is framed as wrath against Israel and being redirected onto Israel's lambs, but it is a judgment on Egypt's oppressive order.

[00:43:16] But that in and of itself, framing it that way, shows the need for Israel to be protected in this.

[00:43:23] When we see the wrath of God actually come down on people, it is largely indiscriminate except for the fact that God will warn the people, and they can take refuge in Him, and in that refuge, Yahweh will protect them.

[00:43:40] So even though it's maybe apparently indiscriminate to us, it's not from God's perspective and from the people's perspective because what they need to do is participate in Yahweh's deliverance. If they do, then they do get protected, even if they don't always get out of all of the repercussions and consequences. But regardless, Israel is saved.

[00:44:05] This is the picture and the story. Israel is living in the land where judgment is falling. They must follow Yahweh's commanded rite and remain within the marked refuge, and needing protection in the place of the judgment that's going on around them is not the same thing as being the guilty target of that judgment.

[00:44:26] And this matches the logic of the flood, and it matches the logic of the exile as well. Noah needed protection in a judged world. The faithful people in exile needed preservation within another judged people. Israel needs a protection in Egypt on the night that judgment falls.

[00:44:47] None of that indicates any substitutionary replacement logic.

[00:44:52] The plague is judgment on Pharaoh, Egypt, and Egypt's gods. Israel is in the land where judgment is falling, so Yahweh gives them a refuge sign, and protection is not substitution.

[00:45:06] Now, here's one of the difficult points, point number seven that I have to give you. The lamb's death is necessary, but the necessity of a death does not mean that substitution replacement has to be going on.

[00:45:21] This is some of the obvious pushback I've seen from people. " But the lamb still dies, and Israel lives." And so in that, they're seeing a kind of exchange logic. The lamb's death leads to Israel's salvation. And I won't dispute that at all, but again, it does not automatically make the lamb a substitute.

[00:45:44] Many things can be necessary for deliverance without being substitute replacements. For example, the ark is necessary for Noah's preservation, but the ark is not Noah's substitute. The Red Sea crossing is necessary for Israel's deliverance, but the sea is not Israel's substitute. The bronze serpent is necessary for healing in Numbers twenty-one, but the bronze serpent is not a substitute for the bitten Israelites. Rahab's scarlet cord marks her house, but the cord is not her substitute.

[00:46:21] Likewise, the lamb is necessary for Passover because its blood marks the house, and its flesh forms the meal. But necessity does not equal replacement.

[00:46:34] Point number eight, Passover is about forming Israel as a delivered people. Passover is not just about individual firstborn survival. It is about Israel's liberation from slavery and their birth as a people. And by the way, remember all of the people who went with Israel? It was not just Israel. It was a mixed multitude who decided to follow Yahweh and worship Him.

[00:47:01] And so Passover establishes a memory and an identity, and it gives an annual reenactment that will enable later people to participate in the same circumstance. The text says, "When your children ask what this means," it actually gives us an explanation. They are to say that Yahweh passed over the houses of Israelites in Egypt when he struck Egypt and delivered their houses.

[00:47:28] It is a reminder of that salvation. So Passover is not merely that single night of crisis. It becomes Israel's foundational deliverance meal, and it forms them as a people who are rescued from Egypt. So while there is the context of deliverance from death, that context is seated within the idea of becoming the delivered people of Yahweh and being allegiant and following Him.

[00:47:56] We have a memory created as well as an identity which tie up with the allegiance, obedience, and departure from a situation. Israel is created as a formal nation brought out of slavery by Yahweh's strong arm. Then you can move right into the New Testament and see what Jesus is doing on that fateful Passover, where Christ is offering a new exodus and forming a new people.

[00:48:27] There's a couple of other more obvious points that show that the lamb is also not a replacement substitute. One of those is that the firstborn are consecrated afterward. After the Passover, the firstborn belong to Yahweh. They are consecrated, they are marked as redeemed, which is not a natural follow-up if the lamb is simply replacing them and the situation is one and done and over with.

[00:48:55] The deliverance of the firstborn leads to them belonging to God, being consecrated to God for service. So we can't say that the lamb died instead of the firstborn and now the firstborn are uninvolved in anything. But really, the firstborn were spared, and now they belong to Yahweh. That fits participation and covenant consecration.

[00:49:21] And so deliverance creates belonging, and the spared life now belongs to the God who delivered it.

[00:49:28] I hope you're seeing that Passover's logic is closer to Noah than it is to substitution replacement. Noah is not saved because someone else is drowned instead of him. Noah is saved because he enters the refuge that God provides. Likewise, Israel is not saved because a lamb receives the plague instead of them.

[00:49:50] Israel is saved because the household is marked and remains inside the refuge that God commands. It is the same pattern. Judgment is coming. God gives a warning. God provides a means of refuge. The faithful respond. A boundary is marked. The judgment passes through, and life emerges on the other side.

[00:50:13] So likewise, I would say that Christ as our Passover also does not require substitution replacement. When Paul says that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, he is not giving an abstract mechanism of penalty transfer. In First Corinthians five, the context is leaven, purity, identity, and the community becoming what it is in Christ. It is formative, and this is what constitutes our identity. There are boundaries put into place here.

[00:50:48] So I'm saying when Paul says that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, we should let Passover itself define those categories. Christ is not our Passover because God punished him instead of us. Christ is our Passover because through him, God marks out a people, brings them out of slavery, protects them through judgment, removes the old leaven, and forms them as a new creation community.

[00:51:17] All right. There are a few more points I could give for Passover not being substitutionary, but I think that hits a lot of them. And I hope you can see that Passover is one of those places where people often assume substitution, but that's because they're bringing that baggage with them into the text.

[00:51:36] If you're thinking the lamb dies, the Israelite firstborn lives, therefore, the lamb must have died instead of the firstborn, in order to get that context, I want to see it within the text itself. But that is not how Exodus twelve describes the event. And so calling this substitution skips over the actual ritual logic in place. And the text is very explicit about some of that. Passover is not replacement. It is marked refuge, covenant identity, liberation, and participation in God's order and obedience to Him.

[00:52:18] So we've talked about several of the really deep formative texts that people use in order to argue for PSA. Now I'm going to move to one that is a little bit less seen. And I think this example is going to be really interesting. I'm gonna talk about Rahab. The story of Rahab is a story of household refuge and faithful allegiance that really is another excellent example of the biblical pattern we're tracing because her story gathers together several themes we've already seen. Judgment is coming, a warning is given, a household is marked, a boundary is created between the inside and outside, a visible sign identifies the place of refuge.

[00:53:04] Faithful allegiance is required, the people who are gathered inside are preserved, and life continues through the faithful one's response. That sounds a lot like Noah's Ark. Sounds a lot like the Passover. It sounds a lot like what we've talked about with Isaiah, and it points forward to Christ as refuge.

[00:53:24] But Rahab is not a substitute for her household. She does not die instead of them. She is not punished in their place. She does not receive the judgment of Jericho so that they do not. She does not absorb wrath as their replacement. And yet, through her faithful allegiance, her household is preserved.

[00:53:45] So this is the category and the theme and the pattern we want to notice. I'm not gonna take the time to read the passages, but this is a pretty familiar story. Judgment is coming upon Jericho. So the spies enter the city before the destruction, and Rahab recognizes that Yahweh has given the land to Israel. Her confession in Joshua chapter two is really surprising to us.

[00:54:10] She says that she knows Yahweh has given Israel the land and that the terror of Israel has fallen on the people. She says the inhabitants are melting in fear. And then she rehearses the Exodus story, how Yahweh dried up the Red Sea and defeated the Amorite kings. So she's heard the report of Yahweh's mighty acts, and she rightly discerns what is going on.

[00:54:34] Because she knows who to be allegiant to, she is going to act faithfully in that. She receives the spies, she hides them, she protects them, she confesses Yahweh's name, and she asks for hesed, covenant loyalty, or mercy or faithful dealing with her. Then she ties the scarlet cord, and she gathers her whole household, and she remains there. This is a picture of faith being embodied in action. That is what faith is and what it should be. And of course, we have her later used as an example of faith in Hebrews 11 and of active faith in James 2 as well.

[00:55:16] Rahab's house is built into the city wall. That's an important point because the wall is precisely the thing that's gonna fall down. Her house is located in the doomed structure of Jericho, and yet it becomes a place of preservation. It's not outside the judged place, it is within it and within the judged location in particular.

[00:55:39] Again, very similar to the patterns we've seen. Noah is not removed from the world before the flood. He is preserved inside the ark while the judgment falls. Israel is not removed from Egypt before the tenth plague. They are preserved inside marked houses while the judgment passes through. Isaiah's people are told to enter their chambers until wrath passes by. And Rahab's household remains inside the marked house while Jericho falls.

[00:56:07] These are not pictures of escape from the judged location before the event. It is not escape from judgment exactly. It is the refuge within the place where judgment comes, which is really unexpected. Wouldn't we just expect people to just leave Jericho instead of staying there while the judgment happens?

[00:56:29] I believe that this is another picture of Christ. Christ does not save by avoiding the judged condition from a distance or from telling everybody to just leave and escape while the walls fall. Jesus enters the judged condition and he becomes the refuge within it. And just like the blood on the doorposts in the Passover, the scarlet cord is functioning as a sign. It's a very obvious parallel where the cord is marking the house, identifying it as the refuge, and so on.

[00:57:01] And so the Passover blood functions more like Rahab's scarlet cord than it does like a focus on the death of the lamb. In both the Passover as well as the story with Rahab we have the boundary inside and outside. And we have no substitute replacements in this story, which is maybe why it surprises you that I bring it up. But it follows all these patterns. Other people are preserved inside this refuge because the faithful one did what she was supposed to do.

[00:57:33] The interesting thing about Rahab is that she shifts her allegiance from Jericho to Yahweh. She no longer locates herself within the doomed city, but she identifies with Yahweh and his people. And this is the reason why her house becomes a refuge space in the midst of that judgment.

[00:57:52] We might miss this point, but Rahab's faith has political and covenantal dimension. She's not simply trying to survive, but she is transferring her allegiance to Yahweh. She recognizes his rule, abandons confidence in Jericho, and identifies herself with Israel. Her house becomes that refuge because of all of that.

[00:58:14] So we move into the New Testament, and we see Christ as the refuge, and so to be in Christ is to transfer allegiance from the doomed order to the Kingdom of God.

[00:58:25] Rahab is not merely spared, she is incorporated. Joshua chapter six tells us that Rahab and her family are brought out and live in the midst of Israel. Later biblical tradition remembers Rahab as part of Israel's story, and Matthew includes Rahab in Jesus' genealogy.

[00:58:45] And this fits in with the Passover again, where Israel is not just Israel, but is a mixed multitude. It is not about genetics, it is about allegiance. It is about being incorporated into the people and being in that covenant relationship. Rahab's story is a story of being brought out of places that are not allegiance to God and being brought into a covenant relationship that provides protection and life.

[00:59:16] This is an important highlight for when we move into the Gospel narrative. Salvation is not merely non-death, it is belonging to the people of God.

[00:59:29] All right, so let's go ahead and wrap all of this up into the Christ connection, where we have refuge, we have allegiance, and we have incorporation. So when we're asking, " What did Jesus do?" I mean, I do think it's a story of salvation from death, literal death, like actual death. It is a thing that's not a problem anymore because of Jesus.

[00:59:55] But in addition to that, there are layers upon layers here. Rahab helps us see that the biblical pattern is not just this idea of punishment, replacement, and things like that. The biblical pattern is faithful response that creates a refuge space where others are gathered and preserved.

[01:00:16] And with Christ, this becomes deeper and fuller. Because Christ is the faithful one, he enters the judged condition of humanity. Christ becomes the place or the person of refuge, and those gathered into him are preserved. Those in him share his vindication and life. Salvation is incorporation into him, not just avoiding a penalty.

[01:00:42] So of course, Rahab is not a full picture of the Messiah, but like with other things, her story gives us biblical grammar. Judgment is coming, faithful allegiance, marking out a refuge, and those gathered into that refuge are preserved. When we get to Christ, the refuge is not simply an ark or a house. It is the person of Jesus himself. Those who are in him share in his deliverance, his vindication, and his life.

[01:01:16] All right, so there are several other things I could bring out here, but I think I've gotten my point basically across that all of these patterns do point directly to Christ.

[01:01:27] And that it's really important that we look at the text very carefully. We look at what it says, what it doesn't say, what the patterns are teaching us in all of these different people and all of these different situations, and finding out how God relates to people who are under judgment.

[01:01:47] There's a broad situation of people who deserve that judgment and who are in rebellion against God, and people who are in allegiance to God who will be brought through that same situation protected by God.

[01:02:05] All right. So that is wrapping up this idea of representation. Next week, we will talk about actual substitution replacement and where we can see that in Scripture, because there's quite a few places where that pattern shows up as well. And so we're gonna look at that, and we're gonna try to tease out what we can learn from those patterns and these stories.

[01:02:28] I think that will be very, very interesting. Again, I am not doing a full scholarly breakdown or takedown of substitution, but I am again opening the door to look at these ideas and see what Scripture is telling us.

[01:02:46] I think sometimes we make things a little bit too difficult, and that is just the way things are sometimes. But studying Scripture should get us deeper into that context and away from our own presuppositions, which are not really helpful because that's not what Scripture is telling us.

[01:03:06] I realize that that's difficult because for a lot of us, we have deep traditional roots into these ideas. And we believe the church has taught this for so long, and we don't wanna see the church as being wrong and all of these other ideas. But if Scripture is our grounding for what the revelation of God is bringing us, these things are important.

[01:03:30] I'm not really gonna care what tradition says if it is different from the pattern of Scripture. And I'm gonna be rather unapologetic about that fact. Sorry, I know that that's rough and it's hard and it's difficult when it goes against what we have thought before, and it can be really, really difficult to rethink things. But it is important. And so that's what we're doing, and we are just going to continue in that study and see what we can recover in it.

[01:04:02] But that is it for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. I hope it got some of the gears going for you to think about these ideas in a different way. I don't promise that I'm correct in everything, but I do think, again, that looking at the patterns and the themes is just incredibly instructive.

[01:04:22] So I leave that all with you and appreciate you all for listening, and I appreciate those who share the episodes with others who might enjoy this as well. And a really big shout out, as always, to those who support me financially, either through Patreon, PayPal, or my biblical theology community. You guys are such a blessing to me, and I really thank you for all of that. But that is it for this week, and I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.