Below is Part One of the transcript of a podcast I recorded with Matt Tully of Crossway Books on my new book, A Dozen Things God Did with Your Sin (and three things he’ll never do). The book is now available for purchase at Amazon. I will follow up with Parts Two through Five every few days.

Matt Tully

Sam, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Sam Storms

I’m glad to be back. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Matt Tully

Definitely. When it comes to the biggest problems that we as humans face—that would be our own sinfulness in the face of a holy God—those of us who know God and love his grace and have been Christians for a long time, I think we know that we can’t take care of this problem on our own. We get what the Bible teaches about our own inability to take care of our sin. Scripture makes that very clear to us. Yet, I think that even for those of us who with our whole hearts believe that we need God’s grace and salvation, we can nevertheless still think simplistically about what it is that God has done for us and how he deals with our sin. As you reflect on all the years you’ve spent teaching, preaching, and shepherding people as a pastor and as a professor, have you noticed that maybe sometimes even solid Christians can struggle to fully appreciate the nuances and the beauty to what God has done for us?

Sam Storms

Absolutely. I think one thing I’ve noticed about Christians—and maybe this is true of human nature in general—is that we’re hard-wired for self-punishment. There is this instinctive reaction in our hearts and our souls when we fail, when we sin, when we don’t live up to whatever standard we have embraced for ourselves. For Christians, that standard is the biblical principles of right and wrong and what would please God. Our instinctive reaction is to basically fall into the pit of self-contempt, condemnation, despair, thinking God forgave me when I first became a Christian, but I’ve probably pushed him over the edge. I’ve out-sinned his grace. I’ve gone beyond the capacity that even a good and holy God has to put up with somebody like me. We just fail to grasp the magnitude of the extent to which God went in the death of Christ to deal with our sin. I think that’s one of the central problems. It may well be the single central problem that Christians face and struggle with in their Christian life—this idea that I just out-sinned God’s ability to have mercy and forgive me. They live in doubt, they question their salvation, they don’t have the joy of assurance. All of that is really due to one primary factor, and that is we have not wrestled with what Scripture says God has done with our sin. We focus on our having sinned and not so much on what God has done with our sin. That is what I think leads to so much despair and depression and shame and false guilt. That is what I have been trying to address in this book as best I can. I’ve largely seen this in the body of Christ over the years, and I just think it needed to be addressed.

Matt Tully

You say that a fundamental core of why this is happening is because we spend too much time focused on our own sin and less time focused on our Savior and what he has done with it. Do you ever get the sense that that is sometimes encouraged by the way we talk about sin and the way we talk about, within the church, what it means to be saved? There’s such an emphasis on, to put it bluntly, feeling bad about our sin. We know we need to repent, we need to turn from our sin, we need to feel a level of remorse over it. Do you think sometimes that teaching is a little bit out of whack and that contributes to this?

Sam Storms

I think it can be. Honestly, it differs from church to church and from Christian to Christian. There is no one size fits all when it comes to this. But I do think that the central problem is just the failure to grasp the significance of what is known as penal substitutionary atonement, which I address rather directly and extensively in the book, primarily because not only do good, Bible-believing Christians not know what it means, but because there’s so much push back on the part of progressives who think that it’s a horrific way of envisioning the relationship between the Father and the Son.

Matt Tully

Unpack that a little bit for us. First, define what penal substitutionary atonement is, for those who aren’t familiar with that term, which does sound a little bit harsh or cold or scary. Then, why is it that there are some Christians, or some people who claim to be Christians, who would raise a lot of concerns with that doctrine?

Sam Storms

I actually talk about the glory of penal substitution in the book because it is a glorious, glorious truth, apart from which Christianity makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t think—this is my own conviction—I don’t think you can preach the gospel apart from penal substitution. I don’t think there is a gospel apart from that. What good news do I have to bring to a lost and dying world, who stand in jeopardy of eternal damnation, if I don’t have the solution that God has provided in the cross of Christ? The simple fact of the matter is God is infinitely holy and infinitely just, and his own nature requires him to punish violations of his will. It’s not because God is a bully. It’s not because he’s mean. It’s because he’s good and just and holy and true to his own character. What we have in the death of Christ is Jesus in our stead as our substitute—there’s the substitutionary element—enduring the penalty—there’s the penal element—the just desserts of our sin, and satisfying the demands of God’s holy justice and wrath so that we can be set free. If I don’t have that message, if I can’t go to a non-Christian world and say, Look, the greatest threat to your welfare, both now and in eternity, is the wrath of God, if I don’t have a solution to that, if I don’t have an answer to that, what good news do I have to proclaim?

Those who push back on penal substitution say it’s barbaric, it’s the Father abusing the Son, it disrupts the harmony and the unity of the Trinity. I answer all of those objections in the book. The bottom line is that they say since God is merciful; he can just let bygones be bygones. Well, that reveals a horribly deficient view of God. If God somehow, in his justice and his holiness and his love for goodness and his hatred of evil, could just somehow push “delete” and suddenly all of the transgressions of our lives, all of the vile rebellion against the revelation of God in nature and in creation and in Scripture—if he could just somehow willy nilly cast it aside and it be swept under the carpet of God’s mercy, that’s demeaning to God. So, I think penal substitution is a glorious, wonderful expression of how much God loves us, that he and the Son would, as it were, enter into a covenant by which they would deal with the judgment that we so richly deserve.

Matt Tully

What would they describe then as the purpose of Jesus’s death, if it wasn’t to bear the wrath of God on our behalf?

Sam Storms

They can’t. The bottom line is they cannot. They would say things such as, Well, it was to show us how Jesus identified with the poor and the outcast, or It was designed to show us what real love is for others. Well, if I’m walking alongside a friend along the lake shore and I fall in, what is love? How does he demonstrate love for me? It’s by jumping in and, at risk to his own life, securing my safety and pulling me from the waters while he drowns. Just to stand on the shore and say, Hey, I just want you to know how much I love you as you die, that’s not love.

Matt Tully

Or just to jump in and die himself is not love.

Sam Storms

Exactly. If it doesn’t secure my safety and my freedom and release. So, that’s a great question: Why did Jesus have to die? They might say, Maybe he didn’t have to, but he chose to. But if he didn’t have to die, why would the Father, according to Romans 8, not spare his own Son but deliver him up for us all? So, they have no way to rationally and biblically explain the reality of Christ’s death. They say it’s to set an example, to break the power of Satan, or to restore the image of God in man—all of which, of course, Jesus did. All of these theories, explanations, or models of the atonement are true, but they’re only true because of the underlying foundational reality that in his dying in our place, he satisfied the wrath of God and endured the penalty that we deserve so that we now don’t have to suffer. That is out of which flows all of these other effects of his atoning death. That’s why he was able to defeat Satan. What is Satan’s grip on us? Unforgiven sin. How has the image of God been damaged? It’s been damaged by sin. We’re restored only because Christ has endured in our place and reconciled us to the Father and dealt with the issue of our cosmic treason against an infinite holy God.