The Power of Christ's Death

Second term (Lent term) has now ended and a month-long break has begun before third term (Easter term) begins. Later today, I will be flying to Dublin, Ireland, to travel for a couple weeks with a friend. I leave you with words from J. I. Packer.

In Knowing God, J. I. Packer, reflecting on Romans 8:32, elucidates the verse's implications for the immediate, direct efficacy and sufficiency of Christ's death to produce salvation. That is, Christ's death (and resurrection, presumably) was and is directly and inherently salvific for the believer (i.e., everyone for whom Christ died).

Note . . . what Paul implies about the effectiveness of our redemption. 'God,' he says, 'gave him up for us all'—and this fact is itself the guarantee that 'all things' will be given us, because they all come to us as the direct fruit of Christ's death. We have . . . said that the greatness of God's giving on the cross makes his further giving (if the words may be allowed) natural and likely, but what we must note now is that the unity of God's saving purpose makes such further giving necessary, and therefore certain.

At this point the New Testament view of the cross involves more than is sometimes realized. That the apostolic writers present the death of Christ as the ground and warrant of God's offer of forgiveness, and that we enter into forgiveness through repentance and faith in Christ, will not be disputed. But does this mean that, as a loaded gun is only potentially explosive, and an act of pulling the trigger is needed to make it go off, so Christ's death achieved only a possibility of salvation, needing an exercise of faith on our part to trigger it off and make it actual?

If so, then it is not strictly Christ's death that saves us at all, any more than it is loading the gun that makes it fire: strictly speaking, we save ourselves by our faith, and for all we know, Christ's death might not have saved anyone, since it might have been the case that nobody believed the gospel. But that is not how the New Testament sees it. The New Testament view is that the death of Christ has actually saved 'us all'—all, that is to say, whom God foreknew, and has called and justified, and will in due course glorify. For our faith, which from the human point of view is the means of salvation, is from God's point of view part of salvation, and is as directly and completely God's gift to us as is the pardon and peace of which faith lays hold.

Psychologically, faith is our own act, but the theological truth about it is that it is God's work in us: our faith, and our new relationship with God as believers, and all the divine gifts that are enjoyed within this relationship, were all alike secured for us by Jesus' death on the cross. For the cross was not an isolated event; it was, rather, the focal point in God's eternal plan to save his elect, and it ensured and guaranteed first the calling (the bringing to faith, through the gospel in the mind and the Holy Spirit in the heart), and then the justification, and finally the glorification, of all for whom, specifically and personally, Christ died. (264–65)