(The Other) Limited Atonement

When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him. When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.”
Matthew 8.14-17 (TNIV)

For so long fundamentalists, in reaction to their brothers and sisters who favoured a ‘miracles on demand’ approach to the sovereignty of God á la Word-of-Faith style bastard Christianity, which cuts off any humble supplications along the lines of ‘not my will but Your will be done,’ replacing it with ‘my will must be Your will so long as I really believe it,’ to the ignorance of Rom. 9.16 (’It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy’), have denied that in Christ’s atonement there was provided physical healing, reversing the curse of Adam’s fall. But this theology of Christ’s atonement was, for their own fault, propagated to the ignorance of Matthew 8.14-17 (quoted above) where the author of that Gospel claims that Christ healed the sick, specifically in order to fulfill Isaiah 53.5 ‘by his wounds we are healed.’ No other interpretation is possible, given the nature of the way in which Isaiah is quoted. In this manner, fundamentalists clearly ignored the doctrine of sola scriptura, instead interpreting the passage in Matthew 8 in response to their own experience following what they saw as ‘charismatic excess’ and a clear throwing off of Biblical submission to God.

I believe it was R.A. Torrey who cleared away the fog, insisting that yes, physical healing was provided in the atonement following Matthew 8.17. But Torrey didn’t stop there. While some temporal healing was provided for in Christ’s atonement, it’s primary application was to effectually cleanse all who trust in Christ alone from sin. But just as we will never experience true freedom from sin in this life, so too will the atonement not provide all physical healing, this side of glory. John writes in Revelation that at the end of all things, ‘[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ (Rev. 21.4 ESV) Then the fullness of Christ’s atonement will be made manifest, for Christ will redeem all of creation, He will restore it to the days when it was ‘very good,’ (Gen 1.31) and God will be ‘all in all.’ (1 Cor 15.28)

John Piper once said that moral evil, moral rebellion is so awful and horrific a concept, that the only way God can give us a hint of what it is like to him is with physical forms of curse (Gen. 3.17, Rom 8.20), and that physical disasters and disease is about teaching humans the horrific nature of our moral corruption. The flipside of this is that while Christ roamed the highways and byways of Palestine, cleansing the lepers and healing the sick, he was doing this purposely to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of His coming atonement for creation. Christ’s miracles always pointed the way to the larger, more significant power of Christ to heal not only physical deformities or diseases, but His ability to redeem humans from the penalty of sin.

Why bother bringing up Torrey in a day when Word-of-Faith preachers/scam-artists dominate the religious broadcasting and pop theology markets? Wouldn’t it be better to argue, say some, that there was no healing in the atonement, skew an argument around twisted Gospel passages, just to drag people out of the Health-and-Wealth, Name-it-Claim-it, Blab-it-Grab-it heresies?

If we deny that there was any healing in the atonement, then we are limiting its effect upon creation. We are doing what many Presbyterians do in their attempt to narrow the atonement to only so few details, effectively making it effective only for the elect. But what we see is that the atonement spreads to too many areas to be narrowed down to a bullet list. Even an anti-Calvinist tract I found at the back of our church, after arguing ‘But the atonement is not limited…’ went on to say ‘The atonement is limited only…’ to those who repent and place faith in Jesus Christ.

‘For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.’ (John 3.17-18 ESV)

The atonement is without limits, in other words, it is unlimited; even irresistible. There is not one thing that it does not affect that our Sovereign God has not willed it to affect. As shown earlier, not all of its effects are made known currently. At the consummation of all things, all disease, sickness, sin and sadness will be put away and never again be known. This is because of Christ’s atonement, which made propitiation for the sins of the world, for the errors in creation, and removed the wrath of God (1 John 2.2, Rom 3.25). Christ’s atonement does not merely deal with what we have done and what we are, it deals with everything, especially creation which endured the curse of God when the first sin entered the world. As Yahweh said in Genesis, we are a part of creation, we will ‘return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ (Gen 3.19) We should expect the atonement to save us, what we are by nature. Dust.

~ by Tyler on January 30, 2007.