I recently decided to try to practice just writing shorter articles explaining different theological topics. For that reason, I wrote the “Cur Deus Moriendus” post for Good Friday and I have written this one for Easter. I really wanted to do this post justice, so I put it off until I felt I could focus on it and complete it with quality, so hopefully, I can get this out by Easter, but if not, I still want to complete this. What’s important to me is the quality and I don’t want to rush it, while at the same time, I want to keep this post short.
This post will be focusing on the logic of Romans 4:25 when Paul says that Christ was “delivered up for [on account of] our trespasses and raised for [on account of] our justification”. We have before dealt with the logic of this verse here and here, but I want to expand on it and parse it out more.
To give a quick summary/overview, Christ’s resurrection vindicated the fact that He lived a perfect life of obedience, and thus that provides the meritorious grounds for his resurrection (as eternal life is the covenantal reward for perfect obedience; if you do the law, you will live). Due to Jesus' perfect obedience to the Father in the Covenant of Redemption, the Father "satisfied him with a long life" (Psalm 91:16, cf. the logic of Psalm 1 and 2, that the Messianic King who obeys the Law will be rewarded with eternal life. The logic of “do this and live” is typologically enshrined in Israel’s Sinaitic Covenant by which they are rewarded with earthly blessing if they obey and curse if they disobey. This is why Christ uses this verse as Abner Chou shows and why Paul cites it in Galatians.) by prolonging his days, thus reversing the curse of Gen 2:17. Christ's resurrection vindicates his righteousness, which becomes ours in him (Rom 4:25; 1 Cor. 1:30). The pronouncement of "righteous" in Jesus' resurrection becomes ours because we are united to Him. Thus we are justified through Him because we too receive the same verdict that he received. Were Christ not raised, He would still be under the judicial/penal condemnation of death that He suffered to take the curse for our sins, and so we would be only condemned in Him. Being raised, He receives the legal verdict of justification for the completion of His work of obedience unto death and therefore we are justified in Him.
Okay, that’s way more than a quick summary/overview, but it will help me to structure my thoughts in writing this and will make me be sure that I mention everything.
Let us start with Leviticus 18:5. “The one who does these commands shall live by them”. Israel is given a choice between life and earth. If they obey the commands of God, they will typologically merit life by them, but if they do not, they will merit death. This typology serves to paint a picture of the original covenant with Adam. Israel is the New Adam bound to covenantal obedience to God. Indeed, Morales shows that Israel’s typological choice between life and death begins with Adam. When Jesus confronts the lawyer, asking how he can obtain eternal life, Christ responds with Leviticus 18:5, pressing the Law upon the man. The lawyer can never obtain to this standard. As Chou says, this stresses the necessity for complete and perfect obedience to the Law of God in order to win eternal life. The Mosaic command was typological and thus commanded imperfect obedience to win earthly blessing, whereas Christ knows this command was merely a picture of the Adamic Covenant and his command to win life by his obedience or death and cursing by his disobedience (2:17). As Brandon Crowe says, “The lawyer’s powerlessness to secure resurrection life by law obedience serves as a foil to Christ himself, whose resurrection proved that he was able to ‘do this and live.’ Jesus’s perfect obedience led to resurrection life” (Why Did Jesus Live a Perfect Life? pg. 83). Resurrection (eternal) life is the vindication of the completion of a covenant of works, for it is its reward. Jesus becomes the true Tree of Life (Jn. 6:51) because He did what Adam should have done and obeyed God by giving His life for those in Him. He goes on, “Whereas the rich young ruler was unable to meet these demands, Jesus himself can offer eternal life (see Matt. 19:29 and parallels in Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30), which presupposes Jesus’s unique ability to do that which is required for life” (Ibid., 83-83).
As the original curse for disobedience to God’s Covenant-Law was death (Gen. 2:17), so the original reward, in reverse, for obedience was eternal life (see G.K. Beale’s New Testament Biblical Theology, which also touches on resurrection as vindication/justification. This is also relevant to the next post I've been working on for a while which will be a defense of "final justification"). Christ, as the Last Adam, was perfectly obedient to the Law of God in the Covenant of Redemption (Romans 5:12-21), and thus was rewarded with resurrection life.
However, part of his obedience, demanded that He suffer and die and take the curse and penalty that we deserved. As the positive law given to Adam in his covenant was not to eat of a tree, so the positive law given to Christ in His covenant was to die on a tree. Christ had to move from suffering into glory. He first had to take the legal penalty for our sin, becoming damned by God and judged as a sinner in His death (going back again to Genesis 2:17), evidence that He was judged by God (Galatians 3:13, 2 Corinthians 5:21). But what He did, He did for us. God cannot turn away His justice. Sin must be punished. And so, it was punished in our federal head (1 Peter 2:24), so that He, taking the curse for us, we would never have to take it ourselves since God cannot punish twice. He, being our head, when the decree of condemnation was passed against Him, it was also passed against us so that when He died, we died and we paid our penalty in Him (2 Cor. 5:14, Colossians 2:14). He takes the penal curse of death, descending into the chaos-judgment waters of death. But he does not stay there. He emerges as a New Creation (cf. L. Michael Morales’ Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?). He dies forensically condemned by his death but arises forensically justified by His resurrection. He dies damned by God, arises, glorified by God. He dies deserving the curse, arises deserving blessing. He dies deserving to be cut off from God and from His face (cf. Note 1 here), arises deserving the inheritance of all the earth (cf. Beale’s Temple and the Church’s Mission).
Again, were Christ to have remained dead, He would remain under the penalty and forensic condemnation of death. As our head, He being condemned, we would be condemned in Him, deserving of death, to be cut off from God. This is why Paul says:
But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised.
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And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.
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Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we bore witness against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.
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For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.
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And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.
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Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
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If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.
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But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
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For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead.
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For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
If there is no resurrection, if there is no vindication/justification, then only condemnation remains. We have been condemned for our sins in Christ's death if Christ has not been raised and remain so if this is true. If our head remains condemned under the sentence of penal death, so are we. But this is not so. Because Christ has obeyed the law perfectly as the Last Adam, God raised Him from the dead, thus justifying HIm and all who are in Him due to His perfect obedience to the Law of God and so through Christ comes life, even as through Adam came death. He did what Adam was supposed to do and “did that and lived” if I can put it that way. Whatever is true of our federal head is true of us. Whereas we were counted as disobeying in Adam, we have received spiritual and physical death because of this. But whereas we have been counted as having been condemned in Christ, we no longer have to pay the penalty since it has been done, and as we have been counted as being obedient in Him, we have received eternal life, His reward, so that we have received justification in Him, brought forth when we believe, and will receive justification and the fullness of our reward and His when we are resurrected with Him.
As Schreiner says, “Jesus’s resurrection authenticates and confirms that our justification has been secured. The resurrection of Christ constitutes evidence that Jesus has been vindicated. At Jesus’s resurrection, God declared that Jesus was in the right, so that this work on our behalf has been completed. . .the resurrection of Jesus constitutes their [believers’] justification” (Romans, 252).
As our disobedience constitutes the meritorious cause of the legal verdict of condemnation expressed in death (and all of the suffering leading up to it throughout Christ’s entire life), so His obedience constitutes the meritorious cause of the legal verdict of justification expressed in His resurrection. There is a difference between a legal, forensic verdict and the grounds of that verdict. Our disobedience imputed to Christ and His obedience imputed to us are the grounds of each verdict (condemnation of Christ and justification of us). But the actual forensic verdicts themselves are carried out either in the death of Christ (condemnation) or the resurrection of Christ (justification). So, when Christ was resurrected (due to His obedience), we were justified in Him and we receive this justification through faith. Even so, when Christ died (due to our sins), He was condemned in us so that we may never have to be condemned by God. Christ’s resurrection, “by vindicating Christ. . .enables those who share in his resurrection (6:1-10) to share in his vindication (or ‘justification’) also” (Moo, The Letter to the Romans, pg. 315).
A very good summary of the issue of justification in union with Christ is found in Kingdom Through Covenant (2nd Edition), pg. 782, which states: “Kevin Vanhoozer suggests that the more biblical way of thinking is to view Christ’s work and how it becomes ours in the contest of Christ’s covenant representation of his people and our faith union with our covenant head. When we do so, it now makes sense to say that. . .
The author (I’m assuming Wellum at this point), then goes on to quote Vanhoozer:
God reckons Christ’s “right covenantal relatedness” ours. . . [since] “Christ does everything that Israel (and Adam) was supposed to do. He suffers the covenant sanction and fulfills the covenant law, including its summary command “to love God and your neighbor as oneself”. In counting us righteous, then, God both pardons us (“there is now no condemnation” [Rom. 8:1]) and gives us the positive status of rectitude, a down payment as it were, sealed with the Spirit, on out eventually achieving an actual righteous state (i.e. sanctification). . .
Christians become members of God’s covenant family by receiving the Son’s status: righteous sonship. Jesus Christ was the righteous Son the Father always wanted Israel, and Adam, to be. . . Sons and daughters in Christ, we have Christ’s righteousness standing before God and unity with one another as members of Christ's one body.
In resurrecting Christ, God fulfills the promise typologically expressed in the psalms that if the Davidic King obeys God’s Torah, meditating on it day and night, He would satisfy the king with long life. He would be given eternal life and set over all of creation as its ruler. To be resurrected is to reverse the curse of Genesis 2:17 that the one who sins will die. In this way, Christ is vindicated and declared the Son of God in power (Romans 1:4, Acts 2:32), proving that He was the obedient Adam who deserves and merited authority and dominion over all the earth, just as Adam was supposed to achieve. He won the New Creation through His obedience and thus is resurrected as the start, the firstfruits of the New Creation (Col. 1:18, Rev. 3:14). He is the obedient Adam, the true Israel, the obedient Davidic Messiah, who has been proclaimed as such by His resurrection, evidencing that He merited eternal life through His perfect Torah obedience and thus His obedience is counted to us who are represented by Him even as His death is and thus we are forensically justified in Him because He was forensically justified by God when He was declared righteous before Him in His resurrection. God condemned Christ and our sins in Him when He died, and He justified Christ due to HIs obedience when He was raised.
In short, whatever is legally true of Christ is legally true of us. When Christ received the judicial verdict of condemnation in His death, so did we. Yet He did not remain under his verdict. If He did, then we also remain under the verdict of condemnation that was brought against Him. But, no, He was resurrected due to His perfect obedience. And thus He received the judicial verdict of justification in His resurrection, and so we receive this same verdict in Him when we first believe.
So praise God for Easter. We would be condemned without it. But because He lives, so do we. And because He was raised, so shall we rise again, not because of anything that we have done, but solely because of His perfect obedience. We died with Him in judgment and rose with Him in justification.
“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies" John 11:25
Edit: I do want to qualify that my language about Christ being condemned and us in Him can probably be admitted but should probably be understood as a "for all we know" type of thing. I do not want to say that Christ was actually judicially condemned by God in Sheol, but instead that He paid the penalty for our sins in full at the cross.
I feel this post to be inadequate and not what I was hoping for. So, here are my suggestions for further reading:
A New Testament Biblical Theology by G. K. Beale
Why Did Jesus Live a Perfect Life? by Brandon Crowe
The Last Adam by Brandon Crowe
I know Richard Gaffin is great on this, but I’ve never actually read anything he’s written.
I know Matthew Barrett has a chapter on this in The Doctrine on Which the Church Stands or Falls, but I have not yet read it.