What does First B Jackson teach about substitutionary atonement?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on substitutionary atonement starts with the plain logic of Isaiah 53. Pastor Karl worked through that chapter in detail, tracing how the servant bears griefs and carries sorrows that belong to others, wounded for their transgressions and bruised for their iniquities. The weight of the teaching rested on the Lord's own purpose in all of it: it was God who laid on the servant the iniquity of all who would trust in him. Karl noted that the word "atonement" itself had to be coined by Wycliffe precisely because the concept needed a name, and he stayed honestly with the hardest line in the passage, that it pleased the Lord to bruise him, rather than softening it.
Pastor Billy made the same point from 2 Corinthians 5:21, where Paul writes that God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Billy said plainly that this is substitutionary atonement, and that anyone who tells you it is not in the Bible is wrong. The righteousness credited to a believer is not their own but Christ's, given in exchange for sin carried to the cross. Both teachers pointed to a real transaction, not a symbol or a moral example.
Pastor Matt approached the same ground through Isaiah 50, reading those verses as the first-person voice of Christ himself. What comes through in his teaching is that none of the suffering was coerced. Jesus gave his back voluntarily, set his face toward Jerusalem knowing what was there, and kept moving forward on the confidence that God would vindicate him. The cross was not something that happened to him against his will. It was something he walked into deliberately, for the sake of others.
Taught from Isaiah 52:13-53:12 · 2 Corinthians 5:21 · Isaiah 50:4-11 · Romans 3:9-18 · 1 Peter 2:21-25
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 1:18
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- December 16, 2018 He Set His Face Like Flint Isaiah 53 written 700 years before Christ describes His suffering, death and resurrection in detail. Pastor shows why Christmas only makes sense in light of the cross.
- December 16, 2018 Who Has Believed Our Report Isaiah 53 read beside its New Testament echoes: a sermon on the suffering servant, written 700 years before Christ, and what it means to believe the report.
- October 4, 2015 Now Is the Day of Salvation A pastor weaves memories of a feared grammar teacher and Jonathan Edwards into Paul's call in 2 Corinthians 5 and 6: today is the day of salvation.
Mentioned along the way
- April 21, 2019 It Is Finished Tracing the story of Holy Week through Scripture and art, the pastor follows Jesus from the triumphal entry to the empty tomb and the finished work of the cross.