13: The Triumph of the Cross

Stephanie (00:01): Season 4, Episode 13. Hello, Father. How are you today?

Marcus (00:05): Hello, Daughter. I’m doing well. This is a nice, gray, drizzly fall day today as we record this.

Stephanie (00:16): I have been very much enjoying the colors that are still on the trees, and I’m also remembering the last episode. I was gonna say challenge, it wasn’t really a challenge, it was a soft launch of brainstorming. I’m wondering if anybody has come up with a fun On the Trail community listener name for us because obviously I garble it every time I try to say something.

Marcus (00:44): I just assumed we’d be The Fellowship of the Trail, or something like that.

Stephanie (00:50): The Fellowship of the Trail. You heard it here first. My goodness. Okay, well that in the running. We will keep percolating on it. Let me know. I’m gathering ideas. I love it.

Well, always good to be here with you. Last week, we were talking about the incarnation and spiritual warfare. And we’re in the midst of our biblical foundations of spiritual warfare series. This week we are looking at the atonement and spiritual warfare.

Obviously, there’s lots we could say about the atonement, but today we’re going to look at, honestly, I just captured a quote from Dr. Marcus Warner saying. “The atonement is the hinge on which all of spiritual warfare hangs.” So with that statement, Father, will you first get us on the same page with, what is atonement?

Marcus (01:51): I will do my best.

Stephanie (01:53): You don’t have to give a whole seminary course just like, what are you meaning when you say atonement in this episode?

Marcus (02:00): All right, take all the fun out of it. Okay. So the atonement essentially is something that is done in order to make something right that has been wrong. It can make right what was wrong. It can make sacred what was profaned. It is a corrective thing.

When you make atonement for something, you’re correcting something, to bring it into right standing with what is divine and what is sacred. So when we talk about it, we mean that it is whatever was done to fix the problem that separated us from God, and so atonement is that thing that was done to correct the problem that separated us from God. It had to deal with sin, and it had to deal with death. It had to deal with our identity. It had to deal with a whole bunch of stuff, and it does.

Stephanie (02:54): This is a definite freedom word. All right, well, you have a fabulous acrostic, that we’re not shocked by at all, that helps us remember what the triumph of the cross is, the cross of Jesus Christ. We’ve gone over this before, but it’s always good to have a refresher. It’s been a couple years since we worked through it. So this is C-R-O-S-S. Covenant, Ransom, Ownership. Substitution and Subjugation. The S’s don’t really matter which order they go in, but we’re going to land on subjugation today.

So would you walk us through? What is the triumph of the cross and atonement and all of that?

Marcus (03:39): Yes. The idea behind this was that Paul said, “I decided to know nothing among you, but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” We talk a lot about the cross as the core theme of Christianity, but there are a lot of people who struggle to explain what happened at the cross. How do we know what it means and what was really going on there?

So I started just listing out bullet points of about four or five things that clearly changed at the cross, and before I realized it, half of the words on my list almost spelled cross, so I just put together a few synonyms and here we are.

One of the first things that happens at the cross though, we use the word covenant for, and it’s the idea that just as the blood of bulls and goats established the old covenant or the law, so the blood of Jesus establishes a new covenant. And thus when we take the Lord’s Supper, the wine represents the new covenant, the blood that established the new covenant. So every time that we think of atonement, we think about the blood of Jesus and what the blood of Jesus did.

One of the things that it did was establish the new covenant. And so that opens up the door to all kinds of other teaching on our identity in Christ and things like that. The first thing that we highlight, not necessarily in some theological order, but one of the first things that the atonement accomplished was that the blood shed on the cross was instrumental to the founding of a new Covenant.

The second thing is Ransom. And ransom is basically the word that is used for the price of redemption. And so you’re like, “Well, who needs to be redeemed?” Slaves need to be redeemed. The price of your freedom, that would be a ransom. Prisoners of war need to be redeemed. So that would be the price of your freedom.

And we can go on down. We’re slaves of sin, so the ransom is basically a way of saying the price of your freedom. Now, obviously this brings up a question of who’s getting paid this ransom. It’s not clean, right? It’s not a super clean thing here, but

Stephanie (06:09): I was going to say, bring up a theological can of worms.

Marcus (06:11): I just, I can’t not go there, right? Anyway, but the vast majority of evangelicals will say that the ransom was paid to God and that ransom simply means penal substitutionary atonement, that it was the price that was paid for our sins. But it runs into some kind of messy imagery here because then that makes God the one who is enslaving us and we have to somehow pay him the price for our freedom.

And so let me just say that I don’t really care how you solve that so much as to say that a price was paid that bought our freedom, and that price was the blood of Jesus. So you’re looking at what was one of the things that was accomplished on the cross. The answer is that the blood of Jesus was the payment that purchased our freedom and our redemption. And the word for that is ransom.

Stephanie (07:10): All right. Do you want to move on to Ownership or anything more to say on Ransom?

Marcus (07:14): No, let’s move on Ownership or it’ll become a real can of worms. Okay. So ownership is also this idea that a price was paid, but in this case not a price that bought my freedom from slavery, but a price that bought me to belong to God. And, at first I might say, “Wait a second, I’m swapping one form of slavery for another here. Is that really a good thing?”

And the answer is yes, because what happens is, I was a slave of a master and that master was sin and I had to be set free from that. That’s what the ransom was for, but by being bought by God and bought with a price, I now have belonging, and that is, it is very clear who my people are, who my God is, who I’m connected to.

And while we talk about God as friend and we talk about God in very intimate relational terms, there is a sense in which he’s the potter and we’re the clay and he is the owner, right? He’s above us and He’s the master. And so this is just saying that’s a good thing. I want God to be my master. I don’t want sin and Satan to be my master. And so the fact that I am owned, the good thing there is, it establishes belonging and connection with God. That’s important.

Stephanie (08:43): So you’re reading it as an attachment.

Marcus (08:45) : I’m reading it as attachment. You are bought with a price and therefore, Paul says, “So don’t use your body to do immoral things because it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to God. it was a purchase for his purposes and not just so you could do whatever you want.”

Stephanie (09:06): Alright, so next up is Substitution.

Marcus (09:10): Substitution, yes. Some people make all of atonement simply this and it’s understandable because substitution plays such a core part of what was going on at the cross. And that is that Jesus died in our place as a substitute and that was the price that paid the ransom. That was the price that caused the ownership. It was the blood that established the covenant.

The idea of substitution is that Jesus died in our place. We are the ones who should have borne this penalty, but it was borne by Christ instead. There is a very real sense here where we talked before last episode, I think, that Jesus was the new Adam, and that just as the new Adam sinned brought death on all people…

Stephanie (10:02): The old Adam.

Marcus (10:07): I’m sorry, the old Adam sinned and brought death on all people, the new Adam was righteous and brought life to all people, and that he died and that ended any claim that the enemy may have had on us.

So I have, for example, in spiritual warfare encounters had demons speak through people and say things like, “They belong to me. They’re mine.” To which I’ll usually say something like, “Well, they may have been yours, but they were bought by the blood of Jesus. And that’s good, because that means they were ransomed, they were redeemed, they now are owned by God, they belong to him. Jesus, as a substitute, took care of all of that.” And it usually quiets any demonic opposition.

Sometimes I take it a step further. It’s like, not only that, but before the foundation of the world, God already said, “In Christ this person is mine,” and so God’s claim on the person predates any claim that the enemy has. And all of this is the case because God, in his foreknowledge, knew what he was going to do at the cross in having Jesus die as a substitute for us.

Stephanie (11:25): Mm-hmm. As you were saying that, I was also just thinking about this combination of covenant and ownership and all these things also being like, “You belong to me,” and there’s an attachment. But there’s also a, “You are mine to protect,” kind of thing. There’s a protection of, “Nope, take your hands off of my child here.”

Marcus (11:50): Right. It’s good. “I belong to God, therefore Satan can’t have me.” There’s an element of that. There’s an element of, “I have a master and I should obey that master,” but there’s also an element of. “My master loves me, he protects me, and because I belong to him, others can’t have me.” It’s also very much a part of that.

Stephanie (12:11): Yeah. All right. So then the final S of our CROSS acrostic is particularly freedom oriented, and that is Subjugation. Who is getting subjugated? What is this about?

Marcus (12:23): Yeah, so it says very clearly in Colossians 2.15 that Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers, and so when we talk about the disarming of them and the leading of triumphal processions, that would have been a well-known imagery to everybody in the first century Roman Empire.

When generals, particularly consuls, went off and did something great in the sense of, they conquered a really important enemy or they brought in a vast amount of territory or a vast amount of wealth to the Roman Empire, they were awarded a triumph.

In a triumph what would happen is the conquering general with his army would approach the city of Rome. There would be a delegation that would go out to meet them and then escort them into the city where the wealth that he had plundered was put on display.

Elements of the enemy who had been conquered would be put on display and this was a disarmed enemy who was taken through this triumph. And at the end of the triumph, those enemies were killed.

And that’s also what’s going to happen here. Jesus, having disarmed the demonic entities at the cross, at the end of this age is going to kill them.They are going to hell and that’s what hell is for, it’s what the lake of fire is for.

Stephanie (13:55): The second death.

Marcus (14:16): It is the second death. And so it is a very clear picture of what’s going on here. Some people have even seen it in an image of the second coming of Christ because the appearing of this host on the outskirts of the realm was called the Parousia or the appearing of the one who has come.

And so this idea of rapture and escorting people back, some people have even seen that imagery in here. But whether that’s the case or not, it is a very clear picture to the first century readers of what Jesus had done to the enemy on the cross.

And that is, he defeated them. They are now his prisoners. He has disarmed them and they are going to be executed. Their judgment has been sealed. And so they are being led and put on display, so to speak, which is a way of shaming them and humiliating them, which are things we don’t necessarily associate with God.

But when it comes to the kingdom of darkness, that’s exactly what he’s doing. And it’s letting us know we don’t have to be afraid of the kingdom of darkness. We don’t have to be afraid of these beings. They have been subjugated. And so that’s where that idea comes from.

Stephanie (15:10): It is subjugated.

Stephanie (15:15): Well, this is clear spiritual warfare talk here, so let’s talk how the atonement and the subjugation affects what the role is here for spiritual warfare and what that means for us.

Marcus (15:28): Yes, because of the cross.The only reason that we can confront demons with the kind of authority that we do is because of what Jesus did at the cross. And it’s because he disarmed them, because he ransomed us, because he bought us, because he brought us into a new covenant.

We belong to him. Everything has changed. The whole legal foundation of our connection to the adversary has changed. And so when we put our faith in Christ, we move from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s own son.

That transition of kingdoms is marked by a covenant. It’s sealed by the blood of Jesus, where it’s sealed by the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is established and done. And so the enemy is trying to get us to think that, “You still belong to me, and you’re still mine, and you’ve been so bad that this doesn’t count anymore, and you’ve crossed some line you can’t come back from.”

To believe that you’ve crossed the line you can’t come back from is really devaluing what Jesus did at the cross because he settled once and for all the sin of the whole world at the cross. And if he settled the sin issue for the whole world, I think that’s a little bit more than any sense that you and may have committed individually.

And so I look at it like the sin issue has been dealt with, and now what separates us from God is far more about our mindset and our attitudes. Our actions can separate us from him, but not in a legal sense. We’re not legally separated from God because there is now no more condemnation for those who are in Christ.

Stephanie (17:14): Right. Well, sin still has present-day consequences. The devil is still present-day active, but sin has ultimately been dealt with, and the devil has ultimately lost. Can you talk a little bit more about the now and not yet?

Marcus (17:43): One of the things that comes up with the idea of subjugation is this already / not yet dimensioned to the kingdom of God. For instance, we see in the triumphal procession an already / not yet dimension to this in that they are already captives, but they are not yet executed.

There are some things regarding the kingdom of God that are like that. We are already citizens of the kingdom of God, but we are not yet living in our eternal bodies. That the eternal buildings will take the place of these earthly tents.

There’s a lot of things that are not yet the case, but what is already the case are the foundations and the evidence that those things are yet to come. And so while the devil has already been defeated, he is not so subjugated that he can’t harm people, he can’t deceive people, he can’t have an impact on nations, he can’t have an impact on individuals, because there’s an already / not yetness to the subjugation.

He is already subjugated in the sense that we can live in victory over him, and we can be free from him, but that final subjugation where he can no longer deceive anybody and he can no longer harm anybody and he himself is bound for a thousand years and then ultimately cast into the lake of fire, that is a not yet part of atonement.

Stephanie (19:21): So how can we navigate that as Christians? What does it look like to live out of that victory, that already / not yet victory in our day to day?

Marcus (19:32): Well, it means that I can’t go through life and say that Satan can’t do anything to affect my life, like I somehow am immune to any of his activity in my life.

On the other hand, it means I don’t have to be afraid of him. That I can resist the devil and make him flee. And that there are things that I can do as a Christian because of what Jesus did at the cross.

Stephanie (19:54): Mm-hmm.

Marcus (20:00): And those include things like, I share in the authority that was given to Jesus, that I share in because of the new covenant, that is the ability in the name of Jesus to resist the devil, to bind the devil, to loose myself or others from demonic influence in their life through things like forgiveness and repentance and the renunciation of deception. And all of these things I do with confidence because of where I stand because of the subjugation of the enemy.

Stephanie (20:40): So do you have a core takeaway from the atonement as people are processing through this enormous, victorious concept? Is there something that you would hope people would take away?

Marcus (21:00): So atonement. Some people say it is “at one-ment,”  which is cute and there’s some truth to it, but it way oversimplifies what atonement is all about. Atonement does create the foundation for intimacy with God because it removes the obstacles between us and God, particularly the sin obstacle. It removes that barrier between us and intimacy with God.

But a major part of the atonement is what it does in our relationship to the devil, and that is the freedom that it gives us, the ransom from any claim that the enemy may have on us, the ownership – that we now belong to God. There are so many things related to the atonement that can only be understood in spiritual warfare terms.

And so I’d say the key takeaways are kind of two, and that is on the one side, it’s about intimacy with God and the other side is about freedom from all those things that enslave us. And those are the two keys of what atonement has done for us.

Stephanie (22:05): That’s a really good word.

Well, thank you everyone for being on the trail with us every week. Thank you to each donor who equips us to stay here with you and to reach others around the world. It is a privilege to be on the trail with you. If you want to become a donor, we welcome you to join us at deeperwalk.com/payitforward

Next episode, we’re starting our final series of 2025. Father, would you take a little time and give some final thoughts for the biblical foundations of spiritual warfare?

Marcus (22:43): Well, you may notice that the biblical foundations of spiritual warfare are sort of the biblical foundations of theology. We’re going back to creation, we’re looking at core things like worldview, and the kingdom of God, and covenant, and incarnation, and atonement.

That’s because everything in the Bible takes place in the context of spiritual warfare. The story of the Bible, the human story, is about how God made us for something greater, but we find ourselves engaged in a war between two kingdoms, and that this war won’t end until this present evil age comes to an end.

And so we need a guide book, right? We need a guide, and we need to know what resources are at our disposal and how all of this works, so that we can understand life and understand how to live with wisdom and with the greatest freedom possible during this time of war.

Stephanie (23:44): Yes, indeed! See you back next week.