One of Paul’s most distinctive teachings about the death of Christ — something especially associated with him and logically flowing from what we have already seen — is the idea that Christ’s death brings about reconciliation to God. This theme shows up clearly in passages where Paul speaks of Christ’s death as restoring peace between God and humanity.
In Romans chapter 5, verse 1, Paul pulls together his earlier teaching — especially Romans chapter 3, verses 22–26 — and describes its outcome as “peace with God through Christ,” a peace that comes from “being justified by faith.” Later in that same chapter, verse 10 restates the argument of verse 9 by saying that believers have been “reconciled to God through the death of His Son,” treating this as another way of saying that they have been “justified in His blood.” Then, in verse 11, Paul adds, “through whom we have now received the reconciliation.”
We see the same pattern elsewhere. In 2 Corinthians 5:18–20, Paul writes that God “reconciled us to Himself through Christ,” speaks of “the ministry of the reconciliation,” and explains that “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.” He then urges his readers, “Be reconciled to God.” In Ephesians 2:16, Paul unpacks the statement “He is our peace” by saying that Christ aimed “to reconcile both (i.e. Jews and Gentiles) to God through the cross, having slain the enmity by it.” According to Paul, hostility existed not only between people but also between humanity and God. Christ’s death on the cross was the means by which that hostility was destroyed and peace was restored.
Paul presses this point further in Colossians 1:20–22, where he attributes the work of reconciliation directly to God: “He was pleased to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace by the blood of His cross.” The believers in Colossae themselves had once been estranged — “aliens and enemies” — but now, Paul says, “God has reconciled them in the body of Christ’s flesh, through His death.”
Across all these passages, the message is unmistakable. God gave Christ to die in order to remove a barrier that human sin had raised between God and humanity. And the specific means by which that barrier was taken away was the death of Christ itself.
The same point appears in 2 Corinthians 5:19. When Paul says that “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself,” he immediately explains what this means by adding, “not reckoning to them their trespasses.” Likewise, the appeal “Be reconciled to God” in verse 20 is grounded in verse 21, where Paul says, “Him who knew no sin, on our behalf He made to be sin.” In other words, Paul understands reconciliation as something that logically follows from justification. Because believers are justified, they are reconciled.
This line of reasoning makes sense. A king is effectively at war with anyone who breaks his laws. Even though he desires the well-being of his subjects, his authority must be exercised against those who resist it. As long as they remain in rebellion, they experience their own king as an enemy. But if rebellion is war, then forgiveness is peace. Once a criminal is pardoned, there is no longer any reason for him to fear the king’s power.
This helps explain why, in Romans 5:10, the idea of being “reconciled to God” seems mainly to refer to God’s opposition to sin rather than to any internal moral change in the believer. At this point in Paul’s argument, he has not yet addressed inner transformation. What he has emphasized is God’s justice — justice that required “propitiation in the blood of Christ.”
Someone might object here that the New Testament never says God is reconciled to humanity, only that humanity is reconciled to God. The standard language is “God reconciled us to Himself.” God is presented as the source of reconciliation and its indirect object, while human beings are its direct object. From this, some have concluded that the obstacle to peace lies entirely in humanity.
That conclusion does not hold up when we look closely at how the language of reconciliation is used elsewhere. In Matthew 5:23–24, for example, Jesus speaks of someone bringing an offering to God who then remembers that his brother “has something against” him. In that situation, the problem is clearly not the offerer’s feelings but the offended brother’s. That is why the offerer is told to leave his gift and first seek reconciliation. Any personal resentment the offerer himself had could be set aside immediately; the real challenge is persuading the offended party to let go of his hostility. Yet Jesus still says, “be-reconciled to thy brother.”
The same pattern appears in 1 Corinthians 7:11, where a separated woman is told either to remain unmarried or to “be-reconciled to her husband.” A Christian woman would not be free to harbor personal hostility, so reconciliation here can only mean seeking to overcome her husband’s opposition. The Old Testament provides a similar example in 1 Samuel 29:4, where the Philistines fear that David might “be-reconciled to his master” by betraying them. This supposed reconciliation refers entirely to restoring Saul’s favor, not to any hostility on David’s part. Josephus uses the term in the same way (Antiquities, book 5, section 2.8). All of this shows that Paul’s language does not imply that the barrier removed by Christ’s death lay only — or even mostly — in human beings.
This explains why Paul consistently avoids making God the direct object of reconciliation — just as he avoids making God the direct object of propitiation. The wording itself does not determine whether the obstacle to peace is in humanity or in God. That question is settled by Paul’s teaching in Romans 3:26, which Romans 5:1, 10, and 11 summarize.
One thing must be stressed carefully: Paul always attributes propitiation, reconciliation, and the harmonizing of forgiveness with divine justice to the Father’s love. God Himself provided — at infinite cost — the means His own justice required in order to justify the ungodly. To picture the Father as harsh or unwilling, pacified only by Christ’s intercession and death, is completely contrary to Paul’s teaching. As Paul makes clear elsewhere, everything Christ does has its source in the Father. “The Son can do nothing except what He sees the Father doing.”
Taken together, the many passages discussed our posts thus far make one historical conclusion unavoidable. Paul taught, with full confidence, that salvation comes to believers through Christ’s death. Without that death, they could not have been saved from death. Christ knowingly and deliberately laid down His life for their sake. The necessity of this costly act lay in human sin, viewed in the light of God’s judicial righteousness. Christ’s death removed a real barrier to salvation — one firmly rooted in God’s eternal justice. The fact that Paul expresses this idea again and again, in a variety of forms, shows how central it was to his thinking and his life. Whatever judgment we may make about the doctrine itself, the documentary evidence is overwhelming: Paul clearly taught it, and he did so with conviction.
Finally, it is worth noting that this legal way of understanding Christ’s death — its relationship to God’s justice and law, and the idea of believers being reconciled to God through Christ’s death — is largely unique to Paul in the New Testament (except for a metaphor in Hebrews). This distinctive emphasis likely reflects both Paul’s own temperament and his training “at the feet” of a respected teacher of the Law (Acts 5:34). Through him, this juridical perspective became a defining element of the Christian message.
This post is based upon Lecture XIX from J. A. Beet's book Through Christ to God: A Study in Scientific Theology (1893), re-written with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original text may be found at the Internet Archive here: Through Christ to God.
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