Mark,
Others will doubtless welcome you more officially to the site later; for now, greetings in the blessed name of our Lord Christ.
It being bitter cold and dark here on the opposite side of your summery world, I did not read every word of your rejoinder to Mr. Ponter, but enough to follow the thrust of your argument. On the whole, you seem to have diligently applied the full weight of the Scriptures to his statements. (It is reassuring, is it not, to be able to turn to any page of the Bible and find echoes, if not shouts, of the glorious gospel of sovereign grace there, rather than having to constantly return, as others must, to the handful of passages they have wrested from the counsel of the whole based merely on the ambiguity of a word in our modern tongue?)
That said, please allow me to point out one apparent weakness. In your quite necessary development of the "payment of debt" required by God and accomplished by Christ, your presentation seems to lack a little clarity. Whereas reformed thought has found it helpful to differentiate the place of the passive obedience of Christ (His sacrificial death) and His active obedience (His perfect life) as being necessary for the satisfaction of divine justice, you have tended to speak as though the "debt payment" were accomplished almost exclusively by the former. For example, you state:
Ponter confuses and perhaps even obfuscates the payment idea inherent within the atonement.
He is seeing some kind of "wooden" commercial transaction, when in fact, the metaphor of payment is relating to a debt we owe to God, and that debt is otherwise known as obedience or perfection, and that debt is paid by the Son, to the father, in the Covenant of redemption.
The payment of this debt, which is the perfect and sinless sacrifice of Jesus Christ, is of such value to the Father, that this payment actually appeases and satisfies the wrath of God against sins committed against a Holy and offended God.
where you are clearly referring to passive obedience.
Your next sentence:
As the Substitute of God's people from every Nation, tribe and tongue, the Sinless Savior satisfies God's justice, by providing perfect obedience as the second Adam, undoing what the first Adam had wrought for humanity by plunging ever person into sin.
could be read as applying to either passive or active obedience, but the context, followed immediately by:
We need to comprehend that not only do "we" need a sacrifice for our sins, but God "also" needs a sacrifice for sins.
strongly favors passive.
Now since you do here go into a long section specifically on the difference between propitiation--in which the passive obedience is essential--and expiation, it makes sense to have emphasized that obedience. My point is that our redemption required not only propitiation, but active obedience; although one of the Westminster quotes mentions it, your own commentary seems to avoid the subject.
Finally, in your little catechism concerning the "debt payment" at the end, although you begin well with:
Sinners owe a debt to God the Father.
Q. What is this debt?
Our perfect obedience to His law and a perfect righteousness before His presence.
That is what we owe God, and none of us can pay it. We are all debtors under the Law of God.
you soon enter upon shaky ground when you state:
Q. For whom did Christ pay the debt?
The debt is all sins committed against God, and Christ comes to take that debt upon Himself,
...
who pays the debt of our sins through the sacrifice of Himself at Calvary.
You need to be more precise here in 2 ways:
1) the debt is most certainly not "sins committed"--we are not required to give God more sin!--but rather "
the death penalty demanded for sins committed"
2) having dealt with the propitiation so thoroughly, you leave unsaid the solution for our above-mentioned lack of "
perfect obedience to His law and a perfect righteousness before His presence".
This is where classical reformed preaching would spotlight Christ's active obedience, since were the propitiation, even having removed deserved wrath, to be unaccompanied by the imputed robe of righteousness--not only a perfect death, but a perfect life--we would still be as devoid of righteousness as a stone.
Spurgeon, on Job 9:2, having recounted the benefits of justification which come through Christ's death, then adds:
Nor is this all. If nothing beyond the suffering of the penalty of the law had taken place, men would only have been released from the punishment due to sin. If they were to obtain the reward of obedience, its precepts must also be obeyed; and this was accomplished to the utmost by Jesus Christ. To every requirement of God’s holy law he yielded a complete and sinless obedience; every command it enjoined as well as every prohibition it contains were in all respects fully honoured by him. The righteousness of Jesus therefore is two-fold, consisting in his spotless obedience and meritorious sufferings, and this is that very righteousness by which sinners are justified before God.
