Chapter 11
1 Peter, the Cry of Dereliction, and the Petrine Witness to the Atonement

Introduction: Peter's Voice and the Heart of the Cross

There is something deeply moving about the fact that some of the clearest, most direct statements about substitutionary atonement in the entire New Testament come from the apostle Peter. This is the man who watched Jesus die. He was there — or at least nearby, lurking in the shadows of the courtyard after his devastating denials — when the Roman soldiers drove the nails. He heard the crowd's mockery. And according to early church tradition, he later received a detailed account of the crucifixion from those who stood closer to the cross than he dared to stand that day. When Peter later wrote about what happened at Calvary, he did not write as a detached theologian constructing abstract theories. He wrote as a witness. He wrote as someone who had seen the risen Christ, who had been forgiven and restored, and who understood from personal experience what it means to be brought back to God by the death of the Righteous One.

In this chapter, we turn to the Petrine witness to the atonement — the testimony found in 1 Peter — and to one of the most haunting moments in all of Scripture: Jesus' cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Together, these texts open a window into the deepest mystery of the atonement. They reveal, in language that is both simple and staggering, that Jesus Christ bore our sins in his own body, that the Righteous One died for the unrighteous, and that in those dark hours on the cross, the Son of God voluntarily entered into the full weight of what human sin deserves — including the horror of separation from God.

My thesis in this chapter is straightforward: the Petrine epistles, especially 1 Peter 2:24 and 3:18, provide some of the most explicitly substitutionary language in the New Testament, while Jesus' cry of dereliction from the cross (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46) opens a window into the deepest dimension of the atonement — the Son's voluntary experience of bearing the judicial consequences of human sin. When we examine these texts carefully, we find that substitution, penalty-bearing, and sacrificial imagery are not later theological constructs imposed on the text. They are woven into the very fabric of the apostolic witness.

We will proceed through four major sections. First, we will examine 1 Peter 1:18–19, with its rich ransom and sacrificial lamb imagery. Second, we will undertake a detailed exegesis of 1 Peter 2:24, one of the most important atonement texts in all of Scripture. Third, we will analyze 1 Peter 3:18, which provides what may be the most concise summary of penal substitutionary atonement anywhere in the New Testament. And fourth, we will wrestle with the cry of dereliction — that terrible, mysterious moment when Jesus cried out in the words of Psalm 22:1 — and consider what it reveals about what was happening in the depths of the cross.

1 Peter 1:18–19 — Ransomed by Precious Blood

We begin with a passage that sets the stage for everything Peter will say about the atonement later in his letter:

"knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." (1 Peter 1:18–19, ESV)

Right away, Peter deploys two powerful images side by side: ransom and sacrifice. Let's look at each one.

The verb "ransomed" is elytrōthēte (ἐλυτρώθητε), from the root lytroō (λυτρόω), meaning to redeem or set free by paying a ransom price. As we explored in Chapter 2's survey of atonement terminology, this word family is deeply rooted in the Old Testament concept of redemption. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the ga'al (גָּאַל) — the kinsman-redeemer — was the family member who paid the price to buy back a relative from slavery or to redeem a family inheritance. The padah (פָּדָה) word group likewise carried the idea of ransom — a price paid to liberate someone from bondage.¹ Behind Peter's language stands the great redemption story of the Exodus, where God redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt by the blood of the Passover lamb. Peter is telling his readers: what God did for Israel in Egypt, He has now done for you — only the price paid this time was infinitely greater.

Notice the sharp contrast Peter draws. You were not ransomed with "perishable things such as silver or gold." The ransom price was not money. It was not any earthly currency. It was "the precious blood of Christ." The word "precious" (timios, τίμιος) means costly, of great value, honored. Peter wants his readers to feel the weight of what was paid for their redemption. All the silver and gold in the world could not accomplish what Christ's blood accomplished.

Then comes the sacrificial imagery: "like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." This language reaches back into the heart of the Old Testament sacrificial system. The requirement that sacrificial animals be "without blemish" (amōmos, ἄμωμος) and "without spot" (aspilos, ἄσπιλος) echoes the regulations for the Passover lamb in Exodus 12:5 and the broader Levitical requirements for sacrificial animals.² As we saw in Chapter 4's treatment of the Levitical system and Chapter 5's analysis of Yom Kippur, the unblemished nature of the sacrifice was not incidental — it was essential. The animal had to be perfect, whole, without defect, because it was standing in the place of the worshiper before a holy God.

Peter is making a Christological claim of enormous significance here. Jesus Christ is the true Passover Lamb — the one to whom all those Old Testament sacrifices pointed. He is the Lamb "without blemish or spot," the sinless one whose blood has the power to accomplish what no animal blood ever could. Paul makes the same connection explicitly in 1 Corinthians 5:7: "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."³

What Peter gives us here, in compressed form, is a theology of the cross that combines multiple biblical motifs. There is ransom — a price paid for liberation. There is sacrifice — the blood of an unblemished lamb offered to God. There is redemption — freedom from bondage to sin and futile living. And hovering behind all of it is the Passover narrative, with its themes of divine judgment, substitutionary protection through blood, and deliverance from slavery. These are exactly the themes that, as I have argued throughout this book, converge most coherently in penal substitutionary atonement: the innocent one dies in the place of the guilty, bearing the cost of their liberation, and the blood that is shed is the means by which God's people are delivered from judgment and brought into freedom.

We should also note what Peter says his readers were ransomed from: "the futile ways inherited from your forefathers." Peter is writing primarily to Gentile converts (see 1 Peter 1:14, 18; 2:10; 4:3), and he is telling them that Christ's blood has purchased their freedom from the empty, purposeless way of life they inherited from their pagan ancestors. The word "futile" (mataias, ματαίας) is striking — it means empty, purposeless, leading nowhere. Before Christ, their lives were a dead end. The pagan way of life, for all its rituals and traditions, could not address the fundamental problem of sin or bring people into relationship with the living God. But Christ's blood changed everything. The atonement is not just a transaction that happens in a heavenly courtroom. It has real, practical consequences. It changes the direction of human lives. This theme of transformation — dying to sin and living to righteousness — will return with full force when we come to 1 Peter 2:24.

There is one more dimension of this passage worth noting. The word "knowing" (eidotes, εἰδότες) that opens verse 18 indicates that Peter is reminding his readers of something they already know — something that was part of the foundational teaching they received when they came to faith. The ransom-and-lamb theology of the cross was not Peter's private invention or a late theological development. It was basic, first-generation Christian instruction. From the very beginning, the earliest believers understood the death of Christ through the categories of ransom, sacrifice, and the blood of the Passover Lamb. Peter is drawing on a shared tradition of catechesis — the common teaching that new converts received about the meaning of Christ's death. This strongly suggests that substitutionary and sacrificial categories were present in the church's proclamation from the very start, not imposed later by systematizing theologians.

1 Peter 2:24 — "He Himself Bore Our Sins in His Body on the Tree"

We come now to what is arguably the single most explicitly substitutionary statement about the atonement in the entire New Testament outside of Isaiah 53 itself. And that connection to Isaiah 53 is not accidental — it is deliberate, unmistakable, and theologically loaded.

"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." (1 Peter 2:24, ESV)

This verse is extraordinarily dense. Almost every phrase carries enormous theological weight. Let's work through it carefully.

The Context: Christ as Example and Substitute

Before diving into the verse itself, we need to understand its context. In 1 Peter 2:18–25, Peter is addressing servants (or slaves) who are suffering unjustly under harsh masters. He holds up Christ as an example of patient endurance in suffering (2:21–23): "For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly."

These verses present what scholars sometimes call the "exemplary" or "moral influence" dimension of the atonement — Christ as the model of righteous suffering. And this is indeed a genuine facet of the cross, as we will discuss in Chapter 22. But Peter does not stop with the example. He moves from Christ's example to Christ's achievement. He pivots from what Christ shows us to what Christ does for us. And it is at this pivot point — verse 24 — that the substitutionary heart of the atonement breaks through with unmistakable clarity.⁴

As Fleming Rutledge observes, the exemplary model taken by itself has a Pelagian tendency — it can reduce the cross to mere moral inspiration, as though Christ simply showed us how to suffer well and now it is up to us to follow his example through our own moral effort. But when the exemplary model is combined with substitution, as it is here in 1 Peter, it finds its proper place. The example has power precisely because the Substitute has accomplished something we could never accomplish for ourselves.⁵

"He Himself Bore Our Sins"

The phrase "he himself bore our sins" is the theological center of gravity in this verse, and it demands careful attention. The verb "bore" is anēnegken (ἀνήνεγκεν), from the root anapherō (ἀναφέρω). This word choice is far from incidental. In the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the early church used widely — anapherō is the standard term for offering sacrifices on the altar.⁶ It carries the concrete image of lifting something up and placing it upon the altar as an offering to God. When Peter says that Christ "bore" (anēnegken) our sins, he is using the language of sacrifice — the language of the priest carrying the offering up to the altar.

But there is more. This same Greek word, anapherō, is used in the Septuagint of Isaiah 53:12: "And he bore (anēnegken, ἀνήνεγκεν) the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." Peter is not reaching for a random vocabulary word here. He is deliberately echoing the language of Isaiah's Suffering Servant — the one who "bore the sin of many." The connection is unmistakable, and scholars across the theological spectrum recognize it.⁷ As Fr. Joshua Schooping notes, the Hebrew concept behind this term is nasa (נָשָׂא), meaning to bear or carry, which in Isaiah 53 specifically means to bear the consequences of sin vicariously. The Septuagint translators rendered this Hebrew concept with anapherō, and Peter picks up that exact Greek term and applies it to Christ.⁸

What does it mean to "bear" sins? This is a crucial question, and the Old Testament background provides the answer. As we explored in Chapter 6's detailed exegesis of Isaiah 53, the phrase "to bear sin" (nasa avon in Hebrew) is a technical expression in the Old Testament. It means to carry the weight of sin's consequences — to suffer the penalty that sin deserves. Leviticus 5:1 says, "If anyone sins... he shall bear his iniquity" — meaning he shall suffer the consequences of his sin. Numbers 14:33 uses the same language: "Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness" — literally, "bearing" the consequences of the parents' sin.⁹ When Peter says Christ "bore our sins," he is saying that Christ carried the weight of our sins' consequences in our place. He suffered what we deserved.

The pronoun "our" is critical. These were not Christ's own sins — he had none (1 Peter 2:22; cf. 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15). They were our sins. The transfer is explicit: our sins, his body, the tree. The sinless one carried the sins of the sinful.

"In His Body on the Tree"

Peter specifies that Christ bore our sins "in his body on the tree." Both phrases are significant.

"In his body" emphasizes the physical, bodily nature of Christ's suffering. The atonement was not a spiritual abstraction. It happened in flesh and blood. It involved real nails, real wood, real pain, real blood, and real death. The Son of God took on a human body (as we affirmed in the great Christological creeds — Nicaea, Chalcedon), and it was in that body — fully human, fully divine — that he bore the weight of the world's sin. As we saw in Chapter 10's treatment of Hebrews, the author of Hebrews makes a similar point: "We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10). The incarnation was for the purpose of atonement. Christ took on a body so that he could offer that body as a sacrifice.¹⁰

"On the tree" is a loaded phrase. The Greek word is xylon (ξύλον), which literally means "wood" or "tree." It is a common New Testament euphemism for the cross (Acts 5:30; 10:39; 13:29; Galatians 3:13). But its use here is not merely a stylistic choice. The word "tree" deliberately evokes Deuteronomy 21:22–23: "And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God."¹¹

Paul had already drawn on this passage in Galatians 3:13: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.'" Peter, by using "tree" rather than the more common stauros (σταυρός, "cross"), is invoking the same Deuteronomic curse tradition. The one who hangs on the tree stands under the curse. Christ, by hanging on the tree with our sins upon him, entered into the curse that our sins deserved. He absorbed the consequences of our sin — including its curse — in his own body.

Now, I want to be careful here. As we will discuss more fully in Chapters 19 and 20, this does not mean that God the Father was punishing an unwilling victim. The Father did not pour out vindictive rage on the Son. Rather, the Trinity acted in unified love. The Son went willingly. The Father sent the Son in love. Together, in the mystery of the Triune God's self-giving, Christ entered into the curse so that we might receive the blessing. But the curse was real. The penalty-bearing was real. The judicial consequences of sin fell upon the sinless One — and Peter tells us this with startling directness.

"That We Might Die to Sin and Live to Righteousness"

Peter does not leave us in the darkness of the cross. He tells us the purpose of Christ's sin-bearing: "that we might die to sin and live to righteousness." This purpose clause (using the Greek conjunction hina, ἵνα, expressing purpose or result) is enormously important, because it shows us that the atonement is not merely a legal transaction that leaves us unchanged. Christ bore our sins so that something would happen in us — so that we would be transformed, so that we would die to sin and begin to live a new kind of life.

The word Peter uses for "die" here is unusual. It is apogenomenoi (ἀπογενόμενοι), a word that occurs only here in the entire New Testament. It literally means "to be away from" or "to depart from" — to have no part in something, to be completely separated from it.¹² Peter is not using the common Greek word for death (apothnēskō, ἀποθνῄσκω). He reaches for a rarer, more vivid term that emphasizes departure, separation, and a decisive break. Through Christ's sin-bearing death, we are to be utterly separated from sin — departed from it, done with it, finished with the old way of living.

And the positive counterpart: we are to "live to righteousness." The atonement does not merely forgive us and leave us where we were. It empowers a new life. The death of Christ breaks the power of sin, and the resurrection of Christ (which Peter will emphasize in 1 Peter 3:18, 21) opens the way to a new kind of existence — a life oriented toward righteousness rather than sin. Paul expresses the same truth in Romans 6:11: "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus."

This is a critical point for our broader argument in this book. One of the common criticisms of penal substitutionary atonement is that it reduces the cross to a mere legal transaction — a bookkeeping exercise in a divine courtroom that has no real effect on human lives. But Peter's theology knows nothing of such a reduction. For Peter, the substitutionary bearing of sin is inseparable from the transformative purpose of the atonement. Christ bore our sins precisely so that we would be changed — so that we would die to the old life and begin living the new one. The legal and the transformative dimensions are two sides of the same coin.¹³

"By His Wounds You Have Been Healed"

Peter closes with a direct quotation from Isaiah 53:5: "By his wounds you have been healed." The Greek word for "wounds" is mōlōpi (μώλωπι), which refers to a bruise, welt, or wound caused by a blow — the kind of mark left by a flogging or beating. It is a vivid, physical word. Peter wants his readers — especially the suffering servants he is addressing — to picture the beaten, bloodied body of Christ on the cross.

And the result? "You have been healed." The verb is iathēte (ἰάθητε), from iaomai (ἰάομαι), meaning to heal, to cure, to restore to health. In this context, the "healing" is not primarily physical (though the atonement certainly has implications for physical wholeness, as Matthew 8:17 suggests). The healing Peter describes is spiritual: restoration to right relationship with God, liberation from sin's power, the mending of what was broken by human rebellion. The next verse confirms this: "For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls" (1 Peter 2:25). The healing is conversion — the return of wandering sheep to their Shepherd.¹⁴

The beauty of this image should not be missed. It is by his wounds that we are healed. It is through his suffering that our suffering is addressed. It is because he bore the consequences of our sin that we can be freed from sin's power and restored to the life God intended for us. This is the paradox at the heart of the gospel: life comes through death, healing comes through wounding, freedom comes through the bearing of another's burden.

Engaging the Objections: What "Bearing Sins" Does Not Mean

Before we move on, I want to interact briefly with Vee Chandler's treatment of this passage, since Chandler represents an important voice that affirms substitution but rejects the penal dimension. Chandler argues that 1 Peter 2:24 does not teach that God punished Christ for the sins of humankind. Rather, Christ bore sin in the sense of carrying it away — removing it — and the emphasis in the passage is on the removal of sins and the transformation of life, not on the satisfaction of divine justice.¹⁵

I appreciate Chandler's emphasis on the transformative purpose of the atonement — the "that we might die to sin and live to righteousness" clause. Chandler is right that this passage is not merely about a legal transaction. The purpose of Christ's sin-bearing is transformation. On that point, we agree fully.

However, I find Chandler's attempt to evacuate the penal dimension from this passage unpersuasive, for several reasons. First, the Old Testament background of "bearing sin" consistently includes the idea of suffering sin's penal consequences. As we noted above, "to bear iniquity" in the Old Testament means to suffer its consequences — and Numbers 14:33 explicitly connects this with the penalty of unfaithfulness. The phrase cannot be reduced to mere "carrying away" without doing violence to its Old Testament roots.¹⁶

Second, the "tree" language evokes the Deuteronomic curse, which is inescapably penal. The one who hangs on the tree is under a curse — a judicial sentence. Peter's choice of xylon (tree) rather than stauros (cross) is deliberate, and it brings the curse tradition into direct contact with Christ's sin-bearing.

Third, the broader context of 1 Peter includes 3:18, which we will examine next, where Peter explicitly describes Christ's death in terms of "the righteous for the unrighteous" — language that is unmistakably substitutionary and carries clear judicial overtones.

Chandler is correct that the text does not explicitly say "God punished Christ." That exact phrase is not present. But the conceptual framework — bearing sin, hanging on the tree under the curse, the righteous dying for the unrighteous, the purpose of reconciliation with God — points unmistakably toward the reality that Christ endured the judicial consequences of human sin in our place. To acknowledge substitution while denying that the substitute bore any penal consequences seems to me internally incoherent. If Christ truly stood in our place and bore what we deserved, then what he bore includes the penalty — because penalty is what sin deserves.

1 Peter 3:18 — The Righteous for the Unrighteous

If 1 Peter 2:24 gives us the most explicitly substitutionary atonement statement in the Petrine corpus, then 1 Peter 3:18 gives us what may be the most concise summary of penal substitutionary atonement in the entire New Testament. In a single sentence, Peter compresses the essential elements of the gospel into a formulation of breathtaking clarity:

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit." (1 Peter 3:18, ESV)

Let us examine each element carefully.

"Christ Also Suffered Once for Sins"

The word "once" is hapax (ἅπαξ), which carries the sense of "once for all" — a single, unrepeatable, definitive act. This is the same emphasis we find throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews, as we explored in Chapter 10: the sacrifice of Christ is not something that needs to be repeated. It was offered once, and it accomplished its purpose completely and forever (cf. Hebrews 7:27; 9:12, 26, 28; 10:10).¹⁷ The finality of Christ's sacrifice stands in sharp contrast to the repetitive sacrifices of the Old Testament system, which had to be offered again and again because they could never fully deal with sin (Hebrews 10:1–4). Christ's once-for-all sacrifice succeeds where all previous sacrifices fell short.

He suffered "for sins" — peri hamartiōn (περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν). This is highly significant language. In the Septuagint, the phrase peri hamartias (περὶ ἁμαρτίας) is the standard translation for the Hebrew chattath (חַטָּאת), the sin offering.¹⁸ When Peter says Christ suffered "for sins," he is using the technical vocabulary of the Old Testament sacrificial system. Christ's suffering was not random, not merely the result of political injustice or human cruelty. It was for sins — it was a sin offering, a sacrifice that addressed the problem of human sin before a holy God. As we discussed in Chapter 4's analysis of the Levitical system, the sin offering was specifically designed to deal with the guilt and defilement that sin produces. Christ's death functions as the ultimate sin offering — the final, definitive sacrifice to which all the old sacrifices pointed.

"The Righteous for the Unrighteous"

Here we arrive at the heart of the verse: dikaios hyper adikōn (δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων) — "the righteous for the unrighteous." This phrase is, I believe, one of the clearest and most powerful summaries of substitutionary atonement in all of Scripture. Its meaning is almost impossible to miss.

"The righteous one" — that is Christ, the sinless one, the one who "committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth" (1 Peter 2:22). "The unrighteous" — that is us, all of humanity, the ones whose sins needed to be borne. And between them stands the preposition hyper (ὑπέρ), meaning "on behalf of" or "for the sake of," and in many contexts — as scholars widely acknowledge — carrying the stronger sense of "in the place of."¹⁹

As we surveyed in Chapter 2's treatment of the key atonement prepositions, the word hyper (ὑπέρ) has a range of meaning that includes both "on behalf of" (beneficiary) and "in place of" (substitutionary). The context must determine which sense is primary. And in this context, where the righteous one suffers for the unrighteous, where the sinless one dies so that sinners might be brought to God, the substitutionary sense is virtually required. It is not merely that Christ suffered for our benefit — though He certainly did. It is that He suffered in our place. The righteous one stood where the unrighteous should have stood. He absorbed the consequences that we deserved.

Rutledge is characteristically forceful on this point. She argues that while some scholars have shown an unreasonable antipathy toward the concept of substitution, the New Testament text makes it extremely difficult to avoid. 1 Peter 3:18 is one of the places where the substitutionary meaning is most transparent: the innocent dying in place of the guilty, the righteous standing in for the unrighteous.²⁰

John Stott puts it simply and memorably: the cross reveals God's justice in that the Righteous One dies for the unrighteous. The sinless substitutes himself for the sinful. And the result is not punishment for its own sake but reconciliation — "that he might bring us to God."²¹

"That He Might Bring Us to God"

The purpose clause — "that he might bring us to God" (hina hymas prosagagē tō theō, ἵνα ὑμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ θεῷ) — is beautiful in its simplicity and profound in its implications. The verb prosagō (προσάγω) means to lead toward, to bring near, to present, to grant access. In the Old Testament, it was used of the priest bringing the sacrifice near to the altar (Leviticus 1:2–3 LXX) and of the worshiper being brought into God's presence.²² In the New Testament, it is used of the access that believers now have to God through Christ (Ephesians 2:18; 3:12; Romans 5:2).

Peter is telling us what the atonement is ultimately for. It is not an end in itself. The bearing of sin, the suffering of the righteous for the unrighteous, the once-for-all sacrifice — all of it serves a relational purpose. The goal is reconciliation. The goal is access to God. The goal is that human beings, who were separated from God by their sin, might be brought near to Him.

This is why I keep insisting throughout this book that the atonement is fundamentally an act of love. It is not the story of an angry God who needs to be paid off before He will tolerate human beings in His presence. It is the story of a loving God who goes to extraordinary lengths — even to the point of bearing the cost of sin Himself in the person of His Son — so that the people He loves can be brought home to Him. The penal dimension is real: sin has judicial consequences, and Christ bore them. But the purpose of the penalty-bearing is relational: "that he might bring us to God." Love is the motive. Reconciliation is the goal. Substitution is the means.

"Being Put to Death in the Flesh but Made Alive in the Spirit"

Peter concludes the verse with a contrast that encompasses the full scope of God's saving work: Christ was "put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit." The cross is not the end of the story. The death of Christ gives way to the resurrection. The suffering gives way to vindication. The apparent defeat gives way to ultimate victory.

The precise meaning of "in the flesh" and "in the spirit" is debated among scholars. Some understand it as referring to two realms or spheres of existence — the physical realm (where Christ died) and the spiritual realm (where Christ was raised and exalted). Others see a reference to Christ's two natures: his human nature (in which he died) and the Spirit of God (by whose power he was raised). Still others understand "spirit" as referring to Christ's human spirit, which survived death and was the locus of his continued activity between death and resurrection.²³

What is clear, regardless of how we resolve this interpretive question, is that Peter views the death and resurrection of Christ as a unified saving event. The sacrifice on the cross achieves its purpose, and the resurrection vindicates the sacrifice. The righteous one who died for the unrighteous was not left in the grave. God raised him, confirming that his sacrifice was accepted and that the way to God has been opened. As Paul puts it in Romans 4:25, Christ "was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification."

The Cry of Dereliction: "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

We turn now to what is, in many ways, the most mysterious and theologically weighty moment in the entire Gospel narrative. It is the moment when Jesus, hanging on the cross in the darkness that had covered the land, cried out in a loud voice:

"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34, ESV; cf. Matthew 27:46)

These are the words of Psalm 22:1, spoken in Aramaic from the cross. They are reported by two Evangelists — Matthew and Mark — making the cry of dereliction one of only a few sayings of Jesus on the cross that is attested by more than one Gospel writer. The early church preserved these words carefully, including the original Aramaic, because they were recognized as profoundly important — and profoundly troubling.

What does this cry mean? What was happening in the depths of the cross when the Son of God uttered these words? This is one of the most debated questions in the history of Christian theology, and we need to examine the major interpretations carefully before stating what I believe the evidence supports.

Interpretation 1: A Cry of Despair or Loss of Faith

Some interpreters have suggested that Jesus' cry was an expression of genuine despair — that his faith buckled under the weight of his suffering, and he cried out in bitter confusion or even anger at God for abandoning him. Perhaps he had expected rescue that never came. Perhaps the agony overwhelmed him.

This interpretation must be rejected. As Stott forcefully argues, to read the cry of dereliction as a failure of faith is to deny the moral perfection of Christ. It accuses Jesus of unbelief at the very moment of his greatest act of obedience and self-sacrifice. It makes the Sinless One guilty of the sin of despair precisely when he was accomplishing the salvation of the world. Christian faith rightly protests against such an explanation.²⁴

Interpretation 2: A Cry of Loneliness (Feeling Forsaken but Not Actually Forsaken)

A second, more nuanced interpretation holds that Jesus was not actually forsaken by the Father but only felt forsaken. On this reading, Jesus experienced what the mystics have called "the dark night of the soul" — a subjective sense of God's absence, a withdrawing of the conscious experience of the Father's love and comfort, even though the Father was in fact still present. Jesus knew God's covenant faithfulness. He trusted in God's promises. But in his suffering, he was allowed to feel the anguish of apparent abandonment. The cry, then, is an expression of genuine emotional and spiritual pain but not of actual dereliction.

This interpretation has more to commend it than the first. It preserves the sinlessness of Christ and takes seriously the reality of his suffering. And there may be an element of truth in it — Jesus certainly experienced real, agonizing pain that included spiritual dimensions we can barely fathom.

However, as Stott notes, there seems to be an insuperable difficulty with this interpretation: the words of Psalm 22:1 express an experience of being, not merely feeling, God-forsaken. "Why have you forsaken me?" is not a statement about feelings. It is a statement about reality.²⁵

Interpretation 3: A Cry of Victory (Quoting Psalm 22 as a Whole)

A third popular interpretation argues that Jesus was not expressing despair or even subjective desolation. Rather, by quoting the first verse of Psalm 22, he was invoking the entire psalm — which begins in agony but ends in triumph and vindication (Psalm 22:22–31). On this reading, the cry is actually a proclamation of confidence: "Yes, I am suffering now, but this psalm ends in victory, and I know that victory is coming."

This interpretation is ingenious, and it rightly recognizes that Psalm 22 does move from lament to vindication. The church has always read Psalm 22 as prophetically fulfilled in the crucifixion, and the psalm's movement from suffering to praise is indeed significant.

But I find this interpretation, taken by itself, unconvincing. As Stott asks: "Why should Jesus have quoted from the Psalm's beginning if in reality he was alluding to its end? It would seem rather perverse."²⁶ If Jesus wanted to express triumph, he had the entire psalm available to him — why choose the verse of deepest agony? Moreover, the other evangelistic details surrounding the cry — the darkness, the loud voice, the anguish — all suggest that something genuinely terrible was happening, not that Jesus was calmly proclaiming future vindication.

Interpretation 4: A Cry of Real Dereliction

The fourth interpretation — and the one I believe best accounts for all the evidence — is the simplest: Jesus' cry was an expression of real dereliction. He was not merely feeling forsaken; he was, in some genuine and mysterious sense, experiencing the reality of being forsaken by the Father as he bore the full weight of human sin.

I agree with R. W. Dale's famous statement, quoted by Stott: "I decline to accept any explanation of these words which implies that they do not represent the actual truth of our Lord's position."²⁷ Throughout his ministry, even when forsaken by all his human companions, Jesus could say, "Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me" (John 16:32). But in the darkness of the cross, something changed. Something unprecedented occurred. For the first and only time in all eternity, the Son experienced a rupture in the conscious, experiential fellowship he had always enjoyed with the Father. He was, as Calvin put it, not merely dying a bodily death but suffering "the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man."²⁸

What the Cry Does and Does Not Mean

Now I need to be very precise here, because this is territory where sloppy theology can do real damage. When I say that Jesus experienced a real dereliction — a genuine forsakenness — I need to make clear what I mean and what I do not mean.

I do not mean that the Trinity was "broken," "ruptured," or "fractured." The ontological unity of the Godhead — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three Persons, sharing the same divine essence — cannot be broken. The Trinitarian nature of God is not contingent on circumstances. It is the eternal, immutable reality of who God is. As David Allen carefully explains, following Thomas McCall's analysis, concepts like "rejection" or "complete abandonment" of the Son by the Father are not supported by the New Testament evidence. The eternal Trinitarian union between Father and Son, as well as the incarnational union of the divine and human natures in Christ, remained unbroken at the cross.²⁹

Psalm 22 itself provides a crucial counterbalance. While verse 1 says "why have you forsaken me?" verse 24 declares: "For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him." If Jesus was indeed invoking the whole of Psalm 22 — and I believe he was aware of the entire psalm, even as he quoted verse 1 — then the psalm itself testifies that the Father did not ultimately hide his face from the Son. The Father heard his cry.³⁰

Charles Cranfield captures the paradox beautifully: Jesus experienced "not merely a felt, but a real, abandonment by his Father," and yet "the unity of the Blessed Trinity was even then unbroken."³¹ How can both be true simultaneously? This is where we reach the limits of human understanding and stand before genuine mystery. But I believe the best way to articulate it is as follows.

What Jesus experienced on the cross was not an ontological rupture in the Trinity — that is impossible and must be firmly rejected. Rather, it was an experiential, functional, voluntary acceptance of the consequences of human sin. Sin separates human beings from God. That is its fundamental consequence — it produces alienation, exile, spiritual death. When Christ bore our sins in his body on the tree (as Peter tells us in 2:24), he entered into the full reality of what sin does. He experienced from the inside — voluntarily, vicariously, on our behalf — the horror of what it means to be cut off from the life-giving presence of God. He tasted the alienation that sin produces. He endured the "curse" (Galatians 3:13) that the law pronounces on sinners. And in doing so, he exhausted its power. He absorbed its force. He drained the cup of judgment so that we would never have to drink it.³²

Think of it this way. If the fundamental penalty of sin is separation from God — and Scripture consistently teaches that it is (Isaiah 59:2: "your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God"; Romans 6:23: "the wages of sin is death") — then for Christ to bear the penalty of sin must involve, in some real way, his entering into that separation. Not an ontological sundering of the Trinity, but a real, experienced, voluntary entering into the darkness of sin's ultimate consequence. The cry of dereliction is the moment where that reality breaks through into human hearing. For a brief, terrible, holy moment, the veil is pulled back and we glimpse what it cost the Son of God to save us.

Fleming Rutledge's treatment of what she calls "the godlessness of the cross" is especially powerful here. Rutledge argues that the crucifixion was not merely a painful death — it was a God-forsaken death. The cry of dereliction reveals that Jesus entered into the most extreme form of human alienation from God. He experienced the full weight of the human condition under sin — the condition of godlessness, of being cut off from the source of all life and goodness and meaning. And he did this not because of any sin of his own, but because he had taken our sin upon himself.³³

This is why the cry of dereliction is so important for understanding penal substitutionary atonement. The cry reveals the depth of what Christ endured. It was not merely physical pain, though that was agonizing. It was not merely social rejection, though he was mocked, abandoned, and despised. It was spiritual desolation — the experience of bearing the weight of the world's sin before a holy God, and entering into the consequence that sin produces: separation from God. This is the penalty of sin. And Christ bore it in our place.

The Cry as the Interpretive Key to the Cross

Rutledge goes so far as to suggest that the cry of dereliction may be "the ultimate criterion for the interpretation of the cross of Christ." It is the one saying from the cross that is reported by not one but two Evangelists. It is the saying that most directly reveals what was happening in the spiritual depths of the crucifixion — beyond what any human eye could see.³⁴

I believe Rutledge is on to something profoundly important here. The physical details of the crucifixion — the nails, the thorns, the scourging — are terrible, but they are not, by themselves, theologically unique. Many people in the ancient world were crucified. What makes the cross of Christ different from every other crucifixion is not the physical suffering but the spiritual reality behind it: the sinless Son of God was bearing the sins of the world, and in doing so, he was entering into the godforsakenness that sin produces. The cry of dereliction is the window into that spiritual reality. Without it, we would see only the external brutality of Roman execution. With it, we catch a glimpse of the cosmic, spiritual, judicial transaction that was taking place in those hours of darkness.

Stott's summary is worth pausing over. He notes that the darkness seems to have lasted for three hours — from the sixth hour (noon) to the ninth hour (3 p.m.). In that darkness, the biblical writers use a variety of expressions to describe what happened: he was "pierced for our transgressions," he "bore our sins in his body on the tree," he was "made sin" for us, he "became a curse" for us. "The fearful concept of Jesus 'bearing,' even actually 'becoming,' our sin and curse" was given outward expression by the darkness of the sky — a symbol, perhaps, of the spiritual darkness that enveloped Christ as he bore the consequences of human sin.³⁵

And then, emerging from that darkness, came the terrible cry: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Stott comments: "An actual and dreadful separation took place between the Father and the Son; it was voluntarily accepted by both the Father and the Son; it was due to our sins and their just reward; and Jesus expressed this horror of great darkness, this God-forsakenness, by quoting the only verse of Scripture which accurately described it, and which he had perfectly fulfilled."³⁶

The Father's Love Was Never Withdrawn

I want to return to a point I made briefly above and develop it further, because it is absolutely essential for a right understanding of penal substitutionary atonement. The cry of dereliction does not mean that the Father stopped loving the Son. It does not mean that the Father was an angry deity pouring out his rage on an unwilling victim. It does not mean that the cross was "cosmic child abuse," as Steve Chalke infamously suggested.³⁷

The Father loved Jesus on the cross. The Son went willingly to the cross (John 10:18). The Spirit was present at the cross (Hebrews 9:14, "who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God"). The entire Trinity was involved in the atoning work of Calvary, acting in unified, self-giving love. As Stott argues in what is perhaps the most important chapter ever written on the atonement — Chapter 6 of The Cross of Christ, titled "The Self-Substitution of God" — the cross is not the Father punishing the Son. It is God Himself, in the person of His Son, bearing the cost of our salvation. It is divine self-substitution.³⁸

Herman Bavinck captures this beautifully: "Also on the cross Jesus remained the beloved Son, the Son of his Father's good pleasure. Precisely in his suffering and death, Christ offered his greatest, most complete obedience to the will of the Father." And Jesus himself, Bavinck reminds us, told his disciples "that the hour would come when all his disciples would abandon him, but that he himself would not be alone for the Father was with him" (John 16:32).³⁹

So we hold two truths in tension — and we must hold them together, even though the tension is enormous. On the one hand, Christ genuinely experienced the forsakenness that is the consequence of sin. The cry of dereliction was real. On the other hand, the Trinitarian unity was never broken, and the Father's love for the Son was never withdrawn. The Son voluntarily entered into the experience of sin's consequences — including the horrifying sense of separation from God — out of love for us and in obedience to the Father. The Father allowed the Son to enter into that experience — not because He hated the Son, but because He loved the world (John 3:16). As we will explore more fully in Chapter 20, the cross is the supreme demonstration of Trinitarian love, not its contradiction.

Schooping's Orthodox Perspective on the Cry

Before leaving the cry of dereliction, I want to draw attention to an important contribution from Fr. Joshua Schooping, who writes from within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Schooping engages with St. Philaret of Moscow's interpretation of the cry and shows how Orthodox theology, properly understood, can accommodate a genuinely penal and substitutionary reading of this moment.

Schooping explains that Philaret defines sin as "separation from God," stating that "separation from God and a state of sin are one and the same thing." If sin is fundamentally separation from God, then to atone for sin, Christ must undergo a punishment proportioned to that separation — what Philaret calls "forsakenness." Christ experienced in his human nature what forsakenness is, in order to atone for the fundamental consequence of our sin, which is forsakenness from God. This is a vicarious atonement in which Christ suffers the consequence of sin — namely, separation from God — on our behalf.⁴⁰

What is remarkable about this reading is that it comes from an Orthodox priest who is drawing on Orthodox patristic sources — and yet it aligns closely with the penal substitutionary understanding we have been developing. Schooping shows that the cry of dereliction, understood through the lens of writers like Philaret and Gregory Palamas, reveals a Christ who voluntarily underwent the penal consequence of human sin (forsakenness, separation from God) in order to atone for that sin vicariously. This is not a Western innovation. It is a genuinely catholic (universal) Christian understanding that transcends the East-West divide.⁴¹

The Broader Petrine Theology of the Cross

Before we draw our conclusions, it is worth stepping back and noting some broader features of Peter's theology of the cross that reinforce the specific exegetical findings we have discussed.

Christ's Sinlessness as the Foundation of Substitution

Peter is emphatic about Christ's sinlessness. In 1 Peter 2:22, he quotes Isaiah 53:9: "He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth." In 1 Peter 1:19, Christ is "a lamb without blemish or spot." In 3:18, he is "the righteous" (dikaios). Peter builds his entire theology of the atonement on the foundation of Christ's sinlessness. Why? Because substitution only works if the substitute is genuinely innocent. If Christ had sins of his own to answer for, he could not have borne ours. The fact that Peter emphasizes Christ's sinlessness so repeatedly and so emphatically shows that he is thinking in substitutionary categories. The sinless one dies for the sinful. The unblemished lamb is offered in the place of the blemished people. The righteous stands in for the unrighteous.

This is not a minor theological detail. It is the logical hinge on which the entire substitutionary framework turns. In the Old Testament sacrificial system, as we explored in Chapters 4 and 5, the unblemished animal was not offered because animals are morally innocent in some philosophical sense. It was offered because it was whole, complete, without defect — a fitting offering to a holy God. The sacrificial animal represented what the worshiper ought to be but was not. When Peter calls Christ "a lamb without blemish or spot" and "the righteous one," he is making the Christological claim that Jesus was what all those Old Testament sacrifices merely symbolized: the truly perfect, truly sinless, truly righteous offering. His sinlessness was not a legal fiction. It was a living reality — and it is what qualifies him alone to bear the sins of others.

The Suffering Theme in 1 Peter

The theme of suffering permeates 1 Peter. Peter writes to Christians who are suffering (1:6; 2:19–21; 3:14–17; 4:1, 12–19; 5:10). And he consistently holds up Christ's suffering as both the ground of their hope and the pattern for their lives. Christ "suffered for you, leaving you an example" (2:21). "Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking" (4:1). "Rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings" (4:13).

But here is the crucial distinction: Christ's suffering was unique. The readers' suffering is meaningful because Christ's suffering accomplished something they could never accomplish — it dealt with sin, it brought them to God, it secured their redemption. They follow his example of patient endurance, but they do not replicate his atoning work. He alone bore the sins. He alone was the righteous one dying for the unrighteous. Their suffering participates in his, but his suffering was foundational and unrepeatable. This distinction between Christ's unique substitutionary suffering and the believers' responsive suffering of discipleship runs throughout 1 Peter and gives the letter its distinctive theological shape.⁴²

The Shepherd Who Brings the Sheep Home

One more note on Peter's theology before we conclude. In 1 Peter 2:25, immediately after the great atonement statement of 2:24, Peter writes: "For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls." The image is from Isaiah 53:6: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way."

Peter is telling us that the atonement is about homecoming. We were lost sheep, wandering far from God, going our own way. And Christ — the Good Shepherd — came after us. He bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. He suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, so that he might bring us to God. The shepherd laid down his life for the sheep (John 10:11, 15), and through his death and resurrection, the sheep are brought home.

This pastoral dimension of the atonement should never be lost in the midst of our technical theological analysis. The cross is not primarily a doctrine to be debated. It is a rescue mission to be celebrated. The Shepherd went to the cross for the sheep. The Righteous One died for the unrighteous. The Sinless One bore our sins. And the result is that we, who were straying and lost, have been brought home to the God who loves us.

Conclusion: The Petrine Witness and the Heart of the Gospel

As we draw this chapter to a close, let us summarize what we have found in the Petrine witness to the atonement.

In 1 Peter 1:18–19, we found ransom language combined with sacrificial lamb imagery — the precious blood of Christ, the Lamb without blemish, paying the price to redeem sinners from their futile way of life.

In 1 Peter 2:24, we found what may be the single most comprehensive atonement verse in the New Testament: sacrificial language (the verb anapherō from the Levitical system), Suffering Servant theology (direct echoes of Isaiah 53:4, 12), explicit substitution (he bore our sins), curse-bearing (on the tree), transformative purpose (dying to sin, living to righteousness), and healing through the wounds of Christ (quoting Isaiah 53:5).

In 1 Peter 3:18, we found what I believe is the most concise summary of penal substitutionary atonement in the New Testament: once-for-all sacrifice (hapax), sin-offering language (peri hamartiōn), unmistakable substitution (the righteous for the unrighteous), and reconciliation as the purpose (that he might bring us to God).

And in the cry of dereliction (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46), we found a window into the deepest mystery of the atonement: the Son of God, bearing the sins of the world, entering voluntarily into the experience of what sin does — separation from God — so that we might never be separated from God. The cry was real. The forsakenness was genuine. But the Trinity was not broken, and the Father's love was not withdrawn. Rather, the Triune God, acting in unified love, bore the cost of human sin in the person of the Son so that sinners might be brought home.

When we step back and look at this evidence as a whole, the picture is striking. The apostle Peter — the eyewitness, the restored denier, the leader of the early church — proclaimed the death of Christ in unmistakably substitutionary, sacrificial, and penal terms. He did not use the word "penal substitution," of course. That is a later theological label. But the realities that the label describes are present in full force in the Petrine writings. Christ bore our sins. The righteous died for the unrighteous. He suffered for sins once for all. He was the unblemished Lamb whose precious blood ransomed us. By his wounds we were healed.

These are not the constructions of later theologians imposed on the text. These are the apostolic witness itself — the testimony of a man who saw the risen Christ, who was forgiven and restored, and who spent the rest of his life proclaiming the good news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for the unrighteous so that he might bring us to God.

I want to end with a personal reflection. When I read these Petrine texts, I am struck by their clarity. There are passages in Paul that require careful, patient untangling — layers of argument, dense theological reasoning, complex syntax. And we have spent considerable time in earlier chapters doing exactly that kind of exegetical work with Romans 3, 2 Corinthians 5, and Galatians 3. But Peter's atonement texts have a different quality. They are direct. They are simple. They cut straight to the heart of the matter. "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree." "Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God." These sentences are not hard to understand. A child can grasp their meaning. The Righteous One took my place. He carried my sins. He suffered so that I could be brought home to God.

That simplicity is not simplistic. Behind it lies the full weight of Isaiah 53, the Levitical sacrificial system, the Passover narrative, and the theology of the Suffering Servant. Peter's simple words stand on a foundation of centuries of Old Testament preparation. But the simplicity is the point. The gospel is not a complicated philosophical system that only the educated can access. It is good news — news that a fisherman from Galilee could proclaim, and that anyone with ears to hear can receive. Christ died for our sins. The Righteous for the unrighteous. That he might bring us to God.

That is the gospel. And it is very good news indeed.