Christ Our Hope: Slain and Resurrected for Us

Jesus Christ has defeated Satan. Christ has destroyed the works of the devil (1 John 3:8); this was the very reason for which he appeared.

But on Good Friday and Easter weekend, we do well to unpack this further. What exactly about the cross constituted the head-crushing of the devil (see Genesis 3:15)? The cross certainly did not look like Satan’s defeat. The cross looked like Jesus’ defeat by any normal measurement. How on earth can we Christians insist, a little stubbornly, that the devil is even now a defeated devil (though we await his final vanquishing)?

Paul gives a very helpful explanation in Colossians 2:13–15. There, Paul connects the triumph of God to the forgiveness of sins:

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

This passage shows us that Christ’s death is the ultimate spiritual disarmament project. In Christ our propitiatory sacrifice, God has forgiven all our sins (Col. 2:13). Those for whom Christ died are forgiven in full. Paul expounds on this point by switching to a financial metaphor: we had heaped up an unpayable “record of debt,” a record that came with all the force of law (v. 14).

None of us could overcome the “legal demands” before us (v. 14). Paul is not here laying out achievements that we would find difficult in our own terms; Paul is here detailing that Christ did what we could never do, and had no hope of doing. Colossians 2 teaches us that the biblical God has record books. He sees and knows and registers all our transgressions. He stands as the authority over humanity; it is his holy character that is our standard, the standard that we fail to honor. God is the one who rules the created order morally and legally. God is the one offended and wronged by all our sin.

Yet mark this well: God is the God who made us alive with Christ (v. 13). We have not made ourselves alive, both now and eschatologically. We have not helped to forgive ourselves. Our good works have not balanced the debt ledger. Our religious exercises have not met the divine requirements of God’s legal demands. “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” and, we can say, vain works (Isa. 64:6).

All this means that atonement belongs to God and God alone. God alone makes dead men live. God alone forgives trespasses. God alone cancels the record of debt. The one work that accomplishes God’s own ends is the work of the cross. When God wants to deal with sin decisively, you could say, he nails it to the tree (Col. 2:14).

The cross is not man’s idea, and the cross is not subject to man’s approval. The cross has pre-loaded meaning in it. God is the one who has defined the cross of his Son. God is the one who wanted his Son to die in history on actual wood for our sins. God accepts only one form of payment for sin, not many. That form is the death of his Son. The cross is efficacious; the accomplishment is objective; the work is done.

The God who is holy and loving is also the God who is undefeated. As we have seen here, because the work of propitiation is complete, God’s triumph over the devil is realized. We are not waiting for God to have victory over the devil. The church is not hoping against hope that the powers of light vanquish the principalities of darkness. Nor has Jesus died as a Lamb such that sin is forgiven, but we have no taste of victory yet. Paul shows us otherwise: the spiritual “rulers and authorities” are now “disarmed” (Col. 2:15). This means that Satan and his forces have suffered a decisive and devastating defeat.

The nature of this defeat is found in this one phrase: “having forgiven us all our trespasses” (Col. 2:13). It is not that Jesus died as an offering unto God and rose again, without any substitutionary effect. It is that the perfectly righteous Jesus, perfectly obedient all his days, died in our place on the cross, and in so doing drank the Father’s wrath against sin for us. This is how all our trespasses are “forgiven.”

The death of Christ means the forgiveness of sin. It is this forgiving act that constitutes God’s victory over Satan. The sins of God’s people are no longer unforgiven. They are fully forgiven. Nothing can overturn this forgiveness; nothing can diminish it; nothing can supplement it. The forgiveness of our trespasses has occurred, and there is the grounds of Christ’s victory and Satan’s defeat. As I do in this volume of theology, you could sum it up this way: penal substitutionary atonement has effected Christus victor, the Messiah’s triumph.

There is no coming back from this kind of defeat. There is no turning back the clock. There is no reversing the effects of this spiritual disarmament project. The devil cannot build up his arsenal such that he may overcome the Father’s work realized in the Son’s death. Satan’s anti-kingdom has met its end. Nor is this a quiet defeat. The forgiveness of sins achieved in the death of Christ for us is a matter of public record.

In Christ’s greatest moment of open shame, the moment when he hung naked before leering eyes, the Father put the devil’s armies “to open shame” (Col. 2:15). Here we remember just how ironic the cross is. It looks like the destruction of the mission of Christ, but it is in truth the destruction of the mission of Satan. The event that looked like the defeat of God was actually the moment when God triumphed over his ancient adversary. The Father secured this triumph “in him,” in the forgiveness won for sinners by his only Son (v. 15).

The world witnessed the triumph of the Son just three days after his death. In his resurrection, Jesus overcame death, and came back to life. But he did not just come back to life; he came back in glorified form. He emerged from his crucifixion the true Adam (as he always was) in his glorified state, and indeed the new Adam.

The resurrection does indeed represent the triumph of God in nothing less than bodily form, then. Our being made alive together with Christ is the realization in us, as a living display, of this triumph. Resurrection is not a mere happening, then; resurrection is a form of life, true life. The people of God are a resurrected people who thus represent a new order of humanity.

The resurrection is the visible triumph of God, as we will consider below. But we cannot miss that in Colossians 2, Paul finds the triumph of God first in the cross, where forgiveness of sin takes place—more precisely, where every sinner elected to eternal life is purchased back from the dead. The cross is the first stage of the Father’s triumph in the Son, for through Christ’s death—the shedding of his blood, per Hebrews 9:22—our sins are forgiven. The resurrection is the second stage, the moment when the new order clearly emerges and the new humanity begins its triumphal procession to the world of love.

Thus we see that the cross and resurrection are distinct but bound, and inseparably so. If we do not have the first stage of triumph, we cannot have the second, for our sins are not forgiven, and so there is no ground of resurrection life. But by the same token, if we do not have the second stage of triumph, the first stage is no triumph at all, for we are still dead in our sins without new life, and thus the accomplishment of the cross is not realized.

Take heart, believer: the Son of God was crucified for you. But not only this: the Son of God was resurrected for you. Because of these entwined truths, all your sin is paid for, God is pouring out love into your life, and you can be sure that the devil is even now a defeated devil.

Soon, we will see his wicked tyranny ended once and for all.

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This essay is adapted from my 2024 book The Warrior Savior (P&R), and is used here with permission.