Welcome to a new week on the podcast.

We start the week with an email from a podcast listener named Jessica from Davis, California,

and it couldn't be more important.

Pastor John, as I talk with millennials about Christ in the gospel, I've repeatedly had

people say that they don't believe that someone else paying the punishment for another's

sin, substitutionary toment, is just.

I too have internal pushback against this, but have come to know that substitutionary

atonement has its roots in the mosaic sacrificial system.

Our generation, however, at least in California, is biblically illiterate and doesn't have

this framework to go off of.

How would you explain the justice of substitutionary atonement to this generation?

Well, not much more could be more important than the question of whether Christ was in

fact a just and merciful substitute for sinners so that when he died for his elect, he actually

bore their punishment so that they can experience no condemnation.

That is the heart of the Christian gospel.

If that goes, everything goes, and let us eat drink and be merry for tomorrow, we perish.

Now there are at least two issues here.

One is how biblical authority relates to the categories of thought in people's minds,

and the other is how to help people today grasp the justice of the atonement, given what

they presently have as categories in their mind.

A word about that first issue, my approach to biblical authority in relation to John

Piper's fallen and fallible mind is to try, at least try to let the Bible shape and

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