Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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Martyn Lloyd-Jones would agree that God loved man
eternally, and would offer the Incarnation as the prime
proof of that fact. God sent Jesus Christ to live and
die on earth as the supreme expression of his love. Yet,
according to Lloyd-Jones, God, in his holiness, could not
accept sinful man without an atonement for sin. Sin
placed man in God's debt and under his wrath. The cross
was God's solution to this otherwise unbreakable tension
between his holiness and his love. Following in the Line
of the Old Testament cultic sacrifices, Jesus died the
death man deserved (as punishment for sin) and enabled a
new birth of spiritual life in man. According to
Lloyd-Jones, the Gospel is this:
• . that in dying He [Jesus Christ] fulfilled
the Law and destroyed the power of death, and
that by so doing He cancelled the power of sin
and wiped out the sinful debt of humanity and
that by the power of His Spirit a man can be
created anew and start upon a new life which is
an eternal life.
Lloyd-Jones's agreement with Rudolf Bultmann comes
In this: no person receives the benefit of Christ's
death until that person chooses to appropriate Christ's
death as his own. Lloyd-Jones preached, "What makes me a
Christian is to believe and accept the testimony that
Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, . • • that he died
for men's sins on the cross, that he rose from the
dead. . • ." (underlining mine).7
Barth and Stewart valued preaching that proclaimed
the eternal benefit of what Christ had already done. For
them, the goal of preaching was to help people know that