One thing that can happen when we equate the gospel with PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) is that we primarily come to think of God as the one from whom we need to be saved. This is the central logic at work in PSA. The death of Jesus on the cross is a kind of payment Jesus makes on our behalf to satisfy God’s anger. Without it, we are fish out of water.

But when you read the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), this is not the general sense you get — that Jesus comes to appease God.

If we take the Gospel of Mark as an example, after Jesus is baptized he is immediately sent into the wilderness to do battle with the Satan. Right after he has multiple confrontations with impure or unclean spirits and then is shown overcoming various diseases that afflict the sick.

All this to say, at the outset of his ministry, Jesus is taking on the forces of evil (not God), battling against what ails those he comes in contact with. As his offensive gains momentum, his tactical brilliance proves too convincing and quickly ignites the ire of his opponents. They accuse him of being in league with Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. In response Jesus utters a rather enigmatic parable about a strong man being plundered.

Here is the parable and the context in which it is given:

Mark 3:23-27

23 And he called them to him and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

The metaphor can be a little jarring. Who is the strong man? We are apt to think it is Jesus, but then the parable describes this strong man as being tied up by someone stronger. So then this stronger one must be Jesus. But then we read this stronger one is a plunderer.

Is Jesus a plunderer?

It certainly seems so. 

This is Jesus’ own self-description of what he came to do. He comes to plunder the strong man — the one who possesses the power to hold captive those trapped within his house.

It goes without saying that the strong man Jesus comes to plunder is not God. It is God’s enemy. The anti-God power that holds creation captive.

Throughout Mark, the shape of this captivity is expressed through those possessed by demons as well as those suffering from physical ailments. What Jesus wants the people to know is that all the exorcisms they see him performing, all the bodies they witness him healing, these are evidence of him binding up the one who has kept them bound for far too long. 

They are the signs that a stronger one has come.

This, in the end, is the Gospel. It is the good news that Jesus has come to save us, not from God, but from the strong man, the Satan, the Devil; to deliver us from Sin and Death, from the powers and principalities, from the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil.

It is they who are the enemy. They oppress and imprison us.

Jesus comes to defeat them and set us free.

This is what we mean when we say Jesus saves.

We see this emphasized throughout the New Testament.

As the Apostle Paul says in Colossians: 

Colossians 2:15 (NIV)

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The writer of Hebrews puts it this way:

Hebrews 2:14-15 (NIV)

¹⁴ Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵ and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. 

The book of Revelation over and over again reiterates the truth of the Gospel as the proclamation that the Lamb wins. The Lamb is Jesus and Jesus saves precisely because the Lamb wins; because he defeats the anti-God forces so memorably portrayed as “the beast” in Revelation. It is the beast who in chapter 17, gathers up an army under his power and authority to wage war against the Lamb. But the Lamb proves too strong and conquers the diabolical forces of the beast and proves the proclamation to be trustworthy and true: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever,” (Rev. 11:15).

What these all point to is that God, in Jesus, comes to rescue us from powers that we have no hope of escaping from on our own. Jesus comes to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. But it is not to save us from God. Rather it is God and Jesus working in tandem to free us from our enslavement to Sin and Death.

Now, it may be possible to hold this view together with the penal substitutionary model of atonement. I tend to think not, but if there were a coherent way to see both as true, my suspicion is that PSA will inevitably flex to take pride of place. Rather than focus on how God acted on our behalf, at great cost to himself, to deliver us from evil, we will fixate, either consciously or unconsciously, on the claim that God is fundamentally angry at us, so much so that he wants to punish us eternally.

And so we can easily fall into the confused impression that God is our enemy from whom we need Jesus to come and save us.