Some people are very perverted in their thinking. They are theological deviants, and they can twist any beautiful doctrine into something false and self-serving. I am referring to those who assert that God was willing to redeem us by "the precious blood of Christ" because he considered us valuable. That is, he was willing to pay such a high cost to redeem us because we were worth the price.

The teaching is supposed to attract sinners to accept the gospel, to boost the people's self-esteem, and to encourage them to make something of their lives. One preacher even said that the atonement proves that God considered us of greater worth than Christ himself, for otherwise he would have never allowed his Son to die for us sinners. At this point the teaching has reached the stage of blasphemy.

This view makes the atonement a purely business transaction, or an economic decision. However, even from this perspective, the atonement does not prove our worth, not to say that it proves we are of greater worth to God than Christ himself. This is because, although Christ had to suffer, afterward he was not lost or destroyed, but he was resurrected and glorified. The sacrifice was not in a permanent loss of one for the gain of another, but in that Christ had to endure the humiliation and suffering involved in his incarnation, persecution, and crucifixion. So it was not as if God gave up Christ for the elect in the sense of a permanent financial exchange, and there is no basis to think that the chosen ones were of equal or greater value to Christ himself.

Instead, the New Testament presents sinners as unworthy and undeserving, so that there is nothing in them that demanded God's attention or moved him to send Christ to die for them. He did not redeem the elect because he thought that it would be a profitable investment in the economic sense. The atonement proves what Scripture says that it proves – nothing more and nothing less. And from the scriptural perspective, the atonement is a demonstration of the extent of our sinfulness, of God's justice and wrath, and the greatness of God's love and grace toward his chosen ones. In fact, it is because sinners are worthless in themselves that the atonement is rightly said to be an act of divine grace.

We can take a step back and look at this relative to God's eternal purpose, instead of looking at this relative to sin. From this ultimate perspective, God's decrees for Christ to redeem the chosen ones and for man to fall into sin themselves serve the greater purpose of God's glory. In this biblical and supralapsarian scheme, God so valued his glory that he decreed the fall of all mankind, so that there would be a company of elect sinners for Christ to redeem.

Therefore, the atonement demonstrates God's commitment to glorify himself. To look at this from the other direction, if the atonement is all about the worth of the elect, then God could have just decreed for Adam to remain in righteousness, rendering the atonement unnecessary in the first place. God did not decree this because his plan has never been centered on man, contrary to some false theological systems, but on exalting his own glory through Christ.

Creation, election, reprobation, and redemption all work toward this ultimate purpose. And this is where all sound theology begins and ends – not man's worth, but God's glory. It is true that believers have been redeemed at a high price, even the precious blood of Christ, but this should elicit deep gratitude and holy confidence, and not self-esteem or some idea of inherent worth in us such that God could not help but sacrifice Christ to redeem us.

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