Substitution Essential to God's Work at the Cross

Christopher Wright:

"...the Bible uses different metaphors as ways of conveying the multifaceted truth about what God accomplished through the cross of Christ and what that accomplishment can mean for us when we put our faith in him. This basic affirmation, however, at the heart of the Bible's interpretation of the cross, namely, that it was an act of God in which God in Christ put himself in our place is an act of substitution for our benefit, is not really a metaphor...

the act of substitution seems not to be a 'something else' that we can use as one way of talking about a different reality--namely, what God did at the cross. Rather, there is something inescapably essential about this. Substitution is not a metaphor for what God did; it is what he actually did. God actually did choose to put himself in a place where we should be, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves...[this] is not one metaphor among others, but the core reality that then presents itself to our understanding through the variety of metaphors and analogies that the Bible uses to appreciate the vast rich reality of all that God achieved by that self-giving, self-substituting act." The God I Don't Understand, 125.