Surety, Christ as

Surety is a word dating back to c. 1300, “a guarantee, promise, pledge, assurance,” from Old French seurté, from Modern French sûreté, from Latin securitatem, “freedom from care or danger, safety, security,” meaning “one who makes himself responsible for another.”¹ It was the power of the Son that was responsible for all creation. There is a dichotomy when the Son is saying He has to rely on the Father for all that He does and is, and yet He’s very clearly the One that is responsible for this creation and is the life and the light of this creation — and it is through His sustaining power that all exist. The Father empowered the Son to use the Father’s power to accomplish this. All had to be done through the Son because the Son was going to come down into the creation, reverse the process, and atone. The creation had to be made with the power of Christ in order for Christ to be able to redeem the entirety of the creation. Christ acts as the surety to guarantee that if this creation goes amok, He will sacrifice Himself in order for that to be reversed and restored again. Christ operates by the power of the Father to accomplish the creation and the redemption, and by accomplishing the redemption, He’s able to reverse the process and restore it again. Once He had finished the process of the atonement, He had finished the course, He had lived the life that allowed Him to lay claim upon the resurrection (because the “wages of sin” is death, but He did not earn those wages), He had the right to eternal life. In fact, it’s because He had the right to eternal life that the atonement itself was infinite. What He gave up was infinite life by taking upon Himself death. Christ guaranteed, as a surety, that this whole mess would be fixed by His willingness to attain to the resurrection and put himself in this position. Because the Father’s power was what came through and because the Father had attained to the resurrection, it was impossible for the Father’s plan to fail — the Father has already taken care of redeeming all the creations under His hand.²