In Romans 8:34 and elsewhere Jesus Christ is said to intercede for us with the Father. This is a strange idea if it suggests that there is an unwillingness on the part of the Father to forgive us unless Christ pleads on our behalf. We know that it was the love of God the Father which gave his Son to die for us (John 3:16; Rom. 5:8). We ought, therefore, to see the purpose of this statement as being to assure us that if Jesus, the Son of God whose character was revealed to us in his earthly life and death, is on our side, then we can be equally sure that God the Father, whom we have not seen, must share the same attitude of forgiveness to us. In other words, the text is in effect saying the same as John 14:9: ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father.’ To be sure, this does not remove the need for faith that the God whom we worship has revealed himself in Jesus, but it does mean that we can cheerfully abandon the impossible implication of Romans 8:34 that the Son has to plead with a Father who might be unwilling to pardon sinners.
Consider now a verse which says: ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins’ (Heb. 9:22) This is a statement about the sacrifices described in the Old Testament, but the writer to the Hebrews applies it by analogy to the offering of the sacrifice of Jesus who shed his own blood. Many modern people find the idea of this kind of sacrifice (as opposed to the weaker modern idea of giving up something that one values dearly) to be quite repugnant. They cannot believe that God is unable to forgive sins without an offering being made, and they want to insist that God can forgive freely simply through his fatherly love for us. There is a strong desire to reject the ‘without blood no forgiveness’ principle from the Christian faith.
Such an attitude, however, would run clean contrary to a principle which is attested right through the Bible. In the New Testament it finds expression in the fact that sin is forgiven not by shedding the blood of animals which (as Heb. 10:4 goes on to say) cannot possibly take away sin, but only through the self-offering of the Son of God. Thus there is a cost to forgiveness, and that cost was borne by God himself in Jesus. The love of God can forgive sins only because it is suffering—and dying—love. Here we have a theological principle which, however offensive it may at first seem, represents an essential aspect of biblical teaching. To surrender this principle would be to surrender biblical religion itself. (I. Howard Marshall, Biblical Inspiration [Biblical and Theological Classics Library; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1995], 105-6)
