What Wonderous Love is This

The Bible reveals that God created mankind in His image and likeness for His glory; that we would find our greatest joy and pleasure, our ultimate satisfaction and significance in knowing and loving and being loved by Him as His beloved children, willingly obedient to His wise and loving fatherly authority.  It also reveals that we, beginning with the first man Adam, and everyone since, have rejected both God’s purpose for and authority over our lives (Ecclesiastes 7:29), a rejection that the Bible refers to as sin (Romans 3:23).  The Bible makes it clear that God does not take man’s sin and rebellion lightly – that it provokes His wrath (His hatred and anger), incurs a debt, and demands His justice, which God determined from the foundation of the world would be paid for or satisfied by death (Genesis 2:15-17); death ultimately defined as the forfeiture of the glorious life with God for which we were created and consignment of the sinner to an eternity in Hell (Psalm (9:11).  Hell is essentially a cosmic prison where both rebellious men and angels suffer the penalty for the innumerable crimes they all have willfully committed against the creator and sovereign ruler of the universe, who created mankind to be the objects of His infinite love.  In our sin and rebellion, we have instead made ourselves the objects of His wrath (Romans 1:18).

As such, we are all part of a condemned race, spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1-3), with no desire to know and love and be loved by God on His terms and to live for the purpose for which we were created (Romans 3:9-19).  In such a condition, there is nothing we can do to escape the Hell we have earned nor to restore ourselves back to the perfection of being, the perfect righteousness that God requires for entrance into His presence in Heaven (Matthew 5: 20) (Matthew 5:48). Thus, our fate is sealed, our eternal destiny is sure, and Hell will be our eternal home.

That is unless…unless God Himself makes a way for sinful men and women to be rescued from the Hell we deserve and qualified for a Heaven we never could.  And the good news, the Gospel, is that He has!  He did so in what occurred approximately 2000 years ago on a hill outside of Jerusalem called Golgotha, wherein God, in the person of Jesus Christ, who through His perfectly righteous life as a man and sacrificial death on a Roman Cross, would accomplish everything necessary for sin-condemned men and women to be justly forgiven of their sins, and reconciled and restored to the glorious relationship with God for which we were created (2 Corinthians 5:17-20).

It begins with His unjust arrest and travesty of a trial before the Jewish authorities.  It proceeds with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, declaring Him innocent of all charges, but then succumbing to mob rule as those who Jesus came to save cry out “crucify Him – crucify Him” (Luke 23:20-21).  And after being physically tortured we have this Galilean carpenter’s son, the offspring of the virgin prophesized in Isaiah 7:14, hanging bloody and beaten, weak and helpless on a Roman Cross to die a most excruciating death; put there ultimately not by Judas, nor by the  Jews or the Romans, but by love – by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God the Father (Acts 2:22-23  ) who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten and precious son to suffer the full and exacting consequences of the heinousness and vileness of the sin of all who believe on Him for their salvation (John 3:16). On the cross – in Jesus’s soul – all of the horror and terror, all of the unimaginable torment of God’s divine wrath necessary to satisfy His divine justice, was poured out on His son so that throughout the ages to come all of the riches of God’s mercy and grace could be poured out on those who by faith believe (Ephesians 2:4-7).

To hear the cry, “My God My God why have thou forsaken me” (Matthew27:45-46) is to hear not simply a cry of pain and despair from the cross, but it is to hear a cry of anguish from Hell.  This is the moment Jesus experiences in His soul the darkness of Hell because Hell is exactly that – being forsaken by God as the object of His love, which Jesus had been for all eternity, and who is now, for a moment in that eternity, made the object of God’s wrath, of his hatred and punishment for sin (Isaiah 53:6).  He, Jesus, who never sinned, was made to be sin on our behalf so that we may be reconciled to right relationship with God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

This is misery and suffering that goes beyond our understanding.   We can’t possibly comprehend it, and if we are truly a Christian, never will, as Jesus took upon Himself all the misery that God’s justice required we experience throughout eternity.

This is God’s ultimate proof, the indisputable evidence of His great love for man; His ultimate counter to Satan’s lie in the Garden of Eden that God is holding out on us, that He does not love us, that He is not truly committed to our eternal happiness and wellbeing (Romans 8:31-39).

Theologian John Murray says that it is the love of God – not the sin of man- that is the cause of the Jesus’s atoning work, and that any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected if it does not take into account that the atonement (Christ’s taking on Himself the penalty for our sin) is the provision of God’s love – …that all that is achieved by Christ’s substitutionary undertaking must always be subordinate to the design and purpose of the Father’s love – a love that arises out of the unsearchable riches of God’s goodness.

1 John 4:9-10 we read ^“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation (payment/satisfaction) for our sins.”

I will close by suggesting that if the love of God compelled Him to provide a means by which sinful men and women could be made right with Him, it will ultimately be our love for Him that should (and will if it is sincere) compel us to live our lives in a manner that pleases and honors and glorifies Him (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).

Grace and Peace × (and Happy Easter)