God’s love for his enemies led him to the cross. It is where, as Paul says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
When one sees the marvelous works of the Lord, telling the glory of those works is the response. If you see, tell. The marvelous works of the Lord find their zenith in salvation. The whole theological concept of salvation. A salvation finds its nucleus in the marvelous work of Jesus on the cross. Perhaps we could say that the cross is the engine of salvation. Without the cross, the salvific work of God is powerless.
There’s many aspects of the cross that we could consider. There are many things that make Good Friday, good. We can break down the work of the cross, generally speaking, into two categories…Atonement and Deliverance. Atonement meaning that Jesus is our sacrifice, sin offering, guilt offering, expiation, and substitution. The atonement of the cross means that Jesus satisfies the holy justice of God’s pure wrath against the rebellious mutineers. But Jesus also accomplishes deliverance. On the cross, God triumphs in victory over Satan and his powers of deceit and darkness and he voids the power of Sin and Death, vanquishing his foes and releasing us from tri-fold bondage of Satan, Sin, and Death.
This evening, I want to go behind the actions, the work, the accomplishment, to understand the motivation of God that led him to the cross.
Understanding the motivation of God’s action are just as important as comprehending the outcome of God’s actions. Perhaps we could say that one can only truly understand the full splendor of the work of salvation when we see the comprehensive intermingling of the motivation and the outcome.
Because how we see the work impacts how we respond to the work. See and tell.
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