Eastertide #28:

Christ had offered for all time

 a single sacrifice for sins.

(Hebrews 10:12)

Why was the Cross necessary? Why doesn’t God just let bygones be bygones? The Reformers imagined it had to do with how we can be justified (made right) before a Holy God. God being perfectly just, cannot simply set aside the divine law of punishment. If he did, he would be unjust. Man, by his transgression has earned the dreadful punishment which a just God must inflict. God’s justice is such that sin cannot go unpunished. However, God is not only just, he is also merciful; and he himself, in his infinite mercy, provided a substitute who being himself infinite, could bear the infinite punishment for the sins of the world. Thus Christ came down to offer himself as a substitute; he bore the punishment in our stead. This made it possible for God to forgive sins, and at the same time to remain perfect both in his justice and his mercy.

Maybe the Cross works something like that. A.W. Tozer thought the idea too transactional—a deal made within the Godhead between Father and Son. It lacked, in Tozer’s words “love” and “soul” (The Pursuit of God, chp. 1).

We are never told “how” the Cross works; but, we are told why it works. It works because “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (Jn 3:16-17).