77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #53)

53.      Didn’t God predestine the crucifixion of His Son?

Jesus was surrendered in God’s specific plan and foreknowledge of what would follow, so much so that the event was pre-recorded in prophetic Scripture in considerable and varied detail.  But it didn’t take a prophet to predict the outcome.  It was the religious and political leaders along with the fickle complicity of the bloodthirsty mob that assassinated him, not God.  God merely set the stage to allow sinners in thrall to Satan to strut their vaunted powers against the fullest revelation of mature human love, integrity, and innocence ever to show up among mortals.  The bloody outcome of this encounter was inevitable given the hatred, envy, and murder well entrenched in their history, their culture, their very bosoms.  But the denouement that resulted fully justified this divine playing into the vicious hands of mortal enemies, for it primed the unveiling of God’s triumphant rectitude, graciousness, wisdom, wholesomeness, goodness, and love as nothing else possibly could.  God engineered circumstances to permit the people to fill full the cup of their vicious intent as a backdrop to dramatize, at the perfect historic moment, His own virtuous power to liberate them from their delusive enchantment of Satanic captivity.  Good gracious!

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #22)

 22.     Doesn’t God manifest His wrath from heaven against sin?

Absolutely.  God’s wrath smolders against all stiff-necked, hard-hearted, callused, stubborn wrongdoers.  And especially now that the light of Christ has appeared, refusal to believe the truth of His Proclamation of divine graciousness as demonstrated in the invaluable self-sacrifice of His innocent Son makes conscious rejection the more culpable.  Yet God’s dominant love and graciousness wait patiently with many tokens of kindness and mercy to induce people to change their minds and respond favorably to His graciousness so that He doesn’t have to destroy them after all, along with the sins they foolishly cherish.  Accordingly, when after much patience due change of heart was not more generally forthcoming, at length God unveiled His indignation against the worst sin His chosen people Israel ever committed—the virtual lynching of His own precious Son, the only qualified Messiah—by the terrifying desolation of Jerusalem and the razing of its boasted temple to the ground before that wayward generation could all die off by natural deaths.  Thus they forfeited the ultimate ‘Promised Land’ the prophets foretold.