57. “What did the Cross achieve?”
If Jesus had not died on the Cross, God could not have shown the magnitude of His own justice and graciousness by more than reversing such a degrading death and thereby bequeathing him such a superabundant reward that even we could share in the treasure! The Cross was necessary so that God could burst forth beyond all historic precedent in a demonstration of overwhelming graciousness to His abused Son as the rightful and just award in recompense for his putting up so patiently with those who destroyed him. The Cross pulled out all the stops, although the organ of God’s graciousness had been playing many a lovely prelude all along. Through Jesus the award reaches us too! He is the prototype of human maturity, perfectly following the lead of the Holy Spirit, free from the prosthetic of Moses’ Law, bounding exuberantly, amenably, toward mastery of all the works of his Father’s hands. God’s superabundantly over-compensating graciousness, visible in the historic Resurrection, was His exquisite counterpoint to His Son’s own graciousness throughout his entire childhood, youth, manhood, ministry, and suffering of highhanded and treacherous abuse. Furthermore, ever since Pentecost this favor is generously passed along to all who believe, so that their misdeeds are both rightfully and graciously wiped out. These actions historically demonstrated the Father’s graciousness in answer to, and supreme endorsement of, His Son’s own manifest graciousness throughout his lifetime, thereby strikingly revealing an ethically united front that winsomely invites our emulation everywhere and in everything. “Grace in exchange for grace”!
The Premial Atonement 