41. Was the work of the Cross exclusively Godward?
The Cross of Jesus ‘influenced’ God by demonstrating the Master’s own loyal obedience to Him, in the face of towering injustices, thus provoking God’s speedy reversal of the crime and His vindication of Jesus as Messiah and Lord with overcompensating glory and blessings. It ‘influenced’ mankind by showing the lengths to which God—both Father and Son—was willing to go to prove his love, without any show of vengeance or hostility toward our sinful race in the bargain, thus prompting a conciliatory attitude in alienated sinners and supplying us with the Holy Spirit for free, by faith, to erase our wrongdoings and empower a new life of good (even though flawed) activities worthy of praise and reward. Additionally, and crucially, the Cross ‘influenced’ Satan too, for it drew out all his cowardly rage and, in a triumphant irony, thereby only increased the amount of God’s reparative damages to Jesus (and of penal retribution to Satan, in the final Lake of Fire) when Jesus steadfastly proved undeviating in faithful obedience. The physical body of Jesus was the final battlefield of the agelong war raging between the kingdoms of Light and Darkness for possession of earth’s human and natural resources. The fact that Jesus held out to the last breath without breaking down and calling either angel or Deity to save himself was a decisive Satanward thrust, the finishing stroke that forever pulled the stinger (i.e., sin, powerfully aggravated by the Law of Moses—curses and all) of the last enemy, Death (under whose reign sin reigned), which was under the control of Satan. For God Himself could now rightly intervene to justify Jesus with a superabounding degree of life-making Spirit to inaugurate and fully fund the renewal of creation! The Cross accordingly possesses a threefold vector of influence.
The Premial Atonement 