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!
The Premial Atonement 