50. Wasn’t the Cross necessary so God could forgive sins?
Only indirectly. The difficulty lay in our own hard-hearted estrangement from God, so that we neither recognize our fatal sins nor change our minds and turn back to Him, much less beg for pardon. Yet notwithstanding, no amount of divine forgiveness would pre-empt our demise, which would ensue anyway as the evil fruit of Adam’s sin and ban from the Tree of Life. In the final analysis, such forgiveness would amount to little more than tokenism. In upright forbearance, God often passes over penalties due to human sin; yet regardless, He still seeks to woo us back to Himself so He can lavish His Spirit on us with continuous fresh waves of love and life. The refusal of people to turn back to Him and stay in His regenerative Explanation provokes His indignation and, sadly, can lead to premature and even final destruction. The real problem requiring an efficacious atonement, therefore, is not how to get God to forgive our sins, but rather how we can possibly outlive death in spite of His kind remission. We all suffer the identical semi-final result for our sins that Adam did for his and die despite every temporal pardon. Or hadn’t you noticed? That conundrum necessitates that we get drawn back to our Maker to acquire some elixir of life yet more potent than daily release from our accumulating debt of offenses (even dwindling though they ideally ought to be for those maturing in the love of Christ). God unseated Sin by dethroning Death, not the other way around. Only a Sinless One could conquer Death, of course, according to the equity of God’s justice. Consequently, the ‘sin problem’ had already been solved (mostly) in Christ’s own sinless person before he ever took up his ultimate weapon—the Cross. Yet had he not stayed sinless through this greatest of all Satan’s fiery trials and temptations to revile his tormentors, blaspheme God, and fend for himself, all would have been lost. There could have been no display of the Father’s own righteousness, i.e., raising Christ from the dead. Absence of Resurrection = absence of Holy Spirit = absence of the life-giving power of the Lord “our Righteousness” for us = the persistence of Sin in us = the continuing reign of Death over us = no hope for us.
The Premial Atonement 