“What love it is, that this holy God should give His Son–His only Son, His beloved–to suffer and die in the place of rebels. He gave Him, not hoping He might be spared, but knowing that He would be despised, rejected and killed.
As He turned His face away from his Son in the blackness of Golgotha, He turned toward us–a people loaded with guilt, children given to corruption–and fulfilled those precious words ‘God so loved the world that He have His only Son.’
A penal substitutionary understanding of the cross helps us to understand God’s love, and to appreciate its intensity and beauty. Scripture magnifies God’s love by its refusal to diminish our plight as sinners deserving of God’s wrath, and by its uncompromising portrayal of the cross as the place where Christ bore that punishment in the place of his people.
If we blunt the sharp edges of the cross, we dull the glittering diamond of God’s love.”
–Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced For Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2007), 152-3.
Wow, Nick – you’re putting as much work into typing out chunks of PFOT as we put into writing it… ;-)
Steve