Reading: The Cross of Christ pg. 165-173
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4.7-10
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that God’s love is the source, not the consequence, of the atonement…God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.
So then, God himself is at the heart of our answer to all…questions about the divine propitiation. It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship. | Stott, pg. 172, 173
How can an improper understanding of God’s holiness and love make God seem mean or angry?
Complete atonement Thou hast made,
And to the utmost farthing paid
Whatever Thy people owed;
How then can wrath on me take place,
If sheltered in Thy righteousness,
And sprinkled with Thy blood?
-Augustus Toplady