As He Turned His Face Away From His Son, He Turned Toward Us
An important quote from my favorite chapter, The Pastoral Importance of Penal Substitution, in Pierced For Our Transgressions:
The Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to meet with his friends. He came to die for his enemies. He came to a people who had rejected his law and killed his prophets, who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, trampling his courts in the hypocrisy of their self-righteous religious observances. He came to nations that had exchanged the truth of the living God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for man-made images, and the fountain of living water for cracked and broken cisterns. he came to a world stained with violence, to a people whose hands were full of blood and whose righteous deeds were like filthy rags, to a complacent humanity who proclaimed 'Peace! Peace!' while they waged war with God.This is the biblical portrait of the people for whom Christ died. We were objects of wrath, rightly facing the unmitigated, everlasting fury of an incensed God, but now in Christ we have found mercy. We have been brought from death to life, from corruption to glory. We were slaves to sin, the world and the devil, but are now adopted children of our heavenly Father...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.