"When we think of Christ dying on the cross we are shown the lengths to which God’s love goes in order to win us back to himself. We would almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son! We cannot measure such love by any other standard.
"He is saying to us: I love you this much. The cross is the heart of the gospel. It makes the gospel good news: Christ died for us. He has stood in our place before God’s judgment seat. He has borne our sins. God has done something on the cross we could never do for ourselves.
"But God does something to us as well as for us through the cross. He persuades us that he loves us...."
..."But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (NASB).The cross should never be expounded simply as a demonstration of the love of God in a sense of being overwhelmed with his love, like it doesn’t matter if anything else was accomplished on the cross as long as we are overwhelmed by his love and swept along into fellowship with him, and that is the atonement. No. But while wrath is satisfied and Christ dies for our sins, it would be erroneous for us to reduce this to the kind of mathematical formulation of “this is how God has merely dealt with our sins.”
"No, this is also how God actually proves to us he really loves us!So it is both the effecting of the atonement and the persuading of his love...."
-- Sinclair Ferguson (from an interview of Ferguson by C.J. Mahaney)
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