Quote:
Originally Posted by votivesoul
In this way, if I am reading and exegeting the passage properly (think so, hope so!), it would appear that Jesus, while on earth, through His death on the cross, was able to provide His Father the means of finding reconciliation with humanity. This occurred, I believe, because 1.) Christ's death wrought atonement for sins, meaning His blood covers, and so, takes away, the sins of the world, and 2.) Christ's death propitiated the Father, or brought about in the Father a desire to forgive and not punish, so that, all who were enemies and aliens to God, could find their way back to Him, that is, the Father "who art in heaven" hallowed be His name.
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I do not see how the cross wrought a change in God's disposition towards us. Rather, the cross (combined with our repentance) provides God the judicial reason for acting on His Divine sympathy and love for us. God couldn't act on that love by pardoning our sins without providing certain governmental remedies to offended justice. Otherwise He would be overthrowing His own government!
So God needed a mechanism whereby He could not only justify the ungodly, but be just in the way He did it. that is, He had to do it a certain way so as to maintain righteousness in his government of the universe.
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
(Romans 3:24-26)
In other words, the cross did not change God's disposition towards us. Rather, the cross was a demonstration of God's disposition toward us.
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