Two Words: Guilt and Love

Two Words: Guilt and Love

Two Words: Guilt and Love

For many of us, this month of March will be filled with the events surrounding Good Friday and Easter. I often find myself overawed and incapable of taking in the enormity of all that took place in Jesus’ death and resurrection. I find that’s true for many of us. Therefore, as you continue to set your face towards the cross and the empty tomb, I offer you these words from the late Scottish theologian, T. F. Torrance, for your reflection.

Christ’s salvation is of such a kind that it expresses the ultimate reality of guilt and exposes it in all its stark actuality. It exposes it in terms of the wrath of God, but at the same time manifests in the midst of it all the infinite and overwhelming love of God. In forgiveness, Jesus Christ offers himself on behalf of and in the place of the sinner, and the gulf of human sin and guilt is spanned, but in throwing a bridge over the abyss, the depth and breadth of it are made still more evident. That is why Golgotha casts such a dark shadow over the world. That is why the cross unmasks the inhumanity of man, at once exposing sin and guilt and dealing with them at their worst — in mankind’s ultimate attack upon God in Jesus Christ — and out of the heart of that there come two words that reveal the infinite guilt of humanity and the infinite love of God. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

— T. F. Torrance
Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ

May the Lord give you deep thoughts about Christ and deep affections for Christ.

For his glory and your joy in him,
Keith

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