What Was God Demonstrating at Calvary?

22 September 202622 min read

At Calvary, was God demanding satisfaction—or demonstrating something about himself? This article argues that the cross was not the moment God became willing to forgive, but the moment he answered the oldest accusations against his character in public.

This article continues Why Then Did Jesus Die?.

They were still at the table when it started.

Jesus gave the man sitting beside him a piece of bread and told him to get on with what he meant to do. Judas took the bread, stood up, and left. When John wrote the scene down many years later, he ended the sentence with four words he clearly never got over.

And it was night.

Before the next afternoon was out, Jesus was dead on a cross outside the city wall, and the men who arranged it had paid thirty pieces of silver for him. That figure appears once in the law of Moses. It is the compensation owed to the owner of a slave gored by an ox.

That was the world’s appraisal of him.

But Paul, looking back at the same event, says something rather different was happening there. At the cross God publicly demonstrated his own righteousness:

“For God showed him publicly dying as a sacrifice of reconciliation to be taken advantage of through faith. This was to vindicate his own justice (for in his forbearance, God passed over men’s former sins)—to vindicate his justice at the present time, and show that he is upright himself, and that he makes those who have faith in Jesus upright also.” — Romans 3:25–26 (Goodspeed)

Notice whose righteousness Paul says had to be demonstrated.

God’s.

Which raises an obvious question.

Why?

The accusation

What had God been accused of that required a public demonstration of his righteousness?

The quarrel did not begin in Eden; by the time the serpent appears there, it is already underway. But Genesis 3 is where Scripture lets us hear the accusation in plain language:

“That’s not true; you will not die. God said that because he knows that when you eat it, you will be like God and know what is good and what is bad.” — Genesis 3:4–5 (GNT)

There are two charges here, and neither is really about fruit.

The first is that God has lied about death.

The second is that God is withholding something good because he does not want his creatures to have it.

Every later version of the quarrel tends to run along those same two lines. His warnings are empty; perhaps he does not mean them, perhaps he cannot carry them through. And his law is a restriction upon life and freedom, a fence around something better which he would rather keep for himself.

What made the first charge so difficult to answer is that Adam and Eve did not drop dead that afternoon. They lived. They had children. Cain grew up and killed his brother. Generations came and went, and God continued bearing with people who broke faith with him—warning, forgiving, waiting, warning again—century after century.

Imagine a doctor who tells a man that the growth in his lung will kill him. The man walks out, feels perfectly healthy for years, and begins telling his friends that the doctor was only frightening him for money. Nothing the doctor said was untrue. But time is working against him, and the patient’s apparent health begins to look like evidence that the warning was false.

Something like that problem stands behind Paul’s language in Romans 3. Look again at the clause in brackets: for in his forbearance, God passed over men’s former sins.

Whatever else Paul believes the cross accomplished, the problem he specifically names here is God’s previous forbearance. God had passed over sins. He had forgiven sinners. He had tolerated rebellion for so long that the question had to be answered publicly: had he really meant what he said about sin and death?

And there was still the second accusation. Was God truly good? Or was the serpent right that his government stood between the creature and a fuller life?

Those are not questions which power alone can answer.

What kind of answer could settle it?

Suppose a man is accused of poisoning the village well.

He could have the accuser arrested, but the villagers would still not drink. He could produce documents, witnesses and chemical reports, and perhaps they would believe him; perhaps they would suspect that he had arranged them.

But there is an answer everybody in the village understands. Let him go to the well in full view of them all, draw a cup, and drink.

A charge about character cannot finally be settled by force. Force can establish which party is stronger. It cannot establish which party is good.

Nor can God settle a question about trust simply by commanding everybody to trust him. Trust required by force is no longer trust in any meaningful sense.

If the accusation was that God was self-interested, arbitrary and opposed to the life of his creatures, then the answer had to become evidence. And the evidence would have to be of the kind that a self-interested being could never afford to give.

Which brings us back to Friday.

What Calvary showed about God

Judas came into Gethsemane after midnight with a crowd carrying swords and torches. The sign he had agreed upon was a kiss. Jesus allowed him to give it, and then asked him about it by name.

“Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” — Luke 22:48 (ESV)

What followed was horrifying partly because almost nothing needed arranging. Nobody had to be persuaded into some new and extraordinary kind of evil. Frightened, angry, ambitious, obedient and self-protective people simply did what such people do.

But if Calvary was to say anything about God, it matters not only what they did to Jesus. It matters what Jesus did in return.

He was falsely accused and did not retaliate. He was mocked, struck and spat upon and did not answer injury with injury. He possessed the power to put an end to the whole thing and never once used that power against the people hurting him.

Peter saw enough of that night to be ashamed of his own part in it, and later wrote:

“When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten.” — 1 Peter 2:23 (ESV)

Now suppose something impossible.

Suppose you could go to heaven exactly as you are—through the gate, along the street, into the very presence of God. And suppose that when you got there you struck him in the face and spat at him.

What would he do?

There is less need to guess than we sometimes imagine.

Human beings have already struck God in the face. They have already spat upon him, torn open his back, pushed thorns into his head, hammered iron through his hands, and stood around laughing while he died.

We are not left wondering how God behaves when his creatures attack him. We have the transcript, recorded by witnesses, from a city whose name we still know.

That is why it matters who was in their hands that night. The accusation concerned God; an angel could not finally answer it. Nor could some lesser being whom the Creator sent in his place.

When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus replied:

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” — John 14:9 (ESV)

Whatever we saw in Jesus under the blindfold, in the courtyard and on the cross, we were seeing what God is like. The Son was not shielding us from a Father unlike himself.

He was revealing him.

Pilate examined Jesus and repeatedly said he could find no grounds for condemning him, yet eventually yielded to the pressure around him and handed him over. Hoping to release him, he gave the crowd a choice between Jesus and a man imprisoned for insurrection and murder.

They asked for the murderer.

So Jesus was flogged, dressed as a king for the soldiers’ amusement, crowned with thorns, and led out to be crucified between two criminals. And while they were killing him, he prayed:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” — Luke 23:34 (ESV)

Notice what that prayer assumes.

Jesus does not sound like a man attempting to persuade an unwilling Father to become merciful. He speaks to his Father as though forgiveness is precisely the sort of thing his Father desires.

The same thing appears a little later. One of the criminals joined the mockery; the other acknowledged what he had done, said that Jesus had done nothing wrong, and asked only to be remembered.

Jesus promised him paradise before Jesus himself had died.

That fact does not by itself settle every question about what his death accomplished; Scripture can speak of the benefits of Christ’s work reaching backward as well as forward. But it tells us something important about the God Jesus was revealing.

Mercy was not waiting on the far side of the cross for suffering to make it willing.

Then at noon darkness came over the land.

For three hours it remained. And from inside that darkness came the most disturbing words Jesus spoke all day:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — Matthew 27:46 (ESV)

Here an obvious difficulty enters the argument.

If Jesus is showing us what the Father is like, what are we to make of this cry? Was the Father himself doing something quite different—turning away from his Son while the Son continued loving and forgiving those below?

One reading is that Christ truly bore the Godforsakenness, curse or judicial consequence belonging to sinners. On this understanding, Father and Son remained one in purpose and love, but Jesus entered the abandonment which divine judgment upon sin entails.

There is another possibility: that the cry is the truest description ever given of what sin does to the experience of a creature, spoken by the one man who had never sinned, standing where sinners stand.

Several lines of Scripture ought to be allowed into the room before we decide between them.

Only hours earlier, Jesus had told the disciples what would happen that night:

“You will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” — John 16:32 (ESV)

Jesus expected everyone else to leave him. He expressly said the Father would not.

Then there is the psalm from which the cry comes. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is its opening sentence, but the psalm does not end there. Later it says:

“For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” — Psalm 22:24 (ESV)

The psalm holds two things together: the sufferer experiences abandonment, and God has heard him.

And Jesus’ own final words are not addressed to an absent stranger:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” — Luke 23:46 (ESV)

Whatever the darkness had done to his experience, it had not destroyed his trust.

Isaiah adds another caution:

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” — Isaiah 53:4 (ESV)

Isaiah certainly does not place Christ’s suffering outside God’s saving purpose; the rest of the chapter makes that impossible. But he does mark the conclusion we esteemed as the conclusion drawn by those looking on. We should therefore hesitate before assuming that the spectators’ interpretation exhausts the meaning of the event.

And Paul says it more plainly still:

“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” — 2 Corinthians 5:19

Not absent from Christ.

In Christ.

Jesus had entered the full human experience of terror, shame, alienation and death, while the Father remained where Jesus had said he would be.

Present. Unseen.

At three o’clock Jesus said it was finished and died. The curtain in the temple tore from the top to the bottom. Whatever else that sign meant, the direction is difficult to miss: the opening begins from God’s side.

And Mark tells us that the officer supervising the execution, having watched the way Jesus died, said:

“Truly this man was the Son of God!” — Mark 15:39 (ESV)

The way he died had itself said something about God.

But there were two charges in Eden, and so far we have answered only one.

The serpent had not merely said that God was withholding something good.

He had said something much more testable.

You will not die.

The other charge

Was God telling the truth about death?

To answer that, we first have to ask what sort of thing life is.

Scripture does not describe life as something God gives once and then leaves the creature to possess independently. He “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25); “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); and “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

Creaturely existence is continually received.

That changes the way we think about the relation between sin and death. Death need not be imagined as an arbitrary penalty attached from outside to a life which would otherwise continue perfectly well without God. To separate from the giver of life is itself catastrophic.

Suppose a diver deep underwater cuts the line supplying his air. He does not drown because the man at the pump has suddenly become angry and decided to kill him. The man above may be hauling desperately on the lifeline, trying to bring him back. The danger lies in the severance from the source by which he lives.

That is remarkably close to the language of the prophets.

“Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God.” — Isaiah 59:2 (ESV)

Jeremiah pictures God as “the fountain of living waters” and his people as abandoning him to dig broken cisterns which cannot hold water. Then he asks:

“Have you not brought this upon yourself by forsaking the LORD your God?” — Jeremiah 2:17 (ESV)

Wisdom says it without imagery:

“He who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” — Proverbs 8:36 (ESV)

And the voice at the other end has never been obscure about what it wants:

“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.” — Ezekiel 18:32 (ESV)

A branch does not wither because the vine has become angry with it. Once severed from the source from which its life was being received, withering follows.

The warning in Eden can therefore be heard not merely as a threat but as a diagnosis. God speaks like a physician telling his patient where the disease leads.

But that immediately raises another question.

Jesus never broke faith with his Father. How, then, could he die?

Because he had entered our condition.

He “tasted death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9), and “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). He entered the deathward world rebellion had made and allowed himself to be treated, from beginning to end, as though he were the rebel.

The cross therefore did not merely show that death happens.

It showed where the road ends.

The serpent had said, You will not die.

God’s answer was not to stand at a distance and kill somebody in order to prove the warning true.

He entered our condition himself.

And died in it.

What Calvary exposed

Calvary therefore showed something about the consequence of rebellion.

But it also showed something about its author.

Scripture is careful here about agency. Peter says that Jesus was handed over “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and in the same breath tells his hearers, “you crucified and killed” him (Acts 2:23).

Both statements are true.

God purposed to give his Son. Christ purposed to give himself. His enemies purposed to kill him.

Those are not the same intention.

Jesus had already said:

“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” — John 10:18 (ESV)

He was not the victim of circumstances God later learned how to use. He came for this. But God’s intention to give does not make the murderousness of the cross God’s.

Luke says Satan entered Judas (Luke 22:3), and John says the same (John 13:27). Jesus had told the disciples that “the ruler of this world” was coming (John 14:30). And shortly before his death he described what was about to happen in remarkably cosmic terms:

“Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” — John 12:31–32 (ESV)

Jesus himself puts the three things together. The world is judged. Its ruler is cast out. And Christ, lifted up, draws.

Hebrews says that through death Christ would destroy “the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Paul says the rulers and authorities were disarmed and publicly exposed at the cross (Colossians 2:15). Jesus had long before called Satan “a murderer from the beginning” and “the father of lies” (John 8:44).

At Calvary the lie and the murderer finally appeared together.

For ages the accusation had been that God’s government stood between the creature and life. Given room to act against God in human flesh, the opposing principle showed what it does when it encounters Life himself.

It kills him.

Ellen White, writing of this moment, put the point with unusual force:

“He had revealed himself as a murderer. By shedding the blood of the Son of God, he had uprooted himself from the sympathies of the heavenly beings.”

And in the same few square yards, at the same hour, the other principle stood exposed too.

One side mocked, struck, betrayed, bargained, accused and killed. The other prayed for the men driving the nails while they drove them.

One took life.

The other gave his away.

Even the thirty pieces of silver at the beginning now take on their full ugliness. The Son of God entered his own world, and the world appraised him at the price of a slave.

A murderer was unmasked at Calvary, and it was not the Father.

Who was watching?

That brings us back to a word Paul used at the beginning of the argument.

God put Christ forward publicly.

Publicly before whom?

The cross makes little sense if its audience is confined to the people standing on the hill. Paul’s horizon is much larger:

“Through the Son, then, God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself. God made peace through his Son’s blood on the cross and so brought back to himself all things, both on earth and in heaven.” — Colossians 1:20 (GNT)

Whatever the reconciliation of “things in heaven” means in all its detail, Paul’s point is plainly larger than the pardon of individual human sinners.

Elsewhere he says God’s purpose is to gather “all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10), and that through what God is doing “the manifold wisdom of God” is being made known to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). Peter says angels “long to look” into these things (1 Peter 1:12).

Heaven was watching too.

God’s answer to the accusation was not bare assertion. He allowed his character, and the character of the opposing principle, to be seen in history.

And when Revelation shows where the argument finally leads, the answer is not coerced silence.

It is agreement, and it is sung.

The living creatures and the elders begin. Then the angels join them, thousands upon thousands. Then the final circle opens:

“…every creature in heaven, on earth, in the world below, and in the sea…” — Revelation 5:13 (GNT)

And the one at the centre of the song is a Lamb that was killed.

Nobody has been shouted down. The evidence has done its work.

The psalm Jesus prayed in the darkness ends in much the same place: the ends of the earth remember and turn to the Lord, while a generation not yet born is told what he has done (Psalm 22:27–31).

That is atonement at full stretch: not merely one sinner brought back into fellowship, nor even one species, but God’s creation brought again into harmony with him through what has been revealed in Christ.

Which brings us, finally, to the blood.

What then was the blood for?

This is where a familiar way of telling the story deserves another look.

A great deal of Christian preaching begins with the assumption that God could not simply forgive. Justice required punishment. Mercy wished to release the sinner, but justice would not permit it until the debt had been answered. The Father required a death; the Son provided one.

We ought to be fair. Serious Christians who speak this way do not normally mean that Father and Son were opposed to each other, or that an unwilling Father had to be persuaded by a kinder Son. They rightly insist that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” and that Christ went voluntarily. The cross proceeds from God’s love; it does not create it.

But the narrower question remains.

Was suffering something God required before forgiveness itself could become morally possible?

Because if we tell the story carelessly, a strange picture begins to form. The Father becomes the one whose requirements stand between the sinner and forgiveness, while Jesus becomes the one who satisfies those requirements and opens the way.

Many Christians would reject that description if it were stated so plainly. Yet the emotional picture can remain. They love Jesus, who stepped in for them, while remaining faintly afraid of the Father he supposedly stepped in front of.

And that should trouble us after everything we have just seen at Calvary.

The Son was not showing us somebody kinder than the Father.

He was showing us the Father.

Nor does the biblical direction of the giving fit the picture of human beings supplying something God requires before he will become gracious.

In Leviticus, God says of the blood:

“I have given it to you… to make atonement.” — Leviticus 17:11 (ESV)

I have given it to you.

The blood is God’s provision to the worshipper, not the worshipper’s provision to God.

And at Calvary the direction remains the same.

God gives his Son.

The Son gives himself.

“God so loved the world that he gave” (John 3:16). “The Son of God… loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

The traffic is moving from God toward us.

That does not make the blood incidental. Nor does it make the death unnecessary. Christ really does give his life. He really does bear our sins. He really does enter our death and reconcile us through his blood.

But the blood does not tell us that mercy had to be purchased from an unwilling God.

It tells us what God’s mercy was willing to give.

So when Jesus lifted the cup and called it “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20), the blood was not making God faithful to a promise he had previously been reluctant to keep.

It was showing how far his faithfulness had always been willing to go.

And now Paul’s words at the beginning make more sense.

God put Christ forward publicly to demonstrate his righteousness.

The charge was that God could not be trusted.

Calvary was his answer.

Where that leaves us

It would be easy to read all of this as a controversy conducted somewhere above our heads, with the evidence handed down to us merely for our information.

But we are in the argument too.

The question raised in Eden eventually reaches every one of us: Can God be trusted?

And God will not answer that question by force. He cannot compel trust and still call it trust, or manufacture love by command and still call it love. So he has done the only thing open to someone whose character has been called into question.

He has shown us himself.

That is what Calvary was.

Not God finally becoming willing to forgive, but God showing what had always been true of him. Not the Son persuading the Father to love us, but the Father giving the Son because he already did. Not a kinder Christ standing between sinners and a harsher God, but God himself in Christ, receiving our hostility and answering it with forgiveness.

If, after looking at Jesus, we are still inclined to trust the Son while remaining suspicious of the Father, then we have not yet allowed Jesus’ own claim to have its full weight:

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

There is no kinder member of the Godhead standing between us and a less merciful one. The Father is as patient as the Son under the blindfold, as forgiving as the Son beneath the nails, and as intent upon bringing the sinner home as the Son who prayed for the men killing him.

And that turns around the question with which so many of us approach the cross.

We come wondering what had to happen before God could be persuaded to receive us.

He has never needed persuading.

The question is whether we have been persuaded—whether the evidence has answered the old suspicion, whether we believe what God has shown us about himself, and whether we are prepared to trust him and come home.

Paul leaves very little doubt about the direction in which the appeal runs:

“It is for Christ, therefore, that I am an envoy, seeing that God makes his appeal through me. On Christ’s behalf I beg you to be reconciled to God.” — 2 Corinthians 5:20 (Goodspeed)

God is not standing at the far end of the cross waiting to be talked into reconciliation.

He is the one making the appeal.

The door was never locked from his side.

And Calvary was God showing us, at immeasurable cost, that it never had been.

Notes

On the word translated “sacrifice of reconciliation.” Goodspeed renders hilastērion in Romans 3:25 as “sacrifice of reconciliation.” Other translations use “propitiation,” “atoning sacrifice,” or language associated with the mercy seat. The argument above does not require the disputed word to bear the whole weight. Paul’s own explanatory clause says that the event demonstrated God’s righteousness in view of his previous forbearance. Goodspeed’s “vindicate” makes that implication unusually explicit, but the underlying argument does not depend upon that particular English rendering.

On whether the cross was simply a crime. It was murder, but Scripture does not allow us to say that God merely permitted a tragedy and afterward found a useful meaning for it. Peter holds divine purpose and human culpability together in the same sentence: Jesus was handed over according to God’s plan, and “you crucified and killed” him (Acts 2:23). Jesus likewise says, “No one takes my life away from me. I give it up of my own free will” (John 10:18, GNT). God’s intention to give, Christ’s intention to give himself, and the murderers’ intention to kill are all present at Calvary without becoming the same intention.

On the cry of dereliction and Isaiah 53. Those who understand Christ to have borne divine judgment will rightly point to texts such as Isaiah 53:6, 10 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. The argument here is not that Christ’s suffering fell outside God’s saving purpose, nor that he did not bear our sins. The narrower question is whether Scripture requires us to understand “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as the Father ceasing to be present with or loving toward the Son. John 16:32, Psalm 22:24, Luke 23:46 and 2 Corinthians 5:19 give substantial reason to distinguish Christ’s experience of abandonment from an actual rupture between Father and Son.

On Jesus’ prayer for his executioners. Luke 23:34 introduces the prayer with the imperfect elegen (“he was saying”). The imperfect can present an action as continuing or repeated, although the tense by itself does not establish how often Jesus repeated the words. The argument above therefore does not depend upon the claim that he necessarily prayed the sentence repeatedly throughout the crucifixion.

On “he did not retaliate.” Scripture does show Jesus angry—for example at hardness of heart (Mark 3:5) and in the temple courts (John 2:13–17). The claim here is narrower, and it is Peter’s: under personal insult and injury, “he did not revile in return,” and when he suffered, “he did not threaten” (1 Peter 2:23).

Scripture quotations marked Goodspeed are from Edgar J. Goodspeed, The New Testament: An American Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), now in the public domain.

The quotation on Satan’s unmasking is from Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (1898), chapter 79, “It Is Finished.”