The Cross not a Cosmic Symphathy Card

Christopher Wright:

"The extent of God's love is not only that he has entered with compassion into our suffering and proved (from the exodus to Galilee) that he is the God who stands with the weak and the oppressed--all this is gloriously and gratefully true. God has identified himself with our suffering and knows what it is to bear the pain of human injustice and violence. Yes, but the even greater extent of God's love is that he also took our sin and rebellion--of the oppresed and the oppressor--and bore all its just consequences on himself, in the mysterious unity of the Trinity at the cross...

...there is a twisted version of penal substitution that is rightly to be rejected--the idea of an angry God making a victim Son the whipping boy for his brutality. Such a picture of 'cosmic child abuse' is indeed a gross caricature. But it is equally a grossly deficient caricature to reduce the cross to nothing more than a cosmic symphathy card, in God's handwriting shaying, 'I share your pain.' God did more than merely share our pain. God in Christ bore the pain of the just consequences of our sin, bore them 'for us', such that we need never have to bear them ourselves, for all eternity." The God I Don't Understand, 153-154