“When you have children, they’re in a state of dependency.  They have so many needs, they can’t stand on their own. And they will not just grow out of that dependency automatically… Unless you sacrifice much of your freedom and a good bit of your time, your children will not grow up to be healthy and equipped to function… they’ll grow up physically, but still be children emotionally— needy, vulnerable, and dependent. Either you suffer temporally in a redemptive way, or they’re going to suffer tragically, in a wasteful destructive way.

We know from experience, from the mundane to the dramatic, that sacrifice is at the heart of all real love.  And we know that anybody who has ever done anything that made a difference for us— a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a spouse— sacrificed in some way, stepped in and accepted some hardship so that we would not get hit with it ourselves.

Therefore it makes sense that a God who is more loving than you and I, a God who comes into the world to deal with the ultimate evil, the ultimate sin, would have to make a substitutionary sacrifice.  Even we flawed human beings know that you can’t just overlook evil.  It can’t be dealt with, removed, or healed by just saying, “Forget it.” It must be paid for, and dealing with it is costly. How much more should we expect that God could not shrug off evil? The debt had to be paid. But he was so incredibly loving that he was willing to die in order to do it himself.

The only way that Jesus could redeem us was to give his life as a ransom.  God couldn’t just say, “I forgive everybody.” In the creation God could say, “Let there be sun, moon, and stars,” and there were sun, moon, and stars.  But he couldn’t just say, “Let there be forgiveness.”  That’s simply not the way forgiveness works.

God created the world in an instant, and it was a beautiful process.  He re-created the world on the cross—and it was a horrible process. That’s how it works.

Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.”

– Tim Keller, Jesus the King