God was never a bigot
Consider the claim that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a righteous yet merciful God’s solution to His wrath against mankind for their sins.
Proponents of this view say that God being perfectly righteous and holy cannot leave sin unpunished; He has to punish mankind with eternal separation from His presence and damnation in order to be consistent with His own code of righteousness.
They propose that God was somehow at pains to carry out His righteous decrees because He did not want to condemn mankind to the fate of eternal destruction.
But He could not simply leave them unpunished; let them get away ‘scot-free’ as it were. If He did that, it would be unrighteous of Him, so they say.
And so He thought up of the perfect solution that would both satisfy His righteousness and enable Him to bestow on mankind His richest mercies.
In the midst of all this, a very questionable, basic assumption has been made: namely, that the fact that God is righteous means that He has to punish every sin. It is not only His right; it is a demand that even God cannot ignore and has to ‘work around’.
This is not an issue about criminal justice, where every criminal case should be dealt with an adequate measure of justice; God’s righteousness is closer to morality, for lack of a better word. It has to do not simply with outward physical actions of murder, adultery and stealing; it has to do even with the innermost feelings, thoughts and plans of the mind.
Since that is the case, and keeping in mind that morality cannot be legislated as criminal action can, to assume that God has to punish every wrongdoing as a court punishes a criminal is no less than to assume that He is a divine bigot, which assumption is extremely suspect.
God did not plan the cross to save mankind and borrow the hands of sinful people to achieve His greater purposes; to do His ‘dirty’ work as it were.
If that were so, God could be rightly charged with ‘divine child abuse’ as a leading in the emerging church movement called it, or at least schizophrenia.
Yet while God did not plan the crucifixion of His Son, He certainly knew what would happen if He sent Jesus into the world; He could foresee the cross. And foreseeing that tragic event in eternity, God did not hold back from sending His Son, for all the people who would accept Him, even if it meant that those who rejected Him would kill Him.
God’s is the love that is willing to suffer any loss for the sake of those who love Him and even those who do not, in the sense that His revelation is given to one and all. And so God did not foreordain the cross, but He foresaw it, and He foreordained His salvation through the cross. It's the same with every incident of human suffering; while God did not foreordain that suffering, He through His foreknowledge foreordained His salvation through that suffering.
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23 When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them.
24 And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, "Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them,
25 who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,
"'Why did the Gentiles rage,
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers were gathered together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed'—
27 for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,
28 to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
29 And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness,
30 while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus."
31And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.
- Acts 4:23-31
All emphasis mine.
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