God's Response to the Fall - Baxter Kruger

What was God's response?  What was the reaction of the Triune God to such a disaster?  The response of the Father, Son and Spirit to Adam's plunge into ruin can be put into one word: No!  In that No! echoes the eternal Yes! of the Trinity to us.  Creation flows out of the fellowship of the Triune God, and out of the decision, the determined decision, to share the Triune life with us.  That will of God for our blessing in Christ, that determined Yes! to us, translates into an intolerable No! in the teeth of the Fall.  God is for us and therefore opposed–utterly, eternally and passionately opposed–to our destruction. 

That opposition, that fiery and passionate and determined No! to the disaster of the Fall, is the proper understanding of the wrath of God.  Wrath is not the opposite of love.  Wrath is the love of God in action, in opposing action.  It is precisely because the Triune God has spoken an eternal Yes! to the human race, a Yes! to life and fullness and joy for us, that the Fall and its disaster is met with a stout and intolerable No!  "This is not acceptable.  I did not create you to perish in the darkness, not you."  Therein the dream of the ascension and of our adoption in Christ becomes riddled with pain and tears and death. 

There are those who want us to believe that on the day Adam fell, God the Father was filled with a bloodthirsty anger that demanded punishment before He would even consider forgiveness.  And they want us to believe that when Jesus Christ hung on the cross, the Father's anger and wrath were poured out upon him, instead of us.  But that is to assume that the Father was changed by Adam's sin, and that His heart is now divided toward His creatures.  I say to you, God does not change.  Adam's plunge was met by the same God, and the by same determination to bless, and by the same passionate love that birthed creation in the first place.

The Fall of Adam was met by the eternal Word of God. The love of the Father, Son and Spirit is as tireless and unflinching as it is determined and unyielding. 

This portion of a sermon by Baxter Kruger eloquently expounds God's response to the Fall of humanity into sin - and it might not be what you think!

How is the one plan of the Triune God for our adoption in Jesus Christ to be accomplished now,

In the context of Adam's Fall and the sheer disaster it sent rippling through the ocean of humanity?  Jesus Christ stepped into human history with the ascension in his sights, but the road to ascension and to our adoption is now paved with pain and suffering and death.  For how do you get from the Fall of Adam to the right hand of God the Father almighty?  The only way is through death.  The Fall must be undone.  Adam must be thoroughly converted to God.  Human existence, broken and estranged and perverted, must be radically circumcised and systematically recreated, utterly and thoroughly transformed, and bent back into right relationship with the Father. 

Why did Jesus Christ die?  What happened in his death?  Jesus Christ died because the Father would not forsake us, because the Father had a dream for us that He would not abandon, because the love of the Father for us is endless and unflinching.  And Jesus died because the only way to get from the Fall of Adam to the right hand of the Father was through the crucifixion of Adamic existence. 


http://www.perichoresis.org/free-resources/sermons/54-on-the-death-of-our-blessed-lord-jesus-christ.html