Theological Journal - March 10: Torrance Tuesday - Atonement

“This . . . reconciliation encounters me telling me that I am already reconciled to God in Christ, already died for, redeemed and forgiven. It tells me that already the great positive decision of God’s reconciling love in my favour has been taken, and it can no more be undone than Jesus Christ can be undone, than the incarnation can be reversed or obliterated, or the cross made as if it had never taken place. . . . I am already included in the finished work and already part of Christ, for it was my nature, my humanity, my flesh of sin, that he assumed and made one with himself in his one person.”
T. F. Torrance, Atonement, 167.

This is the great evangelical truth and one thing we can sure we know about any other person we meet: they too are all that Torrance affirms in the above statement. Before, beyond, and above anything else we may think we know or feel about another, this is true about them. This the message of Lent Jesus tries to press home to us on his way to Jerusalem. Whoever he meets he responds to as this person and his response to them, whether in mercy or judgment, is premised on it. He practices no easy sentimentalism nor moralistic judgmentalism. Rather, he sets each person in their belovedness and calls them appropriate accountability for their responses to it. Everything in is ministry rests on this truth. May we hear it again and afresh this Lent.