When we are asked about the Gospel or why we trust in Christ or what is the importance of our faith, we sometime stammer out something to the effect that Jesus loves me and He died for me and He forgives me. Those are all great things and true as far as they go but there is so much more and as we have said before you can never say to much about what Jesus did to bring about the salvation of the world.. Martin Franzmann trying to get to all the handles of all that salvation, atonement, reconciliation and the other Gospel words that we use mean said this –
Werner Elert has expressed it more chastely and more beautifully than is given to most of us to express it: When Christ carried His
voluntary humiliation even to the deeps of death (Phil. 2: 8), a death in which the wrath of God spent itself upon all that is man, He was acting “even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings” (Matt. 23: 37) to turn the threatening peril away from others upon Himself, as the shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10: 12). In so acting it was His wish to die for others (Mark 10:45), and the whole New Testament with consenting voice declares with grateful recognition and in manifold metaphors that He has done so. The effect of the death of Christ consists, then, in this, that the wrath of God is thereby, by His death, turned from the others.”
