Appeasing an Angry God ……or being embraced by a Loving Father?

Ponder this thought!
The way in which many Christians typically understand Christianity and the Gospel  is that the Redeeming and Sacrificial Love of Christ could ‘save’ a sinful man, who chooses to believe, yet is simultaneously incapable of  ’saving’ God the Father from resenting the unbelieving sinner, as though God the Father was the one ‘person’ who was beyond redemption.
As though Jesus and the Loving Father who ‘sent’ Him have two different and opposing agendas!
This idea of being under compulsion to propitiate a distant an angry God has been both endemic and systemic in the mentality of mankind from the beginning.
The same attitude towards God has been reflected throughout the ancient history of humanity both in Hebrew and Gentile religious and philosophical thought and is still prevalent today.
Yet, this notion is radically different from what Jesus, the one who had come out of Heaven, and the only one who actually knew the Father testified to.
This approach also ignores the fundamental tenant of the Bible, which is that God took complete and total responsibility for the demise and restoration of of His fallen Creation.
It negates the grand fact that mankind’s Redemption and Reconciliation was and is totally Gods own initiative!
We conclude then that the notion of man needing to appease and reconcile a distant, angry and offended Deity to Himself, is typical of every false religion and is in fact the opposite of what Christianity it truly about!
Man has ignorantly equated and confused terms such as ‘the wrath of God’ with ‘the wrath of man’ and the way the world commonly understands ‘wrath’. As though any parallel can exist between God and an angry outraged undignified man who loses his temper and retaliates by direct vindictive penal action.
As if God can put aside His love… if and when man cannot successfully persuade and win Him around by ‘believing’ and by ‘having faith’ of sufficient quality and quantity.That man’s change of heart or mind is able to to stay God’s hand of vengeance and shift Him from punishment to mercy!
Ironically this implies that man has the ultimate say in the matter of ‘salvation’, able to manipulate even God Himself by his choices! That the ‘locus of control’ rest ultimately with man and not with God, making man more powerful than God! Perish the thought!
They do not understand that God’s wrath is His Grace in agony… and is the passion of His love going forth to redeem his lost children.
Christ’s Redemptive Act at Calvary was not man’s initiative, but unilaterally God’s idea and provision, who had Himself  ’set Christ forth’  in order to reconcile lost man to Himself!
God was never lost…..He has eternally related to mankind through His Love and Grace. He has only beheld and valued man as In Christ, the Lamb that was slain, in the foreknowledge of God,  before the world began!
He has only ever known man as existing in Christ, Him being the very Source, Agent and Fulfilment of all Creation. The very Life and Sustainer of Mankind…..in Whom Mankind is constituted and consists.
Him being the very Logos…the Original Logik…the Very Mind of God in expression.
Man on the other hand has never for one split second had any existence independent from or outside the sphere of Divine Love and Grace. Yet erroneously operating under an illusion of separation he  had alienated himself from God in his own mind!
Adam blamed his original sin on God. His failure brought into the soul of man loss of perspective, darkness, guilt, bitterness, alienation, resentment and hostility towards God.
Paul says;
“For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight..” Col 1; 19-22
God is the Reconciler from beginning to end.
It is God who reconciles!
It is man who was reconciled!
In His unwavering and unflinching Love He took the initiative, broke into the spiritually contaminated and darkened atmosphere of man’s hostility and antagonism towards His Maker.
At His own expense He pulled down every estranging barrier that mans guilt, deception, inferiority, hopelessness and resentment has erected. He cancelled out  in and through  Christ Jesus all of man’s varied rationalizations and many justifications for maintaining distance between himself and his Creator.
In the human body of  Jesus Christ, the Triune God demonstrated within the created order of matter, energy time and space and established in human history a fixed a point of reference. An eternal living  testimony of man’s inclusion in the Love and Life of the Trinity.