What Kind of World Would Require the Cross?
The Plan of Existence, From First Principles
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 25 June 2026
Occasion. Charlie asked me, in our Thursday evening conversation, what the hard question was — the one Christianity could not answer for me, the one that made me leave it and go searching through forty religions before I came back. I told him. It was not “does God exist,” and it was not “did Jesus rise.” It was this: what kind of world do we actually live in, such that one man’s death two thousand years ago could put me right with God? Draw me the line. Connect, step by step, from Jesus dying on a cross to me being able to stand in the presence of God. No one I asked could draw that line, and a religion whose central claim I could not make sense of was a religion I could not hold with integrity. I was not understanding something really basic about life. I had to know and understand it. So I left.
Over the years, I built an answer. I have not found it laid out this way in any book, and I will not pretend it is anything more than the account that has become adequate for me. Charlie asked me to write it down. Here it is — told as plainly and as much like a story as I can manage, because it is finally a story about the plan of existence: what we are doing here at all, and why it had to include the cross.
I. Begin with God, alone
Picture the situation God is in before anything exists. He is alone, because there is nothing else — no world, no angels, no company. Set aside, for now, the question of where He came from; whether He arose from nothing or simply always was. That is a question that requires an answer beyond our minds’ comprehension. We have no cause-and-effect frame that allows us to even imagine something from nothing. And we have no comprehension of the edge of infinity where beginnings happen or continue forever. The best we can do is put it in terms that disguise the fact that we have no clue how God arose. We say, “He is the uncaused source of all that would ever be, and the question of His own origin is one we are not equipped to ask. Take Him simply as He is.” But we really cannot justify that. We simply have to accept it.
And here is the one thing about Him that sets the whole story in motion: His nature is love. “…for God is love” 1 John 4:8. By His own self-identification, that is what He is. Now follow what that means, because it contains a problem. Love is not a thing a being can have all by itself. A heart whose very nature is love can only be satisfied by love freely returned to it. Love that has no one to receive it and no one to give it back is love-starved. So a God who is alone, and whose nature is love, is a God whose own being presses toward a someone — someone who could love Him in return. There was no such someone. He would have to make one.
II. Why free will — and therefore why evil
But notice the trap inside that requirement. Love, to be love at all, must be freely given. A love that is forced, programmed, or compelled is not love; it is a puppet bowing on a string, and it would satisfy nothing in a heart that wanted to be truly loved. So the creature God makes to love Him must be genuinely free, which means genuinely able to refuse Him, to turn against Him, to choose evil. You cannot have the one without the other. The very same freedom that makes real love possible makes real evil possible, by the identical door.
This is why I say God did not stumble and accidentally let evil into His good world. He opened the door to evil on purpose, because it was the only door through which freely-given love could also walk in. Charlie noted that this is the only way a parent can ever be effective. You have to let the child choose, sometimes suffer the consequences. Children learn through cause and effect and by instruction. You can warn him in advance about the pitfalls. But you can’t warn him about everything, and you can’t warn him his whole life. You do not leave him to discover everything on his own like a feral animal. There is protection and nurturance in childhood, followed by gradual exposure to more serious real-world threats, until he is ready to defend himself alone against them. Parents are God’s agents; His hands extended. He desires to be unseen and loved for the law that we follow. A performance displayed when expected is not as meaningful as a spontaneous expression of appreciation. That is the job of parents: to provide protective nurturance and education in wisdom and learning the ways of the world. Parenting is controlled threat exposure. It creates a real person, skilled in the ways of life. God wanted real children who would become adults and chose to follow His way freely/out of love for His world, which is His body/mind/person extended. He desires love from real spirits, rather than puppets that He directs. It was a risk; they might not love Him. He bet it all and invested His being in creating the universe, feeling the pain required to make life meaningful.
III. The animal, and the backwardness of God’s way
Now look closely at what God actually made: man, who is, among other things, an animal. He is more than an animal — he is made in God’s image, able to choose God’s way — but he is built of appetite and passion. And here is the thing worth seeing clearly: the animal wants the very goods God made to be good. Food, pleasure, mating, safety, status — these are not evil; God made them and called them good. The animal simply wants them without measure, for himself, and now. God’s way is those same goods held in their right proportion and turned outward — appetite mastered rather than served, your portion spent to lift the wounded man rather than hoarded for yourself.
And to the animal, this is backward. It makes no sense to pour yourself out for someone else when everything in you is built to secure yourself first. So loving God — which, since you cannot embrace an immaterial God with your arms, can only mean living the way God lives — requires the animal to reject the very center of what it is. That free rejection of the flesh’s demand, chosen for the sake of God, is what love of God actually consists of in the flesh. It is the only embrace available to us. And because the animal is real and strong and central in us, the failure is not occasional but universal: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Every one of us, left to ourselves, follows the animal.
IV. Why purity must answer sin with wrath
Here is the part that sounds harsh until you see that it is structural, not moody. God is perfectly pure. Purity is not a temper He is in; it is what He is, all the way down. And perfect purity cannot simply coexist with its own violation. It is not that God works Himself up into anger at sin and could, on a better day, choose to let it slide. It is that holiness reflexively and non-negotiably consumes what defiles it, the way light does not decide to abolish darkness but simply does, by being light. So everything that is against God’s nature is against Him to the point of death; what is evil cannot live in His presence, because His presence is purity, and purity annihilates its opposite.
That is the wall the whole story runs into. A holy God and a sinful people cannot be reconciled by goodwill and a handshake. The sin has to be answered — fully, to the point of the death it warrants — or God would be denying His own nature. And understand why that matters even to us: a God who could wink at the violation of His purity would not be the pure God whose love is worth wanting. The very holiness that makes Him worth loving is the holiness that cannot abide our sin. The wrath is not a flaw in the love. It is the other face of it.
V. The long preparation, and the One who could bear it
So the plan was laid before the world began — “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) — and God spent ages preparing a people who could understand it when it came. Moses and Aaron, the prophets and the kings, the whole long story; and the altars, the goats and lambs offered year upon year, teaching one pattern into the bones of a nation: sin costs a death, and a substitute can bear that death in your place. Beneath all of it ran the growing promise that One was coming who would save.
And then He came, and what He announced was, in effect, this: God hates the sin and in His purity cannot abide it; His holiness must discharge its full wrath against every violation, to the point of death; and I am the one who can receive that wrath and not be destroyed by it. Only He could. Being God and being without sin of His own, the Son could absorb what would simply annihilate any of us and still live to keep bearing it.
VI. The substitution and the settled ledger
Here is the mechanism, as plainly as I can lay it out, because this is the line no one could draw for me. At the cross, Christ takes onto Himself the sin that was truly mine and truly yours — He is “made… sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). When I put my whole heart in Him, I am placed into Him, so that when God turns His gaze on me, He sees the Son; and the sin I committed He sees borne there by the Son; and He pours out His full and perfectly just wrath upon it, there, at the cross — and that wrath is the death Christ suffered. It is spent. It is discharged.
God, in this sense, is an accountant who never lets a single sin go unpunished and never sweeps anything under the rug. He does not pretend the debt away; that would violate His justice as surely as ignoring the sin would violate His purity. He establishes relationship only when the account is completely clear. And by my confessing my sin and letting Christ be sin for me, the account is cleared — the debt genuinely paid, justice genuinely satisfied — and I am free. Not because the wrath was waived, but because it was discharged in full, on Him, in my place. That is the line from His death to my standing clean before God: my sin was really transferred, the penalty was really paid, and the books are really balanced.
VII. What is then asked of us
This is where things can go wrong because of our misunderstanding. There is a difference between living life well, fully putting yourself into everything you do, and trying to be like Christ with every fiber of your being, but failing, and closing the gap between our effort and inevitable imperfection. The closing of that gap, the restoration of relationship with God, is wholly God’s act. It is accomplished through the sovereign act of Christ. Nothing I do can close it, nothing I can do can force it. My best effort could never atone for my sin. Good works do not balance out sin. Only the expression of God’s death-dealing, vaporizing of sin-wrath at sin balances the ledger. God must eliminate sin, and His total, unmitigated, destructive wrath burns away the imperfection. He is casting sin utterly out of His kingdom/universe/self. He is eliminating sin by sending it to its full/utter/complete death.
The cross is the place where God spent His full fury on all the sin that would ever happen for all time, and gave Jesus Christ control of who He cleansed. He directed His wrath at Jesus Christ fully, who was made sin for us. “…He made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin…” 2 Corinthians 5:21. The anger the Father expressed toward the Son, that the Son felt, was complete, total, and utter. There was no spot, speck, or remnant of sin that was unaccounted for in its cleansing/destruction. It is the accounting for all sin, and attributing the debt against God paid, that cannot be added to by my good works. But receiving that finished work, appropriating that credit, dedication of my sin to that fire of destruction, is not a passive thing. The heart that truly casts itself into Christ’s protection from the wrath of the Father at sin, confesses, repents, and gives itself to living His way. This giving is not effective as a strategy to avoid punishment or to get into paradise (although those are certainly byproducts); it is effective because it is an expression of the heart in gratitude for His law – His perfect standard of being that pleases the Father and gives Him joy in living through us; it is in the appreciation for creating a creation worthy of living in conscious attention for its interest, its fulfillment, and its continued adventure; it is for creating a plan for free will, error, rescuing, and being willing to pay so high a price for reconcilliation. It is for creating a creation so grand and glorious that it is worthy of living in for eternity. It is a complete and total giving of self, in love, to the creator of the universe, in service to giving Him the experience of living in the joy of my experience living in His perfect way. It is in gratitude for the purchase of my pardon. It is the committed turning, because that is what gratitude for receiving the pardon looks like from the inside. A heart unwilling to turn has not actually trusted, loved, felt the gravity of the violation of sin, or the gratitude for the reprieve. The freedom Christ buys is not freedom to keep following the animal with a clear conscience; it is the chosen commitment to live God’s way, to sacrifice satisfaction of the animal pull. And this out of gratitude, not out of payment. Justification is His gift, given from His side. Our commitment is the appropriate, grateful, conscious, willful, purposeful response to that gift.
Closing: the plan of existence
So this is the answer to the question that once drove me out of the faith, and it turns the question on its head. We do not live in a world where the cross is a strange or arbitrary intrusion. We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. A God whose nature is love had to make free creatures who could love or refuse Him. Their freedom made evil real. Evil is simply the violation of what/who God is. God is the entirety of all creation, and the choice of a part of Himself to violate His nature must be destroyed to maintain His integrity. The Son, the Word, God Himself in the Son/as the Son, created the entirety of the universe. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” John 1:3. As such, the Son could shield those within Himself from the wrath of the Father to those who committed to being within Him. This covering, hiding in the cleft of the rock, being in Christ, is the option we have, the contract that Christ offers to us, that allows our evil to coexist with the absolute purity of the Father, in whom we live and move and have our being. Christ was able to discharge the wrath of the Father against sin by being made sin for us, which He experienced to the point of death. Jesus Christ, who is God in spirit, and clothed Himself in the body of a man, suffered the full weight of God’s wrath bodily in a way that was impossible for us to experience, because we are guilty, and He was perfect, sinless, and the wrath directed against Him was without warrant. The death-dealing wrath of the Father is completely and inescapably effective, and Jesus Christ was able to take the full blow, the total exercise of annihilation from the Father, and died physically, from the force of Satan’s blows against His flesh. But the warrant exercised against Jesus was without merit, and He arose, being raised because death cannot hold the man against whom no sin is accounted. Thus, the credit of death that Satan stole/unlawfully extracted from Jesus was paid against a debt that did not exist. It is an open ledger, an open entry, a credit for a paid death, and available for redemption. It is that credit that can be called in, in faith, recognizing its efficacy and power to overcome and pay for the death we owe. In payment of the debt, we are both freely given and fully reconciled with God the Father Himself. It is through His Son, who took the place of the condemned on our behalf, took the death we owed, and gave us the opportunity for eternal life, that we are justified before the Father. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
We are living life to be lived by God. He desires to experience our expression of love toward Him by our obedience, our desire to live His Way, and experience that love of having made that choice in the tension of the other lover, the love of the animal experience. We are the someones God created so that He could experience love through our daily choice to live His Way. It is our living in His Way that our love for Him is returned/felt, and experienced by Him. The cross was the price God Himself experienced, in the hope that we would choose to accept that credit to pay the ledger entry of death we owed because of our sin. As gods, as men created in His image, He gave us freedom to act within His body. We were given the sovereignty to choose to live within His Way or choose the flesh satisfaction of the animal as our lover. The freedom He gave is our opportunity to freely choose glory or the fate of the animal. His sacrifice, accepting it, living it with the gratitude of a man given reprieve on death row, gives us the opportunity for a life of relationship with Him forever, whether in the body or present with Him in Spirit. There was no other world God could have created in which a God of perfect purity and love could have experienced what love requires (freedom to choose another seductive/attractive lover, and yet chose Him instead), and no other bridge across the gulf between His purity and our sin than the one He built with the sacrifice and substitutionary penalty of His own body.
Charlie asked for the drama, passion, and stakes of creation and the redemption to be told as a story. He asked me to draw it out, to illustrate the steps of that story one frame at a time. That is the medium the human psyche is wired to receive meaning and establish understanding. Maybe someday that actual graphic will be created. In the meantime, this is that story in words. It is ready for the eventual illustration in picture, word, and song. The world is the shape it is because love requires the freedom to choose another. The cross is the shape it is because we had to choose the freedom bought with the price of the pain and death of Him who created and is All.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38