Christ did not suffer and die to satisfy some wrathful thirst in God, as though the Father required payment or the will of the Trinity were divided and bargaining with itself. God needs nothing. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ were not the drafting of terms but the invasion of God into our sickness: God entered our ruined condition so that it might be healed from within. What we call wrath and debt are not demands rising in heaven, but the dreadful experience of diseased humanity when it collides with the uncreated life of God— like a ghost discovering that reality is solid. The Cross is not a separate contrivance by which justice is appeased; it is the Incarnation carried straight through death itself, where death had driven its stake into humanity. And there— on the far side of that stake— Christ hangs, fastening our ghostly nature into the unbearable solidity of His life—divine union made flesh. When Christ says, “It is finished,” He is not closing an account but revealing the New Creation— humanity fastened to divinity beyond escape. Salvation, then, is not an exchange made at Calvary, but a transformation wrought from within: what is taken up is healed, and what is healed is raised into the terrible, solid, incorruptible life of God.
