Chioma was four years old when her father left Nigeria on a contract job abroad. She does not remember the day he went. She remembers the letters.
They came every few weeks in thin blue envelopes with foreign stamps. Her mother would sit on the edge of the bed after dinner, with Chioma and her two brothers squeezed beside her, and read them aloud under the light of a rechargeable lamp when NEPA had taken the power. The letters asked about school. They told stories about the heat and the long shifts and the food that tasted of nothing. Sometimes there was a photograph. Sometimes there was money for school fees folded inside. And every single letter, without exception, ended with the same line in her father’s careful handwriting: I am coming home.
Her mother kept them all in a biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe.
Six years later the family drove to the airport in Lagos at five in the morning. Chioma was ten. She stood at the arrivals barrier holding her mother’s hand and watching strangers come through the doors, and she asked a question that made her mother laugh and cry at the same time. “Mummy, is today the day he starts being our daddy?”
Her mother bent down. “My dear, he has been your daddy every day. Every school fee, every letter, every prayer at night. Today is not the day he starts. Today is the day he finishes coming home.”
Chioma’s question is one many Christians ask about God without realising it. Did God begin loving sinners when Jesus died? Was Calvary the day salvation started, a sudden rescue organised when everything else had failed? Or was it the day that something long promised, long prepared and long loved finally arrived?
PunchlineThe answer shapes how you pray, how you read your Bible and how you understand your own place in God’s purposes. Let us open the biscuit tin.
Love came first
John answers Chioma’s question long before he reaches the account of the crucifixion:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave.” Notice the order. Love came first, and the giving followed from it. The Father did not begin to love the world when the Son died. He gave the Son because He already loved the world. Paul says the same: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The cross demonstrates a love that was already there.
We misunderstand Calvary badly if we picture a compassionate Jesus persuading a reluctant, angry God to have mercy on us. That picture has done real harm. It leaves believers loving Jesus but quietly afraid of the Father, as though the Son were the friendly one and the Father had to be managed. Scripture never speaks that way. The Father sends. The Son comes willingly. The purpose of the sending is rescue: “that the world through him might be saved.”
This matters every time you pray. If you think Jesus made an unwilling God briefly favourable toward you, you will always wonder how long the favour will last. But if the gift of the Son comes from the Father’s own love, then your confidence rests on the Father Himself. You come through Christ to the God who wanted you brought near in the first place.
The cross is the place where that love reached its decisive accomplishment. The love itself is older.
A plan older than the world
Paul writes to Timothy about a grace older than either man’s ministry:
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
Read those phrases slowly. “His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” Before Timothy preached, before Paul was converted, before Abraham left Ur, before Adam was formed from the dust, grace already had its place in God’s purpose in Christ. And that purpose “is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Hidden for ages. Revealed at the appointed time.
Peter says something very similar about Christ: “Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (1 Peter 1:20). And Paul tells Titus that eternal life was something “which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began” (Titus 1:2).
Revelation has a striking phrase that belongs here. It speaks of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). It is only fair to say that sincere scholars read that verse in two ways. Some connect “from the foundation of the world” with the names written in the book of life, as in a similar verse a few chapters later (Revelation 17:8). Others read it as the King James translators did, of the Lamb Himself. But whichever way the grammar runs, the truth it points to is plainly taught by Peter: the sacrifice of Christ was in the mind and purpose of God before creation. Calvary was never a rescue improvised after the original plan went wrong.
That does not make history unimportant, as though everything were already done and the events were merely a performance. A promise is carried out through action. The Son truly took flesh. He truly obeyed, suffered and gave His life. God’s eternal purpose takes its saving form within real time, on a real hill outside a real city. Our salvation rests on what God purposed and what He actually accomplished.
Chioma’s father had intended to come home from the day he left. But the intention did not put him in the arrivals hall. He still had to work the shifts, buy the ticket and board the plane. In the same way, the eternal purpose of God did not make the incarnation and the cross unnecessary. It made them certain.
The first promise in the garden
The letters began early. The first one was written in the worst moment in human history, just after Adam and Eve had sinned and hidden from God among the trees of the garden. God came looking for them. He questioned them. And then, before He pronounced any consequence on the man or the woman, He spoke to the serpent:
And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Christians have long called verse 15 the first announcement of the gospel. It is worth seeing why. God promises enmity, a war, between the serpent and the woman, and between the serpent’s seed and hers. Then the language narrows from a whole line of descendants to a single figure: “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” One will come from the woman who will crush the serpent’s head, and in the process He Himself will be wounded.
A bruised heel and a crushed head. That is the cross in seed form. The serpent would strike, and the Son would suffer. But the wound He received would be the very act by which He destroyed the enemy. Hebrews explains it: the Son took part of flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). John says, “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
Notice too the phrase “her seed.” Paul seems to echo it when he writes, “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). The promised Deliverer would be truly human, born of a woman, a son of Eve. He would win the battle Adam lost, standing in the same humanity.
And look at what God does next. Before Adam and Eve leave the garden, “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). We should be careful not to make every detail carry more than the text says. But it is hard to miss the first hint that covering for human shame would come through a death God Himself provided.
NuggetSo the first letter in the tin was written in Eden. And at its end, in effect, God wrote: I am coming.
A lamb God would provide
The letters kept arriving. One of the most moving is in Genesis 22. God told Abraham to take his son, “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Genesis 22:2), to a mountain in the land of Moriah and offer him there. Abraham rose early and went. On the third day they saw the place. Father and son climbed together, the boy carrying the wood and the father carrying the fire and the knife. Then Isaac asked the question:
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
“God will provide himself a lamb.” Abraham did not yet know how. God stopped his hand and provided a ram caught in a thicket, and Abraham named the place “Jehovah-jireh,” with a saying that lasted for generations: “In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen” (Genesis 22:14). It shall be seen. Something was still to be provided on that mountain range. Centuries later another Father would bring His only Son, whom He loved, to a hill outside Jerusalem. This time there would be no substitute in the thicket. The Son was the Lamb.
Then came Egypt. On the night of the Passover each household took a lamb, “a lamb for an house” (Exodus 12:3), killed it, and painted its blood on the doorposts. God promised, “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13). The lamb was to be eaten whole, and God gave a curious instruction: “neither shall ye break a bone thereof” (Exodus 12:46). For centuries Israel kept the feast, year after year, remembering a deliverance and waiting, without fully knowing it, for a greater one.
John the Baptist saw Jesus walking toward the Jordan and cried out, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). And John the apostle, describing the crucifixion, is careful to tell us that it was “the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14), the day the Passover lambs were being made ready. When the soldiers came to break the legs of the crucified men to hasten their deaths, they found Jesus already dead and did not break His. John comments: “For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken” (John 19:36).
Paul draws the line straight: “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Every Passover lamb in Israel’s long history had been a letter. At Calvary, the Lamb arrived.
The Servant who would bear our sins
Of all the letters in the tin, none is clearer than Isaiah 53. Seven centuries before the cross, the prophet described a Servant of the Lord who would suffer for the wrongs of others, having none of His own:
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
Read it as though you had never heard of Jesus, and you are still faced with a man who carries griefs that are not His, is wounded for transgressions that belong to others, and goes silently to His death like a lamb. “The LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Then Isaiah says something even more startling: “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin” (Isaiah 53:10).
It pleased the Lord. That cannot mean that the Father enjoyed His Son’s agony. It means the suffering of the Servant was not an accident outside God’s will. It was the very purpose of God for the salvation of many, and the Servant’s soul would become “an offering for sin.” The same chapter says that “he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12).
On the night before His death, Jesus quoted that chapter and applied it to Himself: “For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end” (Luke 22:37). Have an end. The Greek word there is related to the word He would cry from the cross the following afternoon. The things written about Him were reaching their goal.
Some time later, a high official from Ethiopia was riding home from Jerusalem in his chariot, reading this very chapter aloud and puzzling over it. He asked Philip, “of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?” And “Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:34-35). Isaiah 53 had been waiting seven hundred years for that conversation.
PunchlineCalvary was not God’s emergency response to a plan gone wrong. It was the day His oldest promise arrived.
Wicked hands and a determined counsel
On the day of Pentecost, Peter stood up in Jerusalem, weeks after the crucifixion, and spoke to some of the very people who had shouted for it:
Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.
Two things stand side by side in verse 23. Jesus was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” And “ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” God’s plan and human sin are both fully real. The determined counsel of God did not make the hands that crucified Jesus any less wicked. And the wickedness of those hands did not mean God had lost control.
The early church prayed the same truth back to God after Peter and John were threatened by the authorities. They said that Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles and the people of Israel had gathered against Jesus, “For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:28). The worst crime ever committed accomplished the greatest good ever done.
We should not turn this into fatalism, as though nobody was responsible. Peter called his hearers to repent, and three thousand of them did. Nor should we use it to explain away every evil done to us as though God approved of it. But there is real comfort here for a believer whose life has been touched by other people’s wickedness. Joseph said to the brothers who sold him into slavery, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). If God could take the cross, the darkest act of human rebellion, and make it the completion of His saving plan, then no injustice done to you is beyond His power to redeem. That is not a reason to stay silent about abuse or to stay in danger. It is a reason not to despair.
The prophets were looking toward it
Peter describes the prophets searching the meaning of what they themselves had written:
Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.
They prophesied of “the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow,” and they searched diligently to understand when and how it would come. They knew they were writing letters for a future reader. “Not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister.” Even the angels, Peter says, long to look into these things.
After His resurrection Jesus told His disciples, “all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me” (Luke 24:44). All three divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures. The law, with its sacrifices and its Passover. The prophets, with their suffering Servant. The psalms, where David cried “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1), the very words Jesus prayed from the cross. The Old Testament is not the record of a different God who later changed His character. It is one long correspondence pointing toward one arrival.
What about believers who lived before the cross? Did Abraham and David have some other way of being saved? Scripture honours their faith: Abraham “believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). But Hebrews tells us that Christ’s death reached backward too, “for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament” (Hebrews 9:15). The earlier covenant was never a second route by which people saved themselves while Jesus provided an alternative later. The saints of old trusted the God who had promised. The cross is where His promise to them was paid for. “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off” (Hebrews 11:13). They read the letters. We have seen the arrival.
That has a practical consequence for reading your Bible. When you open the Old Testament, you are not reading a stack of disconnected moral stories. Jesus said of the Scriptures, “they are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). Read the sacrifices and ask what they reveal about Him. Read the promises and look for how He fulfils them. You will find that your whole Bible becomes a single story with a single hero.
Completed, then raised
The title of this teaching needs a careful word. The cross completed the sacrificial offering for sin. It did not complete everything in every sense. Jesus was raised on the third day, and that resurrection belongs to the gospel as much as the cross does. Paul says that He “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Romans 4:25). A sacrifice completed on Friday does not mean nothing of saving significance happened on Sunday. The Father vindicated the Son, the risen Lord now lives and intercedes, and the Spirit brings people into the life the gospel announces. The cross is sufficient as sacrifice. The living Christ is essential to salvation.
But that is the point of the title. The cross was not the first step of a salvation that we must now finish by our religious efforts. It was the completing of an offering God had promised from Eden and prepared through Abraham, Moses, David and Isaiah. You do not need to search for another sacrifice hidden behind the gospel. You do not need a new spiritual payment for an old family history. Spiritual care can help you understand that redemption and walk in its freedom. It cannot sell you a completion Christ failed to provide.
This is also good news for the believer who fears that his story is too complicated for grace. The gospel did not come into existence after your problem became difficult. God’s purpose is older than your failure. He knew everything about you before the foundation of the world, and the Son He sent is sufficient for the need you bring. That does not minimise the consequences of your past. It places your past before a Redeemer whose coming was already the expression of the Father’s love.
Receiving that gift is personal, of course. Knowing that a meal has been prepared does not mean you have eaten it. The announcement of an accomplished redemption calls for faith in the Redeemer. That faith adds no missing payment. It simply receives what God gives in Christ.
When you tell someone the good news, then, tell the whole story. Let them hear the heart of the Father as well as the sufficiency of the offering. Tell them who came, why He came, what He did, and that He lives. The plan was God’s before they knew how to ask for it.
Chioma is a mother now, with a son of her own. Not long ago he came home from Sunday school confused. His teacher had said that Jesus “came to save us,” and he wanted to know whether God had been angry with everybody before that.
Chioma went to the wardrobe and brought down a biscuit tin. Her mother had given it to her years ago. She sat on the edge of the bed with her son squeezed beside her and took out a thin blue envelope, then another, then another, and read him the last line of each one. I am coming home. I am coming home. I am coming home.
“Was Grandpa our grandpa before he came back?” her son asked.
“Every day,” she said. “These letters prove it. And God wrote letters too, for thousands of years. A promise in the garden. A lamb on a mountain. Blood on a door. A prophet who wrote about a Servant. Every one of them said the same thing.” She put the letters back in the tin. “The cross was the day He finished coming.”
That is the gospel. The Father’s love did not begin at Calvary. It arrived there. Every promise found its yes in the Son who hung on that tree, and the work He came to do was done. Stand on that completed work today. It was planned for you before the world began.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you ever thought of Jesus as the friendly one and the Father as the one who had to be persuaded? How does John 3:16 correct that?
- Which “letter” in the Old Testament most moves you as a pointer to the cross: Genesis 3:15, Genesis 22, the Passover or Isaiah 53? Why?
- How does Acts 2:23 help you hold together God’s sovereignty and human responsibility?
- Is there any part of your story that you have felt is too complicated for God’s plan? What does 2 Timothy 1:9 say to that?
- How would you explain the cross to a child, or to a friend who is afraid of God?
This Week
This week, read one “letter” each day and then its arrival: Genesis 3:14-15 with Hebrews 2:14-15; Genesis 22:1-14 with John 1:29; Exodus 12:1-13 with 1 Corinthians 5:7; Isaiah 52:13-53:12 with Acts 8:26-35; and Psalm 22 with Mark 15:22-37. After each pair, write one sentence that begins, “God promised... and in Jesus He...” At the end of the week, share one of those sentences with someone who needs to hear it.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that the cross revealed a love You had for me long before I knew You. Thank You for the purpose and grace You gave me in Christ Jesus before the world began. Thank You for every promise You kept, from the garden to Calvary, and for the Lamb You provided Yourself. Forgive me for the times I have been afraid of You, as though You had to be persuaded to love me. I rest my whole life on the sacrifice Your Son completed and on the risen Lord who lives. Teach me to read Your Word as one great story, and to tell that story to others with joy. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.