Toss out the notions that God could not love us without being paid off in some way. Instead use the illustration Fredrica Matthews-Green used of a firefighter. The firefighter makes a sacrifice -- a sacrifice not "to" someone but "for" something. A sacrifice for US. God can hear heartfelt applogies. But if they are appologies from the window of a burning building we still need saving; and the more God loves us the more he wants to save us.

The OT sacrifices were an accomodation which did two things: connected with what they could understand in their place of growth (Abraham's ceremony with the cut up animals, where God makes him sleep so that required payment for sin would fall on the sole signitor of God himself, still, is less grown than the major prophets picture of God writing his law on our hearts and giving the Holy Spirit in Ezekiel.), and giving them the tangible means they needed so as to make a difference in their lives. (Scape goats are good psychology, but they also underlined that sin is not just a notion and that it bears dreadful consequences on mankind and the whole cosmos.) All these were shaddows to point to what would happen. What happened later required saving by God who also is one of us.

We need saving and God wants to save us.

The "group of men" had feelings. But when the incarnation began it was an angel and a young girl.

God had asked for sacrifice in the OT to teach of his love to forgive people over and over, but not never accept them staying in the burning house's windown. To mix (metaphors from scripture) the "glowing ember" he did not "snuff out", and the lost sheep he went and looked for.

To the sheep came the shepherd. First God's Spirit overshaddowed the young woman who said an unequivocal "yes" to God's will -- Mary. Before God began saving the world from the moment of conception through all those "obediences" of taking on himself everything that we bear in struggles, striving, and sorrow, and before Jesus was formed by the Holy Spirit from someone having the same needs of saving and healing as us...God prepared the moment when one human person would be able to say "yes" without hesitation or duplicity.

Salvation does not just come from God "forgiving" us; it comes through God healing the illness of sin and its consequences of death in his own flesh -- in our flesh -- in his own life and death and resurrection, for us.

THAT was and is the purpose!

A human being became the NT equivalent of the burning bush that was not consumed, and the alter upon which the "sacrifice" was laid. She is the one through whom "salvation" (the person of her son Jesus) entered the world. And her son, who was born of the flesh with a mother but no father is also God from beyond all ages begotten of the Father without a mother. And he is the living expression of the Love of God to us, who are in need of the salvation by which we can partake of the eternal life of God through the conduit of Christ's glorified humanity. He is the true vine, the bread of life, the mustard tree.

PoW