If death on the cross was only to show God's love, God could have sent Michael to die. Why Jesus?
If Jesus didn't take God's wrath meant to be upon us, why did He have to die on the cross?
If God was cruel to make Jesus die for our sins, wasn't God cruel to make Jesus die to defeat sin & satan?
Jesus
IS God. So
God was willing to suffer an excruciatingly humiliating and painful death in human flesh if that’s what it takes to convince us of His goodness, trustworthiness, and love, if that’s what it takes for us to turn from darkness and begin to place love at the forefront ourselves. So that we may know the
true God IOW, and follow Him, because He’s really worth it and worthy of our love, not just our fear. And His sacrificial act of love is crowned and completed by the resurrection that triumphed over His death, and so over
our death, so we may know the full depth of His intention for us, and so of His goodness.
The God of Christianity is, amazingly,
humble, and yet could squash us like a bug. But He won’t; He doesn’t condemn us; He lets us do that for ourselves to the extent that we choose pride and selfishness, covetousness and darkness over Him, over love. So the cross always stands as a point that we can navigate to, towards the true God, worthy of our love and worship-or not.
So the sin that opposes and viciously and violently and gladly killed God; the anger, enmity, hatred, selfishness, and darkness, is centered in
man, not Him. And He seeks to overcome it the way Jesus told
us to overcome it, with love, in His case fully and dramatically taking on and directly experiencing while forgiving that hatred and violence, that sin, rather than by forcing it out of existence. He's sought to
draw man to righteousness, to
Him, beginning already in Eden. The Cross is His ultimate act; it's what His love "looks like".
God hates evil, as love
naturally opposes evil. But he's not
threatened by it; He's always in control. He allows disobedience wrought by human pride and the evil it results in
for now, so that we may ultimately choose between the two, good and evil, with His ongoing help. And He still loves man even in his sin, as the cross demonstrates.