Romans 5:10, “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.”
I was reading though Romans 5 this morning as we struck once again by the significance that God’s love is manifest to us not only in the Son’s death for us…but in the Son’s death for us WHILE we were still enemies. Paul says that, if we are to recognizes the fullness of God’s love, we need to consider the fact that the Father gave the Son even when we were viciously opposed to His heart and would have crucified Him if given the chance….And this recognition ought to give us an invincible hope that God is FOR us in Christ and that we will–in the risen Son–be preserved from God’s wrath both now and forever.
So in this picture the saint is portrayed as driving the spear into Christ’s hand in order to represent the enmity we had toward Him at the moment of His self-giving for us….and then the fires on the left side of the image represent the wrath of God that is now and forever absorbed and turned away from us because of the person and work of the Son.
