revelation not atonement
Maybe we’d got it all backwards. Maybe the sacrificial system wasn’t God’s invention but ours. A kind of theological security blanket to convince ourselves we were still in God’s good books.
But all it really did was create victims.
In fact, that’s where the word “victim” comes from—literally, "a creature killed as a religious offering."
The cross was violent. It was sacrificial. But the violence wasn’t God’s. It was ours. And God didn’t demand it. God endured it—to show us that love was never something we had to earn.