Being made in His likeness, we awaken to our authentic identity in Him. He decimates our man made, circumstance fashioned, false identities by assuming our likeness and dealing with what we can't imagine a holy God can comprehend. Satan brings temptation upon man in the Garden, and later God tempts Himself (led by the Spirit into the wilderness for the purpose of being tempted) in a garden. In the Garden of Eden God calls out to man 'where are you' as God forsaken. On the cross Jesus cries out to God as man forsaken. He faces down the identity of atheism by assuming the identity of the atheist in the most radical way imaginable. For in the garden and on the cross, God annihilates the separation anxiety of Divine and human rejection in that for a brief instant God Himself appears to be an atheist, crying out, "Why have You forsaken me?" And from that place of lonely isolation, He reconciles the cosmos to Himself, dying and raising from the dead not just for us but as us. That's grace and goodness beyond the realm of understanding, but not beyond the realm of experience. The grace of Jesus is most often experienced long before it is understood. I would even say without the experience there is no understanding.
