Christ and the Cross of Our Deliverance

The Gospel is not about sinners in the hands of an angry God, but about sinners in the hands of a loving God, God in the hands of angry sinners, and how God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us. For the Word did not become human to satisfy divine anger or settle divine accounts but to confront the powers that enslaved humanity — to destroy death and bring us to life.

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14-15) 

This is not the appeasement of an offended deity, but freedom from the enslaving power of death, the fear of death, the devil — and so, also, from the power of sin.

Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:15)

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. (1 John 3:8)

For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:9-10)

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24)

This early Church Fathers understood the atoning work of Christ to be not one of divine penalty or appeasement but of divine victory over everything that stood against us.

St. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies (5.21.1), “He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head.” 

St. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation (2.10), “For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection. By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Catechetical Orations (§24), speaks of  how Christ deceived the devil by offering himself under the veil of our human nature, like bait to a greedy fish, “the hook of divinity might be swallowed with the bait of the flesh, and thus when life came to dwell in death and light shone in the darkness, that which is understood as the opposite of light and life might be utterly destroyed.”

St. John Chrysostom, in his Paschal Homily, tells how Christ destroyed death by enduring it, and Hades by entering into it. “It is in an uproar because it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and it discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.”

Christ did not go to the Cross to deliver us from 
God but to rescue us from the power of death, 
the power the devil, and the power of sin.