can He be said to have "determined"
it?

The answer leads us to a consideration of decisive importance. God works
by law, in the spiritual, no less than in the physical region. The Death
of the Christ, at the hand of lawless men, came about in virtue of the
working of those laws. As we have said, sin is the alienation and
estrangement of man from the Divine life which is in him, and by virtue
of which he is man. Now, in the human character of Jesus Christ, we see,
for the first time, the perfect, genuine, uncaricatured humanity, in
which the human will is at every point in absolute agreement and
fellowship with the Divine Will. Shortly, He represents the complete and
absolute contradiction and antithesis of sin. It could not have been,
that that Life should have been realised in a world of alienation from
the Divine, without the result, which followed as necessarily and
inevitably as any of the physical happenings of nature, of the death of
the Sinless. "He became obedient unto death." A deeper meaning lies in
these words of St. Paul, which contain the whole secret of the Atonement.
But, for the present, we may understand them to mean, that death was the
natural issue of the Life of perfect obedience lived in a world permeated
by the spirit of disobedience. Thus we gain a clear knowledge of the
manner in which the death of Jesus Christ happened in accordance with the
determined counsel of God. That which takes place, in the spiritual or
in the physical world, as the result of the working of those laws of God
which are the constant expression of His will, may be said to have been
determined by Him.

There is a yet more profound meaning in the Death of Christ as the result
of sin, than any which we have as yet considered: that Death is the
outward sign and sacrament of an inward and spiritual fact. When we sin
we are, in a measure proportioned to the deliberateness and heinousness
of our sin, doing to death the Divine life, the Christ within us. That
which happened once on Calvary is renewed time after time in the inward
experience of men. The outward fact is an historical drama representing
an ever-repeated spiritual tragedy. Daily, by the hands of lawless men,
by ourselves in our moments of wilfulness and disobedience, Christ is
being put to death. There is no sin which, in its measure and degree, is
not a rejection and crucifixion of the Christ.

The Cross of Christ, viewed in the light of its histori