“Paul’s current eye of faith does not stare mysteriously into the cosmos, but backward to the revealed historical person of the Son of God. In his role as ‘Son of God’ and ‘Christ,’ Jesus fulfills the messianic and representative service predicted of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53). In Jesus’s death, Paul does not see a stoic philosophical transaction, but love! ‘He loved me,’ Paul cries! ‘He loved me, and gave himself for me!’ Indeed, unless a person looks back to the life and death of Jesus and there sees the love of God for himself or herself, that person has not come to know the love of God as taught in Scripture.”
Robert L. Plummer, The Love of God, 82.