What could be better than the divine plan of substitutionary atonement? God must punish sin; He could not be God unless He did. It is a necessity of His nature, that He should hate sin with an infinite hatred, and He must punish it! Yet, as He had loved His people with an everlasting love, how could He better show His love to them, and His hatred of sin than by giving up His well-beloved Son to die in place of them!
This seems to me to be the most beautiful thing I ever heard of, and it delights my soul to preach it!
The false doctrine of universal redemption that Christ died for the damned in Hell, and that He suffered the torment of those who afterwards are tormented forever seems to me to be detestable,
subversive of the whole Gospel, and
destructive of the only pillar upon which our hopes can be built!
Christ stood in the place of His elect; for them He made a full Atonement; for them He so suffered, that not a sin of theirs shall ever be laid at their door. As the Father's love embraced them so the death of His Son reconciled them.
Christ's atonement gives such an exhibition of the guilt of sin, as is not to be seen anywhere else no, not even in the flames of Hell!
The heart of the gospel is redemption, and the essence of redemption is the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. Those who preach this truth preach the gospel. But those who do not preach the atonement, whatever else they declare have missed the soul and substance of the divine message. To deny the great doctrine of substitutionary atonement by the blood of Jesus Christ is to hamstring the gospel, and to cut the throat of Christianity!
What the sun is to the heavens that the doctrine of a vicarious satisfaction is to theology. Substitutionary atonement is the brain and spinal cord of Christianity! Take away the cleansing blood, and what hope is left for the guilty? Deny the substitutionary work of Jesus and you have denied all that is precious in the New Testament!
He who understands the mystery of Christ's substitutionary atonement for His people, is a master in Scriptural theology!
[Charles H. Spurgeon]
2 Corinthians 5:21 ... For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
Galatians 3:13 ... Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree:
1 Corinthians 4:20 ... For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. ❤
