I will not execute the fierceness of my anger. I will not return to destroy Ephraim: For I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of you; And I will not come in wrath.
The offender has broken the law, there is a penalty laid upon him for what he has done, and he righteously deserves to bear it. It was an offense against me, and he deserves to be punished for it, but I will bear the whole penalty myself." We never heard any mere man say, "Here is a burglar who has broken into my house; he is to have five years' penal servitude, but I will offer to go into penal servitude in order that he may be set free;" or, "Here is a murderer doomed to die, and I offer to suffer in his stead, that he may be accounted innocent." Such a thing was never heard of among men, but this is what God has done. As Judge, the righteous God must punish sin. Say what you will, there is a necessity that the Judge of all the earth should do right. If you could take away the justice of God, and the fact of the judgment to come, you would have stolen the linch-pin from the wheels of God's chariot; you would have marred the moral government of the universe. Sin must be punished, but the Judge himself condescends to bear the penalty for the offenses committed against himself; mark, to bear the consequences of sin committed against his own authority and his own person, and to bear those consequences in his own person that the offending one may be reconciled to him. There never was such another tale as I am telling you now; it could not have been invented by men, it must be divine. It has such a stamp of originality about it, that it must have come from God. It is so divine on the very surface of it that it must be a blessed fact. God himself becomes the Substitute for those who have broken his own law, and done despite to his own name; and, in union with human nature, in his own body on the tree he bears the consequences of the sin which otherwise must have fallen upon his enemies, the guilty sons of men. It is a very wonderful story, this "old, old story, of Jesus and his love." I cannot tell it to you as I should like to tell it, but it does not so much matter how it is told. The power of it lies, not in the telling of it, but in the doctrine and truth itself when blessed by the Spirit of God.  VIII. MEN WOULD NOT IMPORTUNE AN OFFENDER IF HE REFUSED THE PARDON. 