Necessary Blood 5

By R.C. Sproul

What if Jesus offered to pay our debt and the Father was not willing to accept His payment.  All of His blood would not be enough to atone for our sins.  It's only because the Father in all eternity has been determined to accept the payment of that blood sacrifice, that that debt can be erased once and for all. 

Finally, the sinfulness of sin is found in the reality that it is a crime.  It is a crime because sin violates people.  Everybody at one time or another has been a victim or been violated by somebody's sin against them.  Everybody has at the same time violated other people with their sin.  But the violation that we experience from each other isn't worthy to be compared with what it means to violate God Himself.

Several years ago I received in the mail a new edition of one of Bartlett’s familiar quotations and I couldn't understand why the publisher sent me this complimentary copy, and so I started leaping through the pages, and I saw quotations from Plato and Aristotle and the Surgeon General of the United States and all these dignitaries, and to my utter astonishment, I found there was a quotation in there from me.  I said, what have I ever said that would be worthy of putting in a volume of quotations?  The quotation that made it was a statement that I had made years ago, and in the final analysis what makes sin so serious is that it is cosmic treason.  Every time I commit a sin, no matter how small, I'm asserting my authority over the authority of God.  I am insulting God's holiness. 

Why does He require blood?  First because of our sin and secondly and even more importantly because of who He is.  God is loving!  Yes! God is gracious! Yes! We know that God is forbearing. God is longsuffering. 

But His love is a holy love, and His grace is a holy grace, and His longsuffering is a holy unsuffering, and His patience is a holy patience, and the one thing that God will never do to save you or to save me is to compromise His own integrity.  He is never going to lay aside His only holiness for your sake.  That's why in the drama of our salvation that Paul expounds in Romans that the doctrine by justification of faith alone through the imputed righteousness of Christ.  The grand conclusion is that this was done so that God can be both the just and the justifier of the ungodly.

At the same time that His love reaches out to redeem you, it is not a love that will negotiate His righteousness, and the wonder of the cross is found that in it we see the greatest example of God's justice in all of human history as at the same time the greatest example of His grace.