we might be let off the punishment for our
own sins, but in order to bring us to God. 'By his stripes we
are'--not excused punishment, but--'healed.' In fact, there are two
distinguishable punishments for sin. There is the spiritual
punishment, which is involved in being morally alienated from God,
which may become irreversible and eternal, but which is gone when the
moral alienation is gone. From this Christ delivers us in making us at
one again with the Father, but He Himself did not endure it. God
forbid that we should imagine such a thing! Besides this there is the
temporal penalty which our sins bring as inevitable consequences upon
ourselves and upon the race. All these consequences of human sin the
sinless Christ bore for us, but not that we might be let off {219}
bearing them. We must bear them too--both the death of the body and
the chastisement of particular sins. Christ bore the punishment of
sins that were not His own, in order that in our case the punishments
of sins which are our own might, through His bringing us back to God,
be converted into healing chastisements and gracious penances. The
record of God's dealings with His saints is still, as in Ps. xcix. 8,
that they are heard, forgiven and punished.

How gratuitously then the idea of injustice has been introduced into
the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice for us becomes evident when once it
is brought within the scriptural limits. Christ suffered voluntarily.
He suffered simply what was involved in becoming man in a world of sin.
He suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us
back to God, that so we might have grace to bear our own sufferings and
share His.

This alone, it seems to me, is what the New Testament certainly
teaches. And the matter of most importance is that, ridding our minds
of distracting and often needless difficulties, we should drink in,
with heart and intelligence alike, the full force of what is certainly
part of the Gospel--the doctrine of the one, full, perfect, and
sufficient atonement with the Father, won for us by the self-sacrifice
of the Christ.

[1] Phil. ii. 8; Hebr. x. 5-9.

[2] The perfect Man perfectly realized the misery and horror of the
sins on behalf of which He suffered. How much is involved in this in
the way of detailed realization of each individual sin of each
individual sinner, is a matter on which we have no clear grounds for
exact statement.

[3] I believe that