Impunity
is not mercy, and punishment is never the negation of perfect love, but
rather, if you destroy the one you hopelessly maim the other. The two
halves are needed in order to give full emphasis to either. Each note
alone is untrue; blended, they make the perfect chord.

II. And now, let me ask you to look with me at another point, and that
is, the relation of the grace to the punishment.

Is it not love which proclaims judgment? Are not the words of my first
text, if you take them all, merciful, however they wear a surface of
threatening? 'Lest I come.' Then He speaks that He may not come, and
declares the issue of sin in order that that issue may never need to be
experienced by us that listen to Him. Brethren! both in regard to the
Bible and in regard to human ministrations of the Gospel, it is
all-important, as it seems to me at present, to insist that it is the
cruellest kindness to keep back the threatenings for fear of darkening
the grace; and that, on the other hand, it is the truest tenderness to
warn and to proclaim them. It is love that threatens; 'tis mercy to tell
us that the wrath will come.

And just as one relation between the grace and the retribution is that
the proclamation of the retribution is the work of the grace, so there
is another relation--the grace is manifested in bearing the punishment,
and in bearing it away by bearing it. Oh! there is no adequate measure
of what the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is except the measure of the
smiting destruction from which He frees us. It is because every
transgression receives its just recompense of reward, because the wages
of sin is death, because God cannot but hate and punish the evil, that
we get our truest standard of what Christ's love is to every soul of us.
For on Him have met all the converging rays of the divine retribution,
and burnt the penal fire into His very heart. He has come between every
one of us, if we will, and that certain incidence of retribution for our
evil, taking upon Himself the whole burden of our sin and of our guilt,
and bearing that awful death which consists not in the mere dissolution
of the tie between soul and body, but in the separation of the conscious
spirit from God, in order that we may stand peaceful, serene, untouched,
when the hail and the fire of the divine judgment are falling from the
heavens and running along the earth. The grace depends for all our
conceptions of its glory, its tenderness, and its de