The two aspects of the death of Jesus must be carefully distinguished in the atoning sacrifice He has accomplished. He has glorified God, and God acts according to the value of that blood towards all. He has borne the sins of His people; and the salvation of His people is complete. And, in a certain sense, the first part is the most important. Sin having come in, the justice of God might, it is true, have got rid of the sinner; but where then would have been His love and His counsels of grace, pardon, and even the maintenance of His glory according to His nature as love, while righteous and holy too?
I am not speaking here of the persons who were to be saved, but of the glory of God Himself. But the perfect death of Jesus—His blood put on the throne of God—has established and brought into evidence all that God is—all His glory, as no creation could have done it: His truth, for He had passed sentence of death; it is made good in the highest way in Jesus: His majesty, for His Son submits to all for His glory: His justice against sin: His infinite love. God found means therein to accomplish His counsels of grace, in maintaining all the majesty of His justice and of His divine dignity; for what, like the death of Jesus, could have glorified them?
Therefore this devotedness of Jesus, God’s Son, to His glory—His submission, even unto death, that God might be maintained in the full glory of His rights—has given its outlet to the love of God—freedom to its action; wherefore Jesus says, “ I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” His heart, full of love, was driven back, in its personal manifestation, by the sin of man, who would it not; but through the atonement it could flow forth to the sinner, in the accomplishment of God’s grace and of His counsels, unhindered; and Jesus Himself had, so to speak, rights upon that love—a position we are brought into through grace, and which has none like it. “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.”
We speak with reverence of such things; but it is good to speak of them; for the glory of our God, and of Him whom He hath sent, is found therein established and manifested. There is not one attribute, one trait of the divine character, winch has not been manifested in all its perfection, and fully glorified in that which took place between God and Jesus Himself.
That we have been saved and redeemed, and that our sins have been atoned for in that same sacrifice, according to the counsels of the grace of God, is (I presume to say it, precious and important as it is for us) the inferior part of that work, if anything whatever may be called inferior where everything is perfect: its object at least—we sinners—is inferior, if the work is equally perfect in every point of view.