The gospel begins at the dose of God's experience of man's heart and calls us from that in order to give us joy and peace from the experience of what is in His heart.
Nothing gives such a sense of the horribleness of sin, nothing such a testimony to the judgment of God against sin, as seeing Christ under it; and yet nothing is such a testimony of the love of God to the poor sinner.
The cross was the perfect hatred of man and the perfect love of God, doing for him that hated Him that which put away the hatred and blotted out the sin that expressed it. There is nothing like the cross. It is the meeting of the perfect sin of man with the perfect love of God—sin risen up to its highest point of evil and gone, put away and lost in its own worst act. J. N. D.