the brain and spinal cord of Christianity. By Charles Spurgeon

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. What could be better than the divine plan of substitutionary atonement?

God must punish sin. He could not be a just God unless He did. It is a necessity of His nature that He should hate sin with an infinite hatred and that He must punish it. Yet, as He had loved His people with an everlasting love, how could He better show His love to them and His hatred of sin than by giving up His well-beloved Son to die in their place as their substitute?

This seems to me to be the most beautiful thing I ever heard of, and it delights my soul to preach it. The false doctrine of universal redemption, that Christ died for the damned in hell and that He suffered the torment of those who afterwards are tormented forever, seems to be detestable to me, subversive of the whole gospel, and destructive of the only pillar upon which our hopes can be built.

Christ stood in the place of His elect. He made a full atonement for them. He suffered the punishment for their every sin. As the Father's love embraced them, so the death of His Son reconciled them.

Christ's atonement gives such an exhibition of the guilt of sin as is not to be seen anywhere else, no, not even in the flames of hell. The heart of the gospel is redemption, and the essence of redemption is the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. Those who preach this truth preach the gospel, but those who do not preach the atonement, whatever else they declare, have missed the soul and substance of the divine message.

To deny the great doctrine of substitutionary atonement by the death of Jesus Christ is to hamstring the gospel and to cut the throat of Christianity. What the Son is to the heavens, that the doctrine of a vicarious satisfaction is to the gospel, substitutionary atonement is the brain and spinal cord of Christianity.

Take away the sin-atoning blood, and what hope is left for the guilty? Deny the substitutionary work of Jesus, and you have denied all that is precious in the gospel. He who understands the mystery of Christ's substitutionary atonement for the sins of his people is a master in scriptural theology.