ou
would stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, and the
inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his essential antagonism and
just hatred against sin; all this consciousness taking voice in you
and through you, cried out in your soul, "I am guilty and undone."
And this filled you with a horror of great darkness and the utter
blackness of a hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of Jesus
Christ saying, "Come unto me." "Him that cometh unto me I will in no
wise cast out." You came. You fell at his feet. You owned his death
as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed him as your substitute. You
claimed forgiveness through his blood. He said to you, as he said to
the paralytic, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." You rose and went away
as when one is released from a galling chain; as when a burden that
was crushing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleeding
shoulder; as when one who has been tossed on a midnight sea enters
the haven while the dawn is breaking, casts anchor and touches
shore. For years you have had peace. The memory of your sins are
there (for though God when he forgives forgets them, you cannot).
Like David, perhaps, you cry, "My sin is ever before me!" The sin
marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been
able to look at them and have peace because you have said to
yourself, "I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been
punished in my substitute; they have been fully answered for in his
blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him
I stand clothed in the very 'righteousness of God.' I hate my sin
and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my
redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied
in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered
before God's court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit
of sin. I have, in short, _gone through the judgment with Christ on
the cross_. He has pronounced forgiveness--absolution--upon me, and
he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living
one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily--as my
saviour and my God he has forgiven me and I am at peace."

All this you have said within yourself and testified.

But I ask you now to face the terrible fact--if Jesus Christ were
not God--this terrible fact--that you have been deceived.

You have had a false peace.

You have been living in a fool's paradise.

You are before God a