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a word was not enough

timothy ah koy / unsplash

 "Sin is the most serious matter that has ever entered into the whole universe. Let me put it like this. The problem of sin is the greatest problem that even Almighty God has ever had to deal with. 

 "Now, creation is a tremendous matter. There was nothing, and God created. There at a certain point the Spirit broods upon the abyss and the chaos, and God said: ‘Let there be light: and there was light.’ God brought light into being by the mere word of his power, his mere fiat. And God created everything in the same way—a word was enough, such is the power of God. He speaks and it is done. 

 "But when God comes to deal with the problem of man, and man in sin and rebellion, and man in alienation against himself, a word is not enough. 

 "God cannot forgive sin just by saying: ‘I forgive.’ If he could, he would have done so. Do you imagine that God would ever have sent his only begotten Son to the cross if he could have forgiven the sin of men in any other way? Would God have abandoned his Son to that, and poured out upon him the vials of his wrath? Would he have allowed his only begotten, dearly beloved Son, to cry out in agony, and to say, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ while he endured the agony and the thirst and the shame? Would he ever have allowed it if there had been any other way? But there was not. A word is enough to create, but a word is not enough to forgive. 

 "Before God can forgive any sin to any man, his only begotten Son had to leave the courts of heaven, and come down on earth and take on human nature, and live as a man and be ‘stricken, smitten of God’, upon that cross. And the cross thus proclaims the holiness of God, the heinousness of sin, the terrible problem of sin, the terrible seriousness of man’s rebellion against God."

 ~ Martyn Lloyd-Jones, "The Cross of Christ Speaks" from The Cross: God's Way of Salvation (Crossway, 1986) 
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