"What Deliverance Costs"
Introduction
Sin is a pollution that offends God
The sin offering is a remedy for sin
“A surgeon who selects a scalpel in the operating room rejects a scalpel with a minute spot of defilement on it as readily as one that was severely defiled, because even the smallest spot means the scalpel is defiled and cannot be used in surgery. The degree of defilement is inconsequential. The fact of defilement is what matters to the surgeon. A thing is sterile or defiled, clean or unclean. A person is holy or unholy. God is not concerned with degrees, only with the absolute” (J. D. Pentecost, Design for Living [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977], p. 57).
Jesus is the perfect and eternal remedy for sin
“Do let us take the holiness of God centrally and seriously, not as an attitude isolated and magnified, but as God’s very essence and nature, changeless and inexorable. The holiness of God is a deeper revelation in the cross than his love; for it is what gives his love divine value. And it is meaningless without judgment. The one thing he could not do was simply to wipe the slate and write off the loss. He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And he chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took his own judgment” (pp. 205–6).
SOURCE: P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (Hodder and Stoughton, 1909).