oh Jesus! your wounds; these are my refuge in my trouble. Oh sinner, may you be helped to believe in his wounds! They cannot fail; Christ’s wounds must heal those who put their trust in him.
Justice Satisfied
No. 255-5:241. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, May 29, 1859, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
Just, and the justifier of him who believes in Jesus. {Romans 3:27}
Just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. {1 John 1:9}
1. When the soul is seriously impressed with the conviction of its guilt, when terror and alarm get hold upon it concerning the inevitable consequences of its sin, the soul is afraid of God. It dreads at that time every attribute of divinity. But most of all the sinner is afraid of God’s justice. “Ah,” he says to himself, “God is a just God; and if so, how can he pardon my sins? for my iniquities cry aloud for punishment, and my transgressions demand that his right hand should strike me low. How can I be saved? If God would be unjust, he might forgive: but, alas! he is not so, he is severely just. ‘He lays justice to the line, and righteousness to the plummet.’ He is the judge of all the earth, and he must do right. How then can I escape from his righteous wrath which must be stirred up against me?” Let us be assured that the sinner is quite right in the conviction that there is a great difficulty here. The justice of God is in itself a great barrier to the salvation of sinners. There is no possibility for that barrier to be surmounted, nor even for it to be removed except by one means, which shall this day be proclaimed to you through the gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is true that God is just. Let old Sodom tell you how God rained fire and brimstone out of heaven upon man’s iniquity. Let a drowning world tell you how God lifted the sluices of the fountains of the great deep, and bade the bubbling waters spring up and swallow man up alive. Let the earth tell you for she opened her mouth when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram rebelled against God. Let the buried cities of Nineveh, and the tattered relics of Tyre and Sidon, tell you that God is just, and will by no means spare the guilty. And worst of all, let hell’s bottomless lake declare what is the awful vengeance of God against the sins of man. Let the sighs, and groans, and moans, and shrieks of spirits condemned by God, rise in your ears, and bear witness that he is a God who will not spare the guilty, who will not wink at iniquity, transgression, and sin, but who will execute vengeance upon every rebel, and will give justice its full satisfaction for every offence.
2. The sinner is right in his conviction that God is just, and he is moreover right in the inference which follows from it, that because God is just his sin must be punished. Ah, sinner, if God does not punish your sin, he has ceased to be what he has always been — the severely just, the inflexibly righteous. Never has there been a sin pardoned, absolutely and without atonement, since the world began. There has never yet been an offence remitted by the great Judge of heaven, until the law has received the fullest vindication. You are right, oh convicted sinner, that such shall be the case even to the end. Every transgression shall have its just recompense of reward. For every offence there shall be its stroke, and for every iniquity there shall be its doom. “Ah,” now says the sinner, “then I am shut out of heaven. If God is just and he must punish sin, then what can I do? Justice, like some dark angel, strides across the road of mercy, and with his sword drawn, athirst for blood and winged to slay, he strides across my path, and threatens to drive me backwards over the precipice of death into the ever burning lake.” Sinner, you are right; it is even so. Except through the gospel which I am about to preach to you, justice is your antagonist, your lawful, irresistible, and insatiable enemy. It cannot allow you to enter heaven, for you have sinned; and that sin must be punished, that transgression must be avenged, as long as God is God — the holy and the just.
3. Is it possible, then, that the sinner cannot be saved? This is the great riddle of the law, and the grand discovery of the gospel. Wonder oh heavens! be astonished oh earth! that very justice which stood in the sinner’s way and prevented his being pardoned, has been by the gospel of Christ appeased; by the rich atonement offered upon Calvary, justice is satisfied, has sheathed its sword, and has now not a word to say against the pardon of the penitent. No, more, that justice once so angry, whose brow was lightning, and whose voice was thunder, has now become the sinner’s advocate, and itself with its mighty voice pleads with God, that whoever confesses his sin should be pardoned and be cleansed from all unrighteousness.
4. The business of this morning shall be to show, in the first place, according to the first text, how justice is no longer the sinner’s enemy — “God is just, and yet the justifier of him who believes”; and then, in the second place that, justice has become the sinner’s advocate, and that “God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
5. But here let me utter a caution; I shall speak this morning, only to those who feel their guilt, and who are ready to confess their sin. For to those who still love sin, and will not acknowledge their guilt, there is no promise of mercy or pardon. For them there remains nothing but the fearful looking for of judgment. “He who being often reproved hardens his heart shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.” The soul that neglects this great salvation cannot escape; there is no door of escape provided for it. Unless the Lord has now brought us to feel our need of mercy, has compelled us to confess that unless he gives us mercy we must righteously perish, and unless, moreover, he has made us willing now to be saved on any terms, so that we may be saved at all, this gospel which I am about to preach is not ours. But if we are convicted of sin and are now trembling before the thunders of God’s wrath, every word that I am now about to speak will be full of encouragement and consolation to you.
6. I. First, then, HOW HAS JUSTICE BEEN PUT ASIDE? or rather, HOW HAS IT BEEN SO SATISFIED THAT IT NO LONGER STANDS IN THE WAY OF GOD’S JUSTIFYING THE SINNER?
7. The one answer to that is, Justice has been satisfied through the substitution of our blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. When man sinned the law demanded that man must be punished. The first offence of man was committed by Adam, who was the representative of the entire race. When God would punish sin, in his own infinite mind he thought of the blessed expedient, not of punishing his people, but of punishing their representative, the covenant head, the second Adam. It was by one man, the first man, that sin entered into the world, and death by sin. It was by another man, the second Adam, who is the Lord from heaven, it was by him that this sin was borne; by him its punishment was endured; by him the whole wrath of heaven was suffered. And through that second representative of manhood, Jesus, the second Adam, God is now able and willing to forgive the vilest of the vile, and justify even the ungodly, and he is able to do so without the slightest violation of his justice. For note, when Jesus Christ the Son of God suffered on the tree, he did not suffer for himself: he had no sin, either natural or actual. He had done nothing whatever that could bring him under the ban of heaven, or subject his holy soul and his perfect body to grief and pain. When he suffered it has as a substitute. He died — “the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.” Had his sorrows been personally deserved they would have had no efficacy in them. But since he did not die to atone for his own sins; since he was punished, not for any guilt that he had done or could do, but for the guilt incurred by others, there was a merit and an efficacy in all that he suffered, by which the law was satisfied, and God is able to forgive.
8. Let us show very briefly how fully the law is satisfied.
9. 1. Note first the dignity of the victim who offered himself up to divine justice. Man had sinned; the law required the punishment of manhood. But Jesus, the eternal Son of God, “very God of very God,” who had been hymned through eternal ages by joyous angels, who had been the favourite of his Father’s court, exalted high above principalities and powers, and every name that is named, he himself condescended
