'The propitiatory obedience until death of the God -man is a Divine

expedient, constituting an equivalent, and more in penal suffering and

loss, for the suffering and loss to which the world stood exposed, on

account of criminal rebellion, and is thus, to the Moral Administration

of the universe an infinitely meritorious ground of the remission of

penalty, while it is also, as satisfying man and peculiarly manifesting

God, especially the Divine love of compassion, a morally omnipotent

power for holiness'.

We conclude with a word from Chalmers: 'The love that prompted it, the

wisdom that devised it, the admirable fitness of it to preserve unbroken the

authority of the Law -giver, while it provides an amnesty, a wide and welcome

amnesty, for the most heinous transgressors of His law, the union, the

blessed harmony of the benevolence that is there, with august and inviolable

sacredness, the lustre it pours over the high and holy attributes of God,

while it rears a firm pathway between earth and heaven for the unholiest of

us all, the charm that resides in this single truth at once to pacify the

conscience and to purify the heart, to give unbounded security in the

friendship of God, while it quickens into activity and life all the springs

of new obedience, these are what elevate this great doctrine into the capital

truth of the Christian system, the dearest of our sentiments upon earth, the

song of our eternity' (Chalmers).

See articles on Ransom7; Redemption7; and Sacrifice7; and in The Berean

Expositor Vol 17, Redemption, article No. 12, The five offerings of

See Deity of Christ (p. 157).

See Faith (p. 200).

'Without shedding of blood is no remission' (Heb. 9:22).

'Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His

blood' (Rom. 3:25).

'In Whom we have redemption through His blood' (Eph. 1:7).

Whatever our reaction may be to the insistence upon a sacrifice

involving the shedding of blood, there can be no two thoughts regarding its

place in the Scriptures as a whole.

The shedding of blood in association with sin and its forgiveness is as

old as mankind.  It is implied in the coats of skin provided in the Garden of

Eden and in the discrimination made between the offerings of Cain

and Abel.  It cannot be relegated to coarser and less enlightened times, for

it is embedded in such epistles as those to the Romans, Ephesians, Colossians

and Hebrews, and is as insistent in the closing book of the canon, namely the

book of the Revelation, as in the Law.

When recording the will of God for Israel in the matter of food and the

abstinence from eating 'any manner of blood', Moses adds a word of