You had sinned! There were memories of the sins you had committed. They allowed you no rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others could not forgive you. You could not forgive yourself. The consciousness that you stood naked before the all-seeing eye of a holy God; that he knew the circumstances and every detail thereof, down to the very intents and purposes lying behind your deeds, and even your thoughts; that he looked into and saw all that was in your heart; in the consciousness growing clearer and stronger and more terrible each day that you had no excuse, no place that you could hold for a moment; that if he summoned you to his presence, you 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 an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state—
IF—
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the sinner.
If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.