Reading: “And David spake unto the Lord when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said, lo! I have sinned, and I have done wickedly; but these sheep, what have they done?”—2 Samuel 24:17

Daily DevotionalsThe apostle tells us that for man’s sin the whole creation “groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” The slaughter of every beast, the sacrifice of every lamb proclaimed with a louder voice than words can declare, the malignity of human transgression. And if David, when he saw the destroying angel brandishing his dreadful sword over Jerusalem, felt remorse in the recollection of his own sin, and the punishment falling on the harmless sheep; what views ought the contemplation of the unequalled sorrows and sufferings of the Lamb of God to occasion, when it is recollected that “he died the just for the unjust, to bring us to God?”

To see sin as exceeding sinful we may get some idea, from beholding apostate spirits cast out of heaven; or from the curse of Jehovah upon the earth, and all the children of Adam involved in it; the destruction of the old world by water; or the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire; and the everlasting torments of the damned in hell. These form awful views of the dreadful nature of sin. But all these are nothing, in comparison to Calvary.

If you want to see sin in all its tremendous consequences, go to Golgotha and take the words of David, and ask, what has this Lamb of God done? But do not stop here. If “he who knew no sin became sin,” if He who in His sacred person “was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heaven” yet became both sin and a curse for his redeemed, “that they might be made the righteousness of God in him,” is it not therefore the first, the last, the highest, the best, the most momentous of all, to know whether you are made the righteousness of God in him?