The Blood of Jesus is Precious

.....the blood of Christ is precious for another reason.  Sometimes
people get the idea that this amazing transaction of the cross was
a governmental arrangement with no especial significance in the
way of affection or love.  God commendeth his love to us in that
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  We have a picture
setting forth all the effect of the infinite love of God; precious to me
because of what it cost a Father to give that Son to death.  Do you
think of God as a great, wonderful, impassible being that experiences
no sorrow—that can know no emotion such as you and I feel at the
death of a child?  God through the Scriptures, talks in human language;
tells of his sorrow, of his love; of his being grieved at the heart; of his
being susceptible of those emotions of which yours and mine are but
feeble manifestations.  Now out of the bosom of the Father to make
this atoning sacrifice, his only begotten and eternal Son came forth to
suffer and die—it was full of cost to the Father.  I saw during the war
what some of you saw.  I remember a regiment in my own town in
Kentucky; I saw the boys standing in ranks waiting for the word to
march to battle.  I have seen a widowed mother hanging upon an
only son—seen hot tears pouring down—seen her sinking at the
feet of her son when the word to march came.  I have seen fathers
and mothers, brothers, wives and sisters yielding up their loved ones
to the country.  Some of you here to-night know how great a sacrifice
this was.  But if you could have known that the loved son would have
come back a mangled corpse your patriotism would have broken down. 
You gave him up with nine chances in ten that he would come back a
hero.  But when God gave His Son he knew what was coming.  He
knew the time was coming when under the cause of the law that dear
Son bearing the sins of the world would suffer the agonies of the
damned, that he would lie in the garden and sweat great drops of  blood
under the force of an anguish that we can never comprehend.  God knew
that His Son would have His back stripped, His flesh hanging in ribbons,
as he was scourged like a common criminal.  God knew that His own
Son, the ruler of the universe, would be spit upon and mocked; God
knew not simply that His Son would go to yonder cross bearing the
agony of crucifixion, but that in those hours of darkness, when there
was silence in Heaven, when the earth reeled and rocked in terrible
sympathy with that awful scene, God knew He must smite His Son as he
would smite a world of sinners, cursed by the law. There is infinite meaning
packed away in the 16th verse 3 chapter of John: "God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him,
should not perish, but have everlasting life."  "Herein is love, not that we
loved God, but that He loved us and gave His Son to be a propitiation
for our sins."  Besides it is precious because of what it cost the Son who
sprang with gladness to offer himself in our stead, to have his face marred
more than the face of any man; to have himself filled with all the mysterious
consciousness of a sin-offering—bearing the awful curse of the law that
rested on men and that you and I might be redeemed from that curse.
                                          Rev. George F. Pentecost