God, by the application of a coat of blood upon its homes, could redeem Israel from the avenging stroke. It was not for any among them to speculate about it, to doubt and refuse it. To do so would have meant disaster. Only in that blood was security, safety, and deliverance. There are many these days who are offended at the blood doctrine of the cross; they will have none of it; it's puerile to them. They know not whereof they speak. It reflects Heaven's profoundest wisdom; it was thus, and only thus, that the authority and dignity of God's Law could be maintained, and yet the transgressor pass unpunished. The supreme, the perfect and sinless Lawgiver Himself, even the eternal Son, bearing the penalty in the room of those by whom it had been incurred, and on whom it must otherwise and most justly have fallen,--this is the only way in which peace could have been reinstated between God and man, deliverance made possible. And this, even this, is the great burden of the Gospel message, the only balm of peace to the troubled soul, the only solid ground of hope for another life,--without which all in this world would be darkness, disorder, and despair. Imagine a prisoner under sentence of death in his lonely cell; the last morning sun he ever expects to gaze on streaming through his grated window, and the sound of busy hammers erecting his gallows ringing in his ears, and, then, unbar the bolts of his prison, and instead of leading him out to execution, put into his hands the Governor's pardon, and bid him go forth and enjoy till life's latest time the best and sweetest it can offer. Or think of a crew of voyagers on a dark and stormy sea, a fearful hurricane above, all around perilous rocks and quicksand, and the vessel threatening every moment to part asunder below,--think of them wafted all at once into a peaceful harbor and landed on a hospitable shore. Figure yourselves placed in such and kindred perilous circumstances, and followed by a like happy deliverance, and you will still have only a dim shadow of the glorious and blessed reality to which our text points. Far more terrible than bodily bondage, more appalling than death of the body, is the terror and the doom that attends a soul exposed to the extent of God's wrath and destruction, and from that--deliverance, safety, and escape through the blood of the Lamb.