The common lot of death thus involved the consciousness of separation from the life of God, and when we so regard it, we can understand something of the horror which its anticipation brought upon the soul of the Son of God[227]. He must pass through this last and most awful human experience; not only because it was human, but because by the victorious endurance of it alone could the propitiation be accomplished. The thought throws light upon the prominence given to the death of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon His mysterious cry of dereliction upon the cross. It shows us how, though the experience was common to man, yet in Him it was in a twofold manner unique. The withdrawal of God's presence, awful as it is to the sin-hardened nature of man, must have been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was One with the Father, whose 'meat was to do the will of His Father.' Just as we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been specially grievous to the perfect body which was unstained by sin, though other men have endured them, so, though all have to pass through death with its accompanying terror of the loss of God's presence, none can realize what that experience was to Him, because He was the Son of God. The death of Christ was therefore unique because of the nature of Him Who underwent it. But it was also unique in its results. No other death had been a propitiation for sin, for in no other death had this overwhelming consciousness of dereliction been endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect obedience, no shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In this final experience the offering was complete, the essence of the propitiation was secured, for the actual result of all human sin was herein made the very revelation of holiness itself, the means whereby the union with the will of God, so far from being finally broken, was finally perfected. The propitiatory value, therefore, of the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute obedience, in His willing acceptance of suffering which was thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and in the death which was the essential form of both, for death is the culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both sin and its punishment. He alone endured it victoriously and without sin; He alone, therefore, transformed it from the sign and occasion of God's wrath into a well-pleasing offering; He took the punishment and made it a propitiation. 'The chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.'