Him (not it, but Him) with the acceptance of not His word only but His deed. He is the God of Peace. How do we know it? We thought He was the God of the tribunal, and the doom. Yes; but He has "brought the great Shepherd from the dead, in the blood of the everlasting Covenant" (Heb. xiii. 20). Then, O eternal Father of our Lord, we will believe Thee; we will believe in Thee; we will, we do, in the very letter of the words Thou didst bid Thy messenger write down here, "_believe upon Thee_," ἐπὶ τὸν Ἐγείραντα, as in a deep repose. Truly, in _this_ glorious respect, though Thou art consuming Fire, "there is nothing in Thee to dread." "_Who was delivered up because of our transgressions._" So dealt the Father with the Son, who gave Himself. "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him"; "He spared not His own Son." "_Because of our transgressions_"; to meet the fact that we had gone astray. What, was that fact thus to be met? Was our self-will, our pride, our falsehood, our impurity, our indifference to God, our resistance to God, to be thus met? Was it to be met at all, and not rather left utterly alone to its own horrible issues? Was it eternally necessary that, if met, it must be met thus, by nothing less than the delivering up of Jesus our Lord? It was even so. Assuredly if a milder expedient would have met our guilt, the FATHER would not have "delivered up" the SON. The Cross was nothing if not an absolute _sine quâ non_. There is that in sin, and in God, which made it eternally necessary that--if man was to be justified--the Son of God must not only live but die, and not only die but die thus, delivered up, given over to be done to death, as those who do great sin are done. Deep in the heart of the divine doctrine of Atonement lies this element of it, the "_because of our transgressions_"; the exigency of Golgotha, due to our sins. The remission, the acquittal, the acceptance, was not a matter for the verbal _fiat_ of divine autocracy. It was a matter not between God and creation, which to Him is "a little thing," but between God and His Law, that is to say, Himself, as He is eternal Judge. And this, to the Eternal, is _not_ a little thing. So the solution called for no little thing, but for the Atoning Death, for the laying by the Father on the Son of the iniquities of us all, that we might open our arms and receive from the Father the merits of the Son.