loved God, but that _He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.... Him that knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf."_ That is how they spoke in the beginning of the Gospel, and so let us speak. Nobody has any right to borrow the words "God is love" from an apostle, and then to put them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic import. Still less has any one a right to use them as an argument against the very thing in which the Apostles placed their meaning. But this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the Gospel; it will cease to hold men's hearts with its original power when the reconciliation which is preached through it contains the mercy, but not the judgment of God. Its whole virtue, its consistency with God's character, its aptness to man's need, its real dimensions as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes to us in it through judgment. In the last words of the passage the Apostle tells us the object of this great interposition of God: "He made Christ to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." Our condemnation is made His; it is accepted, exhausted, annihilated, on His cross; and when we receive the reconciliation--when we humble ourselves to be forgiven and restored at this infinite cost--there is no longer condemnation for us: we are justified by our faith, and have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what is meant by becoming the righteousness of God in Him. It is not, as the very next sentence suggests, all that is included in the Christian salvation, but it is all that the words themselves contain. "_In Him_" has all promise in it, as well as the present possession of reconciliation, with which the Christian life begins; but it is this present possession, and not the promise involved in it, which St. Paul describes as the righteousness of God. In Christ, that Christ who died for us, and in Him in virtue of that death which by exhausting condemnation put away sin, we are accepted in God's sight. FOOTNOTES: [53] This seems to be the force of ὡς: it is a violent supposition that it means "since," or "for," and that ὅτι is a marginal interpretation of it which has crept into the text. [54] This makes λογιζόμενος a true present, not an imperfect participle. It quite dislocates the sentence if it is co-ordinated with καταλλάσσων, and not with θέμενος. XVII _THE SIGNS OF AN APOSTLE_ "And working together _with Him_ we intreat also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain (for He saith, At an acceptable time I hearkened unto thee, And in a day of salvation did I succour thee: