God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
It is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a revelation such as the Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as simple to me as the multiplication table, and say, “This is the Word of God. In it He has revealed His whole will and wisdom,” I would shake my head and say, “I cannot believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite wisdom.” There must be, in any complete revelation of God’s mind and will and character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the wisest and best of us are but beginners.
See you here the foundational truth of Christianity, the rock on which our hopes are built. It is the only hope of a sinner, and the only true joy of the Christian – the great transaction, the great substitution, the great lifting of sin from the sinner to the sinner's Surety; the punishment of the Surety instead of the sinner, the pouring out of the vials of wrath, which were due to the transgressor, upon the head of his Substitute; the grandest transaction which ever took place on earth; the most wonderful sight that even hell ever beheld, and the most stupendous marvel that heaven itself ever executed – Jesus Christ, made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him! You scarcely need that I should explain the words when the sense is so plain. A spotless Savior stands in the room of guilty sinners. God lays upon the spotless Savior the sin of the guilty, so that He becomes, in the expressive language of the text, sin. Then He takes off from the innocent Savior His righteousness, and puts that to the account of the once-guilty sinners, so that the sinners become righteousness – righteousness of the highest and divinest source, the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.