The liberation of Latimer

I got home in the small hours last night, driving back from the Bulkington Lecture (more details to follow) where I had a thoroughly delightful time lecturing on the life of Hugh Latimer and enjoying fellowship with some of God’s people afterward (I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy fellowship with others of them, I mean that they weren’t all there . . . oh, you know what I mean). Anyway, this morning I woke to this little nugget from Luther, the truth that set Latimer free from his spiritual bondage. Quite glorious:

Because an eternal, unchangeable sentence of condemnation has passed upon sin – for God cannot and will not regard sin with favor, but his wrath abides upon it eternally and irrevocably – redemption was not possible without a ransom of such precious worth as to atone for sin, to assume the guilt, pay the price of wrath and thus abolish sin. This no creature was able to do. There was no remedy except for God’s only Son to step into our distress and himself become man, to take upon himself the load of awful and eternal wrath and make his own body and blood a sacrifice for sin. And so he did, out of the immeasurably great mercy and love towards us, giving himself up and bearing the sentence of undending wrath and death.

via The Old Guys.