“By our fall, we are cast down so low into sin and misery, so deeply plunged into a most miserable and sinful condition, that it may truly be said, although all things are infinitely easy to God with respect to His omnipotence, yet with respect to God’s holiness and justice, God himself could not redeem us without a great deal of cost, no, not without infinite costs; that is, not without the presence of that, that is of infinite worth and value, even the blood of His Son, and in proper speaking, the blood of God, of a divine person.
This was absolutely necessary in order to our redemption, because there was no other way of satisfying God’s justice. When we were fallen, it was come to this: either we must die eternally, or the Son of God must spill His blood; either we, or God’s own Son must suffer God’s wrath, one of the two; either miserable worms of the dust that had deserved it, or the glorious, amiable, beautiful, and innocent Son of God.
The fall of man brought it to this; it must be determined one way or the other, and it was determined, by the strangely free and boundless grace of God, that this His own Son, should die that the offending worms might be freed, and set at liberty from their punishment, and that justice might make them happy. Here is grace indeed; well may we shout, ‘Grace, grace!’ at this.”
–Jonathan Edwards, “Glorious Grace: A Sermon on Zechariah 4:7” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 10, Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723. Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 393.
