“Be sure you see this most wonderful and astonishing of all truths: God took the record of all your sins that made you a debtor to wrath (sins are offenses against God that bring down His wrath), and instead of holding them up in front of your face and using them as the warrant to send you to hell, God put them in the palm of His Son’s hand and drove a spike through them into the cross.
It is a bold and graphic statement: He canceled the record of our debt… nailing it to the cross (Col. 2:14). Whose sins were nailed to the cross? Answer: My sins. And Noël’s sins. My wife’s sins and my sins. The sins of all who despair of saving themselves and who trust in Christ alone.
Whose hands were nailed to the cross? Jesus’ were. There is a beautiful name for this. It’s called a substitution. God condemned my sin in Christ’s flesh. ‘Sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). Husbands and wives cannot believe this too strongly.”
–John Piper, This Momentary Marriage (Wheaton: Crossway, 2009), 45.
