had been toiling for eighty years at a very thankless task would
consider it a very severe punishment to be told, 'Go home and take your
wages'? It did not mean the withdrawal of the divine favour. 'Moses and
Aaron among his priests. ... Thou wast a God that forgavest them,
though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.' The penalty of a
forgiven sin is never hard to bear, and the penalty of a forgiven sin
is very often punctually and mercifully exacted.

But still we are not to ignore the fact that this lonely death, with
which we are now concerned, is of the nature of a penal infliction. And
so it stands forth in consonance with the whole tone of the Mosaic
teaching. I admit, of course, that the mere physical fact of the
separation between body and spirit is simply the result of natural law.
But that is not the death that you and I know. Death as we know it, the
ugly thing that flings its long shadows across all life, and that comes
armed with terrors for conscience and spirit, is 'the wages of sin,'
and is only experienced by men who have transgressed the law of God. So
far Moses in his life and in his death carries us--that no
transgression escapes the appropriate punishment; that the smallest sin
has in it the seeds of mortal consequences; that the loftiest saint
does not escape the law of retribution.

And no further does Moses with his Law and his death carry us. But we
turn to the other death. And there we find the confirmation, in an
eminent degree, of that Law, and yet the repeal of it. It is confirmed
and exhausted in Jesus Christ. His death was 'the wages of sin.' Whose?
Not His. Mine, yours, every man's. And because He died, surrounded by
men, outside the old city wall, pure and sinless in Himself, He therein
both said 'Amen' to the Law of Moses, and swept it away. For all the
sins of the world were laid upon His head, He bore the curse for us