[1.] Of the person suffering for it. This the Scripture oftentimes very emphatically sets forth, and lays great weight upon: John iii. 16, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” It was his only Son that God sent into the world to suffer for sin, Rom. viii. 32. “He spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.” To see a slave beaten and corrected, it argues a fault committed; but yet perhaps the demerit of it was not very great. The correction of a son argues a great provocation; that of an only son, the greatest imaginable. Never was sin seen to be more abominably sinful and full of provocation, than when the burden of it was upon the shoulders of the Son of God. God having made his Son, the Son of his love, his only begotten, full of grace and truth, 2 Cor. v. 21. sin for us, to manifest his indignation against it, and how utterly impossible it is that he should let the least sin go unpunished, he lays Zech. xiii. 7. hand on him, and spares him not. If Heb. x. 7; Isa. liii. 6. sin be imputed to the dear Son of his bosom, as upon his own voluntary assumption of it it was (for he said to his Father, “Lo, I come to do thy will,” and all our iniquities did meet on him), [and] he will not spare him any thing of the due desert of it; is it not most clear from hence, even from the blood of the cross of Christ, that such is the demerit of sin, that it is altogether impossible that God should pass by any, the least, unpunished? If he would have done it for any, he would have done it in reference to his only Son; but he spared him not.