Well, if it be so, that God’s direct displeasure and infliction is the worst thing in sin’s penalty, did the displeasure totally vanish from the infliction when Christ stood under it? Would He have really borne the true judgment on sin if it had? Was Christ’s great work not the meeting of that judgment and hallowing it? Did the complete acceptance of God’s displeasure as an essential factor in the curse? A holy God could not look on sin without acting on it; nor could He do either but to adhor and curse it, even when His Son was beneath it. Wherein is guilt different from sin but in this – that it is sin, not cut adrift from God and let go its own way and go to pieces, but sin placed under the anger of God, under the personal reaction of that Absolute Holy God which no creature, no situation, can escape? And could Christ bear our guilt and take it away if He did not carry it there, and bear it there, and hallow its judgment there? Did He just throw it down there, leave it, and rid Himself of it? Does not the best of sons suffer from the angry gloom that spreads from the father over the whole house at the prodigal’s shameless shame? Did God not lay on Him the iniquity of us all, and inflict that veiling of His face which darkened to dereliction even the Redeemer’s soul? It is not desert that is the worst thing in judgment, but desertion – the sense of desert forsaken by God. The forsakenness is the worst judgment. For with God’s presence my sense of desert may be my sanctification. What Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin, but a sense of the sinner’s relation to the personal vis-a-vis of an angry God. God never left Him, but He did refuse Him His face. The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn. He was forsaken but not disjoined. He was insolubly bound to the very Father who turned away and could not look on sin but to abhor and curse it even when His Son was beneath it. How could He feel the grief of being forsaken by God if He was not at bottom one with Him? Neglect by one to whom we have no link makes no trouble.