P. T. Forsythe, in the middle of a lecture on the work of Christ, gets to preaching, and it's pretty wonderful:

To deliver us from evil is not simply to take us out of hell, it is to take us into heaven. Christ does not simply pluck us out of the hands of Satan, He does so by giving us to God.

He does not simply release us from slavery. He commits us in the act to a positive liberty.

He does not simply cancel the charge against us in court and bid us walk out of jail, He meets us at the prison-door and puts us in a new way of life.

His forgiveness is not simply retrospective, it is, in the same act, the gift of eternal life. Our evil is overcome by good. We are won from sin by an act which at the same time makes us not simply innocent but holy.

In speaking of the reasons behind Christ's work, Forsythe has this insight....

 This obedience (of dying on the cross in our place) was the Holy Father's joy and satisfaction. He found Himself in it. And it was also the foiling and destruction of the evil power. And it was farther the creative source of holiness in a race not only impressed by the spectacle of its tragic hero victorious, but regenerate by the solidarity of a new life from its creative Head.

The work of Christ was thus in the same act triumphant on evil, satisfying to the heart of God....He subdued Satan,  rejoiced the Father, and set up in Humanity the kingdom — all in one supreme and consummate act of His one person. He destroyed the kingdom of evil...by actually establishing God's kingdom in the heart of it.

Propitiation is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ by which He appeases the wrath of God and conciliates Him who would otherwise be offended by our sin and would demand that we pay the penalty for it.

Sadly, our age has ceased affirming that truth. P. T. Forsythe did his best to keep the propitiatory element from extinction. Like a skilled diagnostician, he articulates the symptions of a race having lost its way, oblivious to the ways of a holy God.

Forsythe champions "a true grasp of the atonement.....which meets the age in its need and impotence, its need of a center, of an authority, of a creative source, a guiding line, and a final goal.

It (a substitutinary atonement)....meets our....lack of a fixed point. All around us in a growing flux; change is everywhere; and it may or may not be development according as our fixed standard and goal may be.

With no center. either for its own action or for our estimate, it means disintegration. And especially does our religion need a moral center. It grows on the one hand evolutionary and therefore inevitably unearnest; and on the other hand sentimental.

Fraternity grows at the cost of fidelity, the democratic sympathies and pities monopolize the moral world, the moral type changes and another scale of virtues fills the ideal.

Forsythe then quotes a nurse from the working class who observes: "generosity ranks before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one, and the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue the higher it stands in the popular estimation."

C. H. Spurgeon spelled out the take away from the cross this way....

You were in debt, but a friend paid your debt; no writ can be served on you. It matters nothing that you did not pay it, it is paid, you have the receipt. That is sufficient in any court of equity. So with all the penalty that was due to us Christ had bourne it.

It is true I have not bourne it; I have not been to hell and suffered the full wrath of God, but Christ has suffered that wrath for me, and I am as clear as if I had myself paid the debt to God and had myself suffered His wrath.