14. Doesn’t God’s holiness demand that He punish every sin?
Certainly not! God’s holiness is the exhaustless wellspring of His agelong life. Holiness is to life as decay is to death. Thus a better word for this concept might be ‘wholesomeness’—the healthful purity that characterizes everything that is vigorously alive and life-giving. God’s love impels Him to share His vitalizing wholesomeness with those who are deteriorating and dying. Love found a way to do it that was right and faithful to God’s ancient covenantal promises, in spite of humanly impossible odds. The viciously shed blood of His blameless Son evoked God’s rightful super-compensation, which included the sending of vast new quantities of His life-making Spirit of wholesomeness to actually clean away sin by reversing the corruption at our motivational core. This is the real function of God’s holiness or wholesomeness. If people become resistant to exposure of their failings, then God gets tough and sends punishments in fatherly measure to humble and correct them. God cannot personally be threatened by human unwholesomeness or corruption, but he knows that the creatures He dearly loves are placed at risk by it, hence his get-tough policy under the Old Covenant. Still, He need not demand the last ounce of pitiful human flesh. God is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and with much kindness and covenantal troth, preserving kindness to thousands, bearing with depravity, transgression, and sin, although not summarily rendering sinners innocent, but holding out for repentance, for He wants our hearts. He is bound to behave like this; it’s His nature. He overlooks many sins in His leniency so that sinners may repent. He loves all His creatures and hates none of them or He would not have made them. Sins He can pass over, for He knows we are mortal, ephemeral. Now, good deeds, on the other hand…
The Premial Atonement 