Paul's Evangel.
The history of God's relations with human sin breaks into two before Christ, and after Christ. The death of Christ, which marks the point of division, is at the same time the key to explain both.
I. Antecedently to the death of Christ the sins of men were passed over in the forbearance of God. By offering His Son for the expiation of sin, God has cut off from men the temptation to misconstrue His earlier toleration of sins, His forbearance to punish them, or His willingness to forgive them. Then, in the antecedent ages, He did pretermit sin in His forbearance; but it was only because He had purposed in His heart one day to offer for it a satisfaction such as this.
II. The same public satisfaction for sin, made by God in the face of the world, which is adequate to explain His former indulgence to past sin, is adequate to justify Him in forgiving sin now. (1) The propitiation instituted by God in His Son's sacrificial death having been made amply adequate to vindicate Divine justice, without any further exaction of penalty from sinners, Christ's death becomes our redemption. (2) Let God justify whom He will on the ground of this redemption by the expiating blood of His Son, such a justifying of the guilty must be entirely a gratuitous act on His part, undeserved, unbought by themselves, a boon of pure and sovereign grace. (3) A way of being justified which is entirely gratuitous, hanging not on man's desert but on God's grace, must be impartial and catholic. It is offered on such easy terms, because on no harder terms could helpless and condemned men receive it. Only it lies in the very nature of the case that whosoever refuses to repose his hope of acceptance with God upon the revealed basis of Christ's atonement, shuts himself out and never can be justified at all, since even God Himself knows or can compass no other method for acquitting a guilty man.
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul,p. 77.
References: Romans 3:21-26. E. H. Gifford, The Glory of God in Man,p. 30; Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 15.