"... the preacher of the Gospel is not justified in declaring to all and sundry that Christ died in their stead. Consider what such a statement involves. If Christ died in the stead of an unregenerate person indifferent to God's claims and hardened in sin, he may, if he accepts what is told him, reasonably take it to mean that, in spite of his condition as an unregenerate sinner, he is no longer subject to judgement, for Christ had died in his stead; he is no longer in the place previously occupied. If I tell men, regardless of their condition, that Christ has died in their "room and stead," I am in danger of conveying a wrong impression, and of ministering to that careless and deceived state of soul which thinks that salvation is already possessed and heaven secured, when all the time the person has not accepted the conditions of the Gospel, and is wandering down to perdition instead of to an imagined heaven. There is no Scripture whatever which gives support to that kind of phraseology which tells unregenerate persons that Christ died in their room and stead."
W. E. Vine, The Gospel of the Bible (London: Pickering & Inglis, [?1929]), pp. 49-50.
