Owen and Required Justice
For God to forego his right to punish the sinner would therefore amount to a denial of the relationship that exists between Creator and creature, a rejection of the immutable fact that humans are rational beings dependent upon God for their existence and answerable to him for their deeds. This relationship is ontological, rooted not merely in God's decretive will but in the fact that he is the uncreated source of all being.
Carl Trueman, The Necessity of Atonement, Drawn into controversie: reformed theological diversity and debates within seventeenth-century British Puritanism (Göttingen ;Oakville, Conn. : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 211