Today we are beginning a short series of blogs concerning the Biblical pictures of the Gospel. We want to re-focus on the Gospel, to reacquaint ourselves with it, to be gripped by it, and to re-calibrate our lives to it again. Sometimes the ‘foyer’ of our faith needs renovating, but once in a while we need to inspect the foundation – that is, the Gospel – too.
Part of the difficulty that faces us, though, as we hone in on the Gospel is that while we generally know what it is, it is hard to express it in words.
Let me illustrate that a couple of ways:
In a seminary class the question was asked: What are the essential things one needs to understand and affirm in order to be ‘saved’?
Immediately, suggestions were made and the professor started writing them down on the whiteboard, things like: the death of Christ for sin, the resurrection, the authority of the Bible.
They began naming all the things they would (rightly) consider basic tenets of Christianity: the Trinity, eternity, the nature of sin and repentance, Christ’s perfect life, God as Creator, the virgin birth, heaven and hell, Satan, second coming of Christ… Within minutes the whiteboard was filled with ‘the essentials’. And the students wondered: couldn’t the Gospel be more simple than that?
The second is much more recent: our elders in the last couple of weeks have engaged in the exercise of articulating the Gospel as completely as possible, but in just one or two sentences. Most of us could not but help to write a full paragraph, and the one who managed it in just over thirty words, then included a full paragraph to give context, or further explanation of the short definition.
This is not just because we have trouble expressing ourselves. It is because the basic Gospel is just about impossible to articulate. The Gospel is like art or beauty or leadership: you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. Probably no two of us here in this room would describe the Gospel the same way. No matter how we try to do it, we cannot help but feel like we need more words, that the lines need to be coloured in before we can get anywhere even close to a full understanding.
We do not need to feel too badly about that, however, because the Bible itself doesn’t frame the Gospel in a brief summary. God doesn’t ‘tweet’ the Gospel in fewer than 140 characters. The reason for that is simple: it cannot be done. But what the Bible does is paint some pictures that, taken together, show us a little more fully what the Gospel is. More specifically, with these pictures, the Bible unpacks that irreducible core of the Gospel which declares, at the very least, that ‘Christ died for the sins of sinners’. But what does it mean that Christ ‘died for our sins’?
We start today with the ‘Courtroom Gospel’ or the Gospel in legal terms.
The Gospel, then, is good news as to one waiting on Death Row. The Courtroom Gospel is that of criminals, guilty, but regarded by God as though they are innocent. For 500 years we Christians have called it ‘justification’.
The first brush strokes of the Courtroom Gospel are painted right in the very beginning. Adam and Eve are in the paradise of Eden, where God has placed them to care for it, and from there to populate and exercise care over all creation. This they would do under the loving Lordship of God. The end of Genesis 2 makes a point of saying they were naked, and not ashamed. There was no fear, nothing to hide, no relational barriers, no self-consciousness, only open intimacy and authenticity of relationship. Free, perfect relationship. But at one point, they disobeyed God by eating from the one tree of which God had said, ‘Do not eat.’ The Bible says that the first result of this disobedience was that they realized they were naked. So when God called out to Adam, Adam said, ‘We are afraid because we are naked, so we hid.’
And God’s response to Adam was, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? God’s first description of their sin was that it was the breaking of a commandment. Faced with the word of God on one hand, and their own desires on the other, they chose their desires. This is more than simply an error of judgment on their part. It was an act of rebellion against the authority under which their lives were to be ordered.
This is how we define a crime, whether the crime is mass murder or speeding. All crime is a rebelling against the authority under which we are called to order our lives.
The Bible uses certain words as synonyms for sin: words like ‘transgression’ or ‘trespass’ (to cross the line) or ‘iniquity’ (a misdeed, doing what is not right). These are ‘breaking-the-law’ words. Adam and Eve’s disobedience was a crime against God. They were law-breakers.
This became the DNA of the human race. The Bible says that sin became our nature. That is where this idea of ‘original sin’ came from. You may have heard that term. David in Psalm 51 said of himself, ‘I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me’. We aren’t sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. It is who we are and who we are leads to what we do.
But even one wanted to argue that we are not sinners even when we first enter the world, observation of the world around us, and the Biblical evidence demonstrates that we are all sinners anyway, sinners at least by action and by choice if not by nature.
All of us are sinners. All, without exception. There is not a person you know (including yourself) who has not very consciously chosen to act, speak, or think in a way that they knew full well was wrong. No one. We have unduly criticized. We have stolen, or broken the law outright. We have lied, maybe even to our spouses. We do not have to look at a world at war to see sin. We look into our hearts and find it right there.
The Bible shows the universality of sin. Adam and Eve’s son Cain killed his brother. The generations that followed led to the Biblical verdict that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that the intentions of the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually.
Centuries later David observed in Psalm 14, affirmed later by the apostle Paul, that there is no one who is good. All have turned aside, together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one. Against a perfect, holy and sovereign God, we are all criminals.
There is a word we use to describe the condition of those who break the law: guilty. And there is something that our legal system – when it functions properly – metes out to those who are guilty of crimes. We call that punishment. Whether or not the goal is rehabilitation, from a ‘time-out’ to life imprisonment, we understand that law-breaking deserves punishment.
So consider humanity. Consider yourself. A law-breaker.
And consider God: the creator, owner and absolute sovereign of history and the cosmos, perfect in character, infinitely righteous, supremely honorable, and in whom is not a shadow of darkness. All that we see as right and good exists in the world because it flows from his character. This is he against whom any and all our sins are committed. And so even that burst of anger is an infinitely gross offense against him. The smallest lie or the indulging of petty greed violates so completely the righteousness of God to an extent we cannot begin to imagine.
We have a hard time believing that it is exactly this that we are guilty of. We think we are not so bad. ‘At least I have never killed anyone, or even cheated on my taxes’, we say. ‘Compared to some people I am not doing too badly.’ We see ourselves on a scale with Hitler and child-killers on the bottom and Mother Theresa and Billy Graham on the higher end. We conclude that, on such a scale, most of would place ourselves closer to the top than to the bottom.
But two things: One – it is not Billy Graham or Mother Theresa who are on the high-end. It is God himself. Our ‘goodness’ is measured against God, not anyone else. And so, second: with that comparison, we are all on the same level. My sins place me on the same level of the abuser and killer of children. I am a sinner equal to Hitler. Please understand this. We sometimes say, ‘All sin is equal in God’s eyes’ but we don’t really believe it. We do not believe it because (rightly) not all sins have far more serious and dangerous consequences from a human-experience perspective. Some sins are ‘worse’ and so we punish them to a greater lesser degree: you don’t get a ticket for mass murder and get a 25 year jail sentence for jaywalking. (Though Draco, the legislator of Athens in the 8th Century BC, mandated the death sentence for relatively minor offenses and as for the greater crimes. When asked about this, his response was that he thought the minor offenses deserved the death penalty, and for the greater offenses there was no greater punishment available.)
But a sin against the infinitely holy God is therefore an infinite moral offense, and there is no difference between this infinitely serious crime against God and that infinitely serious crime against God. There is no real difference in who jumps higher when you are trying to jump over the tallest building. It does not matter whether you prick the balloon with a pin or shred it with a chainsaw; it is destroyed. It does not matter how much taller one blade of grass is than another when looking down from a plane at 35,000 feet.
And it makes no difference my sin vs. anyone else’s sin when it is God’s sinlessness that is the standard, when it is God who sees it. Any sin against God is a crime of unimaginable proportions. We, therefore, bear guilt of unimaginable proportions and deserve punishment of unimaginable proportions.
We stand in the courtroom. The charges against us have been read. The evidence is overwhelming, the verdict beyond dispute: ‘Guilty!’ All that remains is for the sentence to be handed down. And though the sentence be infinitely severe, everyone – and we ourselves – know that it is a just and appropriate sentence.
What hope do we have?
About two thousand years ago, a baby was born into a manger in Bethlehem. His name was Jesus, and for two thousand years Christians have affirmed that this Jesus is the Son of God: come to earth from the very throne of God himself.
He lived about thirty-three years, walking the earth as a human being. He was tired, hungry, sad. He laughed, had friendships, and experienced joy. He was hailed as a healer by some, a supernatural healer by others, a dangerous public figure by others. And, the Bible tells us, he was tempted in every way: tempted to lash out at people, tempted to abuse the adoration in which he was held, tempted to take the easy path to glory, tempted to lie, to strike his enemies, to lust, to steal, to disobey parents, and tempted to curse. And yet he, alone of all people who have ever lived, was without sin.
‘Was he really tempted?’ we ask. ‘Didn’t temptation really roll off his back, being divine after all? Did any temptation ever hold any real danger for him?’
I think it was C.S. Lewis who noted that Jesus has felt temptation more than any of us ever have or will. All of us have sinned. That means that as the weight of temptation increased, at some point it overcame and we yielded. Jesus alone has stood under the enormous heaviness of temptation. Only he has felt its full weight, where we have all collapsed before it got to that point.
Jesus perfectly kept the commands of God, and lived in perfect conformity to the character and will of God. He never transgressed God’s Law. He was in no way unaligned with what God said, what God did, or who God is.
Jesus said of himself, ‘Whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ and ‘ I do nothing on my own authority but speak just as the Father taught me’. He challenged those who accused him: ‘Is any of you without sin?’ and ‘Which one of you can convict me of sin?’
After his period of ministry, he is arrested and brought to trial by those who made themselves his enemies. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate said to his accusers, ‘I find no guilt in this man’ and he reaffirmed it two more times.
The Bible says that he was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. It also describes Jesus as a priest, holy, innocent, unstained , who does not need to offer sacrifices first for his own sins, and only then for the sins of the people.
In the Old Testament sacrificial system, there was a sacrifice called the ‘guilt offering’. The worshipper brought an unblemished animal, whose life was given as a substitute for the life of the worshipper, and the life of the sinner was spared. This was a shadow of what was to come. Jesus: the only human who has ever lived who never sinned, and therefore was not worthy of death. And yet he did die.
Prophesying about the coming Messiah and King, Isaiah spoke of him as a suffering servant of God. This is how he described Jesus:
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God , and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned – everyone – to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. It was the LORD’s will to crush him and he has put him to grief, when his soul makes an offering for guilt.
This is Jesus. This is Jesus’ death. The sinless man, the perfect Son of God, dying for sinners. He is the sacrifice, the unblemished ‘guilt offering’ whose life was given for the sinner, that the inner may walk free.
Put in the plainest terms possible: Jesus was punished for our crimes against God.
What does that mean for us?
Well, for starters, justice demands that punishment for crime can only be meted out once. You don’t get a second ticket after paying the first. You do not go back to jail after serving your sentence.
God punishes sin once. If that punishment was poured out on Jesus, God will not now punish you as well. So for all practical purposes, we can live as if we were innocent. And God relates to us on that basis: innocent.
This is what the Bible means when it uses the word ‘justified’ or ‘justification’. It is a legal word. To a judge who is perfectly just, and who always requires justice, sinners can stand in his courtroom and be declared ‘justified’ in the sight of the law, because the sentence has been carried out.
God no longer says, ‘Criminal! Sinner!’ He now says, ‘Innocent!’
What is the Gospel? It is the Good News that the death sentence has been lifted from us, for there has already been a death for our crimes.
What does it mean that ‘Christ died for us’? It means that even though we stood in the Courtroom and were declared guilty, it was Jesus who was led to the jail cell, and to the execution chamber, while we walk out the front door.
Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the one whose sins the Lord will not count against him… [Righteousness] will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In Jesus, God looks on us now as innocent, and does not count our sins against us. More than that: he does not merely overlook our sin, but he removes it. This is not probation: if we re-offend, we are back before the judge and back into the slammer we go. As incredible as it sounds, sinless Jesus says: ‘Having served your sentence, I will also fulfill the terms for you. If I slip up, only then will you go back into the slammer.’ And Jesus will not – cannot – violate the terms. You are forever safe from judgment. The price is paid. The sacrifice made. The sentence is already carried out. God, the just judge, will treat you as innocent.
Sin – crimes against God – is punished, but only in one of two ways: on Jesus, or on the sinner, but not both. You can accept Jesus’ death for your sins, or you can continue to bear them yourself, and ultimately to bear the sentence yourself. You can trust that the infinite perfection of Jesus, and the infinite worth of his life was laid down in your place for your infinite offenses against God, or you can receive the infinite punishment for your own sins.
Those are your only two options. Why would you not throw yourself on the mercy of the Judge who has made provision for your crimes?
We call Jesus ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’. To accept Jesus as ‘Savior’ is by definition to accept him as ‘Lord’. If sin is offense against the authority of God and stepping out from under the Lordship of God, then/= to repent of sin is, by definition, to step back under the Lordship of God. And Jesus said that ‘all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me’. He is the King of kings and Lord of lords.
If you have never thought in these terms before, and if the reality of your sin, your guilt, Jesus’ death, and God’s mercy has never hit home before, if you know today, perhaps for the first time, that you desperately need a Savior, and you know that life under his Lordship is right and good, then you have a decision to make and it is, more than any other decision you will ever make, a life and death decision: will you trust in the death of Jesus for your sins, and by repentance, reaffirm that Jesus is Lord, and your life is to be lived under his authority?
Perhaps God is convicting you of this truth. If he is, don’t fight it, or even ignore it. Respond to it.
What this doctrine really means for us:
First, our justification means that we are a people of grace. We are receivers of grace, we are dispensers of grace. Knowing the monstrosity of our sin and our guilt, we begin to sense the enormity of God’s grace to us. And so we do not take offense at anything anyone can do to us. How could we possibly?
Has anyone sinned against you, and you continue to be resentful, to dwell on it? Has anyone offended your family or cheated you financially? Has anyone spoken hurtful or false words? That offense is just a microscopic triviality. Can you who have been forgiven much not extend just a particle of grace?
25 years ago I knew two men in their fifties. These two men attended the same church, and the son of one married the daughter of the other. Years before, one of them had done some work for the other. The one for whom the work was done thought it was being done as a favor. The one who did the work did not consider it so, and accordingly sent an invoice for his work. When I knew them, years later, it was still a live issue. The two men remained not only unreconciled, but angry.
Will you stand before God someday and say that you had a right not to forgive? Will you who have been forgiven the wealth of nations resent the unpaid fraction of a penny that another owes you? Grace does not only release the debt. It overflows with kindness and goodness. It binds people together as co-forgiven before God. How would it be if Christians had the public reputation in the world as being a people who loved one another relentlessly, who refused stubbornly to be unforgiving?
Our justification means that we become a people of grace. For those who do not extend grace demonstrate that they do not really know what it means to have received grace.
Second, imagine the joy of someone who, on the walk from the cell to the execution chamber, suddenly is directed down a different corridor to the front door, where the gates are open, and a new life is given to him. Are we not people of such joy? Where the sentence was staggeringly terrifying, now life is abundant. It is free. It is full. It is the joy that springs from the forgiven sinner.
Some of the most sour people we know are Christians (or at least church-goers). But also some of the most centered, content and joyful people are Christians. Christians who understand what it feels like to be taken from death row and given freedom and new life.
What would people say about you, in terms of joy? People who have known grace, know joy. The fruit of the spirit is joy.
Third, know that the truth of this Gospel, the reality of standing confidently as an innocent one before this perfectly Holy God does not make us try harder not to land in the dock again. Rather, it makes us love the one who kept the Law for us, and to love the merciful Judge. It makes us stand in amazement at what just happened.
A heart swelled with adoration at such a one! A life lived not in obligation, but in joyful, freely given gratitude to an overwhelmingly beautiful, merciful Saviour. It is easy to tell whether or not you understand the grace of God that has forgiven your crimes: do you love him, or do you feel obligated to him?
Many are experiencing up with it right now: the contradiction that exists between having our sins forgiven in Christ, and God laying a new set of do’s and don’ts that we will inevitably fail to keep, and therefore rack up a brand new rap sheet of offenses. Such a God is one to be cautious of. ‘I don’t want to step on his toes!’
But a God who has forgiven all, freely, lovingly and at the cost of his life. He is not to be appeased, but adored.
Amen.
Guilty to innocent (Justification)
Today we are beginning a short series of blogs concerning the Biblical pictures of the Gospel. We want to re-focus on the Gospel, to reacquaint ourselves with it, to be gripped by it, and to re-calibrate our lives to it again. Sometimes the ‘foyer’ of our faith needs renovating, but once in a while we need to inspect the foundation – that is, the Gospel – too.
Part of the difficulty that faces us, though, as we hone in on the Gospel is that while we generally know what it is, it is hard to express it in words.
Let me illustrate that a couple of ways:
In a seminary class the question was asked: What are the essential things one needs to understand and affirm in order to be ‘saved’?
Immediately, suggestions were made and the professor started writing them down on the whiteboard, things like: the death of Christ for sin, the resurrection, the authority of the Bible.
They began naming all the things they would (rightly) consider basic tenets of Christianity: the Trinity, eternity, the nature of sin and repentance, Christ’s perfect life, God as Creator, the virgin birth, heaven and hell, Satan, second coming of Christ… Within minutes the whiteboard was filled with ‘the essentials’. And the students wondered: couldn’t the Gospel be more simple than that?
The second is much more recent: our elders in the last couple of weeks have engaged in the exercise of articulating the Gospel as completely as possible, but in just one or two sentences. Most of us could not but help to write a full paragraph, and the one who managed it in just over thirty words, then included a full paragraph to give context, or further explanation of the short definition.
This is not just because we have trouble expressing ourselves. It is because the basic Gospel is just about impossible to articulate. The Gospel is like art or beauty or leadership: you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. Probably no two of us here in this room would describe the Gospel the same way. No matter how we try to do it, we cannot help but feel like we need more words, that the lines need to be coloured in before we can get anywhere even close to a full understanding.
We do not need to feel too badly about that, however, because the Bible itself doesn’t frame the Gospel in a brief summary. God doesn’t ‘tweet’ the Gospel in fewer than 140 characters. The reason for that is simple: it cannot be done. But what the Bible does is paint some pictures that, taken together, show us a little more fully what the Gospel is. More specifically, with these pictures, the Bible unpacks that irreducible core of the Gospel which declares, at the very least, that ‘Christ died for the sins of sinners’. But what does it mean that Christ ‘died for our sins’?
We start today with the ‘Courtroom Gospel’ or the Gospel in legal terms.
The Gospel, then, is good news as to one waiting on Death Row. The Courtroom Gospel is that of criminals, guilty, but regarded by God as though they are innocent. For 500 years we Christians have called it ‘justification’.
The first brush strokes of the Courtroom Gospel are painted right in the very beginning. Adam and Eve are in the paradise of Eden, where God has placed them to care for it, and from there to populate and exercise care over all creation. This they would do under the loving Lordship of God. The end of Genesis 2 makes a point of saying they were naked, and not ashamed. There was no fear, nothing to hide, no relational barriers, no self-consciousness, only open intimacy and authenticity of relationship. Free, perfect relationship. But at one point, they disobeyed God by eating from the one tree of which God had said, ‘Do not eat.’ The Bible says that the first result of this disobedience was that they realized they were naked. So when God called out to Adam, Adam said, ‘We are afraid because we are naked, so we hid.’
And God’s response to Adam was, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? God’s first description of their sin was that it was the breaking of a commandment. Faced with the word of God on one hand, and their own desires on the other, they chose their desires. This is more than simply an error of judgment on their part. It was an act of rebellion against the authority under which their lives were to be ordered.
This is how we define a crime, whether the crime is mass murder or speeding. All crime is a rebelling against the authority under which we are called to order our lives.
The Bible uses certain words as synonyms for sin: words like ‘transgression’ or ‘trespass’ (to cross the line) or ‘iniquity’ (a misdeed, doing what is not right). These are ‘breaking-the-law’ words. Adam and Eve’s disobedience was a crime against God. They were law-breakers.
This became the DNA of the human race. The Bible says that sin became our nature. That is where this idea of ‘original sin’ came from. You may have heard that term. David in Psalm 51 said of himself, ‘I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me’. We aren’t sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. It is who we are and who we are leads to what we do.
But even one wanted to argue that we are not sinners even when we first enter the world, observation of the world around us, and the Biblical evidence demonstrates that we are all sinners anyway, sinners at least by action and by choice if not by nature.
All of us are sinners. All, without exception. There is not a person you know (including yourself) who has not very consciously chosen to act, speak, or think in a way that they knew full well was wrong. No one. We have unduly criticized. We have stolen, or broken the law outright. We have lied, maybe even to our spouses. We do not have to look at a world at war to see sin. We look into our hearts and find it right there.
The Bible shows the universality of sin. Adam and Eve’s son Cain killed his brother. The generations that followed led to the Biblical verdict that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that the intentions of the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually.
Centuries later David observed in Psalm 14, affirmed later by the apostle Paul, that there is no one who is good. All have turned aside, together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one. Against a perfect, holy and sovereign God, we are all criminals.
There is a word we use to describe the condition of those who break the law: guilty. And there is something that our legal system – when it functions properly – metes out to those who are guilty of crimes. We call that punishment. Whether or not the goal is rehabilitation, from a ‘time-out’ to life imprisonment, we understand that law-breaking deserves punishment.
So consider humanity. Consider yourself. A law-breaker.
And consider God: the creator, owner and absolute sovereign of history and the cosmos, perfect in character, infinitely righteous, supremely honorable, and in whom is not a shadow of darkness. All that we see as right and good exists in the world because it flows from his character. This is he against whom any and all our sins are committed. And so even that burst of anger is an infinitely gross offense against him. The smallest lie or the indulging of petty greed violates so completely the righteousness of God to an extent we cannot begin to imagine.
We have a hard time believing that it is exactly this that we are guilty of. We think we are not so bad. ‘At least I have never killed anyone, or even cheated on my taxes’, we say. ‘Compared to some people I am not doing too badly.’ We see ourselves on a scale with Hitler and child-killers on the bottom and Mother Theresa and Billy Graham on the higher end. We conclude that, on such a scale, most of would place ourselves closer to the top than to the bottom.
But two things: One – it is not Billy Graham or Mother Theresa who are on the high-end. It is God himself. Our ‘goodness’ is measured against God, not anyone else. And so, second: with that comparison, we are all on the same level. My sins place me on the same level of the abuser and killer of children. I am a sinner equal to Hitler. Please understand this. We sometimes say, ‘All sin is equal in God’s eyes’ but we don’t really believe it. We do not believe it because (rightly) not all sins have far more serious and dangerous consequences from a human-experience perspective. Some sins are ‘worse’ and so we punish them to a greater lesser degree: you don’t get a ticket for mass murder and get a 25 year jail sentence for jaywalking. (Though Draco, the legislator of Athens in the 8th Century BC, mandated the death sentence for relatively minor offenses and as for the greater crimes. When asked about this, his response was that he thought the minor offenses deserved the death penalty, and for the greater offenses there was no greater punishment available.)
But a sin against the infinitely holy God is therefore an infinite moral offense, and there is no difference between this infinitely serious crime against God and that infinitely serious crime against God. There is no real difference in who jumps higher when you are trying to jump over the tallest building. It does not matter whether you prick the balloon with a pin or shred it with a chainsaw; it is destroyed. It does not matter how much taller one blade of grass is than another when looking down from a plane at 35,000 feet.
And it makes no difference my sin vs. anyone else’s sin when it is God’s sinlessness that is the standard, when it is God who sees it. Any sin against God is a crime of unimaginable proportions. We, therefore, bear guilt of unimaginable proportions and deserve punishment of unimaginable proportions.
We stand in the courtroom. The charges against us have been read. The evidence is overwhelming, the verdict beyond dispute: ‘Guilty!’ All that remains is for the sentence to be handed down. And though the sentence be infinitely severe, everyone – and we ourselves – know that it is a just and appropriate sentence.
What hope do we have?
About two thousand years ago, a baby was born into a manger in Bethlehem. His name was Jesus, and for two thousand years Christians have affirmed that this Jesus is the Son of God: come to earth from the very throne of God himself.
He lived about thirty-three years, walking the earth as a human being. He was tired, hungry, sad. He laughed, had friendships, and experienced joy. He was hailed as a healer by some, a supernatural healer by others, a dangerous public figure by others. And, the Bible tells us, he was tempted in every way: tempted to lash out at people, tempted to abuse the adoration in which he was held, tempted to take the easy path to glory, tempted to lie, to strike his enemies, to lust, to steal, to disobey parents, and tempted to curse. And yet he, alone of all people who have ever lived, was without sin.
‘Was he really tempted?’ we ask. ‘Didn’t temptation really roll off his back, being divine after all? Did any temptation ever hold any real danger for him?’
I think it was C.S. Lewis who noted that Jesus has felt temptation more than any of us ever have or will. All of us have sinned. That means that as the weight of temptation increased, at some point it overcame and we yielded. Jesus alone has stood under the enormous heaviness of temptation. Only he has felt its full weight, where we have all collapsed before it got to that point.
Jesus perfectly kept the commands of God, and lived in perfect conformity to the character and will of God. He never transgressed God’s Law. He was in no way unaligned with what God said, what God did, or who God is.
Jesus said of himself, ‘Whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ and ‘ I do nothing on my own authority but speak just as the Father taught me’. He challenged those who accused him: ‘Is any of you without sin?’ and ‘Which one of you can convict me of sin?’
After his period of ministry, he is arrested and brought to trial by those who made themselves his enemies. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate said to his accusers, ‘I find no guilt in this man’ and he reaffirmed it two more times.
The Bible says that he was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. It also describes Jesus as a priest, holy, innocent, unstained , who does not need to offer sacrifices first for his own sins, and only then for the sins of the people.
In the Old Testament sacrificial system, there was a sacrifice called the ‘guilt offering’. The worshipper brought an unblemished animal, whose life was given as a substitute for the life of the worshipper, and the life of the sinner was spared. This was a shadow of what was to come. Jesus: the only human who has ever lived who never sinned, and therefore was not worthy of death. And yet he did die.
Prophesying about the coming Messiah and King, Isaiah spoke of him as a suffering servant of God. This is how he described Jesus:
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God , and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned – everyone – to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. It was the LORD’s will to crush him and he has put him to grief, when his soul makes an offering for guilt.
This is Jesus. This is Jesus’ death. The sinless man, the perfect Son of God, dying for sinners. He is the sacrifice, the unblemished ‘guilt offering’ whose life was given for the sinner, that the inner may walk free.
Put in the plainest terms possible: Jesus was punished for our crimes against God.
What does that mean for us?
Well, for starters, justice demands that punishment for crime can only be meted out once. You don’t get a second ticket after paying the first. You do not go back to jail after serving your sentence.
God punishes sin once. If that punishment was poured out on Jesus, God will not now punish you as well. So for all practical purposes, we can live as if we were innocent. And God relates to us on that basis: innocent.
This is what the Bible means when it uses the word ‘justified’ or ‘justification’. It is a legal word. To a judge who is perfectly just, and who always requires justice, sinners can stand in his courtroom and be declared ‘justified’ in the sight of the law, because the sentence has been carried out.
God no longer says, ‘Criminal! Sinner!’ He now says, ‘Innocent!’
What is the Gospel? It is the Good News that the death sentence has been lifted from us, for there has already been a death for our crimes.
What does it mean that ‘Christ died for us’? It means that even though we stood in the Courtroom and were declared guilty, it was Jesus who was led to the jail cell, and to the execution chamber, while we walk out the front door.
Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the one whose sins the Lord will not count against him… [Righteousness] will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In Jesus, God looks on us now as innocent, and does not count our sins against us. More than that: he does not merely overlook our sin, but he removes it. This is not probation: if we re-offend, we are back before the judge and back into the slammer we go. As incredible as it sounds, sinless Jesus says: ‘Having served your sentence, I will also fulfill the terms for you. If I slip up, only then will you go back into the slammer.’ And Jesus will not – cannot – violate the terms. You are forever safe from judgment. The price is paid. The sacrifice made. The sentence is already carried out. God, the just judge, will treat you as innocent.
Sin – crimes against God – is punished, but only in one of two ways: on Jesus, or on the sinner, but not both. You can accept Jesus’ death for your sins, or you can continue to bear them yourself, and ultimately to bear the sentence yourself. You can trust that the infinite perfection of Jesus, and the infinite worth of his life was laid down in your place for your infinite offenses against God, or you can receive the infinite punishment for your own sins.
Those are your only two options. Why would you not throw yourself on the mercy of the Judge who has made provision for your crimes?
We call Jesus ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’. To accept Jesus as ‘Savior’ is by definition to accept him as ‘Lord’. If sin is offense against the authority of God and stepping out from under the Lordship of God, then/= to repent of sin is, by definition, to step back under the Lordship of God. And Jesus said that ‘all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me’. He is the King of kings and Lord of lords.
If you have never thought in these terms before, and if the reality of your sin, your guilt, Jesus’ death, and God’s mercy has never hit home before, if you know today, perhaps for the first time, that you desperately need a Savior, and you know that life under his Lordship is right and good, then you have a decision to make and it is, more than any other decision you will ever make, a life and death decision: will you trust in the death of Jesus for your sins, and by repentance, reaffirm that Jesus is Lord, and your life is to be lived under his authority?
Perhaps God is convicting you of this truth. If he is, don’t fight it, or even ignore it. Respond to it.
What this doctrine really means for us:
First, our justification means that we are a people of grace. We are receivers of grace, we are dispensers of grace. Knowing the monstrosity of our sin and our guilt, we begin to sense the enormity of God’s grace to us. And so we do not take offense at anything anyone can do to us. How could we possibly?
Has anyone sinned against you, and you continue to be resentful, to dwell on it? Has anyone offended your family or cheated you financially? Has anyone spoken hurtful or false words? That offense is just a microscopic triviality. Can you who have been forgiven much not extend just a particle of grace?
25 years ago I knew two men in their fifties. These two men attended the same church, and the son of one married the daughter of the other. Years before, one of them had done some work for the other. The one for whom the work was done thought it was being done as a favor. The one who did the work did not consider it so, and accordingly sent an invoice for his work. When I knew them, years later, it was still a live issue. The two men remained not only unreconciled, but angry.
Will you stand before God someday and say that you had a right not to forgive? Will you who have been forgiven the wealth of nations resent the unpaid fraction of a penny that another owes you? Grace does not only release the debt. It overflows with kindness and goodness. It binds people together as co-forgiven before God. How would it be if Christians had the public reputation in the world as being a people who loved one another relentlessly, who refused stubbornly to be unforgiving?
Our justification means that we become a people of grace. For those who do not extend grace demonstrate that they do not really know what it means to have received grace.
Second, imagine the joy of someone who, on the walk from the cell to the execution chamber, suddenly is directed down a different corridor to the front door, where the gates are open, and a new life is given to him. Are we not people of such joy? Where the sentence was staggeringly terrifying, now life is abundant. It is free. It is full. It is the joy that springs from the forgiven sinner.
Some of the most sour people we know are Christians (or at least church-goers). But also some of the most centered, content and joyful people are Christians. Christians who understand what it feels like to be taken from death row and given freedom and new life.
What would people say about you, in terms of joy? People who have known grace, know joy. The fruit of the spirit is joy.
Third, know that the truth of this Gospel, the reality of standing confidently as an innocent one before this perfectly Holy God does not make us try harder not to land in the dock again. Rather, it makes us love the one who kept the Law for us, and to love the merciful Judge. It makes us stand in amazement at what just happened.
A heart swelled with adoration at such a one! A life lived not in obligation, but in joyful, freely given gratitude to an overwhelmingly beautiful, merciful Saviour. It is easy to tell whether or not you understand the grace of God that has forgiven your crimes: do you love him, or do you feel obligated to him?
Many are experiencing up with it right now: the contradiction that exists between having our sins forgiven in Christ, and God laying a new set of do’s and don’ts that we will inevitably fail to keep, and therefore rack up a brand new rap sheet of offenses. Such a God is one to be cautious of. ‘I don’t want to step on his toes!’
But a God who has forgiven all, freely, lovingly and at the cost of his life. He is not to be appeased, but adored.
Amen.