Bible Studies

Romans 833 2

by Thomas Kirkpatrick
05/16/22
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“Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies.” (Romans 8:33)

Last week we looked at the elect of God, and this week we will look at justification. We are justified by God’s pardon of the sins we have committed. The sins of our past, present, and future sins. In the Old Testament, sins were forgiven by the sacrificial system of animals’ death and blood. When man fell to sin, the penalty was death. Death was God’s judgment for the disobedience of His Word. Throughout the history of the Israelite nation, they would have to sacrifice animals to remove their sins. It wasn’t the animal’s actual death or the shedding of its blood that took their sins away. It was faith in God’s promise that He would accept that sacrifice as a propitiation for their sin. As we often do today, the people back then became caught up in the process rather than believing and acting in faith upon that belief that God would honor the sacrifice. God taught His people that the wage for sin was death, and death was the only payment for sin.

But God and man knew the death of a lamb did not erase the sin the master of the lamb had committed. It was an object lesson that someday, the very best of humanity would have to be sacrificed to pay the sin debt humanity had against God. What saved them in the Old Testament was their faith in God’s full revelation. In Genesis 3:15, the prophecy was spoken by God that the woman would bear a son who would be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. This promise is the full revelation of God. If the people believed that and lived in faith in that reality, God would accept it as righteousness. Perfection is the standard to walk the streets of God’s Holy City. “Because it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16) Fractured man is incapable of achieving that, we need a Savior, and that Savior is Jesus Christ, the full revelation of God.

The sacrifice does not save us, but our belief in the One sacrificed can if we have faith to live for Him. He, Jesus, will give us forgiveness, sanctify us, and provide us with His righteousness so that God may accept us as holy. Redemption is a gift from God, as He loves us and is full of mercy and grace. By His grace, we are saved, and by our faith, we are justified. “But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, And whose sins have been covered.” (Romans 4:5-7)

It is God’s work and not man’s. It is the work of the Creator and not the creature. We can seek and find the way to our salvation through righteousness, sanctification, and redemption because of what God has done.  “But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” (1 Corinthians 1:30)

Through Jesus, we can come boldly to the throne of God’s grace because through Him; we have been made righteous in the eyes of God; He sees us through His Son. Jesus is the way, and we need to travel on His way. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

God justifies us through the constitution of the New Covenant of the Gospel purchased by the blood of His Son Jesus. The law never saved anyone. The law is a standard to reveal how sinful we are and how much we need a Savior. Therefore, to live in constitutional justification, we need to know who offers the pardon. There is no other way as you were born in sin, and you will die in sin, and the only way is to have your life washed in the blood of Jesus. “Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through Him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and through Him everyone who believes is freed from all things, from which you could not be freed through the Law of Moses.” (Acts 13:38-39)

The terms of this agreement are repentance from the fractured self you once were to the new person God created you to become. You must become the character of the one who pardoned you from the bondage of your past. He took you just as you were and washed you, and His Spirit is sanctifying you into the image you were created to be. One who lives the gospel message brings forth the fruits of Christ’s death so that others may be freed. “Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11)

We live under a sentence and must make a choice. Do we choose the sentence of death or the sentence of life? Does God interpret us as the wicked or the righteous? Job knew there was a judgment, and he knew there was an advocate that would save him as he was a righteous man. “If there is an angel as mediator for him, One out of a thousand, To remind a man what is right for him, Then let him be gracious to him, and say, ‘Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom.” (Job 33:23-24) Jesus is our judge and our justifier, and He will pronounce without regard for an excuse. “But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:36-37)

All men chose the course of their life. Many chose to live and bare the fruits of their sin and suffer its wage. The few chose to produce the fruits of righteousness and rejoice over it. They receive many blessings from God as a pledge of His love. He gives us Himself in the Holy Spirit to sanctify and guide them into all truth with His counsel. The day will surely come when each will receive the result of their choice. “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:46)

We are God’s from the beginning as He is our Creator. But we fell away and worshiped the things of this world. Jesus came into the world, and by His life, He ransomed us, and God accepts that reconciliation as justice. In that reconciliation, we have honored His law and the government of His Kingdom. Through the work of Jesus, God is satisfied that the wrong according to His justice has been settled. “Being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed.” (Romans 3:24-25)

By this reconciliation through Jesus, we have constituted righteousness and have been so proclaimed. “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19) Man did not place Jesus on the cross as He willingly went for humanity’s salvation. He cried to the Father in His last breath, “It is finished.” Neither can a man take Him off the cross and reverse the mighty work that our Christ has done. He endured the cross because of the joy set before Him, and we can overcome the world, as He, for the hope He set before us. “In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.” (Hebrews 6: 17-18)

Thomas N Kirkpatrick

First Baptist Church of Durant, May 2, 2019