PURSUED BY LOVE

_______________________________________

 

5. Right with God

When preachers are silent about God’s right and our state of condemnation, telling the people instead just to ‘come to Jesus’, then the consciousness of our guilt before God is minimized and genuine repentance is made all but impossible. We substitute discontent for true brokenness of heart and weaken the realisation of what is the meaning of reconciliation through the blood of the Cross. Reconciliation with God cannot be achieved if the question of right, God’s right, is set aside.

If we place ourselves at the centre of the Gospel, our need of improvement, our deliverance from misery, then we reduce Almighty God to a physician who gives assistance and then is discharged with our thanks. The question of right does not arise so long as the sinner is made more holy everything is fine, it is said. However, once we see and admit that we do not belong to ourselves, but to another then matters taken on a completely different perspective. Then we begin to understand we are in no position to do as we please for it is God who must determine what we shall be or do. If we move away from this then we are transgressors, guilty rebels. When I once acknowledge God as divine sovereign, then everything changes. As mortally sick, we are to be pitied and treated with loving care, but on the other hand, when we are considered as belonging to God, then we have robbed God, deprived Him of what is His. It is not healing we need as much as punishment we deserve.

Justification has to do with right, the right relation between two persons, in this case the claim of God upon man. ‘Justification by faith’ lies at the very heart of the Reformation. God is the absolute Sovereign and Lawgiver who by His own being determines what is right. As Judge he judges our being and doing. As King and Sovereign, He dispenses rewards and punishments. The question of right will arise as soon as a sinner sees himself as a creature not his own but belonging to Another.

Right has to do with status. If the law has not proven us guilty, convicted and sentenced us then we have the legal status of a free law-abiding citizen of the land. Once guilt is proven in a court of law, we immediately become a law-breaking citizen. Before God we are either just or unjust. Our status depends not on what we are, but on what we are counted to be before God. It is God who declares a man righteous and not he himself. Those who maintain that what a man is makes him righteous before God, detracts from the redemption that is in Christ Jesus and from the reality of the guilt that He satisfied. Those who say that God must count a man according to what he is and not what God decides will have no understanding of how the Lord Jesus could bear our sins and be a ‘curse’ and ‘sin’ for us on the Cross. Actual bearing of our guilt by Christ our Mediator is then unthinkable. This means to seek not God’s judgment of us, but to seek our own estimate of ourselves.

Our justification is decided outside of us irrespective of what we are. God does not justify us or declare us righteous because we are becoming more holy, but after He has justified us, then we will grow in holiness. “Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9).

God does not declare someone righteous who is in reality most wicked. No, this declaration finds its ground in the fact that God puts us poor miserable sinners into partnership with an infinitely rich Mediator, our Saviour the Lord Jesus. Whilst we remain in ourselves in poverty, in Him we are rich. All depends on faith in Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is the bond of that partnership. In Him we are no longer on our own account, but in partnership with Him who blots out all our indebtedness and makes us recipients of all His treasure. God looks not at us, but Christ. What Christ is, we are in Him.

It is the sacrifice of our blessed Saviour on Calvary which satisfies for us before God. This is not accomplished at a distance from us, but includes us all in it. In His resurrection, not only is Christ Himself brought back from the dead, but we too in Him. We have been united to Christ in such a way that what happened to Him on Calvary and at His resurrection happened to us. So, the apostle Paul could say:

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20)

What Christ accomplished is reckoned to us because we are in Him. His righteousness is imputed or assigned to us. We receive this in God’s grace by faith in Him.

In justification we are accepted not on the basis of self-assumed holiness, but as one who confesses to not being dependent upon any merit of our own, but relying solely on grace alone. It puts us in the ranks of the law-abiding, of those declared righteous. Christ’s own fulfilment of the law is imputed and imparted to us, esteeming it as though we had fully accomplished that obedience which Christ has accomplished for us. God imputes and grants to us not only Christ’s satisfaction upon the Cross and His righteousness, but even His original righteousness in such way that we stand before God once more righteous and honourable as though the whole history of sin never existed.

 

NEXT SANCTIFICATION

____________________________________________