Romans 3:26 says that God is the “Just and the Justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Today when a sinner comes to God and confesses that He is a sinner, the Bible does not say that God is “merciful and loving” to cleanse him from unrighteousness, it says,
He is FAITHFUL and JUST to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9, emphasis mine)1
How did He cleanse us from all unrighteousness? He removed the sin and conquered it! He condemned the sin so that we would never have to be condemned by it!2 Faithful, righteous, and just are judicial words of the courts. He is the Judge who has judged the work of His Son as “perfectly perfect, completely complete.”3
God was just in making us righteous. This means that He put His very character on the line when He declared us acquitted of all of our sins. If one sin was left unpunished, then God would not be just, and He would be a liar. God can’t be just merciful and not righteous.
The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)
Please don’t think that grace makes sin light.
Sin makes you stay longer than you want to stay,
go further than you want to go, and
costs you more than you want to pay.
Yes, there are consequences to sin in this world. God hates sin because He loves us. He doesn’t want us limping through this life suffering the consequences and condemnation of sin. As for the believer, whenever we sin, there is a tension between our new creation nature which is never inclined toward sin nor tempted to sin and the flesh where sin operates.
Are you sick and tired of living in that tension? The answer is take the focus off the sin and the flesh and put it on Jesus. The more we behold Jesus and the more steeped we are in His amazing grace, one day we will be able to look back and realize that those sinful tendencies that we used to struggle with have fallen off like dried leaves!
For God so loved the world… Love and mercy compelled the Trinity to send Jesus to earth, but the cross demonstrated God’s justice. He is a righteous Judge who saw us with a problem: we were guilty as charged. He removed the problem so that we could live the abundant life in Him.
Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed. (Psalm 85:10)
Every judgement of God fell on Jesus. Every curse, all the condemnation, all the poverty, all the sickness, all the separation from the life of the Father, and all the darkness fell upon Jesus for all our sins! It’s wasn’t for His sake that He endured the cross, it was for our sakes. It brought Him great joy for us to become a new creation in Him filled with HIS LIFE!
(from pages 108-110 of Unveiling Jesus)
Want more from Tricia Gunn? Check out excerpts from the Unveiling Jesus 20-part series!
Unveiling Jesus, by Tricia Gunn, is a verse by verse study of the pure gospel of grace. It’s an amazing journey of love, identity, and freedom in Christ.
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1All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New King James Version. Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission.
2Romans 8:3
3Derek Prince, Bought with Blood, Chosen Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2007, p. 33
