Cross My Heart: Meditations on the Cross for Holy Week - Thursday: The Cross and Justification
Reading - Romans 3:21-28
Lin Manuel Miranda’s incredible musical Hamilton is a sensation, drawing thousands and thousands to its compelling performances. The show opens with an introduction to the lead character, who is presented to us through the eyes of his contemporaries. His arch-foe Aaron Burr is first up and sings, “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten Spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” While Hamilton won’t attribute his rise to God’s grace, his origin in sin and squalor is an apt summary of our own beginnings. We are ‘by nature children of wrath’ and its astonishing that anyone rises from the ash heap of human ruin to the throne room of God’s glory. How can that possibly happen?
In short, it’s a gift. God loves us and bestows his love on us through Jesus Christ. Something unique happens when that occurs. At the cross, Paul notes, God revealed his love. Through the cross, we who were so far away for so long have been brought near to God. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, he bore in his heart our guilt and shame, all those things which would be impediments in our relationship with God, and took these with him to his death. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul puts it this way: “God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf.”
That’s just the first part of an incredible exchange that the grace of God engineered so that Christ, as our representative, might take all of the sins of his own people upon himself. In short, Jesus lived the life we should have lived but couldn’t; Jesus died the death we deserved to die but didn't. As our Royal representative Jesus Christ took upon himself the full weight and responsibility, the entire guilt and penalty, of the sin and wrongdoing of all of those who are his people. When he died, he cried out, “It is finished!” which means “Paid in full.” The full weight of our sin was born by Jesus and the full penalty of our sin was paid for by Jesus.
Remarkable as that fact most certainly is, there is more to the story. Paul goes on to write in that second letter to the Corinthians that “God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” This remarkable statement tells us that not only were our sins accounted to Jesus, but Jesus' own righteousness was accounted by us as our own. This means that righteousness - right standing with God - is a gift we receive, not a reward that we earn. Righteousness before God is not something we merit but rather something Christ has merited for us and bestowed graciously and freely upon us.
Justification and Adoption
The Greek word translated as ‘righteousness’ is also translated as ‘justification’ and Paul uses this word frequently in his letters. He tells the Corinthians that “Christ has been made unto us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and Redemption.” He told the Romans that the gospel ‘reveals the righteousness of God’, going on to say, ‘we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ in just the same way that Abraham was justified’, namely by faith in God. Justification is a gift we receive through faith in God and what he has done; it is not the achievement of the highly spiritual but rather the astonishing gift God gives to the undeserving and broken.
This gift of righteousness/justification is so emphasized as free and undeserved, given by love, that Paul eliminates every consideration of human achievement, religious observance, ethnic pedigree, or social standing as any basis of being part of God's family. Even though we were born into a fallen household, a rebellious family named for Adam and Eve, the full penalty of that sin against God has been paid by Jesus Christ so that we are entirely guiltless. God not only declares us to be wholly and utterly free from all guilt associated with the human fall and our sinful condition and actions, but he goes even further and counts Jesus’ own perfect righteousness to us and says that we are sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, God adopts us as his own children.
This is why the Holy Spirit is referred to as '“the Spirit of adoption.” in his work of applying Christ’s labors to our lives in new birth and justification, the Spirit also makes us children of the adopted Father, the younger siblings of the Son.
One of my favorite moments in the stage Musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is when Jean Valjean sings in wonder at the grace of the good Bishop. “He called me brother”, and that revelation, the truth that he was in a new family of faith by grace and mercy, changed his life forever.
Because of the Spirit’s work in us, uniting us to Christ and reconciling us to God through his merciful love, we have an entirely new kind of familial relationship with God as our Father. The power of this dramatic change can be seen in the way Scripture speaks of our relationship with Jesus himself. “He is the first of many brothers”, Paul writes of Jesus. The author of Hebrews notes that Jesus ‘is not ashamed to call us brothers”, and Jesus himself teaches us to pray to God using the words he himself used and to say these beginning with ‘Our’: Jesus is our ‘elder brother’, sharing his sonship with us, teaching us that God loves us with the same love with which God the Father loves him. Frankly, that’s mind-boggling. Just look at what Jesus says about God the Father’s life-giving love:
I in them and You in Me--that they may be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me… And I have made Your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love You have for Me may be in them, and I in them." - John 17:23, 26
Let me put in the form of a question: How perfectly and completely do you suppose God the Father loves God the Son? The answer is in the question: perfectly and completely. Here’s the astonishing, heart-transforming, mind-boggling good news: the love God the Father has for you is exactly the same love he has for Jesus Christ. Our relationship with God as our tender, loving Father is the result of a relentless love that pursued us, won us, sacrificed all for us, and will never let us go.
Justification by Faith Alone through Grace Alone in Christ Alone
We have to choose between two paths of righteousness, one based on our performance and the other based on Christ’s life and death. The choice could not be starker, for as Paul has said, our only boast is the cross of Jesus Christ. In other words, these two potential paths are mutually exclusive. One cannot have righteousness through Christ and one’s own performance. Jesus’s work is perfect, and nothing can be added to it; indeed, the notion of adding to what God has fully accomplished is not only absurd but offensive, for it is a denial of the sufficiency of what Jesus did on the cross. I can either have him as my Savior or try to save myself. The DIY approach to God negates grace and insults love; if it were possible for us to be right with God through our own works, then there was no need for Jesus to die. Yet Jesus did die on the cross after living a life of perfect obedience before the Father who sent him to be our Savior.
Isaiah gets graphic about the idea that our own righteousness can save us: he reminded Israel that “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa. 64:6), a polite translation of a term that means used menstrual pads—that’s us when we’re doing our level best, not to mention how bad it is when we’re at our worst. Paul was just as severe; referring to his own self-salvation efforts prior to coming to faith in Jesus—all his religious pedigree, education, zeal, and attempts at obedience—he called them “dung,” using a Greek word—skubalon—we might less delicately translate. Self-righteousness not only stinks, but it’s also fatal. You can try to be righteous—right with God—on the basis of your work, or you can do what Paul did and says we must do: rest in the perfect righteousness of Jesus freely given to us on the basis of what Jesus has done at the cross.
One Christian leader wrote of this remarkable gift, “The righteousness wherein we must be found, if we will be justified, is not our own . . . Christ hath merited righteousness for as many as are found in Him. . . . I must take heed what I say: but the apostle saith, “God made Him who knew no sin, to be sin for us; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God Himself. Let it be counted folly, or frenzy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom, and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man hath sinned, and God hath suffered; that God hath made Himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God” (Richard Hooker).
The story of our life with Jesus in us begins with the story of Jesus’s death for us. Because of the cross of Christ, our sins have been forgiven, and we stand before God with the same perfect righteousness that Jesus possesses. No wonder all the company of heaven gathers around the throne of grace and ceaselessly sings, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain!”
Jesus, the Lamb of God who died on the cross to take away our sins, has done absolutely everything that is required for us to be right with God. We aren’t saved through anything done by us but by everything he did for us. We dare not add to his work any of our own efforts because these, at their very best, are all infected with our fallenness. Instead, we simply trust fully and completely in the perfection of his life and the propitiation of his death. He took our sin to the cross and the grave, and gave his righteousness to us so we could finally begin to live and love.
When Jesus died on the cross, he cried out, “It is finished!” and, with those words, announced that all the guilt of our sin had been taken away, permanently and completely. That means the only thing still standing between God and us is the obstinate and foolish thought that we can save ourselves.
We cannot save ourselves. He must save us… and he has!