Justification - Peace With God

What is a Christian? Last week, we saw that a Christian is a person who does two things: he turns away from sin - that is what the Bible calls repentance. And he turns to Jesus Christ trusting completely in him for salvation. That is what the Bible calls faith. You can’t be a Christian unless you’ve done those two things. In the words of Ross Perot, “it’s just that simple.”

Now the passage we read earlier in the service, Romans 5, is one of the greatest passages in the whole Bible on the subject of what it means to be a Christian. That passage tells us exactly what happens between God and man when a person repents and places his trust in Jesus Christ. It tells us about a process that the Bible calls justification.

Justification is a very powerful process. When God justifies you, he accomplishes four amazing things on your behalf.

1. You go from being guilty to being innocent.

2. You go from having no righteousness to having the righteousness of Christ.

3. You go from being at war with God to having peace with God.

4. You go from standing under God’s wrath to standing under his grace.

I want to talk to you about each of these things today.

1. You go from being guilty to being innocent.

Right now, in the newspapers, we are reading the tragic story of a judge who broke the law. He was the highest judge in the State of New York, but in the aftermath of an illicit love affair, he attempted to commit an act of extortion and kidnapping. He broke the law, and now he faces criminal charges.

His personal sin led him to do something that was against everything he stood for. Now he is under house arrest. He’s ruined his career, he’s ruined his reputation, he’s hurt his family, he’s brought shame and disgrace to the judiciary, and he’s made an utter fool of himself. Never underestimate the power of sin, even of sin done in secret.

But let’s rewind the tape a little bit. Let’s go back to the time before his downfall. That judge was a paragon of respectability; an upright man. When he put on his judicial robes, he not only represented the law, he personified it in his own conduct.

Now let’s imagine for a moment that you are a criminal. You are brought into this judge’s courtroom, and you’ve been charged with some terrible crime. The prosecution assembles all the evidence, and it is overwhelming. The trial takes place, and there is virtually nothing you can say in your defence. The jury deliberates for just two minutes before coming back in with a guilty verdict. It is an open and shut case.

And as the proceedings unfold, that judge sits on the bench, and he hears it all. He hears in gruesome detail, just what you did. He knows you are guilty, and he knows that the law calls for a mandatory death sentence in cases like this.

Now imagine that you appear in his courtroom one final time for sentencing. In solemn tones, the judge pronounces the death penalty and there is an awful hush in the courtroom. But then the judge stands up. He steps down off the bench and comes around to where you are standing before the judicial bar. Everybody wonders what he is going to do. He meets you there in front of the bar, and he says to you “I am going to take your sentence for you. You are hereby pardoned and you are free to go.”

There’s a gasp from the audience. You can hardly believe your ears. You stand there in a daze as the bailiff takes the handcuffs off your wrists and the shackles off your legs and puts them on the judge instead. There he stands, shackled and bound, in his black judicial robes. With a steadfast gaze, he watches you walk out of the courtroom a free man. Then they lead him away to death row, where his execution is already scheduled.

What happened in that imaginary courtroom is the first thing that justification is all about. The root idea behind it is that although we are guilty of sin, God has stepped in to take our penalty for us. He stepped off the bench as it were, to be our substitute.

It is not as though the penalty were cancelled. God would be less than just, less than holy, if he simply threw out the verdict against us. No. God cannot and will not sweep our sin under the rug. But he has paid for it by sending his Son to die in our place. And when Jesus died on the cross as our substitute, the demands of the law were met. Justice was served. So there’s no longer any legal charge against us. We go from being guilty to being innocent.

2. You go from having no righteousness to having the righteousness of Christ.

Someone has said that when you are justified, it is just as if you’d never sinned. But does that mean that when God looks at you, he somehow forgets that you are a sinner? Not at all. It’s just that when he looks at you, he sees that by faith you have been united with Jesus Christ, and he credits Christ’s righteousness to your account. It works something like this…

Imagine for a moment that a young woman has been very careless with her personal finances. She’s gone on too many shopping sprees to Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Ave. She has charged her credit cards up to the limit. She’s two months behind on her car payments. Her landlord is after her for the rent. Her liabilities are greater than her assets.

But then suppose she falls in love with a nice young man who happens to be very wealthy. He comes from a family that is fabulously rich. Romance blossoms and they end up getting married. Now what is her financial status?

Because they are one, their assets are combined. And his financial assets just happen to be much more than enough to make up for her liabilities. So she goes overnight from being in the red to being well into the black, thanks to her union with him.

That’s the way it is with us and Jesus Christ. When we repent of our sin and place our trust completely in him, we don’t turn into perfect people overnight. We don’t gain any inherent righteousness of our own. But the Bible says that, because of our faith, we have been united with Christ so that in the sight of God, Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness. His assets become our assets.

Now you might be saying “Hey, wait a minute! Does that mean that I can go out now and live whatever way I want, knowing that Christ’s righteousness will be enough to cover whatever moral bills I run up? Is that what you’re saying?”

Well, that’s a very good question. In fact, the Bible anticipates that question. There is a very good answer for that question, which I’m going to give you in three weeks on Dec. 6, so be here!

The second thing that happens when we are justified by faith is that we go from having no righteousness to having the righteousness of Christ.

3. You go from being at war with God to having peace with God

Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ

There is a small, remote island in the Philippines called the island of Lubang. On March 10, 1974, something very remarkable happened there. That was the day that Lt. Hirro Onoda of the Japanese Imperial Army, walked out of the jungle and surrendered.

The Second World War ended on September 2, 1945, when the Japanese government officially signed a surrender document aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. On that day, the gunfire stopped, the troops laid down their arms. The bloodshed was over. But for Lt. Onoda on the island of Lubang, the war went on.

He refused to believe the reports of peace that he heard on his radio. He thought it was all an American trick to lure him into a trap. So he continued his one-man war for the next three decades. He simply refused to surrender.

He was pursued by Filipino soldiers who tried to find his hideout. But they could never track him down. He was as elusive as a shadow. He became an expert in jungle survival. Every day, he would climb a tree and scan the horizon with his binoculars to see if the Japanese Navy would return and help him to recapture Lubang. But finally, after 28 years of disappointment, Onoda simply gave up.

The war had been over for almost three decades, but that stubborn Japanese soldier didn’t benefit from that fact. To finally be at peace, he first had to believe that a peace treaty had, in fact, been signed. Second, he had to personally accept it by laying down his arms and giving up his life of resistance. It took him twenty-eight years to finally get to that place.

Spiritually speaking, Onoda’s situation on the island of Lubang is similar to many people’s relationship to God. When Jesus Christ died on the cross on Good Friday in the year 30 A.D., his death was the peace treaty between God and man. The Bible says so.

But Jesus’ death on the cross doesn’t bring us peace with God until we personally believe that it is true, and accept it as personally applying to us. That’s the choice that only we can make. We can choose to go on fighting and running and hiding like fugitives. Or we can lay down our arms and accept the peace.

When we put our trust in Jesus Christ and are justified, we go from being at war with God to being at peace with God.

I travel a lot between Canada and the United States. Because Canada and the U.S. are at peace, the border between the two countries is the longest undefended border in the world. You can travel back and forth between the two countries at will.

But have you ever crossed a border between two countries that were not friendly? I have. In 1989, Peter Lesniewski and I went into Eastern Europe, which was still under Communist rule at the time. We crossed the border from Austria into Czechoslovakia. We saw the guard towers along the Danube River, and the barbed wire, and the machine guns held by the border guards.

Then, as we traveled further into Eastern Europe, we crossed the border between Hungary, which was a relatively open country, and Romania, which was still under the yoke of a fanatical Communist dictator. At that border, we had guns waved in our faces. We heard the mean snarl of the guard dogs outside the train we were riding on. Fear and tension were in the air.

Which would you rather experience in your relationship with God? You see, for a non-Christian, God is a very fearful person. God is holy. God is just. God hates sin. And man, the sinner, instinctively knows all those things. So he shies away from God. He is afraid of God. He doesn’t want to think about God, or get very close to God. Remember how Adam and Eve ran and hid from God in the Garden? There’s no peace between God and man when man is a sinner. A state of hostility exists. The Bible says that our sin makes us God’s enemies.

Now that spiritual war has tremendous ramifications for human behavior. Because man is not at peace with God, man cannot be at peace with his fellow man.

In 1965, the Secretary General of the United Nations asked some haunting questions to the assembled delegates: “What element is lacking so that with all our skill and all our knowledge we still find ourselves in the dark valley of discord and enmity? What is it that inhibits us from going forward together to enjoy the fruits of human endeavor and to reap the harvest of human experience? Why is it that, for all our professed ideals, our hopes, and our skills, peace on earth is still a distant objective seen only dimly through the storms and turmoils of our present difficulties?”

The answer of course is that there will never be peace on earth until there is peace in the heart of man. And there can never be peace in man’s heart unless he has peace with God. No amount of education, agitation, manipulation, or legislation is going to bring that kind of peace. It can only come through justification.

Colossians 1:21-22 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.

4. You go from standing under God’s wrath to standing under his grace

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men.

Some people will try to tell you that God is not a God of wrath. They say, “Oh no, God is love, God is good.” But I want you to know that God’s wrath is a very important part of his character. God’s wrath is just as much one of his attributes as love and goodness are.

Because the wrath of God is the way he feels about sin. It is his attitude of hostility toward anything that is evil or wicked or impure. He will not accept it, because he is holy and righteous and pure. God would not be good if he tolerated evil. So God’s wrath is an essential part of his character.

If you are a sinner, you stand under the wrath of God. That’s your position in relation to God. It’s not a very good place to be. But when you repent of your sin and place your trust in Jesus Christ, God ushers you from that awful place of judgment to a place where his grace showers down upon you.

Last Friday, I went to an air show put on by the U.S. Navy. I happened to be in a party of V.I.P’s. I was not a V.I.P., but I was with V.I.P’s! They gave us a police escort though the front gates of the naval base. They gave us each a special nametag and a ticket that said “Distinguished Visitor”.

When we got in the gates, we found that there were thousands of people at that airshow. There was a large area set aside for the general public. There were concession stands there where you could buy souvenirs and hamburgers and so forth.

But everyone in the VIP party went through a little gate. There were a couple of U.S. Navy corpsmen standing there checking credentials. So I just flashed my card that said “Distinguished Visitor”, and that let me into a special roped off area right up at the front, right next to the runway, where you had a completely unobstructed view.

There were already rows of chairs set up so that we could sit down while we watched the show. The general public had to stand. There was also a large tent in the VIP area. Inside the tent, you had all the food you could ever want spread out on tables. And it was all free for the taking.

Now the point I’m trying to make is this: When you went through that special VIP gate, you were being ushered into a place of privilege and favor and honor.

Now the people in the VIP party got all of that special treatment because in some way or another, they deserved it. They were there because they were important people; people who had value to the U.S. Navy.

But I was there simply because I was fortunate enough to have been invited. I hadn’t done anything to deserve being there; I had rendered no service to the U.S. Navy. I was just there because I had been invited.

That’s exactly the way it is with us and God. When you’re justified by faith in Jesus Christ, you go from standing under God’s wrath to standing under his grace. Not because of anything you’ve done. Not because of any merit. But simply because Jesus Christ gives us access into that grace in which we now stand.

What is a Christian? A Christian is someone who has repented of his sin and placed his trust in Jesus Christ. A Christian is a person to whom four things have happened:

1. He has gone from being guilty to being innocent.

2. He has gone from having no righteousness to having the righteousness of Christ

3. He has gone from being at war with God to having peace with God

4. He has gone from standing under God’s wrath to standing under God’s grace

That’s what justification is all about.