By Colleen Tinker
“Hope and joy elude me,” Angela said; “I constantly feel a sense of doom and guilt, and I don’t see a future without it. There are times when it’s truly impossible to imagine getting into heaven because of it. Somehow, the rest of you seem to have gotten past it.”
Her words stung me. I knew she was suffering and felt helpless, but her sense that the unidentified “rest of you” had somehow all gotten past our guilt—as if we had figured out a formula for ignoring our sins and grabbing gladness—felt accusing. She resented us who could talk about joy in the Lord.
My friend had grown up Christian in a somewhat liturgical “high church” with British influence. Fortunately, she had never been burdened with a deceptive, cultic worldview. I did wonder, though, if she had ever fully understood what Jesus really did for her.
I also knew that she had suffered deeply in her life. I didn’t know details, but I knew she understood estrangement, isolation, and loss of family. Her suffering was real, and I had no doubt that she lived with deep regrets. Her depression and loss were real and felt familiar in many ways.
What we didn’t understand
As her words impacted me, I remembered a phone call I received years ago from a young former Adventist woman. A driven, high-achieving professional, this young mother had just left her weekly women’s Bible study at the Christian church she and her family attended. She called me, shaken by another woman’s question to her as she left: “Have you trusted Jesus to forgive your sins?”
“What am I missing? Why did she ask me that?” she asked me.
As I talked to her, I asked her to tell me what she understood that Jesus did. Her answers were uncertain, and she was clearly upset that she couldn’t articulate what seemed to be a simple question.
“Get your Bible,” I told her, “and read to me Romans 3:21–26.” In a few seconds I heard her voice reading these words from our “own” apostle, Paul—whom God appointed to bring the gospel to the gentiles:
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
As she read those words, she suddenly saw the truth: God in Jesus is truly just. He leaves no sin unpunished. Yet God in Jesus took those sins onto Himself in the Lord Jesus and paid the price of enduring the wrath of God they demanded. By taking our sins and our punishment, He demonstrated that He is also our Justifier.
God is absolutely just—AND He is our Justifier. In Himself is the One who metes out wrath for sin, and in Himself He endured His own wrath and the curse of death in order to justify us who had no defense.
When that young woman read these words, she suddenly stopped—and then breathed, “Oh! I see it!”
Suddenly she knew what Jesus had actually done.
As Adventists we were not taught two critical things: our true nature of depravity—our inability to please God—and God’s utter justice. In fact, we were actively taught that God does not have wrath, that He “would never” punish anyone eternally for a few years of sins.
We were never taught that the real question was never whether or not God was “fair” in requiring obedience from His people. The real question was how a just God could leave sinners unpunished, as it appeared He did before the Lord Jesus took our sins to the cross.
The cross demonstrated God’s justice; He demanded full payment for human sin in the suffering and death of His own Son.
Foundation of truth
My memories of that long-ago phone call impacted me as I thought about Angela’s recurring spiral into guilt.
I have also struggled with guilt I couldn’t resolve—guilt that haunted me and came in waves. I even have struggled—and am still tempted to struggle—with guilt for things that I didn’t know were wrong at the time but see in retrospect that they hurt people. I have lived with some consequences that have grown out of choices I made that had results far beyond what I anticipated.
I also know how hard it is to see how the gospel can actually do anything when I am drowning in a sea of hopeless regret.
As I thought about Angela’s anger at being trapped in guilt, I knew that she probably needed many things—but the most important thing was a foundation of truth. I knew from experience that the only reason I have been able to experience hope and peace instead of terminal hopelessness and fear is that the Lord revealed Jesus to me. Even though I know Angela is a Christian, I was not certain that she really understood what God did through Jesus.
I decided I had to take Angela to Romans 3:21–26, just as I had that young former Adventist woman years ago. In fact, this profound statement of the heart of our salvation is so significant that I am going to take a closer look at it here.
Paying for sin
Here’s what this passage in Romans tells me: there is a righteousness that does not belong to me or become “mine” that resides in God alone. That perfect righteousness is credited to the account of everyone who has faith in Jesus, who trust the reality of His finished work. Every one of us is intractably guilty and without any hope of being absolved. We are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph 2:3) and unable to do good or even to seek for God on our own (Rom. 3:9–15). But there is a righteousness that is God’s own character and perfection that is available to us through faith.
Now here’s the thing that impacts me. God put His son Jesus “forward as a propitiation by his blood”. (Please forgive me so much detail, but I had think through this passage step-by-step to figure out its depth and impact.) A propitiation satisfies a demand. God’s demand for sin was death. Man sinned, so man had to die. Man couldn’t provide any substitute deaths, either. He had to die for his own sin.
The Old Covenant demonstrated, however, that God was both just and merciful. On the one hand, sin separated humans from their holy God. No one could pay for another’s sin, and no person could avoid the consequences of his own sin. Sin held every person in bondage to separation and death.
God, on the other hand, established a system of representative sacrifices that would enable His people to approach Him in repentance and worship. The Israelites could bring animal sacrifices from their own flocks when they repented for their sins, and those sacrifices brought ritual cleansing to them. While those blood offerings acknowledged God’s demand that sin requires death, however, they could not remove sin, because an animal’s death could not atone for a human’s sin.
Significantly, even those individual sin offerings were not sufficient for God’s people to be in right standing with Him. Every year on the Day of Atonement the high priest offered a blood sacrifice for the nation from the temple flock. In addition, every morning and evening the priests presented sacrifices from that same flock, and the smoke of those slain animals represented a continual blood sacrifice offered to God on behalf of the nation of Israel.
In other words, even the personal offerings of each Israelite were insufficient to cover all the people’s sin. A representative high priest had to offer sacrifices of worship and of atonement for the nation—but even those sacrifice could only ritually cleanse the nation. The blood of animals could not take away sins.
God made it very clear that no one could carry or pay for another’s sin, and He forbade Israel from offering their firstborn children for appeasement—a horrific practice the pagans performed to satisfy the cruel Canaanite gods including Molech and Chemosh. God forbade that practice. In fact, He set up the levitical priesthood and said the levites were His…and they replaced the offering of Israel’s firstborn (Num. 3:12, 41–46). The Levites served God in the office of priests, offering the blood sacrifices for Israel’s sins, but they did not have to die themselves. God provided Israel a way of acknowledging their sins through offering sacrifices from their own livestock, and He would grant them ritual cleansing in response for their obedience to His law—a law that provided for the saving of their own and their children’s lives while never diminishing their sin.
A sufficient propitiation
So, back to Romans 3: the propitiation God established—the payment that would satisfy His demand for human sin—was the death of His own Son, but His Son had to shed human blood in order to pay for human sin. (Heb. 2 explains this further.) Not only did God’s Son have to be human, however, but He had to be infinite—something only God is—in order for His sacrifice to be sufficient for the entire human race.
The problem, however, was that if God simply took the lives of sinful humans, humanity would cease to exist. A human death would be a just consequence for human sin, but such a death would not be redemptive. By sending His Son to take on human flesh and to die a human death that was sufficient for all humanity’s sin, God established a way for sinful humans to be released from the just consequence of death.
God provided a way to credit us with His own righteousness by providing, from Himself, the propitiatory sacrifice that would satisfy His own demand of death for sin. God’s Son became incarnate—fully God in a fully human body—a total mystery. He was without sin—he was spiritually alive from the moment of conception, not conceived in sin as we all were—the only human ever born who did not have to be born again and made spiritually alive. Jesus was born a sinless human—never spiritually dead and disconnected from the life of God. He lived a sinless life, and ultimately He gave up His own life on the cross, dying the death of a criminal but shedding innocent blood, as even Judas acknowledged after he betrayed Him.
This death of Jesus was the Sacrifice which substituted for every human being on the planet who ever had faith in God. Jesus shed human blood, but He was infinite and omnipotent, and His blood was sufficient for ALL of us humans. Jesus is a singularity that can never be repeated. When we believe Him and trust what He did, our sin is removed from us and placed on Jesus whose death has satisfied God’s demand and has paid for our sin.
In fact, Jesus’ shed blood is the reality which every animal sacrifice in the old covenant foreshadowed. His death is the Sacrifice which opens the way for us to approach God in repentance. It is the Sacrifice which always stands between us and God, guaranteeing that Jesus is forever interceding for us and ensuring that we can always worship the Lord in spirit and truth.
Our Romans passage goes on to say that this substitutionary death shows God’s righteousness.
Now here’s the interesting part. The next passage explains that before Jesus came, it appeared that God had “passed over” the sins of people who lived since the time of Adam to the cross. In other words, there was an unanswered question hanging in the universe: if the consequence of sin is death, why hasn’t God destroyed sinners?
Jesus’ death finally settled that question. God the Father sent God the Son to become a human so He could die and pay the price He demanded for human sin. All along Jesus was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the earth, but until He actually became incarnate and died, God’s righteousness hadn’t been fully demonstrated. Now, Jesus’ death demonstrated that God wasn’t taking sin lightly; rather, He was taking onto Himself the sin of humanity and paying the full price of His own curse on sin. Jesus’ death settled forever the question of why God hadn’t simply destroyed the sinful human race.
Just and Justifier
Now here’s the part that took my breath away. God sent Jesus—God the Son—so that we could clearly see that God is two things. First, He is just. He absolutely will demand the full penalty for every sin. Second, He is the Justifier. In other words, God the Just has taken full responsibility for paying the penalty of human sin for everyone who believes, and in so doing, He is also the justifier of all of us sinners who believe.
God IS just. God the Son bore the full measure of God’s wrath for my sin and yours—the FULL wrath. Concurrently, He is the Justifier of US! When we believe and trust His sacrifice as the full payment for our sin, He JUSTIFIES us! All our guilt—every cringing memory we have, every embarrassing and humiliating moment we have endured, both as a consequence of others’ sins against us and of our own sins against others—every moment and intention that we indulged in sins we couldn’t even help doing—they are forgiven because God has JUSTIFIED us through our trust in His Son’s perfect and infinite blood of the eternal covenant shed for us!
The One who is fully JUST is also the JUSTIFIER, the one who takes full responsibility for the guilt of my sins and JUSTIFIES me before Himself. He takes my full punishment of His own wrath, and He credits me with His own perfect righteousness before the almighty, righteous, triune God when I trust the sacrifice of the Son!
Here is my personal take-home from this remarkable passage. My only appropriate response to this miracle and mystery of justice and justification is to trust and believe in the Lord Jesus. When I do, I am justified and born again. I am credited with the perfect righteousness of God Himself; my life is hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3).
Solution for my guilt
Now I finally can trust God with my guilt and sins. Now I can admit to Him the ways I sinned without defending myself. Oh, yes—I have been sinned against in many deep and painful ways, and those sins against me set me up to sin against others—often without even intending to or even fully knowing I was sinning against them. In retrospect, however, I feel regret and guilt.
Now that I know Jesus has justified me, however, I can go “belly up” before Him and admit the sins I committed without rationalizing my circumstances or intentions. I can admit that my sins were sins when the Lord brings them to my remembrance, but once I do that, I can ask the Lord to redeem them.
For example, shortly after leaving Adventism, I became deeply convicted of the hundreds of students I had taught in Adventist schools whom I had urged to remain true to Adventism, persuading and convincing them that it was the right thing for them to do. Many listened to me.
I remember the day I sat in front of my computer and realized I had specifically taught all those students FALSE DOCTRINES and urged them to embrace a false gospel. I wept!
There was no way for me to contact those students by then, so I prayed and asked the Lord to forgive me for all those times I had endorsed Adventism to my unsuspecting and often trusting students. I asked Him to redeem my teaching in their lives. I asked Him to deal with those students and to bring them the truth of the gospel and to redeem all those ways I had unwittingly sinned against all those teenagers!
I have had to admit that I have sinned in many ways I hadn’t intended to sin, and I have reacted to people in ways that hurt them not because I wanted to hurt them but because I was reacting to triggers that caused me to hurt others when the real “trigger event” might have been something from my childhood.
I have not been able to deal with my guilt except by accepting the miracle of a just God becoming my Justifier. I know He paid for my sin, and I know that on this side of the cross, I can entrust to Him not only myself but also the people I have hurt. I can protect myself from dangerous people by putting up firm boundaries, but I can entrust those people to the Lord. I can give to Him my right to get even or to hurt them back. I can give up to Him my (perhaps legitimate) right to expect certain kinds of treatment or respect, trusting myself to the Lord who will give me a new identity in Him. He will fill my heart where those who have betrayed me have left gaping holes. He knows how to work in those people; I don’t.
My Justifier knows how to comfort me and to provide for me.
I know that God does not deal with His own children by piling us under guilt. When we are born again and belong to Him, He CONVICTS us. He never allows His true children to sin successfully, as our pastor Gary Inrig says. When we are His, He convicts us when act outside of faith. He leads us to repentance, and He shows us how to trust Him and to allow Him to be our strength and our defense.
Before we are born again, we do feel guilt because our natural position before God is “condemned sinner”. When we have trusted Him, however, our guilt is entirely gone, and His righteousness is credited to our account. From then on, the Lord convicts us of His will. His Spirit seals us, and He gives us a new heart and spirit. Our guilt is paid for in full. We may be deeply convicted we have sinned against God and against another, but if we are His, our just Justifier covers us with His righteous identity even as He shows us how to repent and how to go on living in the truth of His sufficient propitiation, one next-right-step at a time.
When we have trusted Jesus and know Him as our just Justifier, we can entrust our regrets to Him. They are safe with Him, because He has already paid their price. He can bring beauty out of ashes, and He will guard our hearts. †
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