Not Guilty
“Have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?
“What is your verdict?”
This was my first time on a jury, and for some reason, I had been chosen as foreperson; I had written our decision on the Issue Paper, and now I was being asked to announce our decision in open court.
"Not guilty," I replied, seeing rather than hearing the defendant, the 'accused' as he had been for the past few hours, express relief. He'd be able to walk free from the courtroom in no time, fully justified.
How relieved he must have been to learn that the charges levelled against him were baseless and that he was free to walk away from punishment.
On behalf of a jury of twelve men and women I had declared the man, justified, the charge against him had no foundation, and he was un-condemned.
He was saved……….
How frequently have we asked or been asked, "Are you saved?," and how frequently have we been answered or answered with a simple "yes, praise the Lord!"
….. But how often have we truly grasped the significance of that straightforward response?
Do we fully understand what we are saved from?
The man in the dock, the accused, was saved from a possible prison term or at the very best a severe fine and community service.
What are we saved from, and more importantly what are we telling others that they need to be saved from?
Well, the verse that seems to be universally known is that in John 3:16
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
It would seem that the danger here is one of perishing, we will all perish if we do not trust Christ; but what does perishing mean?
Fortunately, things become clearer as we read on.
"He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already."
The issue is not simply dying, but being judged by God.....
I had witnessed the accused's fear and apprehension in my court case as he was judged by a jury of his peers...but to be judged by God!
John 3:36 brings even more clarity and what a climactic and sobering end to the chapter.
“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”
To perish means that we remain under the wrath of God, and there cannot be a more terrifying place to be.
But you wouldn't think so if you heard some people preach the Gospel; all you'd think is that failing to believe and trust Christ Jesus simply prevents you from living your best life now, that it impedes your chances of success and fulfilment, of good health and happiness, that it prevents great relationships or profitable employment, and so on....and while these things can be blessings from God, there is little or no mention of God's wrath, of condemnation, of separation from God, of torment… consequently, there is no message of being delivered from this judgement, which begs the question of why!
You and I, along with the gentleman whose court case I sat through, are sinful beings, we fall short of the glory of God and that is our status in this world. We do not and cannot come up to the standard that God requires of us. We cannot come into God’s Kingdom because we are simply not good enough, not holy enough, not righteous enough, what does God's word say about our righteousness?
“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind, our sins sweep us away.”
Our righteous acts do us no good, they carry no merit with God.
And, yes, those filthy rags are menstrual rags; the language is strong but accurate; our "righteous acts" are as repulsive to God as soiled feminine hygiene products.
How then can the judge of all the earth, Almighty God who is perfectly holy receive sinful creatures into His presence?
The answer is justification by faith alone.
In the same way that I declared the accused "not guilty" in my court case, the justification the bible speaks of is a verdict of "not guilty," a declaration of being completely righteous, but it is a divine verdict, a favourable verdict in the Courts of Heaven, a reversal of God's attitude toward the sinner, the polar opposite of being condemned.
However, while God is a merciful judge, he is also a just judge, and we have been found guilty before God, and God's favourable verdict of being declared righteous before Him is given to us based on Jesus Christ's sinless life and substitutionary death on the cross.
It is also important to recognise that God does not make us righteous in ourselves, that is the work of Sanctification, the experience of being set apart for God, of becoming obedient to God's Word in our lives. It is a progressive righteousness that is imparted to us as a gift, but, and this is important to realise, not until we are glorified will our righteousness be perfected and we are conformed without sin to our Saviour.
Although justification occurs the moment we believe in the person, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and place our faith in Him for our salvation, it is far more than a simple pardon; a pardon alone would still leave us as sinners without merit, with nothing to commend ourselves to God. So, when God justifies, He imputes, or credits, divine righteousness to the sinner.
You may have heard the metaphor that we stand in our filthy garments, our stinky unrighteous rags that are disgusting, stained, and smelling from our sin.
We stand before God in these horrible disgusting filthy garments, and as we put our faith and trust in Christ, as we stand there, loathsome with sin on the inside and clothed with our unrighteousness on the outside, our sin is imputed to Christ, and we are forgiven – our sin is punished in the body of Christ - all sin is punished - but a believer's sin is punished in the body of Christ.
As God looks upon us, he washes away all our stinky, filthy, unrighteousness, he washes it all away.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
But that still leaves us naked; our sins are gone, as are our filthy rags of unrighteousness; we are washed, washed clean, but then we're back to square one....we are clean but without any righteousness. So, God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us; God takes the clothing of Christ's righteousness and clothes us from head to toe, and we are presented before God, and all he sees is the perfect righteousness of Christ; our sins are removed as far as the east is from the west, never to be seen again, and we have been clothed with Jesus Christ's perfect righteousness. God now sees us as those who are righteous in His sight.
The astounding outcome of this justification is that there is now no condemnation for the believer.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life has set you free, in Christ Jesus, from the law of sin and death.”
Previously we were condemned and under the wrath of God and now we are declared legally to be the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus and we now stand faultless before the throne of God. This means that no sin a believer can commit-past, present, or future-can be held against him since the penalty was paid by Christ and His righteousness was imputed (credited) to the believer.
Justification elevates the believer to a place of full acceptance and divine privilege in Jesus Christ. We have moved from being under God’s wrath to being under God’s blessing.
1 Corinthians 1:30 – “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,”
Romans 4:5 "To the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.”
The defendant in my court case who was declared not guilty was deserving of that decision, there was no evidence to suggest that he had committed the crime he was accused of.
But what about us, have we committed any crime to be justified from?
Paul tells us in Romans 3:23 that well have committed the same crime.
"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
And in Romans 6:23 we see the penalty for that sin
"The wages of sin is death," that is, perishing.
We have all sinned. And sin deserves perishing.
Before we were Christians before we saw the preciousness, the sacrifice, and value of Christ and His atoning death, we were running blindly down a hill, our bodies gathering momentum as we ran forward, knowing there was a chasm ahead but unsure how far away it was from us and giving little thought, if any, to what lay over the edge…..
Others had run this way, had fallen over the edge and rather than wonder what had become of them, we celebrated their run, hoping that our race would be as long and as successful as theirs……but still we never considered what was over the edge.
And as we ran, God sent others to warn us, to tell us we were going the wrong way, that our path was unsafe….but when we looked we saw that our path was smooth, it was wide, it became easier as we ran faster and faster…what could go wrong!
But then God in His mercy, through the Holy Spirit, allowed us to see, to understand, he enlightened us to see the folly of our own way, to see the truth of Jesus Christ and he gave us the gift of saving faith, a faith that allowed us to place our trust in Christ for our salvation.
And as we came to Jesus at that moment, in the act of justification he reversed our status and standing with himself.
Before justification we were condemned, we were hurling down that hill with only one destination available to us. We were under the curse of the law, the wrath of God, we were the enemy of God, but the moment we believed it was a total reversal of our status and standing before God; we went from condemned to no condemnation.
It is an extraordinary and completely undeserved act; it is all by Grace, not one of us deserves to be justified, we have all broken God’s law, we all fall short, weighed in the balance there is no way we could ever come level to the weight of God’s Glory with our own efforts. We could never keep the law because you only need to break one tiny little law to break it completely.
Paul, you remember, called himself the worst of sinners, this giving, this declaring of righteousness to the worst of us magnifies the Grace, the Glory and the Greatness of God, as he declares righteous those who are the furthest away from Him.
God’s declaration of justification is free, there is nothing we can do to gain it, to earn it, to grasp it, apart from believing in His son, Jesus Christ, the one who earned it. We say don’t we that we are not saved by works…well, we are saved by works…just not our works, but the works of Jesus Christ, who lived in our place, died in our place, and lived a sinless life and died as a substitute for us, he bore all our sin…all our sins. It is the finished work of Christ that is given to us.
This righteousness that is deposited into your account, this righteousness that God clothes you with is not theoretical, it’s not just an idea, a concept, a thought, it was achieved in a moment of time, in history when Jesus Christ came among us to live a perfect sinless life. Galatians 4:4 says that he was born by woman and born under the law.
A man under the law he kept that law perfectly, this is the law that I have broken, that you have broken…so many times…unbelievable amounts of times, with only one sin needed to condemn us.
You want to know how holy God is…Adam sinned just once…and the whole human race was condemned….that’s how holy God is. God loathes sin and cannot live with sin, but this righteousness we have been talking about is the righteousness that Jesus achieved, on our behalf in His sinless life and substitutionary death upon the cross.
It is all in Christ, you won’t find it anywhere else, not in good living, not in good deeds, not in your own attempts to gain favour with God, not in anything except Jesus Christ. There is only one mediator between man and God, the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Timothy 2:5) Christ took all the wrath, anger, the crushing judgement of God upon himself as he took our punishment for our sin.
Not only was it the physical pain he suffered, but the heavy crushing wrath of God.
Never will we go through that, never will we be sentenced to death, never will we suffer as Christ suffered for sin…never will we hear the words “guilty” as we stand in the courtroom of Heaven because Christ suffered in our place, no condemnation for us.
Never will we be separated from God, from our Father….because Christ took it all..for me and for you and for whoever believes and puts their faith in Christ.
It is all extraordinary and I am sometimes lost for words to express the level of gratitude I have, that a thrice Holy God would send his Son to die in my place so that I can be declared righteous.
Those who put their faith and trust in Christ Jesus can have their sins paid for by Christ, can stand righteous before God, and nothing, no charge, can be brought against us.
All those years we have lived, all our behaviour throughout our lives, the things we have forgotten, the things we have done that we desperately want to forget….childhood, teenage years, marriage, work, business…..all the times we ignored God, refused to look to Christ, all the things we did, laid out before us in heaven, as the books are opened….all of these sins punished…but punished in Christ if we have put our faith and trust in Jesus, who bore our sins on the cross and secured our righteousness in Him.
— there are many things in life that we are unsure about, decisions we must make, and we find ourselves in situations that require us to make choices; some are good choices, others are downright difficult with no right outcome. However, regardless of what is happening in your life right now, whatever problems you and I are carrying, whatever situations that are affecting your life right now, whatever decisions you have to make, there is one thing that is absolutely certain in your life, you have hope:
Christ has given us a new heart, a new hope, peace with God, and a new future — by giving himself, bloodied on a cross, for us.
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”
This is the ground of our hope; that in ourselves we have no right to come into God’s holy presence, but God himself said in His word, in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died in our place and bore all our sin and if we believe in Him, then His righteousness would count for us, to make us acceptable to God. The goal then of our hope is to see the glory of God; this is the hope that will wipe away every tear and correct every wrong and make us feel that it was all worth it.
“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,”
All the glory of God that we will experience on the other side of death or when He returns will outweigh all pain in this life — regardless of how much.
All the misery you ever experienced in this life will be outweighed by an eternity spent in the presence of the glory of God, and you will realise it was a light and momentary affliction by comparison….all this because we place our faith and trust in Christ Jesus, the Son of God who died in our place and bore all our sins, that His righteousness would count for us.
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