A Resurrection Postscript: Saved by Justice

From Kevin DeYoung:

Though few would put it this way, it’s easy for Christians to think the cross is where love overcame holiness. Or to put it more prosaically: God saved us because he loves us so much he decided to look past our sins.  God is love and he loves to forgive our sins.

But that’s not exactly how justification works. We are not justified because God’s mercy triumphed over God’s justice. We are justified because in divine mercy, God sent his Son to the cross to satisfy divine justice. Mercy triumphs over judgment, but it does not remove the need for justice. We were saved not by the removal of justice, but by the satisfaction of it.

A Loud Declaration

The resurrection, then, is the loud declaration that there is nothing left to pay (cf. Rom. 4:25). Peter says in Acts 2:24, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Why was it impossible for Jesus to remain dead? Because God is more powerful than death and the devil? That’s certainly true, but there’s another reason. The grave could not hold the Son of Man because it had no claim on him. The wages of sin is death. So when sin is paid for, there is no obligation to pay the wages of sin.

Here’s how Charles Hodge puts it:

Our sins were the judicial ground of the sufferings of Christ, so that they were a satisfaction of justice; and his righteousness is the judicial ground of our acceptance with God, so that our pardon is an act of justice.

Think about that.  Our justification is not an act of legal fiction, but an act of justice.  God would be unjust if he did not pardon those who belong to Christ.  It would be a denial of his name, his character, his own justice.

I believe many of us have not begun to grasp just how good the good news is, just how secure our salvation is, just how completely and unalterably justified we are through faith in Christ. Mark this: God did not set aside the law in judging us; he fulfilled it.  Christ bore the curse of the law so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.  Not because we possess this righteousness, but because God credits it to our account.  So that, in one sense, at the moment when Christ died, it was what he deserved (by imputation).  And now by faith, blessing and mercy and favor are what we deserve (by imputation).

Justice is shot through the entire plan of redemption. People go to hell because God is just, and people go to heaven because God is just. We are not forgiven and justified because God waved his magic wand and decided to whitewash your faults. He has not overlooked the smallest speck of your sin. He demands justice for all of your iniquities. He demands justice for every last lustful look and proud thought and spiteful word. He demands justice for all of it. But praise God: the resurrection of the crucified Son of God assures us the demands of justice have been met.

The Resurrection Gospel

The resurrection is not a sentimental story about never giving up, or the possibility of good coming from evil. It is not first of all a story about how suffering can be sanctified, or a story of how Jesus suffered for all of humanity so we can suffer with the rest of humanity. The resurrection is the loud declaration that Jesus is enough–enough to atone for your sins, enough to reconcile you to God, enough to present you holy in God’s presence, enough to free you from the curse of the law, enough to promise you there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Something objectively happened on the cross, and that objective work was broadcast to the whole world by an empty tomb. The good news is not a generic message of love for everyone or hope for all. The gospel is the theological interpretation of historical fact. You might put the good news like this: Faith will be counted to us as righteousness when we believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom. 4:24-25).

Are There Any Gentlemen Left? Jane Austen vs. The Hook-Up Culture

Check out this intriguing article from the Front Porch Republic.

Carl Trueman on American Pastor Celebrity Culture

Interesting thoughts here as usual from Dr. Carl:

Now, I am aware that hero-worship is the sin of the worshipper, not necessarily the hero.  The factions in 1 Corinthians who claimed to follow Paul or, even more so, Jesus as their celebrity guru were clearly not encouraged to do so by their chosen leader.   Likewise an alcoholic barman who gets drunk on the job is himself responsible for his drunkenness; but if the bar owner hired him knowing of his drink problem, the bar owner too shares in the guilt.  Thus it is in the highly celebrified culture of the USA: church leaders who know that their people have a tendency to the sin of idolizing their heroes need to take account of that fact in how they decide to behave.  So here are my suggestions...

Read the rest.  


Via Z

A Moment for Perspective

Brethren,


Remember that amidst the concerns of Libya and budget issues/potential federal government shut-down (both of which are heavily relevant to American citizens and rightly capture our attention), we would do well to remember in our prayers before the Father several other issues on the world stage. Major, potentially world-changing events are happening or have happened. 


Governments have been toppled. Totalitarian regimes are being challenged. Protesters are being massacred. 


Far beyond weightiness of rising gas prices (which in the US are still a third of the cost that Europeans pay at the pump) and the monumental significance of Charlie Sheen's latest exploits, or Lindsay Lohan's most recent rehab session, millions of people, including many of our Christian brothers and sisters, are in very real chaos, turmoil, or life-threatening danger.


Please remember in prayer:


-Japan: pray for recovery and relief from the tsunami devastation, that the unstable nuclear reactors may come under control, and that the Gospel would take deep root and produce much fruit in an otherwise gospel-drought nation


For Nations that have undergone or are undergoing severe political unrest, violence, and government upheaval, pray that there might be good, just governments in these lands that have been wracked by injustice and tyranny for ages, and pray that the God who causes all empire to rise and fall would direct these events in lands of biblical origin, that many might come to saving faith in Him: 


-Bahrain
-Yemen 
-Egypt 
- Syria 
- Libya 
- The Ivory Coast


-Brazil (we have several Brazilian students here at the seminary whose families were directly/indirectly affected by this tragedy): pray for the grieving families of children killed in the tragic school shooting, and for the nation of people who are unused to instances of this kind of violence that we in the USA are, sadly, finding ourselves more and more un-phased. Pray also that God would get gospel glory and the Word would go forth and accomplish what he purposes for it, amidst the tragedy and heartache.


Consider the word of II Thessalonians 3:1 to be from your Christian brothers and sisters in these regions:


Finally, brethren, pray for us that the word of the Lord will spread rapidly and be glorified, just as it did also with you.

The Simplest, Most Complex Commercial

What Kind of Feast For You?

“They enjoy breakfast more than the testimony of their salvation.”

John Calvin on the sometimes worldliness of his congregation on Sunday morning.

via: KDY

The Real World

By Tony Esolen

When my daughter was young, she would often be asked, not usually by fellow homeschoolers, why she kept reading The Lord of the Rings. I told her to reply, "Because I want to know what's going on in the world."

That came to my mind today after a discussion I had with a Catholic men's group at our school. One of the young fellows told me that his professor in Introduction to Sociology -- a typical course assigned during orientation to unsuspecting freshmen -- expressed her disdain for our twenty-credit Development of Western Civilization Program, required of all students. "You should be studying something that will be of use to you in the Real World," she said, "like feminist sociology."

Pause here to allow the laughter to die down.

Homo academicus saecularis sinister, the creature beside whom I have spent all my adult life, is a source of endless entertainment, like a child with wobbly consonants trying to talk serious grownup. I really could not repress the merriment. "If somebody said that to me," I laughed, "who was a construction worker, or who went down in the mines, or quarried rock, or built roads, I'd say, 'Fellow, you're wrong about that,' but at least I'd say there was something to what he'd said." But homo academicus saecularis sinister doesn't really have much regard for the men who do that. HASS never drives down the highway, saying, "You know, I'm quite lucky, because I don't have to break my back in the sun, and I get three months of the year off, and am paid quite well compared with what a man or a woman who does something absolutely necessary is paid, as for instance the men who rolled the asphalt on this road I'm speeding on." Indeed HASS will complain about never being paid in accordance with his or her intelligence, which, according to the most reliable testimony, that of HASS -- who should know best, after all -- is astonishingly high.

When I hear a phrase like "The Real World," I must confess that I fall into the sin of detraction. That is, I immediately detract fifteen points of intelligence and ten points of common sense from my interlocutor. If it's followed by such phrases as "today's society" or "the global marketplace" or "thinking outside the box," I inevitably turn to an object of greater interest, a child playing in a sandbox, a retriever wagging his doggy tail, or the purple streaks of cloud gathering in the west. I dearly hope that my students will never consider the sand-furrowing child, or the galumphing retriever, or the setting sun, to be anything other than deeply Real, mysteriously and beautifully and achingly Real, and that their encounter with the great poetry and art of the west, not to mention that perennial philosophy of Aristotle, and that wisdom-seeking eros of Plato, and the word of God itself, will confirm them in their love for that Reality.

One of the students said, "She's overeducated," but alas, that is not true. If I were to take my friend the truck driver to the Sistine Chapel, he would not be so foolish, I am sure, as to say, "Hmm, a lot of naked people falling all over themselves." He would sense that there was a mystery there to which he'd hope someone might introduce him, to lead him by the hand, saying, "Notice the electric space between the finger of God and the finger of Adam," or "See how Michelangelo has painted his own face in the sagging skin held by Saint Bartholomew." My friend might be slightly undereducated for an hour in the Sistine Chapel -- and who, for that hour, would not be? But the college professor who sniffs at the Gilgamesh, Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the letters of Saint Paul -- just to take the first semester for example -- is not overeducated. That professor is undereducated, andoverschooled, a deadly combination. Deadly, but common enough, from what I see, and especially common among people who reduce all matters to contemporary partisan politics, ashomo academicus saecularis sinister is wont to do.

Posted by Anthony Esolen at 08:20 PM | Permalink from Touchstone Magazine