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. [Romans 3:23-25 (ESV)]
“Chocolate comes from cacao beans. Beans are vegetables. Salads are made of vegetables. Therefore, chocolate is a salad!” said the sign in the bakery. “I like their logic!” I thought. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight you probably know the loopholes used by dieters. Broken cookies have no calories because they fell out when the cookies broke, anything eaten with a diet soda is calorie-free, and food eaten off someone else’s plate doesn’t count because the original calories belong to them! Technically, anything licked off a spoon while preparing food isn’t eating; it’s cooking! Furthermore, if you’re eating with someone else, you’ve kept to your diet if the other person consumes more than you! As a once struggling dieter, I know all the excuses to justify over indulging. The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves and, unfortunately, most of them aren’t as silly as these.
When I first learned that Christians were justified, I thought about the kinds of excuses we make to justify, validate, or defend our less than stellar behavior. Like Adam (who justified his sin by blaming Eve), we continue to justify or excuse our sins. We rationalize that it wasn’t our fault, it was harmless flirtation, we were only joking, everybody else did it, nobody was hurt by it, it really wasn’t gossip because it was true, no one warned us, or my children’s all-time favorite—the other guy started it! Since we often justify our bad behavior to avoid condemning it, the Christian term justification can be puzzling. Today, outside of the Christian church, the words “justify” and “justification” are used to excuse, defend, support, prove correct, or to vindicate one’s actions in the eyes of man or the law. While a legally justified man would be an innocent man in a court of law, justification means something else theologically.
Simply put, Christian justification is the removal and forgiveness of our sins and requires nothing more than faith in Jesus Christ. When the Apostle Paul said Christ-followers are justified, he was saying that we have been made righteous by the Lord; we’ve been cleared of all charges and any punishment related to our sins. Jesus’ cleansing us of our sins, however, is a whole lot different than our excusing or rationalizing them. When we justify, defend, rationalize, or excuse our sinful behavior, we claim to be innocent and continue to sin. On the other hand, when we are justified by Christ, there is no question of our guilt. We are acquitted, not because we are innocent, but because Jesus paid our penalty and took our punishment!
Justification, however, is not a “get out of jail free” card in the here and now. Sin’s consequences don’t disappear with God’s forgiveness and our salvation. Our justification before God does not mean that we won’t have to deal with the aftermath of our foolishness and disobedience. While we won’t face eternal consequences, we should expect to face temporal ones!
Jesus did the work regarding our justification but the rest is up to us. Justification means that we have the responsibility to live as God wants us to live. When we received forgiveness through faith, we also were sanctified and received Jesus’ righteousness. With the power of His Holy Spirit, we are to grow more and more like Christ which, among other things, means that we can no longer justify or defend our sins. We can never separate the faith needed for justification from obedience; true faith entails obedience and true obedience needs faith. We may be able to lie to ourselves (especially when in a bakery) but we better remember that we never can lie to God!
Through the death of Christ on the cross making atonement for sin, we get a perfect standing before God. That is justification, and it puts us, in God’s sight, back in Eden before sin entered. God looks upon us and treats us as if we had never sinned. [A.C. Dixon]
After being asked, “How different would the world look if everyone got what they deserved?” I started wondering. Even as a child, I knew people didn’t get what they deserved. When I was ten, I watched on television as nine black students tried to enroll in an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas; they were blocked by the National Guard and an angry mob of 400 angry whites. Two years earlier, on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman. I grew up in Detroit and, while discrimination and segregation were more subtle than in the South, it existed. I lived in a large home with a big yard on a tree-lined street but any bus trip “downtown” told me that the people of color didn’t live in neighborhoods like mine. There may not have been “colored” drinking fountains or “white only” bathrooms but there was a six-foot high, one-foot wide, and half-mile long wall segregating one black community from a neighboring white one. Many other invisible and more impenetrable walls existed within our divided city.
Devotions of the Heart 