What remains is for the human race on their own part to be reconciled to God. God has already forgiven them their trespasses and forgotten their sins through what the death of his son accomplished. The fact is Paul taught that God loves the human race so much that the magnitude of his love is almost incomprehensible to imagine. God used one major event in history to demonstrate the depth of his love; allowing his own son to die on the tree of crucifixion for the sinful human race. One must understand the reconciliation where the human races sin is concerned. Rather than judging the human race for their sins, God judged his son for the human races sins.
The Apostle Paul was commissioned to tell people that God is reconciled where the totality of the sin debt of all the human is concerned; sin is no longer the issue on the table of God’s justice today. How much forgiveness does everyone have according to the Apostle Paul? It has all been forgiven upfront; there is not an ounce of forgiveness to be obtained. The reconciliation that Jesus accomplished for the human race was total, complete, and unalterable, it will always stand. God is reconciled where the entirety the human races sin debt is concerned; there is no sin left on an individual to forgive.
This is not to the saved, we know we are reconciled, but now all have access to God, a change in status for the entire world. Does this mean the entire world is save? save? No! Everyone has to have an individual change of status and that takes place when we accept what God’s son accomplished for us. The issue with God is what his son accomplished, not sin. Who in the world are people asking for forgiveness from? From God! Therefore, the assumption is that he is not reconciled when people sin. In peoples mind, they are separating themselves from God by their sin, and Paul is saying that God has already reconciled the human race where their sins are concerned.
Seems like Paul should have been able to make great progress with his message of grace. We are given our righteous standing as a free gift, it is a grace gift given by God and we receive it the instant we place our faith in Jesus’ faithfulness having resolved God’s justice for our sins when Jesus offered himself a sacrifice for those sins. This gift decree of righteousness comes totally apart from any and all human promise, any or all human performance or any or all human production. God will never consider peoples works as a payment for God’s justifying declaration. To say your works have anything at all to do with God’s gift declaration of righteousness is to slap the giver in the face.
Eve was deceived and she missed the ball unintentionally, but not Adam. Adam purposely took his eyes off the ball and when he dropped his bat; he lost the ball game for the human race. What made that such a catastrophic loss for the human race is heightened by the fact that people are unable to do anything to alter their moral choice of good and bad condition. Human wisdom, human reasoning would say, “Give us a law. Give us something that we can do. Give us some way to perform. Give us a few balls of our own to hit so that we might earn back what we lost through Adam.” God’s reasoning said, “Impossible!” Why? The Law that he gave to Israel was a measure of what the human race would have to perform to be accepted by God.
God would have to do for the human race what the human race was totally incapable of doing for themselves. God would of necessity have to credit the righteous faithfulness of someone else to account of hopeless and helpless human race. The word “Redemption” has to do with a ransom. So, Jesus paid the price necessary to satisfy the Father’s justice for all the sins of the human race. The human race was given a Redeemer and the price the Redeemer paid through the shedding of his blood dripping on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant, to ransom the human race was a satisfactory payment to take those sins off the table of God’s justice forever!
However, the fact that Jesus became a redeemer of all the human race does not mean that all the human race will accept the gift the redeemer purchased on their behalf. Jesus’ faithfulness was the only faithfulness sufficient to merit God’s favor. God used our faith in Jesus’ faithfulness as the means whereby he would credit Jesus’ righteousness to all them that believe. To believe is to receive! To be justified does not mean to be perfectly righteous in performance. It also does not mean to become perfectly righteous or even more righteous in performance through time, it means having Jesus’ perfect righteousness freely credited to the account of the ungodly who believe.
We didn’t receive our righteous standing before God by the things we’ve done in the past that we might consider to be righteous. We certainly don’t maintain it by the things we continue to do or what we promise God that we’ll do that we might consider to be righteous. Our justification was something accomplished for us by God’s grace. Understanding the Grace of God results in joy. The mind set of joy will not come apart from understanding the Grace we have in this age of Grace. Many lack joy from not understanding that justification is compete.
The New Creation, this is the thing that’s brand new, but the Old Things being passed away does not mean that believers are now sinless at all. New identity in God’s son comes only by way of being placed into God’s son, the miraculous, judicial transaction called Sanctification; joined to Jesus. You were identified with every aspect of the one to whom you were joined at the point of your belief. When Jesus died, it’s just as though you died from the judicial viewpoint of God. When Jesus was buried, it’s just as though you were buried right alongside Jesus from God’s viewpoint. When God raised Jesus from among the dead, you rose from among the dead from God’s perspective.
Sanctification is a set-apartness that comes by way of baptism into Jesus, not immersion into water, but immersion into a person. God, through his power from on high is the Baptizer in this instance. Pastors do not perform this baptism. The 12 apostles did not perform this baptism. Jesus never performed this baptism. Paul himself never performed this baptism. Only God can perform this baptism and he performs it through his power from on high the instant you take God at his Word and there’s no water involved. Identification through union and every believer is set apart through union with the Savior himself.
If God is no longer imputing the human races sins unto them because he imputed those sins to his son, would that mean that the entire human race would then instantaneously become dead to sin? The answer is no, because Reconciliation and Sanctification are not one and the same doctrine. They are two different doctrinal truths. No one is dead to sin apart from being baptized into Jesus, even though God is not imputing the human races sins to their account, no person is placed into his son apart from belief. We are not called to be saints, we are called saints, Holy Ones. Sainthood is not earned at all. It’s not something to be sought after as though it could be attained to or something that only comes for a select few.
We’re not in the process of becoming something new and different. We’re not even in an instantaneously cleaned up version of the former creation. We’re not a sinless version of who we once were. We are at the very instance of our belief a brand new creation. God sees us in a brand new way. In the fact, that it’s called a new creation, it tells us this new creation as God sees it, is not an extension of some former creation. In other wards, we are not an extension of believing Israel time past carried on over in some form to the Age of Grace. God has designed believers to be a brand new unique organism operating as a living breathing manifestation of the Savior’s Body right here on earth.
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