If you have not yet believed Paul’s good news message, you have not yet accepted the gift of your salvation. You are standing only in the righteousness your flesh has been able to produce for you, which means you have missed the mark of the righteousness God requires for heaven. What Paul wants us to see in Romans chapter 4, is that God justified Abraham (declared Abraham to be righteous) solely on the basis of Abraham’s belief. Abraham learned that it would not be his own fleshly production that would accomplish God’s purpose for him. It is significant when we think about Abraham’s faith, that God wanted Abraham to place no confidence in his flesh. Paul wants to make it crystal clear that Abraham was not justified according to a ritual, a ceremonial observance, even the ritual of circumcision that Abraham was given to perform.
“That we might be made” is the subjunctive mood. It is not that everyone will be made, it is that those who believe might be made the very righteousness of God in the Savior, which is what dwelling with God through eternity is all about. There is no more powerful message than that, God was using Jesus’ death for the sins of the entire world as his criteria to no longer impute sins to the world. The issue is not our sins today, most people think sin is the issue, so they are looking for ways to keep short accounts. The issue is: In order to dwell with God in eternity future; we have to be as righteous as God, his justice will not allow nothing other, and until you believe what happened to the sins Jesus died for concerning yourself, you are not placed into the Savior.
When Paul refers to us as the called, he is referring not just to the fact that God is extending a call to us, an invitation or summons. Paul’s also referring to the fact that God’s calling us to participate in that to which we have been called, the body of the Savior. The body of the Savior is an expression denoting the point when God began to judicially join believers to his son. The body of the Savior is not about program, but about judicial identity. God forgave us, not because he had to, but because it was his desire too. God accomplished through Jesus what we could never do on our own. God did not wait for us to do the first step. God had a choice, Jesus Christ had a choice, and they chose to do it. Jesus believed that his sacrifice would settle the sin issue once and for all, and that God would raise him from among the dead.
What an ingenious salvation plan, to take someone else that is righteous and join us to that person. Sin causes a debt to God so large that it can never be paid by ourselves, but the person who knows what Jesus really accomplished, exist in a completely new relationship with God. Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive. God could only declare us to be right on the bases of who and what he is, not on the bases of who and what we would be apart from him. God had to devise a way to see us that way, and the way he devised to do that was by joining us to, hiding us in our perfectly righteous Savior, thus freely crediting to our account Jesus’ righteousness.
Total forgiveness for total sin, accomplished by the one time death of Jesus, and because of Jesus’ payment for all sin, there is now no more reason for the believer to ever feel alienated, estranged from God. All who will accept reconciliation on the bases of Jesus’ death and resurrection are forever reconciled to God, that is grace. All people as a whole was reconciled to God where sin is concerned and that is grace. Reconciliation is the link that connects Grace and Peace. Jesus’ victory over death affects the believer’s understanding of physical and eternal death. The believer can face physical death with the confidence that Jesus has swallowed up death in victory, because Paul was eagerly awaiting God’s purpose for Paul.
The glory that Paul knew would be revealed in him at the manifestation of the sons of God, when the sons of God receive their glorified bodies when the believers meet Jesus in the air (not on the earth). For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. When the curtain drops and this present age comes to an end, it will be a glorious time when our blessed hope is realized. God has more in store for his grace age saints, not only heaven, but an authoritative position, a joint place of authority in the heavenly realm.
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