Justified by Faith
Lenten Season: Third Sunday in Lent, Sunday, 23 March 2014.
Rev. Bruce Skelton, Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Highlands Ranch, Colorado
A young Scottish lad and lassie were sitting on a low stonewall, holding hands, and just gazing out over the loch. After several minutes of sitting silently, the girl grew a little impatient and leaned over and whispered in the boys ear, "A penny for your thoughts, Angus."
"Well, uh, I was thinkin'.” He muttered, “I was thinkin perhaps it's aboot time for a wee kiss."
The girl blushed, then leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. And then he blushed.
And the two turned once again to gaze out over the loch. After a while the girl spoke again.
"Another penny for your thoughts, Angus."
The young man knit his brow.
"Well, now," he said, "my thoughts are a bit more serious this time."
"Really?" said the girl, filled with anticipation.
"Aye," said the lad. "Din'na ye think it's aboot time ye paid me that first penny you promised me?"
Perhaps you have to be a Scott to understand that one. At any rate I believe many people view God as the same way Angus approached his girlfriend. They are looking for a something a little different from God. Many look for worldly things, when the greatest blessings that God has to offer are those things that we cannot lay our hands on. As St. Paul reminds us in our Epistle Lesson: “THEREFORE, SINCE WE HAVE BEEN JUSTIFIED BY FAITH, WE HAVE PEACE WITH GOD THROUGH OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST!”
What good new that is for us. God is no longer angry with us because of our sin. Instead, He wants to make peace. In fact, He already has made peace with us because Jesus took away God’s anger at our sin. That’s the thought that is summed up in that beautiful word justified. It’s the Greek verb dikaiowo and this is what Bible scholar William Barclay has to say about it:
“All Greek verbs that end in” owo” do not mean to prove or make a person something. They always mean to treat or account a person as something. If God justifies the sinner, it does not mean that He finds reasons to prove that the sinner was right. Far from it. It means that God treats the sinner as if he had not been a sinner at all. Instead of treating him as a criminal to be obliterated, God treats him as a child to be loved. That is what justification means.”
In other words, our justification means a change in our status. It means that God does not view us as His enemies to be destroyed, instead He considers us as His sons and daughters, forgiven and free. And all thanks to what Jesus did for us on the cross. However, Jesus’ death on the cross didn’t just affect a change in our status, but also a change in our state or condition, the way we live our lives. We call that sanctification, the process of the Holy Spirit working within us to make us more holy like Jesus.
That’s what Paul was getting at in our text, when he said that now that we’ve been justified, we rejoice in our sufferings. In other words, justification leads to sanctification - because we’re saved, we live our lives a way that’s different from the rest of the world. And rejoicing in suffering truly is different. Notice, Paul doesn’t say we rejoice “because of” our suffering. We’re certainly not happy when we are in pain or when bad things happen to us. But when they do come, we should react differently from the rest of the world. We can rejoice, because we know our suffering isn’t meaningless. God has a purpose in it, to strengthen our Christian character and fill us with hope. That’s why we can rejoice in our sufferings. As a matter of fact, in the Greek text Paul puts it a bit more strongly than that. He literally says that we can boast in our sufferings. And the reason we can boast, is because no matter what happens to us, we know that our good and gracious God will take care of us!
But do we always do that? Do we rejoice in our sufferings or do we gripe about them? Do we boast about God’s great deeds, or do we blame Him for our troubles and thanklessly boast about how we go ourselves out of them? If so, then perhaps it is because the motivation for our sanctification has gotten messed up. I’m told that there’s a collection letter sent out by an ingenious collection agency that produces terrific results. It’s supposedly a two-page letter, but the first page is missing. The top of the second page, the one that’s actually sent, reads: “And we’re sure you don’t want us to do that to you, do you!”
Fortunately, that is not how God deals with you and me. He doesn’t try to motivate us by the fear of the Law, but by the comfort of the Gospel. For the Law may get results, but as far as God’s concerned they’re the wrong kind of results. You see, the Law’s main purpose is to bring us back from our destructive ways and shoo us towards the Gospel. For only the Gospel can produce the right results and the right attitude behind the results. Thus, if you and I are living our Christian lives out of fear, then the motivation for our sanctificaiton has gotten messed up. And we once again need to hear the pure Gospel message.
You see, that’s the real thing that Paul was boasting about in our text. As He summed it up in verse 11: “MORE THAN THAT, WE ALSO REJOICE (OR BOAST) IN GOD THROUGH OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, THROUGH WHOM WE HAVE NOW RECEIVED RECONCILIATION!” Reconciliation - that’s the key to living our Christian lives with the proper motivation; namely, because we have been reconciled to God. Certainly reconciliation is what those folks at the collection agency need - a settling of differences between them and those who owe them money. Well, that’s exactly what Jesus provided for you and me, when He died on the cross. He paid the debt of our sin in full and settled our differences. He reconciled us to the Father.
Interestingly enough, the Greek word reconcile actually means: ‘to exchange.’ And isn’t that what Jesus did? He exchanged our sin for His righteousness. He exchanged God’s anger for His love. He exchanged our enmity with God for friendship with our Creator. In other words, He made us one with God. It’s similar to the Old Testament concept of atonement. In the Old Testament, we read that on the Day of Atonement, the people of Israel would take a goat and send it out into the wilderness. One man would lead the goat with a rope and the rest of the people would follow close behind it, pulling out its wool, pricking it, spitting on it and urging it to be gone. In this manner they would bring the goat to the edge of a cliff in the middle of the desert. Once they were there, they would tie a scarlet string around the goat’s neck and attach the scarlet string to a rock. Then they would push the rock over the cliff, thereby causing the goat to plummet to its death.
This unusual ceremony signified to the people that their sins were gone for good. That’s why a goat was used. The goat had long been a symbol of evil and wickedness. It represented the sins the people had committed in the past year. And it was taken out to the wilderness, because that was thought to be the abode of the demons, the very dwelling-place of the devil himself. Thus, by leading this goat out into the wilderness and pushing it off a cliff, the people were symbolically taking their pasts sins and taking them back to the devil, back to the place they had come from. That was the method God had given the Hebrews for escaping from their sins. And that’s where we get our term scapegoat.
However, this was all meant to be a foreshadow leading up to our Savior Jesus Christ. He is the true scapegoat, who took all the blame for our iniquity, so that we could be set free. Now the ancient Hebrews had a legend that on the Day of Atonement, at the very moment when the goat was pushed over the cliff, the scarlet string around its neck turned white to show that their sins had been purified. Well, when Jesus was pushed over the cliff of Mount Calvary, so to speak, that legend became a reality. By His scarlet blood we are purified. And the most wonderful part about it is the God did not wait until we had our act together before He came to our rescue. He did it while we were still sinners. As verse 8 of our text says: “WHILE WERE STILL SINNERS, CHRIST DIED FOR US!” In other words, that old saying about how God helps those who help themselves has got it all wrong, because God helps the helpless.
My friends, that is the one and only proper motivation for our sanctification. Because Jesus atoned for our sins, and reconciled us to God - that’s why we live for Him. That’s why we can boast, even in the face of our suffering and troubles - because we have been justified through faith. May God empower us to do just that, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.