GOD’S PROMISE
There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
—Romans 8:1
New York City.
If you want a view of the skyline, visit the Brooklyn Bridge.
For entertainment go to Broadway.
Looking for inspiration? Tour the Statue of Liberty.
Like to shop? The stores on Fifth Avenue await your credit card.
But if you want to be depressed, utterly overwhelmed, and absolutely distraught, take a cab to the corner of Avenue of the Americas and West Forty-Fourth Street and spend a few moments in the presence of the US National Debt Clock. The sign is twenty-five feet wide, weighs fifteen hundred pounds, and uses 306 bulbs to constantly, mercilessly, endlessly declare the US debt and each family’s share. The original clock wasn’t built to run backward, but that feature has seldom been needed. Plans to install an updated model that can display some quadrillion dollars have been discussed.1 If debt is a tidal wave, according to this sign the undertow is going to suck us out to sea.
I’m not an economist; I’m a preacher. But my monetary experience has taught me this: when people owe more than they own, expect trouble.
Again, I’m not an economist. I’m a preacher, which may explain the odd question that occurred to me as I pondered the debt clock. What if heaven had one of these? A marquee that measured, not our fiscal debt, but our spiritual one? Scripture often refers to sin in financial terminology. Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts” (Matt. 6:12). If sin is a debt, do you and I have a dot matrix trespass counter in heaven? Does it click at each infraction?
We lie. Click.
We gossip. Click.
We demand our way. Click.
We doze off while reading a Lucado book. Click, click, click.
Talk about depressing. A financial liability is one matter, but a spiritual one? The debt of sin has a serious consequence. It separates us from God.
Your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear. (Isa. 59:2)
The algebra of heaven reads something like this: heaven is a perfect place for perfect people, which leaves us in a perfect mess. According to heaven’s debt clock we owe more than we could ever repay. Every day brings more sin, more debt, and more questions like this one: “Who will deliver me?” (Rom. 7:24 NKJV).
The realization of our moral debt sends some people into a frenzy of good works. Life becomes an unending quest to do enough, be better, accomplish more. A pursuit of piety. We attend church, tend to the sick, go on pilgrimages, and go on fasts. Yet deep within is the gnawing fear, What if, having done all that, I’ve not done enough?
Other people respond to the list, not with activity, but unbelief. They throw up their hands and walk away exasperated. No God would demand so much. He can’t be pleased. He can’t be satisfied. He must not exist. If he does exist, he is not worth knowing.
Two extremes. The legalist and the atheist. The worker desperate to impress God. The unbeliever convinced there is no God. Can you relate to either of the two? Do you know the weariness that comes from legalism? Do you know the loneliness that comes from atheism?
What do we do? Are despair and disbelief the only options?
No one loved to answer that question more than the apostle Paul, who said, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).
How could he say this? Had he not seen the debt we owe? He’d certainly seen his own. Paul entered the pages of Scripture as Saul, the self-professed Pharisee of all Pharisees and the most religious man in town. But all his scruples and law keeping hadn’t made him a better person. He was bloodthirsty and angry, determined to extinguish anything and everyone Christian.
His attitude began to change on the road to Damascus. That’s when Jesus appeared to him in the desert, knocked him off his high horse, and left him sightless for three days. Paul could see only one direction: inward. And what he saw he did not like. He saw a narrow-minded tyrant. During the time of blindness, God gave him a vision that a man named Ananias would restore his sight. So when Ananias did, Paul “got up and was baptized” (Acts 9:18).
Within a few days he was preaching about Christ. Within a few years he was off on his first missionary journey. Within a couple of decades he was writing the letters we still read today, each one of which makes the case for Christ and the cross.
We aren’t told when Paul realized the meaning of grace. Was it immediately on the Damascus road? Or gradually during the three-day darkness? Or after Ananias restored his sight? We aren’t told. But we know that Paul got grace. Or grace got Paul. Either way, he embraced the improbable offer that God would make us right with him through Jesus Christ. Paul’s logic followed a simple outline:
Our debt is enough to sink us.
God loves us too much to leave us.
So God has found a way to save us.
Paul began his case for Christ by describing our problem: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). We haven’t met the standard God set. We were intended to bear the nature of God. To speak, act, and behave the way he speaks, acts, and behaves. To love as he loves. To value what he values. To honor those he honors. This is the glorious standard God has set. We have failed to meet it. Jesus, on the other hand, succeeded. “Christ never sinned” (2 Cor. 5:21 NLV).
What a remarkable statement! Not once did Jesus turn right when he was supposed to turn left. He never stayed silent when he was supposed to speak, or spoke when he was supposed to stay silent. He was “tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Heb. 4:15). He was the image of God twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
When it comes to the standard, he is the standard. To be sinless is to be like Jesus.
But who can?
We may have occasional moments of goodness, deeds of kindness, but who among us reflects the image of God all day every day? Paul couldn’t find anyone. “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God’” (Rom. 3:10–11).
People often bristle at the message of this verse. They take offense at its allegation. No one is righteous? No one seeks God? And then they produce their résumés of righteousness. They pay taxes. They love their families. They avoid addiction. They give to the poor. They seek justice for the oppressed. Compared to the rest of the world, they are good people.
Ah, but herein lies the problem. Our standard is not the rest of the world. Our standard is Christ. Compared to Christ, we, well . . . Can you hear the debt clock?
Sometime ago I took up swimming for exercise. I didn’t buy a Speedo, but I did buy some goggles, went to a pool, and gave it a go. Over the weeks I gradually progressed from a tadpole to a small frog. I’m not much to look at, but I can get up and down the lane. In fact, I was beginning to feel pretty good about my progress.
So good, in fact, that when Josh Davis invited me to swim with him, I accepted. You remember Josh Davis, three-time gold medalist in the Atlanta Olympics. His waist size is my thigh size. Half of his warm-up is my entire workout. He is as comfortable in a swimming lane as most of us are in a cafeteria line.
So when he offered to give me some pointers, I jumped in the pool. (A pool, incidentally, that bears the name Josh Davis Natatorium.) After all, I had two months of swimming experience under my belt . . . Senior Olympics? Who knows? So with Josh in his lane and me next to him in mine, he suggested, “Let’s swim two laps and see how fast you go.” Off I went. I gave it all I had. I was surprised at the finish to see that he had touched the wall only seconds before me. I felt pretty good about myself. I half expected to see photographers and endorsers gathered on the edge of the pool.
“Have you been here long?” I panted.
“Just a few seconds.”
“You mean I finished only a few seconds behind you?”
“That’s right.”
Whoa . . . Forget Senior Olympics. I’m thinking world-record holder. But then Josh added, “There was one difference. While you swam two laps, I swam six.”
Josh raised the bar. He displayed swimming at the highest level.
On a minute scale he did in the pool what Jesus did for humanity.
Jesus demonstrated what a godly life looks like.
So what are we to do? He is holy; we are not. He is perfect; we are not. His character is flawless; ours is flawed. A yawning canyon separates us from God. Might we hope that God will overlook it? He would, except for one essential detail. He is a God of justice. If he does not punish sin, he is not just. If he is not just, then what hope do we have of a just heaven? The next life will be occupied by sinners who found a loophole, who skirted the system. Yet if God punishes us for our sin, then we are lost. So what is the solution? Again we turn to Paul for the explanation:
What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. (Rom. 4:3–5)
To credit something is to make payment for it. I have a credit card. If I were to write a check to pay the balance on the card, the debt on the card would be removed, and I would be credited a zero balance. I would have no debt. No outstanding payment. No obligation. None whatsoever.
According to Paul, God has done the same with our spiritual debt. He presents Abraham as an example of a grace recipient. Yes, Abraham from 2000 BC! Abraham had, not a credit-card debt, but a spiritual debt. He had sinned. He was a good man, I am certain, but not good enough to live debt-free. His debt clock had abundant clicks.
Every time he cursed his camel. Click.
Every time he flirted with a handmaiden. Click.
Every time he wondered where in the world God was leading him and if God knew where in the world he was headed. Click. Click. Click.
But for all the bad things Abraham did, there was one good thing he chose to do. He believed. He put his faith in God. And because he believed, a wonderful, unspeakably great thing happened to his debt clock.
It was returned to zero!
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” God’s promise to Abraham was salvation by faith. God’s promise to you and me is salvation by faith. Just faith.
God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin. Having faith in him sets us in the clear. God decided on this course of action in full view of the public—to set the world in the clear with himself through the sacrifice of Jesus, finally taking care of the sins he had so patiently endured. This is not only clear, but it’s now—this is current history! God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness. (Rom. 3:25–26 THE MESSAGE)
God never compromised his standard. He satisfied every demand of justice. Yet he also gratified the longing of love. Too just to overlook our sin, too loving to dismiss us, he placed our sin on his Son and punished it there. “God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God” (2 Cor. 5:21 THE MESSAGE).
Now we understand the cry of Christ from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
Jesus felt the wrath of a just and holy God.
Wave after wave. Load after load. Hour after hour. He cried out the words of the psalm he would have known since his youth: “Why have you forsaken me?” He felt the separation between his Father and him.
And then when he could scarcely take any more, he cried, “It is finished!” (John 19:30 NASB). His mission was complete.
At the moment of Jesus’ death, an unbelievable miracle occurred. “Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed His last. Then the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Mark 15:37–38 NKJV). According to Henry and Richard Blackaby, “The veil separated the people from the temple’s Most Holy Place, and it had done so for centuries. According to tradition, the veil—a handbreadth in thickness—was woven of seventy-two twisted plaits, each plait consisting of twenty-four threads. The veil was apparently sixty feet long and thirty feet wide.”2
We aren’t talking about small, delicate drapes. This curtain was a wall made of fabric. The fact that it was torn from top to bottom reveals that the hands behind the deed were divine. God himself grasped the curtain and ripped it in two.
No more!
No more division. No more separation. No more sacrifices. “No condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).
[Jesus] personally carried our sins
in his body on the cross
so that we can be dead to sin
and live for what is right.
By his wounds
you are healed. (1 Peter 2:24 NLT)
Heaven’s work of redemption was finished. Christ’s death brought new life. Whatever barrier that had separated—or might ever separate—us from God was gone.
Gone is the fear of falling short! Gone is the anxious quest for right behavior. Gone are the nagging questions: Have I done enough? Am I good enough? Will I achieve enough? The legalist finds rest. The atheist finds hope. The God of Abraham is not a God of burdens but a God of rest. He knows we are made of flesh. He knows we cannot achieve perfection. The God of the Bible is the One who says:
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28–30)
When you lose your temper with your child, Christ intervenes. “I paid for that.” When you tell a lie and all of heaven groans, your Savior speaks up: “My death covered that sin.” As you lust over someone’s centerfold, gloat over someone’s pain, covet someone’s success, or cuss someone’s mistake, Jesus stands before the tribunal of heaven and points to the blood-streaked cross. “I’ve already made provision. I’ve paid that debt. I’ve taken away the sins of the world.”
Karl Barth described grace in this manner:
On the one side there is God in His glory as Creator and Lord. . . . And on the other side there is man, not merely the creature, but the sinner, the one who exists in the flesh and who in the flesh is in opposition to Him. It is not merely a frontier, but a yawning abyss. Yet this abyss is crossed, not by man, not by both God and man, but only by God. . . . This man does not even know how it comes about or happens to him.3
Salvation, from beginning to end, is a work of our Father. God does not stand on a mountain and tell us to climb it and find him. He comes down into our dark valley and finds us. He does not offer to pay all the debt minus a dollar if we’ll pay the dollar. He pays every penny. He doesn’t offer to complete the work if we will start it. He does all the work, from beginning to end. He does not bargain with us, telling us to clean up our lives so he can help. He washes our sins without our help.
An elderly woman was once asked about the security of her salvation. Though she’d dedicated her life to the Lord, a cynic asked, “How can you be sure? How can you know that after all these years God won’t let you sink into hell?”
“He would lose more than I would,” she replied. “All I would lose would be my own soul. He would lose his good name.”
What a gift God has given you. You’ve won the greatest lottery in the history of humanity, and you didn’t even pay for the ticket! Your soul is secure, your salvation guaranteed. Your name is written in the only book that matters. You’re only a few sand grains in the hourglass from a tearless, graveless, painless existence.
This is the message of God, the promise of grace. The declaration Paul preached with unwearied enthusiasm: “What we cannot do, God has done. He justifies us by his grace.” Grace is entirely God’s. God loving. God stooping. God offering. God caring and God carrying.
This is God’s version of grace. Is it yours? Don’t hurry too quickly past that question. Guilt simmers like a toxin in far too many souls. Do not let it have a place in yours. Before you turn the page, internalize this promise that is written with the crimson blood of Christ: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).
No condemnation. Not “limited condemnation,” “appropriate condemnation,” or “calculated condemnation.” That is what people give people. What does God give his children? “No condemnation.”
Stand on this promise. Or, better said, take this promise to the clock, your personal debt clock. As you look up at the insurmountable debt you owe, the debt you can never pay, let this promise be declared: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”