Some good stuff from your own site, recommended reading:
berean.mccafferty1.site/pg7.htmlThird, we are justified by blood.
The provision for righteousness is solely through the blood of Christ. “Much more then, being now justified by His (Christ’s) blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him” (Romans 5:9). “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness, that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:24-26) These verses are of tremendous importance because they show the only ground of justification.
We emphasize the phrase “to declare his righteousness,” for to justify means to declare righteous, the basis of which is the shed Blood of Jesus Christ. The righteousness of God for sinners has been wrought through the redeeming process of God’s Son. When God declares a man righteous, that declaration and act finds its efficacy in the Blood of Jesus Christ, Who died on Calvary. The worth of His shed Blood is the righteous ground on which the grace of God can act in behalf of sinners.
Did you ever question why Christ died on the Cross? The answer is “to declare His righteousness.” You see, God could not remain just and at the same time allow sin to go unpunished. Justification cannot be on arbitrary grounds. There must be a moral basis for a holy God to justify a sinful man. God cannot be just and the Justifier of the ungoldly (Romans 3:26) unless a just penalty has been exacted. He is never merciful at the expense of justice. If God is to justify a guilty sinner, He can do it only on the ground that the payment for sin has been met. When an earthly judge shows mercy, he is not being just; and when he is just, he cannot show mercy. The only way that God could be both merciful and just was through Calvary, where Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin. There He vindicated His Holy Law and at the same time showed mercy to sinners. The vicarious sufferings and death of Christ are the cause of our justification before God.
Paul set forth this doctrine clearly in II Corinthians 5:21 when he said, “For he (God) hath made him (Jesus) to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Justification is only “in Him,” for apart from Him no basis for it exists.
Let us put it another way--the only righteous basis for our justification has been provided through the death of Christ. This was the only way that God could have reckoned to us His righteousness, and it is the one way He found of not reckoning to us our sin. The righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer; the sin of the unbeliever is imputed to Christ as if that sin were Christ’s. Think you it was a fair exchange? Little wonder that men will love and serve the Lord Jesus by life and by death! Praise God for the atonement, for without it He could not reckon us other than what we actually are, nor could He deal with us differently from what we deserve. God can make bad men good only through the death of His Son, for we are justified by His Blood.
berean.mccafferty1.site/pg13c.html The Bible teaches that the final destiny for unrepentant, unbelieving sinners is a place of eternal, conscious torment called “hell.” Revelation describes it as a “lake of fire and sulfur,” and Jesus says it is a place of “unquenchable fire,” (Rev. 20:10; Mark 9:43).
Given how the Bible talks about hell and warns us against it, I do not understand the impulse some Christians seem to have to explain it in a way that makes it sound more tolerable. When Revelation speaks of Jesus treading the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty, when Jesus himself warns of the “unquenchable fire … where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:43, 48), my incredulous question is, Why would any Christian have an interest in making that sound less horrific? Why on earth would we comfort sinners with the thought that maybe hell will not be so bad after all?
We Didn’t Just Make This Up
The images the Bible uses to talk about God’s judgment against sin are truly horrifying. It’s really no wonder the world reads the Bible’s descriptions of hell and calls Christians “sick” for believing them.
But that misses the point. It’s not as if we just make these ideas up ourselves. We Christians don’t read, believe, and talk about hell because we somehow enjoy the thought of it. God forbid. No, we talk about hell because, finally, we believe the Bible. We believe it when it says that hell is real, and we believe it with tears when it says that people we love are in danger of spending eternity there.
This is the Bible’s sobering verdict on us. There is not one of us righteous, not even one. And because of that, one day every mouth will be silenced, every wagging tongue stopped, and the whole world will be held accountable to God.
berean.mccafferty1.site/pg13d.html Do you see what these Christians were saying about the significance of Jesus’ death? They were saying that when Jesus died, it was not the punishment for his own sins that he endured. (He didn’t have any!) It was the punishment for his people’s sins! As he hung on the cross at Calvary, Jesus bore all the horrible weight of the sin of God’s people. All their rebellion, all their disobedience, all their sin fell on his shoulders. And the curse that God had pronounced in Eden—the sentence of death—struck.
That is why Jesus cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). God his Father, who is holy and righteous, whose eyes are too pure even to look on evil, looked at his Son, saw the sins of his Son’s people resting on his shoulders, turned away in disgust, and poured out his wrath on his own Son. Matthew writes that darkness covered the land for about three hours while Jesus hung on the cross. That was the darkness of judgment, the weight of the Father’s wrath falling on Jesus as he bore his people’s sins and died in their place.
Isaiah prophesied about this seven centuries before it happened:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed. (Isa. 53:4–5)
Do you see the significance of this? Ultimately, it means that I’m the one who should have died, not Jesus. I should have been punished, not he. And yet he took my place. He died for me.
They were my transgressions, but his wounds. My iniquities, but his chastisement. My sin, his sorrow. And his punishment bought my peace. His stripes won my healing. His grief, my joy.
His death, my life.
The Heart of the Gospel
Sadly, this doctrine of substitution is probably the one part of the Christian gospel that the world hates most. People are simply disgusted at the idea of Jesus being punished for someone else’s sin. More than one author has called it “divine child abuse.” And yet to toss substitutionary atonement aside is to cut out the heart of the gospel. To be sure, there are many pictures in Scripture of what Christ accomplished with his death: example, reconciliation, and victory, to name three. But underneath them all is the reality to which all the other images point—penal substitution. You simply cannot leave it out, or even downplay it in favor of other images, or else you litter the landscape of Scripture with unanswered questions. Why the sacrifices? What did that shedding of blood accomplish? How can God have mercy on sinners without destroying justice? What can it mean that God forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, and yet by no means clears the guilty (Ex. 34:7)? How can a righteous and holy God justify the ungodly (Rom. 4:5)?
The answer to all these questions is found at the cross of Calvary, in Jesus’ substitutionary death for his people. A righteous and holy God can justify the ungodly because in Jesus’ death, mercy and justice were perfectly reconciled. The curse was righteously executed, and we were mercifully saved.
berean.mccafferty1.site/pg13e.htmlWhere Will You Point?
When you stand before God at the judgment, I wonder what you plan to do or say in order to convince him to count you righteous and admit you to all the blessings of his kingdom? What good deed or godly attitude will you pull out of your pocket to impress him? Will you pull out your church attendance? Your family life? Your spotless thought life? The fact that you haven’t done anything really heinous in your own eyes? I wonder what you’ll hold up before him while saying, “God, on account of this, justify me!”
I’ll tell you what every Christian whose faith is in Christ alone will do, by God’s grace. They will simply and quietly point to Jesus. And this will be their plea: “O God, do not look for any righteousness in my own life. Look at your Son. Count me righteous not because of anything I’ve done or anything I am, but because of him. He lived the life I should have lived. He died the death that I deserve. I have renounced all other trusts, and my plea is him alone. Justify me, O God, because of Jesus.”
