Word of Salvation – Vol.44 No.44 – November 1999
How Are We Saved From God’s Justice
Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 5 (Heid.Cat. Q&A 12-15)
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 8; Colossians 1:15-23
Suggested Hymns: BoW 349, 186, 191, 398
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Most of you are familiar with the meeting between the prophet Nathan and king David, where Nathan told the king a story about a rich man stealing a lamb from a poor man. When David expressed his outrage at the injustice done to the poor man, Nathan proceeded to convict David of his crimes of adultery and murder.
In this sorry account, two things stand out. One: God is just and He will not let sin go unpunished. Two: He will make sinners see their guilt and agree that His judgment is just. There is no one who has not sinned. Some have sinned more than others but all have sinned. And God will say to each one – what have you done? Just like He did to Cain after he had murdered his brother – what have you done? [Gen.4:10]
Let us now look at Scripture’s teaching summarised in Lord’s Day 5: HOW ARE YOU SAVED FROM GOD’S JUSTICE? In the first place, we say it is a necessary question to ask. In the second place, we will consider some wrong answers. And in the third place, we will look at the scriptural answer.
- It’s a necessary question to ask
Why is that so? Why do we need to ask ourselves and others – how am I, how are you, saved from God’s justice? One of the first things you need to know about the justice of God is that it is holy and perfect. Many people have hang-ups about God’s justice. They think it’s unfair that God who is love can and will also punish. They think that God should take into account the good people do and use that to overlook their bad things. But God does not operate like that. His perfect and holy nature demands that every sin be punished.
Now that’s just the way it is. This is not some cruel, harsh, vengeful side to God’s nature. It is one hundred percent pure justice. No sinner will ever stand before God and say – now that’s a bit unfair, that’s a bit over the top. No one will ever be able to say – I was dealt with harshly, or – I was dealt with leniently. But everyone will have to admit that he or she was dealt with justly. None will be punished for sins they did not commit. All will be punished for the sins they did commit.
Alongside the justice of God there is also His love and mercy. The whole Bible is full of it. However, the thing to remember is that God will not push aside His justice in order to make way for His love and mercy. He will uphold His justice and He will show His love and mercy.
How God does that is of course the heart of the message of salvation. We can state it here very briefly and simply. God sent His own Son Jesus into the world and He was willing to be the guilty One for all those sinners whom God will save from His justice. God had His judgment on these sinners come upon Christ, and thus Christ died for them saving them from God’s justice. They now have to hear about this. And they do through the gospel. In it God reveals His love and mercy. The Spirit of God helps all those whom God will save understand how He does it through Christ. They believe it and they are thus saved from God’s justice.
That’s how sinners are saved from God’s justice, through Jesus Christ. The question must never be – what about the injustice of God? For there is no injustice in God. The real question is – how am I, how are you, saved from the perfect justice of God? And the gospel answers that by pointing to Christ.
Now we came to this answer very quickly. But the sad fact is that man’s sinful nature frequently prevents him from seeing and believing this answer. So often it is necessary to come back to this basic question – how are you saved from God’s justice? And to fully grasp the answer and rejoice in it, people have to realise, just like king David, that not only have they sinned, but also that God will punish them for their sin – either in themselves, or in Jesus if they will believe in Him. But somehow people seem to find it difficult to do either. They don’t think that their sin is so bad that it warrants God’s punishment of everlasting death. And because they feel that way about themselves, they can’t see the urgency either of believing in Christ as the only way to be saved.
People who have done bad things and then have suffered the consequences are inclined to regard their own sufferings as paying for their sins. They will say – I have paid for my sins many times over. But God does not see it that way. Reaping what you sow is one thing but that does not satisfy the ultimate penalty on sin, which is death.
The reason why people think along these lines is because that type of thinking is constantly reinforced by today’s society, and by many religions as well. Back in the 1970s John Blanchard wrote a book called ‘Right with God’. He carefully explains what sin has done to man. How it has cut the sinner off from God. Then he shows that God, too, has cut Himself off from the sinner; and you can think of God putting Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. Blanchard then proceeds to show that God reaches out again to sinful man with the message of salvation and that the heart of this message is Jesus Christ as the Substitute. He shows how the whole Old Testament system of sacrifices was meant to help the Israelites see this. The sinner needs a sacrifice to atone for his sin. Not that a lamb or a goat could actually do this. But it was to teach the sinner to see the need for a sacrifice. Christ was the real sacrifice. And sinners need to see that and believe that it is the only way for them to be right with God.
Blanchard’s book said nothing new. It simply restated what the Bible has always said and what the Confessions of the Reformation have always affirmed. But many people today don’t get to hear these scriptural truths. They believe that their hard times will have God say to them you have suffered enough already. Or that God will overlook their bad deeds in the light of the many good things they have done. So they are really trying to save themselves. And they believe that this is perfectly reasonable. They think they will be right with God, either because they have suffered enough, or they have done enough good. But it is a false assumption and their hope of being okay with God is a false one. Now unless they hear the real truth about God’s justice they will continue to have these false hopes. So the question – ‘How are you saved from God’s justice?’ remains a necessary one.
- Some wrong answers
You will have noticed that Lord’s Day 5 comes up with the goods only in the last answer. Christ is mentioned there but not before. Why did the authors of the Catechism do that? Well, they felt it necessary to teach the people of their day that indulgences, the worship of saints and purgatory, do not take away sin. Just like we today have to stress that sufferings for wrongs done and the doing of good deeds do not make you right with God, so they had to argue that all those other things did not make you right with God. That’s why the Catechism asked those questions. Can we pay for our sin ourselves? ‘No’, is the answer. Can someone else do it for us? The answer is ‘no’ again.
You will see how necessary it was to ask those questions when you realise how Martin Luther wrestled with the problem of getting right with God. He was a child of his time, of course, and therefore what I am about to tell you shows how the Catechism had those very things in mind when they framed the questions of Lord’s Day 5. I am going to quote David Feddes, the Back to God Hour preacher, but I will make some interjections.
Feddes says, “Luther was a brilliant young man. At age 21 he already had a master’s degree and was headed for a career in law. But his thoughts were on more than just his career. He often thought of God and of heaven and hell. He wanted to be right with God and to enter heaven, but he wasn’t sure how. The thought of meeting God terrified him. Luther was part of a church but his church didn’t do much to ease his fears.”
I want to stop here for a moment and remind you how different it has become today. The thought of meeting God which so terrified Luther does not terrify people today because they have heard it said to them so often that hell does not exist and that most, if not all, people will end up in heaven.
People today assume that they will be dealt with favourably by God. They see God not as a frightful judge, as Luther did, but as someone who is like a good bloke who will say: you’ll be all right, my friend, I am not going to hurt you. They assume that God will say:- there is no need to fear because I am a God of love and I just want to forgive all your sins. And while Luther was part of a church which didn’t do much to ease his fears, there are many churches today which do just the opposite. They assure people that there is nothing in God for them to worry about.
But back to Feddes’ comments about Luther. “One summer day, Luther was walking along when the sky became overcast with black clouds. The lightning flashed, the thunder rumbled, and the rain began to pour down. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck so close to Luther that the impact knocked him down. In his terror, he cried out, ‘St Anne, help me! I will become a monk.’ You see, Luther’s church taught that the saints could help a person gain favour with God. The church also taught that if you became a monk, you had a better chance of making it to heaven.”
Let me stop here again. Most churches today do not teach what the Roman Catholic Church taught in Luther’s day. But there are still people in the churches who think that ministers of the gospel are a bit holier and will stand a better chance to get into heaven than just the ordinary church member. I know that unchurched people think that. But they are not alone. It is assumed even among church members that, on the whole, ministers pray more, read the Bible more, and do less naughty things than the average church or non-church members. So they still think that ministers and priests, who are sincere, have a better chance of making it to heaven.
Back again to Feddes’ comments about Luther: “He kept his promise, gave up his career in law and entered the monastery to work on his salvation. There Luther devoted himself to prayer, singing, study and meditation. He did so well that in less than two years, his superior selected him to become a priest. But even this did not give him peace with God. As he was saying his first mass, he had another crisis. During the mass, he found himself reciting the words, ‘We offer unto you, the living, the true, the eternal God…’ and as Luther later told the story, ‘…at these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself: Who am I, that I should lift up my eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say, ‘I want this, I ། ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal, and true God.’ The young priest was shaken. It took every ounce of his power just to stay at the altar long enough to finish saying the mass.”
To interrupt once more. Today we rarely come across this fear of God. What we see more of today is a thinking that God must be pleased when we decide to serve Him. There are songs that reinforce that. People offer their praise and love to God who is seen as working hard to gain man’s approval for who He is and what He does. People are starting to think that God must gain something when people give their hearts to Him. He would have missed out on something had that not been offered to Him.
Back to Luther again. “After that Luther worked even harder to earn God’s approval. He prayed even more than the rules of the monastery required. He studied theology for long hours; he got his degree as a doctor of theology. He fasted, sometime going three days in a row without eating a crumb. He went to confession constantly, in line with the church’s teaching that you had to confess your sins to a priest for your sins to be forgiven. But he knew that there were some sins he was overlooking. If his salvation depended on his ability to recall every last sin and confess it to priest, he was lost.”
How different today. Now there are those who think that God will forgive your sins even if you forget to repent and pray for forgiveness. It is thought that God will regard you feeling sorry as being good enough. Luther worried about being lost. Today people hardly worry about that. In fact, today they neither worry much about either heaven or hell. If there is a heaven, they will probably go there. In my years of ministry I find it hard to remember if people ever called on me to help them with their fear of being lost. But I have found it necessary many times to express my concern to about people about them being too little concerned about either heaven or hell.
Back to Luther again. “Luther kept searching for peace. It frightened him to think of God, so he thought of God’s Son Jesus. But he knew that Jesus would return to judge the world, and that frightened him all the more. He turned his prayers to Jesus’ mother, Mary; he hoped she might be tender and compassionate and put in a good word for him. It didn’t help. He chose twenty-one dead saints as his special patrons, three for each day of the week, and he prayed to them. But that didn’t help. There he was: a priest, a theologian, a monk, completely devoted to the practice of religion – and yet no matter what he tried, it couldn’t put him right with God.”
“Then came the discovery. Luther began to study the Bible book Romans, and he kept coming across a phrase that puzzled him: ‘the righteousness of God’. He took this phrase to mean that God is righteous and acts righteously by punishing those who are wicked. That was a terrifying thought. Luther wrote, ‘My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit could pacify him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him… Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and that other statement in Romans that says ‘the righteous shall live by faith’. Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is the righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning. This passage became to me a gate to heaven.”
Martin Luther had discovered how to be on good terms with God. Not by good deeds, church rituals, or prayers to saints but by trusting in God’s free gift of righteousness in Christ. Luther wrote, “If you have a true faith that Christ is your Saviour, then at once you have a gracious God, for faith leads you in and opens up God’s heart and will, that you should see pure grace and overflowing love.”
Today we can add to that by saying that you cannot hope to be saved from God’s justice by having paid for your bad deeds by the consequences you suffered. God may pity you but His pity does not wipe out your sins. Only Christ can wipe out your sins. Nor can you be saved from God’s justice by being a good person. A good person is not yet a perfect person and that’s what you have to be if you are to be right with God on your own terms.
Like Luther we must discover what the whole Bible is saying, namely, only through Christ are we right with God.
- The scriptural answer
It is a great comfort that the Lord God has not left us to our own ways of finding the gate to heaven. God, who is so holy and infinitely loving, has come to us in our fallen state. He did it by sending Christ, and He satisfied God’s justice. Which is really saying that God Himself found a way to satisfy His own justice. He showed that initiative already when He went looking for Adam and Eve after they had fallen into sin. He went to them and said, “Where are you?” He knew where they were, of course, but it brought Adam and Eve to face God. Then God said, “What have you done?” And with that He made them face up to what they had done. But although God sent them out of the garden He also promised the Christ.
That promise was repeated many times in Old Testament times. It became clearer as time went on. Israel’s Day of Atonement was a reminder of Christ. As said earlier on, the whole sacrificial system was a reminder of Christ; as was the Old Testament priesthood. It was all there for the purpose of helping sinners to see their need for a mediator and a deliverer other than themselves. It all pointed forward to Christ as the real sacrifice.
It is Christ alone who can save us from the justice of God. It is He, and no one else, who is fully able to satisfy God’s justice. The apostle Paul was made to say it so beautifully, “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” [2Cor.5:21]. When Christ is our Substitute then two things have taken place. One is that God’s judgment due to us is no longer going to come on us. The second is that God now accepts us fully as His children. For our guilt is gone and our sins are forgiven.
So we trust not in ourselves but Christ our Substitute. Our believing to be right with God cannot rest on anything that is in us but it can only rest on Christ’s suffering and death. He did that for us.
Do you therefore look to Christ and trust Him alone for your salvation? Can you see Him as the only One who is able to take away your sins and have you stand before God with only His love and mercy, and not His judgment, come over you? Christ’s death on the cross, His cry of being forsaken by God, does that say something to you? If you see and believe Him to be your only Saviour, then that terrible cross and all that took place there, will be to you the gateway to heaven. In this context, heaven means peace with God, being reconciled to Him, having been made right with Him, no longer under His condemnation, and no longer under the sentence of eternal death. Yes, through Christ, God Himself has put you in His presence as a sinner now made holy, completely free from all accusation. That’s what you may believe, for it is the gospel truth and in that faith you must continue. Do not let anyone, not even your own self, move you away from that hope held out to you in the gospel. Say in your heart and witness it to others the words of this hymn:
Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul;
not what my toiling flesh has borne can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do can give me peace with God;
not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load.
Your voice alone, O Lord, can speak to me of grace;
your power alone, O Son of God, can all my sins erase.
No other work but yours, no other blood will do;
no strength but that which is divine can bear me safely through.
I praise the Christ of God; I rest on love divine;
and with unfaltering lip and heart I call this Saviour mine.
My Lord has saved my life and freely pardon gives;
I love because he first loved me, I live because he lives.
Amen.