The Climax of God's Move: Justice Demonstrated & Love Manifested Romans 3:21-26, John 3:16-21

Dear Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, (at the center of God’s salvation)

Key Truth: The Cross requires God’s justice and love towards you in Christ for satisfaction!

Here is a concept that the church has been well aware of for centuries on both sides of RC and Protestant divide - that for the problem to be fixed between God and you and me, satisfaction must be made. Richard Muller “to make amends for human sin so that God can forgive us.” Difficult because sin makes us owe an infinite debt , that we can’t pay in our selves. Law powerless! Anselm of Canterbury before the Reformation summarized the idea so well in His work Why the God-man! The Reformers upheld and developed this Scriptural idea that the big way God moved towards us at he centre of history on the Cross of Christ, is by satisfying the righteousness of God. Earlier theologians like Augustine, said its’ not like God’s righteousness is a law operating above God , He’s got a follow, but it is God’s very character, and He works in keeping with his righteous and holy characters! For God's righteousness to be satisfied, the covenant that Adam broke in the garden, and the penalty that we all with Him have become subject too, and stand guilty of - that needs to reconciled and accounted for. Interesting the word satisfaction of both a legal and a financial accounting term. Someone trying to trace all the government aid money - who got it - big box, ma and pop, foreign companies… is all that money accounted for -. Salvation is not just going to be God saying, well let’s just forget about that, and all your sins, sweep them under the carpet, Ill be nice and you try to be better, won’t you walk with me closer now. No salvation is going to be that all the demands of God’s holy nature must be done, they must be met! And there is a negative and positive side to this that needs to be fulfilled: Negatively because Man voluntarily gave ear to the devil, subjected himself to sin and death - and we have followed suit in him -we’ve destroyed the perfect communion, friendship, calling relationship that God was to have with us.

A. Your salvation is about Christ working satisfaction for your sin and sinful nature

And look how that’s described in the NT: Hebrews 10:5,9

Hebrews 10:5 ESV

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me;

Hebrews 10:9 ESV

then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second.

Do you get this sweep of God’s work through history? Listen to how Paul describes it in our text: there this flawed righteousness that we have in our selves, can’t repay God, can’t make us right restore the fellowship - the harder we try the less we live as true sons and daughter of God. But then there is the righteous of this God-man Jesus Christ, an alien righteousness, not something we’ve earned or attempted, but outside of us in the perfect God man. And look at the key verse of our text in Romans 3:25

Romans 3:25 ESV

whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Up until this point, God had patiently, forbear-ed with the sin of the world, even the sin of his elect, he didn’t mete out the full punishment, eternal hell didn’t break out on us, even the flood just a picture of the final judgment, But God suspended judgment in this age. But now at the crisis point of human history at the Cross, Christ is put forward not just as a payment for our sin, to remove the sin from us transfer it to him, expiation. Get the sin out of us, off our record. But what is the word here in Romans 3:25 not, expiate, but pro - thumbs up to be for someone. The Cross is how Christ removes the wrath of God, the bad relationships we have with God because of who we have become in our very nature - God is too pure to look upon sin, must have a revulsion and punishment towards sin; and Christ in becoming sin for us, turns the wrath away from us and puts it on Christ. God put Jesus froth to remove that just and righteous wrath!

And do you see the result when you are in Christ? Romans 3:26

Romans 3:26 ESV

It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

And here we must see the goal of the gospel - sin is dealt with fully and God’s holiness vindicated, but in such a way that as he is just, because he has justly dealt with our sin, we guilty - worthy of damnation in ourselves, we are justified by this Christ. It was like when God shouted after Adam, trembling all over, running away: Where are You Man? that he had to flee without being able to escape - born under the law, sentence hanging over his head, never ready or able to come back and live in communion with God! Judgment of God looming. But Jesus the Son of God now in our human nature He moved toward us in his incarnation but God isn’t done moving toward us. God isn’t just with us in our struggle in our temptation, not just fulfilling the law for us, no now God with us - goes to the crisis point of your life and mine, the axe falling on our sin, the eternal ruin that our sin deserves - and something happens between God and Jesus there - real wrath is really absorbed and turned aside. This is Isaiah 53 - Christ was really and truly charged with our sin as our confession summarizes it. Able to assume the nature in which our disobedience was committed, he is now able to take the punishment, to show the justice of God is declared on my sin on the Cross. There is no forgives with out justice, without a naming and someone paying back what was broken and stolen, and lost! And real satisfaction by the perfect life lived , paid back to God in full and The God man descends into death and punishment and death for us. 2 Cor 5:21

2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

And do you see it the great exchange at the heart of God’s work in Christ for us - he becomes our sin, so that we can take His righteousness. Our faith our repentance didn’t make that happen, God offered him up freely for us, and our faith and repentance is just the response of Him doing that for us! Well what’s going to happen next? What are the accomplishments, the gifts from Christ to those who have this Great Exchange in their lives by faith? That’s what the rest of the Confession will spell out, it is what the Spirit does with this new standing this new salivation this recreation of our lives, and our community in fellowship with God until He comes again.

And this is why at the heart of our confession is not only that God is just, that his justice and holiness and righteousness has been upheld and demonstrated - that. Every sin has been paid in full, But also that by this means He has truly justified any and all who respond wit this faith! Just and justifier

B. Satisfaction requires God’s justice punishing our sin in Christ

But now dear friends, now fellow confessors of Christ, who want to give witness to our neighbours to our culture to our church culture, we must do the hard work of applying this good old old story today. Following Robert Schuller and golden smile of the health and wealth gospel of Joel Olsteen , following the therapeutic nature of the gospel that our feelings is the measure of reality; We are tempted to say that God’s justice and his love are incompatible and they exclude each other. Listen to Clark PInnock, one time Calvinist, but repudiated Biblical truths to say God is not sovereign , to say He is not holiness. No, he draws a false dichotomy between God being just and God being loving: “The question can be put this way: Is God the absolute Monarch who always gets his way, or is God rather the loving Parent who is sensitive to our needs even when we disappoint him and frustrate some of his plans?”

Do you see what he has done? He has pitted God’s love against his justice and his justice against his mercy. He rules out that God self-consistent in all his ways, whose actions completely match his character and word! Who acts freely spontaneously but in keeping with His nature - that all of his attributes involve each other. This is what it means that God is a simple spiritual being in Art 1, His aseity pure completely in harmony. As one commentator puts it: God is a God of love and justice, grace and righteousness, mercy and wrath, and he communicates himself in the categories of the courtroom and the family room!

Tell me: Is God a judge or is He a father. Is salvation about righteousness and legal status or is it about familial terms and adoption. Do we use the language of the courtroom of the universe, or the family room of the universe? Well what do you say - is God more love or is He more justice? Kind of like asking last week - do you relate to Jesu Christ more as God or more as man. The answer is well how does God reveal Himself - the answer is what is, not how do I imagine him to be to make me feel better. Because often when we make up reality as we’d like it to be, what is easiest and most tolerable, its’ not half as good as it really is! SO the question must be solved by how God reveals Himself in action and then recorded in His very Word as the record of his character and his wonders. And what do the Scriptures say: Romans 3:24-25a

Romans 3:24–25a ESV

and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Do you see that who put God the Son incarnate who put Jesus forward? It wasn’t Jesus himself but God the Father. John 3:16

John 3:16 ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

HOw did God love this world? By giving in love His Son, as the one who would get what our sins deserve. Be lifted up as a testimony to the world this is how God deals with evil and sin in His universe. Would you want to live in a world where God just shrugs at sin? Would you want live in a world where God says, you know what I will save you but without justice, you just chose me, believe, give a bit for repentance, and show your sorry and want to try better, and the Cross is just my example of how much I love you - but then in no real way - was every actual sin and our personal sinful nature really dealt with in Christ. Do you see that God being just on our sin, is a gift. The satisfaction is loving. Can you imagine at the end of the world, the sins you and I committed, the people we harmed rising up and saying, Jesus you can’t make these things new, can’t really forgive because outstanding debt not paid. Justice is getting what we deserve, and Jesus Christ the Son of God in human nature is the only one who could possibly - withstand and take what each of our sins deserve. He alone - could be made our sin, to crucify it and the charges laid against us. Do you really know the chagres laid against you and me because of our sin. Listen God’s justice is an eternal justice , its an infinite justice - only one who is both human and divine could take it and He does for us. He and He alone at the End of the World, with real people whose actual sins have had divine justice meted out, washed in the blood of the lamb, He alone could vindicate God’s justice. There is no forgive and forget without punishment being satisfied. God’s justice in Christ, we must by faith agree with is the only escape for us! A full satisfaction!

And that brings us to the last point which I hope makes your soul sing!

C. Christ’s satisfaction of God’s justice also means God’s mercy must be poured out on us!

The Cross is not only a demonstration of God’s justice satisfied, but also of his mercy and goodness, his love poured out! Look carefully at John 3:16-18a again:

John 3:16–18a ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

There is justice at the Cross, our substitute getting what we deserve. Truly happened, sufficient for any to be saved. But there is also mercy at the Cross. What’s mercy? - not getting what we deserve. “We were guilty and worthy of damnation.” Never forget it you and I were part of that already condemned - perishing - what we deserve not only now in time but eternally! But look at the cross at the end result. Out of the depths of God’s being is a spring of compassion. God didn’t send His Son in his first coming toward us to execute our punishment - we all know we deserve it - but He sent His Son to jump between us and God’s justice - to be a shield and protector from his own justice! The Cross is the culmination of all God’s mercy … we’ve read it in a form for Lord’s Supper:

He was bound that we might be loosed from our sins . . . He suffered innumerable reproaches that we might never be confounded . . . He was innocently condemned to death that we might be acquitted at the judgment seat of God . . . and so has taken the curse from us upon Himself that he might fill us with His blessing; and has humbled Himself unto the very deepest reproach and anguish of hell, in body and soul, on the tree of the cross . . . that we might be accepted of God, and nevermore forsaken of Him.

This is the wonder of the double imputation, our sin imputed in love and justice to him, but his righteousness imputed with love and mercy to us! This is what it means that he was made the cruse for us in Gal 3:13. Listen to why the Christ comes in His first coming - this is the fountain of love we all need at the center of the world: Romans 8:3-4

Romans 8:3–4 ESV

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

And its why like with Evelyn Heida’s testimony in her funeral - say: Romans 8:31 Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ ...

Romans 8:31 ESV

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?

Atonement is God’s turn toward humanity reached a climax in the incarnation. We are astounded at the wonder that the Son of God took on the full reality of human nature as “God with us” at the depths of human existence. That is not the end of God’s “turn,” however. It is not just that God has become our companion in the struggles of life. Nor is it the case that in the utterly new reality of the Messiah as God and human a new state of being exists by which humans are enabled to participate in the divine. That’s great too, but the best is that in the person of the Messiah, God acted in history to meet the crisis, the ruin, into which humanity—and creation—have fallen. God did something that finds its climax at the cross. There something took place between God and Jesus, and consequently between God and the human. And that is the “atonement” that works by satisfaction.

Do you see without the justice and love of the Cross of Christ, we either end up with sentimentalized view of God’s love with no justice in the universe, or we end up with a God who can be nothing but angry with us. But if you know God in Christ in this mediator - we know that God’s wrath has been totally and justly pacified, and He in Christ has nothing but free mercy and love. In compassion he has moved toward me, and receives me in Christ even before I can respond to him with my faith and repentance.!

Its offensive to us, that the best we can do as fallen sinners - is just humanity earning its own ruin. Its frightening to see what that ruin our sin deserves in Christ suffering on the Cross. But keep looking at the justice of the Cross, because this justice results in you and I justified in Christ. Christ entered into the place of the victim and the victimized, and being raised to prove that God accepted the sanctification made for us - rises to prove we have a new righteousness a new life to be lived in God’s communion.

A biblical principle of restorative justice. Not just attempt to punish wrong doing, but to restore what was broken. Restitution. Christian schools in discipline… how make it better fro neighbour harmed. Understand that is there is something so wrong in you and me and in this world that needs to be righted, if ever we are going to on with God in this life and the next. Only the horror of the Cross of Christ taking this for us in love and making anew beginning , only God giving Himself for you could make your life right with Him again. Cry of love and just live that save us - My God God Why have your forsaken me is cried out so that we might justly and mercifully be totally and forever accepted!