Your Sinlessness

Most of us are scared to consider how God sees us. We wrongly suspect that in the blazing purity of his eyes we must look pathetic. The truth is staggeringly different. The Almighty actually sees us as people destined to be flawlessly perfect.

To be blameless in human eyes would be astounding, but to be ‘holy and blameless in his sight’ – in the exacting eyes of the High and Lofty One, the God of Truth, the All-seeing Lord – is mind-boggling. The only thing that could ruin this would be if you were to prevent Jesus from doing what he longs to do for you.

Jesus became completely identified with your sin and shame, so that you could bask in the eternal honor of being completely identified with his sinlessness. Let this sink in: through this staggering exchange, you are credited with righteousness infinitely beyond the most saintly human attempts at goodness. If you partake of this union with the holy Son of God, you gain the very ‘righteousness of God.’ Moreover, you are not just showered with a sprinkle of this righteousness; you are so identified with divine moral perfection that, as this Scripture declares, you actually ‘become’ God’s righteousness!

Our sins are debts to justice. To heighten our understanding, let’s put this in financial terms. You were once frighteningly and hopelessly in debt. Jesus is incomprehensibly rich. He would make a multi-trillionaire look like a pauper. You supposed no one would ever want you, and yet Jesus fell in love with you and longed to marry you. You couldn’t believe it. For a long while you resisted him, thinking it must be some sort of trick. And you had heard all sorts of groundless gossip about this mysterious person. What if some of those malicious rumors were true? Finally, you mustered the courage to marry him. Gradually you discovered that, for him, marriage means such beautiful things as life-long devotion to you and a total merging of assets. All your horrific financial obligations that you wished would disappear, he saw as his responsibility. Your debts become his debts, which he paid in full. And in exchange for you giving him your debts, he handed you joint ownership of his riches. All his wealth is now completely yours to spend and enjoy as your own. You are still coming to terms with the enormity of this gift and he is still trying to urge you to break free of your hesitance to make full use of the rights he has given you. Your status has now rocketed from the shame of gross financial mismanagement to the honor of being, with him, the richest person in the universe. And it is all because of his longing to be one with you. This is what Jesus has done for you morally.

Note the beginning of 1 Corinthians 1:30: ‘It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus.’ Similarly, both of the earlier Scriptures we examined feature the expression, ‘in him.’

To receive a gift, one must believe that it is a genuine offer and not a trick. Suppose, for example, someone says, ‘I have placed in your bank account a gift of $10,000.’ This would do you no good unless you were to begin spending that money. To do this you would have to push through various doubts. What if the money is not there and you overdraw your account? Or what if there are strings attached, or the person demands his gift back? Receiving a gift takes faith. God has offered you the gift of forgiveness but it will do you no good until you do your best to believe his offer is genuine. You will then take the step of faith – perhaps quite shakily at first – by acting as if you are truly forgiven. This involves enjoying the fact that you are accepted by God and are now completely innocent of your past sins. It does not mean that you will feel forgiven, it simply means accepting the fact that you are forgiven.

The analogy about marrying someone richer than a trillionaire highlights one of our biggest hindrances to faith. How many trillionaires have you shaken hands with? Who of us have met even a moderately wealthy person eager to be so generous to us? Why would someone who could have anyone, pick us? The Almighty is so far beyond anything we have ever experienced in any other person as to seem unbelievable – except that God, by his very nature, can be expected to be far superior to anything we have ever seen in a human. Just as the Maker of galaxies has infinitely more power than anyone else, so he has infinitely more selfless love, purer motives, and superior generosity. We must keep rising above the fear that God has any failings. Alongside him, the most loving human we have ever met is selfish, small minded, and prejudiced against us. People have exploited us, let us down, lied to us, dismissed us as unlovable, and done other hurtful things, but God, being God, is altogether different. You can trust him.

Our Lord stressed that the most important command is to love God, and yet he said it is the person who is forgiven most – who is most aware of the gravity of the sins that have been forgiven him – who loves most (Luke 7:47). He warned that blatant sinners who were under no delusion about the extent of their sin had a much better chance of entering heaven that clean-living Pharisees who thought themselves good (Matthew 21:31-32).

In this Scripture, Jesus is stressing that, no matter how good a person has been, anyone who thinks he has lived a morally acceptable life will rot in his sin. No one can stand in God’s holy presence except people willing to see themselves as having been hopelessly depraved morally and in desperate need of God’s mercy. Everyone coming to Jesus with this attitude is miraculously cleansed, because his faith is not in his own supposed goodness but solely in the goodness of God, who longs to purify us through Jesus. Having abandoned faith in his own morality, such a person is credited with Jesus’ moral perfection.

We all have the deadly cancer of sin. The many of us who, like the Pharisee, live in denial, will die in their sin. This is a tragic waste. Treatment is freely available to those who admit their need of it. Just as doctors respect the right of patients to refuse treatment, so the Lord of all allows us the dignity to refuse his treatment for our deadly sin condition. The only ones who have hope are those who humble themselves enough to admit that without Jesus they have no hope.

The apostle Paul was once headed for hell like that Pharisee, but as his eyes opened to his sinfulness he became like that tax collector lamenting his sins and he found mercy. In fact he found so much mercy that his eyes opened to the point where he could truly understand his sinfulness. It was then that he pronounced himself the worst of sinners. It is he who humbles himself the most who is raised the highest.

As he looked to the time when he would face his Judge and be asked why he should not be thrown into hell, the mighty apostle wanted to be found without the slightest defense – other than the fact that Jesus had died for him. He jettisoned every other possible claim – any and every thing that some might think could help him be judged as being passable. This man, who really knew God, staked his whole eternity solely on the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. He was putting all his eggs in one basket. This refusal to try to hedge one’s bets is what faith is all about.

What empowers most of us to reach this point is the realization that we simply have no alternative. We are moral failures. Without Jesus, the best of us are doomed. With Jesus, the worst of us are safe.

It is far, far better to be guilty of horrific sin and beg forgiveness, than to be so deluded as to imagine we could impress God with our ‘righteousness.’ No wonder Jesus said there was far more hope for prostitutes than for those who thought themselves respectable. No wonder the tax collector, overwhelmed by his sin, warmed the heart of God, and the Pharisee touting off to God his ‘good deeds,’ left God cold. Only one of them saw a desperate need to beg for mercy. Only one received it.

This Scripture sends us reeling in shock. How can it be that whatever sin we accuse someone of committing, we ourselves are guilty of? We suppose there are many sins we have not committed, and yet our presumption of innocence merely highlights what deluded hypocrites we are. To wish someone dead is to murder. To dress in the hope of sexually arousing someone who might not want those feelings is to rape. To keep back part of your tithe is to steal from God (Malachi 3:8). King Saul let his soldiers hold on to some of the livestock God told them to destroy. Though they claimed this was for the noble reason of sacrificing the animals to God, the Lord declared it rebellion against God and therefore the equivalent of witchcraft (1 Samuel 15:23). To be greedy is to worship an idol (Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:5).

My desire – and God’s desire – is to not condemn you, but to bring you to the point of surrender so that you can cease the endless struggle to justify yourself, or feel inferior or superior to others, and simply accept divine forgiveness in all its wonder and endless scope. This is one of life’s most liberating and exhilarating experiences.

We are in a tiny boat, furiously baling out water in a desperate, ultimately futile, attempt to stay afloat. Towering above us is a God’s luxury liner, offering security, dignity, rest and refreshment. The sooner we admit to ourselves that our attempt to save ourselves is both hopeless and foolish, the quicker we can enjoy God’s luxury liner.

However, in our secular society, we commonly use the term justify in the slightly different sense of trying to excuse our past. It is this common meaning that I particularly want to focus on.

Once we gain even a shallow insight into the extent of our guilt, it quickly becomes nearly impossible to bear. We find ourselves with an almost overwhelming need to try to shift the blame. That leaves us with essentially two options. We can try to make other sinners take blame for our own sin, which will ultimately get us nowhere, or we can accept the staggering offer of the sinless Son of God taking our blame upon himself, suffering as if he were guilty so that we could get off scot-free as if we were innocent.

We have a choice. We can say, ‘My bad behavior was justified because of my atrocious upbringing, or the person I sinned against deserved it, or I couldn’t help myself.’ Or we can choose to jettison that approach and say, ‘I am not justified by my actions or circumstances; I am justified (make innocent in God’s eyes) solely because Jesus bore the penalty that my sins deserve.’

Self-praise, they say, is no recommendation. To justify ourselves is as valuable as stale air. For Jesus to justify us, however, is profoundly significant. It means the eternal, holy Son of God declares us innocent.

We can try to justify ourselves, which will never allow us to be accepted by God, or we can let Jesus justify us, which will make us fully accepted by God. But we can’t have both, any more than we could be on a train to hell and at the same time on a train to heaven. If there were a literal train to glory and a train to damnation, they would be speeding in opposite directions. To be on one involves leaving the other. Likewise, justifying ourselves is the exact opposite of Jesus justifying us. We usually try to justify ourselves by excusing our sin; we are justified by Jesus, however, by fully admitting our sin.

To try to justify our past is to torture ourselves by trying to dream up lame excuses that would be laughed out of court when we meet our Maker.

Right now, we decide how God will judge us when we stand naked before his Throne. We can through faith enter into a relationship with Jesus that makes us one with the holy Son of God, allowing us to ask God to judge us as if we were Jesus himself. Or we can abandon that option and put our faith solely in our ability to talk our way out of the guilt of every sin we have ever committed; trying to convince the all-knowing Lord that we have always been sinlessly perfect. What little faith we must have in Jesus’ ability to forgive if we still see the need to ease our consciences by trying to excuse our past! Feeling the need to justify ourselves indicates that we have not yet grasped the magnitude of divine forgiveness. When at last we see it, the result will be profound, liberating, and life-transforming.

A school bus driver was certain that he had killed a little boy by running over him. The man was devastated. He went to court and the judge pronounced him innocent. The judge said the bump he felt must have been the bus running over the boy’s bag. The boy’s death had nothing to do with his driving. What a huge difference there is between feeling guilty and being guilty!

What matters is not whether you feel holy and blameless but whether you cling to the fact that this is how the God of Truth sees you, because of Jesus. The Judge declares you innocent – not because of what you have or haven’t done, but because of what Jesus has done in taking your sin upon himself and suffering the full penalty for your sins that divine justice requires. All you need do is admit your need of Jesus, unlike the Pharisee who supposed he could make it on his own.

Just as the bus driver’s mind played tricks on him, so will yours. Like suddenly being told by a millionaire that all his assets are yours to do whatever you like with, it will take quite a while for the truth of what Jesus has done for you to sink in. So for a long while you will still have times when you feel guilty, but that feeling is simply an illusion. To help you come to grips with this, please see this webseries:

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