It is necessary to distinguish the basis of our justification—Christ’s bearing the Father’s wrath on our behalf and being raised from the dead—and the means of our justification—belief in Christ Jesus, who alone bore our deserved wrath and rose from death on our behalf.

All month, Christ Over All has focused on the question, “Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?”. Crucial as this is, it would be pointless and cruel if we did not address God’s glorious remedy for sin with its universal and individual consequences. Today, we redirect our focus to God’s merciful and gracious provision of his Son, to whom he imputed his wrath and punishment as our substitute, that he might acquit us sinners and remit our crimes against him. The Bible’s terms for these conjoined acts are “justification” and “forgiveness of sins,” featured in this article. The good news announces God’s Last Day verdict for everyone who believes in his Son—justified and sins forgiven.

God Promised the Savior at the Beginning in the Garden of Eden

In the Garden, God announced in advance his verdict of the Last Day on humans concerning sin: condemned to eternal death (Gen. 2:15–17). Thus, when the Serpent induced Adam (through Eve) to disobey God by eating fruit from the forbidden tree, sin’s indictment condemned the man and woman, with their progeny, to the punishment of death. Since then, every human born by the union of earthly parents has been subjected to the Creator’s same condemning verdict for sin, punishable by death in both the temporal and the eternal dimensions. Likewise, the Creator subjected the entire creation to futility in the hope of one day being liberated from its slavery to corruption—when God would redeem the bodies of his children by raising them from the dust (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 8:20–23). Thus, from the beginning, God revealed by way of prophetic prefiguring the ensuing cosmic war between the “Serpent’s seed” and the “woman’s seed,” the Coming One conceived not by the union of earthly parents but born of a woman nonetheless, who would crush the Serpent’s head—but not without the Serpent striking a wound to the Coming One’s heel (Gen. 3:15).[1]

Only the Coming One, born of a woman but uncreated, could remediate mankind’s and creation’s common plights—corruption and death. He entered his creation from heaven as the Second Man, the Last Adam, “a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45–49). As the head of a new humanity, he would sweep forward into time the judgment of the Last Day by his obedience unto death, even death on a cross (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:8). Thus, the visitation of God’s Last-Day-wrath upon Christ in his death on the cross effected both (1) that “we shall be saved” from the coming “wrath of God” (Rom. 5:9) and (2) the dawn of the New Creation “by which the world has been crucified” to Christ’s people and they “to the world” (Gal. 6:14–15). Likewise, he brought forward the resurrection of the Last Day into the midst of history when he arose from the dead, which was his “justification” before God (1 Tim. 3:16; Rom. 1:4), thus grounding our justification (Rom. 4:25).  Because Christ lives, we who are in him shall be saved by his resurrection life (Rom. 5:10). Hence, he makes all his progeny righteous (Rom. 5:19), fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (53:11) by creating a people born not from flesh and blood but from the Spirit (John 1:12–13).

Christ Jesus Brought Forward the Last Day Judgment and Resurrection

The vast glory of God’s gift of salvation in Christ obligates Christians to ponder the multifaceted imageries Scripture uses to portray its grace and beauty. God’s Word reveals salvation, eternal life, adoption, justification, sanctification, reconciliation, redemption, regeneration, remission of sins, resurrection, and other imageries as isolated doctrines or primarily past referring.[2]

All biblical imageries of salvation in Christ Jesus entail two phases or aspects: what Scripture presents as already occurring but not yet exhausted as God’s triumphant salvation entering the present age ahead of the Last Day with the advent of his Son. Jesus vividly dramatizes the presence of the Last-Day-resurrection at Lazarus’s tomb. He enhances and develops Martha’s correct belief in “the resurrection on the Last Day” by announcing, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:24–26). Jesus’s raising Lazarus from death’s grip signified that he brought forward into the present time “the powers of the coming age” (Heb. 6:5). This prefigured his resurrection. Likewise, Jesus preached that the not-yet resurrection of the Last Day already begins in this present age through the proclamation of the gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25). The Son’s rising from the dead was the dawn of the last days.

In the same way, Scripture portrays salvation as already ours in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:5, 8; Titus 3:5), but we have not yet received it exhaustively (Rom. 8:24; 13:11). Thus, Jesus instructs us that everyone who comes to faith in him to receive salvation must persevere to the end to be saved (Matt. 10:22). Hence, the frequent biblical imagery of the athlete sprinting forward from faith’s starting blocks endeavoring to lay hold of the prize who is Christ Jesus, to be found in him, to attain unto the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:8–11). As we ponder these imageries of God’s salvation in Christ Jesus, we need to believe and speak even-handedly, avoiding errors by exaggerating either the already or the not yet aspect to the suppression or exclusion of the other.[3] Among Christians, the error regularly occurs, overstating the already to the neglect of the not yet, portraying salvation as already possessed exhaustively. Hence, most Christians think of salvation as exclusively taking place in the past, testifying, “I am saved,” or asking, “Are you saved?”

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