No Condemnation: Justification
Romans 8:33

We are in Romans, chapter 8. Last week we came out of Romans 8:28-30 and now we’re in the last section, the last nine verses of this wonderful chapter. We’re focusing on the various questions that Paul raises to drive home his point. These last nine verses not only serve as a conclusion to chapters 6, 7, and 8 but they also form a conclusion to the entire first eight chapters of the epistle. At the same time they form a transition to what is coming up in chapter 9, which is a major shift in focus for God’s plan in Israel.

The major theme in Romans, as we have seen, is God’s righteousness and how do we as fallen sinners have any kind of fellowship or rapport with God who is perfectly righteous. This has been demonstrated in chapters two and three that man is unrighteous. We’ve seen that the only solution to that is the imputation of righteousness, which we review tonight. Imputation and justification are covered in the last part of chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 5, which forms the transition to chapter 6. Chapter 6 focuses on how the justified person is supposed to live the sanctified or the spiritual life.

Then coming out of these chapter, the question that is raised is if God is so faithful and God is so righteous, then what about the fact that the Jews seem to be getting shunted or set aside in favor of the Gentiles right now. Has God forgotten about His people Israel? Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus our attention on God’s righteousness in relation to Israel and the promise to Israel. When we get into those three chapters there are some really wonderful things there. But there are some complicated passages, some complex verses, that we’ll need to work through but as long as we remember the context we can work our way through them without a lot of difficulty.

Unfortunately, what happens is that when we sort of chop things up people can read theology into various sections. Last time as we looked at verses 31 and 32, I pointed out that there are seven rhetorical questions that Paul asks. A rhetorical question is a question that a writer or an orator uses in order to focus the thinking of his audience but without expecting an answer. So by asking these questions, Paul is doing a couple of different things. He’s reminding people of what he has taught. He is focusing their attention on what to think logically about the conclusions to what he has said so that he can lead their thinking to the proper conclusion which is stated and emphasized in verses 35 down through 39. That is, the security of the believer in God’s faithfulness, because God is immutable; God is faithful; God is righteous. Therefore, nothing can separate us from the love of God so it’s a great passage on eternal security.

But before we get there tonight we’re going to look at verse 33 and perhaps verse 34. They are connected in terms of the fact that verse 33 focuses on justification. Justification is almost always set up or spoken of in a context where the opposite is emphasized as well and that is condemnation. So justification is brought up in verse 33 and that leads directly to the next rhetorical question, which is “Who is he who condemns?” 

Now these are the questions that are asked. The first is the general question, “What then shall we say to these things?” Having gone through the doctrines covered in the first eight chapters, Paul says, “What shall we say to these things? He concludes by saying “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Now this statement is what is known as an a fortiori argument. Last time I gave a couple of illustrations and somebody came up afterwards and said that having heard about this for years and having it explained for years, my illustrations were so simple that they finally understood it. Well, I guess it takes a simple mind to give a simple illustration!

An a fortiori argument, which is a Latin phrase, is basically an idea stating that the strongest premise, such as John is worth a hundred billion dollars, then the conclusion is that he can pay your electric bill. Because he has a hundred billion dollars he has all of that wealth then a paltry $150 to $250 electric bill would be nothing for him to pay if he is worth a hundred billion dollars. So the argument is from the stronger to the lesser. So if God is omnipotent and God is able to handle every situation, then moving from that, God is able to handle any situation, any difficulty in your life or my life. If God is in control of human history, then that means God is perfectly capable of handling any problems that come up in your life or my life. That’s called an a fortiori argument.

The emphasis here is in the context of dealing with adversity. Adversity is going to come up again in verse 35 when Paul asks the question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?” In other words, if we’re going through difficult times is that a sign that God no longer cares for us, that God is not in control or our circumstances are so out of control that God is rather helpless? Now that is a conclusion that some people have reached in trying to deal with the problem of evil and the problem of suffering. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book a couple of decades ago called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. His basic conclusion was that God just can’t control these things. He’s not quite omnipotent. If He was, and if he were really a loving God, then He wouldn’t let these bad things happen to basically good people.

We understand from Scripture that God allows evil to run its course because God allows His creatures to exercise free will. They can make good decisions or bad decisions. If they make bad decisions there will be worse consequences from those bad decisions. In order to allow human volition to run its course, it means God must allow those consequences to come. It’s not that God is not in control but that God is allowing mankind to work things out according to his own volition.

As a result of that, there’s going to be opposition to Christians living in the Devil’s world. We call it the Devil’s world because he’s called the Prince of the Power of the Air, he’s called the God of this Age, and because this is the Devil’s world he has stolen the authority of it from mankind. Man was placed on earth as God’s representative. In Genesis 1:26-27 it says God created man in His image and likeness to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field. When man disobeyed God by yielding to Satan’s temptation in the garden, then the result was that Satan usurped a temporary authority over the planet. Therefore we’re living in the Devil’s world.

When Satan tempted Jesus he offered him the kingdoms of the world. Jesus did not say, “Well who do you think you are? I run things, you don’t. You don’t have the right to offer me the kingdoms of the world.” Jesus didn’t say that because he recognized that until Satan is finally defeated and destroyed at the end of the Tribulation period, he has usurped this authority and the current environment is in the Devil’s world. Therefore we are going to face adversity just because we live in a fallen system, a corrupt system, so there will be things that don’t go right.

Most things don’t ever go the way we think they should but more than that we will also face overt hostility. There are several examples of ways in which in our culture we are facing increasing antagonism as Christians. 1963 is a date that many scholars choose for a variety of reasons as the time when we moved into a post-Christian environment. It has to do with various political decisions, various judicial decisions, and things of that nature. Since then things have been deteriorating many decades but finally due to a variety of factors by 1963 we could say we have moved in our culture beyond the influence and sort of used up the last part of the legacy of the Puritans and evangelicals who founded this country.

Now we see different ways we are attacked. One way in which we’re attacked is that some eleven or twelve years after the attacks on 9/11 the media often labels conservative Christians with the same broad brush-strokes as Muslim extremists. One fundamentalist is the same as another fundamentalist, they say. Just because one’s a Christian and one’s a Muslim doesn’t make it any different; you’re an extremist, therefore, you are a problem. We see this bubbling up when we pay attention to some of the blogs and some of the news items that are coming out after this horrible thing that occurred in Boston this last week, the explosions, the bombs set off. Well you already have some people saying this type of bomb is typical of right-wing extremist. They never say it’s left wing extremists; they never quite admit it. It’s right wing extremists and they say it’s probably someone from some Christian group or some right wing, ultra-conservative group so they begin to attack Christians and say that fundamentalist Christians are just the same as fundamentalist Muslims.

No one ever stops and asks how many times do we have Bible-believing, conservative Christians going around blowing themselves up to kill other people in order to make their point. Now you may have some Catholic extremists during terrorist activities in Ireland or things like that but we’re not talking about things like that. We’re talking about conservative Bible-believing Christians. It just doesn’t happen. They don’t do things like that. You may have some radical, pseudo-Christian groups like the Aryan Brotherhood or some others who do some other things but they’re not conservative Bible-believing Christians. So the world seems to be attacking more and more various Christians.

Another way in which we’ve seen this is that for the last two or three decades the civic observance of Christianity and nativity scenes at Christmas, and resurrection celebrations and motifs at Easter have been challenged. It seems to be okay in some places for an Islamic crescent to be permitted or for a Jewish menorah to be permitted but not a nativity scene. In New York City, where nativity scenes have been banned, lawyers argue that Jewish and Islamic symbols have a cultural or secular dimensions but that nativity scenes were purely religious and so had no place in the Christmas holiday. Another event that happened very recently, just within the last month, a school principal in Alabama made national news by prohibiting any mention of Easter, Easter bunny, or Easter eggs because it might be a religious offense to non-Christians. As I listened to all of this discussion about this I never heard anyone stand up and say, “Wait a minute, the term Easter really has its derivation from Ishtar, the pagan goddess of fertility.” That’s where you get the bunny and the eggs. There’s no bunny hopping around outside the empty grave. When the stone rolled back there weren’t painted eggs inside the tomb that the two Mary’s suddenly found in their early morning Easter egg hunt. All of these trappings they’re attacking have nothing to do with the Resurrection story at all. No one ever said that. It’s like these traditions that have attached themselves like Velcro to the Biblical event. There was a lot of to do about that.

Now in Texas you can Google this. About 80% of the school districts in Texas and many other states have adopted a curriculum that is blatantly pro-Moslem. It’s called the C-scope curriculum. In history it compares those who were engaged in the Boston Tea Party, the Patriots who incidentally were being honored at the Boston Marathon, and says they are really terrorists and what they did at the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism and therefore, those Christians are not any different from Islamic terrorists. This has been verified by the Texas legislature and part of the problem is that there’s a lot of secrecy involved with this. They’ve had days when they’ve had their women students wear hijab and dress like that but they would never do that with Christians or let everybody wear a cross one day so they could see what it would be like to be a Christian. So this has been accepted and a lot of people are waking up to this right now.

In 2009 an activist judge in New Hampshire ordered a home school mother to stop home schooling her daughter because the little girl “reflected too strongly” her mother’s Christian faith. So here we have a judge telling a mother she has to put her child in public school because she’s communicated too much Christianity to her children. Media Matters, which is a non-profit media watchdog organization on the liberal side, stated clearly in its application to the IRS for its application for 501C3 status that it would be an anti-Christian organization and they were given non-profit status. Bumper stickers have been seen saying, “So Many Christians; So Few Lions”. The overt hostility to Christianity increases.

Recently in the news a German family was seeking asylum, political asylum in the U.S. from Germany because the Germans were going to force them to quit home schooling their children and put them into public schools so they were seeking asylum here. Our president and his administration are not going to grant them asylum and are sending them back. They’re being covertly persecuted for their Christian beliefs and we’re not going to protect them.

Then recently I had this e-mail sent out to everyone. An army officer, Lt. Colonel Jack Rich told other officers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky that specifically Christian organizations like the American Family Association and Christian Research Council are domestic hate groups because they oppose homosexuality. We’re going to see more and more of that kind of thing if we accept homosexual marriage. When anybody speaks out against that they will be considered to be a hateful person. That term hate is being redefined as if you disagree with what is politically correct then you are a hate monger. This just goes on and on.

We are living in a time of hostility, increasing hostility, toward Christianity. The reality is, though, God is greater than all of this and even if we end up going to the lions like the Christians did in ancient Rome God is greater than any opposition and so we need to trust the Lord and He is going to provide for everything. When we ask the question, “What shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” the answer is that no one can ultimately destroy us or destroy our salvation.

This was emphasized in Romans 8:32, again, “He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” He did not spare His own Son in the same way, as I pointed out last time, as Abraham who would not spare or withhold from God because Abraham understood that God would bring him back to life even if he died. I pointed out from that, that this is a great verse for understanding substitutionary atonement: that He delivered Him up for us all.

We have passages like Matthew 20:28, Luke 22:19, John 13:37 that use this same Greek preposition huper, as well as the second preposition peri emphasizing substitution. Two great verses we’ve seen in Romans for this are Romans 5:6 and 7, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare to die.” This is emphasizing substitution. Christ died in our place.

 That led to the next statement or question on Paul’s mind. He says, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” I want you to look at the first verse in Romans 8, “Therefore there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ.” That is a clear statement coming out of everything Paul has said up to this point that there’s no condemnation against the believer. Paul is reminding us of this in verse 33. “Who then can bring a charge against God’s elect?” And he answers it, at least the way it is translated in the NKJV; it is translated “It is God who justifies,” as if it is an answer. Now some of you may have a different translation that handles that differently. The problem in the Greek is that there are no punctuation marks so generally speaking, most translations handle this as if the question is in the first part of the verse and then it is “God who justifies” moving us to the next point. That’s how the NKJV handles it and the NASB and the NIV. Some may be a little different so I just wanted to raise that point that if yours reads differently you’ll know why.

I believe the second part of the verse is the answer to the first verse so we’ll look at this as we go through the passage. Now the main verb that is used in the first part of the verse “bring a charge” really clues us in to what’s going on here. The verb is egkaleo. The root is kaleo, which means to call. For example we studied that root verb in verse 28, “those who are the called according to His purpose” but it has this en preposition which gives it a different meaning. At its root it would have the idea to call in somebody but it’s used in the concept where you’re calling somebody in to answer certain accusations that are brought against him. And so it came to mean to accuse someone or to bring a legal accusation against someone in a court of law. So what we see against the context here is not experiential relationships but legal standings.

I remind you of that because this is what is so important in understanding the Biblical teaching on justification. Justification doesn’t mean, “Just as if I had never sinned”. That’s one of those little sayings people come up with and they think it helps them to remember it, but justification doesn’t mean, “Just as if you’d never sinned.” You have sinned but you are credited legally with the righteousness of Christ. All of this has to do with legality in the courtroom of God. Righteousness is a word having to do with the standard of God. The same word that’s used to righteousness is also used for justice in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and Greek of the New Testament.

So that when we read these terms they drive us to understand this as a courtroom setting. In justification we are declared righteous. That doesn’t mean we are righteous. It doesn’t change our makeup. This is the idea that you get in Roman Catholic theology, that there is an infused righteous so that a person becomes morally changed. We’re not morally changed. Our legal standing before God is what is changed. This is the historic understanding of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.

Now Paul asks this question, “Who shall bring any charge against those who God has chosen?” The term that is used for “chosen”, often translated God’s elect, has an interesting background to it. It’s the word eklektos. We get our English word eclectic from it, choosing different things to put things together. You might have someone purely conservative; someone else who’s purely liberal, and they’re going to pick and choose different things, a sort of patchwork quilt of ideas. That would be called an eclectic system because they’ve chosen different things. That’s the root word eklektos. Now this is often thought to refer to God’s selection of individuals for salvation. But again that’s not what it’s saying.

I’ve dealt with this back in Romans 8: 28, 29, and 30, in terms of understanding the calling of God and predestination. The word eklektos was not used there. We get an idea there from some ice cream bars. I pointed this out when I came back from Israel last year, the doctrine of the Magnum bar. If you don’t remember or you weren’t here, one of my favorite things in life is ice cream. I could just live on ice cream. Good ice cream, not some of this swill they serve at some places. It’s got to be good ice cream. A lot of ice cream bars you get in America when you go into some convenience store are not of good quality but Magnum bars are really good quality ice cream. They really have a wider variety of flavors outside the U.S. but anyway; they started selling them in the U.S. not long ago.

In Israel I had a habit of having one or two or three a day whenever we would stop. I kept trying to learn to read the Hebrew writing and the labels. Modern Hebrew is a little different and they have a very sophisticated way of taking root words that I would know from Biblical studies and they add a lot of different suffixes and prefixes in order to allow these words to work with a lot of modern vocabulary. You might have a basic word such as rapha, which in Scripture talks about health or healing and a form of it becomes a term for a doctor. A feminine form would be a term for a nurse or hospital. All these terms would be built off of that same basic Biblical root.

I was asking our Israeli guide what a word on the Magnum Bar meant. It was mobecharim. He said that means choice almond. The hard consonants in the middle “ch” are the word for election or elect in Hebrew. That’s the counterpart to eklektos. I thought about that and it’s one of those things where the lights go on and that the idea here isn’t selection in terms of choosing one person but looking at it as a group, as a collective whole, that this is a choice group, emphasizing the quality of the group.

As a result of that as I did some additional studies with various writers and found that this has been set forth by many people as the primary meaning of the Greek word eklektos and the doctrine of election in the New Testament really focuses on a collective sense and it focuses on the qualitative aspect of the body of Christ. This is reinforced by the fact that in the Greek here in the word eklektos there is no article in the Greek. I’m getting into a lot of technical grammar here but it’s important in terms of understanding the difference. In English we have an indefinite article and a definite article. “A” or “an” are indefinite articles. So I could hold up a piece of paper and say, “This is a piece of paper.” It’s just a generic or any piece of paper. But if I say, “This is the paper” then I’m indicating its individuality and I’m distinguishing it from all other pieces of paper. That’s how the definite article works in English.

Technically it’s improper in Greek to refer to the article as a definite article because there’s no indefinite article. There’s no “a” or “an”. You either have a word with an article or a word without an article. There are about nine different ways in which the Greek article can function other than just distinguishing this one thing from all the other things in its class. This is what’s going on in John, chapter 1 when John says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.” There’s no article with theos there, the word for God, and it’s emphasizing the qualitative aspect of the noun and not the distinguishing it as The God: all of the attributes of God, all the qualities of God as part of His nature. This word eklektos here doesn’t have an article so it’s emphasizing the qualitative aspect of this group. It’s in the plural indicating the collective so it’s a collective noun where it’s emphasizing the quality of the noun so this reinforces the idea that who should bring a charge against God’s choice ones.

If you’re a part of that group of God’s choice ones and you are if you put your faith alone in Christ alone, then you are in Christ and you are part of that choice group known as the saints in the church age. Then if you’re a part of that choice group, the implication is that there’s no one greater than God so there’s no one can bring a charge against you, that is, a legal accusation against you. The NKJV translates mobecharim there as choice.

There’s an Old Testament example of how this word is used. “Among all these people there were 700 choice men [a battle with the tribe of Benjamin]. It is used to indicate the qualitative aspect of a group. Now the question asked, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” and the answer is that it’s God who justifies. What’s the implication here? The implication is that if God has declared someone to be just, then no one can appeal that decision because there’s no higher court. No one can bring a charge against us. This is just great news for us to understand that one of the implications of the doctrine of justification is that we’re declared not guilty. We’re declared righteous so that can never be reversed. That can never be turned back. We have a security in our salvation that can never be lost because there is no one that can ever be lost. There is no one that has more power, more ability than God to bring a charge against us and to overturn His decision. We are declared righteous.

This has a certain implication. I want to connect it to a verse we’ve discovered several times. I think it’s important to just tie some of these concepts together for us. In Colossians 2:12-14 we see the flow of what Paul is saying here. The moment we are saved, we are identified with Christ and that identification places us in Christ. This is a specific term Paul uses a lot to talk about our new legal standing before God because we’re in Christ. We’re covered by the righteousness of Christ. Verse 12 says, “Having been buried with Him in baptism by which you were also raised up with Him…” This is what happens and water baptism pictures this. At the instant you’re saved there is a legal transaction that takes place instantaneously in heaven. Jesus Christ, using the Holy Spirit, identifies us with His death, burial and resurrection. So just as in water baptism a person is immersed in the water, indicating identification, when they come out they’re in a new state. The water pictures cleaning just as the utilization of the Holy Spirit would indicate positional cleansing from all sin. And so that baptism by the Holy Spirit is something that applies to us the work of Christ on the Cross so we’re completely cleansed of all sin, positionally. We are no longer unjust; we are declared justified.

Then in verse 13 Paul says, “When you were dead in your transgressions [in the past as an unbeliever] and the uncircumcision of the flesh [terms that refer to the fact that the person was not yet a believer, they were still in their sins and spiritually dead] He made you alive.” That was the position we became regenerate. We were spiritually dead and then God made us alive together with Him.

Then we have another participle for forgiveness. It shouldn’t be translated as a finite verb. It probably has a causal sense to it or maybe a temporal sense. “He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us.” So the question is, when were sins paid for? When were they canceled? When were they forgiven? Were they forgiven when you trusted Christ or were they forgiven when Christ died on the cross? According to these verses they were forgiven when Christ died on the cross when He nailed it to the cross. Then it’s applied or realized in the moment of regeneration when we trust in Christ. As we looked at Colossians 2:13 we see that the key idea here is this participle “having forgiven” which is charizomai, the gracious canceling of a debt. It emphasizes grace and it emphasizes the cancellation of a sum or money or a debt that is owed and it means to forgive or pardon an action so if it’s translated casually it has the idea because “He had already forgiven or cancelled our sins.” He regenerated us because He had already cancelled the debt in the past. Or it could be translated as a temporal participle. “He made us alive again after He had cancelled the debt.” They both make the same point. Verse 14, “Having canceled out the certificate of debt.” That word for canceled means to wipe out, to rub out, to erase, eradicate, or remove. That’s why we can say there’s no condemnation against us.

Who can bring a charge against us? None because the certificate of debt, the indictment, has been wiped out, blotted out, erased at the cross by the work of Christ. Not by anything you have done or that I’ve done. We can’t do anything. It was completely done and finished at the cross so that the charge, the indictment against us is dealt with and wiped out at the cross. Then we say, “Well, isn’t everyone saved?’ The reason people aren’t saved is that they’re still spiritually dead. The indictment was wiped out at the cross but their condition of being spiritually dead continues. We’re born spiritually dead and that condition isn’t changed until we trust in Christ. At that instant when we trust in Christ we are regenerated. Why? Because He’s already canceled the debt. The legal debt against us was canceled at the cross and it’s applied and we’re regenerated when we believe. That’s when we become regenerate.

Now this word exaleipho meaning to rub out or to erase is the counterpart to the Old Testament word machah, which also means to wipe something out. We have it used in a couple of significant passages, for example in Psalm 51:9 where the Psalmist prays, “Hide your face from my sins and blot out all of my iniquities.” It’s that idea that God’s going to cancel or wipe out the sins against us. In that case it’s talking about forgiveness for sins after salvation. In Isaiah God says, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins.”

This is a great comfort to people because so many people live through the Christian life so concerned they’re going to lose salvation, so concerned that they’ve done something that made God mad at them and God’s not going to save them. They think that they’re going to lose their salvation. Yet we have great comfort from both Old Testament passages and New Testament passages that God promises a complete eradication of sin and that He will not remember it. That means He’s not going to hold it against us ever again. Romans 8:33, “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect. It is God who justifies.”

Let’s quickly review how justification takes place. There are really two doctrines that come together in justification. The first is imputation and the second is justification. Now these are not part of everyday language. You’re not going to go down to HEB and find somebody using the word imputation. You’re not going to find too many people talking about justification. You’re not going to go down to the local bar and find anybody using those kinds of words. We’ve lost that. These are words that were common words in English fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years ago. A lot of which is a result of the influence of the Bible, because people read the Bible. These were words that were used to translate the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament into English so they were a part of everybody’s vocabulary. The more we move away from Christianity the Devil attacks through our vocabulary. People don’t read their Bible any more. They lose Biblical vocabulary in the culture. So we sometimes have to redefine those words.

Point 1. Imputation is the action of the Justice of God [God functioning as a judge] whereby He either assigns condemnation or blessing to someone. Condemnation is a sign credited or attributed to a human being. There are two categories of imputation: real imputations and judicial imputations. You’re not going to find too many people who teach this anymore. I didn’t generate this. I think there were older nineteenth century theologians who used these distinctions. Lewis Sperry Chafer did an excellent job making these distinctions. Unfortunately theologians today don’t think very precisely and I don’t find anybody who discusses this. I know that when I went to Preston City Bible Church in 1998 when I went up there for an interview, one of the questions they asked was to explain the difference between real and judicial imputations. That was on other ordination exams that were used in a variety of doctrinal churches. If you had never read Lewis Sperry Chafer you wouldn’t know those distinctions. Since Dallas Seminary basically quit requiring students to read Lewis Sperry Chafer after the mid-seventies on, Preston City Bible Church had gotten a number of questionnaire responses form candidates who couldn’t answer the question. Consequently all of the 100 applications they’ve received for the position they all got thrown in the trash because nobody knew how to answer this very basic question just because they hadn’t read Chafer.

Point number two is to define real imputations. Real imputations credit something to a person, which truly belongs to him. What this means is that what is being credited to somebody has some sort of affinity or some sort of similarity between what is being imputed and the target. There’s compatibility between the two things. For example, in the Old Testament we’re told that Adam’s original sin is imputed to every human being’s sin nature at birth. That imputation of the guilt of Adam’s original sin to a corrupt sinful infant at birth shows their compatibility there. There’s an affinity between the sin nature and the imputation of Adam’s original sin. And the same way, when a person is regenerated and is given a new human spirit, which is oriented to heaven and eternality, eternal life is imputed to that human spirit so there is an affinity between what is imputed and that to which it is imputed. That’s a real imputation, meaning there’s a real similarity between the two.

Point three says that judicial imputation has a disconnect between what is imputed and that to which it is imputed. They don’t fit. They don’t go together. It is simply a judicial declaration. For example, at the cross you have the perfectly righteous Jesus Christ to whom is imputed our sins. There’s no affinity between His perfect sinless nature and our sins. So it’s a judicial crediting of something that really doesn’t belong to Him. The same way when we believe in Christ His perfect righteousness is then imputed to us. It doesn’t belong to us, it doesn’t coordinate with anything in our lives, but it is judicially declared to be ours. So this is a judicial imputation given to us. Now that distinguishes the different kinds so when we say God imputes something to us, it’s not something we deserve, something that is natural to us. It’s something that is purely the result of a legal declaration.

The fourth point is that imputation derives from a Latin term imputare which just like the Greek word logizomai, it’s an accounting term and it means reckoning or charging something to someone’s account. If you’ve got a background in bookkeeping or accounting then you understand this concept of imputing or crediting something to someone’s account. It would be comparable to someone who has a 300 credit rating going to a mortgage company to take out a mortgage and someone who is related to him, a father or mother who has a 790 credit rating coming in and saying they will co-sign on the loan so that the bank doesn’t look at the lousy credit of the person who is applying for the loan. They look at the credit of the person who is co-signing the loan because they know their credit is what matters. They’re taking responsibility for the loan.

Imputation has this idea of legally crediting something to someone’s account. So the first judicial imputation that occurs in terms of all of salvation is the imputation that happened in a.d. 33 when all our personal sins were credited to Christ. This is what occurred between 12 noon and 3 p.m. when God covers the face of Jerusalem and Golgotha there so that no one can see what is happening on the cross. This is the first time Jesus cries out, “My God. My God, Why are you forsaking me?” because at that point the perfect Lamb of God without spot or blemish receives in His person the judicial imputation of our sins. He becomes legally condemned, legally guilty, for our sin and pays the penalty for it.

Romans 5:14 and 15 talks about this, “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, [the imputation of spiritual death] even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died [the imputation of Adam’s original sin to all human beings], much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many [the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the many].

So this is the second judicial imputation which is Christ’s Divine righteousness to man. This is in Romans 5:16, “The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift [that’s Christ’ incarnation and atonement] arose from many transgressions resulting in justification.” So Christ’s righteousness is credited to us so we can be declared righteous. The seventh point is that the result is then that man is declared righteous, He is not made righteous, sin isn’t overlooked, and the penalty is paid for. It’s not just as if I’d never sinned. We’re declared by God to be righteous, not because of anything we’ve done but because of we possess the righteousness of Christ.

((CHART)) So here’s a diagram. Here we are as sinners. We have no righteousness. Isaiah 64:6 says, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” At the cross, Jesus Christ who is perfectly righteous receives the imputation of our sins, our lack of righteousness. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” So “he who knew no sin was made sin” is a judicial imputation—so that we who lack righteousness can be made righteous. That is a judicial imputation So that our lack of righteousness is covered by Christ’s perfect righteousness. What God is looking at, then, is that perfect righteousness of Christ and on that basis, His righteousness we’re declared righteous and God can bless us. This is by faith alone.

This is what we saw in Romans 4:3 referencing Genesis 15:6 that at that point Abraham had already believed in the Lord and the Lord had imputed it to him as righteousness. That imputation of righteousness comes through faith alone. The Old Testament also has a picture of this where Zechariah in chapter 3 is having a vision and God shows him Joshua, the high priest, standing before the Angel of the Lord who is probably the Lord Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Satan, the accusing one, is the one standing at the right hand attempting to bring a charge against Joshua. That’s the question here in Romans 8:33, “Who can bring a charge against you?” The only one who’s going to try is Satan. He tried to do that with Joshua but the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you.” This would be the Angel of the Lord saying to Satan and God the Father. “The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebukes you. Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and was standing before the Angel. Then in verse 4 we read, “Then He answered [God the Father on the Throne] and spoke to those who stood before Him and said, “Take away the filthy garments from him.’ And to him He said, ‘See I removed your iniquity from you [the cleansing of sin] and I will clothe you with rich robes.” And he said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head,” and they put clean clothes on him and the angel of the Lord stood by. So this is a picture of how we are clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ. Because of that we are declared righteous.

So the emphasis in Romans 8:33 is to remind us that no one can bring a charge against us. No one is qualified to because we are among God’s choice ones, because we’ve put our faith in Christ and been declared just. Now next time we’ll come back and look at verse 34 because that takes the question to the next level, “Who is he who condemns?” It’s a reminder that Christ died, furthermore He’s risen and He’s the one at the right hand of God who makes intercession for us. So because Christ is at the right hand of the Father no one can bring condemnation because every time they do, He’s just going to point to the cross and say, “I paid for the sins there. They’re taken care of.” Satan can’t bring a condemnation against us. Then that leads to the next great question, “Who will separate us then from the love of God?” The answer is “no one”. We’ll get into that next time and finish up chapter eight.

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