Friday, April 9, 2010

Christ offers more

“Through Him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses.” Acts 13:39
Salvation through Christ is a precious thing. We often undervalue it, because of the minimal cost it requires of us. Christ has done it all; all we need to do is believe that His sacrifice is sufficient to cover our sins, confess and turn from our sins in repentance, and voila, we are justified before God. Being justified means ‘just if I’d never sinned’. God sees us in the perfect righteousness of Christ.
Contrast this with trying to obtain salvation by keeping the Law. This requires extraordinary, superhuman discipline on our part to never sin in deed, word, or thought. Of course, this is impossible. Paul hammers this point home in the epistle to the Galatians: we cannot be justified through keeping the Law, because we are all sinners. With the law, we only need to break it once for it to be ineffective. In contrast, the justification we find in Christ covers all our sins – past, present, and future.
There’s a move in the church at present where people are again seeking to put themselves under the Old Testament Law – keeping the feasts of Judaism, observing Sabbath days, eating according to the dietary restrictions laid out there. I am sure some of them even put tassels on their garments (Num. 15:38), which of course are made of a single fabric (Deut. 22:11). While I admit this latter point was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I just don’t get why people want to go back under the Law. It does not make us any more righteous before God (although it could well make a person more self-righteous). Christ came to set us free from the Law. We live, in Him, by faith.

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