There is something in many people that tells them they need to be justified before a holy God. They know that they don’t measure up to God’s standard so they try to justify themselves before God by their good works hoping that God will be pleased with them. This is a very deadly assumption. God will never be pleased with the works of natural man. The problem is that God is so holy that by virtue of His nature, He must punish sin. This is every person’s problem who has been brought into this world and “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:4,20; Romans 4:1-8)

How are we to be justified before God?

How can God be just and justify sinners?

Here is the answer – “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation (satisfaction to divine law and justice) through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God (Old Testament saints who were justified before Christ actually died); To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (Romans 3:24-26)

Christ justified those for whom He died by becoming a substitute for them to suffer the wrath of God as He punished my sin in Him, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through His substitutionary life and death, the Lord Jesus Christ removed the curse and established righteousness for the people of God, the children of faith, all who will ever believe on His name. In and through Him God is both “a just God and Saviour.” (Isaiah 45:21)

How are sinners justified before a holy God?

“By the obedience of one (Jesus) shall many be made righteous”
(Romans 5:19)

“through faith in His name.” (Romans 3:25; Romans 4:1-8, Romans 4:24-25; Romans 10:4)

By D. Weaver