God's Courtroom Settlement for Our Guiltiness

These are some devotional comments following a reading from Chapter one of Horatius Bonar's excellent book, "The Everlasting Righteousness."

God's acquittal of His people in His Court of Judgment is based upon strict justice - and not a giving way of His holy and perfect law to His love for His people.

Both His love for us and His justice are completely satisfied in the courtroom acquittal that He gives to us. The Righteous requirements of His law - that the soul that sinneth must die - were perfectly satisfied in the death of our Substitute, the Lamb provided by God Himself!

Thus God is just and the justifier of them who trust in Jesus. We lay hold of the sacrifice by faith, laying claim to the merits of Christ and pleading that all our cause be handled by and through Him alone.

Understanding the legal basis for our acquittal opens the door to Romans 8:33 and 34, as well as other passages.

No one can lay any charge against us, because God has already laid all the charges against Christ and justified us. The perfect and all-knowing Holy God has not left out any possible charge that might be laid against us. Nobody can raise a charge which God in His searching knowledge has not already found out and addressed in Christ.

Nobody can condemn us, because there was One already condemned, and judged, and died, and raised and glorified, that is Christ, who is present in Court and conducting our defense for us! Nobody dare suggest in His presence that a condemnation of His people is justified, His already having been condemned for us.

How sad that most of "Christendom" rejects God's method of legal acquittal, and substitutes the works of lost men!