THE GOSPEL OF GOD
Meditations in the St. Paul’s letter to the Romans
BLESSING AND BLESSEDNESS

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THE Apostle confirms his teaching concerning justification by faith by showing that his teaching is not new, but was taught in the Old Testament, and was the salvation of the people of faith in those days, just as it is the salvation of the people of faith in New Testament times. His quotation is taken from Psalm 32:1,2 which is one of the Psalms of David. In fact this blessed doctrine is the way of salvation from sin, death and God’s just judgement which is the teaching of the Bible from start to finish.

There is a word, used by the apostle in the scripture before us, which sums up the glory of this teaching concerning justification by faith. It is the word ‘blessedness’. Paul speaks of the person who is credited with righteousness apart from works as being in a state of blessedness. This is a glorious state to be in, and it is what I want to draw out from our scripture in this sermon. Our theme is ‘Blessing and Blessedness’.

The word ‘blessed’ or ‘blessedness’ is not a word we use a great deal today. It may be that many haven’t any real sense of its meaning. The minister in church is said to pronounce the blessing at the end of the service, and if we are churchgoers we know what this is, which is to call down upon all in the congregation, God’s love and protection. Sometimes we talk of something being a real blessing, by which we mean that this something brings good into our lives. Apart from this the word ‘blessed’ is hardly used in normal life.

In the Bible ‘blessed’ or ‘blessedness’ is used and has particular and real meaning. For example we have this word, and the meaning which goes with it used here in the scripture we are considering, in the Psalm from which Paul draws it, and in the beatitudes at the beginning of St. Matthew chapter 5. In each place the meaning is to do with our relationship with God.

The word ‘blessed’ means ‘happy’, but in a far better way than the word ‘happy’ is used in our daily use. ‘Happy’ is the word which we use to describe our feelings when things are going pleasantly for us, or successfully, and because of this we feel good. It is a subjective experience - we feel happy - we feel good. The experience passes away quite quickly as more mundane things come along, or if things begin to go wrong in our lives. If life is reasonably good we say that we have a happy life, but often we think life is not happy at all.

‘Blessed’ is something different, stronger, real and permanent. It is a bible expression to describe something permanent and lasting, and the result of a a good relationship with God. In the Beatitudes we are told it is to be ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ to be ‘poor in spirit’, to ‘mourn’ and to be ‘meek’. In our normal human life we don’t attach the feeling of being happy to any of these things, yet the poor in spirit possess the kingdom of heaven. Those who mourn are comforted, and those who are meek inherit the earth. The world declares that this is all rubbish because the world does not understand what the experience and attitude is which is described in the Beatitudes. Being poor in spirit is to view ourselves through the eyes of God, and see how far short we fall from his glory. Because of this we mourn for our sins, and in our mourning we are meek, being surprised when people speak well of us. This does not mean we are grovelling ineffective people. This is our attitude before God. It brings real blessedness, because in this state we look for the way into God’s kingdom which is not from our own doing, and we cast ourselves on the mercy of God. In this state of faith, we are accounted righteous by God for Christ’s sake; and hungering after such righteousness, which we know we don’t possess ourselves, we find it credited to us by God. So we know blessedness - real lasting happiness - which is because of a safe and permanent relationship of being in God’s favour.

This is what the apostle is talking about here in the scripture we are studying, and from what he says, and the quotation from the Old Testament he uses, we can draw out something of this blessedness.

CREDIT IN THE BANK OF HEAVEN

Most of us have very limited credit in earthly banks. We have enough to get by, and enjoy a few of the pleasures of life. Many in the world have little or no money at all, and a bank account is an unattainable dream. For all who believe in Jesus as Saviour we have infinite credit in the bank of heaven, which is never exhausted. The credit is the perfect righteousness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The moment we renounced any dependence on our own good works, and as an helpless sinner we threw ourselves on the mercy of God, and received God’s promise by faith, that all who believe on Jesus will not perish but have everlasting life - at that moment God credited to our account in the bank of heaven all the righteousness of Christ.

With this credit all our debt to God due because of our sin has been met. Our debt to God has been cancelled. No accusation will God ever again bring against us for our sins because the perfect righteousness of Jesus is in our account in heaven. Never again will God be our judge to condemn us for our sins, because in God’s view, because of the righteousness of Jesus credited to us, we are considered as fully righteous in his sight.

There is no greater happiness/blessedness than to know there is no condemnation for us and that we have permanent peace with God.

TRANSGRESSIONS FORGIVEN

Who is truly blessed? A truly blessed person is one who has all his or her transgressions or sins forgiven by God!

When we think about forgiveness, we often think of it as the forgiveness of all our sins up to the point in time when forgiveness is received, but not necessarily after this point. We think that future forgiveness needs to be secured in the future sometime. This means that, the next moment we sin, we find ourselves in an unforgiven state again, and this means we are back to where we were before we received forgiveness. If we have one sin unforgiven, we are still unforgiven and under sentence and judgement, however many sins have been forgiven in the past.

The blessedness of being forgiven through faith in Christ is that Christ’s death atoned for all our sins - every sin we have or will commit during our earthly life. So when in the Gospel we receive the forgiveness of our sins, we have received the forgiveness of all the sins we have and will have committed throughout our lives.

This must be so, for if it is not so, then the Gospel is very little Gospel at all. The fact is that Christ died for our sins before we were born. We are told that he bore our sins in his body on the cross. When Christ died, none of our sins had yet been committed in time, yet God placed them on Christ and he died to take the punishment for them when he died on the cross. Christ was either taking responsibility for all the sins we were to commit throughout our lives, or else his substitution for us in death would have been a fiction. The promise does not say that he died only for some of our sins, but for all of them. Because of this we know this wonderful blessedness the moment we believe, that all our sins, past, present and in the future, have been taken by Jesus, and he took the punishment for them to the full in his body on the cross.

This is a wonderful blessedness. It means that always and forever there is no accusation against us in heaven. Our names are in the book of life, and there is no stain against our character because our sins are blotted out, or as the Psalm quoted in the scripture before us puts it, our sins are covered - covered up so that they can’t be seen. They have been covered by the all sufficient death of Jesus where He bore fully the death the sin of the world deserved.

This blessedness means that death has passed away for us, because death is the penalty for sin, and there is now no sin recorded against us, and there is no condemnation for us. This is a secure blessedness because its security is based on the perfect work of Jesus for us, which is complete forever. We can’t lose salvation once we have believed, and to say that we can is a touch of blaspheme. It suggests that Jesus did not die a full and sufficient sacrifice for the sin of the whole world. How dreadful to suggest that Jesus failed in some way in the work of salvation he came to do. It would be saying that God was wrong to raise Jesus from the dead, because Christ’s resurrection is God saying that Jesus had completed our salvation.

People complain against this teaching on forgiveness, and this blessedness because they feel it is encouraging people to sin. If we are saved eternally, they say, then it is encouraging people to sin and not bother to be holy. There are many things that need to be said about this view. Firstly, such a view must be wrong because scripture says that we are forgiven forever. Secondly, how could things be any other way. If our forgiveness depended in any small way on our a efforts at holiness, then there would be no security whatsoever, because we have no ability to do anything that is perfectly holy, and even if we were, how would we ever know whether we had done enough. Thirdly, no one who has received such blessedness as this forgiveness, and felt such mercy, grace and love, can dream of behaving deliberately in a way that Jesus would dislike and disapprove of. Fourthly, the moment we are forgiven we are reconciled to God, and we are raised to new life which wants only to be holy. It is only the flesh which desires to sin, and the holy person we have been raised to become abhors the sin in our flesh and seeks to put it to death.

We need to hold firm to this blessedness, and exercise our faith daily in remembrance of the death Jesus died for us, so that we may never lose the comfort and blessing of being forgiven. This is why Jesus gave his church the sacrament of Holy Communion. As Jesus distributed the bread and wine at the time of the institution of Communion, so each time the service of Holy Communion is conducted Jesus is present, and it is he again who is the host at the supper, and as the bread and wine is given to us, it is Jesus saying to us, be of good cheer, your sins have been cover by me in my death for you. We are to remember Jesus - that he died for our sins, and that he rose again to prove to us that his death was sufficient and effective to remove all the guilt of our sins from us.

WILL NEVER

Here is the last thought concerning this blessedness of justification by faith through the imputed righteousness of Christ, which we have been meditating upon from these verse before us.

Justification means that God does not count any sin against us, because instead, for Christ’s sake, God counts us righteous in his sight. God credits to our account the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The words which are so wonderful, and add to the blessedness the people of faith enjoy is contained in these two words in our paragraph heading.

God will never count any sin against us again. Having placed our sin upon his Son, and his Son having borne the punishment of that sin to the full, it would be totally unjust of God to then count the sin against us, and seek to enforce a further punishment for them. Christ satisfied God’s law on our behalf, and so God’s law has been fulfilled for us, so God is entirely just in pronouncing complete and full forgiveness to us, and never counting any sin against us again.

In Jesus we have a blessed security which can never be broken or taken away in time or eternity.

CONCLUSION

Let us dwell in this blessedness every day, praising God for the gift of our Lord Jesus Christ, and adoring our wonderful and perfect Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ.