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PAUL continues to impress on his readers the assurance that we have in Christ concerning our relationship with God, and our eternal acceptance with God. He is driving home that we are in the hands of God who has made himself our God, and is working all things for our good. Paul wants us to realise and be assured of the fact that the good which God purposes for us is that we might be brought into his eternal kingdom, and live with him in his glory in perfect happiness and blessing. Paul wants us to live in the security of the fact that as we travel through this earthly life we are safe in the arms of Jesus, and though we stumble and fail, and troubles afflict us, and Satan wars against us, yet we are entirely safe in Jesus, and God accepts us through him. This is the gift of the grace of God through Jesus.

Paul is doing this by a series of questions to which he gives a perfect and definitive answer that can’t be disputed. The first of these was in verse 31, then he posed another in verse 32. Now Paul introduces another in the verse before us where he asks, “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen.” The answer is that no charge can be brought because it is God who justifies. Let us now explore this wonderful truth.

NO CHARGE AGAINST US

The problem that Paul is dealing with is the problem of being charged with an offence before God which will condemn us, and so destroy our hope of acceptance and eternal life. Experience tells us that this is a very real problem. We find our conscience accuses us when we fail in our duty to God, specially when we fall short in love for God. Conscience also accuses us when we fail in practice, whether in action, thought or feeling, where we know we have fallen short of God’s law and so sinned.

Satan also exacerbates this problem because he is the arch accuser of Christians (Revelation 12:10). He comes and whispers to us telling us that we can’t possibly be accepted by God because of our failure, and he is there to bring these charges against us for every sin we commit, and with the threat that he will charge us before God and demand that we be punished.

This problem is always rearing its ugly head. The reason is that the devil’s action is always to bring us back to trusting in our own efforts and works for acceptance before God, and this is hard to combat because natural religion, which is espoused so much in the church, specially the Roman Catholic Church, is also written in our consciousness by being human. As the Roman Catholic church teaches we fall under the spell that we are only justified before God by being sanctified. This is why Roman Catholics can’t have assurance of salvation, and fear the idea of purgatory after death which is the teaching of their church, which is said to be a process of purging until the soul is fully sanctified and so justified before God. There is no assurance here, and Satan can exploit this thinking so easily and so strongly. Paul shows us this is all wrong, and that this is not the way we are justified and freed from charges before God.

CHOSEN BY GOD

The first thing that Paul presents to us is in this fact of being chosen by God. This takes us back to what he teaches us in verses 29 and 30, and this answers all our fears, though Paul does not content himself with this alone.

Let us look at this wonderful fact again. If we speak of being a Christian, we tend to speak of ‘one who trusts in Jesus’, or as ‘one who has received Christ’. This is true, and faith in Christ is how we enter into salvation, but do you see what the emphasis is here. The emphasis is all on what we do, and the idea that comes through is that we, by our wisdom and strength, have exercised faith. If this is so, then we may just as easily fail in faith again. Our position before God becomes rather like the action of a ‘yo-yo’, which is up and down, saved one minute and unsaved the next.

The fact is that we are chosen by God. We are God’s elect. God foreknew us before the foundation of the world. This foreknowledge is not God’s omniscience, but speaks of his choice beforehand and in eternity. We believe, because God chose us to be his, and to be saved. It is for this reason that we believe. Paul speaks of this so wonderfully in 1 Corinthians 1:4 “I always thank God for you because of the grace of God given you in Christ Jesus.” The grace of God is given. The grace of God is the gift that gives us faith to believe in Jesus. The gift of God’s grace is because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.

Do you see what Paul is saying. Our security in salvation rests on the choice of God. It rests on the action of God to make his choice effective. Our security of salvation rests in God, and not in our failing and weak efforts. Because our security rests on God’s choice of us, it can’t fail. God never fails in anything he chooses to do. Our security is in the fact that we are a chosen people. The Apostle Peter puts it so fully in 1 Peter 2:9 “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.”

GOD WHO JUSTIFIES

Having reminded us of the fact we belong to God because God chose that we should so belong to him, he answers the question of the Christian being charged with an offence and being condemned, by the words “It is God who justifies”.

The first thing that we can see is the fact that the one who judges every human being is God, but for us who believe because we are chosen by God, it is the judge who is the one who justifies us. If the judge justifies us then there can be no charge which anyone can bring against us that God will not throw out of court. This is the tremendous thought which we must seek to fully understand.

God deals with all human beings in a legal fashion. Our relationship to God is a legal one. This is seen throughout the whole of the Bible. In the case of Adam, God placed him under his Law, and this law was bound up in the one command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God makes covenants with people, and these covenants are legal ones. God promises to be God to people if they obey his commands. This is seen so clearly in the covenant made with Israel through Moses on Sinai, when the ten commandments, and all the ceremonial law, were given.

God also is the one who gives the law by which he will judge human beings. Then God is also the administrator of his Law, and finally every charge that is brought against any person before God must be on the grounds of the law God has given.

Now this seems immediately to take away all our security because we know that by the requirements of the law of God, all sorts of charges can be brought against us. Yet Paul says that God justifies us, and we may well ask how can this be?

What we may be sure of is that when God accounts us just in his sight he does it legally so that no one can upset his ruling. God justly accounts us just before him, and this means he accounts us to be holy in his sight and that we have fully and completely fulfilled all the demands of his law. The question is how can this be so?

It is so, that when God chose us he made sure that he found a way, and worked that way out, that he could be just and at the same time justify the ungodly. This means that God in his choosing of us also provided a way that in the case of every one he chose, his law would be fully satisfied in all its demands, and any punishment prescribed might be fully executed, so that when God pronounces us just and sinless before him according to law, he acts justly and absolutely.

God could not justify us if this was not so. God in his holiness can not allow sin to be overlooked. We human beings forgive people, but the sin we forgive is still there and still legally requires to be punished. God can’t forgive unless the sin is atoned for, and this is where Christ and the gift of God in him is at the centre of God’s glorious grace. The gift of the grace of God to us is through Jesus Christ.

God is just in justifying us sinners, because he has laid all our sin on Jesus, and caused him to bear our sins’ guilt and our sins’ just punishment. So instead of us having to bear the consequences of our sin, the consequences of our sin was visited by God on Jesus. Jesus as the sinless substitute voluntarily obeyed the will of God, his Father, and humbled himself and took the form of a slave being made in human likeness, and in this appearance as a man humbled himself and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 2:6-8) God made him sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be the righteousness of God in him. So Christ died for our sins. He satisfied the whole legal requirements of God’s law for all those God had chosen. So he rose for our justification. Christ’s resurrection was the declaration by God that Christ had done this tremendous and wonderful thing of fulfilling the whole law of God on our behalf, and so God could then pronounce us just in his sight.

The fact is that God, having accounted all our sin to Christ, also accounts all Christ’s righteousness to the believer, and so we are clothed in a righteousness that is a perfect reflection of all the holy requirements of God’s law, and so we are justified by God.

The fact is that God justifies us because as far as the law of God is concerned we are dead. We have died with Christ. It is because we have died in this way that Law of God has no claims on us and no jurisdiction over us. We are free from the law, and we are now under the rule of grace.

CONCLUSION

It is God who justifies. The judge of all the earth is the one who pronounces us as just in his sight, and that means that as far as the law of God is concerned there is no sin or failure that the law can accuse us of. My Saviour’s obedience to blood hides all my transgressions from view - that is how Augustus Toplady speaks of this blessing of justification by God. God remembers our sins no more, and this is because they are no more, for Christ has met the law’s demands on our behalf, and so these accusations are cancelled and can never be revived.