From sin-debt to redemption: why salvation cannot be earned, only received through Jesus (Yeshua)
Status: Working Notes Faith & Logic Published October 18, 2024
Salvation is by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus (Yeshua), as the Scriptures testify. God declares the believer righteous (justification), sets the captive free (redemption), and then begins the long work of making the person actually holy (sanctification). Good works are a result of salvation, not its cause.
“What do you mean ‘good works?’ Why should this apply to me? I believe in God.”
Believing that God exists, and being good by our measure, is not the mark. The mark is his perfection — not ours.
We need to be saved from God’s judgment because of sin — because we’ve missed the mark. Those who remain in that sin will spend eternity separated from him in the place the Bible calls Hell.
What is sin? Sin means to miss the mark. What mark? Perfection. Not our idea of perfection, but perfection as God is perfect.
“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” — Romans 5:12 (NKJV)
“If we’re all born into sin, then how can we be perfect like God? I consider myself a good person. That’s enough. Right?”
No. Everything that comes from you — inside and out — falls short of God’s standard of perfection.
Isaiah records Israel’s own confession in a time of unfaithfulness: their righteousness was beged ‘idim — a polluted garment (Isaiah 64:6). That is a real and severe image. If the covenant people’s best standing could be named that way, no one earns salvation by works. The Law is a second problem, not the same one. Scripture says the Law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives — a bond that ends only in death, “until death do us part”.
These verses establish that those who are in Jesus are dead to the law and ‘married’ to Him.
“Or do you not know, brethren (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives?
For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband.
So then if, while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man.
Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.” — Romans 7:1-4 (NKJV)