No Condemnation - Part 2

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Well I invite you to take your Bibles and turn again to Romans Chapter 8. I'm sorry for those of you who are visiting; you're going to catch us in the middle. We began this morning to look at this amazing passage from the point of view of the Apostle Paul. But I trust it will kind of catch you up to speed as we go here.

I read this week about a man who is 30 years old and was sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. It's hard to fathom, isn't it? I mean I can't imagine the crushing weight of standing in a courtroom next to your attorney and hearing the judge mete out those words, knowing that you will never again see freedom. It's the worst imaginable for us as human beings to think of losing the choice that we have to do whatever it is we choose to do. But as bad as that is, as I thought about it, it reminded me that there is nothing like what every sinner will hear when he stands before God.

As we saw this morning, God is perfectly holy and God has established the law. He's given us that law in His Word. He's written the substance of that law on every human heart. We call the essence of that law the Ten Commandments; those commands that God has laid out for human behavior. Our problem is that we have broken that law, and as we saw this morning, it's not as good as we thought it was. We believe that somehow we had only violated a couple of those commandments. But as we looked at how Jesus explained them, as we looked at what the essence of those commands are, we discovered that in fact (every one of us if we're honest and if we really understand what the Bible teaches), we haven't broken just one or two of them — we've broken all of them. And we're not talking here about man's law; we're talking about God's law. Galatians 3:10 — Paul puts it this way: "For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, to perform them." There's our problem. But as we saw this morning, Paul shows us how our Lord Jesus Christ has removed us from the demands of the law, from the curse that our sin deserves. We saw this in Romans 8:1-4. Let me read it for you. It reminds you of the flow of Paul's argument here:

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

The theme of this great chapter of the book of Romans is the believer's security in Christ. And as Paul sets out to develop that theme, he begins by declaring that for the one who believes in Jesus Christ, the condemnation that our sins (our violations of the law) deserve — that those consequences, that condemnation — is gone forever. And he provides us with four great details about this truth. This morning we saw the reality itself in Verse 1: "There is therefore now no condemnation." Condemnation means both the verdict of guilty and the sentence that that crime deserves. That's condemnation. For everyone who is not in Christ that condemnation remains. In fact, there's a frightening verse at the end of John 3. We love John 3:16. But John 3:36 says the one who has not believed in Christ, the wrath of God is abiding on him. It's as if that person lives his whole life waiting for the wrath of God to pour out on his head. And it comes in eternity. But for us who are believers, for us who have come to faith in Christ, Paul says, "There is therefore now no condemnation." There is no verdict of guilty now and there never will be. There is no sentence of eternal death now and there never will be. It's gone; erased from the record.

How can that be? Well we saw the reasons, secondly, in the second part of Verse 1 and in Verse 2; two reasons he gives us. First of all because we are inseparably united to Jesus Christ; we are in Christ Jesus. By faith we have been connected to Christ. We're hidden in Him and nothing can ever happen to us that wouldn't happen to Christ. There's a second reason he gave us in Verse 2; and that is, we are not condemned not only because we're united to Christ, but we're not condemned because the Spirit has set us free from the demands of the law. At the moment of our salvation the Spirit did a lot of amazing things. And one of those is to set us free from the demands that the law had on us, the claim, if you will, that the law had on us. So the reality is that we no longer stand under God's condemnation because of our violation of His law. And the reasons for that change in our standing are: number one — our union with Jesus Christ; and number two — the Spirit's work in freeing us from the demands of that law. But exactly how did God accomplish this incredible change?

Well that brings us to the third detail that Paul gives us here; the route. Verse 3: "For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh." Here are the means God used to bring condemned, hell-deserving sinners to a status or standing before God of no condemnation. This is how God did it. Notice what he says, "For what the law could not do." What is it that the law couldn't do? It couldn't justify sinners. It couldn't give them a right standing before God. All it could do was say, "Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!" It can't make us righteous. The law could never deliver us from our sin and the penalty that it deserves. It could never accomplish our salvation.

Now why couldn't the law do this? Well, don't misunderstand; it wasn't a problem with the law. He says in Verse 3, "What the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh." Paul isn't criticizing the law here. Notice what he had said about the law in previous verses. Look back at Romans 7:12. He says "the law is holy, [and] the commandment is holy and righteous and good" — nothing wrong with the law of God. In Verse 14 of the same chapter (Chapter 7) he says, "the law is spiritual." And again in Verse 16 he says the law is good — nothing wrong with the law of God. That's not the problem. The problem is us; weak as it was through our flesh. As Paul writes in Galatians 3:21: "Is the law contrary to the promises of God? May it never be! For if a law had been given which was able to impart life," (there was such a thing as a law that could impart life) "then it would have come through this law." The problem is not with the law; the problem is with us. No way we could ever achieve righteousness based on keeping it because we're sinners.

So what the law could never do, justify us before God, God did. And here's how He did it. Look again at Verse 3. God did it, first of all by sending His own Son; His unique, one of a kind Son. By the way there's a lot of rich theology in this verse. The fact that God the Father sent His Son argues for the doctrine of the Trinity. We have two different Persons here in our God, in one substance. But notice He sent His own Son "in the likeness of sinful flesh." This is incredible precision by the Holy Spirit as He ordained these words. Christ didn't come, notice, in the likeness of flesh. Then He would really not have been one of us if He were only in the likeness of flesh. He didn't come in sinful flesh. Then He would have been tainted by sin. He came, we're told here, "in the likeness of sinful flesh." In other words He was just like us except for sin. God sent Him and He made Him one of us. And God sent Him for a very specific purpose. Notice, he says, "as an offering for sin." Literally, you'll notice the words "as an offering" are in italics. That means they're not there in the original Greek text. That's just added by the translators to try to clarify. But literally what it says is He sent Him for sin. This speaks of an amazing reality that Christ came as a substitute. We understand the idea of substitution. If you've ever played sports you've gone in as a substitute for someone else. Christ came as a substitute. First Peter 3:18, the Apostle Peter says, "Christ died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God." You see, Jesus didn't die for Himself; He died in the place of others. And His righteous life wasn't solely for Himself; it was in place of those who would believe. He lived a righteous life in the place of those that would believe. In this way, back to Verse 3, we're told, God "condemned sin in the flesh." What does that mean? It means that God rendered a guilty verdict on His Son and carried out the sentence on Him. He condemned sin in the human nature of our Lord Jesus Christ. As the great commentator Haldane writes:

The guilt and punishment of sin are eminently seen in the death of Christ. Nowhere else is sin so completely judged and condemned. Not even in hell are its guilt and demerits so fully manifested. What must be its demerit, if it could be atoned for by nothing but the death of the Son of God? And what can afford clearer evidence of God's determination to punish sin to the utmost extent, than that He punished it even when laid on the head of His only begotten Son. In all this we see the Father assuming the place of a Judge against His Son, in order to become the Father of those who were His enemies. The Father condemns the Son of His love, that He may absolve the children of wrath.

When you think about the work of Christ on the cross, don't shortchange what Christ accomplished there. You see, when we think of Christ's suffering, our minds immediately go to His physical suffering. And that's only encouraged by films like Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It encourages that preoccupation with the physical suffering of Christ. And certainly that was horrific. But the point of Christ's death was not primarily the human suffering. It was experiencing the wrath of God on our behalf. You see, you can't reduce that to a series of digital images, but that was the key of what happened on the cross that day. Millions of martyrs have died in the same or worse physical torment than Jesus died. But what made the death of Christ unique was that He died under the full weight of God's condemnation. When He cried out in the garden, "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," He was experiencing what the martyrs knew they were delivered from; and that was the wrath of God. That's why He cried out on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Because that was the suffering that He endured that day. That was the means God used. God delivered us from the penalty of breaking the law of God by having Christ bear its condemnation as our substitute. Now think about this. The condemnation we talked about this morning, the condemnation that our sins deserve, the verdict of guilty and the sentence of eternal death that hangs over our head — that condemnation was poured out on Christ on the cross. And that's why there is now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. That's how.

That brings us, fourthly, to the rationale. That was the route; let's look at the rationale. Verse 4: "so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." Now notice he says "so that." The purpose for which God condemned sin on Christ, here it is: "in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us." That's why He did it. That's why He condemned sin in Jesus Christ. Not that Jesus had any sin; it was our sin that He atoned for. Now what does Paul mean here by the just "requirement of the law?" It's an interesting expression. The Greek word that's translated "requirement" in Verse 4 occurs more than 100 times in the Septuagint in its plural form, where it's translated "statues" and "ordinances." It's a reference to God's law. In the New Testament it's used the same way. So what Paul is saying here is "the righteousness the law demands" (you could translate it that way) "so that the righteousness that the law demands might be fulfilled." The great church father Augustine wrote this famous sentence, "law was given that grace might be sought; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled."

But who fulfills this righteousness that the law demands? Who is it that fulfills it? Some think that it's Christians; Christians empowered by the Spirit fulfill what the law requires by righteous living. But the context doesn't permit us to interpret it that way. Notice, first of all in Verse 4, the passive verb (let me remind you of your English lessons); here's a passive verb, "so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us." It doesn't say, "so that we might fulfill the requirement of the law"; that's active. It's in a passive form. It refers not to something we do, but to something done for us and in us. Also, it couldn't be us because our imperfect obedience to the law as Christians always falls short of the perfect obedience God requires. We never could measure up. We never can fulfill the righteous requirement of the law. John Calvin wrote, "the faithful, while they sojourn in this world, never make such a proficiency, as that the justification of the law becomes in them full or complete. This [referring to Verse 4] then must be applied to forgiveness; for when the obedience of Christ is accepted for us, the law is satisfied, so that we are counted just." So in Verse 4, the One meeting the requirement of the law is Christ, not us. If condemned sinners are to have their verdict and sentence overthrown without canceling God's law, without abusing God's law altogether, somehow there must be a perfect obedience rendered to the law's demands. That is exactly what Christ has done, and that's what Verse 4 is teaching. God condemns sin in Jesus Christ so that Christ's perfect obedience to His law might be given to us. As our substitute, Christ satisfied the righteous requirement of the law, living 33 years for a perfect life of obedience. Then God laid on Him, the only perfect One, the condemnation that we deserve; and in so doing, God made it possible to transfer Christ's obedience to us.

What you have in Verses 3 and 4 here has sometimes been called in church history "The Great Exchange." Christ becomes what we are so that we might become what Christ is. Or in the words you've often heard me use to paraphrase 2 Corinthians 5:21, on the cross God treated Jesus as if He had lived your sinful life so that forever He could treat you as if you'd lived Jesus' perfect life — The Great Exchange. So we don't meet the just requirements of the law through our acts of obedience, but through our being "in Christ." Since He perfectly fulfilled the law and we are in Him, it's as if we have fulfilled the law perfectly. That's how God came to issue a verdict of "not condemned" on formerly condemned sinners.

If you're listening at all tonight and if you're really concerned about what God thinks, the question that ought to be in your mind is, 'How can I know?' How can I know if I am one who has had my verdict changed and my sentence commuted? How can I know if I am going to pay for my sins eternally or if Christ paid for them on the cross? Notice the second half of Verse 4, "so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us." And who are "us?" We're the ones who do not walk according to flesh but according to the Spirit. Now notice this is not an instruction. It's not a command. It's a statement of fact. And it's a statement of fact that applies not to a few super spiritual believers, but to all believers. He says, "those who walk." "Walk" is Paul's favorite word to describe the daily behavior, moral behavior of a person. It's clear when you go down to Verse 5 and following that Paul is describing here, when he uses these two terminologies of being "in the flesh" or "in the Spirit," two different rounds of salvation. Notice how those who walk according to the flesh are described. Verse 5: they "set their minds on the things of the flesh." Verse 6: that results in death for them. Verse 7: such a mindset is hostile toward God. It does not subject itself to the law of God and is not even able to do so. Verse 8: they're unable to please God. That's the person who walks according to the flesh. But if you're walking according to the Spirit, look back at Verse 5: your mind is set "on the things of the Spirit." Verse 6: the result is you have life and peace. Verse 7: that means the opposite of these things are true; you're reconciled to God, not hostile against God. You willingly submit to God's law, and you're able to do so. Verse 8: that means you can please God. But Verse 9 clenches the point; if you are a Christian, Paul says in Verse 9, you have the Spirit. And if you have the Spirit, you are in the Spirit and you walk according to the Spirit. So now let's go back to Verse 4. If your life demonstrates a mindset on the things of the Spirit and a submission to the law of God, that doesn't make you a Christian, but it shows that you are. Let me say that again. If your life is characterized by a response to the law of God as we saw in Verse 7, a mind set on the things of the Spirit (Verse 5 and 6), that doesn't make you a Christian; that doesn't remove the sentence of condemned; but it shows that you are a Christian, and that the sentence has been commuted. It means that Christ has already fulfilled the law in your place and there is therefore now no condemnation to you. What an incredible passage.

There are a couple of very practical ramifications of these great verses. Let me just mention them to you. The first is our spiritual struggle with sin (and you will always have it as a believer) will never change our status before God. Remember the verses that lead up to these great verses; the end of Romans Chapter 7 where Paul is lamenting his constant struggle with sin? That doesn't change our standing before God of no condemnation. If you are in Christ, if you walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, then you have a standing before God that will never be changed by your struggle with sin. Nothing you can do will change that status.

Secondly, we will never face judgment for our sin. We have absolutely no reason to fear God's punishment. There is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. When I was growing up, I was in a number of churches where they didn't understand this truth of justification. That's why it's such a wonderful thing to me. Something that was often taught to believers sitting out in the pews as you are tonight was that there is coming a day when you as a believer will stand at the judgment seat of Christ (so far that's true). But then they would wax eloquent about the fact that what's going to happen in that day is God's going to break out His divine film network, and He's going to show on a great screen before everyone to see every sin you've ever committed; and you will absolutely be ashamed for what you have done. I'm here to tell you no matter what some little tract you may have read when you were growing up might have said, for the believer nothing could be farther from the truth. There is therefore now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. Your sin has been judged already. It was judged on the cross on Christ Himself. And to bring it up again would be for God to say that His sacrifice wasn't sufficient to cover it.

There's a third ramification of this great passage. No accusation ever leveled against you will stick. Satan is called the great accuser of the brothers. He accuses us to God. And guess what? He accuses us to ourselves. The song that we'll sing at the end of the service tonight says "when Satan tempts me to despair." Has he ever come to you and tempted you to despair because of your sinfulness, because of your heart? Because of how far you are from what you want to be in Christ? No accusation can ever stick because of no condemnation. Look at Romans 8:33: "Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the One who justifies." Listen; if God declared you righteous knowing everything there is to know about you, who can bring up anything that's going to stick? Verse 34: "Who is the One who condemns?" (Who can declare you guilty? And who can give you a sentence of eternal punishment?) "Christ Jesus is He who died, [who] was raised, who is at the right hand of God, [and] intercedes for us." Who could overcome that? Christ saying, "I died in his place." No accusation will ever stick.

And finally, it means we'll never be separated from God's love. Romans Chapter 8 ends with this incredible series of staccato things that will never separate us from the love of God. Let's start in Verse 35: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or [natural disasters like] famine, or [our own poverty like] nakedness, or [some peril] danger [that comes], or [the] sword [some pagan nation comes and takes over our own]?" Verse 38: "I am convinced that neither death" (death is what we, I think, are prone to fear the most, even as believers) — but he says death can't separate you from the love of God, nor life. Nothing that happens in life, nor any great spiritual being like an angel nor principalities (nothing that's here now, nothing that's yet to come), no powers of any kind, no height (then he just waxes eloquent), nor depth, nor any created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. The chapter starts with no condemnation and it ends with no separation. We'll never be separated from God's love because He has declared you His own and He has said there is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. As we celebrate communion this evening, we remember the time when for six hours on a Friday two thousand years ago, God poured out our just condemnation on Christ so that there is absolutely none left for us. Let's pray together.

Father, how can we begin to thank You for Your great grace, for Your wisdom in creating such a plan; in finding a way to maintain Your great justice to protect Your holiness, and yet find a way to show us grace who deserve only the worst from Your hand? Father, help us who know You to deepen in our understanding of these truths, to dig deep and to think seriously about what You've accomplished at the cross and then, Lord, understanding those truths, help us to grow in our love for Jesus Christ and our desire to please Him, to live for Him, to tell others about Him because of all that He's done for us. Father, I pray for the person here tonight, perhaps a member of our church, someone who has attended for a number of years or perhaps a guest, who has realized even as he or she has heard Your Word tonight, they stand guilty before You – condemned by Your perfect law that demands perfect love of You and perfect love of others every moment of our lives. And Lord, we've never kept it – not for a single moment. Lord, if they've realized that tonight, I pray that You would cause them to be willing by Your Spirit to repent, to turn from their sins and embrace Jesus Christ as Lord, as Savior; knowing that then, for them there will be no condemnation. We pray it in the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.