The King's Courtroom

The United States has a presidential election every four years. Changes are usually made in the White House, the Congress, and in many governors’ mansions. When one elected leader is about to step down for his successor, he may grant some pardons to prisoners under his jurisdiction. It’s always interesting to see who might benefit from these last-minute gestures.

If you or I were in prison and were told, “You’re free. The president just granted you a pardon,” we would certainly pack up and get out fast! That pardon would change our lives.

In the courtroom of the King of kings, a pardon means much more. At the cross, God not only delivered the believer in Christ from punishment, He also welcomed him with open arms into His family. He opens His home to us.

At the cross we have not only acquittal, but also justification (just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned); not only pardon, but also acceptance. We saw in the last chapter that God Himself bore the burden of our sin and suffered for us. Now we must see that the cross offers us more than a pardon.

The issue involved is not just in Jesus’ blood, which cleanses us from sin, but also in His righteousness. The key is in the word justified. We are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24).

Several years ago I was to be interviewed at my home for a well-known television show and, knowing that it would appear on nationwide television, my wife took great pains to see that everything looked nice. She had vacuumed and dusted and tidied up the whole house but had gone over the living room with a fine-tooth comb since that was where the interview would be filmed. When the film crew arrived with all the lights and cameras, she felt that everything in that living room was spick-and-span. We were in place along with the interviewer when suddenly the television lights were turned on and we saw cobwebs and dust where we had never seen them before. In the words of my wife: “I mean, that room was festooned with dust and cobwebs which simply did not show up under ordinary light.”

The point is, of course, that no matter how well we clean up our lives and think we have them all in order, when we see ourselves in the light of God’s Word, in the light of God’s holiness, all the cobwebs and all the dust do show up.

Picture a courtroom. God the Judge is seated in the judge’s seat, robed in splendor. You are arraigned before Him. He looks at you in terms of His own righteous nature as it is expressed in the moral law. He speaks to you:

GOD: John (or) Mary, have you loved Me with all your heart?

JOHN/MARY: No, Your Honor.

GOD: Have you loved others as you have loved yourself?

JOHN/MARY: No, Your Honor.

GOD: Do you believe you are a sinner and that Jesus Christ died for your sins?

JOHN/MARY: Yes, Your Honor.

GOD: Then your penalty has been paid by Jesus Christ on the cross and you are pardoned.

I have my pardon, but there is much more. When the Bible says that the person who believes in Jesus is justified as a gift by His grace (see Romans 3:24), this sounds like more than a mere pardon. And it is. If I’m a criminal whom the president or the governor pardons, everyone knows I’m still guilty. I simply don’t have to serve my sentence. But if I’m justified, it’s just-as-if-I’d never sinned at all.

Both pardon and justification come to us when we believe in Jesus. On the one hand God pardons our sin because of the death of Christ. He paid our penalty. On the other hand God actually declares us “righteous” (a word which means the same as “just”).

GOD: Because Christ is righteous, and you believe in Christ, I now declare you legally righteous.

How can God do that and remain “just” Himself—when He attached the penalty of death to sin? The answer is in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He lived an unblemished, perfect life. His character perfectly supported His claim to deity, as we saw in chapter 7, “The Man Who Is God.” It’s easy to see God the Father declaring Jesus just, because He was. But how does that help me, a sinner? Paul gives the answer in 2 Corinthians 5:21. To make it clear we’ll substitute the words God and Christ where the words He and Him appear. “God made Christ who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.”

God put my sin on Christ, who had no sin; He punished Him in my place, as we have seen. But He did one other thing, according to this verse. By God’s action the righteousness of Christ was put on us who believe, “that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

The Judge, God, has transferred Christ’s righteousness to your legal account if you have believed in Christ. Now He examines you according to the law. What does He see? All of your past evil deeds and thoughts? Your sinful actions of the present? No. He doesn’t see your sin because that has been transferred to Christ when God made Christ to be sin. Rather He looks at you carefully and sees the righteousness of Christ.

But you may say, “Look, am I not still a sinful person?”

The answer is “yes and no.” If you mean that you have the legal status of a sinner before God, the answer is “no.” To Him, legally, you are just. You are in right standing before Him, and “standing” is the issue in the courtroom.

Do you still have the capacity to sin? The answer is “yes.” Of course you are not perfect. You may still at times think and act in ways contrary to God’s desires. But your character and mine aren’t the issue here. Our legal standing is. And legally we are declared just.

Am I Free to Sin?

“Love God and live as you please!” Now are we free to sin without restraint? Can we run out of the courtroom, pardoned and justified, and do anything we want? Yes. But you are now “born again.” You don’t want to do the same old wrong things; your desires are changed.

If you have trusted Jesus and seen what depth of concern He had for you at the cross, you can say with the apostle Paul, “It is Christ’s love that controls me” (2 Cor. 4:14, Goodspeed). The inner changes God begins to achieve in our character will be the subject of a later chapter. But they are all based on a change in status. We who were properly condemned are now properly declared just if we have trusted Christ.

Can you imagine what a newspaper man would do with this event?

SINNER PARDONED—GOES TO LIVE WITH JUDGE

It was a tense scene when John and Mary stood before the Judge and had the list of charges read against them. However, the Judge transferred all of the guilt to Jesus Christ, who died on a cross for John and Mary.

After John and Mary were pardoned the Judge invited them to come to live with Him forever.

The reporter on a story like that would never be able to understand the irony of such a scene, unless he had been introduced to the Judge beforehand and knew His character.

Pardon and Christ’s righteousness come to us only when we totally trust ourselves to Jesus as our Lord and Savior. When we do this, God welcomes us into His intimate favor. Clothed in Christ’s righteousness we can now enjoy God’s fellowship and “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16, KJV).

Conclusions from the Testimony

If I were a lawyer, I’m sure I would study the procedures of great trials of the past, the evidences presented, and the conclusions reached by the findings.

There are some vital conclusions we can draw from the death of Christ. First, at the cross we see the strongest evidence of the guilt of the world. Here sin reached its climax when its terrible display occurred. Sin was never blacker or more hideous than on the day Christ died.

People have said that man has improved and that if Christ returned today, He wouldn’t be crucified but might be given a glorious reception. I am convinced that if Christ came today He might be tortured and put to death even more quickly than He was two thousand years ago, though perhaps in more sophisticated ways.

But sinful people would still shout, “Away with Him.”

Human sinful nature has not changed. As we look at the cross we see clear proof that all men have “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” This is God’s inescapable verdict.

The second conclusion we see at the cross is that God hates sin and loves righteousness. He has told us repeatedly that the soul that sins shall die, and that He cannot forgive our sin unless our debt has been paid. The Scripture says, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22, RSV).

God will not tolerate sin. As the moral judge of the entire universe, He cannot compromise if He is to remain just. His holiness and His justice demand the penalty for broken law. There are some schools of thought which feel that such a view of God is too severe. Sin, they say, has its psychological basis. Some time ago a young man was executed for killing two other young men. The newspapers were full of the legal arguments, the debates over the death penalty, and the frequent postponements of the execution date. Why did he do it? What events or people in his past influenced his twisted mind?

Many say they are not responsible for what they do. Poor parents, bad environment, the government are all blamed. But God says that we are responsible. When we look at the cross, we see how drastically God deals with sin. The Bible says, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). “For our sake he [God] made him [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21, RSV).

If God had to send His only Son to the cross to pay the penalty for sin, then sin must be terrible indeed in His sight.

However, we see that God loves righteousness and clothes the believer in His righteousness because of the cross. It is amazing to think about! We are clothed, we are covered, protected, shielded. A wonderful old hymn says, “Jesus, thy blood and righteousness, My beauty are, my glorious dress.”² This is not self-righteousness, but “the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith” (Phil. 3:9).

God is now at work through the Holy Spirit to make the believer righteous in his inner character. Peter shows how intimately this is based on the cross also when he says of Christ that “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:24).

What other conclusion must we reach from the testimony of the cross? We see the greatest demonstration of God’s love. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

In our own weakness as humans, we tend to grade sins. Here’s a little sin on our scale, but over here there’s a very, very heavy sin. We may see God as able to forgive the small sin, but incapable of forgiving and accepting the gross sinner. I recall a story out of World War II that illustrates this graphically. Hitler and his Third Reich had gone down to defeat at the hands of the Allies. Many of the men who had been Nazi leaders in some of the most infamous crimes known to man were brought to trial in Nuremberg. The world watched as sentences of imprisonment and death were brought against these war criminals.

However, out of the Nuremberg trials came an amazing account by Chaplain Henry Gerecke. He was called upon to be prison chaplain to the former Nazi high command. He described himself as a humble preacher, a one-time Missouri farm boy, and then he was given this extremely difficult assignment.

Chaplain Gerecke recalls the sincere conversion to faith in Jesus Christ by some of these men who had committed despicable crimes. One of them was a former favorite general of Hitler. At first the chaplain was very leery of confessions of faith. He said the first time he saw this criminal reading his Bible he thought, a phony. However, as he spent time with him he wrote, “But the longer I listened, the more I felt he might be sincere. He said he had not been a good Christian. He insisted he was very glad that a nation which would probably put him to death thought enough of his eternal welfare to provide him with spiritual guidance.” With this Bible in his hand he said, “I know from this book that God can love a sinner like me.”²

What an amazing love God exhibited for us at the cross!

The fourth conclusion we can reach from the testimony at the cross is that it is the basis for true world brotherhood. There are many groups which espouse the brotherhood of man and make appeals in behalf of peace. Only when we are brought into the family of God through the fatherhood of God can there be any true brotherhood of man. God is not our Father automatically (except by creation) when we are born; He must become our Father spiritually.

The Bible teaches that we can experience glorious brotherhood and fatherhood through the cross. “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace” (Eph. 2:14-15).

Outside the work of the cross we see bitterness, intolerance, hatred, prejudice, lust, and greed. Within the powerful working of the cross grow love, new life, and new brotherhood. The only human hope for peace lies at the cross of Christ, where all men, no matter what their background of nationality or race, can become a new brotherhood.

You are probably familiar with the story of Hansei. Her book Hansei describes vividly her absolute dedication to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement as a member of the Hitler Youth; her subsequent disenchantment and disillusionment; then her conversion to Jesus Christ. My wife has a letter from Hansei telling of her first meeting with Corrie ten Boom, whose book The Hiding Place tells of the ten Boom family’s experiences during World War II. The family was arrested and put in prison for hiding Jews, and Corrie’s father and sister died there.

One day Hansei and Corrie were at a convention and were seated in the same building, autographing their books. Hansei waited as long as she could, then made her way to Corrie because she simply had to ask forgiveness for what she had done. Hansei pushed through those standing in line with their books for Corrie to sign, knelt in front of Corrie with tears streaming down her cheeks, and said, “Corrie, I’m Hansei.” Corrie’s reaction was not only absolute forgiveness, but love and acceptance. This could only happen between Christians and illustrates what the cross does.

Captain Mitsuo Fuchida was the Japanese naval air commander who led the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor. He relates that when the Japanese war prisoners were returning from America, he was curious as to what kind of treatment they had received. An ex-prisoner he questioned told him what made it possible for those in the camp to forget their hate and hostility toward their captors. One young girl had been extremely kind and helpful and had shown such love and tenderness for them that their hearts were touched. They wondered why she was so good to them and were amazed when she told them it was because her parents had been killed by the Japanese army! She explained that her parents had been Christian missionaries in the Philippines at the beginning of the war but when the Japanese landed they were forced to flee to the mountains. They were later found by the Japanese, accused of being spies, and put to death. But before they were killed they had asked for thirty minutes of time to pray, which was granted. The girl was convinced that her parents had spent that thirty minutes praying for forgiveness for their executioners, and because of this she was able to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the hate from her heart and replace it with love.

Captain Fuchida could not understand such love. Several months passed and one day in Tokyo he was given a leaflet as he left a railroad station. This told the story of Sergeant Jacob DeShazer who was captured by the Japanese, tortured, and held prisoner of war for forty months. While in prison camp he received Christ through reading the Bible. God’s Word removed the bitter hatred for the Japanese from his heart and replaced it with such love that he was compelled to return to tell the Japanese people of this marvelous love of Christ.

Captain Fuchida bought a Bible and began to read. He faced the scene of the crucifixion of Christ and was struck by Jesus’ words, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Jesus prayed for the very soldiers who were about to thrust the spear into His side. In his book From Pearl Harbor to Golgotha, Captain Fushida tells how he found the source of this miracle love that can forgive enemies, and how he could now understand the story of the American girl whose parents had been slain and the transformation in Jake DeShazer’s life.

Personal Questions the Cross Answers

“Why can’t I seem to solve my problems?” This question reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon. It pictures Lucy in her psychiatrist’s booth giving counsel to Charlie Brown. Charlie has lost another ball game and feels depressed and defeated. Lucy, the psychiatrist, is explaining to him that life is made of ups and downs. Charlie goes away screaming, “But I hate downs, all I want is ups.”

I’m afraid that often those of us who teach the Christian message give the impression that once we have accepted Jesus Christ we will never again have any problems. This isn’t true, but we do have Someone to help us face our problems. I have a paraplegic friend who has been that way for over thirty years. In spite of overwhelming problems for which there is no solution, she has learned not only to live with her condition, but to be radiant and triumphant, blessing and winning others to Christ.

Paul Tournier, one of the great Swiss psychiatrists, has stated that in the Christian life we have to realize that each day will present new circumstances and there will always be adjustments that have to be made. If I drive my car into a city, I can’t rigidly place my hands on the steering wheel and drive at a set rate of speed. I have to stop and start and turn to make adjustments. The same thing is true in daily living. There is always a price to being a person; part of that price is pain and problems, but we have the promise Christ made that He will always be with us.

In Psalm 34 there are three great statements about our problems:

“This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him and saved him out of all his troubles” (v. 6).

“The righteous cry, and the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles” (v. 17).

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all” (v. 19).

The Christian life is not a way “out” but a way “through” life. The “out of” in these verses refers to deliverance not from but through difficulty. English scholar Dr. Arthur Way phrased it, “Deliverance out of, not from the crisis of trial. So that the sense appears to be, ‘bring me safely out of the conflict’” and “not simply keep me from entering into it.”

Another question: “I feel so guilty—how can I find relief?”

Guilt is a very debilitating feeling. It can destroy our attitude, our personal relationships, and our outreach. Sometimes we feel guilty because we’ve done things that are wrong for which we must accept the responsibility and also accept God’s forgiveness.

I have been told by doctors that a large percentage of the patients in psychiatric hospitals could be released if only they could be assured of the fact that they had been forgiven.

It’s so easy to blame someone or something else. Anna Russell, the British comedienne, has an interesting little poem about guilt:

I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed. To find out why I kicked the cat, and blacked my wife’s eyes. He laid me on this downy couch to see what he could find, And this is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind. When I was one my mama hid my dolly in a trunk, And so it falls naturally that I am always drunk. When I was two I suffered from ambivalence toward my brothers, And so it falls naturally I poisoned all my lovers. Now I am so glad that I have learned the lessons this has taught, That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault.

For some people guilt is an exercise. They won’t accept the forgiveness that is offered to them; it is so hard to believe. It seems too good to be true that God should let us go eternally scot-free from our sins—and yet that is the message that the Gospel brings to us. When we cling to our guilt we do not honor God and we handicap our own lives terribly.

Forgiveness is an opportunity that Christ extended to us on the cross. When we accept His forgiveness and are willing to forgive ourselves, then we find relief.

After the sewage plants of London have reclaimed all that is usable of sewage, sludge barges on the river Thames collect the residue and carry it out to sea a certain number of miles and dump it. Apparently it is only a matter of minutes before the sea water is as pure as it was before! This is a beautiful illustration of how He has buried our sins in the depths of the sea.

Corrie ten Boom tells a story of a little girl who broke one of her mother’s treasured demitasse cups. The little girl came to her mother sobbing, “Oh, mama, I’m so sorry I broke your beautiful cup.”

The mother replied, “I know you’re sorry and I forgive you. Now don’t cry anymore.” The mother then swept up the pieces of the broken cup and placed them in the trash can. But the little girl enjoyed the guilty feeling. She went to the trash can, picked out pieces of the cup, brought them to her mother, and sobbed, “Mother, I’m so sorry that I broke your pretty cup.”

This time her mother spoke firmly to her. “Take those pieces and put them back in the trash can and don’t be silly enough to take them out again. I told you I forgave you so don’t cry anymore, and don’t pick up the broken pieces anymore.”

Guilt is removed with confession and cleansing. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, KJV).

However, the story of David’s sin (Ps. 51) shows that forgiveness does not preclude the natural consequences of our sin. Murder can be forgiven, but that does not bring the dead to life again.

There is a well-known story of some fishermen in Scotland who had spent the day fishing. That evening they were having tea in a little inn. One of the fishermen, in a characteristic gesture to describe the size of the fish that got away, flung out his hands just as the little waitress was getting ready to set the cup of tea at his place. The hand and the teacup collided, dashing the tea against the whitewashed walls. Immediately an ugly brown stain began to spread over the wall. The man who did it was very embarrassed and apologized profusely, but one of the other guests jumped up and said, “Never mind.” Pulling a pen from his pocket, he began to sketch around the ugly brown stain. Soon there emerged a picture of a magnificent royal stag with his antlers spread. That artist was Landseer, England’s foremost painter of animals.

This story has always beautifully illustrated to me the fact that if we confess not only our sins but our mistakes to God, He can make out of them something for our good and for His glory. Somehow it’s harder to commit our mistakes and stupidities to God than it is our sins. Mistakes and stupidities seem so dumb, whereas sin seems more or less to be an outcropping of our human nature. But Romans 8:28 tells us that if they are committed to God He can make them work together for our good and His glory.

When you bake a cake, you put in raw flour, baking powder, soda, bitter chocolate, shortening, etcetera, none of which taste very good in themselves, but which work together to make a delicious cake. And so with our sins and our mistakes—although they are not good in themselves—if we commit them in honest, simple faith to the Lord, He will work them out His own way and in His own time to make something of them for our good and His glory.

Question: “Do I have to understand all this about Christ’s death?”

The depths of God’s love in sending His Son to pay such an awful price is beyond the measure of the mind of man. We must accept it on faith or we will continually bear the burden of guilt. Salvation is by Christ alone, through faith alone, for the glory of God alone.

Jesus never said, “Only understand.” He said, “Only believe.”