This is the second article in a series called Fundamentals of the Faith
God’s grace is the only way that any of us will be worthy to live with Him forever. The following is a brief explanation of our need for grace and how God has made a way for anyone to be saved and receive eternal blessings.
God’s Perfect Integrity
God is more amazing that the human mind can conceive. He is perfect, without flaws of any kind and He is also eternal. Before time began, God existed in an eternal state of perfection. One of His perfect attributes is His integrity, which is made up if His Righteousness and Justice.
Righteousness
His Righteousness (+R) is His absolute standard of rightness by which He judges all creatures. His +R is absolute in the sense that it is 100%. God is 100% rightness and His +R demands that creatures also be 100% +R. When any person falls short of this 100% rightness, God considers that person to be unrighteous (–R). God cannot compromise this +R in any way or for anyone. If God ever compromised to accept an –R person, His integrity would be compromised and God would no longer be perfect. This He will never do.
Justice
God’s Justice is the action side of His integrity. His +R evaluates the worthiness of creatures and His Justice either blesses or curses them accordingly. If we are found +R, then God blesses us. If we are found –R, then God curses us. This perfect system is what God uses and will use to execute justice upon the human race.
Future Judgment
There will come a time when God brings judgment to the whole human race. Every person that ever lived will be evaluated based on God’s +R and then Justice will execute the appropriate eternal sentence. Those who appear before the +R Judge and meet His +R will receive eternal blessing. Those who appear before Him and fall short of His +R standard will receive eternal cursing. The goal of every person in the human race is to attain a +R that God can accept.
Let’s summarize the previous ideas before we move on. God’s perfect integrity consists of His +R and Justice. +R is the absolute standard that He uses to evaluate our worthiness and Justice acts in accordance with what +R decides. For any creature to be accepted by God, he/she must be 100% +R. In the future judgment, those who are found +R will live with God forever and those found –R will be thrown into the Lake of Fire.
Fall of Adam
When God created Adam and Eve, He made them perfectly +R and acceptable to Him. When they sinned, they lost their +R standing before God and sin caused them to become –R. Their perfect status became a corrupted status that forced God to condemn them as required by His +R standard. Not only did Adam and Eve become –R, their corrupted status was passed down to the whole human race. After the fall of man, every human being is born spiritually dead and under the condemnation of Adam.
Total Depravity
The human status of spiritual death and corruption is called total depravity. This term means that as Paul says in Rom 7, that mankind has nothing good in them. All of our motives and behaviors are corrupted by sin passed down from Adam. Total depravity means that man is incapable of performing any action that might rehabilitate his status with God. Having inherited Adam’s condemnation, all mankind is caught in a terrible situation that none of us can rectify. Without help, all of us would end up in the Lake of Fire.
God’s Plan – Grace
God knows that we are helpless to make ourselves worthy of His +R standard. He knows that without His intervention, He will be forced by His integrity to send us into eternal punishment. His love, in spite of our depravity, decided to make a way for us to be worthy so that He could save us. He decided to pay the price for sins that we couldn’t pay, by sending His Son to pay it for us. He sent Jesus, born as a man to live a sinless and life and give Himself as the sacrifice for sins. While Jesus hung on the cross between heaven and earth, God-Father poured out the sins of all mankind on Him and punished Him in our place. When He had finished paying for all the sins of man, Jesus said “it is finished”, meaning they were all paid in full. At that point He died physically and His body was placed in a borrowed tomb. Three days later, He rose from the dead to prove that His payment for sin was accepted by His Father.
God’s love motivated Him to extend mercy by sending His Son to die for our sins and raise from the dead. We didn’t deserve this great gift but God did it anyway because He is a God of love. This gift offered to the undeserving is called grace, God’s unmerited favor.
Accepting the Gift
Having paid for sins and raising from the dead, Jesus is now in heaven with His Father. He offers the work He did for man to each of us as a free gift. To receive eternal life and live with God forever, we must simply accept the gift. The bible makes it very clear that the way we receive this gift is by believing that He did it for us. When any of us believes that Jesus died for our sins, was buried and raised from the dead, for me, for you personally, at that moment the person is given eternal life and they are saved.
If you have never personally believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ (death, burial, resurrection) for your salvation, you can do it right now. You must decide if you are going to believe the gospel of not believe it. God will not allow any of us to stay neutral on this one issue. This the one issue that determines your eternal destiny. The moment that you believe, that is the moment you receive eternal life. When you decide to believe the gospel, you can tell God silently in your own soul that you are believing that Jesus did this for you.
View all posts in the Fundamentals of Faith series
