Suppose you have a person who’s brought before a judge and he owes an awful lot of money. Now he’s about to suffer an adverse judgment because of his debt. In the ancient world, of course, if you were greatly in debt, you could be sold into slavery as a result of your debt. And that’s why in this particular passage, when it talks about justification, it says "saved also through the redemption that comes by Christ Jesus." Redemption is "to buy out of slavery and to set free." And we’ll assume, because we can understand it better, that here’s somebody about to suffer the loss of all his possessions because he’s going to go into personal bankruptcy because of what he owes. At this point, a friend comes in. And this new arrival says to the judge, "How much does my friend owe?" The judge says, "He owes three million dollars"–a vast sum. You and I can’t pay that, but this friend says, "I’ll pay it on his behalf." And so he does. He deposits the money, the papers are signed, and the judge declares that now there is no longer any case standing against the defendant. Now he didn’t pay the debt himself. The debt was paid for him. His own personal circumstances were not changed in the slightest. But the judge is saying now that as far as the requirements of the law stand, those requirements are satisfied. And the person is now justified before the bar of justice.

Or again, let me point it out another way. To say that somebody is "justified" is to say the opposite of what you would say if the person were "condemned." Justification and condemnation are opposites. What happens when a judge condemns a criminal? Does the judge make the criminal a criminal? No, his declaration doesn’t have anything to do with what the criminal is. The person is a criminal before the judge declares him or her to be a criminal. All the judge is saying is that the person has broken the law. He or she has been found guilty of breaking the law, and now the judge is going to impose whatever penalty the law requires. In exactly the same way–but opposite–when God declares that we’re justified, he doesn’t declare that somehow now we are righteous, but only that the law has been satisfied where we’re concerned. And the way that happens is through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf.

Justification involves a transaction, and it involves a transaction with two parts. On the one hand, our sin, our guilt, is placed upon Jesus Christ and punished there, so he dies to pay the punishment for our sin–the righteous for the unrighteous, the innocent for the guilty. And then, on the other hand, the other part of justification, his righteousness, which we don’t have but which we need, is credited to us. So our sin is placed upon him, and he is punished. And his righteousness is credited to us so we are justified.

Study Questions

• Describe how salvation is like a criminal trial.

• What are the two parts of the transaction that leads to salvation?

Definition

Redemption: to buy out of slavery and to set free.

Further Study

Read the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trials. Note how he suffered as a criminal. Matt. 26:14—27:66; Mark 14:32—15:47; Luke 22:47—23:56; John 18:1—19:42.