The Elements of Redemption - The Redemptive Results (Part 2)

Passage: Ephesians 1:6b-10

by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.  7In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace 8which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, 9having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, 10that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth-in Him.  

It is tragic that many Christians are depressed about their shortcomings and wrongdoing, thinking and acting as if God still holds their sins against them - forgetting that, because God has taken their sins upon Himself, they are separated from those sins “as far as the east is from the west” (Ps. 103:12). They forget God's promise through Isaiah that one day He would wipe out the transgressions of believers “like a thick cloud” and their “sins like a heavy mist. Return to Me,” He said, “for I have redeemed you” (Isa. 44:22). What we often forget is that Christ paid the full price for His people for all of their sins, past, present, and future. We tend to think as if any future sins we commit are still, in some sense, unpaid for and so we need to pay for them, or at the least, punish ourselves for them. In such thinking we inadvertently lessen the value of the work Christ accomplished. Even before the Messiah came and paid the price for redemption, God spoke of it as already having taken place. Depressed Christians forget that God,  even before He fashioned the earth,  placed the sins of His elect on the head of His Son, who took them an infinite distance away. He dismissed our sins before we were born, and they can never return.

Hundreds of years before Calvary, Micah proclaimed, “Who is a God like Thee, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love. He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. Yes, Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea” (Mic. 7:18-19).

To ancient Israel the distance from east to west and “the depths of the sea” represented infinity. God's forgiveness is infinite; it takes away our trespasses to the farthest reaches of eternal infinity.

In Shakespeare's King Richard III (5.3.194) the king laments,

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

That is not true of Christians. When Jesus comes into our lives as Savior and Lord, He says to us what He said to the woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you; go your way” (John 8:11). That is a statement of redemptive reality! “There is therefore 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” (Rom. 8:1-2).

Forgiveness in Jesus Christ is undeserved and unmerited, but it is free to the believer and it is complete. Those who have Him have freedom from sin, now and throughout eternity. In Christ our sins - past, present, and future - “are forgiven … for His name's sake” (1 John 2:12; cf. Eph. 4:32; Col. 2:13). They were forgiven countless ages before we committed them and, because God is unchanging, will remain forgiven forever.

Because we continue to sin, we need the continued forgiveness of cleansing; but we do not need to seek  any continued forgiveness of redemption. There is a difference between the two “kinds” or “applications” of forgiveness.  Jesus told Peter, “He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean” (John 13:10). Even though we continue to sin, Jesus “is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He can cleanse us from the stains of our unrighteous actions because the penalty that such actions would have elicited from God has already been satisfied at the

He forgives all our sins in the sweeping grace of salvation. That does not mean we will no longer sin, nor that when we do our sins have no harmful effect. They have a profound effect on our growth, joy, peace, usefulness, and ability to have intimate and rich communion with the Father. Thus the believer is called on to ask for forgiveness daily so that he may enjoy not just the general forgiveness of redemption, but the specific forgiveness of daily cleansing, which brings fellowship and usefulness to their maximum. That is the issue in our Lord's teaching on prayer recorded in Matthew 6:12, 14-15.

There are no second class Christians, no deprived citizens of God's kingdom or children in His family. Every sin of every believer is forgiven forever. God knows how we were, how we now live, and how we will live the rest of our lives. He sees everything about us in stark-naked reality. Yet He says, “I am satisfied with you because I am satisfied with My Son, to whom you belong. When I look at you, I see Him, and I am pleased.”

Because God accepts every believer as He accepts His own Son, every believer ought to view himself in the same way. We do not think of  ourselves in terms of what we are in ourselves any more than God accepts us for that reason. We view ourselves as forgiven and as righteous because that is what God Himself declares us to be. To think otherwise is not a sign of humility but of arrogance, because to think otherwise is to put our own judgment above God's Word and to belittle the redemption price paid for us by His own beloved Son. A genuine Christian who denigrates himself and doubts full forgiveness denies the work of God and denigrates a child of God. If a matter is established to God, we certainly ought to be willing to see ourselves as God has declared us to be.