Our word for today is justification. We are looking at important words found in scripture.
We are going to look at Romans 3:23-24 which says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.
We saw that word redeemed or redemption last time. The Lord purchases us out of the slave market of sin and sets us free to be followers of a new master Jesus Christ. Today we are looking at justification. It is because we have sinned and fallen short of His glory that we need to be justified. The word justified was a battle cry in the time of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic church had looked at that word and were claiming that justification was a process. You could be justified before God, but it was a process. Faith was involved, but so were the sacraments and various requirements that had to be kept in order for the individual to be justified. So, it became a kind of works salvation - you could be saved by faith plus all these different things that you had to do to be justified. The Reformers came along and rightly understood the scriptures taught that justification was not a process, it was a gift as this passage says. It is a gift that God gives those who are fallen, those who are sinners and need to be redeemed and we have been justified.
The word itself means to declare righteous. You might even find sometimes in scripture the word righteous and justified are overlapping in translations in different places because that is the basic meaning. It is to be righteous. It is not our righteousness; however, it is not something we merit or grow in or develop. It is a declared righteousness. It is a legal term. We have been declared righteous. It is like we are going to court, and the judge declares us not guilty. It is even more than that though . . .
