We trample on the blood of the Son of God if we think the reason our sins are forgiven is that we are sorry for them. The only explanation for God’s forgiveness of our sins is the death of Jesus Christ. Our being sorry, our repenting, is merely an outcome, the effect of a personal realization of what Christ accomplished in the atonement: “Christ Jesus… has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). When we realize all that Christ has done for us, the boundless joy of God begins. Wherever the joy of God is absent, the death sentence is at work.
Who or what we are doesn’t matter; the only way we are reinstated into good standing with God is by the death of Jesus Christ. We can’t earn this reinstatement; we can only accept it. All the pleading we do with God amounts to a deliberate refusal to recognize the cross and is of no use. When we plead, it’s like we’re pounding on a door other than the one Jesus has opened. “I don’t want to go that way,” we say. “It’s too humiliating to be received as a sinner.” But there is only one way: “For there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). God may appear heartless in his refusal to receive us in any state other than as lowly sinners. But his apparent heartlessness is the expression of his real heart, for there is boundless entrance into the holiness of Christ by the way he has designated for us
“In him we have redemption through his blood” (Ephesians 1:7). Identification with the death of Jesus Christ means identification with him and the death of everything not of him. God is justified in saving bad men and women only as he makes them good. He doesn’t pretend we’re all right when we’re all wrong. The atonement is an act by which God, through the death of Jesus, makes an unholy person holy.
