Payment and receipt
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (Romans 6:3)
It is into Christ’s death that we are baptised (Rom. 6:3), and hence the cross, which was the instrument of that death, is that in which we glory. The cross is to us the payment of the sinner’s penalty, the extinction of the debt, and the tearing up of the hand-writing which was against us.
And as the cross is the payment, so the resurrection is God’s receipt in full, for the whole sum, signed with His own hand. Our faith is not the completion of the payment, but the simple recognition on our part of the payment made by the Son of God.
By this recognition, we become as one with Him who died and rose, that we are thereafter reckoned to be the parties who have paid the penalty, and treated as if it were we ourselves who had died.
Thus are we ‘justified from sin’, and then made partakers of the righteousness of Him, who was not only delivered for our offences, but who was raised again for our justification.
God's Way of Peace
Book of the Week
