Before thinking about salvation as a present experience or a future blessing, we must begin with salvation’s past accomplishment. Christians often testify to their salvation by using a past tense verb, “I was saved,” possibly going on to describe a particular event as to its place and time.
One of the meaningful Bible terms referring to salvation past is justification. This term brings to mind a courtroom scene where a judge renders a verdict concerning the accused. The verdict might be either “guilty” or “not guilty.” Either verdict expresses how the accused person henceforth stands in relation to the judge, the court and the law.
When a person is saved through personal faith in Christ, somewhat in the likeness of a judge in a court of law, God declares that the believer is no longer guilty of his or her sins. Through the miracle of divine grace and the Savior’s death, God chooses to respond immediately to one’s confession of faith by counting the person innocent of sin. The miraculous part of saving grace is that God’s declaration of a sinner’s innocence is unrelated to the person’s works or worthiness.
In Job 25:24, Job asked the crucial question, “How then can man be justified with God?” His concern was how a sinful human can be right in God’s sight. The New Testament answers that it is by “being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). As Christians have often confessed, “We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.”
Acquitted and accepted
Many of us find it helpful simply to think of justification as being right with God. In thinking about this great salvation as justification or being right with God we need to embrace two other terms and the ideas they express: acquitted and accepted. Acquitted means God the Judge releases the believing sinner from sin’s penalty which the Bible declares to be death (Rom. 6:23). A Christian has been acquitted in the court of heaven of all charges that could be raised by our sin. Acquittal means we are no longer under sin’s condemnation and subject to divine judgment. Our acquittal is instantaneous; it happens at the moment of saving faith in Jesus.
When we testify that we have been saved, we are referring to our release from the penalty of our sins. Another salvation term that captures this release is the common term “forgiveness.” Justification and forgiveness have to do with freedom from the penalty of sin. We will explore further the meaning of forgiveness in a future session.
‘No longer guilty’
A second term is needed to fully grasp the meaning of justification. Upon being acquitted a Christian also is accepted. To be released from all legal obligations to a court of law and to society is one thing, but to be fully accepted as innocent in the eyes of the judge, the court and society may be another thing. In a legal sense the verdict of “not guilty” or, in the case of our salvation, “no longer guilty” carries with it freedom without lingering prejudice. No lingering shadow of guilt remains in the eyes of the law, the court or the judge. In salvation God both releases us from guilt and receives us fully and without prejudice as His children.
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