Losing Your Guilt

Mike Hosey, An Elder

The highest ideal of the American criminal justice system is that everyone is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. We adopt that position because we know that we are finite human beings.  No judge, no lawyer, no jury and no citizen is able to intrinsically know whether a man is guilty of a crime or not unless they were there to witness the actual transgression. So in order to protect the truly innocent, we declare everyone innocent (regardless of their actual guilt) until their evil is proven before men, and agreed upon by them.

But in God's judicial system, everyone who does not belong to His family is guilty. Unlike man with his finite knowledge, God can hold all of us guilty.  He knows every crime we've committed, the laws we've scorned, and the rules we've bent or broken. He knows the darkness in our hearts that motivates our bad deeds.  Even more importantly, He knows the darkness in our hearts that often motivates our "good" deeds. Because of His all penetrating knowledge, we cannot stand before His court and survive His scrutiny on our own.

In earthly courts, once your guilt is proven, there is no way to ever earn your innocence back.  It is gone forever.  You will always be considered a thief, a murderer, a perjuror, a rapist, or whatever you have been declared. Your only hope  is to pay out your sentence and do your best to regain credibility with your fellow man.

God's court is the opposite.  God says that if you believe Him, and Christ's sacrificial death, and His resurrection for your wrongs, then He credits goodness or righteousness to your account (Genesis 15:6, Galatians 3:6, Romans 10:9) and you will be saved from your sins.  When we put our faith in God, He puts his righteousness in us.  He declares us innocent, even though we are not.  Instead of seeing our guilt, He sees the perfection of Jesus Christ.  Even more glorioius than all of that, we become His children.  And with that, He begins to make us into new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17), and begins to guide us to a place where we won't be sinners at all!  Not only will we be declared innocent.  We will be made innocent!