“God presented him as the mercy seat by his blood, through faith, to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his restraint God passed over the sins previously committed. God presented him to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When an offense occurs, someone is responsible and someone is offended. There may be more than one responsible party, and there may be more than one offended party, but there is at least one of each. Indeed, if there is no offended party, then it wasn’t an offense. That is, it wasn’t wrong. And when this offense has occurred, it has to be made right or justice is never achieved. Today, let’s explore why God is always the ultimate offended party, and what He has done about making sure justice—His justice—is ultimately satisfied.

God put together the story of Scripture in the order He did on purpose. That doesn’t mean reading it in order is always the best plan. If you’re new to the Scriptures, in fact, reading it front to back like a regular book is probably the worst approach you could take. That being said, what comes before offers important context for what comes later. This is because all of the New Testament authors were writing from out of a worldview that was entirely defined by what we know as the Old Testament narrative and teachings. That formed the basis for the assumptions they made about who God is and how the world He created worked.

The teachings of Jesus were new, yes, but their newness was not pure novelty. They were an extension of those old covenant ideas in new ways. Because He came to fulfill the old covenant as He was revealing and inaugurating the new covenant, old covenant ideas and concepts of atonement and reconciliation with God provided a pathway for the apostles to explain how the better way the new covenant offered us worked. Those ideas helped to explain how our sin was forgiven in Christ; how we could gain access to the righteousness of God in Him.

Perhaps the most important, foundational assumption for understanding the new covenant offer of salvation was and is that there exists a God who created the world and everything in it. Because He created it – all of it – He owns it. We are not the fully autonomous creatures we imagine ourselves to be. We exist at His pleasure and are rightly subject to His commands. Where we depart from that creational norm, we are violating the proper ordering of creation itself. We are divorcing ourselves from reality. We are living in a delusional fantasy world which will not have a happy ending. Our ship of silliness will eventually crash and break up against the rocks of reality, and unless we swim to shore, we’ll drown in an ocean of obliviousness.

Because of this, all sin is a violation of God’s proper ordering of creation. It is a rejection of His rule and reign in favor of our own, which, again, is an entirely delusional and irrational state of mind. But rather than simply destroying us as just punishment for our violation, God, who is rich in mercy and faithful love, had another plan. He created us to be vessels of His love who lived in a loving relationship with Him. That intention on His part meant giving us the ability to make meaningful and consequential (i.e., free) choices. We had to be able to freely love Him, or the relationship wouldn’t have been real. This necessarily included the ability to choose other than Him.

Well, just because we rejected this plan in favor of the irrationality of sin doesn’t mean that God was going to abandon it. Instead, He created a pathway for us to enter into it again. Because God is just, though, this pathway was going to have to include the satisfaction of His just wrath over our rebellion and rejection of Him and His authority as Creator. The satisfaction of His wrath and justice was going to be obtained by one thing: the returning to Him of what was taken from Him. We took our lives from Him when we rebelled and embraced sin. Our lives would have to be returned if we were to be reconciled. But returning our lives to Him would mean we wouldn’t have them ourselves anymore; that is, we would be dead. This wouldn’t do, though, because you can’t have a relationship with a dead person.

So, God planned another way. Jesus. Jesus came and lived a life that was absolutely sinless. Not once did He violate or reject God’s authority. He said and did only those things God directed. Then, He willingly laid down His life as a sacrificial replacement for ours. All of ours. Yours and mine and every other person who had ever lived. God accepted this sacrifice, this substitutional atonement, and in return was able now, His justice satisfied, to receive all those who were willing to come to Him through faith in Christ back into the relationship He had created us for in the beginning.

All of this informs the imagery Paul uses here. The mercy seat was the lid of the ark of the covenant God directed Moses to build and whose description and construction we looked at together last fall. It was believed to be the place where God’s presence dwelt among the people. No longer was the mercy seat necessary. God made Jesus the mercy seat. Jesus is the place – the person – to whom we can go and experience the presence of God. His spilled blood as a willing and perfect sacrificial substitute for our own paves the way for us to go by faith and enter into the presence of God. The faith is our trust that Jesus really is who He claimed to be.

All of this is a grand demonstration of God’s righteousness. It demonstrates His righteousness for all the world to see by fulfilling the definition of righteousness. He never let go of His own character. He remained consistent with His expectations of sinless perfection for His people. Jesus fulfilled that requirement. He also stayed right with us by patiently passing over our sins – that is, those sins committed before Christ’s sacrifice – until Jesus’ act of atonement was complete and could be extended to cover all of them and all of those that would come after them. This took unimaginable restraint on God’s part. He was dealt one gross injustice after another, and rather than seeing His justice immediately satisfied, He waited until the time came when Jesus would satisfy His justice once and for all time.

And I have long loved and marveled at what Paul writes in v. 26. In doing all of this, God revealed Himself to be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. God played both sides of the conflict for our benefit. He found a way to satisfy His justice and at the same time justify us who were living separated from Him in sin. He made us right and made right His relationship with us in one fell swoop. No one ever conceived of a god doing such a thing before this. No one has offered a comparable copy since.

What the Gospel offers is something entirely unique. It offers us salvation. Real salvation. And eternal life. You can’t and won’t find anything like it anywhere else. The real question is whether or not you are going to accept it.