Eve was deceived and she missed the ball unintentionally, but not Adam. Adam purposely took his eyes off the ball and when he dropped his bat; he lost the ball game for the human race. What made that such a catastrophic loss for the human race is heightened by the fact that people are unable to do anything to alter their moral choice of good and bad condition. Human wisdom, human reasoning would say, “Give us a law. Give us something that we can do. Give us some way to perform. Give us a few balls of our own to hit so that we might earn back what we lost through Adam.” God’s reasoning said, “Impossible!” Why? The Law that he gave to Israel was a measure of what the human race would have to perform to be accepted by God.
God would have to do for the human race what the human race was totally incapable of doing for themselves. God would of necessity have to credit the righteous faithfulness of someone else to account of the hopeless and helpless human race. The word “Redemption” has to do with a ransom. So, Jesus paid the price necessary to satisfy the Father’s justice for all the sins of the human race. The human race was given a Redeemer and the price the Redeemer paid through the shedding of his blood (the second Adam’s blood) dripping on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant (the Ark Moses was instructed to build) to ransom the human race was a satisfactory payment to take those sins off the table of God’s justice forever!
However, the fact that Jesus became a redeemer of all the human race does not mean that all the human race will accept the gift the redeemer purchased on their behalf. Jesus’ faithfulness was the only faithfulness sufficient to merit God’s favor. God used our faith in Jesus’ faithfulness as the means whereby he would credit Jesus’ righteousness to all them that believe. To believe is to receive! To be justified does not mean to be perfectly righteous in performance. It also does not mean to become perfectly righteous or even more righteous in performance through time, it means having Jesus’ perfect righteousness freely credited to the account of the ungodly who believe.
We didn’t receive our righteous standing before God by the things we’ve done in the past that we might consider to be righteous. We certainly don’t maintain it by the things we continue to do or what we promise God that we’ll do that we might consider to be righteous. Our justification was something accomplished for us by God’s grace. Understanding the Grace of God results in joy. The mind set of joy will not come apart from understanding the Grace we have in this age of Grace. Many lack joy from not understanding that justification is compete.
