This blog’s title is a saying often used to describe justification.  It is not a lexiconic definition of the word, but it sums it up well.  Justification is a forensic term meaning to be acquitted in heaven’s court.  When we are justified, we are declared “not guilty” by God.  It is the most blessed condition a person can experience here on earth.  Paul quoted David’s words on the blessedness of being justified.

Romans 4:6–8 (ESV)
⁶ Just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: ⁷ “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; ⁸blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

The “works” that Paul refers to in the context of Romans 4 are works of the law.  To be righteous by the works of the law demanded sinless living because the law could not set a person free from sin (Acts 13:38-39).  We must keep this in mind when we read Paul’s quote from David.

What did David say?  He did not say that the person who is blessed is the one who has never sinned.  He knew that he was a sinner himself, and we know that all have sinned (Romans 3:23).   The blessed man, according to David, is not the one who has never sinned, but the one who has had his sins covered by being forgiven by God.

It is Paul’s quote from David’s Psalm 32:2 where we get the main idea of justification.  This is found in verse 8 of Romans 4.  The man who is blessed is the one against whom the Lord does not count his sin.  The word “count” is the forensic term that means, “to lay, reckon, or take inventory of” (Strong).  When one is justified by God, God does not continue to keep a running tab of his transgressions, but, instead, He no longer reckons them.  He forgives them completely as if the person has never sinned.

This means that when a person is justified, he now appears before God in a sin-free, blameless state because God does not count his past sins against him.

Colossians 1:22 (ESV)
²² He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

Justification paves the way to be reconciled with God.  To be reconciled is to have one’s friendship with God restored, something that is now possible because the sin that separated the person from God has been removed.  Remember, “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).  Thus, to be in fellowship with Him there can be no sin on our account.  Being justified takes care of that.

Since we are all sinners, we are blessed to stand before God as if we have never sinned.  This is not God deciding to ignore sin.  Justification is only possible because our Savior, Jesus Christ, paid the price for sin for us by dying on the cross.

Romans 8:3–4 (ESV)
³ For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴ in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Jesus condemned sin in the flesh when He died for us on the cross, paying the price for sin (Romans 6:23).  But notice verse 4 in the quote above.  When we walk according to the Spirit, the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us.  Do you remember what the law demanded?  It demanded sinless living.  That demand is satisfied in us when we are declared not guilty by God based on our sins being washed away by the blood of Christ.  I call that being blessed.

As you wind down for the night, think about these things.