Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5
"The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone." — John Stott, The Cross of Christ
"As Blaise Pascal wrote, 'God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.' The mechanism of projection is a process of unwittingly ascribing to God our own attitudes and feelings as an unconscious defense of our own inadequacy or guilt." -- Brennan Manning, A Stranger to Self-Hatred: a Glimpse of Jesus
Righteousness by faith alone does not make sense to us. It seems right to us that we should be declared righteous by good works or right things that we do. We want to be the one who decides what is good. God desires and is pleased with good works, but they don't make us right or justified (just as if I had never sinned) in his eyes. Only Jesus' death on the cross does that. In other words, we can't trust in ourselves, we can't substitute our own virtue and goodness for the Blood of the Lamb sacrificed from the creation of the world. And we can't project onto God a willingness to accept that substitution. For the only righteousness that God sees, the only right standing before God, is purely by faith in what Jesus did on the cross.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:5-6
"He himself bore our sins" in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; "by his wounds you have been healed." 1 Peter 2:24
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21
Photo by Sheila Bair
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