Why God Rejects Your Righteousness | Theocast

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Your righteousness, well, we love to proclaim it to each other, but it's really dangerous if you try and take that before God.

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Hi, this is John. And today, Justin and I are going to try and convince you from Scripture to pull your self -righteousness out of your hands, throw it into the fire, and run desperately to Jesus, and by faith trust that his righteousness is sufficient for you.

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Justin does an amazing job explaining Romans chapter 5 to us in the imputation, or if you don't know what that means, where we receive

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Christ's righteousness by faith. It's a lively conversation, and I'll tell you, the SR conversation gets really lively because we talk about the righteousness of Christ and our obedience and how those work together.

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Stay tuned. We are excited to announce we have a brand new podcast available called the

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Kingsmen Podcast. It's where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom.

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You can find it anywhere you download a podcast. You can also watch it on YouTube. We have new episodes that come out every

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Monday. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

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Christian life from a Reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective. Justin and I seek to clarify the gospel today and reclaim the purpose of the kingdom, and we're going to really emphasize the clarifying the gospel today.

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Stay tuned for that. Your hosts are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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And Justin, today is number two, so we're already good and ready, and let's do this.

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I guess you could say that. Yeah, I am. I'm all fired up. We just got done talking about the gospel, part one.

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Now we're going to talk about the gospel, part two. Don't we always talk about the gospel, John? We do. Just aspects of the gospel.

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We just keep turning that jewel, brother. Turning the diamond, maybe. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. There's all kinds of stuff happening right now.

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If you're not on our email list, you can go sign up for that. I thought you meant like in the world, which is also true.

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That's true. There's stuff going on in the world, but in the world of Theocast, there's lots of good things going on.

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We've got some stuff we're working on. Justin and I, Justin's doing some research on Theotomy, so am

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I, so stay tuned for that. We had some amazing episodes with Ken Jones, which should already be out by now.

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Yeah, you've probably already heard those things. Go listen to those. So anyway, it's just some fun stuff. Kingsman podcast,

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Outside Eden, a lot of good stuff. So anyways, Justin, we don't have much time. TheocastU, right? Didn't you say? That's coming out in June.

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Starting soon. That's lectures that Justin and I have taught either through Theocast or our churches, and there's,

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I think, almost 30 of those available now. And we'll be adding to those at least monthly.

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Every month. Yeah, at least one to three a month on average will be added to that. So those of you who are members can access that.

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All right, JP, today is a fun one. Yes, last week we covered a sermon that I had preached and really talked about the death of our situation and how

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God takes us and brings us to life and its hope. And we're going to continue that conversation, but from a sermon that you recently have been preaching through, which is

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Romans. If you have not gone and listened to it, you can download all of Justin's sermons from his website, covvap .org,

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and listen to his entire series on a podcast app. My series on Ezekiel is available. But Justin, get us ready to talk about a very, very important conversation that is often confused and,

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I think, misrepresented and removes assurance from the believer and distracts the believer from the purpose of their life.

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So Justin, talk to us about the righteousness of Christ and the gospel. From Romans 5.

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Yeah. The book of Romans, beloved by many, I'm going to do a really, really quick flyover to get us to Romans 5 .12

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and following. I'm going to begin in Romans 1 .16 and 17, verses that everybody knows probably.

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If you've been a Christian very long, you know what Paul says there, that he's not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, to the

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Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Gentile. And that's because in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed.

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And by that, he means not the fact that God is righteous, but he means that a righteousness that God gives to sinners that is entirely of faith, right?

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The righteousness of God is revealed from faith unto faith, beginning and ending in faith, for as it's written, the righteous shall live by faith, he says.

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So that's what's revealed in the gospel, a righteousness God gives to sinners that's all of faith.

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And this is the only shot you've got if you're a fallen human being. He goes on to prove that pretty convincingly because every human being, whether Jew or Gentile, is under sin.

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You're guilty. You stand condemned. You will never be justified in God's sight on the basis of your own obedience or your own righteousness.

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After having made that very plain, Paul then begins to explain and extol the righteousness that God gives to sinners that is only through Christ.

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Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the law. He fulfilled its penalty. He endured its curse, right? And what he did is counted to sinners through faith.

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Then he explains that this is how God has always worked. He appeals to Abraham most pointedly, and that Abraham was justified not by circumcision or not by works of the law, but apart from both of those things.

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And that just as it was with Abraham, so it is with us. We will be justified by faith apart from works. So having done that, he begins in chapter five to encourage us by considering the fact that we've been justified by faith in Christ, and we now have peace with God now and forever.

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If you want an antidote, like a poison pill against final justification, read Romans five, one to 11. It will encourage your soul to no end because it is very obvious that the present reality of justification guarantees our final salvation.

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It is a future looking passage. We have, we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Christ died for us when we were weak, when we were

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God's enemies. And if that's true, how much more so will we be finally saved? This is what Paul argues for.

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That brings us to Romans five, 12 through five 21. And this is a really pivotal,

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I think for me, having preached, we're preaching through the book right now. If anything, I think this passage is more important than I thought it was before I got to it.

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Isn't it funny how that happens? I mean, you always appeal to this passage because it's the great text in scripture where we see that Adam represented us all and that in the gospel, really the message is you're represented by Christ via your union with him by faith.

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So you were represented by Adam and in Adam, his guilt is counted to you.

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His guilt is imputed to use a theological word to you. But the same is true. There's this striking analogy between Jesus and Adam that as an

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Adam, we were imputed with covenant guilt in Christ were imputed with covenant righteousness, right?

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And so that's Paul's argumentation. He states that effectively in Romans five, 12, he's going to point to this striking analogy between Adam and Christ.

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In Adam, we fell in Christ were redeemed and he explains himself somewhat in verses 13 and 14, he says some interesting things that death reigned from Adam to Moses.

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The reason that that's true is because the guilt of Adam is counted to sinners. And so from the moment a human being begins to exist, we all bear the penalty of Adam's covenant, which was death at a spiritual level.

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And so that's why everyone's dying. That's why death reigns from Adam to Moses is because everyone is counted guilty in the sin of Adam.

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His sin is our sin. His guilt is our guilt, right? That's the message. Then Paul's going to explain further the analogy between Adam and Christ.

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It's true. They're similar, but Christ is greater. We have gained more in Christ than we lost in Adam.

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That's what he says repeatedly. This language of much more, much more. If this is true of what happened to us in Adam, much more, this is true of us in Christ.

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If he's our representative, this is what this means for us. And then he drives it all down on a wedge and puts a beautiful bow on the whole thing in verses 18 to 21, where he says, therefore, as one trespass, this is

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Adam's breaking of the covenant, right? He ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as one trespass led to condemnation for all men.

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So one act of righteousness, think Philippians two, Christ was obedient, obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, right?

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So this is the work of Christ. So one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.

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Those all men there are all whom Jesus represents. Verse 19, for as by one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners.

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So by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous. Again, this principle of the one and the many, the one representing the many is all throughout scripture.

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We're going to talk about that some today. Then we get some words about the law, that the law, the Mosaic law came in to increase the trespass.

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So to come like to double down on the sin of Adam, think Genesis six, five, right? That God surveys the scene before the flood.

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And he sees that the wickedness of man is great on the earth. And he says that the thoughts and the inclinations of man's heart is only evil continually.

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Well, the law of Moses comes in to make that absolutely obvious, that this is how corrupt and wicked we are.

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But don't miss the latter part of verse 20. We'll talk more about the first use of the law, I'm sure. But where sin increased, so the law came in to show us our sin, to make sin sinful beyond measure, right?

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And where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. So the law was given not to save us, but to crush us in our sin and show us the depth of God's mercy and grace in Christ.

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So that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness.

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So sin reigns in spiritual death, right? That we received from Adam. Grace reigns through righteousness that we receive from Christ.

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This is Christ's righteousness given to us. All of this leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So if I'm going to use two theological words in terms of what's going to frame our conversation today.

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And I trust John and I are going to be able to apply this to your hearts pastorally and help you see why this matters. One word is representation.

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That's right. So we're going to be talking about representation today. That's a covenantal category. So truth in advertising,

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John and I are covenant theologians, and that's going to become plain today because the Bible is revealed in covenantal terms.

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The plan of God's revealed in covenantal terms. So representation, one. Two, imputation, which is a word that means that something is counted to us.

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It's reckoned to us. And so in this case, we're going to be thinking about the guilt of Adam, but most pointedly the righteousness of Christ and how what he did is counted to sinners.

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This is, as I understand Paul's argumentation, this section of his letter, in one sense, he's inferring this from everything he's written up to this point in Romans.

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And this is his great crescendo in terms of how he understands justification.

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And in other words, Paul understands justification through these categories of representation and imputation.

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You're represented by Adam and his guilt is counted to you. That's true for every human. For those who trust in the

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Lord Jesus Christ, he's your representative and his righteousness is counted to you. That is the good news, according to the apostle

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Paul, who is the preeminent covenant theologian in Scripture. We'll just drop that there. We'll just drop that there.

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So I said a lot, John, interact with whatever you want. Yeah, so, you know, to put this on, I would say on the street level, everyday life, there's a really important aspect to this.

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Going back to the garden, Adam and Eve fell. What did they do immediately? They wanted to hide their shame, right?

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And God didn't give them requirements to remove their shame.

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Do this and your shame will be gone. He didn't even give them requirements of actions to reset the stage for a second work of covenant.

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No, he just covered their shame and it required a sacrifice of an animal.

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And it was, I think, a beautiful picture of how God required the sacrifice of Jesus to then cover our shame.

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And we are clothed, so the blood of Christ cleanses us from our shame.

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And then we are clothed again so we can stand rightly in the presence of God and never feel afraid, never feel ashamed, never wonder.

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We are clothed with a representation of something that is not our own, right?

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It's something that belongs to another. I love this about the prodigal son. When the son comes home, whose robe and ring goes on him?

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Because he had lost his robe and ring. He had lost his wealth. He puts the father's wealth, his own wealth.

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He puts it on his son and welcomes him back. And the reason why that ring and robe is so important, because in that culture, it's a representation of ownership, right?

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It's a representation of what belongs. And he's saying, son, this belongs to you, which is why the older son is so upset because he's like, you've never even given me a goat to celebrate with my friends, which

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I'm like, man, I could think of a lot of things I'd want to celebrate. Well, a goat would not be one of them, but you know, whatever.

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I'm not a farmer. But the point of it is, is that you aren't receiving because you've earned.

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You're receiving because it's necessary. Like it's absolute necessary. You cannot stand in the presence of a holy

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God and Him accept you to be in His presence, unless you're righteous.

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And we've already proven that you cannot do righteousness by the law. So this is why it's so important that when the title of this,

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I forget what we titled it, but the idea of is that you cannot present your righteousness, your own righteousness, your own righteousness.

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Now, Justin, we'll get to this in a minute because sometimes people think, well, then you guys are antinomians because you don't think obedience is necessary.

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And that's just utter insanity. But when you're thinking about standing before God, this is why

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Hebrews says, it's impossible to please me with your own righteousness. You have to please me with what?

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Putting your faith in the righteousness of another, which is Jesus. It's impossible to please me with your own righteousness.

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So I have so many things popcorn around in my brain right now, and I'm going to try to organize my thoughts a little bit.

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Really brief observation in like what you picked up on in the garden and how God clothes Adam and Eve, He covers their shame, you know, with skins and stuff.

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And obviously even this principle of not only imputation, which we're going to get to maybe more pointedly, but the fact that we are covered by the atoning work and the righteousness of another, not only do we see that in the garden, one of the most striking passages in all of scripture, thinking about the gospel is in the

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Old Testament from the prophet Zechariah in chapter three, where Joshua, the high priest, you know, Zechariah has this vision of Joshua, the high priest standing before the

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Lord and Satan is right there to accuse him. I mean, so Satan is the great accuser of the brethren.

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That's right. And who else is standing on the scene? The angel of the Lord, which just brief interjection, whenever we read those words in the

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Old Testament, the angel of the Lord, we should understand second person of the Trinity. That's right. It is God, the son, right?

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And so we have Joshua, the high priest standing before God. Satan is there to accuse the angel of the

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Lord. The second person of the Trinity is standing there. And so as Satan accuses Joshua, the angel of the Lord begins to speak.

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And he tells Joshua to take off his filthy clothes. Cause that's the issue. Joshua's clothes are filthy.

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His priestly garments are filthy. He's not worthy. He's not fit. He's sinful. He's all this. He's blown it.

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Satan's pointing that out. And the angel of the Lord says, take off your filthy robes and filthy garments. And I will give you,

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I will give you pure vestments to wear. Right? So again, we get this idea of we, we shed like God, literally through Christ.

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Christ removes our filthy clothing, our, our righteousness, which is as filthy rags.

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He removes that and then gives us his own pure vestments of righteousness to wear. Now, where else do we get this language in the scriptures?

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And I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here. I want to tie two themes together if you'll let me. So we were talking about the garden as well.

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The end of Genesis three, right after the verses that you referred to with the skins and all. What happens the last verse of Genesis three?

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God drives the man out of the garden. And that word is strong. Like he expels him, right? He's hurled out of the garden effectively.

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And what is placed there to guard the way? We're told that an angel and flaming sword, like cherubim and flaming swords are placed there, or ain't cherubim with flaming sword is placed there to guard the way to the tree of life.

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Adam has access to the tree of life no longer. He cannot eat of that tree any longer.

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All right. So thinking about that and thinking about pure vestments, if I can just do this really quickly, like marvel at God's word for a minute.

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So to be in Adam is to be counted with Adam's sin and thereby to bear the penalty of the covenant that Adam broke, death, to be in Christ is to be counted with his righteousness and to be set free from Adam's curse, right?

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And to be given access to eat of the tree of life, right? Huge. So Revelation chapter two, the tree of life does not show up again until Revelation chapter two, where Jesus says to the one who conquers, to the one who endures, right?

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I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. Revelation 22, the angel of the

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Lord is showing John the river of the water of life, bright as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb through the middle of the street of the city on either side of the river, the tree of life is there, right?

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That's significant. Then Revelation 22, 14, blessed are those who wash their robes so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.

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Now, so if you're putting all this together, it's like in Christ, we have access to eat of the tree of life.

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He gives that access. The ones who have access to eat of the tree are those who have washed their robes, right?

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So then you go back to Revelation seven, where there's the vision, right? Like John sees, and there's a great multitude that no one can count, right?

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Before the throne of God, and they're clothed in white robes. And then skip down a few verses.

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One of the elders speaks to John saying, who are these who are clothed in white robes and from where have they come?

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And I said to him, sir, you know, it's kind of like from Ezekiel last week, Lord, you know, you know, sir, you know.

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And he said to me, these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. Great tribulation, meaning life under the sun, right?

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They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. Right? So we get all these themes tied together of we need pure vestments.

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Well, where do we get them? Where do we get a wedding garment? Well, it's Christ. It's his righteousness. We've washed our robes, made them white in the blood of the lamb.

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And through Christ, we're given access to eat of the tree of life, all of which we lost through Adam's guilt and Adam's fall.

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So it's everything in the world, John, to be in Christ and to receive these things from him and him alone. Sorry for that little monologue.

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It's just so encouraging. Well, I just want to add to that, I mean, to your point of encouragement, but just how many times

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Paul does this, right? This is Philippians 3, 9. And being found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in what?

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Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. Romans 14, 17.

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For the kingdom that we are seeking first, that we love, the kingdom that we long for, for the kingdom of God is a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, not of our own, and peace, not of our own, and joy in the

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Holy Spirit. So righteousness, joy, and peace come to us by power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 4, 5.

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And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as what?

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Righteousness. I mean, it's so good. It's incredible. And the reason why this is so important, Justin, is that if you try and accumulate all of the righteousness that I have produced today, it's pretty pathetic.

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I mean, not only pathetic, it would cause me to be damned forever in hell because it's not good enough.

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It's not acceptable enough. But when I run to the Father in faith and I seek to obey in faith, presenting his righteousness to him, so Christ's righteousness to him, but then

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I present the world, the love of God and righteousness by my frail, weak, putrefied works, then it's the right balance.

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My neighbor needs to know through my means of love and compassion and proclamation of the gospel, which is going to be fail and weak, and I'm going to fumble all over the place.

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But God uses that. What does Paul say? We are representations.

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We are ambassadors, right? So we are presenting our righteousness, not ours,

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Christ's righteousness. We're presenting Christ's righteousness to the world saying, hey, do you know why God accepts me?

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It's not because you're impressed with my good works, because my good works can't save me. Do you know why God accepts me? It's because I'm clothed in his righteousness.

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See, we never present our righteousness to God, and we don't present our righteousness to the world.

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We present Christ's righteousness to the world. Now, I know you look at me and you're like, John, you're a frail, weak person who can't seem to put two minutes together without messing up, but that's not why

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God accepts me, dear sinner. Do you want to know why he'll accept you? He'll accept you for the same reason he accepts me, by faith in Jesus.

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If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a primer on rest.

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And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. I'll say it this way.

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If we talked about this a little bit on Semper Evermanda last week, the most helpful thing for us in our day -to -day life, the most helpful thing for us in the everyday struggles of life under the sun is to catch glimpses of God's eternal plan.

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Because it's our life, it's our hope, it's our peace, it's our comfort. He says, insist on it.

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Yeah. And so this is immediately practical. I mean, in terms of our life on Tuesday or Thursday morning, or whatever it is, or on a

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Wednesday afternoon, whenever you listen to this podcast, right? What's the best thing for your soul right now? It's to catch a glimpse of God's eternal plan for you.

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And what is the most comforting thought in the world for your final salvation? It's that you will stand before the

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Lord at the end of time, and you will either be, in one sense, represented by Adam, right? You're guilty in him, and you have doubled down on that with your own sin a million times over.

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That's true. Or you will stand represented by Christ. And the best thing in the world is that Christ is your representative.

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And let me ask this question. If Christ represents us, John, how could we ever be damned? If Christ represents us, how could we ever be lost?

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If we are found in him, united to him, where everything that's his is ours, how could it ever go badly?

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It can't, right? And it's like, may the Lord give us faith to trust this. And may we be encouraged by this.

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Romans 5, 12 to 21 could not be more clear that these categories of imputation and representation are the way that the gospel works, in one sense.

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But representation is not Paul's invention. You hear people say this stuff, that Paul just kind of went rogue and wrote all these things about justification, and wrote all these things about representation as though it's not tethered to the entire witness of God from all of time.

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Well, I beg to differ, because the principle of representation is just shot through the entire scripture, from not only

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Adam's fall. I mean, we have to acknowledge that. That unless you're a Pelagian, you have to acknowledge that Adam was the representative of the entire human race, right?

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And that things are the way they are now because of what he did. But then from that point forward, the promise of the

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Redeemer in Genesis 3, 15, and then God working from there on to pointedly bring this promised one.

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Like we were thinking about this, that Abraham in the beginning of the nation of Israel, and then even

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Judah, like you were making the observation earlier in our offline conversation, the words to Judah that he's going to have a ruler who will come from him, right?

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And he's going to sit on the throne. And then the law is given to the nation of Israel to govern the people, but as a standard of righteousness, like we've already talked about before on this show many times, to show them their sin and to drive them to the one who would save them.

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Then there's the covenant with David, where God tells David that he'll have a son who will sit on a throne forever, provided that his son keeps the law.

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Then Solomon shows up and it's going real well. And it's like for a period of time, it's like, man, maybe he's the guy.

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And then of course, Solomon is going to blow it. We know that, but to Solomon, God says in 1

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Kings 9, that if you obey, it's going to go well for Israel. If you disobey, the nation will be cut off.

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Israel will be cut off. As goes the king, so goes the kingdom, right? Then, and I'm just going to lay a few of these things out,

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John, and then I want you to just pivot and interact with it, representation, right? So then you get the king representing the people.

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Then you get the language of the prophets, Isaiah and the servant of the Lord, and how he will bear his people's iniquity and he will atone for their sins.

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And he, through his punishment, his people will be healed. And then how he, through his obedience and knowledge, will cause the many to be accounted righteous.

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And you get the language of Jeremiah, for example, that David's, a righteous branch for David will be raised up.

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And how that means, right? An offspring of David who's righteous will be raised up and he's going to execute justice and righteousness in the land.

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And how in his day, Judah and Israel will be saved and how he will be called, the

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Lord is our righteousness. This is all throughout the scripture.

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And like you were talking about from Ezekiel last week, you know, in Ezekiel 34, it's clear that the Lord is the one who will be our shepherd and how he's going to set up over us one shepherd and one king who is his servant,

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David, right? And that's obviously Jesus. And so this understanding of representation is at the heart of biblical covenant theology, for sure.

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But this is how God has always worked. That's right. Yeah. When I was 18,

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I may have told this story before, but if not, but when I was 18, we took a missions trip to Romania. And so we flew into Germany and we went to like nine different countries and I had my passport and I made it through all of those countries.

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And then we went back to New Amsterdam and we're supposed to fly to New Amsterdam the next morning. And that morning

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I had to walk into my hotel room and tell my dad, I cannot find my passport here. And, you know, this is before cell phones and, you know, we had dial up internet.

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So it's just like communication is the nightmare. So we go to the airport and we had made photocopies of our passports and I had my driver's license.

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And so we present that to the airport and they're just like, absolutely not. This isn't, you have to have a real representation of your citizenship and you don't have a real one.

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You have a copy of one and a really bad copy of that, you know, coffee machines back then were so great. Anyways, they would not accept it.

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And I had to go down to the embassy and thankfully the embassy within 24 hours was able to give me another password, but I had to fly home without my family and everybody else from the church.

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It was, it was a nightmare, but the point of it was, is that it didn't matter how good the copy was.

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The copy cannot be the replacement for what is absolutely necessary. And that's why it's so death.

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It's, it's, it's devastating to think that you can somehow represent by copying

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Jesus's works and then offering that to God. And he's going to accept it by no means.

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This is why Paul says, if you accumulate all of the copying I did of Jesus and you put it into a pile, it represents a pile of dung.

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It's not of use. And that's exactly what I was being told saying, no, you cannot get on the plane.

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That piece of paper is of literally of no value of proving you're a citizen. And this is why it's so important to understand

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Christ righteousness versus unrighteousness. It's so important that we never mix those two.

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It's almost like mixing law and gospel. You cannot do that. No, you can't. And I mean, just to continue to encourage our hearts here with the cohesiveness of scripture and how, like, nobody argues that the

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Bible is covenantal because there's covenants throughout it, right? And people are happy to, man, there's all kinds of covenants in the old

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Testament for sure. I mean, you got Adam, you got, I mean, even they want to call it that. It's like, well, there's a covenant of creation kind of, and then certainly

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Noah and then Abraham and Moses and David and all these kinds of things. And there's also a new covenant that the prophets talk about.

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Like to kind of connect all these pieces for folks. Jeremiah 31 verses 31 to 34.

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I'm not going to read it all. I'm just going to kind of read a couple of important sentences. So the Lord says, the days are coming when

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I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when

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I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke. Which by the way, can

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I say something real quick, which means it could have been failed and they did fail it.

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Right. Which is so different from the new one. Right. So they broke it. They broke the covenant.

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Adam broke the covenant. And like Adam, Israel broke the covenant, Hosea 6, 7, right? So there's a covenant transgression from Adam in the garden and from Israel after Sinai.

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That's true. But then God says he's going to do something new. And in particular, the very last sentence of Jeremiah 31, 34, he says, for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.

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So this new covenant directly relates to the forgiveness of iniquity and God not remembering his people's sins.

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Now, fast forward. What is it that establishes that covenant?

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What is it that ratifies it? Many are already thinking this. Jesus, last night he's on earth.

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He took a cup and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, drink of it all of you for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

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That's Matthew 26, 27, and 28. Like immediately we should have bells going off in our heads,

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Jeremiah 31, 34. Or then in Luke's account and likewise, the cup after they had eaten saying, this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood, right?

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So this is how the covenant is established. And we know that Jesus enters into the holy places that are not made with hands, not through the means of the blood of goats and calves by the means of his own blood, thus securing what eternal redemption.

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That's Hebrews nine. And last thought from me, John, and then you can react and maybe take us out.

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To be represented by Christ is what we have to have. It is the only hope for salvation.

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It is the only way that we can be reconciled to God. And Romans 5, 12 to 21 makes it crystal clear that there are two atoms.

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There's the first one and the last one. They are the heads of the two great covenants that exist in time and space.

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And I'm just going to go and say this now. The one, the first atom is the representative of all who are under the covenant of works and he communicates his image to them and his guilt is counted to.

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The other, the second atom is the representative of all who are under the covenant of grace and he communicates his image to them and his righteousness is counted to them.

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And so think like first Corinthians 15. For the first man was from the earth, a man of dust.

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The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust.

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And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven, right?

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Consider the eternal plan of God and take heart like this is how he's always meant to be and Adam represented us in Adam.

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We fell and were counted with his guilt in Christ. We're saved. He represents us and his righteousness is given to us and we will be saved and we'll bear his image.

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Praise God for that. And then praise God. Yeah. Going back to Romans four, five, when he says the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy.

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I love if you go back to Ezekiel 37 from last week, where he says, I give them a new covenant, a covenant of peace.

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It's so good because we're no longer underneath the wrath of God. We're no longer the enemy of God, Ephesians two.

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I'll close by reading you this and it'll be kind of what leads us into a simple reformata, which I'll explain in a minute.

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This is Titus chapter three and verse four.

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It says, but when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of the works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the

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Holy spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our

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Lord, so that being justified by grace, we might become the heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

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This saying is trustworthy and I want you to insist on these things.

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Oh, this is so good, right? He's saying this is a trustworthy statement. Now listen to what he says.

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This saying is trustworthy and I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.

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These things are excellent and profitable for people. For what? For what?

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Not salvation. Justin, not to clarify, not to guarantee, not to solidify.

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He's saying that our response to this imputation of Christ's righteousness, the clothing of Christ's righteousness is to dedicate ourselves to loving others because it's good for them.

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Amen. It's good for them. Why? Because I'll say this, because when the light of Christ comes, he says, so let your light shine that men may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.

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It is God who is using us as though, as we rest in the righteousness of Christ and we enjoy the righteousness of Christ and we reflect it to one another.

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God is using that to bring people to himself as we are ready to give every man hope of the, that lies within us.

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So that we're going to continue that conversation. And a little bit about evangelism, because this passage

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I think is dealing with that and how we have maybe miscued evangelism and how we have taken, I think, good works out of evangelism.

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So we'll talk about that in a minute. We have, Justin and I do a second podcast. It's called Semper Ephraimana, which means always reforming.

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When we want to kind of take the conversation to the next level, we take the kid gloves off a little bit theologically and get a little deeper in there and Semper Ephraimana is also a community of people who support us monthly and in doing so, it gives you access to this podcast and also an app and all kinds of education material.

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There's a lot of fun stuff that's in there. If you'd like to learn more about supporting us and joining Semper Ephraimana, you can go to our website, theocast .org.

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But Justin, we're going to go ahead and go over to that podcast. It's a pithy pop. It's not very long, but it definitely adds on top of the conversation we already have.

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I like to say it's the tapatio on top of the burrito. So we're going to go ahead and go do that. Whoa, hold my headphones out there.

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We'll see you guys. Thanks for being patient with us as we nerd out about covenant theology and the Bible. We love it and we hope you are enjoyed by it and leave us a review on iTunes or something like that.