SERMON: Sola Fide

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

Lady Jane Grey and the Question of Righteousness

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Well, the year was 1554. The month was February. And we find ourselves in the ancient walls of the Tower of London, where a young woman was waiting to die.

Now, I want you to imagine that that room being as dank as you could probably imagine, winter outside of those stone walls causing it to be freezing. And imagine being shut away with other people deciding when that door was gonna open and how you were gonna walk through it and how many days that you actually had left.

The door opens, a priest comes in to speak with you. His name is John Feckenham. He's the Queen Mary's chaplain and he's gonna later become the Abbot of Westminster. But on this occasion, he had come to cross-examine you.

He had come to a condemned prisoner whose name was Lady Jane Grey. Now, Jane at this time was only 16 or 17 years old depending upon the disputed details of her birth. Some of our children are not even that old.

Some of our children are reaching that age and starting to think about what their life is gonna be like, thinking about marriage, maybe somewhat distantly or about a family or about the work that they're gonna do, all the years that they expect to live afterwards.

But this teenage girl, Jane, she was having to think about her execution. Only months later, this great niece of King Henry VIII had been proclaimed Queen of England after the death of her sickly cousin, Edward.

And now, just months later, the former teenage queen cannot even decide whether she can leave or enter the room. The council who had brought her to power originally had now abandoned her. The throne now belonged to someone else.

The sentence was already pronounced and her father's involvement in a fresh rebellion had just scratched the wound that would now lead to her execution. Queen Mary of Tudor, her government that had replaced Queen Jane, intended with every ounce of power that they had to remove the threat because Jane's claim to the crown represented the illegitimacy of Mary Tudor's rule.

And John Feckenham, the priest, had come to persuade this Protestant girl to return to the true faith of Rome or die. Now, there had been a little bit of a postponement for a few days of religious discussion to see how these things would go, a few more days to urge her to change her opinion, to renounce her Protestant confession, to embrace the Roman church, and perhaps, maybe, her life would be spared.

Now, we have to remember this wasn't a guaranteed pardon. It could be that it would have happened, but it also might not have been as well. The political danger of being on the wrong side of a coup is very real.

The pressure being applied to her to abandon her confession was also real. And there are many things that may sound reasonable to you when you're in a tower in a prison cell thinking that if I say this thing, maybe I could live.

Perhaps there's a way I could spin it. Perhaps there's a way I could say it. Perhaps there's a way that I could give them the words that they want. Jesus knows my heart, and I can go back to being with my family.

Perhaps I could hold my convictions privately. Perhaps there'd be another opportunity in the future to explain what I really believed later when the pressure had cooled down. Imagine all of those excuses bumbling around inside of your head as you sat waiting for death in London's tower.

But underneath that conversation with Jane and Beckenham was a question deeper than England's succession plan, deeper in whether which family was gonna rule, deeper than whether Mary was gonna show mercy.

And the question was a question that was actually motivating Jane. And her response was, what will make a guilty sinner right before a holy God, right before the judge of all the earth? She's standing in a courtroom case getting ready to be judged by a queen of England.

And yet she knows that her life is held captive by the judge over all the earth. Now she was preparing to face that judge, to face the verdict, to face the royal pardon that only Christ could offer. Even if a miracle would have happened and the queen would have released her and she lived another 50 years and she got to build upon her possessions and family and life and marriage, she would still have to stand before a holy God and so will we.

We may never stand before an English court. We may never have a crown offered to us and we may never face a sentence of death, but we will and we cannot escape this question. What will make a man right with God?

Your royal bloodline won't do it and education and pedigree won't do it. Freedom from confinement can't do it. Even the courage to face an executioner can't do it. And this morning we need to understand why.

Because it's possible for us to admire the courage of a teenage girl and to walk out of here not fully understanding the gospel and that would be a tragedy. It's possible to hear this story, to feel deeply for this young woman and then go home still trusting in ourselves.

I want us to hear what God says about guilty people and how they stand rightly before him. And I want us to understand how a sinner has no defense and yet can nevertheless receive pardon from God. But to do that, we have to leave the Tower of London for a moment and we have to go to the scriptures and we have to see what they say.

Sola Fide: The Root of Salvation

But before we do that, I wanna remind us of where we've been. We started a journey through the five solos, the reformation with a six week series, which seems a little ridiculous. Five solos, six weeks.

Well, we're gonna talk about something on the sixth week. So it'll work. But for months, we've been in the book of Proverbs and we've been talking about the fruit of the Christian life. What is the fruit that our life ought to produce?

What kind of words and what kind of homes and what kind of work should we be doing that's downstream of our fear of God? That's the fruit of the Christian life. But in this series, we're not talking about the fruit, we're talking about the root that produces it.

We're asking not about the fruit of our salvation, but the root, the base, the foundation of our salvation. Two weeks ago, we looked at Martin Luther and we saw how he rediscovered this principle called solo scriptura, which is scripture alone.

Scripture is our final authority. Scripture is what speaks. Scripture is the one that has the right to tell us about how must a man be saved. Not popes, not councils, not anything else, scripture alone.

And then last week, we talked about Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer who suffered and his congregation suffered during the time of the bubonic plague. And we saw how that he understood grace alone is the only explanation for why God can save undeserving sinners.

We were dead, we could do nothing, but God made us alive together with Christ by grace and grace alone. Now today, after that foundation of who gets the authority to speak about salvation, the Word, how is salvation accomplished?

Grace alone. So now we need to look at another example of how. How does this faith get inside of us? How does righteousness that is not our own become accredited to us? How does our record of transgressions begin to be forgiven so that His righteousness can be ours?

That's what we're gonna talk about today with sola fide, which means by faith alone. God's grace is the source of our eternal life. Christ's righteousness is the ground for our eternal life. And faith is the instrument by which God brings these things into our heart.

So today we're gonna look at three things. We're gonna look at the verdict that we actually deserve. We're gonna look at the judge who is both the just judge and also the justifier of sinners. And then we're gonna look at our confession, our faith that receives the verdict that we are no longer guilty, but we've been made clean in Christ.

So if you will join me in Romans chapter three, that great chapter where we will read from verses 21 through 28, we'll see what the apostle Paul has to say to us. If you join me right there in Romans 3, 21 through 28, we will read, we will pray, and then we will discuss it.

This is how Paul begins. But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe.

For there is no difference, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness.

Because in his forbearance, God has passed over the sins that were previously committed to demonstrate at the present time his righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that there is no work that we could ever do to earn eternal life.

There is no work that we could ever offer to you that would be so unpolluted and pure that you could receive it. And in that Lord, there's no good work that we could offer in the sense that we could not even force our own lips to declare your supremacy and goodness or to even conjure up a confession of sin because that would be a good work.

We were dead in our trespasses. All had fallen short. And as we learned last week, you are the one who put the faith in our heart that we will be studying and looking at today so that through that confession that you authored on our lips, you would receive it because it was a true confession and you would send forth your spirit to live and dwell within your people.

Jane Grey's Education and Protestant Convictions

Lord, help us to never think that our salvation could be by works. Help us to remember, Lord, that it is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now, I wanna go back to Lady Gray for a moment because before we unpack Paul's argument, I want us to understand a little bit more about who she was, this lady in the tower.

She was born around 1537 into one of the most prominent families in England. Her father was Henry Gray, who had become the Duke of Suffolk. Her mother was Frances Brandon. And Frances' mother was the sister of Henry VIII, so she was a part of the royal Tudor family.

Now, that was an extraordinary privilege in and of itself, but it was also an extraordinarily dangerous thing to be in the family of King Henry VIII for many reasons. One of the reasons is that your life now is gonna be defined by this royal lineage.

Your marriage could be seen as an alliance. Your children would be there to advance a political agenda. Your life would not be free in the sense that you might think it would. You would have to be a certain thing all the time.

And you might discover that the very people who are putting you forward, who are promoting you, who are trying to appoint you, actually are the same ones who have the power eventually to turn on you and to take your life.

Jane's great uncle Henry had recently broken England's allegiance with the Church of Rome. He had broken it because the Pope wouldn't give him an annulment. He had wanted an annulment because he was not having a son.

He wasn't having a son, we find out today, because he wasn't giving his wife the Y chromosome. Back then, he thought it was his wife's fault, and he wanted to put her away. The Pope said no. Henry said yes.

There was a break between England and Rome. And in that, he created the Church of England, in a sense, this newly created church. But it remained Roman, basically, in every way. All the religious theology and trappings, all of it was the same, except now, instead of the Pope being at the top of the church, it was King Henry VIII, which was super convenient if you want an annulment, I guess.

Now, because of this, the spiritual future of the country of England remained deeply contested. Some wanted biblical reform. Some wanted the things that were spreading across the continental Europe, with Calvin and Luther and Zwingli.

Some in England wanted that. And yet, some wanted the older doctrines of Rome to continue ruling England. Some were willing to believe in the God of the Bible. Some were willing to go along with the status quo.

Some were willing to simply follow whoever had power. Jane was not one of those, but she lived during the middle of this tumultuous period. Now, what I found so interesting, I'm sorry I'm telling you so much information, but I found it absolutely fascinating this week.

She received an extraordinary education by the time she was 16 years old. She knew six languages, fluently, English, Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew, and Italian. And she studied classical literature in those languages, not even in English.

She studied theology and was a pen pal with Heinrich Bollinger who was the protege of Ulrich Zwingli. She genuinely loved to learn, which is exampled by a visitor who came to her in 1550. His name was Roger Ascham.

When he visited her home, he found all of the family outside having fun. He found all of the family outside going on a hunt. He found all of the family doing something. He couldn't find her. And he searched and he searched and he searched until he found her in a private room.

She was in a private room reading Plato in ancient Greek. She even said that she found more enjoyment in her books than she did in the entertainments of the outdoors. Now I know for me, sometimes it's hard for me to even read the instructions when I'm building something from Ikea.

To be fair, it's almost useless to read those instructions. But this girl was reading Plato in Greek for the pleasure of it. Learning was a delight to her, but intelligence alone wasn't what she was after.

She was after the fruit of Christian virtue. She was not just after a brilliant mind. She wanted to be able to defend against error. She wanted to understand who this God was who had made the heavens and the earth and everything in it.

And we know that because she received a robustly Protestant education. In 1547, she was transferred to the house of Catherine Parr. That's the former wife of Henry VIII, who was annulled when he made up his own church.

Jane's tutor, John Allmer, encouraged her Protestant convictions. Jane was learned in those sessions to ask, what does scripture actually say? What does scripture mean? What does it mean that we would have salvation by grace alone, through faith alone?

She was taught these things. Again, I said earlier, she was speaking with Heinrich Bollinger, who was the protege of Ulrich Zwingli. In one of the letters that she wrote to him speaking about faith, she admitted to Bollinger.

We have three of these letters that remain in Latin. She wrote her letters in Latin. What have we done with our life? She wrote to him and said, I acknowledge faith to be his gift. That was a very inflammatory statement to say in Catholic England.

I acknowledge faith to be the gift of Almighty God, not by my works. Now I wanna stop here and make an application for a second. We often imagine that courage comes in extraordinary circumstances. We often imagine that when the crisis arises, that somehow we become a kind of different person, that there's something deep down within us that we can muster in the moment and then we can rise to the occasion.

Ordinary Faithfulness Forms Courage

But that's not how courage is actually built. Courage is built ordinarily in time, over time. God uses the scriptures that we read daily, the prayers that we pray daily, the correction we receive, the worship we attend, the ordinary means of grace that we appropriate in our life.

God uses all of those things. They don't really look impressive in the moment to actually build something of substance in us that when we face the danger or when we face the trial or the conflict or whatever else, then we have something inside of us that's been built up.

It was God using that consistent normalcy that forged iron in the veins of Jane. Before her conviction was ever tested in the tower, before she had to face death with grace and elegance, God was building up in her courage in her daily ordinary worship.

And perhaps it goes without saying, but parents, this is why it's so important that we lead our children daily. The catechisms that we repeat to them, the passages that we read to them, the prayers that we pray with them, the worship that we sing with them, all of it is accomplishing something.

It's either preparing them for something or in our negligence, leaving them unprepared. We don't know what obedience is gonna cost our children one day. You can't arrange their little lives in such a way that you can protect them from every struggle.

But what you can do is you can put concrete in their bones. You can put the Word of God in them so that when they face the heartache, they have that foundation. When they face the trial, they have that as their substance.

You can give them the immovable rock, which is Jesus Christ. You can teach them His unalterable Word. You can teach them His unfailing mercy so that whenever they fail, they know where to run. God often forges extraordinary courage in acts of ordinary faithfulness.

That's important. Now, when Jane was learning all of these things, English political future was changing. Henry VIII had died in 1547. His son, Edward VI had become king at only nine years old, which is also incredible.

Unlike his father, however, who was a lover of Rome, in a sense, and an inventor of his own church and another, unlike that, Edward actually was a Protestant and he loved the Protestant faith and he loved the Reformation in Europe.

And he was actually working at nine years old to try to bring the Reformation to England. Under his reign, English Protestants gained tremendous influence. Worship and teaching were reshaped in the country.

The work that we know today that's associated with Thomas Cranmer is downstream of Edward. But by 1553, Edward had fallen seriously ill. He was a sickly child and he had no children. And when it was clear that Edward was going to die, the succession arrangements that were currently in place that would have been set up by his father, Henry, would lead to Mary of Tudor being the next in line to the throne, the Catholic Mary.

And this was a problem for Edward because he didn't wanna see the country go back to Catholicism. He wanted to see the Reformation continue in England. And on his deathbed, fearing what was certainly going to happen, he rearranged the succession plan, overriding what his father had put in place and putting his cousin, Jane, as the successor to the throne of England.

Jane Grey's Brief Reign and Imprisonment

Now, this was hotly disputed in England. To alter a succession plan at the last minute like that would have certainly caused some people to be rubbed the wrong way, namely Mary. And it destabilized the entire political atmosphere.

At the time when it was heard that she was gonna be the queen, John Dudley, the Duke of Northampton, an ardent Protestant, came up with a plan to help secure Jane's future by having her marry his son.

He was one of the most prominent people in Edward's court. So he said, I know what we can do to insulate Jane, to keep her protected. I'm gonna have her marry my son, Guilford Dudley. And by doing that, I can secure power for her and keep her safe from Mary, which is what he expected to happen.

On July 6th, 1553, Edward died. On July 10th, the newly devised succession plan went into effect and Jane was pronounced queen of England. She entered the Tower of London to be coronated in a coronation that sadly would never take place because Mary Tudor was already seeking to gain support in the background and she had been so for a while.

And sadly, she gained support rather quickly and increased the pressure. And nine days after Jane was appointed queen, she was deposed. She was arrested and she was made an enemy of the state. All of the promises, all of the preparation, all of the expectation of her reign, even maybe all of the different prayers that she believed had been answered.

All of it in that moment, she may have felt was gone. The woman who entered that tower to be coronated as queen was now imprisoned in that tower being made ready to die. The place where she had awaited a crown, now she's awaiting her grave.

And in November of 1553, she was tried for high treason and found guilty at the Guildhall in London. And she pled guilty because she knew that in this great kangaroo court that she was in, there was nothing that she could actually do to convince them of her innocence.

Now she was pronounced guilty, but her sentence would wait another seven months until January of 1554. A rebellion in England threatened Mary's government. Behind the scenes, Jane's father had participated in a rebellion to try to overthrow Mary to rescue his daughter.

It didn't work. Jane was still a prisoner. Mary put down the rebellion and now Mary had to die. And after the rebellion, she was executed, which we'll talk more about in a moment. Now it's easy to hear that story and to grieve over what happened to her, to see how powerful men used her, how quickly they abandoned her and how little her life mattered to them.

But as we open Romans, I want us not to just listen to spectators for a moment, I want us to listen as people who think like Jane thought that she is facing a far greater court than the court of Mary.

She's facing the court of Almighty God and she must be right before this God if she will ever, ever see life. So the first thing that I want us to look at when we look at Romans is the verdict that we deserve.

All Humanity Stands Guilty Before God

Jane was facing her own verdict, but all of us face a different verdict. As you open the book of Romans, Paul begins his legal case against everybody. In Romans one, he exposes the Gentile world, which the Jews at the time would have been like, yeah, amen, they're bad.

He says that people know enough about God in order to be accountable to him, but they suppress the truth in their unrighteousness and because of that, they're guilty. Again, the Jews would have said amen.

But then in Romans two, Paul turns on his own people, the Jews, and he says that you're the ones who possess the law, but you don't love the law. You have it, but you don't obey it. You're hypocrites.

The amens kind of stopped at that point. Paul says that they had the commandments, which means that they had no excuse for disobeying it. They knew what righteousness actually looked like, but they didn't fulfill it.

So by the end of Romans chapter two, Paul has said that everybody is under the wrath of God. There's no one who's righteous. There's every one of us have stood condemned by a far greater court than Mary, but by God.

And by the time you get to Romans two, Romans three, Paul wraps everybody up in the same noose. The pagan, the moralist, the religious man, the Jew, the Gentile, every single one of them are guilty. Paul says in Romans 3, 19, that God has found all of us guilty by our own sin so that every mouth may be stopped and all the world would become guilty before God.

Every mouth, Paul says, which means that there's no more excuses. We're not good people. We can't say that I'm mostly good. I'm good compared to my neighbor or I'm good enough. No, you're not. Romans 3, 10 says, there's nobody righteous, not even one.

Romans 3, 23 says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Notice the two expressions there that all have sinned and all fall short. The verb there for all have sinned is a Greek aorist verb, which means that it's completed and settled and there is no argument, all have sinned.

It's in the past, it's done. It's a fact and facts don't care about your feelings. The second verb is a present tense verb, which is interesting. A past tense verb, then a present tense verb. The present tense verb is the one for all have sinned or I'm sorry, all have fallen short, which means that in Greek, by the way, in Greek, when you have a present tense verb, it's ongoing action.

It's not just one time action. It's all have fallen and continue to fall and continue to fall and continue to fall and continue to fall continually. All of us are falling short over and over and over again.

We've all sinned. We've all fallen short over and over and over again. The problem is not merely that we've done something regrettable in the past. The problem is that we are something that continues to do things in the present.

And just in case we think we're the exception, you have to remember all is not a complicated word. All means all. It means the woman in the gutter. It means the man on the throne. It means the drunkard in the street.

It means the hypocrite in the pulpit. All have sinned, all people. And by that, he doesn't just stop at mere numbers and say that every single one of us have fallen. He also is talking about all of us have fallen in every way because it also describes all of our conduct.

We're all fallen all the way in that we have corrupted speech. We have violent conduct. We have an absence of the fear of the Lord. We have a pride of our own life. Paul's saying that all people have fallen in every way.

Sin reaches the entirety of the person, which is why we can say that we are totally depraved. Now that doesn't mean utterly depraved. We're not all as bad as we possibly could be. You could be worse. And we ought to thank God for his restraining grace that we're not worse.

There's some people who've sinned more grievously than we have. They've aggravated us more than others have. They've done far greater damage and harm than others. Not all of us today are as bad as Dahmer, Stalin, and Hitler, thank God.

But we all stand under the same guilty verdict, having trespassed against the same holy law. And apart from Christ, we will receive the same guilty verdict. Paul's question is not, are you better than your neighbor?

He said, are you righteous before a holy God? That's the question. And you can't answer that question by pointing to someone else who you believe is worse than you. Let me give you an example. If you failed to pay your car payment and men with guns come to take your car, you can't say, well, I paid my light bill.

Who cares? Well, think about my neighbor. My neighbor didn't pay his car payment twice as long as I didn't. Okay? As your car rolls down the street behind a tow truck, apply that to God's law. If you could only obey perfectly today and tomorrow, obey perfectly, never once falling in sin ever again, you would only be doing what tomorrow requires.

You could not erase yesterday's sin on that day or the day before it. James 2 .10 says that if we broke God's law at even one point, even once, we've been made a transgressor of the entire law. As John says, if we say that we have no sin, we're a liar and the truth of God is not in us.

The clear and obvious point is that we all deserve to die. We said a couple of weeks ago that there is no small sin because there is no small God with which to sin against. So an infinite or sin against an infinite God creates infinite consequences, even if we only done it once.

And that's not our story, is it? Yeah, we should repent. Yeah, we ought to seek forgiveness. Yeah, we ought to make restitution, but those actions do not cover over the evil that we have perpetrated. Our repentance cannot purify us of our sins, redeem us from our sins or cover over our sins, which is why the moralist actually has no defense before a holy God.

And it's also why the troubled sinner must stop trying to invent one. Jane stood guilty at guild hall and pled guilty because she knew of her condemned state. Now, whatever we say about the politics of her trial, her plea is an example that we ought to follow of having a humble and lonely station before God.

If she could plead guilty before the court of Mary, think about how much more guilty we have actually been before the court of God. No record can survive his examination. No obedience we have that we could ever bargain with.

We are dead to rights. And that's the first answer that Paul gives us, that the verdict against us is sure. We are guilty, all of us, every one of us in every way. And unless God provides the means of escape, there is no hope.

God Justifies the Guilty Through Christ

But God has not left this matter to merely that. He has provided us an answer. How do we who are wicked, how do we who are sinners, how do we who have no hope in and of ourself come back into relationship with his holy God?

God has not left that answer silent. And it is beautiful and it is astounding. Verse 21 says, "'But now the righteousness of God "'apart from the law is revealed.'". But now, I love that. Last week it was but God, this week it's but now.

After the indictment, after all of us sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God, after all of our mouths have been stopped and all of us are nothing more than liars at our core. After all of that, he says, but now.

You were unrighteous, but now. You were condemned, but now. You could not clean up your own record, but now. You couldn't produce the righteousness that God requires, but now. You couldn't get rid of your shame.

You couldn't get rid of your guilt. You couldn't get rid of your misery. You couldn't clean up your past. You couldn't redefine your future. You couldn't do any of that, but now. But now God has revealed the way and he's provided you with a way so that you who have no righteousness in you may have perfect righteousness credited to you so that when God judges you, he's not judging your record, he's judging another record.

Those words mark the great turn in Paul's argument. All have sinned, Jew and Gentile, but God has announced the arrival of a promise that has been working itself out since Eden in a world of sin and misery, in a world where there is nothing but unrighteousness.

Real righteousness has landed upon the shores of this planet in the person of Jesus Christ. The law has exposed our total guiltiness, but now at just the right time, Christ has come. Although we were dead in our trespasses, the righteous one has come.

And I want you to notice this is not a righteousness that comes from God lowering his standards so that we could meet the bar. This is not a righteousness that comes from us obeying the law. This is not a righteousness of us trying to clean ourself up again.

I don't know how many times that I've tried to do that in my life where I'm like, I know I'm a sinner, so I'm gonna clean myself up again. What? Not only am I incapable of that, I don't even know how terrible my sin is, and I don't even know how wicked I am.

So it can't be because of me. It can't be because of you. It must be because of something external to us, and that is Christ. Verse 24 says, we being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Paul says that even though we had no righteousness of our own, even though we had nothing to offer this just and holy God, and while not overlooking his justice, he's provided a way for unjust people to be justified in him.

Justification, great word of the Reformation. It's a courtroom term. Justification means a declaration. It means that God has made a judicial declaration that the unrighteous believer can be counted as if he were righteous on the basis of Jesus's righteousness, not on ours.

He's not announcing that our sinful history is somehow moot and imaginary. He's not saying that he's gonna overlook our sin. There's no judge who overlooks sin and is a righteous judge. He takes the one who had no fault, who did not deserve the wrath of God, and he gives us his status.

And he takes the one who had no merit, no favor, deserving nothing but wrath, and he gave that to Jesus as his status. The wrath he underwent for us was undeserved. The grace that we've been given in him was also undeserved.

God did not search your record, dear one, until he found something that was good. He justified freely on the only one, on the basis of the only one who was ever good. Freely means that he did it joyfully.

It doesn't mean that he did it without cost. It cost the blood of his only son. The freedom that we've been given took his life in order to secure it. Now, verse 25 takes us even deeper. God set forth Christ as a propitiation, which is another great theological term.

Christ's Propitiation Satisfies God's Justice

It's a word that we actually really need to understand because if we wanna see the beauty of what God has done, we need to understand both justification and propitiation. Propitiation means the satisfying of God.