Awakened to Guilt, Appreciating God: The Resurrection of Jesus

“It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”

-Romans 4:24a-25

(ESV throughout; emphasis mine)

In Romans 3, Paul claims that no one is righteous (Rom. 3:10).

Everyone has sinned.

Everyone has fallen short.

There is no human being that has lived righteously.

C. S. Lewis has said,

“Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry.”[1]

You may be thinking, "What?! Jesus' words aren't for me?!"

In other words, until we understand our own sinfulness, we will not understand Scripture, the gospel, and the work of Christ. Our emotional response will not be quite right. We won’t understand Easter Sunday. We won’t understand the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. If we don't know that we are sinful, how can we be saved by Jesus?

But . . . when we see and understand our own sinfulness and stop pointing the finger at other people, we are positioned to see and understand the truth of Romans 4.

In Romans 4, Paul says that Jesus died for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. Put differently, Jesus died and took the penalty of your sin, but he was also raised so that you would be declared righteous (i.e., justification).

There are two things to believe here:

(1) I am a guilty sinner who falls short;

(2) Christ was perfect and offered up his life, death, and resurrection so that I can be saved.

Hear Kevin DeYoung:

“[T]he resurrection tells us that God’s justice has been satisfied. Romans 4:25 says that Christ was raised for our justification. Like a convict being released from prison after his sentence has been fulfilled, the resurrection testifies that the penal and prescriptive requirements of the law have been paid for. Jesus lives, and so can we.”[2]

We have to know that we're convicts in prison before we can be released from the prison through Christ.

If Easter doesn’t make sense, that is probably because we don’t see or comprehend our sin against a holy God.

If Christ came to merely be an example, then he wouldn’t have needed to die.

Instead, Christ came to be delivered for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

He came to pay for sins and give us his righteousness. And as we are awakened to our guilt, we can appreciate what God has done in the work of Christ.

Do you believe?

End Notes:

[1] C. S. Lewis, “There Is No One Who Is Righteous,” The C. S. Lewis Bible (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010), 1272.

[2] Kevin DeYoung, Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 206.