Follow Jesus Christ

Imagine for a minute a person who has made a serious mistake at work. Because of his decision the company lost money. He knows he’s at fault, he’s afraid of being fired, he can’t sleep at night, and he replays what happened over and over. Two courts are working inside him at once. The first is external: what will management say, what will they decide, will he keep his job? The second is internal: “I ruined everything,” “I’m worse than others now,” “I no longer deserve anyone’s trust.” These two courts often operate together, but they work differently. One concerns status. The other concerns the person’s very identity.

The language the Apostle Paul uses about justification most often pertains to that first dimension. He employs the imagery of a heavenly court, accusations, righteousness, justification, reconciliation. It’s the language of a person’s standing before God. A person stands accused, and he needs to hear that the final verdict has been lifted. This was especially important in the ancient world. People lived in a culture of debt, sacrifice, payment, guilt and recompense. They asked: what must we bring to God, how do we pay Him, how do we obtain forgiveness? Paul answers that question. He tells people of that age: justification is possible, and it is given not as a reward for merit but as a gift, through faith in Jesus Christ and the sacrifice on Golgotha.

That was a gigantic, transformative idea for its time, affecting millions. It destroyed the notion that God must be bought off, appeased, or earned by endless human effort. Where people searched for the price of forgiveness, Paul speaks of grace. Where people feared the verdict, Paul speaks of justification. His formula addresses a consciousness that thinks in terms of law, guilt, and release from sentence. Paul taught that only God could pay for a person’s sins, and that is what He did. From that time on, sacrifices ceased; civilization saw another way to God.

But if you look at Jesus Himself, the picture often looks different. Jesus did not explain forgiveness as a legal mechanism. He showed it in living encounters with living people; He explained forgiveness in another way. For Him the primary focus was not the abstract defendant but the concrete person with his inner condition. Not a system of laws and accusations, but pain, fear, shame, isolation, a broken person. His justification concerns not abstract status but the soul, the mind, the human capacity to go on living.

This is clear in the story of the woman brought before the crowd to be judged. Formally it was a question of breaking the law. Jesus was asked whether it was permissible to stone the woman caught in adultery. But Jesus saw more. Standing before Him was not an article of law or a criminal case, but a person in a state of horror and public destruction. He stopped the mechanism of condemnation and returned a future to the woman. It was justification in practice: not because what had happened became good, but because the person was not reduced to her fall. Moreover, Jesus surely understood the circumstances of that adultery, which had suddenly unfolded during His visit to Jerusalem.

The same is seen in the story of the weeping woman who came to Him in the house of a Pharisee — the one who humbly wiped Jesus’ feet with her hair. She carried not only guilt but years of shame, alienation, and an inward brokenness from a life in prostitution. Jesus does not present her with a complicated formula for salvation. He accepts her, restores her dignity, and speaks words of peace. Here forgiveness works as healing of the person. It removes not only a religious problem but the internal poison of self-condemnation. It is precisely self-condemnation that often does the greatest inward harm to a person.

Return now to the person who made the mistake at work. Imagine two ways of helping him. In the first, they tell him: “The company has decided not to fire you. The matter is closed. You remain an employee.” That is important news. The external verdict is lifted. This is close to Paul’s language: justification as a change of status. In the second, they tell him: “Yes, you erred. But your mistake isn’t the whole truth about you. We’ll sort out what happened, help repair the consequences and teach you how to work moving forward.” Here not only the verdict is lifted but the paralyzing internal shame is eased. This is closer to Jesus’ practice: justification as the restoration of the person.

One does not necessarily cancel the other. A person may need both a lifted verdict and a healed soul. But it’s important to see the difference. If only the legal language is offered, a person may hear that his status has changed and yet continue to live broken inside. If there is only warm acceptance without truth, change won’t happen either. The power of the Gospel vision, the essence of Jesus’ words and actions, is in combining mercy with reality.

Paul gave the ancient person an answer to the question that person knew how to ask. Jesus gave a person an answer to the question he often could not even put into words. Paul said: the sentence is not final. Jesus showed: you are more than your fault. Paul broke the market of religious payment to the gods that the ancient person continually supplied. And Jesus acted as if forgiveness were as free as sunlight — not because it is cheap, but because its source is not for sale. And God’s forgiveness is truly free: the Heavenly Father needs no offerings to forgive and justify a penitent person. Justification and the forgiveness of sins come instantly from above in response to a person’s inner readiness to renounce sin. That was true then, is true now, and will always be true. This is what Jesus meant when He taught that God judges no one but is primarily concerned with the salvation of every person.

When justification is understood only mystically, it easily drifts into abstraction. When it is seen in Jesus’ actions, it becomes clear that it concerns life itself: how a person rises again after a fall, how he stops being a prisoner of the past, how he regains the ability to love, work, build, and hope. Then forgiveness turns out not to be an escape from reality but its deepest means of healing.