How can God justify the ungodly? That would seem to be impossible. The point about sin is that it is indelible, incurable, indestructible, impossible to ignore. It is something so terrible and so destructive that mankind must abandon all hope of ever being delivered from it. It is so attached to the individual that the holiness of God is against him forever. He can never forget our sin; he can never regard us as being free from it. It is a stain that no process on earth can remove. It is witnessed to by the conscience, and the conscience can never be fully persuaded to change its mind about our guilt. It speaks the sentence of death in our hearts, and will not be silent. The strength of this verdict is the law of God, and the fact that God’s hatred for sin can never alter is what gives power to the law. How impossible a task man has set himself, if he thinks he is going to remove his own guilt! And yet God calls those who were once sinners, ‘the righteous’, and if he uses a name, that name is never misapplied. He will make us to be what he calls us; it is a word of creation. God has done the impossible, for with God nothing is impossible. This is our confidence and the source of our wonder and praise. We are now the righteous, by justification, and we will be the righteous in the future by sanctification, and not even Satan can find fault with us. He who has the greatest possible motive for denying our righteousness will be unable to say a word. If he could find the smallest fault in us, it might leave undecided the outcome of the battle of the ages between himself and God, and he would surely not hold back his accusation. But the holiness of God is even more searching than this, and if God himself is for us, who can be against us? That God should be for us is the greatest possible cause of wonder. Has God turned against himself, that he should deny his own attributes and no longer hate sin? No, the way of salvation involves what is inconceivable. God has offered up his only begotten Son on our behalf. He has suffered our eternal punishment. He has made an atonement for sin. Therefore, ‘shall the righteous shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’ They will own God as their Father and he will own them as his children, and their adoption will be incontestable. All doubt that they should be there will have been removed from their minds; they have embraced the grace of God in Christ. They are rightly there in their Father’s kingdom, and they feel no hesitation in claiming their right to be there, for they are within the covenant of grace.
‘He who has an ear, let him hear.’ Some do not have ears to hear. They have ears, and they hear a sound of words, but the heart is hardened, and the ear of the soul is deaf. The truth cannot reach the place that it needs to reach. There is no understanding of the urgency or the vital importance of what Christ says. There is no willingness to act on his words. They are not seen as the gateway to life for each individual soul, and so the person turns away to what they think are more important things. But our ears are precious, and Christ’s words that come in through them are able to give us eternal life. If we hear it is because we have been given an ear, an interest in the gospel, a sense of its eternal significance. If we have that kind of ear, we should strain to hear every word, and we do not hear properly unless we are ready to act on what we hear.