Soteriology Lesson 2 - Introduction

<p>     Those who have trusted Christ as Savior are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:24).</p> <p>     It’s important to understand that Christ died for only one kind of person: the lost sinner who stands condemned before a holy and righteous God. If we don’t see ourselves from the divine perspective, as lost and in need of a Savior, then Christ and His work on the cross will be rejected. The cross is God’s righteous solution to the problem of sin, as well as His greatest display of love toward sinners. At the cross, God judged our sin as His righteousness required, and pardons the sinner as His love desires. To understand the cross of Christ is to understand the heart of God toward a fallen world He wants to save.</p> <p>     We don’t earn or deserve God’s kindness in any way, for the record of Scripture is that we are helpless, ungodly, sinners, and enemies of God (Rom 5:6-10) who were reconciled to Him “through the death of His Son” (Rom 5:10). Salvation is never what we do for God; rather, it’s what He’s done for us through the death of His Son, who paid the full penalty for all our sins on the cross at Calvary. Salvation is a work of God alone. We bring nothing of worth to God. Nothing at all. Our contribution to salvation is sin and death, both of which Christ bore on the cross. Jesus freely took our sins upon Himself on the cross, and paid the penalty for our sins and died the death we deserve. That’s love. That’s grace. If we got what we deserved in this life, we would all be dead and forever condemned in the lake of fire. Salvation is based entirely on the merit of Christ, not on anything we do. It is the work of Christ and nothing else. Robert B. Thieme Jr. states:</p> <ul><li>"Every human being needs to be saved, because everyone enters this world in a state of spiritual death, total depravity, and total separation from God. Because man is born hopelessly lost from God and helpless to do anything about it, God, in His grace, designed a perfect pla