Ungodly

This week Jesus received two people who brought Him nothing. Jairus’s daughter was dead, and the dead can’t do anything. The man in the synagogue never even asked; the unclean spirit did all the talking. Today Paul tells us why God receives people like that.

“Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.” (Romans 4:4–5)

I spent most of my working life keeping books. In a ledger, a paycheck is never a gift. The employer owes it. A man works his forty hours, his wages go in the column marked “owed,” and nobody thanks the boss for his generosity.

Paul says grace never goes in that column. His word for debt is opheilēma, something owed. It shows up only twice in the New Testament. The other place is the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our debts” (Matthew 6:12). Before God, the only thing we have ever earned is a debt we can’t pay.

So Paul writes about “him who does not work.” He isn’t praising laziness. He means the person who stops trying to put anything in the column and simply believes.

Then look at who he believes in: “Him who justifies the ungodly.” The law said, “I will not justify the wicked” (Exodus 23:7). A judge who declared a guilty man innocent was corrupt. Paul says God does it anyway, and the word he picks, asebēs, describes someone with no reverence for God at all.

God can do it without bending His own law because of what we read last Friday. He is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). Christ paid the debt in full.

A dead girl can’t earn anything. Neither can a man held by an unclean spirit, and neither can you or I. Grace has never needed us to.

Are you still trying to earn what God only gives away?

On Monday: The man among the tombs.