Sep. 21, 2025

Your Sins are Forgiven! (BTS 21 Sep 25)

Introduction - This lesson is a small part of a larger theme, that of loving God, which I will be exploring in the months ahead.  I personally feel that the laws of God and the effects of sin upon the human race is the least understood of the complex body of knowledge of God we call systematic theology.  In that grouping of subjects it is called hamartiology, from the Greek word hamartia, meaning to “miss the mark.”  Today, we want to establish one simple point, which actually takes us a full lifetime to appreciate: Our sins are forgiven!

Ephesians 2:1-10 And you were dead in your offenses and sins, 2in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. 3Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest. 4But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the ages to come He might show the boundless riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.  NASB

These verses, written to the church at Ephesus, refer to a church of Gentile believers.  Paul refers to their state and contrasts it to that of Jewish believers, who were God’s chosen people, who simply needed to respond to the plan of God in Christ to start living in a better relationship with Him.  The gentile Ephesians, by contrast, before they were guided by the mercy of God to meet a handful of 12 Christians, were not part of God’s chosen people, (the Israelites).  They were without hope and would have been headed for destruction, like the ignorant and blind people in Noah’s flood.  When they became believers, which happens to us today in Verse 5 above, their record of sin was expunged from the record in the “books’ and a new entry in the “book of life” was made in their name.  

Let’s think about what life was like for the Jew under the Old Testament:  The Law of Moses was the first organized body of statutes to give man an idea what God expected in human conduct.  Prior to that, man was guided by Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, and Promises to Abraham. In each period, man’s sin nature always shone through, and man was shown to be a failure.  Were it not for God mercifully crediting the value of the future sacrifice of Jesus to believers before it happened, there would have been no names in the book of life before Jesus death, burial, and resurrection.  So, in what is called the fifth dispensation, the Jew now had to conform to 613 new statutes detailed in the Law of Moses.  

No one ever kept all these laws.  To fail in even one of them meant that you failed the whole system.  There were no grades given for 70% or 90% completion.  One transgression of even the slightest law made you a transgressor.  The Jew then had to offer sacrifices, some of which were financially costly, to hopefully make up for the transgression. He never really knew how well he had done.  Was God happy with him? From an eternal perspective, God would always take the person to heaven who simply had faith in Him in any age.  That same thing is true today, because of the “imputing” or crediting of the payment of Jesus’ sacrifice to the account of anyone who has faith in God.  But the Jew’s daily life was affected by how well he kept the Law of Moses: would his crops and animals grow, would he remain healthy, etc.? He lived with the nagging feeling that he had never done enough to have a good life. He was constantly working on keeping God from being angry with him.  

Conclusion - In Jesus, the weaknesses of the Law of Moses have been forever done away with, not only for the Jew, but for all of us Gentiles, making us all God’s people.  Jesus perfectly paid our accounts, clearing them of the debts our sin had created.  Our sins have been totally and perfectly forgiven and removed by the work of Jesus!  As a blessing, we now just have to dedicate ourselves to the “good works” spoken of in verse 10.  We don’t have to work on keeping God from being angry with us, but can concentrate on developing the rich and deep relationships He has in store as we share in the building of His Kingdom!