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But salvation is not only deliverance from death to life but also from sin to righteousness. God not only acted in Jesus Christ to reconcile us to Himself, that is, to deliver us from death to life, but also to redeem us from sin.

“¹⁸Knowing that you were redeemed from your empty way of life handed down from your forefathers, not with perishable things, like silver or gold, ¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless.”
(I Pet. 1:18-19 ERS;  see also Heb. 9:14-15).

The redemption that is in Christ (Rom. 3:24) is the deliverance from sin by the payment of a price, a ransom, which is the blood of Christ, that is, His sacrificial death. The price is not the payment of a penalty but is the means by which the redemption from sin is accomplished. It is the death of Christ (“his blood”) that sets free from the slavery of sin.

“In Whom [in Christ] we have our redemption through His blood, the deliverance from our offenses, according to the riches of His grace.”     (Eph. 1:7 ERS; see also Col. 1:14)

According to the English translations of Eph. 1:7 and Col. 1:14, redemption is equivalent to forgiveness of sins. But the basic meaning of the Greek word here in these verses which are translated “to forgive” is “to send off or away.” Hence to redeem from sins is to send them away. That is, redemption is the deliverance from sins. This was accomplished by the death of Christ, “through His blood.” He sent away sins by bearing them in His body on the cross.

“who Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, might live to righteousness; by His wounds you were healed.”     (I Pet. 2:24 ERS; see Isa. 53:5, 11-12)

He bore our sins to carry and take them away. Jesus “was manifested in order to take away sins” (I John 3:5). He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). This was to accomplish our redemption, our salvation from sin to righteousness.

Salvation is not just forgiveness. It is more than forgiveness of sins; it also deliverance from death; it is the resurrection of the dead. Forgiveness of sins is not enough; man needs to be made alive to God because he is spiritually dead. And he is dead, not because of his own sins, but the sin of another, Adam. So the forgiveness of a man’s sins does not take away spiritual death because the spiritual death was not caused by that man’s sins. Thus forgiveness of sins does not remove spiritual death. But the removing of spiritual death does remove sins. Salvation as resurrection from the dead is also salvation from sin and thus is also the forgiveness of sins. Thus to be made alive to God means that sins are forgiven, sent away.

And this salvation from sin to righteousness is because it is salvation from death to life. All men have sinned because they are spiritually dead. This is what the Apostle Paul says in the last clause of Romans 5:12, which clause is incorrectly translated in our English translations as “because all sin”. In the Greek, there is a relative pronoun which has not been translated. If it were translated, the whole clause in English would read, “because of which all sinned.” In the Greek, it is clear that the antecedent of the relative pronoun “which” is the word “death” in the preceding clause. (The antecedent of a relative pronoun is the word to which the pronoun refers.) The last clause would then be equivalent to “because of death all sinned” and would mean that all men sinned because of death.

“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death passed unto all men, because of which all sinned:–”     (Rom. 5:12 ERS)

But how is this possible? How can men sin because of death? Let me explain how this is possible by referring to another passage in the writings of the Apostle Paul, Galatians 4:8. In this passage, Paul is reminding the Galatian Christians of their condition before they became Christians.

“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods.”

Not to “know God” personally as a living reality is to be spiritually dead. And a man is “in bondage to beings that are no gods” when he chooses them as his gods. He is in bondage to them because he does not personally know the only true God, that is, because he is spiritually dead.

Let me put it another way. Every man must have a god. Man, by the very structure of his freedom, must choose something to be the ultimate criterion of all his decisions. This is because every choice a man makes is made with reference to some criterion. That is, behind every decision as to what a man will do or think there is a reason, a criterion of decision. And the ultimate reason for any decision — practical or theoretical — must be given in terms of some particular criterion, an ultimate reference or orientation point in or beyond the self or person making the decision. This ultimate criterion is that person’s god. In this sense, every man must have a god. Every man, if he hasn’t already, must choose something as his god. Now if he doesn’t know the true God personally as a living reality, that is, if he is spiritually dead, and since he must have a god, he will choose a false god. He will choose some part or aspect of reality as his god, deifying it.

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator”     (Rom. 1:25).

The choice of a false god and consequent personal allegiance and devotion to it is what the Bible calls idolatry. An idol does not have to be an image of wood, stone or metal. It may be money, wealth, power, pleasure, education, the family, the state, democracy, reason, experience, science, the moral law, etc. It may be anything that is good in its proper place, but has been exalted into the place of God, the utlimate Good. An idol is a false god, and a false god may be anything that takes the place of the true God; anything a man chooses as his ultimate criterion of decision, exalting it as God in the place of the true God. It is any substitute or replacement for the true God in a man’s life. Since a false god usurps the place of the true God in a man’s life, idolatry is the basic sin. This sin is directly against God; it is a direct insult to the true God and an affront to His divine majesty. No more serious sin could be imagined than this one. Since it is the most serious sin, it is therefore the most basic. This is the main reason that idolatry is the first sin prohibited by the Ten Commandments.

“Thou shalt have no other gods besides me”    (Exodus 20:3).

Idolatry is also the basic sin because this sin leads to other sins. It leads to other sins since a person’s god, being his ultimate criterion of decision, ultimately controls the direction and character of a man’s decisions. The wrong choice of a false god will lead to other wrong choices; the basic sin produces other sins. That is, the idol that a man sets up in his heart (Ezek. 14:3-5) will affect the character and quality of his whole life. In other words, if in his heart a man clings to a false god, his actions and speech will show it. In this way also, idolatry is the basic sin.

Now we can understand how death leads to sin. If a man is spiritually dead, separated from God, and since he must choose a god, he will usually choose a false god. If a man does not know the true God, the true God will not be a living reality to him. And lacking this personal knowledge of the true God as a living reality, man does not have the adequate reason for choosing the true God as his ultimate criterion of decision. God Himself is the only adequate reason for choosing Him. He cannot be chosen for any other reason than Himself. For then He would not be God but rather that reason for which He is chosen would be god. Only a living encounter with the true and living God can produce the situation in which God Himself may be chosen. If God Himself is the only adequate condition for the choice of Himself, then apart from a personal revelation of God Himself, man will usually choose as his god that which seems like god to him from among the creation around him or from the creations of his own hands or mind. Man does not necessarily have to sin, but he usually will. Spiritual death is not the necessary cause but the basis or condition for his choice of a false god. (The Greek word translated “because” in the last clause of Romans 5:12 means “on the basis of” or “on the condition of”.)

Man is not responsible for becoming spiritually dead because he did not choose this state. He inherited spiritual death from Adam just as he inherited physical death. But he is responsible for the god he chooses. The true God has not left man without a knowledge about himself (Rom. 1:19-20). This knowledge about God leaves man without excuse for his idolatry. But it does not save him because it is knowledge about the true God and not a personal knowledge of the true God. But even though a man is not responsible for becoming spiritually dead, he is responsible for remaining in the state of spiritual death when deliverance is offered to him in the person of Jesus Christ. If he refuses the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus, he must reap the harvest and receive the wages of his decision, eternal death.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”    ( Rom. 6:23).

If a man refuses the gift of spiritual and eternal life in Christ Jesus and continues to put his trust in a false god, remaining in spiritual death, then after he dies physically, at the last judgment he will receive the result of his decision, eternal death, separation from God for eternity.

Now we can understand why man needs to be saved. As we have seen, man is not responsible for the spiritual death nor for the physical death that he has received from Adam; they are not the result of a man’s own personal sins. On the contrary, a man’s personal sins are a result of spiritual death. That is why he needs to be saved. Man is dead spiritually and dying physically. He needs life; he needs to be made alive — he needs to be raised from the dead. And if he receives life, if he is made alive to God, death which leads to sin will be removed. And if he receives life which leads to righteousness, man can be saved from sin to righteousness. Thus salvation must be understood to be primarily from death to life and secondarily from sin to righteousness.

Now this salvation (primarily from death to life and secondarily from sin to righteousness) is exactly what God accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His Son. Jesus entered into our spiritual death in order that as He was raised from the dead, we might be made alive with and in Him ( Eph. 2:5). And by saving us from spiritual death, Christ saves us from sin. It is by taking away the spiritual death which leads to our sin that God takes away our sin. Jesus died for our sins — literally — to take them away (John 1:29). What the Old Testament sacrifices could not do (Heb. 10:1-4), the death of Christ has done. The blood of Jesus (His death) cleanses us from our sins (I John 1:7). We are delivered from sin itself, not just from its consequences. We were saved from our trust in false gods when we put our trust in Jesus Christ and the true God who sent him. Did we not “turn from idols to serve the living and true God” (I Thess. 1:9)? When we were spiritually dead we trusted in and served those things that were not God — money, power, sex, education, popularity, pleasure, etc. But when we turned to the risen Christ, we entered into life, leaving behind those false gods. The risen Jesus Christ is now our Lord and our God (John 20:28).

The death and resurrection of Jesus was the means by which God removed death — the barrier to knowing the true God personally and knowing His love. Now God can reveal Himself to us in the preaching of the gospel, making us spiritually alive to Himself when we receive Jesus Christ who is life ( John 14:6; I John 5:12). To be spiritually alive is to know God, and to know God personally is to trust Him. For “God is love” ( I John 4:8, 16) and love begets trust. The trust in God that God’s love invokes in us is righteousness (Rom. 4:5, 22); it relates us rightly to God. Just as trust in a false god is sin, so trust in the true God is righteousness.

“³For what does the scripture say?  ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’  ⁴Now to one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due.  ⁵And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness …. ¹³The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith ….  ²²That is why his [Abraham’s] faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.'”      (Rom. 4:3-5, 13, 22)

Righteousness is not a quality that we possess, neither merit that we have earned or have imputed to our account, but it is a right relationship to God; faith in the true God relates us rightly to Him. And just as sin flows from death, so righteousness flows from life.

“Is the law then against the promise of God?  Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive,
then righteousness would indeed be by the law.”     (Gal. 3:21)

Thus by taking away death, God takes away sin. By making us alive to Himself, God sets us right with Himself through faith. Life produces righteousness just as death produced sin.

This redemption from sin was accomplished by the death of Jesus Christ because His death is also the means by which we were delivered from death, the cause of sin. Since spiritual death leads to sin ( Rom. 5:12d ERS), sin reigns within the sphere of death’s reign (Rom. 5:21). And since Christ’s death is the end of the reign of death for those who died with Christ, it is also the end of the reign of sin over them. They are no longer slaves of sin, serving false gods. Sin is a slave master (Rom. 6:16-18) and this slave master is the false god in which the sinner trusts. We were all slaves of sin once, serving our false gods when we were spiritually dead, alienated and separated from the true God, not knowing Him personally. But we were set free from this slavery to sin through the death of Christ. For when Christ died for us, He died to sin (Rom. 6:10a) as a slave master. Sin no longer has dominion or lordship over Him. For he who has died is freed from sin (Rom. 6:7). That is, when a slaves dies, he is no longer in slavery, death frees him from slavery. Since Christ died for all, then all have died (II Cor. 5:14). His death is our death. Since we have died with Him and He has died to sin, then we have died to sin. We are freed from the slavery of sin and are no longer enslaved to it (Rom. 6:6-7). But now Christ is alive, having been raised from the dead, and we are alive to God in Him. His resurrection is our resurrection. “But the life He lives He lives to God” (Rom. 6:10b). This is the life of righteousness. And so we who are now alive to God in Him are to live to righteousness. For just as death leads to sin, so life leads to righteousness.

“And He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, that we, being dead to sins, might live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.”      (I Pet. 2:24 ERS)

Having been redeemed from the slavery of sin through the death of Christ, we who are now alive in Him have become slaves of righteousness (Rom. 6:17-18). Redemption is salvation from sin to righteousness.