Welcome to Things Unseen Today, especially if you're new to the podcast, that we spend

a few minutes each weekday reflecting together on some aspect of the Christian faith that

we hope will be helpful to us.

And this week we've begun to think about some of the big words in the New Testament.

Big words that are used to help us understand what the Lord Jesus has done for us.

Yesterday we were thinking about the word propitiation.

That's a word that belongs to the temple and to the sacrifices that are there, the wrath

of God.

Today I want us to move from the temple to the law court.

Because in Jesus Christ we discover not only the propitiation for our sins, but we also

discover that in Jesus Christ there is justification.

That's a huge and glorious subject far too much to talk about in a few minutes, but let

me underline a couple of things that I think are helpful to us, about being countered

righteous in God's sight, which is what justification means.

The first is this, what the gospel teaches us is this staggering truth that God justifies

those who in themselves are ungodly.

As long as I think of myself as partly godly or more or less godly or just as godly

as the next person, I'm never going to understand the gospel, and actually I'm never going to

be justified either.

Remember the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee when Jesus asked the question,

who went down from the temple justified, the tax collector or the Pharisee?

Every evangelical knows the answer, it's the tax collector who was justified.

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