December 17, the greatest salvation imaginable.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house

of Israel and the house of Judah. Jeremiah 31, 31, God is just and holy and separated from sinners

like us. This is our main problem at Christmas and every other season. How shall we get right

with a just and holy God? Nevertheless, God is merciful and has promised in Jeremiah 31,

500 years before Christ that someday he would do something new. He would replace shadows with

the reality of the Messiah, and he would powerfully move into our lives and write his will on our

hearts so that we are not constrained from outside but are willing from inside to love him and

trust him and follow him. That would be the greatest salvation imaginable. If God should offer us

the greatest reality in the universe to enjoy and then move in us to know that reality in such a

way that we could enjoy it with the greatest freedom and the greatest pleasure possible,

that would be a Christmas gift worth singing about. That is, in fact, what he promised in the new

covenant, but there was a huge obstacle, our sin, our separation from God because of our unrighteousness.

How shall a holy and just God treat us sinners with so much kindness as to give us the greatest

reality in the universe, his Son, to enjoy with the greatest possible joy? The answer is that God put

our sins on his Son and judge them there so that he could put them out of his mind and deal with

us mercifully and remain just and holy at the same time. Hebrews 9.28 says,

Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many.

Christ bore our sins in his own body when he died first Peter 2.24. He took our judgment, Romans

8.3. He cancelled our guilt, Romans 8.1. And that means our sins are gone, Acts 10.43. They do not

remain in God's mind as a basis for condemnation. In that sense, he forgets them, Jeremiah 31.34.

They are consumed in the death of Christ, which means that God is now free in his justice,

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