Jesus prayed to His Father,

“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3 NIV84).

Do we know the Father? Do we really believe that Jesus and the Father are one and that if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father? (John 14:7,9). Do we have faith and trust in the Father, or do we have faith in the misguided mechanics, the mechanisms, the legal loopholes we have invented to protect us from Him?

Do we believe that our salvation is determined by a judicial decision by the heavenly judge? And do we believe that decision is based on made-up rules and legal claims — such as, there is a judgment in heaven and there are legal record books of all the sins you have committed, and that when your name is presented in the judgment, God opens the book and examines it to see if:

1. A legal stamp of acceptance of the legal pardon of Jesus has been applied to your account;
2. Every sin ever committed has been confessed and the legal pardon has been placed against those sins;
3. And then God turns away from your life record and turns to Jesus’ life record and declares, “Even though this person is wicked, sinful, and unrighteous, I declare, because he has claimed Jesus as his legal substitute, and because Jesus paid his legal penalty, that this unrighteous person is now considered by me to be legally righteous. I do not see the truth of who he is, and the rest of you are not allowed to see the truth either; my legal ruling declares that I, and therefore all who are loyal to me, will see him as righteous even though we all know he is not”?

Does this sound right to you?

This is what penal-substitution theology teaches, and it is a fraud built on the lie that God’s law functions like human law—made-up rules that require externally inflicted punishments. It mischaracterizes God as the source of death. It makes Him out to be dishonest. It obstructs true healing and transformation of people. It keeps people afraid of God and teaches them to believe that they need someone or something between them and God to protect them from what God would do to them if He could actually see them in the judgment. It denies the entire testimony of Jesus and the Bible that God is for us (Romans 8:31), that He loved us so much that He sent His Son to save us from sin (John 1:29: 3:16), and that He is the God of truth and reality, not legal fiction.

So, do we believe the human penal/legal lie, or do we worship God as Creator and recognize His laws are not imposed rules, but that they are design protocols built into reality and, therefore, believe the truth that God’s judgments are always the judgments of reality, of what is actually true, that God never lies, never pretends, never creates legal fictions?

When God sees the perfect righteousness of Christ in the sinner’s “account,” when He examines all of His saved and sees they are “perfect,” it is because the perfect righteousness of Christ is actually, in reality, in truth, living within them!

• This is why Paul wrote, “It is no longer I that live but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20 NIV84).
• This is why Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again with a new spirit, a new life, the life of Christ (John 3:5).
• This is why Peter wrote we are to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).
• This is why the new covenant law is written in our hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10).
• This is why Paul said God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7).
• This is why the symbol of conversion is baptism; we actually die to the old life of fear and selfishness and rise with the new life of love and trust that Jesus restored into humanity.
• This is why Paul said, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV84).

This is reality—we are actually, in truth, transformed, receive a new life, the sinless life of Christ, the new animating energy of love and trust, that life perfuses us, and as we choose to align every day with and live out His desires, motives, truths, we are transformed and healed (John 15:5).

God Declares the Reality

This is why the book Christ’s Object Lessons says the following about why the Father sees the perfect righteousness of His Son when He examines us in the judgment; it is presented in the metaphor of the robe of Christ’s righteousness (my comments are in red):

This robe, woven in the loom of heaven, has in it not one thread of human devising. Christ in His humanity wrought out a perfect character, and this character He offers to impart to us. “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” Isaiah 64:6. Everything that we of ourselves can do is defiled by sin. [Because everything we do of ourselves is motivated, driven, animated, by the spirit of fear and selfishness we inherited from Adam. And Paul wrote in Romans 14:23 that whatever is not of faith, not motivated by a spirit of love and trust, is sin, because sin is a breach of trust; it is seeking for self, motivated by distrust.] But the Son of God “was manifested to take away our sins… [Not take away God’s punishment for sin, or take away the historical record of sin, but to take away our sin, our sinful, fear-ridden, self-centered spirit that corrupts us and replace it with a new spirit, the spirit of love and trust that animates us and motivates us to love and loyalty to God.] By His perfect obedience He has made it possible for every human being to obey God’s commandments. When we submit ourselves to Christ, [This is the part God cannot do for us. We must choose to surrender, to submit ourselves, our lives, to Christ, not submit our legal history of sins to Christ for Him to pay the legal debt. We must submit our lives to Christ! The penal/legal model obstructs this. Understand this clearly, the penal/legal model teaches people to submit their sins to God, their crimes to Jesus, so that Jesus can take on the legal responsibility to pay for their crimes and erase those crimes from the legal registry. They are not actually submitting their old life of fear and selfishness; they are operating under the lie of Satan that God’s law functions like human law, and this leads to seeking to protect themselves from legal consequence and, therefore, they claim that an innocent party pays for their crimes. In truth, when we submit ourselves to Christ, we surrender our lives and say to God, “I place my life in Your hands. See the wicked way in me, create in me a new heart and right spirit, purge from me everything that is out of harmony with You. Make me, not an accounting book, righteous!”] the heart is united with His heart, the will is merged in His will, the mind becomes one with His mind, the thoughts are brought into captivity to Him; we live His life. This is what it means to be clothed with the garment of His righteousness. Then as the Lord looks upon us He sees, not the fig-leaf garment, not the nakedness and deformity of sin, but His own robe of righteousness, which is perfect obedience to the law of Jehovah (p. 311).

The reason that, when the Father examines us in the judgment, He sees the perfect righteousness of His Son is because, as the Bible teaches, it is no longer our old fear-driven spirit that animates us but, rather, the sinless life of Christ that lives in us! As Paul wrote,

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20 NIV84).

And,

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV84).

This is reality—we become righteous through faith, through trust, because we receive a new life—the life of Christ! This is also described in the book The Desire of Ages regarding what Jesus told Nicodemus:

Nicodemus had come to the Lord thinking to enter into a discussion with Him, but Jesus laid bare the foundation principles of truth. He said to Nicodemus, It is not theoretical knowledge you need so much as spiritual regeneration. You need not to have your curiosity satisfied, but to have a new heart. You must receive a new life from above before you can appreciate heavenly things. Until this change takes place, making all things new, it will result in no saving good for you to discuss with Me My authority or My mission (p. 171, emphasis mine).

This is what Revelation 12:11 describes as the reality of the saved when Jesus returns:

They overcame him [the devil] by the blood of the Lamb [The blood symbolically represents the sinless life of Jesus (Leviticus 17:11). These individuals have been reborn to receive the new life, the Spirit of Christ, so that it is no longer their old selfish spirit motivating them but, instead, the life of Christ.] and by the word of their testimony; [Their lives and testimony now give the same testimony that Jesus gave, that Jesus and the Father are one. These individuals are Creator-worshipers! They have rejected the lie that God’s law functions like human law. They don’t teach that God needs a human sacrifice offered to Him to pay Him off and prevent Him from killing people. They teach that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son (John 3:16), that God reconciled the world to Himself through Christ (Romans 5:10). They give the testimony of Jesus that when we see Jesus, we see the Father, and they have partaken of Jesus’ life, who lives in them, and therefore:] they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

These are the righteous; these are the ones who are like Jesus, for they have His actual life reproduced in them, and they are—in reality, not legal fiction—righteous. And that is why God sees them as righteous—because they are!

We can be faithful to Jesus only if we have been reborn with His Spirit. We can be faithful to Jesus only if we tell the truth about Him and His Father.

Satan’s Arbitrary Claims

Satan is the legalist. Satan is the originator of the lie that God makes up rules and uses His power to punish rule-breakers. Understand that Satan’s methods are the methods of edicts, claims, proclamations, the authority of office to assert one’s legal right in order to rule over others for the exploitation of them for the benefit of the ruler; in other words, it is law because the one in charge said so.

We see this in the Bible’s description of his fall:

How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:12–14 NIV84, emphasis mine).

Notice the method: It is one of assertion, of proclamation, of arbitrary declaration, rule-making, the authority of office, of artificially created distinction. This is the system of imposed law, made-up rules; it is the way Satan’s kingdom and all the kingdoms of this world operate and why Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36 NIV84).

But notice the clear distinction in Jesus:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5–8 NIV84, emphasis mine).

Jesus didn’t claim a position. He didn’t assert a position. He didn’t use rules to take a position. His position is one of reality! He is God in very nature. This is design law, reality. It is what it is. And Jesus didn’t think that equality with God was something to cling to, but instead, He voluntarily surrendered that equality and took upon Himself our actual nature. He didn’t declare, claim, or proclaim something; He actually became human. He didn’t declare humanity was righteous with God—He actually, in reality, purified humanity, purged the infection of fear and selfishness, and replaced it with His perfect righteousness. He made the species, in reality, the humanity He took upon Himself, right with God again!

And we can partake of that reality. We can partake of the righteousness of Christ here, now, this very moment! We can be reborn with a new life, a new animating energy, the life of Christ, so that when the Father looks at us, He sees goodness, health, purity, the righteousness of Jesus because Jesus actually lives in us! We are partaking of the divine nature through trust and surrender to Him.

But Satan aggressively works to obstruct this truth, this reality, by his lie that God’s law functions like human law and that God only legally declares people to be righteous, while they remain unrighteous in reality.

The entire penal/legal substitutionary system of atonement is a satanic lie built upon the lie that God’s law functions like human law, and it interferes with the plan of salvation and the cleansing work Jesus is doing in heaven today.

God has a special message to go throughout the world at this very time in human history. It is the message of Revelation 14:6–12, the call for people to give the eternal gospel— the good news that is eternally true. This is the good news about God, that He is not like Satan has alleged! He is not the source of pain and death. The message calls for people to return to worshiping Him as Creator, the one who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountains of water. It calls for people to make a right judgment about God, to stop viewing Him as an imperial dictator whose laws function like human law, and, thereby, leave the corrupt system of Babylon, the system of imperial dictators with made-up rules and imposed punishments.

If you would like to learn more about this special message, read our magazine The Final Message of Mercy to the World: The Three Angels. You can read it online or order it from our online store, comeandreason.shop at no cost to U.S. postal address. (This resource is available in South Africa; request it at southafrica@comeandreason.com; and in Australia at: australia@comeandreason.com).