(Send Me The Bill)

(1 Corinthians 15:49) …And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.

Let me talk to you about an important biblical concept. This is deep stuff, like most of what we have studied in this series, but it is literally at the heart of you understanding your relationship with God. If you come to understand this biblical principle it will give you new reason to praise God every day of your life.

It starts with Genesis in the Old Testament and carries right through the New Testament. The Hebrew word hasab in the Old Testament and the Greek word logizomai in the New Testament both mean exactly the same thing and in English we use all kinds of words to try to pin down the meaning of these two words because we don’t have a single English word that defines them. Yet these two words are used over 100 times in the Bible and describe a biblical concept that is essential to your salvation.

Let me give you an illustration that describes the concept and then we will try to find a word to define it…..

This last week I was in Findlay, Ohio at a board meeting with a number of people from various places in the world and several people from this church were there. I met some of them there originally, and that is how they ended up here. The McKeegans were there…Jim. Laura, and Joy as well as Jerry and Debbie Lovell. We ended up on Monday evening at a restaurant called Cheddar’s and had a wonderful meal. When the waiter was figuring out tabs Jerry Lovell said to the waiter….Put this man meal on my tab. We went through the usual ..no…no you can’t pay for my meal but Jerry won.

Here is exactly what actually happened…I ate the meal…all of it…and it was good! Jerry didn’t get any of my meal. He didn’t ask for a piece of my Creole catfish…I didn’t slip a spoonful of broccoli casserole onto his plate. I wolfed it all down like I really needed it but when the cashier rang up the check my ticket had nothing on it like I didn’t even eat a meal and Jerry’s ticket had three meals on it like he had made a pig of himself.

My meal was paid for on Jerry’s tab as if it were his own.

This idea of putting something on another person’s account as if it were theirs floods the pages of Scripture. When the King James version of the Bible was translated 400 years ago they had a word for this that we don’t use any more…

They called it imputing; verb: to impute…

When was the last time you used the word impute in a sentence? Jerry imputed my meal to his tab.

He took what was mine on himself as if it were his own!

Now. I know your mind is starting to churn and you are seeing how this fits into what Jesus did for you on the cross, and that point is critically important, but the concept is even bigger then that.

There is a whole book in the New Testament devoted to this concept. Paul has a friend named Philemon who has a slave named Onesimus. Onesimus runs away from his owner and somehow ends up with Paul who is in prison in Rome. Onesimus becomes a believer and a helper to Paul; eventually Paul sends him back to Philemon with a letter. It’s the epistle of Philemon in your Bible. The law gave Philemon the right to do anything he wanted to an escaped slave up to having him executed but Paul plead with his friend to accept him back as a brother in Christ, to consider giving him his freedom, and whatever monetary loss Philemon suffers; Paul says….

This whole principle of imputation is what got us all into the sin problem to start with.

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of doubt about what happened as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden. Whether you and I particularly like it or not, their sin was imputed to you. They were the human representative of God’s creation, the only one with the freedom of choice, and when they made the wrong choice they made it not just for themselves but for every descendant who would follow them.

Now I’m not particularly fond of the fact that I was in Adam 7000 years before I was born and when little Sammy came squalling into the world in 1957 he carried the sin nature of the first man. As I recall I was an almost perfect little child, but when I wasn’t my sin’s earned me the same punishment Adam’s sin earned him; physical death, spiritual death, eternal death.

From the time of my first sin on this earth, I was yelling out to God…just put Adam’s punishment on my tab…Just spell it out right there on my ticket:

Spiritual Death Jerry, could you make this look like a

Restaurant ticket?

God…that’s not fair…that’s not democratic…that’s not the American way!

Somebody forgot to tell God that he was an American; As much as I love living in a democracy; the Bible is not a book of democracy. It’d never about the rule of the majority; It’s a theocracy; It’s about the rule of the King of the Universe.

It really doesn’t matter if we like the way God set things up…If God set things up a certain way it’s because there is a divine reason for it…the struggle is not for us to get God to understand our reason for why he should do something a certain way…the struggle is for us to submit to God’s plan for our lives whether we understand it initially or not.

It’s true that by our American, democratic, standards God was not fair in allowing us each to pay the full price for Adam’s sin….but it is to all our advantage that in the next step God wasn’t fair either…

It makes sense that a God who comes up with this concept of imputation isn’t going to stop the train with Adam’s sin being imputed to us. If God made us in his image and in his likeness with his moral characteristics and we threw all that away by making rebellious choices; it makes sense that God is going to move to reestablish his image in us.

Because we are coming to understand that one of the ways God does things is through imputation it makes sense that however he goes about re-establishing his likeness in mankind that will also be through imputation.

Let me just take a little side road for a moment. There are so many things I could show you in the OT to establish that this imputation approach is a standard mode of operation for God….let me run one by you that is familiar.

(Romans 4:18-23) Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead-- since he was about a hundred years old-- and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." (NIV)

( That’s the word!! Credited to him-imputed!)

For whatever reason one of the “ways of God” is for him to use this process of taking something over here and putting it on the tab of someone over here.

So….when mankind was caught in this hopeless web of Adam’s sin being written up on their tab God brought in the imputation of all imputations. Jesus took on himself the form of man, came to this earth as the Son of God, lived the life we all have to live, suffered through the temptations we all face, faced off with the evil one and where Adam had failed by making the wrong moral choices, Jesus succeeded in making the right moral choices…

And then he raises his hand and says: Father take all of their tickets:

Spiritual Death Jerry, could you make this look like a

Restaurant ticket?

That’s the ultimate fairness! God could not simply overlook Adam’s sin; neither could he simply overlook our sin. He had made it clear that sin would be punished by death and God always does exactly what he says he is going to do. He had to punish sin but..

He could impute the sin to another account…His account!

He could be just and faithful to his word…he would punish sin but he would bear the punishment on himself..

Just as Adam had imputed his sin on all who would follow him…God would impute everyone’s sin on to his own Son and solve the sin problem once and for all!

(Romans 3:21-26) But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. (NIV)

It doesn’t take long when you read these Scriptures to pick up the fact that there is a third aspect to this imputation thing. I went to one source after another this week to find what they taught about imputation and all of them in a slightly different way said that this doctrine was primary to a persons faith in Christ and all said there were three main points.

(1 John 1:6-9) If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

( Some would like to see this as simply a judicial act that does not affect daily life)

Imputing implies a sharing; (some miss this) When Adam imputed his sin to us we shared in every aspect of his sin… When God imputed our sin onto Christ we shared in every aspect of that payment. When he died we symbolically died with him…when he rose we rose with him into new life.

And when Jesus imputes his righteousness to us we have the privilege of sharing his righteousness:

(Philippians 3:8-9) What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ-- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.