God’s Word for You

Daniel 9:24 Part 4 Faith takes hold of grace

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, December 24, 2025

24 “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for guilt, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophecy, and to anoint a most holy one.

The fourth Gospel promise given through Gabriel is that Christ was going bring in everlasting righteousness. We have two questions about this. The first is, why does righteousness have to be “brought in,” and just what does the angel mean by this righteousness?

Any kind of righteousness must be brought in because man lost his righteous status in the Garden when he fell. This loss of status is even illustrated in Genesis 3 by the change of status of the serpent, and then shown with evidence in the attitude of Adam and Eve regarding their shame. When the serpent is introduced in Genesis 3:1, he is classified by Moses as being “more crafty (or clever) than any of the wild animals God had made. “Wild animals” is one of five categories of animals that Moses uses in his writings. There are first of all, the swimmers and the flyers (Genesis 1:20-21), which included birds and other flying things as flyers, and fish and other things, such as “the large sea creatures” (1:21) as swimmers. Then, on land, there were wild animals, livestock, and creeping or crawling things (Genesis 1:24-25). And while the order of these creatures is different in the various times that they are mentioned, it is evident that the crawling things are not the top of the list. Then in the account of the fall, the serpent is first classed as a wild animal (3:1), but later as a crawling thing (3:14). Speculations are common among Christian teachers of science that certain snakes have shoulder bones that do not attach to limbs, and this is a remarkable and provable fact. But the status of the creature seems to be the more important point of the text. And then there is the shame of our first parents. They had no shame, even over their nakedness, at the end of the creation account (Genesis 2:25), but as soon as they sinned just seven verses later, they felt shame at once: “They realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Genesis 3:7). The status of man after the fall is thus illustrated by the serpent’s change of status and demonstrated by the appearance of man’s shame. He had lost the image of God; he was no longer righteous in God’s sight.

“But!” John writes, in the key passage about this subject. Such a verse is called in Latin a sedes passage, the “seat of a doctrine.” “But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2). Hear how John lets us into the room (as it were) so quietly, without needing to draw attention to anyone in particular: “If anybody does sin,” he says, as if there could be anybody who does not. Only Christ, of all mankind, was without sin (1 John 3:3). The rest of us are all sinners. But John is preaching the Gospel just now, and he wants us to be comforted. “He is the atoning sacrifice for us all.”

Our Confession puts this into clear words: “The terrors of sin and death are not merely thoughts in the intellect but are also a horrible turmoil in the will as it flees God’s judgment; just so faith is not merely knowledge in the intellect but also trust in the will, that is, to desire and to accept what the promise offers—reconciliation and forgiveness of sins. This is how Scripture uses the word ‘faith,’ as the statement of Paul shows, ‘Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God’ (Romans 5:1). In this passage ‘justify’ is used in a judicial way to mean ‘to absolve a guilty man and pronounce him righteous,’ and to do so on account of someone else’s righteousness, namely, Christ’s, which is communicated to us through faith” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession IV:304). And since our righteousness is the imputation of someone else’s righteousness, we need to speak of it with different words than we would about a philosophical or courtroom (judicial) investigation of righteousness. Christ’s righteousness is set onto us, imputed to us. And since his righteousness is imputed to us, given to us, now death has become what one of my college professors called in German ein Unding, “an unthing.” It is a nothing at all. The devil can rage and hell can open its jaws, which are death and the grave, but Christ will make it spit out what it has tried to swallow, just as the whale spat out Jonah alive at God’s command (Jonah 2:10).

For now through faith we have something wonderful. “Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—that righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Philippians 3:9). We turn again to our confession for the simple sentence: “Faith takes hold of grace.” This is how Christ brings in our righteousness, and rescues us from sin, death, and the devil’s rage. His grace is ours because we trust in him. This is what he gives, and he does not skimp or use half-measures.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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