Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.
John 4:34

A couple of blogs ago, I wrote about how important Jesus’ sinless life is in providing us the righteousness needed to enter Heaven. Let me offer two important theological footnotes.

First, the importance of Jesus supplying righteousness for His people. Sin is a spiritual debt that Jesus paid by dying for His people, but paying our sin debt is not enough to provide us with entrance into Heaven. HUH? Let me explain:

Say I have a million dollar debt, and have zero dollars with which to pay. Someone pays my debt, the debt is erased, but I am still flat broke. Because God commands us to “be holy as He is holy” (1 Peter 1:15-16), even if our sin debt is paid, we are still spiritually flat broke. Even if our sin debt is paid, since we have no righteousness, we still cannot enter Heaven (Hebrews 12:14).

In addition to dying for His people to clear our sin debt, by living a sinless life for His people He provides us with the reward of His righteousness, completing the transaction.

Second, and this is a little technical, but wonderful. Jesus is eternally and intrinsically holy and righteous because He is eternal God. That is not the righteousness He gives His people! The righteousness He gives His people is the reward for His righteous living as a man. By living sinlessly, Jesus earned the reward for righteousness. But He does not need that reward because He is already eternally righteous. Wait for it… Jesus lived sinlessly to earn the reward of righteousness to give it away to His people! That is worthy of meditating on and worshiping Jesus for!

By the way: I learned this studying systematic theology in seminary, but it became precious to me when John Bunyan explained it (better than I just did) in “The Pilgrims Progress.”