What God Requires, God Provides

Historically, Protestants have believed that the Bible teaches that our salvation depends on what Christ has accomplished for your pardon and our perfection. We accept by faith his substitution for us in two senses: in his final suffering and death, he was condemned and cursed so that we may be pardoned (see Gal. 3:13, Rom 8:3); and in his whole life of righeousness culminating in his death, he learned obedience so that we may be saved (Heb 5:8-9). His death crowns his atoning sufferings that propitiate God's wrath against us (see Rom. 3:24-25; 5:6-9), but it also crowns his life of perfect righteousness - God's righteousness- that is then imputed to us who believe (see 2 Cor. %:21; Rom. 3:21-22; 4:6,11, 5:18-19).

God provided in Christ what God demanded from us in the law.

Current challenges to justification obscure (not to put it too harshly) half of Christ's glory in the work of justification by denying the imputation of doctrine. Recognizing this, Francis Turretin wrote that imputation "tends to the greater glory of Christ and to our richer consolation, which they obscure and lessen not a little who detract from the price of our salvation a part of his most perfect righeousness and obedience and thus rend his seamless tunic." Jonathan Edwards echoes this: "To suppose that all Christ does is only to make atonement for us by suffering, is to make him our Savior but in part. It is to rob him of half his glory as Savior."

- John Piper