double imputation

Happy 2 1/2 Birthday today to my little girl!  I love you so much sissy. May you one day become my sister in addition to my daughter.  May God in His mercy grant you admission by adoption to a new family, one better than the one I tried so hard to provide for you.  A home built not by my human hands, but one whose Author and Builder is Jesus.

While reading My Utmost for His Highest the past two mornings I have read:

If Jesus Christ is to regenerate me, what is the problem He is up against? I have a heredity I had no say in; I am not holy, nor likely to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is to tell me I must be holy, His teaching plants despair.

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For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. — 2 Corinthians 5:21

Sin is a fundamental relationship; it is not wrong doing, it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. The Christian religion bases everything on the positive, radical nature of sin. Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ faced in men was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the Gospel that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting and its blasting power. ...All through the Bible it is revealed that Our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, not by sympathy. He deliberately took upon His own shoulders, and bore in His own Person, the whole massed sin of the human race.

God is Holy.
You are not.

Those two things are very bad news for you and I.

Jesus is perfect.
He commands you to be perfect.

Again, two things that are the super bad news. Jesus' perfection is bad news for you and I. Now we can't say that, "it can't be done." He did it (perfectly). Crap!

However, by faith, God is willing to make what Martin Luther called, "the great exchange." This is where our word, "impute" becomes so important

im·pute, transitive verb \im-ˈpyüt\

1: to lay the responsibility or blame for often falsely or unjustly

2: to credit to a person or a cause : attribute

God imputes to Christ our sin on the cross. Jesus takes on sins that were not His and becomes them. He is not playing the part of sin as in a play. He is not pretending to be us. He literally takes our place and becomes us and our sin and is nailed to a cross.

God imputes to us Christ's righteouness. Jesus lives a perfect life. He never does the wrong thing and He always does the right thing. Never was there a right thing He ignored and never was there a wrong thing into which He indulged. We are not pretending to be perfect. We are literally seen as perfect by grace through our faith in Jesus.

Double imputation takes place: We receive something that was not ours and Christ receives something that was not His. We get a perfect life by which to be seen and Christ gets our sin by which He is crucified and dies.

It is only in this that we can become righteous. Only by faith in what God has done can we be made right with Him. Not by how badly we feel. Not by how robust our resume. Only by what Jesus did and if that is ours. Only by what we did being taken by Him. We cannot pay off the debt or earn the trophy. We are double damned without God. 

We are double blessed by grace through faith in the Gospel of God.