Justification-Sanctification-Glorification
One Sheet
Kinship Theology maintains that salvation—the rescue from sin and the sin condition enslaving all humankind—encompasses justification, sanctification, and glorification. The salvation process begins with God’s revelation of who he is and his desire to have love relationship with his created image bearers on the basis of his essence—the source of truth, goodness, and beauty. Sinful humans can offer nothing to merit salvation, but by an individual’s faith/repentance response of spirit to God’s revelation, God applies salvation. God saves by forgiving an individual’s guilt for sin committed and by redeeming the person’s cursed condition. Redemption was won in God sending his Son, not to take on and die in punishment for human guilt of committed sin, but to conquer death by putting his own body (shared portion of cursed physical essence) to death and then to take it back (redeem it) through resurrection. Humans could not redeem themselves because of their own active sin guilt and incapability of cognitive spirit activity after physical death. For redemption to occur, Jesus (God in flesh) had to win it for his creation and save believers from annihilation—the resultant punishment/consequence for pursuing full satisfaction in relationship with the physical world in priority over relationship with God. In that sense, Jesus died for the whole world suffering from the curse, the consequence of humankind turning away from God (the definition of sin).
Forgiveness results in a renewed spirit (rebirth or conversion) through relationship with God. Redemption results from Jesus’s atoning rescue. Though his resurrected body is currently the only part of physical creation redeemed (and, thus, referred to as firstfruits), Jesus will return to redeem all physical creation based on the work of his first advent.
Justification: Justification is the proving or pronouncing a person free from sin. Thus, by forgiveness for the guilt of sin committed and redemption of the flesh from its cursed condition, a person may be totally free from sin and so declared righteous. However, the question then arises of how a Christian can be justified in our current age when bodily redemption waits yet for Jesus’s return. In other words, although by an individual’s repentance and faith, God has forgiven committed sins, the person’s spirit remains in this cursed flesh; how then can that person be pronounced free from sin (justified)? The answer is that the forgiven spirit of a repentant believer mindfully unites with the physical essence of Jesus. Believers consider their cursed bodies dead and their spirits alive in the body of Christ (Romans 6:11; 8:10; 12:5). Thus, at the moment a person places faith in Jesus for salvation, that person is justified by that faith because the spirit is forgiven and united with the resurrected, curse-removed body of the Redeemer.
Sanctification: Sanctification is the process, during this age, by which Christians develop dominion over their still-cursed bodies with the aid of the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Bible describes this conflict against Christians’ natural cursed-flesh control in terms of denial, crucifixion, and slavery (Matthew 16:24; Romans 6:6; Galatians 5:24; Ephesians 4:22). In sanctification, the Holy Spirit reminds the believer of his or her new birth as God’s child (Romans 8:16), empowering the believer’s attempts to live based on God’s essence.
Glorification: Glorification is the redemption of the body to freedom from sin’s curse. When Christ returns to redeem all physical creation, justification for the individual is confirmed in the spirit’s freedom of sin through forgiveness and the body's freedom of the curse through redemption.
In summary, we are justified by faith in God, sanctified through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit in this life, and glorified through the atoning work of Jesus Christ—all begun in God’s revelation and the individual’s faith response. Christians should then live in this age in the hope of secured redemption and life everlasting.