Under Sentence: What Condemnation Actually Means

Guilt today is treated like a feeling to manage. Scripture treats it like a verdict already rendered — and the difference changes everything about how it gets resolved.

Originally published at Beholding Christ, the online teaching arm of my ministry where I write, teach, host a podcast, and publish courses. If this is useful to you, you'll find more like it at beholding-christ.com.

Guilt today is a feeling that just needs to be managed. A mistake to be corrected. Feel bad enough, apologize, adjust, move on — and if you don’t feel bad, as far as most people are concerned, there’s nothing left to discuss. That’s not what condemnation is before God.

By definition, condemnation is the judicial act of declaring one guilty and dooming him to punishment. It’s the state of being condemned. You are tried, the verdict has been dealt, the sentence has been given, and there is a declaration of guilty appropriate to the crime. And yet condemnation is often treated by the one who is actually condemned as if it’s a neutral thing — not a verdict already rendered, already enforced, but just a risk maybe hanging over the head. That is not what Scripture says. It’s not what it says at all.

Paul isn’t describing a gradual accumulation of guilt through personal sins, even though there is that too. He’s describing a judicial verdict rendered through one man’s offense that extends to all men legally with him. So you don’t become condemned. You’re born it. That’s what you inherit from Adam. Condemnation is what you stand under. What you stand under is sin itself.

We first took a look at the issue of abomination, the issue of our uncleanness — that has to do with our identity being unclean, and therefore the works produced from that uncleanness being unclean too. Condemnation is the legal shape of that same identity. So we’re going to look at four things: what condemnation means, by definition, and then three features regarding our condemnation in Adam — what it means to be under sin, what the wages of sin are, and what it means to be guilty before God.

Under Sin

Come with me to Romans 3:9, a few chapters back. Are we better than they, Paul asks — Jew better than Gentile? “No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin.” Under is the state of subjection, the state of being under control, governed and ruled by. Paul has spent two and a half chapters proving Jew and Gentile alike in this condition — not that individuals sin occasionally, but that both categories of humanity, without exception, live under sin’s jurisdiction. Galatians 3:22 confirms it in sharper terms still: “The scripture hath concluded all under sin.” Mankind confined, with no exit, no escape, no excuse. Every man in Adam already inside sin’s jurisdiction, and therefore already inside its condemned state — not awaiting judgment, but already under it. Jurisdiction does not ask your opinion of its laws. It only asks whether you are standing inside its borders, and by birth you already are.

Grace Multiplies What Adam Multiplied

Here’s what makes this doctrine, grim as it is, precious rather than merely heavy. Romans 5:16 draws a contrast most people rush past: “The judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification.” One offense brought condemnation. But the free gift addresses many offenses — not just Adam’s, but every one that followed him. Grace mathematics works this way: if Christ dies for Adam’s one sin, and one more, grace is already twice as powerful as what Adam brought in. If He dies for ten sins, it’s ten times as powerful. Do the math on a lifetime of sins and you start to see why this still brings me to tears every time I sit with it. It doesn’t mean He wants you to sin — God forbid. But when you start questioning your salvation over your own sin, remember the math. You never measured your standing by your record to begin with. Why start now?

The Wages of Sin

To add to all of that, you have the wages of sin. Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Sin’s payment isn’t a threat hanging over the guilty. It’s a wage already earned, the way any laborer is owed for service rendered. And a wage is not a one-time strike — it’s an ongoing payment for what’s been done, measured out, not just simply declared. Romans 2:5 shows the bill still growing: “After thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath.” Not freedom. Not grace. Not mercy. Not escape or excuse, leniency or clemency. Just wrath.

I was reading a book by a man named George Swinnock once, and in it he gave one of the most graphic descriptions I’ve found of the wages of sin. I remember reading it one night and it brought me to tears — Lord, don’t let me lose this sight of Your judgment, in which I would not open my mouth to proclaim the gospel as the remedy. He pictures a soul at the very moment of death, still reckoning, too late, with everything it had refused to reckon with before:

“Now your soul stands quivering upon your pale lips, ready to take its flight to its eternal home. You see devils, like so many ravening and roaring lions, looking and longing, for you—their prey. Your past sins trouble you. Oh, how you curse your pastimes and pleasures, your companions and possessions, which stole away your time and affections and hindered your preparation for such a dreadful hour! . . . Now, my day is past, my soul is lost, heaven’s gate is shut. Woe, it is too late! The blessed God, in whose favor is life, to whom I said, ‘Depart from me,’ has now fixed my doom to depart from Him forever.”¹

Swinnock doesn’t let the picture end there. He goes on to describe a misery with no end date to imagine, no arithmetic that makes it bearable — a mind still fully alive, but permanently cut off from anything that could be called living, endlessly arriving at a death it can never finish dying. That’s what awaits man apart from Christ. And a wage is not a threat. It’s a receipt that is already written, just waiting now to be collected. Every day one lives in Adam, unrepentant, treasures up more of it.

Guilty Before God

And finally, we’re guilty before God. Romans 3:19: “That every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” Guiltiness needs to be understood two ways. There’s the feeling of guilt, which a person can have or not have. And there’s the legal standing, which doesn’t move either way. There might be someone before a judge who truly doesn’t think what they did was wrong, and yet the verdict and the sentence have already been passed, whether they feel guilty or not. Guilt today in our world is a feeling that just needs to be managed, a mistake to be corrected. But it’s a legal standing before God to be known, not something received because you feel guilty or not. The Word says it, and the law was given so that you would know that you are. And it isn’t partial — one point of failure implicates you under the whole law, because the One who made all the laws is God, and if you offend Him at one point, you offend Him at every point. Every mouth may be stopped. Not a partial stop, and not only a select group. Every mouth stops.

Two Ways to Get This Wrong

Condemnation is a legal problem, but it’s a legal problem before God that has a solution. When there’s a misunderstanding of condemnation, it can produce one of two errors: a false security — I’m not that bad — or a crushing despair with no remedy in view — I could never be forgiven. But when it’s rightly understood, it presses you toward the only place where grace and mercy and forgiveness can actually be found. As grim as it is, harsh as it is, once you can’t take either of those two erroneous positions, you’re left only with Jesus Christ.

To the One Still in Adam

Everything we’ve discussed — under sin, wages earned, guilty before God — traces back to one thread: Adam. You’re not on trial. The trial is over. The verdict was rendered the moment you were born in Adam, and every day since has just been you adding to the bill. You have likely been treating your standing before God as an open question — something still to be decided, still up for negotiation, still dependent on how the rest of your life goes. And yet it isn’t open. It’s closed. The verdict is already in. The only remaining question is whether you’ll hear it from God now, on the terms of mercy, or later, on the terms of justice. There’s only one way this verdict changes — not by good behavior improving your case, not by time reducing the debt, but by believing on the One who already paid it in full. Jesus Christ bore the wages your sin earned, was condemned in your place, and rose again the third day so the verdict against you could be reversed, not ignored. If you have never believed on what Christ has done for you, today is the day to be saved.

To the One Already in Christ

This was our verdict too. It wasn’t hypothetical — it was the one we actually stood under before the grace of God appeared and we believed. The condemnation was real, the debt was real, the guilt was real, and every bit of it was paid — not waived, paid by Jesus Christ. So may we never let familiarity with the doctrine of justification dull the size of what it actually addressed. If looking at these things has only produced relief that you’re no longer under this verdict, it has only done half of its work. It should also produce a genuine, trembling gratitude. We were not almost condemned, not partially guilty. We were under the full weight of everything looked at here — and Christ absorbed it. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). I pray that the weight of this would have its ongoing work in us — not just a fear, but something that leads us to worship. Not worship only in the sense of singing songs, but the kind that transforms you, that changes your thinking, that begins to educate you and change your life.

— Josh Strelecki, Pastor-Teacher

This is the third article in a ten-part study on Union in Christ at Twin Cities Grace Fellowship. Next up: alienation — more teaching like this at beholding-christ.com.

1. George Swinnock, The Fading of the Flesh and the Flourishing of Faith, ed. J. Stephen Yuille (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), originally published London, 1662.