Isaiah 53:5 NASB95
But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.
Romans 5:1 TPT
Our faith in Jesus transfers God’s righteousness to us and he now declares us flawless in his eyes. This means we can now enjoy true and lasting peace with God, all because of what our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, has done for us.
Sadly, because Christians don’t really understand their union with Christ and what he accomplished for them at the Cross, they often try to create their own peace with God through acts motivated by guilt and condemnation. There are those throughout church history who have tried to accomplish peace with God and holiness to ascetic acts such as self-abasement, self-scourging, etc.
As obviously tragic as that kind of spirituality is, so many of us have engaged in a more hidden kind of partaking of the vinegar and gall by embracing morbid remorse and guilt, with promises to do all kinds of spiritual disciplines to appease the heart of God. There is nothing more painful to behold than this sad search for the Cross, which only ends in a more wounded self; and a conscience that is trying to lay on itself the chastisement for its own peace and a broken guilt-ridden heart that is striving to heal itself with its own stripes.
The reality is that God has reconciled us to Himself through the blood of Christ on the Cross, and we are at peace with God because we are in Jesus, and He is at peace with God. He has clothed himself in our humanity and forever sits before God as the God/Man. Because of our union with Christ, His humanity is our humanity, and therefore He sits before God as us. We are at peace with God, and therefore there are no barriers between our hearts and His. I don’t have to work my way back into His favor because I forever live there in Christ. I also don’t have to earn holiness because Christ is my holiness and that’s been true about me since my new birth, not because of something I accomplished, but because of something He perfectly accomplished at the Cross.