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The Administration of Justice
The Good News of Messiah translates Romans 5:1, "Therefore being administered justice based on faithfulness, we should have peace next to the Almighty...." This is quite a radical departure from the EDS version "justified by faith." But what does it mean in the GNM? It means that the Most High, acting as Judge, administrates justice to us based both his faithfulness and our faithfulness to him. For those who fail to repent and pledge faithfulness to Messiah Yeshua, he will adminstrate the curse and destruction. For those who repent their sins and pledge faithfulness to him, he will forgive their sins and cleanse them from all unrighteousness.
For the faithful to be administered justice means to be forgiven judicial punishment for sin, becaue in light of repentance and faithfulness after sin, the Most High considers it just to forgive. But this is not all that is involved in the divine administration of justice for us. The Most High also considers it just to administer righteousness to us. This is the circumcision of the heart. If we will circumcise the evil from our hearts, then he also will circumcise what we cannot circumcise. He will remake us into the righteous men and women that he created us to be.
This administration of justice has rightly been described by some as medicine. Though I would like to say herbal medicine might be a good qualification over that which pretends to be medicine nowdays, and is really poison. Messiah from his divine life gives to the faithful an administration of righteousness. And in fact, we could have translated Romans 5:1, and all other passages with variants of this phrase, "being administered righteousness."
If you have got the point already, then you have got the whole point of the quoted text. The rest of this essay is linguistic and apologetical. So firstly, I will make an apologetical point. How do we know that the GNM is the truth and the EDS versions are not? And I am speaking mainly to the Torah observant faithful here who realize that the EDS rejects the Torah, both Orthodox and Catholic, and the Catholic spin off called the Protestants. If they are wrong about the Torah, then what makes you believe they are competent to translate Scripture? Why do you trust their translations? They are the lamb with two horns, east and west, but with the words of the serpent. The EDS is the woman the rides on the political beast called globalist government. It is anti-Messiah. And yet, the Eastern Church and the Western Church cannot agree on what the truth is, and they are still fighting theological wars and also backing political wars against each other to this day.
My next apologetical point is the chronology. You don't have to be a theologian or an expert in language translation to grasp the Scriptural chronology. You can verify it with elementary math operations and checking off the Scripture texts making the chronological statements against the charts. The chronology speaks loudly of the validty of Torah, because chronologically related Torah commandments are at its foundations. Yet, the student will be able to see upon studying the chronology that it is the one and only solution that makes harmonious sense out of the biblical chronological data. The gateway to harmonizing the chronology is to realize that the EDS translation, "first day of the week" is a false translation put out by the Babylonian whore to deceive the faithful. The Greek text, as translated by the GNM says, "the first of the Sabbaths." This text alone unlocks a cascade of biblical solutions in overall biblical chronology. This is why the EDS wishes to keep it a secret.
So when the Most High is administering justice, he is also administering the reform called righteousness, which will enable us to keep his commandments. And he is administering justice by forgiving us based on our faithfulness. So what does the EDS believe about forgiveness? In most general terms they believe that forgiveness is paid for by some sort of works or penance. But this teaching is stronger or weaker in different parts of the EDS. What is plain however is that penance is not repentance. Repentence is turning the heart away from sin. It is not performing some repetitive and sacrificial ritual to top off divine appeasment, nor is repentence a prescribed medicine to keep one from sinning. The only thing that can stop sin is the decision of the repentant one to hold faithful to the Most High. Faithfulness is essential, both our faithfulness and the faithfulness of Messiah Yeshua.
Protestantism also has penance, payment for sins. But its penance is theological and doctrinal rather than a prescibed list of things the penitant has to do. In Protestantism, one has to constantly reaffirm the doctrines of believe only, and that Christ paid all debts. But the truth is that Messiah requires faithfulness, and he does not pay our debts. He forgives our debts. He forgives our sin. So in Protestantism, instead of personally paying the debt, the merit of Christ is sought to pay the debt. Truly, therefore, this doctrine is on the same foundation as penance.
Especially in its Lutheran form, though, Protestantism retains elements of the Catholic sacramental system of distributing divine favor. The sacraments are a diversion from what the Most High actually desires of us. He desires our faithfulness to Him, to keep his commandments, and if we are willing to be so, then he adds his faithfulness to our benefit.
So now the final part of this commentary will be the linguistic apologetic. If one were to look us the word "justified" in archaic English, or Middle English, one would find that it means "to administer justice," and though it seems that the justice administered is mostly of a negative sort, in Greek, and especially Hebrew, the equivalent terms could mean to administer justice in a positive sense, and this is to "get justice" for someone.
In the BDAG Lexican, the term is defined as "do justice," in the first definition. We can get the idea if we verbalize the English noun justice as "to justice" someone. And we can express the noun idea as the "justicing" of someone. If you look up the noun form in BDAG it will say "juridical righteousness," which means the administration of justice or righteousness. So the reason for the GNM translating "administer justice" is to expand the sense of "do justice" because that is what administering justice is, doing justice to another. The text means the same as "being justiced based on faithfulness."
The EDS has created a linguistic problem by influencing the English language definition of "justify" to mean acquittal or to declare someone in the right even when they are in the wrong. This definition is part of the language and part of the EDS culture. But we must realize that this culture evolved with the increase of lawlessness in the EDS. Justifying unrighteousness is lawlessness. It is the mystery of iniquity. Paul does not speak of justifying the ungodly in the modern sense. What he means in the original and ancient sense is the Most High faithfully administering justice to the guilty person who wants to repent. The repentant one's faithfulness is taken into account for the administration of justice.