Christ’s Resurrection was GOD’S JUDICIAL DECREE of Justification, which commenced God’s Atoning payback that was consummated in Heaven at Christ’s Enthronement.

The orthodox Protestant doctrines of Atonement and Justification actually shunt around the indispensable role of the Holy Spirit in atonement and justification.  This severe delinquency of doctrine is simply a reflex of not calculating the proper significance of Christ’s RESURRECTION into their formula for salvation.  The corrective for this error is coming to the fundamental realization that his resurrection was God’s judicial act of justification and, simultaneously, the historic payback that commenced the Atonement for Christ’s crucifixion. The Holy Spirit poured out in superabundance is, in turn, his just due (dikaioma) in exchange for his unjust abuse-taking for the sake of the salvation of sinners.  This adjustment in light of apostolic teaching reveals the integral, not “subsequent,” role of the Holy Spirit in these central processes of salvation.  There are no separate, independent, “objective” means of atonement or justification to which the coming of the Holy Spirit can be tacked on as a mere “sanctifying” appendage.  The very sanctifying power of the Spirit is linked to, indeed, inextricable from, its being the fruit and overflow of Christ’s justification-by-resurrection and atonement-by-ascension-cum-enthronement–both of which were themselves the direct operations of that Spirit of holiness.  Thus, CHRIST WAS THE “FIRSTFRUIT” OF SALVATION by the operation of the vivifying Holy Spirit, and we follow in his train.

This is why baptism can be referred to in connection both to Christ and to the Holy Spirit, because to get immersed in the Spirit that Christ received as the reward of his suffering is to get inducted into the very same Spirit (only in greatly magnified abundance to embrace “whosoever will”) that indwelt Christ to empower his entire career in the first place.  He blazed the trail of righteousness ahead of us by the power of the very same Spirit that we can now receive to effect similar deeds of power–nay, “greater“!–for the salvation of yet others in an ever-growing chain-link of amenable respondents.  Thus we are legitimized/justified and equipped exactly like Jesus was, in order to do the same Messianic ministry he patterned and modeled to his disciples and practically trained them to do. [9/21/10]