7 That being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
The originating cause of our justification is not our merit, but God’s grace. We are justified by His grace. In Romans 3:24, Paul makes the assertion that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”.
When the Bible says that we are justified by faith, it does not mean that our justification is earned by the merit of our faith. It is a free gift of His grace. By faith, we embrace and appropriate the justification that God has provided through the merit of Christ. In other words, we receive justification freely through the instrumentality of faith. It is God’s gracious work that makes us justified, and nothing of ourselves.
The fact that our justification is all of God’s grace is seen in the following scriptural depictions of its various facets. Justification that is given to us by His grace (Romans 3:24) is provided by Christ’s blood (Romans 5:9) and His resurrection (Romans 4:25). It is also offered to us in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11), and we receive it by faith (Romans 3:28; 5:1). According to Galatians 2:17, it is Christ who justifies us. According to Romans 8:33, it is God who justifies us. All these scriptural facts of our justification point to the truth that it is all of our Triune God.
In our verse, it is also declared that all whom God freely justifies are also “heirs according to the hope of eternal life”. That is to say, eternal life is an inheritance that God provides for those whom He justifies. Only those who are justified can be heirs of “the hope of eternal life”.
We are made heirs of eternal life, and hence we have the well-grounded expectation of it. Every believer, being justified by God, has a real hope of eternal life. He is waiting for “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven” (1 Peter 1:4) for him. He waits in anticipation of glorious things to come in eternity. As one commentator said, “even the meanest believer is a great heir”.
Because every believer is a great heir of the hope of eternal life, he should endure all his trials in this life, and set his affections on the wonderful inheritance he has in eternity. Every Christian is a possessor of a guaranteed future, referred to as “the hope of eternal life”.