The Bible says God justifies the ungodly. On purpose.

Paul argues the biggest question in the Bible in the vocabulary of a payroll office. Wages. Debt. Gift. Credited. One Greek verb sits under all of it, eleven times in Romans 4 alone, and it explains the sentence that sounds illegal: God justifies the ungodly. This study traces logizomai (to count, to calculate, to credit to an account) from the night God counted a childless man righteous under the stars, through the psalm where sin is not counted at all, to the Servant who was numbered with the transgressors, and into the one Old Testament sentence that Paul and James both quote word for word. If those two pages have ever bothered you, this is the study that puts them side by side. All Scripture quotations are from the ESV. Historical documents (the Council of Trent's canons and the 1689 London Confession) are quoted from their own texts on screen. CHAPTERS 0:00 - The Account Book 0:59 - The Vocabulary Problem 2:25 - The Accountant's Verb 4:18 - The Man With the Empty Column 7:05 - The Entry That Moves 9:59 - The Same Sentence in James 12:56 - The Verb the Church Split Over 15:14 - The Settled Account