Justification by Faith

Today on Renewing Your Mind… More than 500 years ago, a monk named Martin Luther nailed a parchment to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. That paper contained 95 complaints against the Roman Catholic Church. Luther didn't know it at the time, but he was lighting a fire that still burns today. The Protestant Reformation brought the biblical gospel back from obscurity. Here's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. If I were to say to you, what is the gospel? How would you answer that question?

Here are some of the answers that I hear. The gospel, or the good news, is that you can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Or the gospel is that God can give you purpose for your life. Or the gospel is God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Or things of that sort. Not one of those things remotely resembles the biblical concept of the gospel. Now, it is good news to hear that God loves me. And it is good news to know that I can have purpose in my life.

And it is good news that I can have a personal relationship with Jesus. But it's not the biblical good news of Evangelion. The gospel in biblical categories, dear friends, has an objective, definable content. If we go to the sermons that are recorded for us in the book of Acts, we are able to distinguish between what New Testament scholars call kerygma and didache. The word kerygma in Greek has to do with proclamation or preaching. And in the strategy of the nascent church of the first century, the apostles went out and proclaimed kerygma. They proclaimed the gospel. And then when people responded in faith to the gospel and were united to the body of Christ, then they were subjected to didache, or the teaching of the full-orbed doctrinal content of New Testament Christianity.

But that kerygma follows a definite pattern and includes within it a declaration or a message that focuses in the first instance upon the person and work of Jesus, the objective content of the One who is God incarnate, born of the seed of the woman, according to the Old Testament prophecies of Scripture in the fullness of time, who lived a life of perfect obedience, who died on the cross as a substitute sacrificial satisfaction for our sins, who was raised from the grave for our justification, and who was then elevated to the right hand of God the Father in His session by which He was given the title of King of Kings and Lord of Lords and invested as the King of the cosmos and also entered into heaven as our great high priest who intercedes for us daily and who will come again at the end to claim His people and establish His kingdom visibly. Those are the non-negotiable elements, objectively, of the gospel. They're not the same as my testimony. If I give you my testimony and I say, I came to faith in Christ and my life was changed, that may be true and it may or may not be relevant to you, but it's not the gospel. The gospel is about Jesus, about who He is and about what He has done objectively. And there is another element to the gospel, an indispensable element to the gospel, and that has to do with this question.

How do the benefits that Christ accomplished in our stead become personally, subjectively appropriated to us? And the answer to that question the New Testament gives is the answer of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. You recall when Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians and he was stupefied by the rapidity with which the Galatian Christians had moved away from the gospel they had received and tried to embrace another gospel, which is not another gospel because the apostles said, there's only one gospel. And he went on to say that if anybody even an angel from heaven preaches any other gospel except that which you have received, let him be onotema, let him be cursed, let him be damned, because the apostle emphasized there's only one gospel and a necessary ingredient to that gospel is how the benefits of the objective work of Christ are subjectively appropriated, which is by faith and by faith faith and by faith alone. That's why we say justification by faith alone is essential to the gospel.

Any so-called gospel that does not include the doctrine of justification by faith alone is not the gospel. Now one of the problems that created so much controversy in the Middle Ages about the doctrine of justification had to do with the linguistic problem actually. The great Augustine, who in every other respect taught all of the elements necessary for the doctrine of justification by faith alone, nevertheless was working from the Latin text, not the Greek text. He was one of the Latin fathers of the church, not the Greek fathers of the church, and he looked at the Latin word for justification, which is the word justificare, which in Latin literally means to make righteous. And so working with the Latin, he assumed that when the New Testament talked about justification, justificare, it was talking about sanctification. He was talking about God's making us righteous, whereas the Greek term dikaiosune means not to make righteous, but to regard as righteous, to declare righteous, to count as righteous. Do you see the difference? And the cataclysmic division of Christendom in the sixteenth century took place over that very difference, because in the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification, it was set forth so clearly at the sixth session of the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century, declares unambiguously that before God ever will declare a person just, true righteousness must iner within that person.

The Latin is inerens. Now, do you get the point? God will never say, you're just, unless when He analyzes your moral condition, He sees that you are in fact righteous. Now, often the Roman Catholic church is slandered by well-meaning Protestants and evangelicals. Here's the way it's usually set forth. We believe in justification by faith. They believe in justification by works. We believe in justification by grace. They believe in justification by merit. We believe in justification by Christ. They believe in justification by your own self.

No, no, no, no. The Roman Catholic church has always clearly and emphatically argued that justification requires faith, it requires grace, and it requires Christ. Faith is necessary.

It performs three functions, according to Trent. Saving faith is the initium, the fundamentum, and the radix of justification. What does that mean? It says faith is the initiation. It's the foundation. It's the root of justification so that without faith you can't be justified.

But what's missing? The little word alone, because in the Roman view, you can have faith and not be justified. If you commit mortal sin, you lose the grace of justification, which is a necessary precondition, but fortunately you can be restored to a state of justifying grace through the sacrament of penance, which is defined by the Roman Catholic church as the second plank of justification for those who have made shipwreck of their souls. So you start off, you get the grace of baptism, you cooperate with that, you assent to that, you possess justifying grace. You need that grace. You can't make it without grace. You need the faith.

You can't make it without faith. But even when you have that faith and have that grace, if you commit a mortal sin, you lose the grace of justification. And so you have to go through the sacrament of penance to be restored to a state of grace. And you stay in that state of grace unless or until you commit another mortal sin. And even if you make it to the end without committing mortal sin that sends you to hell, you die with any impurity on your soul.

This is as recently as the Catholic Catechism of a few years ago. If you die with any impurity on your soul, you don't go to heaven. You go to purgatory, the purging place, where there in the fires you are refined and made pure until you have that inherent righteousness that is required to be justified.

To me that's the worst news I could ever hear. If God tells me that I can never be justified until I am inherently righteous, I would sleep in tomorrow morning because I would abandon all hope, because I know of the ongoing sin that infects my soul. But the good news is that while I'm still a sinner, not only does Christ die for me, but the moment I put my trust in Him, His atonement is applied to my guilt, and His life of perfect obedience is applied to my account. Paul labors this point in the fourth chapter of Romans when he uses for his exhibit A the patriarch Abraham. When he goes back to Genesis 15 where God promises Abraham, the great nation, and all of those things, and we read in Genesis 15 these words, and Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

And then Paul labors the point, before Abraham had ever done any good deed, before he was even circumcised, before he performed any of the works of the law, seven chapters before he was obedient when taking his son Isaac to Mount Moriah, God counted him just the moment that he believed. This was what was behind Luther's famous formula, simul justus et peccator, or peccator. And if you don't know any other Latin, you ought to get that one and memorize it, because it's the gospel in a nutshell. Simul is Latin for at the same time. We get the English word simultaneously.

Simul justus, at the same time just or righteous, et. You know what that means? It's the past tense of the verb to eat. Have you ate your lunch?

No. You remember in the death scene in Julius Caesar, Brutus assassinates Caesar, and he's dying. He looks at Brutus, and he says what? Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar. And you too, Brutus?

Et just simply means and. So here we go, simul justus, at the same time just, et peccator, sinner. A peccadillo is a little sin. If somebody is without sin or blemish, we say they're impeccable. And so Luther is saying, here is the joy of the gospel, is that while in and of myself I remain a sinner, the minute I put my faith in Christ, His righteousness is transferred to my account so that Christ is my righteousness. It's His righteousness that is the only ground of my justification. The only righteousness that will ever save you is the righteousness of Jesus. That's the gospel, is that there is a righteousness available to you that is not your own. It is a righteousness that Martin Luther called an alienum eustizium, an alien righteousness, a foreign righteousness, a righteousness that comes from somebody other than from me. It is a righteousness that, again Luther said, is extra nos, apart from us, outside of us. The righteousness by which I am declared just is a righteousness that Jesus earned, that Jesus merited in His perfect obedience. So it is the life of Christ with the death of Christ together that save us. And finally, the Apostle says, He lived as the new Adam to fulfill the terms of the law. He died as our substitute on the cross.

He was raised for our justification. Because if Jesus died on the cross and stayed dead, that would mean that the Father did not accept the sacrifice. People say it was impossible for Jesus to be raised from the dead. The Scriptures say it was impossible for Him not to be raised from the dead.

It was impossible for death to hold Him. You know the benediction, you've heard it a thousand times. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you His peace.

Now notice in that formula, there is the word bless. And by contrast, we have the biblical concept of the curse. And in the Mosaic law, particularly in the book of Deuteronomy, you remember what it says, God says to His people that if you keep My covenant, if you keep My commandments, if you obey My law, then blessed are you in the city, blessed are you in the country, blessed are you in the land, blessed are you in the land, blessed are you in the city, blessed are you in the country, blessed are you when you sit down, blessed are you when you stand up, blessed are you in the kitchen, blessed are you in the family room, blessed are you in the living room, blessed are you in the bed, blessed are you all over the place. But if you break My law, if you sin against Me, then cursed shall you be in the country, cursed shall you be in the city, curse and shall you be when you sit down, when you stand up in the kitchen in the living room, curse and shall you be everywhere."

What does that mean? What is this language of blessing and curse? We use the word blessing in a superficial way. It's something we say when you sneeze, where you offer a table grace, you say the blessing. But to the Jew, to be blessed of God was the highest possible felicity that any creature could enjoy. And in that Aaronic benediction, you see the manifestation of a literary form of the Jew and that of parallelism. So you have basically three stanzas that are saying exactly the same thing in each stanza. So if you want to get a clue as to how the Jew understood what it meant to be blessed, you look at all three stanzas. May the Lord bless you and keep you.

That's the second part of the first stanza. But what corresponds to the bless? May the Lord make His face to shine upon. See, what the Jew wanted more than anything else was to come close to God. The ultimate hope was to see His face, the face that was hidden, the face that was in the cloud, the face that was denied to Moses. May the Lord bless you. May the Lord make His face to shine, the radiance of the Shekinah glory, to envelop you in His presence. That's the highest aspiration of a human person, to see the unveiled glory of God. May the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you shalom, the peace that passes understanding. That's what it means to be blessed of God. That's what is accomplished for us by Christ. Christ in His perfect obedience wins the blessing for His people so that every Christian who puts their trust in Jesus on that day will see God face to face, will see Him as He is in His unveiled glory.

We will look at Him, we will look at Him, and the radiance of His face will shine down upon us as He lifts up the light of His countenance. We're going to go to heaven. There's not going to be any sun. There aren't going to be stars.

There aren't going to be moon. There aren't going to be lamps. There aren't going to be candles because of the light of the glory of God and of the Lamb will fill the new Jerusalem, and there will be no night there, nothing but sheer blessedness. And the contrast on the cross is communicated in the same metaphor. May the Lord curse you and abandon you. May the Lord turn His back upon you and hide Himself from you. May the Lord turn off the light of His countenance and leave you in utter darkness and give you His wrath. That's what the cross is about, that in our justification, Jesus in His death receives the full measure of the curse. And in His life of perfect obedience, He gives the full measure of divine blessedness to all who put their trust to Him. But in both cases, the cross and glory rests upon the principle of imputation. Christ dies for me because my guilt is transferred to Him. He is counted as a unrighteous for me by imputation.

And the second part of the transfer is when His righteousness is imputed to me. Right now, as I speak in the heart of evangelicalism, there is this major crisis where all kinds of leaders are rejecting the whole idea of imputation. You take away imputation. You take away justification. You take away justification. You take away the gospel without imputation. There is no hope of your salvation. But with it, with my sins transferred to Jesus, His righteousness transferred to me, I and all who share that faith am God-blessed forever. Amen. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. On this Reformation Day, it's good to remind ourselves why it's important for the church to constantly return to the biblical standard.

Even as R.C. mentioned in his last illustration there, we see church leaders moving away from the biblical gospel in our own day. That's why the Reformation of the sixteenth century matters today. I was born and raised in a Christian home in a mainline Protestant denomination, but I did not learn many of these intriguing details about the Reformation.

Maybe that's the case with you as well. So that's why we're excited to offer the two-DVD set called Luther and the Reformation. Just request the DVD set when you contact us with a financial gift of any amount. Our number is 800-435-4343. You can also go online to renewingyourmind.org. We're glad you joined us today. Renewing Your Mind is the listener supported out of Ligonier Ministries, and we hope to see you right back here next time. you