Justification by Faith

How can the unjust person be justified? Which means, how can the unjust person be made just? Can he start all over again?

You can't. Once this person sins once, it is impossible for him ever to be perfect. Perfect. And perfection is the standard. To be in right standing before God, we must be perfect. So how can we be justified? If we can't rely on our own goodness, we must rely on the righteousness of someone else. Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C.

Sproul reminds us that only one person has achieved that standard. In this session on our study of the atonement, I want to look at the function of the atonement with respect to the theme of justification by faith. You recall that during the great controversy of the Protestant Reformation, Luther insisted that the doctrine of justification by faith alone was the article upon which the church stands or falls.

In fact, in his much celebrated debate with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, there's many sparks that were flying in terms of the intensity of that debate, Luther did on one occasion congratulate Erasmus and thank him for debating the real issue and not fooling around with trifles. The issue is how does the cross of Christ relate to me? We're now out of the level of theory of what actually happened objectively and into the question of how the benefit of Christ's work is appropriated to us. What good is it for me that Christ died on the cross? How does that relate to me?

What really happened? Now we're talking about the atonement as it relates to the concept of justification. Now this word is one of those long, ponderous, theological terms that we find in the Bible, and it's at the heart of the gospel, this whole matter of justification, yet I find that there are lots of folks in the church who have trouble defining the very meaning of the term justification. And let's go back to basics and remember that the need for an atonement, its necessity as we spelled it out in the first lecture, is related to the problem of human sin and the character of God, God's holiness or God's justice. We have this basic problem that God is just and man is what?

Unjust. Now the fundamental question is how are these two parties going to relate? How are we going to reconcile this problem and conflict between a just and holy God and a fallen, unjust, sinful human being? Now to work with this imagery for a minute, let's suppose that this circle here represents the character of mankind, and if that man sins, we see that that sin puts a blemish of sorts, a moral blemish on the character of fallen man. So if he commits a sin, we have a little blemish there, okay, and if he commits another sin, or sin penetrates more deeply into his life, we might put another dot. In terms of the degree of our sinfulness and the extent of our sinfulness when judged by the standard and the norm of God's perfection and God's holiness, how much of this circle should I shade? All of it. Are we talking about man as being half sinful and half pure, or would we say that the corruption is more serious than that?

Now you want to say total. What does Rome say? Rome leaves a little island of righteousness that is left, okay? And this was at the heart of the issue in the 16th century because the Reformers were saying that the sinful pollution and corruption of fallen man is complete, rendering us totally corrupt.

Now there's a lot of misunderstanding about that, and before we proceed any further, we need to clarify. The term that is often used for this human predicament and human situation in classical Reform theology is the term total depravity, and people have a tendency to wince whenever you use the term total depravity because there's a confusion in the mind between the concept of total depravity and the concept of utter depravity. Utter depravity would mean that man is as bad, as corrupt as he possibly could be. And I don't think that there's a human being in this world right now who is utterly corrupt, only by the grace of God and by the restraining power of God's common grace, but total depravity does not mean that men are as bad as they conceivably could be, because as many sins as you've committed, you can conceive of the fact that you could have done worse. You could have committed more gross and heinous sins, or numerically and more frequently. We see that murder is a sinful thing.

It's a bad thing, and if a guy commits first-degree murder, that's corruption, and that's a bad thing. If he does it ten times, he can be charged for ten counts of murder, and there's a sense in which he's multiplied his sin by ten. When the Protestant Reformers talked about total depravity, what they meant was that sin, its power, its influence, its inclination, affects the whole man, that our bodies are fallen, our hearts are fallen, our minds are fallen, and that there's no part of us that escapes the ravages of our sinful human nature.

Sin affects our thought life, our conversation. The whole man is fallen, and that's what we mean by this. To take it further, when the Apostle Paul elaborates on this fallen human condition, he says, there is none righteous, no, not one.

There is none who does good. Now, that's really a radical statement. He is saying that fallen man never, ever does a single good deed, and that flies in the face of our experience because we look around us and we see all kinds of folks who are not Christians who do things that we would applaud for their virtue. We see acts of self-sacrificial heroism, for example, among those who are not Christian, acts of kindness, acts of charity.

Calvin called this civil righteousness, and the reason why we have this problem is that when the Bible describes goodness or badness, it looks at it from two distinct perspectives. First of all, there is the measuring rod of the law, which measures the external performance of human beings. For example, if God says you're not allowed to steal, and you go your whole life without ever stealing anything from an external evaluation, we could say that He has a good record there.

He's kept the law externally. But in addition to the external measuring rod, there is also the consideration of the heart, the internal motivation for our behavior. You know, we're told that man looks and judges by outward appearances, God looks on the heart. From a biblical perspective, to do a good deed in the fullest sense of the word requires not only that the deed conforms outwardly to the standards of God's law, but that it proceeds from a heart that loves Him and wants to honor Him. Remember the great commandment, thou shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart.

Let's just stop there for a second. Is there anybody in this room who has loved God with all of their heart for the last five minutes? Nobody in here has loved God with all of their heart since they got out of their bed this morning. And to add to that all of your soul, all of your strength, all of your mind, even in our finest works there is a taint of sin mixed in with it, a pound of flesh in our most spiritual activity because I have never done an act of charity, an act of sacrifice, an act of heroism in my life when at the time of doing it I was doing it out of a heart that loved God completely or out of a mind that loved God completely. Externally, all kinds of virtuous acts are going on, both among believers and unbelievers. But God considers both, and under that tight norm of judgment we're in trouble.

So you've got this problem. God is too holy to even look at iniquity. He is perfectly just. How is an unjust person going to stand in the presence of God? The question is how can the unjust person be just defied? Which means how can the unjust person be made just? Can he start all over again?

You can't. Once this person sins once, it is impossible for him ever to be perfect because he's already lost his perfection by his initial sin. So you have a serious problem here. Now, we may say that, well, we don't really have a problem because God can overlook this, and that's true. God could say, I in my grace am going to overlook all of this sin and I'm going to give these people heaven and eternal life and all of that just gratuitously. And God could do that theoretically if He did one thing, if He sacrificed His justice.

Here is where mediation, as we've looked at it, is required and where Christ comes to act as our mediator. When we consider our redemption, we tend to think that salvation comes to us through the death of Christ. And even in this course on the atonement, we've been focusing our attention on the death of Christ. And in doing that, it's very easy to overlook something of absolutely crucial significance for the atonement to have any value at all. If I ask a child, what did Jesus do for you, they will say, Jesus died for my sins. Well, if that's all Jesus did, then why didn't Jesus just come down from heaven at age 30 and go straight to the cross? The point of the atonement is that a just man died for the unjust, that to qualify to be the redeemer, to qualify to be the Savior, Jesus first had to live before His death meant anything. He had to live a life of obedience. He had to acquire, if you will, merit at the bar of justice.

Because what is often overlooked in our justification is that there is a double transaction that takes place. Here is Jesus, and He lives a life, how many blemishes do we put in His circle? John sang the Agnes day, behold the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. The Lamb of God is the Lamb without blemish. Jesus Himself said, you guys disagree with me when He's debating with the Pharisees, but which of you convicts me of sin?

You talk about extravagant statements. Jesus says, you people are willing to admit that nobody's perfect. I am.

What would you do to somebody who walked in here and said, I am perfect. If you don't agree with me, prove that I'm not. That's what Jesus said. He didn't flinch from it. No shadow of turning, no blemish, no sin. His meat and His drink was to do the will of the Father. Zeal for His Father's house consumed Him. He was a man whose passion in life was obedience to the Father. I do nothing on my own authority, but only what the Father tells me to do. I and the Father are one.

No wonder they picked up rocks and started to attack Him. So now we have this problem. We've got one unjust party and two just parties. We've got a just God, and now we have a just mediator who is altogether holy. Now the biblical imagery about the atonement is an imagery of what we call imputation. The justification of which the New Testament speaks, we call in the Protestant tradition, forensic justification.

Some of you are involved in police work. What is forensics? It has to do with authoritative formal acts of declaration. Forensic justification means that a person is declared to be just at the tribunal of God. That the justification takes place ultimately when the supreme judge of heaven and earth says you are just. Now the question is, on what possible grounds could God ever say to you, you are just, when in fact you are not just?

Again, how can an unjust person be justified? Well when we look at imputation, the concept of imputation is found frequently in the New Testament with the imagery like the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. How does He take away the sin of the world? How does the Lamb do it in the Old Testament? What's the symbolism? The priest puts his hands on the Lamb.

Why? He's transferring symbolically the sins of the people to the animal that is to be sacrificed, or to the scapegoat who's to go out into the wilderness, and we'll look at that again later on. Jesus is said to bear our sins. He takes upon Himself the sins of the world. The language there is a language of a quantitative act of transfer where the weight of guilt that belongs here is taken from this man and given to somebody else. So that what happens is that God in Christ, Christ willingly takes upon Himself all of this so that before God, once the sin has been imputed to Him, and again we'll talk more about what this means when we examine the curse motif in the New Testament, but now in the sight of God, God looks at Christ and what does He see?

Justice? He sees a mass of sinfulness because the sin has been transferred to Jesus. This is elementary.

I don't want to be insulting your intelligence, but we've got to get this into our bloodstream. The sin is transferred or imputed to Jesus. If that happened and that's all that happened, the single transfer, the one-dimensional transaction, you would never be justified. If Jesus took all of my sins that I've ever committed on His back and took the punishment for me, that would not get me into the kingdom of God. All that would do would be keep me out of hell. I would still not be just.

I would be innocent, if you will, but still not just in a positive sense. I have no righteousness of which to speak. And remember, it's not simply innocence that gets me into the kingdom of God, it's righteousness. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you'll never get in to the kingdom of God. And so we can talk about maybe I'm not guilty of anything, but I haven't done anything.

I haven't merited anything whereby justice would give a reward. So the point is that there is a double transfer. Not only is the sin of man imputed to Christ, but what happens to the righteousness of Christ? The sin is transferred to Jesus. The righteousness of Christ is transferred to us, to our account, so that in God's sight this circle is now clean, so that God, when He declares me just, is not lying.

Incidentally, Rome has trouble with this. Rome calls this concept, the Protestant concept, a legal fiction, and they recoil from it because they sense that in the Protestant view of imputation that somehow this concept casts a shadow on the integrity of God because God is now declaring people just who are not just. The response of the Reformers was if the imputation were fictional, then when God declared us just, it would be a legal fiction.

It would be a lie, and that would be a blemish on the character of God. But the point of the Gospel is that the imputation is real, that God really laid my sins on Christ. And not only that, God really transferred the righteousness of Christ to me, and that there is a real union for those who are in Christ, that I really possess the righteousness of Jesus Christ by imputation. Christ is my righteousness. That's why He is my Savior, not merely because He died, but because He lived. Without the life, the atonement has no value. Without the act of obedience, the suffering on the cross is merely a tragedy, so that we must have the double transfer. So then God declares us just.

One last thing. Theologians like to have Latin phrases. One of my favorites is one offered by Luther. It's a very important phrase to capture this concept, and it would behoove us to learn it. The essence of our salvation is found in this phrase, simil justus et peccator.

The word simil is the same word from which we get the English word simultaneously, and it means simply at the same time. Justus is the word for just. At the same time, just, et, we all know what that means, et tu, brute, and you too, Brutus.

Et means and, peccator, peccadillo, a little sin, impeccable, without sin, simply the Latin word for sinner. At the same time, just and sinner. This is the glory of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, is that the person who is in Christ is at the very same instant just and a sinner.

That's the good news. The bad news would be I am unjust, God is just, and the only way I could be justified, it'd be for me first to become just. And have no sin in me. And if I have to wait until there's no sin in me to get into the kingdom of God, when is my starting time in heaven?

I don't have one, right? The whole point of the gospel is the minute you embrace Jesus Christ, all that Christ has done is apply to you. All that He is becomes yours, including His righteousness. And what Luther means by this at the same time, just and sinner, at the very instant that I believe I am just by virtue of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. It's Christ's righteousness that makes me just. And His death has taken care of my punishment.

His life has taken care of my reward. There it is, my justice is all tied up in Christ, and yet at the same time I am a sinner, considered in and of myself. It is sinners who are saved by the atonement.

It is the godly dying for the ungodly. That is the glory of the gospel and of the cross. And the only means by which the New Testament ever gives us that the justice, the righteousness, and the merit of Christ can ever come into your account and be applied to you is by faith.

You can't earn it, you can't deserve it, you can't merit it, you can only trust in it and cling to it. Justification by faith alone means very simply this, justification is by Christ alone. It's by His merit, His righteousness, His life, His death that we can stand in the presence of a holy God. And without Christ, we're without hope because all we can ever carry before God is our unjustness. No wonder the author of Hebrews said, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

The answer to the question is obvious, isn't it? You won't, you can't, because it's impossible for an unjust person to survive in the presence of a just God. We need to be justified. We're either going to do it through our own righteousness or through what the Reformers call an alienum justitia, a foreign righteousness. And the only foreign righteousness that is available for you is the righteousness of Christ.

So we can be reconciled to God because of the perfect life of Christ. That's the glorious good news of the gospel. Today's message from Dr. R.C. Sproul is part of his series, The Cross of Christ. We varied portions of the series each day this week, and we'll wrap up the series tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. I do hope you'll join us. If you've missed any of the series along the way, you can contact us with a donation of any amount, and we will add the full series to your learning library, plus the digital study guide. We'll also send you the hardbound copy of Dr. Sproul's book on the same theme, The Truth of the Cross. So contact us today with your gift at 800-435-4343 or on our website, renewingyourmind.org. Well, tomorrow is the last day of the year, and let me take just a moment to thank those of you who have supported us financially in 2021, our 50th year of ministry. God in His providence continues to open doors for us around the world to proclaim God's holiness, and that's why I'm asking you to consider a generous year-end gift that will help propel us into 2022 on a firm financial footing. To do that, just go to ligonier.org slash donate, and let me thank you in advance for your generosity.

That website again is ligonier.org slash donate. Well, as I mentioned, tomorrow we will wrap up Dr. Sproul's series, and here's a preview of what we'll hear. When Jesus takes the curse upon Himself, so identifies with our sin that He becomes a curse, God cuts Him off, and justly so, because at the moment that Christ takes upon Himself the sin of the world, that figure that is on the cross is the most obscene mass of sin concentrated in the history of the world. It's a message titled, Blessing or Curse? I hope you'll join us Friday for Renewing Your Mind. .