Salvation

On New Year's Day of 1937, Machen dies. Before he dies, he sends the telegraph and he says, so thankful for the active obedience of Christ, no hope without it. This is how a theologian dies, thinking about doctrine, thinking about the life-giving, the marrow of doctrine, and this doctrine of the obedience of Christ. Before I had ever read Christianity and liberalism, I was aware of that quote that Stephen Nichols just read from Machen, so thankful for the active obedience of Christ, no hope without it. Welcome to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. So why is that a popular quote? Why does a line like that circulate around the internet often? Because as Christians, we rejoice to think about what Christ has accomplished for his people. But liberalism, on the other hand, rejects the work of Christ. For the final day this week, as we've been working through J. Gresham Machen's classic book, Christianity and Liberalism, our teacher, Stephen Nichols, comes to Machen's final chapter on salvation. Today, you'll hear the good news of the gospel, the good news that you and I must defend, and you'll learn the context for that final telegram sent by Machen.

Here's Dr. Nichols. One of the verses that I love returning to again and again is Romans 5, 1. I think it so encapsulates what salvation ultimately is about in this single verse.

Paul here writes, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. You know, if you read the first chapter of Romans, you find out very quickly that we have a significant problem. And that problem is the wrath of God. We are under the wrath of God. And as you look at chapter 2 and as you look at chapter 3, it makes no difference whether you're a Jew or a Gentile.

Now, the same conclusion is reached for both. You're under the wrath of God. And then we get to verse 10 of chapter 3. And for 12 verses, all Paul does is string together Old Testament quote after Old Testament quote after Old Testament quote to say how unrighteous we are, how lost we are, which is to say we are under the wrath of God and there's nothing we can do about it. And as those Old Testament quotes pile on, it's as if another nail in the coffin and another nail in the coffin. And then Paul concludes, there is none righteous, not one. And what are we left with?

Right? We're left with our sin and we're left with the penalty of the wrath of God. But then we have one of those great little words, one of those conjunctions that comes, but. And what comes after that conjunction is Jesus Christ, who is the righteous one. And so from Romans 3 21 through the end of chapter 4, what do we have?

But a teaching of the justification by faith through the work of Christ on the cross. And it's brought to this wonderful summative conclusion in chapter 5 verse 1. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God.

We really only understand that verse when we understand ourself as sinful and God as holy, because then we understand how important this doctrine of justification by faith is. And then we understand what a celebration it is when we can finally say, we are at peace with this God of the universe. We are at peace with the holy God. And you know, we talked about it earlier, that prophecy, it actually is the way Luther ends the 95 theses. He ends by quoting from the Old Testament, the false prophets who say, peace, peace, but there is no peace. Do you remember what Luther says in the 95 theses?

Away with those prophets who say peace, peace, and there is no peace. Instead, cross, cross, and there is no cross. What's Luther doing there at the end of the 95 theses? He's saying this church, this false understanding of that you can just work your way right into heaven.

And if you don't work off all of that unrighteousness in this life, don't worry. You've purgatory, and maybe someone will come along and buy an indulgence to get you out of purgatory. If you buy an indulgence to get someone else out of purgatory and you will have peace with God. Luther says this is a false prophet.

You're saying peace, peace, and there is no peace because that's false. Instead, cross, cross, and there is no cross because there's no cross for you because Christ is the one who died on the cross for you. The cross was for Christ.

And then he gives you the free gift of salvation, having done for you what you could not do for yourself. That's how Luther ends the 95 theses. This is what Machen was dealing with in the liberal church. The liberal church was saying to you, peace, peace. But there is no peace there because for them, peace is just simply, remember, good people and an even better relationship with God. That was the message of salvation. That was the message of peace. But it's a false message, and so it's a false peace. We only have peace with God when we come to understand that we were under His wrath, that we were at enmity with God. There it is again, echoing Ephesians chapter two, we were by nature children of wrath.

And there's another conjunction, but God being rich in mercy. So, this is such a crucial text, and it gets at this doctrine of salvation. That's the chapter we have finally arrived at. It is the penultimate chapter in the book. We have one more chapter to go after this one, the doctrine of the church.

But in many ways, Machen has been building up to this. He said Christianity is ultimately a message. It's the gospel message. We need to know who God is. We need to know who man is. We need to know the book that this message is contained. That's the Bible.

We need to know the person behind the work. That's Jesus Christ, the God-man. And now we can get to it. We can get to the very message itself. Well, to understand the distinction between Christianity and liberalism, this is what Machen tells us. The truth is that the modern rejection of the doctrine of God's wrath. We're back in Romans 1.

We're teeing up the gospel. The rejection of the doctrine of God's wrath proceeds from a light view of sin, which is totally at variance with the teaching of the whole New Testament and of Jesus himself. Religion cannot be made joyful simply by looking on the bright side of God. For a one-sided God is not a real God, and it is the real God alone who can satisfy the longing of our soul. God is love, but is He only love?

See what Machen's doing there? He's helping us understand that this God is not just a one-dimensional God of our making, or a God of our choosing, or a God of our wishing, but it is the God as the Bible declares Him to be. And understanding that is everything for understanding salvation. Because one of the things that we need to see very quickly is that the issue in salvation is our guilt. And our guilt is not something that we've manufactured.

It's not a holdover from Victorian culture. It is a reality because, again, at our core, at our root, radix is the Latin word. And don't think radical, think radish, right?

You eat the root. We are at our core sinners. And as sinners, we are also, as Paul describes us, dead. And we are also, one more, unrighteous. We are creatures of guilt.

It's not manufactured. It's not imposed upon us. Guilt is a reality.

And that guilt is not a psychological dimension. It stems from who we are dispositionally as sinful creatures. Dead in our trespasses and sins, and unrighteous, and all of our works are as filthy rags. Well, as we dig into this doctrine of salvation, we find two words that speak directly to this true description of the human condition. These two words are regeneration and justification. Regeneration and justification.

Regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit. This goes back to Jesus in John chapter three. And there he is with Nicodemus.

Remember him? Nic at night, he comes to Jesus at night. And what does Jesus say to him? You must be born again.

And Nicodemus has no idea what he's talking about. How is it possible for me to go back and be born again? And then Jesus says, you know, you're born from above. You're born again. And ultimately, we'll see this doctrine get developed in places like Titus chapter two, where we see the Lord and the Holy Spirit is the agent of regeneration, of being born again. Regeneration is bringing life to our death. Regeneration is canceling out our being dead in trespasses and sins.

And now we are made alive. Justification. Again, we are unrighteous.

We have nothing good to offer God. And so what is justification? In justification, we are declared righteous. Declared righteous, not because of anything that we have done, but because of what Christ has done for us. So now, here we are made alive.

Here we are now righteous. These two doctrines, regeneration and justification, are crucial to this understanding of salvation. And what is taking place within this act of justification is this very crucial word, imputation.

We touched on this together last time, but it's worth going back and it's worth expanding a little bit because this is absolutely essential to understanding the orthodox doctrine of salvation. In imputation, what we see happening is that our sin is imputed to Christ. Imputed is an accounting term. It means to reckon.

This is what southerners say, I reckon I'm going to go on and do that today, but that's not what we're talking about. A reckoning is applying something to an account. And so we have sin and here's Jesus without sin. And he who knew no sin became sin for us. Our sin was imputed to Christ's account. And then what does Christ have? Christ has righteousness.

We talk about this as getting at the obedience of Christ, the passive obedience, the active obedience. That goes back to Adam. Adam did two things. Adam broke the law, so he did something he shouldn't have, but he also was not doing something that he should have.

He didn't keep the law perfectly. And so when Jesus came, the new Adam, the last Adam, Jesus is going to do two things. He's going to undo what Adam did. He's going to pay the penalty for Adam's sin and our sin. He's going to pay that penalty. And he is going to do what Adam did not do.

He's going to perfectly keep the law. I told you about Machen's death. It was the winter of 1936. He was exhausted, totally run down.

Travels to North Dakota in December, not a good place to be in the debt of winter if you're exhausted. And he gets pneumonia and he goes into the hospital. And on New Year's Day, 1937, Machen dies. Before he dies, he sends a telegraph. He loved getting and sending telegraphs.

He actually kept a lot of them. They're up in the archives of Westminster Seminary. He sent a telegraph to his colleague, professor back at Westminster, John Murray, professor of theology. And he says, so thankful for the active obedience of Christ no hope without it. This is how a theologian dies. Thinking about doctrine, thinking about the life-giving, the marrow of doctrine and this doctrine of the obedience of Christ, because Christ paid the penalty, our sin is canceled out.

But he did more than that. He also kept the law, his active obedience in his life and in his death. We have the passive and active obedience of Jesus Christ. And so what that means is this righteousness that Christ has accomplished can be applied to us. I remember one of the last things Dr. Sproul recorded, and it was in his office and he was talking about justification. And he said, if I were to die right now, I would be in heaven because I have all of the righteousness I will ever need because I am clothed in the righteous robe of Jesus Christ.

That's what imputation means. God doesn't see us. He doesn't look down and see us a sinner, child of wrath at enmity with him.

He looks at us and he sees his son and he sees the righteous robe of his son. Since, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. That's the doctrine of justification.

And behind it is imputation. Well, we know that this justification is by faith alone. Matron is going to say that this is not a process justification. It's an act of God. There is a moment in time when we have moment in time, make no mistake about it, where you are lost and then you are saved, where you are cursed and then you are declared righteous. It is an act, not a process. Now he does say, person might not always be cognizant of it. You might've grown up in a Christian home and you can't remember the day and the hour and the minute and whether it was raining outside or what the temperature was or what you were wearing, but make no mistake about it, it certainly was a moment in which you were converted. Your awareness of it, your cognition of it, well, that could very well vary depending on your circumstance. For some people, they remember exactly the moment. It was cataclysmic in their lives, but that may not be the case for all. But whatever your apprehension of it is, it's an act.

It's not a process. He goes on to say this about faith. To have faith in Christ means to cease trying to win God's favor by one's own character.

The man who believes in Christ simply accepts the sacrifice which Christ offered on Calvary. I love the way Machen says simply, resting in Christ alone. Faith is the end of our striving. It's the end of thinking we can somehow white knuckle it into the presence of God. It's the end of, remember he talked about this last time, the pride that is in the human heart that keeps the grace of God at bay.

Because God is going to accept me because of something that I have done that has made me look favorable in his eyes. Faith is the end of all that. Faith is the end of our striving and simply resting in what Christ has done. The other thing Machen is going to say is he's going to pull a playbook again from the Reformers and say, what are we talking about when we're talking about faith? And the Reformers said, well, we're talking about three things. We're talking about the Latin word notitia, but we're talking about propositions. The Latin word notitia means knowledge.

You could think of it in terms of statements, of fact, propositions. Propositions like God is holy. I am a sinner. Christ lived a perfect sinless life. Christ died on the cross. Christ was buried and rose again. Christ is the sinless substitute. Those are the propositions of the gospel.

That's the notitia. That's the first part. What is that saying but a content?

This is what Machen has been telling us all along. Christianity is a message. That message is an account of facts. That is a body of teaching. That is a doctrine.

The gospel is doctrine. It's propositions. But we must assent to that.

So there is notitia, and then there is assensus. And assent is a mental act. We are saying, yes, this is true. This is true of who I am as a sinner. This is true of my sin. This is true of who God is. This is true of who Christ is and of Christ's work. There's notitia.

There's assensus. That is on a cognitive level. And that reflects, again, the value of talking about the gospel as content. Liberalism couldn't be more wrong when it talks about the gospel as just simply experiencing Jesus. There is a content there. There is an object of our faith. It is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

But that third piece, that crucial piece to faith is the Latin word fiducia, or trust. We're talking about a content. Then we're talking about assenting to that content.

Yes, that's true. And then we say, and I'm putting an end to my striving and my ceasing and my trying to get to heaven by myself and my trusting in my works, my trusting in my goodness, my trusting on how buttoned up I am. And I'm resting in Christ alone.

I'm letting all of that go. And I'm trusting in Christ alone. That's saving faith. Well, while salvation is an act and not a process, it is an act that leads to a process, which is to say salvation leads to sanctification.

So Machen talks about that. We have the act of faith that is salvation. And then we have the life of faith and obedience that is sanctification, that is living the Christian life.

Make no mistake about it, works do not contribute to our salvation in any way, shape, or form, but they do follow from our salvation. And here's the thing, we are now different. We are ontologically different in our being.

What do I mean by that? You are no longer the person you were. You were dead in trespasses and sins.

Now you're made alive. You are, as Paul tells us in Galatians, a new creature. And so now we live for God, this process of sanctification. And here's the thing, and here's the thing, where do we live out our salvation? We live it out in the world and not always the world of our choosing, but we live it out in the world in which God puts us.

Let me read this to you for Machen. The other worldliness of Christianity involves no withdrawal from the battle of this world. Our Lord Himself, with His stupendous mission, lived in the midst of life's throng and press. Plainly then, the Christian man may not simplify his problems by withdrawing from the business of the world, but must learn to apply the principles of Jesus even to the complex problems of modern life.

Once we are saved, we are not beamed up to heaven and taken out of here. We are called to be sanctified. We are called to be holy, and we are called to be holy in this world with all of its throngs and press and perplexities and challenges and conflicts and controversies.

But it is in this world that we are called to live out our sanctification. As Machen said, may God help each of us apply the principles of Jesus even to the complex problems of modern life. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was Stephen Nichols helping us understand Machen's classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. Today is the final day that you'll be hearing messages from that series, and it's also the final day that we're making Ligonier's newly released 100th anniversary edition of Christianity and Liberalism available to you for your donation of any amount. So I encourage you to visit renewingyourmind.org, and when you give your gift of any amount, we'll send you that special edition along with Dr. Nichols' 12-message series, walking you through each chapter of Christianity and Liberalism, and you'll receive digital access to the study guide. Because this is the last day that we're making this book available for a donation of any amount, if you know someone that would appreciate this classic yet timely book from Machen, encourage them to visit renewingyourmind.org or call us at 800 435 4343. When you were a child, your parents might have said to you, actions have consequences. Well, did you know that ideas have consequences as well? That's what we'll be considering next week, beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.