Paul versus Peter

The doctrine of justification by faith alone does not require a PhD in theology to understand.

It's simple. But to get it in your head is one thing. To get it in the bloodstream where you live on the basis of justification by faith alone is so hard that even the Apostle Peter was caving in to this Judaizing heresy. Justification by faith alone, it's central to the good news, and it's always under attack.

That's why R.C. Sproul preached and taught this doctrine with such passion and clarity, and why Ligonier Ministries and Renewing Your Mind by God's grace will never waver or shrink back from the clarity and precision of Gospel truth. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where each week we feature the preaching ministry of R.C.

Sproul. This week, we're starting a new series in Galatians, an important epistle that responds sharply to attacks against the Gospel, and one that we need to read, study, and meditate upon as we continue to have our minds renewed according to Scripture. This is a four-message study with Dr. Sproul unpacking the Gospel and the dangers of legalism. But if you'd like to study the entirety of Galatians until midnight tonight, you can request Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary on Galatians when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, if you have your Bible with you, open it to Galatians chapter 2.

Here's Dr. Sproul. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. Where before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews, hypocritically along with him, said that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. When I saw their conduct was not in step with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you though a Jew live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Jesus Christ in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. Before we look at this text that I've just read, let's remember the full context of this letter to the Galatians, where Paul is writing to address a very serious heresy that had arisen among the Galatians, what's called the Judaizing Heresy, where certain converts under the apostolic ministry then changed their position and began to think of justification as a combination between faith and works and insisted upon the keeping of the Jewish law, both ceremonial and moral, even among the Gentile converts. At the center and at the core of the problem is the question of the truth of the Gospel. And then in a secondary sense, Paul is defending his credentials as an apostle called from God and by Christ directly, therefore giving his authority, his apostolic authority, to the preaching that the Galatians had received. And last week we looked at how the first aspect of this trip to Jerusalem where the apostles were clearly of one mind, and they had the right hand of fellowship between Peter and Paul, and we think of these two as the titans of the early church, where Peter was principally the apostle to the Jews and Paul the apostle to the Gentiles. And now suddenly everything changes, and we see a conflict that arises between these two titans of the faith, something you would never expect to read in sacred Scripture that there was some kind of falling out between Peter and Paul. But there it is.

It's right in front of us. It's in Paul's own words what he says, but when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. You know, Peter had learned at Cornelius' household through Espresso Revelation that all things were considered free from contamination with respect to unclean foods. God announced that these things that had been unclean in the Old Testament were now clean, and he was free to eat with Gentiles whatever they were eating. And so Peter then would continue with the presence of Gentiles to sit down with the Gentiles and eat like a Gentile. That was fine until a delegation that was sent by the Judaizers from Jerusalem came up to see what was doing. And as soon as Peter saw this party of the circumcised coming, all of a sudden he ducked out a fellowship with the Gentiles, and all of a sudden became a strict dietary Jew out of fear. And Paul said, Peter, this is dissembling. This is hypocrisy. You're not doing this for the sake of the gospel. You're doing it because you're playing favorites.

You're doing it because you're afraid of the party of the circumcision. And so he rebuked Peter. And the assumption that we find in the rest of the Scriptures is that Peter accepted that rebuke, that the relationship between Paul and Peter was not destroyed. It was healed.

It was repaired. But not until or before Paul had to call him out publicly for his deception. But also, he said, the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?

That's radical inconsistency. And again, Paul sees what's at stake here, the gospel, so that even Barnabas, who was Paul's partner in his ministry to the Galatians, was starting to weaken and fall into the Judaizing trap of thinking that somehow he had to add good works to faith in order to be justified. Now we get to the heart of the matter where Paul says, For we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, and yet we know that a person is not justified by the works of the law. We know that.

We learned that. Even as Jews, we knew that it wasn't the law that saved us. But through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.

Did you hear that? And Romans says the same thing, verse 19 of chapter 3, We know that by whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable. For by the works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since to the law comes the knowledge of sin. Again, the same words that he speaks here to the Galatians he spoke to the Romans. By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in the sight of God. And that no flesh means nobody, no person, no one could ever possibly be justified by the works of the law. Now Paul is laboring this whole doctrine of the gospel of justification by faith alone. And really this gospel is very simple. The doctrine of justification by faith alone does not require a Ph.D. in theology to understand. It's simple. A six-year-old child can understand it if you explain it.

But to get it in your head is one thing. To get it in the bloodstream where you live on the basis of justification by faith alone is so hard that even the Apostle Peter was caving in to this Judaizing heresy. I guess it was forty-seven years ago, I'm not sure exactly. I was a minister in Cincinnati, Ohio, and part of my job description was to be the minister of evangelism.

And I trained a whole lot of people. The method of evangelism that was done by Jim Kennedy, the evangelism explosion method of evangelism, and it had two diagnostic questions. Some of you will remember it. The first question you would ask a person is, have you come to the place in your thinking where you know for sure that when you die you're going to go to heaven? The genius of this plan of evangelism was it started with a question that people felt comfortable in answering no to, because in fact people were not only willing to say, I'm not sure that I'm going to go to heaven, but they were suspicious of anybody that said they were sure that they were going to go to heaven. So it wasn't hard to ask the question, do you know now that when you die you're going to go to heaven?

Easy question. Second question was this one. If you were to die tonight, and you stood before God, and God said to you, why should I let you into My kingdom? What would you say? Now when we did that work of evangelism in Cincinnati, we would keep records of how people would answer that question, and ninety percent of the people who would listen to that question, what would you say to God if God said to you, why should I let you into My heaven?

Ninety percent, these were basically church people, people who in my class on Romans for heaven's sake, they were answering the question with some kind of works righteousness. They would say, well Lord, I tried to live a good life. I tried not to harm anybody.

I didn't commit any criminal felonies or anything like that. And so I think that to the best of my ability, I did what You wanted me to do. And so that's why I think You ought to let me into heaven. When I asked that question to you a moment ago, what was your answer in your mind?

If you're like most people, you gave something of a works righteousness answer, well I tried to live a good life. There's got to be more to it than faith alone. So many people have a caricature of the Roman Catholic Church. They think that Protestants believe in justification by faith, and Catholics believe in justification by works.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not only not true. It's slanderous to Roman Catholics. I don't know of any Roman Catholic theologian who wouldn't say that justification is by faith. In the sixteenth century, the Counter-Reformation assembled the church ecumenically at Trent, or Trento in Italy, and therefore called the Council of Trent, in which the Catholic Church gave its definitive dogma, formal definition of how justification occurs. And at the very beginning of their exposition of the doctrine of justification, they labor the point that justification is by faith.

How so? Three things they say, that faith is necessary for justification because in the first place it is the initiation for justification, the initium. Secondly, it's the foundation of justification, fundamentum. And thirdly, it's the root of justification, the rodex of justification. So the initiation, the foundation, and the root of justification is by faith. The big dispute in the sixteenth century wasn't whether justification was by faith.

It was the same issue in the Galatian church. The question was, was it justification by faith alone, or was it through justification by faith plus something else, namely the works of the law? The Roman Catholic Church talked about saving faith and said you had to have it, but saving faith, if you have it and it's authentic, if it's real, doesn't guarantee justification. In other words, you can have faith as an initiation, as a foundation, and as the root of your justification, but still not be justified. A person can have saving faith and commit mortal sin and go to hell and spend eternity there. Or you can have saving faith, and if you have one blemish on your soul, even if you've gone through the sacrament of penance that it's the second plague of salvation or justification for those who make shipwreck of their souls, that if even you go through the sacrament of penance and it restores your status of justification, if you have one blemish on your soul when you die, you don't go to heaven, you go to purgatory.

Only a handful of people in the history of the church ever went straight to the church, ever went straight to heaven, and those few who had more merit than they needed, merit that was deposited in the treasury of merit. That was what the indulgence controversy was all about in the sixteenth century. And so the issue was whether justification is by faith alone, or is it by faith plus? In the sacrament of penance, to be restored to a state of justification, one has to do works of satisfaction in which they earn meritum de congruo, merits of congruity, not merit that's good enough that requires God to justify you, but merit that makes it fitting or congruous for God to justify you.

But you have to have those works. Now we believe you have to have works as the fruit of your justification, as the proof of your justification, as the evidence of your justification. But those works that evident your justification don't count one iota towards your justification. They don't cause your justification. The instrumental cause of justification is faith and faith alone.

That's the dispute here. This is what it's all about between Paul and Peter in the apostolic community where he says, we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law, no one will be justified. No one, not Peter, not Paul, not me, and not you. I don't care how high your pile of good works may be. They are not high enough or good enough for your justification in the sight of God. The only one whose works are good enough for justification are the works of Jesus. That's why you have to have Jesus, because your works aren't good enough.

You can work as hard as you can from now until kingdom come, and when that kingdom comes, if all you have are your works, you will perish forever. Maybe you've heard this too often. Maybe I beat this drum too heavily. Can you hear it?

Do you hear it? How hard do I have to beat it? How hard did the Apostle have to beat it hard enough that it could reach even the ears of Peter and of Barnabas so that they so that they would not lose what they understood and go backwards to the law which couldn't save them in the first place? And if it wasn't able to save them in the first place, it certainly wasn't able to save them in the second place. And if you go back to works after believing in Christ, you're turning away from the gospel, and you have no Savior left. Now I've heard people say about the sixteenth-century Reformation that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that it was a tempest in a teapot.

The whole thing was overdone over one little word, aline, alone. But that's what Luther said was the article upon which the church stands or falls, and it's the article by which you stand or fall. And what Paul is saying to Peter is that that Peter is the article by which you stand or fall because it's faith in Christ, because it's trusting in His righteousness, which is given or transferred to all who believe, what Luther called a righteousness that is a eustitium alienum, a foreign righteousness.

It's not your own. And again, it's what Luther said, a righteousness that is extra nos. Excuse me for all this Latin, but sometimes that's the only way we remember things. Extra nos, that's not so hard.

Extra means outside of, apart from, nos means us. So that the righteousness by which we are justified is an alien righteousness. It's not a righteousness that we possess.

It is not something that we gain or that we merit. Abraham says, this is the sixth chapter of Trent, that until or unless with the help of grace, with the help of Jesus, with the help of faith, you finally come to the place in your life where true righteousness inheres within you, you will not be justified. God will never declare you just until or unless you really are just.

Inherence is the word that is used by the theologians at Trent, which that word is still on the books today and is still maintained as vigorously as it ever was in the 1990s Roman Catholic catechism. You've got to be inherently righteous or God won't pronounce you righteous. Otherwise, if God says you're righteous, Rome looks at that as a legal fiction.

It's a lie. God is saying you're righteous when you're not. That's why Luther responded, again with another Latin phrase, forgive me simil jusus et peccator, at the same time righteous and sinner. I am righteous by God's granting me the righteousness of Christ, but in and of myself, I'm still a sinner. How long do you think you're going to have to wait to become sinless to get into the kingdom of God? If I have to wait till I'm sinless, if I have to go as much purging of purgatory that requires me to have every blemish removed from my soul, it would be a heck of a long time to wait to get home with my Savior. And as I said, if I believed that I had to do good works in order to get into the kingdom of God, I would be in utter despair.

I would sleep in tomorrow morning. I wouldn't waste my time with going to church. I wouldn't waste my time with Jesus because it would be a fool's errand indeed because it's not possible by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. That's not gospel. I mean, to think that you're going to have to have works in order to be justified destroys the gospel. There is no gospel. Paul's already labored that point. If anybody tells you another gospel, if it's the pope, if it's an angel from heaven, if it's St. Peter or Barnabas or Silas or even Paul, what you're hearing is not the gospel.

It's bad news, not good news. But the good news is the just shall live by faith, that is the righteous shall live by trust, by trusting in the One who was righteous, who did fulfill the law, who kept every jot and tittle of the law, not for Himself in order to qualify for salvation. But for me, Jesus is my righteousness.

And if you're a Christian, Jesus is your righteousness. You have no other righteousness before God every time we sing rock of ages cleft for me. We get to one verse, and I look down, and my wife is always doing the same gesture.

She's doing like this. What's that mean? There's that verse. Nothing in my hand I bring. And then what do I do? I open my hand. My hand never leaves my wrist. No magic. Show that it's empty.

Nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to the cross I cling. The just shall live by faith.

Amen. Jesus is our righteousness. And may we as Christians never forget this incredible gospel truth.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul preaching from Galatians chapter two as we begin a four-week sermon series on the gospel and the dangers of legalism. If you have not done a serious study of Galatians, I would commend it to you.

And you can do that with R.C. Sproul as your pastoral and theological guide when you request his line-by-line study of Galatians when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. This hardcover commentary can be your aid in Bible study, but it would also make for wonderful devotional reading. And know that every donation is helping take trusted teaching that proclaims and defends the doctrine of justification by faith alone to the nations. So give your gift while there's still time at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you. Next time we move ahead to Galatians chapter three to a section that Dr. Sproul describes as perhaps the weightiest and most significant portion of the entire epistle. So don't miss the sermon next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind.