How can we be right with God? How does God declare sinners righteous without violating his justice? Is justification a process or a point-in-time declaration? In this two-part podcast pastors Derek and Cliff answer these questions and more as they discuss the doctrine of justification.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to With All Wisdom, where we are applying biblical truth to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown and I’m here with Cliff McManis. We are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California. We both serve as professors at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary. Today we want to talk about a Christian doctrine that is so important. One well-known reformer is known to have said that it is the article on which the church stands or falls. This well-known reformer will be familiar to many of you. His name was Martin Luther and it’s somewhat disputed if he actually said those exact words, but it’s not disputed that he did in fact believe the truth stated in those words, namely that the doctrine we are going to talk about was so vital to the individual Christian and the church’s corporate health that if you got it wrong or if it became obscured, the church would be in a bad place. The doctrine to which we are referring is known as the doctrine of justification and Cliff and I are excited to spend some time talking about it and helping you, our listeners, get a better grasp on this important truth from God’s Word. But before we do, we want to encourage you to check out WithAllWisdom.org where you will find a large and growing collection of resources on a variety of theological, practical, and cultural issues that we trust will help you make progress in your walk with the Lord Jesus. Now on to our topic.
We mentioned Martin Luther at the beginning of this episode because it was Luther who, you might say, rediscovered this doctrine over 500 years ago. He was a Catholic monk and he was struggling mightily with a sense of his own sin, a troubled conscience, and the fear that God was angry with him. He would confess his sins incessantly, participate in religious duties, try to live a holy life, but he couldn’t rid himself of the sense that he wasn’t right with God. Eventually, as he was studying the book of Romans, he started to gain some understanding of what Paul meant when he wrote about the righteousness of God. Paul had thought that the righteousness of God in Romans was a reference to God’s righteous judgment upon sinners. Actually, Paul’s use of the phrase the righteousness of God was a reference to the gift of righteousness that God grants sinners through faith in Christ alone. Rather than laboring intensely to be right with God, Luther had only to believe in Christ to be fully forgiven of his sin, declared righteous, and be in right standing with God. Once he discovered this glorious truth, he said that he felt as though he were altogether born again. He said he felt like he entered into paradise and the sense of love and acceptance with God flowed into his mind and heart. From that point on, Luther became a champion of the precious truth he discovered, the doctrine of justification, and he labored for the rest of his life to spread this glorious life-giving burden-lifting truth to his countrymen and to the rest of the world, and we are thankful that God used him to do that. But then, as today, the doctrine of justification is being challenged, and we even feel like it’s being constantly challenged as we are here in our contemporary setting. And we believe this is the case because Satan has a particular interest in sowing confusion about this truth. Why this truth? Because justification is the very basis of our right standing with God. You tinker with this doctrine, and we are easily led to believe that our right standing with God is grounded in us in some way, in our works, in our religious activity, and so on. So we want to spend some time discussing a few vital truths from Scripture regarding this doctrine of justification. And so what we’re going to do in this episode is we’re going to discuss justification and discuss its definition. We’re going to say that justification is a legal declaration, that’s our first point. We’re going to say that justification is an instantaneous declaration, that’s our second. And then third, justification is an unchanging declaration, and that will all help us define justification, what it is. And then in the next episode, we will talk about justification is based on Christ’s righteousness credited to us. We’ll answer the question, how can God forgive sinners and declare them righteous when they are in fact sinful? And then we will talk about how this gift of justification is received. So let’s talk about our first point. Justification is a legal declaration. What we mean by this is you want to set yourself in a courtroom setting, you’re there, you’re the defendant, you are guilty, the plaintiff is the law, and the law has declared you to be a violator of the law, you’re a sinner, and you agree, and you’re in trouble. And then God does something amazing, the judge does something amazing, he actually looks at you and he says, you are innocent, and I not only declare you innocent, I declare you righteous. That would mean that he just justified you. And we’ll talk about how God is able to do this in a moment, but that’s what we’re talking about. It’s a legal term. God is declaring you righteous. This is a status term. This is not, the declaration of righteousness does not have to do with your own practical righteousness, the righteousness in your own heart, or anything like that. It is an external ruling, a declaration from God where he says that you are righteous. And this word is used several times throughout the New Testament. Romans 3:21-30 is an excellent example if you wanted to check that out in your Bibles. Romans 4:5-6, Romans 5:1, Galatians 2:16, and I just want to look at a passage briefly, Romans 3:21, and following before I hand it over to Cliff to see if he has thoughts about this topic. Paul says this, he says, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe their righteousness of God is that gift of righteousness that God gives through faith in Christ. For there is no distinction for all who have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there it is, declared righteous by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation, that word means wrath bearing sacrifice, by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness. What does that mean? God had to demonstrate that he was truly righteous because in the Old Testament he was forgiving sinners. But how could he forgive sinners and still be just? Who paid for those person’s sins? Well, he had to declare and demonstrate his righteousness at the present time and what he did that by sending his son, it says, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. God forgave David. How could he do that and still remain a just God? So he sends Jesus and Jesus pays the punishment that David deserves so that when God forgave David, he was just and righteous in doing so. And when he forgives us as sinners and declares us righteous, he is just and right in doing so. Why? Well, because Christ has paid for our sins. It says, continuing in Romans 3, it was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier, the one who declares righteous, you could say, of the one who has faith in Jesus. So here what you have is you have a legal courtroom setting. God is declaring a person righteous. It is not based on any practical or intrinsic righteousness, but based on this verbal declaration that God declares. And so, Cliff, I want to hand it over to you to see what you have to say about this topic.
Cliff: Yeah, thanks, Derek. So our topic today is on justification. Wow, that’s a big word, a lot of syllables. And we have several words like that, justification, imputation, propitiation, and on and on. But all these words are in the Bible, and we need to understand what they mean, and they are all somewhat related under the category of the doctrine of soteriology or salvation. And I’m just reminded of when I first got saved, when I was 19 or 20 or so. For a couple of years, I would take all those terms, as I’m reading my Bible and I come across the word justified or justification or imputation or propitiation, I really didn’t know what they meant, other than I just kind of threw them under the general category of salvation or born again. And really, I kind of smushed them all together and conflated all those terms, and it wasn’t until years later where I realized, no, these words are specific. They have a different nuance, and they mean something, and I need to understand that meaning. I can’t just mush them all together, meaning that they all generally are synonyms for salvation. They’re related to it, but they’re definitely different, and justification is one of those that has this unique meaning that took me years to get, and it was a mentor. It was actually during seminary where he explained this to me in a way that I could remember or never forget, and I understood it for the first time, the way the Bible teaches it, because your definition of justification, he said, is it’s a legal declaration, or the way he said it was, Cliff, justification is a forensic declaration from God. And I didn’t know what forensic meant, and I thought, wow, that doesn’t help. He just confused matters, and then he said, well, let me give you an illustration. It’s like when you get married and you and your fiancé, you go into the church building and you’re not married, but when you walk out of the church building on your wedding day with your spouse, something has changed. You are now married. So what changed between the time you walked into the building as two single people and walked out of the building as one married couple, legally married before God? What happened? When did that change? Where in the ceremony did that change? Who did something to make that change? Well, actually, it came down to an authoritative legal declaration that was made by the officiating representative of God, our pastor, who said, I declare you married as a husband and wife. And it was in that moment of declaration, that verbal declaration that literally changed our status of being single to now being a married couple before those witnesses, before the law of the land, and also before God Almighty. So it was a legal declaration that changed everything. It primarily changed our status or our standing. Nothing about me as a person really changed. I was still the same goofy Cliff, and we were still two sinners. But our legal status had changed, and it came down to this legal declaration. So that metaphor really helped me understand what we’re talking about here.
Derek: No, and I think that marriage metaphor is a very, very helpful, really helpful illustration for illustrating what we’re talking about with justification being a legal declaration. We’re talking about a status change, not an intrinsic change here. I want to point to Romans 4:5, because Romans 4:5 is one of my favorite verses, because it so clearly explains what God has done in this work of justification. It says this, and to the one who does not work, this is Romans 4:5, and to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. And the reason this is important, I asked my students this yesterday, I said, when God justified you, were you godly or ungodly? And they’re kind of scratching their heads and wondering what’s the right answer, right? And I wanted them to see in this text that the moment you’re justified, you’re still ungodly. Now, God begins at that moment a process of what we would call sanctification. He gives you the Holy Spirit, and you do. You begin a process of sanctification and growing in Christ’s likeness. But the fact that this text says that he justifies the ungodly shows us that it wasn’t on the basis of our godliness that he justified us, which is a hugely important point in terms of our own assurance. We don’t gain justification by our righteous deeds, and we don’t lose it, as we’ll talk about in a little bit, by our unrighteous deeds. Just a vital point.
Cliff: Yeah, absolutely. And just the fact in that verse that you just quoted from Romans 4, it’s not by works, right? It’s strictly, and it’s not by what we do. It’s not our works, but God’s declaration to radically different realities.
Derek: Yep. All right. So justification is a legal declaration that’s vital. Next is we want to say that justification is an instantaneous declaration. What do we mean by this? Well, I remember like you as an early Christian, as a young Christian, you’re saved, and you have a new heart, and you just love Jesus, and you enjoy the Word, you don’t know a whole lot, and I came into some spiritual troubles that may have been avoided had I had some knowledge that I gained later. But this particular point I learned reading from a helpful theologian, and his point was to say that justification occurs at the moment you place faith in Jesus. And we just had read that in Romans 3:26, that God would be the just and the justifier of whom? The one who has faith in Jesus, and then Romans 5:1. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s an instantaneous thing. It’s not something that you attain after a certain amount of time, or years, or of trying, and that’s why it’s important to distinguish this as a legal declaration, that this is not something that I must gain a certain amount of practical righteousness, and then boom, ten years of that, boom, now you’re justified. This justification, this declaration from God happens the moment I place faith in Jesus Christ. And this is vital too, because Luther, he wanted to uphold, Luther and the Reformers wanted to uphold the truth that we’re justified, we’re declared righteous by faith alone, and by upholding this definition here that justification is an instantaneous declaration, we do, we protect that idea that justification is by faith alone, because we’re saying that it doesn’t happen over the course of your life, it doesn’t happen by you adding works to faith, no, it happens by faith alone, it’s instantaneous the moment you place faith in Jesus Christ.
Cliff: Yeah, and the fact that it is instantaneous is that it’s also complete when it’s instantaneous, absolutely thorough, complete. God makes this declaration, everything that is needed is completely satisfied by His declaration, and also, he hinted at the fact that it’s an instantaneous declaration that happens at a moment of time, justification is not a process that happens over a long period of time, or through steps, the seven steps I’ve got to do to get justified. And for me and you, with our Roman Catholic background, me for almost 19 years, having grown up in the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church has a doctrine of justification, but it’s not the biblical view, because the Catholic view or doctrine of justification is actually a process, it’s kind of like you have a spiritual IV that you stick in your arm, and you have to continue to drip, drip, drip, and do all these things and works that the Catholic Church requires so you can earn justification one piece at a time, incrementally, over time, as a matter of fact, over the course of your whole lifetime, and never in this life have you done enough to realize that, oh, yes, I’m finally justified, it doesn’t happen in this life, you can never know. So you have no security whatsoever, and you’re just guilt-ridden, really, your whole life with that theology.
Derek: Yeah, one of the things I try to explain to the students and also to our young adults is that God has structured salvation in such a way that He intends for you to have assurance of your salvation, and the things that we’re talking about today, justification is a legal declaration, instantaneous, and then another one that we’ll see in a moment, unchanging, all of these are given and made so that the believer can have assurance of their salvation. The Catholic doctrine of justification completely undermines any assurance whatsoever because you can’t have the confidence, you’ve already said, you can’t have the confidence that you’ve attained to this declaration of righteous standing with God, because they’ve conflated sanctification and justification. Justification is a kind of what happens after you grow in enough Christ-likeness, and we would say, biblically speaking, justification happens, it’s God’s declaration, it’s by faith alone, and then you start a process of sanctification. But your justification is not changed by your sanctification, it is a sure instantaneous thing that has already happened. So Catholic doctrine actually undermines the assurance that God has intended for us to have.
Cliff: Pastor Derek, I have a question for you. Do you think every true born-again Christian should have a specific doctrine of assurance in their own life?
Derek: Yes, absolutely.
Cliff: And that would be foreign to the worldview of a Catholic, because it was to me. I was never taught that, 12 years of Catholic school.
Derek: Neither was I.
Cliff: That was new to me, a doctrine of assurance, and then when I got saved, I went back and talked to all my priests that I grew up with, and the nuns that I grew up with, and family members who were still Catholic, and I was trying to explain this assurance stuff. That actually offended them, and every single one of them, you can’t know in this life, you can’t have that assurance. How arrogant of you. So this is really a distinctive of biblical Christianity, that you can have a doctrine of assurance, and actually every Christian, I think, is obligated to pursue that, and have that informed. And you can’t have that unless you have a proper understanding of the doctrine of justification.
Derek: That’s right. Yeah, that’s a really excellent point. It’s not arrogant to believe and to pursue what God has actually laid out in Scripture. God desires, it’s His will that we would have assurance, and so when He’s made promises and laid everything out so that we might have it, it’s actually arrogant to not receive and accept that. And so, that’s an excellent point. Finally, we want to wrap this episode up by saying that justification is an unchanging declaration, and this is vital, because again, it ties to assurance, because if you think that you can undo justification, then there is no basis for assurance, because I mean, I don’t know about you, but if I could undo justification, I would undo it, because I’m sinful, and I’m prone to sin, and if it’s left up to me, I’m in serious trouble. And so, we need to emphasize that justification is an unchanging declaration. You see that in the way the word is used and defined in the text that we’ve already read. You see that in the way Paul describes all of our sins being forgiven in Colossians 2:13. Every sin, present and future, has been forgiven. God has established our right standing, and He will not revoke it. It cannot be changed. If you are justified, here’s the glorious truth, if you are justified, you are justified for all eternity. It cannot be overturned or undone by our failure to do righteousness practically, by our sin, or any of those things. And one thing I’ll just note for a moment and see what your thoughts are, is this is sometimes maligned, this doctrine that we’re talking about is sometimes maligned, because folks will say, well, if you believe all that, then you’ll never really walk in holiness or pursue holiness, because, well, there’s really no motivation to. And I would say, actually, the exact opposite is true. When I’m fully understanding these truths, I see God as wonderful, beautiful, I love Him, I love the Lord Jesus, and I’m just thankful, and I just want to pursue Him, and know Him, and serve Him even more. So that kind of obscuring the truth by that idea that you won’t be motivated to pursue holiness, if you say it like this, or if you define justification this way, I think is a real disservice to Christians. Actually, the exact opposite is true. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Cliff: Yeah, great point. Justification is an unchanging declaration by God. It is irrevocable.
Derek: Yeah.
Cliff: The reason it’s irrevocable is because God is the one who initiated it. It’s based on what He did, not my works.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: That’s why it’s irrevocable. I think of this verse when you define it that way, of Romans 8:28 and following. But in verse 29, He’s talking about just the greatness of our salvation and all the different truths that play into our overall salvation. He says this, matter of factly, and this is true of every Christian, in verse 30, actually, He says, those whom God has justified will be glorified. So literally, it’s or have been glorified. So He’s guaranteeing there in Romans 8, if you’ve been justified, you will be glorified. It is guaranteed.
Derek: Yeah.
Cliff: So there is no way that a person who has been justified by God through that legal declaration based on the work of Christ can undo it, and glorification is guaranteed. As a matter of fact, Paul puts the glorification of it in the past tense, even though it hasn’t happened yet, thus guaranteeing all the more that God started salvation. He’s going to complete it with glorification, as Paul says in Philippians 1. This is His work. He will finish His work to perfection.
Derek: Yeah, I’m really glad you pointed to that verse. That really ties that together, that instantaneous or that unchanging part of justification. That ties it up really nicely. Well, we are thankful that you joined us in this discussion of a very important topic, the doctrine of justification. We’re going to come back in a later episode to finish up. We’re going to talk about how justification is based on Christ’s righteousness credited to us, and we’ll also talk about how you receive that gift of justification. And until then, we just encourage you again to check out withallwisdom.org, where you’ll find many resources, even resources talking about the doctrine of justification. You can check those out at withallwisdom.org. Until then, we’ll see you again next time.
