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 am here today with Cliff McManis. We are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and we both serve as professors at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary, and today is part two of a podcast we started last week on the doctrine of Justification. We mentioned last week that this is a vital doctrine that Christians need to know, need to know deeply, to embrace. It’s essential for our assurance of salvation, and so last week we talked about definitions, and this week we’re going to talk about how it is that God can justify sinners and how we receive that gift of justification. But before we get into our topic for today, 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 will help you make progress in your walk with the Lord Jesus.
Well, on to our topic. Last week we mentioned that justification is a legal declaration. It’s forensic. It’s something that has to do with a courtroom setting, you might say, where God the Judge declares you righteous. It’s not based on any intrinsic righteousness that you have or anything that you have done. In fact, it says in Romans 4:5 that God justifies the ungodly, and he does it through faith alone. And it’s a legal declaration. We also said that justification is an instantaneous declaration. You don’t try to achieve a certain amount of goodness or righteousness over the course of your life and then be rewarded with justification. Justification happens at the moment that you put your faith in Jesus Christ. And then finally, justification is an unchanging declaration. God will not revoke your justification. Once you are justified, you are always justified, to the point where Paul can talk like this, that those whom God has called, he has justified. Those whom he has justified, he has glorified. God will not revoke your justification. And all of these three put together are essential. They’re vital for understanding justification, and practically, they are vital for our assurance of salvation. We do not lose our justification. We do not enjoy our justification based on our works. We enjoy it, as we’ll see today, because of what Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior, has done for us. And so we want to talk about that right now. You know, some folks have called this idea of justification, or actually the idea of imputation, what we’re going to talk about today. There’s another big word, and we’ll describe what that is. But some have suggested that this idea of imputation is a kind of legal fiction. And we want to point out that it’s not. It’s biblical. But it’s important to do so because we need to answer the question of how God can justify ungodly sinners. There’s actually, in the Proverbs, Proverbs 17:15 says that God abominates someone who justifies the ungodly and condemns the innocent. And so we have to explain, we did explain a little bit of this last week, we have to explain how it is that God can remain just and yet declare righteous people who have broken His law. People have committed heinous crimes against Him and against people. We need to establish how He does that. And an important word we’ve already mentioned is imputation. God, we’ll just say it briefly here, and then we’ll go on to explain it. God justifies us, He declares us righteous, by imputing Christ’s righteousness to our account. And this is important. There are words of external realities that are outside of us so that our account that Christ’s righteousness is credited to. This is not some sort of intrinsic righteousness that God infuses into us, but rather a reckoning that God makes by giving us Christ’s righteousness. And there are a couple of passages in the New Testament, both in Romans, where we derive this doctrine of imputation. The first one is in Romans 4, verses 5 through 8, and I’m just going to read those. Paul writes, And to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. And the words we’re looking at here is the word counts, counted, counts, in verses 4 and 5. And we see that Paul is saying that it’s the one who believes who is counted as righteousness. And then verse 6, it says God counts righteousness to that person who believes apart from works. And this word counts is the word that we’ve used that you can explain as an imputation, a reckoning you might say, that God sees us as sinners. We are sinners. But then when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, He then takes that righteousness of Christ, that real life righteousness. Jesus was a man, He’s the God man who lived here on this earth for 30 plus years. He lived out practical, real righteousness before God, His Father. He never sinned. He was the unblemished, spotless lamb who then went to the cross. And He attained full righteousness before God, never sinning, always doing what pleased the Father, He would say.
And so He has a perfect righteousness so that then when we are united to Him, joined to Him by faith, we get that righteousness. It’s not our righteousness inherently. It’s the righteousness of Christ, but nevertheless, God now views us as possessing that very righteousness that Christ has because we are united to Him and He counts us righteous, He counts us righteous apart from works as Paul says in Romans 4:6. And then in Romans 5:12-21, Paul uses a different word there. He uses the word made, which can also be translated as appointed or accounted, not made in the sense of some sort of forming, but made in the sense of accounting or appointed. And he says that in verse, we will look down, if you have your Bibles, you want to look down to verses 18 and following, it says, Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience, that’s Adam, the many were made sinners or accounted sinners, so by the one man’s obedience, that’s Jesus’ obedience, the many will be made or counted as righteous. And this is language that we’ve already mentioned of accounting, of appointing, of status, really. And these are not words that have to do with our intrinsic righteousness, but rather the righteousness of Christ credited to us when we believe in Him and are united to Him. And so this is how God justifies the ungodly. And as we noted last week, God is fully righteous when He does this, because when He forgives, He doesn’t just forgive. You know, I’ve talked to some folks who are adherents of other religions, and I asked them, how do you get forgiveness? And they said, well, our God just forgives us. And then I try to challenge them and say, well, if that’s the case, then your God is unjust. Our God, the one true God, is not unjust. He forgives, but He takes care of all the sin. He remedies or repairs justice, and that’s what He did in Christ. Christ is our righteousness. God has a righteous demand. We have a requirement, and we have totally violated that requirement. We are sinners. We have fallen short of the glory of God. We deserve punishment. That’s what justice would do. But God does forgive us. How does He do that? He gives us the righteousness of Christ. Christ is in our place. We are united to Him. He has paid for our sins. He has fulfilled all righteousness, and now we have His righteousness imputed to our account. Cliff, what do you want to say about this?
Cliff: That’s some heavy duty stuff.
Derek: It is. It is.
Cliff: And so what you’re telling me, somebody out there might be listening. So you’re trying to tell me that here’s God, creator of the universe, holy, perfect, sinless, God tolerates sin, He’s the perfect judge, and then He looks at someone like you or me who is sinful to the core and guilty and actually deserves physical death and eternal death and hell forever, and then God the judge, the holy judge, just looks on us and makes a declaration that we call justification and says, you are not guilty.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: As a matter of fact, not only are you not guilty, you’re innocent. Is that what you’re saying?
Derek: That’s exactly what I’m saying.
Cliff: And someone, as you alluded to there, might think, well, that’s not fair. That’s completely unjust because God’s skirting the law. He doesn’t care about justice because where there is sin, there needs to be death. God requires death for sin. So why are we getting off scot-free? And what you’re saying is we’re not getting off scot-free.
Derek: We’re not.
Cliff: Somebody had to die.
Derek: That’s right. Absolutely. And that’s Paul’s point in Romans 3:21-26, that God remains just because someone did in fact die. God requires perfect righteousness, and there’s someone who provides it 100% in our place.
Cliff: And that’s where this big, you used another big word there, imputation, and you didn’t make that up. That’s in the Bible.
Derek: That is. Right.
Cliff: You gave some translations for it, imputation. So as you said, justification comes from the courtroom and imputation comes from the accounting room. So an accounting term. I think some of your definitions there, synonyms for imputation, were reckon, you said, credited to, impute, that’s the old King James word, but that’s what it means. So it’s a transfer, right?
Derek: Yes.
Cliff: So anyway, that’s important to keep in mind the distinction of those terms. But justification is made possible by the work of imputation.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: Okay.
Derek: That’s right. An important piece to this, and something we don’t want to forget, we don’t want these things to become abstract and kind of out there. And the way we keep them from becoming abstract is by following the logic of scripture. And we are to understand these things, I think, in union with Christ. So we need the benefits that Christ has accomplished for us. How do we get them? We get them no other way except for being united to Him. So we’re united to Him by faith. His death has benefited us now. His righteousness benefits us now because we are united to a person, and the person has accomplished all righteousness in our place. That’s why we receive, well, that’s why we’re counted righteous, imputed, or whatever words you would like to use, whatever synonym you would like to use. So we are imputed with the righteousness of Christ. We have Christ’s righteousness credited to us because we are united to Him.
Cliff: Derek, can you maybe go to, I mean, there’s a lot of verses we can go to, but I think 2 Corinthians 5:21 is a good one. And just explain this a little further, this imputation thing.
Derek: Sure. Well, this is a wonderful verse. It’s a verse that has caused many to describe it as the great exchange. And the great exchange goes like this. We have sin, and that sin will only get us judgment. Christ has righteousness, and that will get us right standing with God. But how do we get that righteousness? Well, here you have in 2 Corinthians 5:21, it says this. For our sake, He, that’s God, made Him to be sin who knew no sin. So God didn’t make Jesus intrinsically unrighteous. He didn’t make Jesus intrinsically a sinner. That’s not what the text is saying, but rather that He laid upon Jesus our sin and reckoned as a sinner, though Jesus was never in any way a sinner, even while on the cross bearing our sin. And why did He do all that?
Cliff: He treated Him like a sinner.
Derek: Exactly. Treated Him like a sinner. Not only that, treated Him like the worst sinner the world has ever seen.
Cliff: And how do you treat a sinner? You kill him.
Derek: That’s right. That’s right. So God makes Him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin. Why did He do that? So that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. And here again, this is not being, the idea here is not that we’re made somehow intrinsically righteous. Rather, this is the great exchange. This is our sin being counted to Jesus, His righteousness being counted to us. So that we might be the righteousness of God or become the righteousness of God. So that’s what theologians have called the great exchange. Jesus takes our sin. We take His righteousness. So His righteousness, meaning the fact that God the Father looks at Christ as completely innocent, sinless, perfect, holy, just by virtue of who He is. But also because in His 33 years of life, He was 100% obedient to God’s requirements in the law.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: And all of that righteousness, obedience, sinlessness, righteous character of Christ is literally imputed to our account, credited to our account.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: And then the flip side of that is all our yucky sin is transferred onto Jesus.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: As our substitute. Right? As the Lamb of God. So is that the vicarious atonement, the substitutionary atonement?
Derek: That’s right. Substitutionary atonement, that’s an important word, that substitution word, because Christ steps in our place. Like you said earlier, we deserve death. Sinners deserve death. And so a death has to occur. And so Jesus takes that death in our place, bearing our punishment on the cross. And that’s precisely what happened. And then what you mentioned about the righteousness that Jesus attained in His life, His earthly life, never sinning, always doing all that the Father wanted and required. The law can be summed up as loving God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus did that perfectly at every single moment during His entire life. So all that He did, not only was He innocent, but He was positively pleasing the Father at every moment, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. And now we receive that righteousness in this great exchange, wonder of wonders. And now God views us as though we have done all of that. We didn’t actually do all that, but that’s how God views us.
Cliff: So that’s why we call it positional righteousness and not practical righteousness. So would you say, is it legitimate to think because of God’s justification, His legal declaration of us to be not guilty through the work of imputation, of imputing our sins on Christ, and then crushing Him on the cross with that double exchange of then putting all of Christ’s righteousness on us positionally. So we have positional righteousness. That is our standing before God as our Father. So legally and positionally, is it that imagery where God the Father is looking at me as a child of God and my status before Him today is I am sinless and as pure as Christ is Himself.
Derek: Yeah. In terms of your status before God and your righteous status, your justified status being declared righteous, that is how He views you. I’ve had more on more than one occasion where I’ve different sermons I’ve actually said that or preached that and gave that illustration and actually had either members of our church or believers come up and corner me after the sermon and say, can you explain that? Because they just didn’t believe that.
Cliff: Right. You mean to tell me that God the Father looks at me and sees the pristine sinlessness of Jesus? And I’ve said, well, actually, yeah, positionally, positionally, right, positional righteousness. Don’t confuse that with practical righteousness. We still have sin living in us, right? We still mess up. We still got to go to the Father and confess our sins, right? So that our dirty feet can be clean, like Peter, who was already saved, but needed his feet cleaned. So that’s just that is a truth that a lot of Christians don’t realize.
Derek: Yeah. And it’s important to maintain that helpful distinction between positional and practical righteousness because we do also have texts in the New Testament about God disciplining us and cleansing us and changing us and growing us. And those things have to happen and we want them to happen. And that has to do with our practical righteousness and things that need to happen practically. But positionally, you’re right. God sees us as His very own Son with His very own Son’s righteousness and sinlessness. And that is really the only way that we can actually begin to take care of these practical issues because otherwise, scripture says, that we’re actually under God’s condemnation without this righteous standing. And so some may not fully understand it, but you can’t balk at it because without this positional righteousness, then we are actually under God’s condemnation and we can’t do anything in terms of practical righteousness. So we can’t get the cart in front of the horse in that sense.
Cliff: Well, this positional righteousness, perfect standing, this justification doctrine, this imputation, this sounds like good news.
Derek: It is.
Cliff: How can I attain this? How can I have this in my life? Maybe there’s people listening, Derek, who don’t have this reality in their life. They’re burdened with guilt and how can they attain it?
Derek: Well, so this is the good news. I mean, this is the gospel. It’s the heart of the gospel. And we want to make it clear because I’m glad, Cliff, that you’re sensitive to that there might be people listening that don’t have this peace that comes with this knowledge of having a right standing with God. And so we want to point you to a couple of important texts. One I’ve already read in Romans 4:5. How do you receive this? Well, we want to make it absolutely clear. And if you haven’t been able to listen to the first podcast, we’d encourage you to go to withallwisdom.org and listen to the first part of this podcast because this is foundational for your assurance. You receive this gift by faith alone, not by any works. Paul labors throughout many of his epistles to make this abundantly clear. Many times, he says it many times, many different ways. But Romans 4:5 is particularly helpful and then we’ll go to another text in Galatians. But he says this, he says, and to the one who does not work, any works, religious works, good works towards your fellow man, any work at all, to the one who does not work for his right standing with God. That’s what he means. The one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteous. How do you attain this right standing with God? By believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. By believing that God justifies the ungodly through the death, life, death, and resurrection of your Savior Jesus Christ. And then Galatians 2, Paul is emphatic, so emphatic that he uses the word justification, how many times?
Cliff: Three times. In one verse.
Derek: In one verse. And he’s emphatic that your justification comes by faith, not by works. So I’m just going to read this verse, it says, 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 Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified. So it’s hard to find a more emphatic verse than that one. You are justified by faith alone apart from works.
Cliff: Amen. And a synonym is, it’s believing in the gospel, the good news. Faith and the complement to faith is repentance. In Luke 18, Jesus tells the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the tax collector is a sinful, condemned person, yet they feel convicted by God. And the tax collector stands before God with his head bowed, beating his breast repeatedly saying, God be merciful to me, the sinner. That’s all he said. That’s repentance. And it was between him and God, and it was a work in his heart that God graciously did. And Jesus commented on this repentant sinner and said in Luke 18:14, I tell you this man, the repentant sinner, went to his house justified, rather than the other justified. So justification comes by belief in the gospel, and with that is acknowledging that your sin in need of a substitute.
Derek: Your right standing with God is not on the basis of anything that you have done or will do or fail to do, but on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness and his death and his resurrection alone. That is glorious news. Well thank you for listening. We want to draw your attention again to WithAllWisdom.org, where we have many resources, we even have articles on the doctrine of justification, you can check those out, you can check out a lot of other topics at WithAllWisdom.org. We encourage you to do that, and until we see you next time, keep seeking the Lord in his word.
