Theology for Everyman: Atonement: "Justification By Faith; Twofold Salvation"

FROM CHAPTER 1:18 to 3:20 of the Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul seeks to demonstrate the universal sinfulness of men. He shows the wrath of God revealed against the heathen because they would not have God in their thinking. He shows that the nominally religious people of Israel, by their condemning other persons for sins of which they were also guilty, were treasuring up “wrath against the day of wrath.” In the third chapter Paul shows that all have gone astray. “There is none that doeth good.” With the law or without the law, men have sinned. Every mouth is stopped. The whole world is shut up under judgment. Then and then only does the Apostle come back to his theme, saying: “Now the righteousness of God without [apart from] the law is manifested [revealed], being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Rom. 3:21-26).

Having shown most plainly that no man can be saved by the works of the law, Paul proceeds to show, just as plainly, that men may be saved by the faith that is in Christ Jesus. Now that he has shown men why they should not trust in themselves, he will show them how suitable it is to trust in Christ. Since their own works only condemn them, he will tell them of One whose works can save them. Futhermore, he says that this is no novel way of salvation. It is the only way of salvation in all ages. Abraham was saved this way, and so was David. In the beginning of chapter four Paul points out that “if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” In verse 5 he gives us a classic statement of justification by faith alone. “To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteouness.” Justification is by faith alone without works.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism has well summarized the abundance of biblical data on this great theme: “Justification is an act of God’s grace wherein he pardoneth all our sins and accepteth us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone.” Justification has a positive and a negative element. It consists at once in the removal of guilt and the imputation, or granting, of righteousness. It rescues the sinner as a brand from the burning and at the same time gives him a title to Heaven. If it failed to do either of these, it would fail to do anything. For man, as a sinner against God, must have that enormous guilt somehow removed. But, at the same time, if he had the guilt removed, he would still be devoid of positive righteousness and with no title to Heaven and would also be certain to fall again into sin and condemnation. If Christ only cancelled out guilt, He would merely return the sinner to Adam’s original state without Adam’s original perfection of nature. There must be the “double cure.”

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood, From Thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

This epistle has already shown us that men are guilty before God. Their sins have incurred the wrath of God (“the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” — Rom. 1:18), and this wrath is further intensified by every sin that is committed (by your hard and “impenitent heart treasurest up wrath against the day of wrath and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God” — Rom. 2:5). Later, the same epistle tells us that the “wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Death refers to eternal death in Hell because it is set in contrast with eternal life. Had Christ Himself not said the same thing? “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). “This,” He said, “is my body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19). Had He not said that like “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14)? Why should the Son of man be lifted up as a vile serpent, the symbol of sin, to become sin, and cry out in His desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46) except that, as Paul says, God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us “that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (II Cor. 5:21, ASV). Christ Himself did not say so much about His death. He was making the sacrifice; He left to others the privilege of explaining it. For two thousand years now the church has been glorying in His cross and exploring its wondrous meaning.

The positive element, the making just or righteous, is really the central aspect of justification, though it is commonly less noticed. But, as we have said, if Christ did not procure our righteousness as well as secure our remission, the latter would have been of no avail to us, for we would still be outside Paradise and exposed to the recurrence of sin and ultimate damnation. God could not bestow righteousness on us, to be sure, without removing our filthy guilt. But, on the other hand, it would have been no use to remove our guilt if He did not bestow a new righteousness on us. This is what the first Adam failed to do. He was never asked to die for the remission of sin, but he was placed on probation to fulfill the law and secure the perpetual favor of God upon all whom he represented. He failed in this. The second Adam, the man Christ Jesus, both washed us from our sins by His blood and clothed us in the white raiment of His righteousness, justified.

In order to do this great thing, Christ had first to be justified Himself so that in His justification those whom He represented might share. This He did. He fulfilled the law perfectly, not for Himself alone but for His people. He was holy and undefiled — a lamb without blemish. He was one who could say, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” He was the Son in whom the Father was well pleased, made in all points like as we are, but without sin. Therefore God vindicated the second Adam, as we read in I Peter 3:18: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but quickened by the Spirit.” In I Timothy 3:16: “Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” Here it is seen that the man Christ Jesus was justified by His own keeping of the law, but in Romans 4:25 we see that this justification was not for Himself alone but representatively for His people: “Who was delivered up for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” So I Timothy tells us that He was raised again for His own justification and Romans 4:25 that He was raised again for our justification. In justification, as in all other works of the Mediator, He does not act as a private person, but as a public one; not for Himself alone, but for all of His own; not for the Head only but for the members of the body as well. So that we are quickened, raised up, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Again in Romans 8:34: “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” So, being justified, being endowed with a title to life as well as a reprieve from death, “we have peace with God, . . . access into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice [triumphantly] in hope of the glory of God.”

That these two elements together constitute justification is shown in Acts 26:18: “that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.” Also John 5:24: “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation.”

Why is faith the means of justification? Is it a kind of good work? No, for the Bible is very plain in teaching that salvation is not by works of any kind. If it were, we would have whereof to glory. We could not boast that we did this or that or the other thing, but we could glory in our belief. “Nothing in my hands I bring,” we could sing, “except my faith.” No other work could avail, only the work of believing. If faith were a kind of good work, we would be back again at the old heresy of salvation by works; but now it would be the work of faith. Romans 4:5 makes it clear that we are not saved by faith as a good work. For that text says that we are justified while still ungodly in ourselves. God “justified! the ungodly.” So, at the moment of justification we are still ungodly. If we are still ungodly then, our faith cannot be a good work.

But why is faith the means of justification? Simply because it is the action of union with Jesus Christ. Faith is our coming to Him, our trusting Him, our resting in Him. The moment we are united to Him, we are immediately endowed with all that He has secured for us. We are immediately justified before we have done a single good deed, because we are His and He is God’s. Just as a very poor woman is a very poor woman until the very moment that she marries a wealthy man. But at the moment that she becomes his wife, she becomes a wealthy woman. It is by means of her acceptance that she becomes a wealthy woman, but her acceptance does not make her a wealthy woman; it is her husband’s wealth that makes her so. So faith does not justify; Christ justifies. But faith is the act of union with Christ.

A. H. Strong uses the analogy of the coupling. The coupling joins a train of cars to a locomotive. The coupling has no power in itself. It cannot move a single car an inch. All the power is in the locomotive. But the coupling is the link by which the power of the locomotive is transmitted to the cars. Faith has no power in itself; it is not a ground of salvation; it is not a good work. It is merely that by which all the goodness and grace and glory of Christ comes to the sinner,

How emphatically Romans 4:5 states this central truth of the Bible! “But to him THAT WORKETH NOT, but BELIEVETH on him that justifieth the UNGODLY, his FAITH is COUNTED for righteousness.” From this verse we learn that: (a) the justified person is one that worketh not; (b) he believes rather than does; (c) he is ungodly when justified rather than godly or one who has something to his credit; (d) it is his faith, not his deeds, that is the instrument of his justification; and (e) his justification is counted or reckoned to him rather than awarded him on the basis of merit. If it were possible to state the gratuitousness of justification more clearly than this, we doubt if even divine inspiration could find the words. Five separate expressions in one part of a sentence setting forth the absolute freeness of salvation leave no room to doubt that the way to God is wide open. There is nothing standing between the sinner and his God. He has immediate and unimpeded access to the Savior. There is nothing to hinder. No sin can hold him back, because God offers justification to the ungodly. Nothing now stands between the sinner and God but the sinner’s “good works.” Nothing can keep him from Christ but his delusion that he does not need Him — that he has good works of his own that can satisfy God. If men will only be convinced that they have no righteousness that is not as filthy rags; if men will see that there is none that doeth good, no, not one; if men will see that all are shut up under sin — then there will be nothing to prevent their everlasting salvation. All they need is need. All they must have is nothing. All that is required is acknowledged guilt. Only confess your sins. But, alas, sinners cannot part with their “virtues.” They have none that are not imaginary, but they are real to them. So grace becomes unreal. The real grace of God they spurn in order to hold on to the illusory virtues of their own. Their eyes fixed on a mirage, they will not drink real water. They die of thirst with water all about them.

Why do men not accept the gospel? How can they refuse the tender overtures of the gracious Son of God? Why do they even take offense at the cross? Let us consider an analogy. An etiquette book is a very valuable accessory. It is useful on many important occasions. A good one costs considerable money. Who would not be glad to have one, if it were given him? You wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t you be glad to be given such a book? Because it would imply you needed it! That is the reason proud sinners do not come to Christ. Their coming would imply they needed Him. They are too proud and self-righteous in their natural state to admit that!

I was wondering when your next installment was coming.

In the third chapter Paul shows that all have gone astray. “There is none that doeth good.” With the law or without the law, men have sinned. Every mouth is stopped. The whole world is shut up under judgment.

Nobody seems to want to stop here. Everyone seems compelled to add a but which nullifies all that comes before it.

Back on another thread a few weeks past, someone noted that Wesley believed that a person could achieve perfection in a moment of crisis. I think he was addressing this in a way related to the reception and refusal of Grace. I don't think even Catholics have this take; the Orthodox, maybe. But it led me to wonder if what he asserted had an opposite? Could a person achieve a state of total debasement in a moment of crisis as well? Would that be the one moment when a person resists grace in some catastrophic way? And for each moment; was he saying that this perfection was a sign of salvation, and the opposite moment a sign of damnation? Fuzzy.

I never quite understood what the conflict was between Paul and James as it relates to the faith/works divide. I must be missing something because Luther thought there was a divide there, and was dismissive of James' Epistle, wasn‘t he?

In the History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, here's what he writes about the first Council in Jerusalem. I thought both of you might find it interesting.

Some time around the middle of the first century AD, and very likely in the year 49, Paul of Tarsus traveled south from Antioch to Jerusalem and there met the surviving followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified about sixteen years before. This Apostolic Conference or Council of Jerusalem, is the first political act in the history of Christianity and the starting-point from which we can seek to reconstruct the nature of Jesus’s teaching and the origins of the religion and church he brought into being.
We have two near-contemporary accounts of the Council. One, dating from the next decade, was dictated by Paul himself in his letter to the Christian congregations of Galatia in Asia Minor. The second is later and comes from a number of sources or eye-witness accounts assembled in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. It is a bland, quasi-official report of a dispute in the Church and its satisfactory resolution. Let us take this second version first. It relates that ‘fierce dissension and controversy’ had arisen in Antioch because ‘certain persons’, from Jerusalem and Judea, in flat contradiction to the teaching of Paul, had been telling converts to Christianity that they could not be saved unless they underwent the Jewish ritual of circumcision. As a result, Paul, his colleague Barnabas, and others from the mission to the gentiles in Antioch, traveled to Jerusalem to consult with ‘the apostles and elders.’
There they had a mixed reception. They were welcomed by ‘the church and the apostles and the elders’; but ‘some of the Pharisaic party who had become believers’ insisted that Paul was wrong and that all converts must not only be circumcised but taught to keep the Jewish law of Moses. There was ‘a long debate’, followed by speeches by Peter, who supported Paul, by Paul himself and Barnabas, and a summing up by James, the younger brother of Jesus. He put forward a compromise which was apparently adopted ‘with the agreement of the whole church.’ Under this, Paul and his colleagues were to be sent back to Antioch accompanied by a Jerusalem delegation bearing a letter. The letter set out the terms of compromise: converts need not submit to circumcision but they must observe certain precepts in the Jewish law in matters of diet and sexual conduct. Luke’s record in Acts states that this half-way position was arrived at ‘unanimously’, and that when the decision was conveyed to the Antioch congregation, ‘all rejoiced.’ the Jerusalem delegates were thus able to return to Jerusalem, having resolved the problem, and Paul carried on with his mission.
This then, is the account of the first council of the Church as presented by a consensus document, what one might call an eirenic and ecumenical version, designed to present the new religion as a mystical body, with a co-ordinated and unified life of its own, moving to inevitable and predestined conclusion. Acts, indeed, says specifically that the ruling of the Council was ‘the decision of the Holy Spirit.’ No wonder it was accepted unanimously! No wonder that ‘all’ in Antioch rejoiced at the encouragement it brought.’
Paul’s version, however, presents quite a different picture. And his is not merely an eye-witness account, but an account by the chief and central participant, perhaps the only one who grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake. Paul is not interested in smoothing the ragged edges of controversy. He is presenting a case to men and women whose spiritual lives are dominated by the issues confronting the elders in that room in Jerusalem. His purpose is not eirenic or ecumenical, still less diplomatic. He is a man burning to tell the truth and to imprint it like fire in the minds of his readers. In the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, written perhaps a hundred years after his death, the tradition of his physical appearance is vividly preserved: ‘…a little man with a big, bold head. His legs were crooked, but his bearing noble. His eyebrows grew close together and he had a big nose. A man who breathed friendliness.’ He himself says that his appearance was unimpressive. He was, he admits, no orator; not, in externals, a charismatic leader. But the authentic letters which survive him radiate the inner charisma: they have the ineffaceable imprint of a massive personality, eager, adventurous, tireless, voluble, a man who struggles heroically for the truth and then delivers it in uncontrollable excitement, hurrying ahead of his powers of articulation. Not a man easy to work with, or confute in argument, or rebuke into silence, or to advance a compromise: a dangerous, angular, unforgettable man, breathing friendliness, indeed, but creating monstrous difficulties and declining to resolve them by any sacrifice of the truth.
Morevover, Paul was quite sure he had got the truth. He has no reference to the Holy Spirit endorsing, or even advancing, the compromise solution as presented by Luke. In his Galatians letter, a few sentences before his version of the Jerusalem Council, he dismisses, as it were, any idea of a conciliar system directing the affairs of the Church, any appeal to the judgment of mortal men sitting in council. ‘I must make it clear to you , my friends,’ he writes, ‘that the gospel you heard me preach is no human invention. I did not take it over from any man; no man taught it to me; I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.’ Hence when he comes to describe the council and its consequences he writes exactly as he feels, in harsh, concrete and unambiguous terms. His Council is not a gathering of inspired pneumatics, operating in accordance with infallible guidance from the spirit, but a human conference of weak and vulnerable men, of whom he alone had a divine mandate. How, as Paul saw it, could it be otherwise? Jewish elements were wrecking his mission in Antioch, which he was conducting on the express instructions of God, ‘who had set me apart from birth and called me through his grace, chose to reveal his Son to me and through me, in order that I might proclaim this among the gentiles.’ To defeat them, therefore, he went to Jerusalem ‘because it had been revealed by God that I should do so.’ He saw the leaders of Jerusalem Christians, ‘the men of repute’, as he terms them, ‘at a private interview.’ These men, James, Christ’s brother, the Apostles Peter and John, ‘those reputed pillars of our society’, were inclined to accept the gospel as Paul taught it and to acknowledge his credentials as an apostle and teacher of Christ’s doctrine. They divided up the missionary territory, ‘agreeing that we should to the gentiles while they went to the Jews.’ All they asked was that Paul should ensure that his gentile congregations should provide financial support for the Jerusalem Church, ‘which was the very thing I made it my business to do.’ Having reached this bargain, Paul and the pillars ‘shook hands on it.’ There is no mention that Paul made concessions on doctrine. On the contrary, he complains that enforcing circumcision on converts had hitherto been ‘urged’ as a sop to ‘certain sham-Christians, interlopers who had stolen in to spy upon the liberty we enjoy in the fellowship of Jesus Christ.’ But ‘not for a moment did I yield to their dictation.’ He was ‘determined on the full truth of the gospel.’ Unfortunately, continues Paul, his apparent victory at Jerusalem did not end the matter. The ‘pillars’, who had contracted to stand firm against the Jewish ‘sham-Christians’, in return for financial support, did not do so. When Peter later came to Antioch, he was prepared at first to treat gentile Christians as religious and racial equals and eat his meals with them; but then, when emissaries from James arrived in the city, he ‘drew back and began to hold aloof, because he was afraid of the advocates of circumcision.’ Peter was ‘clearly in the wrong’, Paul told him so ‘to his face.’ Alas, others showed the ‘same lack of principle’, even Barnabas, who ‘played false like the rest.’ Paul writes in a context in which the battle, far from being won, is continuing and becoming more intense; and he gives the distinct impression that he fears it could be lost.
Paul writes with passion, urgency and fear. He disagrees with the account in Acts not merely because he sees the facts differently but because he has an altogether more radical idea of their importance. For Luke, the Jerusalem Council is an ecclesiastical incident. For Paul, it is part of the greatest struggle ever waged. What lies behind it are two unresolved questions: Had Jesus Christ founded a new religion, the true one at last? Or, to put it another way, was he God or man? If Paul is vindicated, Christianity is born. If he is overruled, the teachings of Jesus become nothing more than the hallmarks of a Jewish sect, doomed to be submerged in the mainstream of an ancient creed.

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