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Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church
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Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church
[Sunday School] What is justification? (WSC 32-33)
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Alright.
SPEAKER_00Alright. Let's go.
SPEAKER_01Let's do this.
SPEAKER_00Recording is on.
SPEAKER_01The recorder is rolling. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for bringing us together this morning. Thank you for giving us this opportunity to learn and to study together. Lord, thank you for the precious truth that we're unpacking today, our justification, our grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. Thank you, Lord, that you are the judge of heaven and earth. You can only do what is right. You are perfectly holy, perfectly righteous, perfectly just, and yet you justify the ungodly. So, Lord, we come before you this morning as sinners saved by grace, as those who possess a righteousness not of our own, but a righteousness that you have freely given us in Christ. Lord, help us to grasp more deeply the nature of that righteousness this morning, how it comes to be ours, and help us to glory all the more in your grace and the salvation that you have brought for us in Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. Alright, so the last several weeks we've talked about the order of salvation. We've talked about our being united to Christ. We've talked about our effectual calling, we talked about regeneration. Last time we talked about conversion of faith and repentance. This week we are talking about justification, which has to do with, as I prayed, the judge of heaven and earth who can only do what's right, justifying the ungodly, justifying us, giving us the righteousness of Christ. So just to get us thinking, um a judge, right? God is the judge. What does a judge do? Just thinking in general about judges. What does a judge do?
SPEAKER_06Administer the law.
SPEAKER_01Or interpret the law, administer the law. Yeah. And duplicate matters of the law. What's that?
SPEAKER_03Examines the evidence.
SPEAKER_01Examines evidence.
SPEAKER_03Passes sentence.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Passes a sentence. James and missing anything. What do judges do? Frustrate you? They make rulings. They make rulings. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And human judges can be very bad. Yeah. People.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Bad judges can be bad people. They can be bad judges.
SPEAKER_02Make sure that the process is followed.
SPEAKER_01Make sure the process is followed, yeah. Yeah, in a perfect world. So, you know, in broad strokes, a judge adjudicates matters of law, applies the law, or at least is supposed to. With respect to offenders, a judge declares guilt or innocence and deals with them according to the dictates of the law, or, you know, passes a sentence, all of that kind of thing. So God, of course, is the original judge. He's the capital J judge. He's the judge of heaven and earth. And as the judge, he cares deeply how we judge matters of law, matters of justice, matters of propriety. Genesis 18, 25. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just? And then Proverbs 17, 15. He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord. So God is perfectly just. He's not like human judges we might think of, who might be corrupt in their character or might be corrupt in some way in their administration of the law. He's the perfect judge, and he wants us to judge in that sort of way. But that introduces a puzzle into when we think about salvation. Because based on our sin, we stand condemned before the bar of God's justice. We are guilty. So if we're not allowed to acquit the guilty or to justify the wicked, so much more the judge of heaven and earth that we can only do right. How in the world can God look at a guilty sinner and say not guilty without compromising his own justice by the blood of Jesus Christ?
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks, we're done.
SPEAKER_01Let's go.
SPEAKER_05Right. Putting Aaron putting his or the priest putting his hand on the head of the goat or the whatever it is, and saying, I will put all the people sin on this, and then we're gonna kill it. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So God makes provision in Scripture for how He can grant us a righteousness we did not earn and do not deserve without compromising his own righteousness. Alright, that's that's what we're talking about today. That's what a doctrine of justification deals with. And it really is the heart of our, it lies at the heart of our understanding of salvation. This is the material principle of the Protestant Reformation. The formal principle of the Protestant Reformation was a sola scriptura, the recovery of scripture as the top authority in matters of doctrine and devotion. The material principle is what the reformers discovered in Scripture in terms of how our salvation works over against the Roman Catholic view of salvation. We'll talk a little bit more about the key differences there as we go on. So just jumping in, the last week we took a bit of a detour so that we can kind of order things pedagogically to go to questions 86 and 87. This week we come back to questions 32 and 33. And question 32 asks, what benefits do they that are effectually called partake of in this life? And it answers, they that are effectually called to partake in this life of justification, adoption, and sanctification, and the several benefits which in this life do either accompany or flow from them. Justification, adoption, and sanctification. The catechism speaks those three principal or primary benefits together in one breath for a reason. Because they're not steps in a process, they are comprehended under the umbrella of union with Christ that we've been talking about in the past several weeks. It's not like we get justified, then we get sanctified, and then we get adopted, as though those were three steps, and you can maybe have one without another. Because of our union with Christ, we have all three at the same time. So you are declared righteous in justification, you are made righteous in sanctification, and you are adopted God in the same process. And we'll talk a little bit more about that kind of stuff as we go. But today we're we're kind of zeroing in and focusing directly on justification. How would you define justification? Some people come with a ready-made definition in mind that they learn somewhere. Do you have one of those? You have a definition for the doctrine of justification in your own mind? Declared righteous. Declared righteous. It's not bad. Some people think to me justified, to be justified means that through faith, God treats me just as if I'd never sinned. It's kind of cute, right? Justified, just as if I'd never sinned. That's good. There's more to say. And hey, we got a catechism to tell us what to say. Question 33, what is justification? Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone. So one thing that helps us as we dive into justification is to think a little bit about the language of justification. Because when you read in the New Testament, you'll see different words like justify or righteous or righteousness or to declare righteous. Those actually, in English, you know, we translate it in different ways because we don't really have a word that says, you know, to righteousify someone or to make somebody justiceness. All these kind of words, we translate them in different ways, but just remember when you're reading about justice, justification, justify, righteousness, righteous, those are all getting at the same thing in the original language. So righteousness is really what we're talking about. We're talking about the righteousness of God, we're talking about the righteousness of man, specifically, how do we come to have righteousness, and how do we exercise that righteousness? When you think about righteousness, you can think about it as an attribute of God. God is just, God is righteous. And you can also think about it, you know, that's a kind of noun form of thinking about righteousness. You could also think about the verb form, right? What does it mean for God to do righteousness or to be right? It means for him to exercise justice. Right? Again, all of these things are so tightly linked conceptually that we'll be speaking about them basically interchangeably. For God to be righteous is for God to be just. For God to do righteousness, it's for God to rightly administer justice. So justice. Let's get a definition for that. Anybody have a definition for justice? What is justice?
SPEAKER_00Correct application of the law. Correct application of the law. But what if you have an unjust law? Then it's no law at all, as Augustine said. Augustine said yeah.
SPEAKER_05Justice is used a lot in the social, that word is used a lot in social justice conversations. And being at Belmont, which is a liberal school, I heard it all the time. Yeah. And it got to where I started my first starting to bristle. I started to bristle because it was always extracted and abstracted and absolutized, like you know, the process of any kind of heresy does that. They take one thing out, they make it a the ruling principle of everything else. Yeah. And I would just I would squirm and and you know, want to all my militant self getting riled up because of that. You can't talk about social justice unless you talk about justice. And justice is the thing for everyone on this planet because it comes from God.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_05So, you know, they were always talking about reparations and all that stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, justice is a hot button cultural topic today, usually in terms of like social justice. And it deals with the basic classical definition of justice is giving others what they're due. Uh fair treatment, right? Uh social justice today works almost pretty well exclusively, definitionally exclusively, on the horizontal plane. So giving other human beings what they're due. So if you're part of an oppressed and marginalized group, it means you know, overcoming your oppressors, lifting you out of oppression, or you know, whatever the case might be. Giving others what they're due. Which, in the abstract, can be good, but is almost exclusively untethered. That's the horizontal dimension. It's untethered from the vertical dimension. Because before you can ask what others are due, you have to ask what God is due. Alright, so justice, first and foremost, is giving God what He's due as the judge of heaven and earth, as the absolute supreme creator and sovereign and lawgiver, right? And we are created in this image. So, insofar as we understand justice on the vertical plane, then we'll be able to exercise it on the horizontal plane. But if we lose the vertical, then we set ourselves up for all kinds of injustice in the name of justice on the horizontal. Right? Two wrongs making a right, right? Or trying to make a right.
SPEAKER_05And we cannot, as somebody who loves to read and loves old authors from long ago, you have to be just to them. If you are truly a just person, you're going to be fair to what the Bible says. You've got to be fair to what people 2,000 years ago said. You're going to the fairness and the judgment that comes out of you as fair judgment, rightly dividing the word of truth has judgment implied in it. You're not, it's not just making sure everybody has the same piece of pie. Yeah. Same size piece of pie.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. So that vertical plane, we can look at the biblical data on righteousness and justice, and we see the interplay of God's justice and our justice, God's righteousness and our righteousness. The key Old Testament word for this is zedek or zedik. It literally means right or straight. You hear it in names like Melchizedek, right? Mzed means the king of righteousness or the king of justice. So as we've been saying again and again, God is the God of righteousness who acts rightly in all his works. Genesis 18, the judge of heaven and earth will be right. God calls us based upon his justice, his just exercise of righteousness as the judge. He calls us to be the same. Deuteronomy 1, 16 through 17. I charged your judges at that time, hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother, the alien who is with him. You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God's. And the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring it to me, and I will hear it. So partiality, right? It's a biblical word for favoritism, uh, prejudice, even. So a just judge won't be afraid, won't be afraid of the big guy, uh, you know, intimidated by someone with the clout and the power and the influence to be able to maybe take away his position or make life difficult for him. He and he won't be uh he won't be influenced in the other direction, wanting to curry favor with those kind of people and mistreating the poor and the little guy, or you know, executing one judgment for one person because he doesn't like his face and another, or doesn't like his skin color, and so on and so forth. A judge will be impartial just as God is impartial. Uh God makes his justice known, uh, you know, ascending back the vertical plane. God makes his justice known in judgment, God makes his justice known in salvation. Psalm 9, 7 through 9. The Lord sits enthroned forever, for he has established his throne for justice, and he judges the world with righteousness, he judges the peoples with uprightness. The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Speaking of the oppressed, part of God's justice is providing deliverance for the oppressed, often doing it through his king. Psalm 72, one through four, give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son. May he judge your people with righteousness and your poor with justice. Let the mountains bear prosperity to the people and the hills in righteousness. May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor. So often people think of, you know, people will complain that our Christian sort of understanding of righteousness and justification is purely legal, and it doesn't have enough of the social justice element in it. And sometimes that's true, because in the Old Testament, if you look at righteousness, to be just before the Lord is to treat others justly. He has shown me, O man. He has shown you, O man, right? What is good. Yeah. Yeah. He has yeah, Micah 6.8, he has told you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. Thank you for that. Your pastor's falling down on his Bible memory today.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But you know, that's it, right? God is just, he wants us to be just, and being just before the Lord doesn't just mean resting in a legal status, although it certainly is that, but it means exercising that toward other people. All right. Um his righteousness is an aspect of his covenant faithfulness, not just to his people, but actually to the world that he's made. Uh Jeremiah 33, 25 to 26, thus says the Lord, if I have not established my covenant with day and night in the fixed order of heaven and earth, then I will reject the offspring of Jacob and David my servant, and will not choose one of his offspring to rule over the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for I will restore their fortunes and will have mercy on them. So what God is doing there is he is implicating himself and saying that, you know, I have made a covenant with everything. I have I've committed myself to everything, I have established the order of the cosmos. And for me to give up on my people is for me to give up on fat. And that would be the grossest kind of injustice that God could actually commit is uh going back on his own word, going back on his own promise. The climax of God's righteousness, we see it in the coming Messiah. Isaiah 11, 3 through 5. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he will judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth, and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins. So, Old Testament prophets looking forward to this one who comes, this Messiah, who comes in the very righteousness of God, as Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, right, comes to exercise God's justice in a perfect and impartial way, which constitutes deliverance for the poor and oppressed, deliverance for the people of God, the people he's made his covenant promises to. And what have we seen so much of in Luke? Jesus is the promised deliverer. Jesus is the one who's come to set the people of God free from their oppressors, from their enemies. The ultimate one of those, Satan, sin, and death, of course, but that doesn't exclude their political oppressors. Jesus came to do righteousness, Jesus came to establish righteousness. That's wrapped up in the very core of who he is. And that provides the baseline for when we get into the New Testament and we start thinking about justification and righteousness there. Righteousness is linked with the kingdom of God. Romans 14, 17. The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself talking about what he come to prepare the way for in Matthew 5, 17 through 20. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass through the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness succeeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Often the way people think about New Testament versus Old Testament, the way of salvation in Christ versus the way of salvation in the Old Testament, is to not see the continuity between the two, but to see a stark continuity where Jesus is kind of God's plan B. Gospel is, you know, God tried a bunch of stuff with Israel, it didn't work, so he's going to try something new with Jesus and with the church. And the idea there tends to become well, the law, right? That was something that we dealt with way back then. Righteousness was the way of things back then. Now we have a new sort of arrangement where I don't have to keep the law anymore, where you know Jesus is the righteous one, and I just kind of go with it. I love him, I serve him, I worship him, I thank him. But what Jesus Himself is saying is that uh I'm not abolishing any of the law. I'm not turning down the knob on righteousness, I'm cranking it all the way up to a level. And if you want to be righteous, you're gonna need a righteousness that's even Greater than what the Pharisees have. And it's kind of bringing the point home to say that, hey, those are the varsity believers over there who are much better at this than you. They're much holier than you. They get it all right, right? Well, they've got it all wrong. So you actually have to be better than them. And you know you can't be better at them. You're screwed. But it's showing us, right? If you want to have that kind of righteousness, you're going to find it in me. So it's not that you're going to be less righteous, it's that you're going to be more righteous. My pastor quoted this is final task. Thank you, sir. It's not the first time. It won't be a left. This one goes through that. Yeah. So of course we know we're not righteous. One more. That's the point.
SPEAKER_05We're headed to being righteousness because I'm one one.
SPEAKER_01Galatians 2.16. We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have belief in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. But because by works of the law no one is justified. Let's skip some things and get us into a nice big passage that we can chew on together. Let's consider how this dynamic works by looking at Romans 3, 19 through 26. Because what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount takes us right into the heart of the problem that justification articulates the solution to. We need a righteousness that exceeds that of the Pharisees, and yet we don't have it, and we can't get it on our own. So could someone read Romans 3, 19 through 26 for us?
SPEAKER_00Now we know that 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 to God. Provided the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. Although the law of the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift to the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
SPEAKER_01Alright, so based on what we just read, what we've been talking about, what will never justify us?
SPEAKER_05Any kind of work. Any kind of work.
SPEAKER_01Why not?
SPEAKER_05Because they're not enough.
SPEAKER_01What does Paul say comes through the law?
SPEAKER_03Knowledge of sin.
SPEAKER_01Knowledge of sin. And why is that? You know, we try to do these works of the law, right? They're the rules that God has put in place. And we try to keep the rules. And we we want to think that if we keep the rules, we'll be rewarded for keeping the rules. But through our rule keeping, there doesn't come the knowledge of reward and fulfillment and satisfaction. There comes the law, the knowledge of our sin. The knowledge of who we actually are, what we're actually capable of, right? And for some people who are, you know, we all suppress the truth in unrighteousness, right? That's what Paul says in Romans 1. And for some of us, that suppression looks like pride, where we actually think we can keep the rules. But I think for every human being who's at least honest with themselves, that can only take you so far. Because when you're forced to reckon with just how incapable you are of keeping the rules, your pride shifts to despair. You realize I can't do this. And in comes the knowledge of sin. In comes the knowledge that you don't measure up. So if that's the case, if the works of the law do not bring us salvation or the knowledge of our own righteousness, if they only bring us the knowledge of the sin, uh how did God have to manifest his righteousness? Well, through the law or apart from the law, right? He says he manifests his righteousness apart from the law. Does that make the law useless? No. Does it make the prophets useless? No. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. So the law and the prophets bear witness to the righteousness of God, even as they bring to us the knowledge of sin. Right? And it's like Calvin said in book in the very beginning of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin basically said you kind of know yourself and you know God at the same time. Because in knowing yourself, you realize this dynamic. You realize your dependence upon God, you realize that there's something bigger than you to which you're accountable, and you realize how far short you fall. So it's kind of like in coming to know your lowness, you come to know his highness. And that's just the witness of creation within your heart, right? That's your being made in the image of God. Calvin called it the seed of religion or the seed of divinity. It's God's common grace, it's his revelation in us. And that's before you get a Bible in your hand and you start reading about who God is. You start reading the law and the prophets who bear witness to him, who bear witness to his justice and his righteousness and what he requires of us. And so the law and the prophets, they are not useful as an instrument by which we attain our own righteousness. And yet they are useful in that they show us what it means for God to be righteous. So, and they kind of set us up to want that righteousness and to comprehend that righteousness as it's revealed to us in Christ. And that is how the righteousness of God comes to us, Jeff.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So the righteousness is revealed to us in the law and prophets and bears witness to us. Yet it comes to us. It comes to us from without. It's not a righteousness we gin up within ourselves as a response to what we've read. It's a gift that's given to us by grace through faith. Randy.
SPEAKER_07Those things are not emphasized enough, and people kind of miss that. But in the excitement of the moment and in their uh emotions, you know, they feel like they're sending. How do you open that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I think there are a lot of settings, I mean, there are lots of different circumstances that bring about false professions. But a lot of settings, it is very emotionally driven, right? Uh and you know, you could have feelings of guilt and despair over your own sin. And right, that could be the powerful emotion that leads you to Christ as your Savior who saves you from your sin. There ain't nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. But there are other things where it's like, you know, are you really struggling in life right now? Is nothing coming together? Are all your relationships falling apart and so on and so forth? Let Jesus show you a new way. Let Jesus come and repair your relationships and so on and so forth. Uh which isn't false, isn't wrong, but you might be so overcome with that desire for a newer and better life, where it's like, that's the thing you give yourself over to. And Jesus has just kind of been presented as a means toward that end. And, you know, maybe that's a step in the process by which God gets you. But that in itself, you know, the gospel hasn't actually been preached. Right? If you don't, if you don't, because the righteousness, justification really is at the core of it. Like, what is our problem? Right? Why are your relationships falling apart? Why are you struggling in life? Why are you hurting? Why is nothing coming together for you? I mean we see as the symptoms. Right, right. They're the symptoms of the disease, and and the disease is wrapped up in sin. Sin and rebellion. That's what Jesus came to save us from. So will Jesus deal with the other stuff? Yeah, he will. Better than we could ever imagine. But he's got to deal with the disease before he deals with the symptoms.
SPEAKER_02Randy wouldn't then be the rocky soil, you know, the thing. They have the emotion and spring up, and then the object then becomes an emotion that they continue to try to get that dopamine release somehow as opposed to doing the hard work.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. People who have been raised in a very legalistic tradition uh can have kind of a corrupted conscience. A corrupted, so they feel guilty about stuff they wouldn't need to feel guilty. Uh, I'm thinking of a mother friend who this is many years ago who um became a Christian and thought he was free of all the Muslim prescriptions against pork, especially. And he was walking along and somebody said, Hey, don't you know that sandwich you're eating? It's pork made up. And he was so, he threw up right up on the sidewalk. He was so violently sick from the idea of putting pork in his body. And I I always think of that as a an example of a conscience that has been really you know shaped by the Islamic religion. Yeah, and he you can't quite get away from how horrible that was. I mean, I'm old now, and and took me a long time to sin freely. I don't mean that, but yeah, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I don't think.
SPEAKER_01They had plenty of those in the early church. When Paul talked about when Paul talked about the weaker brethren and the the poor, or sorry, the strong bearing with the weak. That's what that's what he's talking about. People whose entire lives have been enculturated into a certain set of dietary laws, uh, you know, people can't always turn on a dime. So if you've got a Jewish Christian brother or sister who uh you know is gonna throw up if you feed them pork or if they watch you eat pork, then it's the one who's free in Christ who actually has the obligation to bear with the weaker brother or sister.
SPEAKER_00I just love how David always talks about, like in Psalm 1, 2, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law he meditates day and night. I just love that. You know, when you fall in love with Christ, you delight, you know, and and and really practically speaking, yeah, when you keep the law, you your your life is more peaceful. Your life, yeah, I mean, there's a reason, there's also a practical reason for keeping the law. The Lord knows when He gave that, you know, gave the law as far around good. Yeah, I mean that is the goal.
SPEAKER_01Well, that is that is the goal, right? The psalmists delight in the law of God. I mean, that's that's uh the epitome of that is Jesus, who himself is the law giver who delights in the law that he's given. And so he gives us a new heart. He puts the the law on our new hearts of flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit and gives us a desire to walk in it. Not as like a way of attaining our own righteousness, not as a way of the sheep weaning themselves off their knee for the shepherd, but as a way of following him, as a way of becoming more and more like Jesus. Alright, so it it it's uh it's just you know, we have been adopted into God's family. He's told us how things go in his house. Life will go better for us if we follow the rules, but it's not in the following of the rules that we become sons and daughters. And it's not because we keep the rules that God keeps us in the house. We're adopted, we're in the family, we're in the house. He's not gonna kick us out, he's not gonna let us go. And yet he shows us how life goes. And we'll talk more about that kind of stuff when we get to sanctification. There are a few more particulars that I want to get into as we talk about justification, uh, especially looking at the catechism answer. It says that justification is an act of God's free grace. Um focus in on that word act. Why is it significant that the catechism uses the the word act as opposed to say, I don't know, what do you think other words it could be used in? Product. Yeah. Well, it could it could, when we look at sanctification, it'll actually use the word work, right? So it's an act as opposed to a work or a process or a procedure or a journey, right? It's an act.
SPEAKER_00Act is what sounds more acute. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds not like it has an event.
SPEAKER_05Volitional agency God does it. Yeah. God choose to do this.
SPEAKER_01It's an act, it's an event, it's an accomplishment. God does it. Uh Romans 5, 1 through 2. Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Past tense, pointilier. It's a declaration. God, uh, this gets us into thinking about speech acts, which we've talked about a little bit in different settings in here. Uh, God's words are also actions. God accomplishes things with his words. His speaking is his doing. Uh, Isaiah 55, his word goes forth, it does not return to him void, it accomplishes exactly what he intends it to accomplish. Uh, think about a wedding, right? When I stand up here and we we've done all the stuff, like with the bows and the rings and all of that, and I say, by the power of estimated by the state of Tennessee and the triumph God, I now declare you husband and wife, or I now pronounce you husband and wife. That's actually a speech act that accomplishes something. Where there were two, there is now one because of words that the officiant said, right? In view with the power of the state and the power of God to do it. So that's that's the kind of thing that happens in justification. God makes a pronouncement that affects an actual change in the status of the person who's pronounced upon. This is important because this in part, you will hear Roman Catholics talk about our doctrine of justification as a legal fiction, uh, where it's like God is saying something that's not true. Uh no. God is because we're still guilty, right? And he's pronouncing us not guilty. And so for you know, us dirty Protestants, we believe that God is truly justifying the ungodly in a way that's illegitimate. It's a legal fiction. No, through the declaration, God turns the fiction into fact. He makes us what he declares us to be, he pronounces us righteous, he makes us righteous. And that's where justification and sanctification kind of go hand in hand when we're thinking about salvation. Um God doesn't just change his attitude toward us, he changes us, he makes us righteous. And in answering the question how, how he makes us righteous, that really gets us to the fault line between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Because where we would say that God imputes the righteousness of Christ to us, he reckons it to our account, the Roman Catholic Church would say he infuses it into us. Where righteousness is understood as a kind of, well, grace is understood as a kind of substance that affects a kind of change within us and makes us righteous, like ontologically in terms of our being. And then God justifies us on the basis of how much of that internal transformation is taking place. Does that make sense? The emphasis in the Roman Catholic view of justification is on our being. At baptism, right? Baptismal regeneration, something that the Roman Catholic Church believes in and practices. And the baptism, the spirit, infuses the baptized with grace and virtue, whether it's a baby or it's a Roman Catholic convert. And that grace drives out original sin and allows us to increase in righteousness. And so the grace is infused into us and then as justifying grace, and then we are perfected by sanctifying grace. Let me read a quote from the Council of Trent to try this home a little bit. It says, justification is not only a remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts, whereby an unjust man becomes just and from being an enemy becomes a friend, that he may be an heir according to the hope of life everlasting. So justification is not about being declared righteous so much as becoming righteous in terms of your cooperation with the infused grace and virtue of God. So that view of salvation. What uh, you know, think about it, what are some of the implications of that kind of view?
SPEAKER_02So in the view of justification for Catholicism is that through baptism, it basically puts you back in the position of Adam, that you are you've taken away the original sin, and so you are in a better state to follow God.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the original sin has been dealt with, and now you're in a position to cooperate with the grace of God.
SPEAKER_02But Protestant takes it back to Genesis 1, where it's a new creation.
SPEAKER_01We'll talk about the Protestant view in a couple minutes. Imputation versus infusion, where imputation is more of a declaration. It's more of a forensic kind of thing in terms of what justification is. But infusion, right? It's understanding grace. Grace like a medicine, right? Grace is a medicine that helps you do what you're supposed to do.
SPEAKER_07So it depends on that.
SPEAKER_01Right. So it depends on that. It depends on who? On the person. On the person, right?
SPEAKER_03Right. It's all about our works that make that give us gives us more righteousness. Right. We have a partial righteousness, and it all depends on our works to make us more righteous.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00PCA five.
SPEAKER_04So your what's that? It's unconditional. It's conditional, right? What's conditional?
SPEAKER_01Right, exactly. So on this on this scheme, and this understanding of Of what justification is and how it works, is that God is going to infuse the grace into you. He's going to give you the medicine that you need in order to live a just life and to grow in righteousness. But when it comes to the final judgment, right, when it comes to uh when everything is weighed in the balance, he's not going to weigh you up according to the righteousness of Christ. He's going to weigh you up according to the righteousness that you produced in response to what Christ did. What use you made of grace. So if you have that treasury of merit, then you can dip into well, yeah, there's a treasury of merit that you can dip into in case you've fallen short. You know, part of that is if you haven't sufficiently progressed along that path, you're going to spend some time in purgatory, right? Being further purified and prepared to enter into your final rest.
SPEAKER_02And like divided in decimal.
SPEAKER_01But you know, think like not thinking theologically so much as practically, personally, devotionally. What do you think are some of the implications of that kind of view of justification and salvation?
SPEAKER_04Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough.
SPEAKER_01Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough, right? You're not justified solely on the basis of Christ. It's Christ and what you produce, right? What else?
SPEAKER_03It's not based in love. It's based in pressure.
SPEAKER_01Well, a Roman Catholic would look at Paul's words in Romans and say, it's faith working through love. It's a way to love. Like if you're going to love God, you're going to love him by becoming more righteous, right? So it's not a crass works righteousness, where it's it's not, I mean, it practically it works out to kind of like I'm earning my salvation. But a good Catholic, I don't think, would think of it exactly like that, even though that is the way it cashes out. Because they would be responding to the work of Christ and their love for Christ, and they would try and be expressing that in love for Jesus. Think about your assurance. Your assurance of pardon, a thing we do in service in the service every Sunday. Uh can you be assured? Can you have much assurance about your salvation? As a Roman Catholic? Yeah. No.
SPEAKER_05And Wesleyan's not likewise. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wesleans likewise are always because and they're coming at it from maybe a slightly different angle, but what it makes are very anxious Christians. Very anxious.
SPEAKER_01Anxious Christians, yeah. I mean, that was me, growing up Roman Catholic. Like you weren't allowed to say you were going to heaven. Uh that's that's presumptuous, that's prideful. You're not you're not supposed to do that. Like, what if you die in mortal sin or something like that? Uh and so that that scared your pants off me. Um. Yeah, but it's if it's if you're constantly engaged in this process where you, in a real sense, have to complete your salvation, Jesus didn't pay at all, right? Uh then it it really strips you of the ground of assurance. Um, you know, think of uh the wrath of God, Jesus completely absorbed it on the cross. There is no punishment left for you. And if you experience something that feels like a punishment, Hebrews 12 calls it the discipline of God. So even in that, you know, you may suffer the consequences of your sin in this life as a Christian, but you suffer it in the hope and the knowledge that, even in that, your heavenly Father is disciplining you for your good. He's not casting you off, he's not kicking you around, he's actually making you more like Jesus in and through the consequences of the thing. You don't really have that in the Roman Catholic system because if you go to purgatory, that's all right, that's a punishment, right? It's a purgation. It's it's you you kind of lose the ability to say that Jesus paid it all and he took all the punishment and discipline for you. But coming to the Roman Catholic view, or sorry, to the Protestant view. The Roman Catholic view is that the righteousness of Christ is infused into the person. The Protestant view is that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the person. It's a legal move, it's a forensic move. Yes, when we talk about sanctification, we'll talk about our being made righteous. But when it comes to justification itself, when it comes to God actually making a declaration about you, God actually saying not guilty, again, it's an act. It happens when you put your faith in Christ. And it's it happens in time, yet it pulls forward from the future. Because once you are justified, you are always justified. And you have the good assurance and hope that when Jesus comes again and you stand before the bar of God's judgment, you will hear the same verdict that you heard now. God will declare you innocent in Christ, not on the basis of how you responded to the grace of Christ, not on the basis of your works done in righteousness, but on the basis of what Jesus did and the righteousness that you received by grace through faith. So we're not playing this game where we wait and see. If we accrue enough good works, if we if we cooperate appropriately with the grace of God, we're not waiting until we don't we don't kind of have our you know our fingers crossed or whatever superstitious thing we might do, hoping that when we get to the bar of God's justice to say, you've done enough, you're good, come on in. We know. We're assured. Because it doesn't matter. I don't want to say that. It absolutely does matter how we respond to the grace of God in Christ. But the thing that gets us in, the thing that gets us into our heavenly homeland, the thing that allows us to hear that final verdict of not guilty is not us or anything we did. It's everything that Jesus did in his life, death, resurrection, and essentially. So that's the big difference in thinking of justification as like an infusion and an ontological personal change as opposed to imputation in a legal forensic category where God says you were guilty, now you're not guilty. Because of Jesus, Jeff, and then James.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. But the other that God justifies the wicked, not people who have justified themselves through their life, but God declares wicked people. Just yeah.
SPEAKER_00One of the uh get out of jail free cards in the Catholic Church is the brown scapular. Look it up. If you die wear the brown scapular, you're good to go. So, curveball there. But uh yeah, I wore one for three years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So you'll find it very interesting if you look up what is the brown scapula in the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_00It's a you should get out of jail free card.
SPEAKER_05Is that like the special underwear that the Mormons wear?
SPEAKER_01A very close.
unknownIs that a thing? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Mormons have special clothing that they wear anymore. Um really. Are you wearing a brown scapula? Is that what that is? I don't have any idea. Neither do I how does our response to God's grace affect our salvation?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. Because salvation is a bigger concept than just justification. Oh, justification. Right. So we are saved by faith alone, but the kind of faith that saves is never alone. And so the way our confession, chapter 19, talks about the place of the law in believers' life, and we'll talk more about this next week. Like our response to the grace. Not as a covenant of works, not as a rule that is going to accomplish our salvation, but as the fruit and evidence of a true and living faith. So the way we respond, it doesn't affect our salvation so much as it expresses our salvation. So, you know, the grace of God is opposed to earning, but it's not opposed to effort. So we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works within us, both the will and to be state of pleasure. And so we're not accruing points, we're not actualizing or realizing our salvation, we're not uh shoring up the foundations by way of our good works. We are merely expressing the grace of God at work within us. Uh does that take effort? Yeah, that takes effort. Uh do we have to do it? Yeah, we have to do it. And it's not as though I sit around and say, you know, I'm saved by the grace of God in Christ. I might not kill anybody today, or I might, you know. Either one, I'll be good. Right? That sort of attitude, that laissez-faire attitude to the law, just doesn't really compute or track with what we heard from Psalm 1.
SPEAKER_02Is it the sanctification that's the sanctification? Is what we're referring to now as the work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Right. And that's another important bit for you know the Protestantism versus Roman Catholicism. And the Roman Catholic Church to get justification and sanctification all kinds of buggered up and intertwined. Whereas we're so careful to distinguish it, both things are happening at the same time through our union with Christ, but we don't mix them up in such a way to where all of a sudden we're thinking that our salvation or our justification depends on our level of sanctification. Right? That that gets us back into the Roman Catholic way of thinking. Have I done enough? Have I grown enough? Have I become just enough? Do I have enough righteousness in my tank for God to acquit me in the final day? No. Wrong.
SPEAKER_02Bad. Is it possible for people? I mean, in a in a in a verbal sense, is it possible for people to become or to go through processes of sanctification and never be justified? I mean, is that I mean, I don't, you know, they would never get to the end, they would never be glorified, but they would still go through processes of sanctification and never be justified.
SPEAKER_01We would put that in the category of common grace. Hebrews 6. It talks about this category of people who they've been enlightened. They've tasted of the powers to come, or they tasted of the powers of the age to come. They've experienced all kinds of benefits for having been a part of the church. And in some ways you'd look at them and you know you'd see their growth, and you'd describe it the same way you describe a Christian's growth, or the Spirit sanctifying them, and so on and so forth. And yet they fall away.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Right. Or 1 John, or they went out from us to show that they were never truly of us, right? So you can have the appearance of sanctification that doesn't lead to glorification. But I think the word appearance there is the key word. Because if we have the spirit, if we have been regenerated, if the heart of stone's been taken, we've been given the heart of flesh, God's put his spirit in our hearts, written his law in our hearts, if we have all that, those are the kind of promises that God says are irrevocable. So if it's the Spirit who's transforming us, then the Spirit will take us all the way home. But if it's something else, then you know all bets are off. Alright, the crew is amassing out there, so let's pray. Father, thank you for this precious truth. Lord, thank you that you have justified the ungodly, not because of anything we have done or will do, not because of our cooperation with your grace, but Lord, because of your mercy and your love for us in Christ. Lord, help us to live in faithful response to what you have done for us in Him. And help us this morning as we come together to worship you in spirit and truth. Remind us of the grace that we have, the grace that you show us continually. Assure us in our faith and remind us, Lord, that you will take us all the way home. We pray his name in Jesus' name. Amen.
unknownThank you, Henry, and thank you for all.