20th February 2005

Jonny Elvin

All Bible references in this sermon transcript are taken from the English Standard Version. This can be found at www.biblegateway.com

Last week we looked at the issue of who killed Jesus. This week and for the next two weeks we’re going to develop that thinking as we look at what Jesus’ death achieves for us. This morning we’re looking at some big words – justification and imputed righteousness. Now don’t switch off! I know they sound like a horribly complicated words, but they’re not. Though they are words that it’s vital to understand. Ephesians 4.14 says the goal of our preaching ministry should be that you “are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” My job is to help you to be strong and stable and mature. In particular, I want you to know these great doctrines because they’re so liberating!

1. Justification is a legal declaration from God.

The verb to justify has a range of meanings. When it comes to computers it means to make straight, to align the words on the page. When it comes to why you’re tucking into your third pudding justifying yourself means more like to put yourself in the clear. ‘I’m eating for two!’ But the way the Bible uses the term means ‘to declare righteous’. It refers to the way that God sees us. A helpful way of remembering what it means is this: to be justified means it’s just as if I’d never sinned. It’s not that we are sinless in and of ourselves, but that through Christ God chooses to see us this way,

7"Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin."

What are the two major components of justification?

Forgiveness of sins

When Adam sinned his guilt was imputed to us – God viewed it as belonging to us all and we have proved that we are his offspring by choosing to go our own way too. So the question comes, how can God declare us to be not guilty when we are in fact guilty as hell? Well, it’s not that he makes us good internally and therefore worthy in and of ourselves. It’s that He deals with our guilt and chooses not to count our sin against us, but to reckon it to Christ’s account.

Imagine you have a bank account. But because of your lifestyle you go into debt. Eventually, because you can’t clear you debts, you are taken to court. Justice must be done and there’s no room for leniency. You deserve to pay the penalty for your debts. But you’re in no position to do so. What you need to happen is for the bank to choose out of their generosity to forgive your debts.

To be justified doesn’t mean that we are sinless, it’s an acknowledgement that we are guilty. In debt. But in our helplessness God steps in, in the person of Jesus Christ, and pays our debts. Therefore if we trust in Christ God declares us ‘justified’ in his eternal court. The debts are all paid, so we do not have to pay the penalty for our sin. It’s just as if we’d never sinned.

This is the first part of justification. No penalty to pay. When Christ died for our sins, God sees that our sin has been paid for. He has removed our debts and our guilt and all records of our wrongdoing.

William Callahan was a homeless criminal until he came to faith in Jesus. He tried to change his former lifestyle, but found it hard to do. The Police kept him under constant surveillance, refusing to believe that a man like him could be reformed. After five years his lawyer managed to retrieve his photos from the Police. He didn’t want to be known as a crook for any longer. Then he tried to retrieve his records from the prison authorities. Their reply was curt, ‘you may have got the records from the Police, but you can’t get them away from the State of Illinois.’

Some years later in ill health, he found himself giving a testimony of his conversion at a meeting attended by no fewer than three state governors (including the Governor of Illinois, John Atgeld). By the end Atgeld was wiping tears from his eyes, and said to Callahan, ‘I’ll see what I can do’. A month later William received a letter from the governor. ‘My dear My Callahan, it gives me great pleasure to enclose your photo from the Penitentiary of Joliet, and to tell you that your records there have been destroyed. There is no record, except in your memory, that you were ever there. You have the gratitude and best wishes of your friend, John P. Atgeld.’ (from ‘Cross Examined’ by Mark Meynell, p111)

Through Jesus the records of our sin have been destroyed. God chooses not to count our sin against us. Great! But this only deals with half the problem. We’re forgiven, our debts are cleared, but there’s something still to do. This brings us to the second part of how we are made righteous. God not only imputes our sin to Christ, he imputes Christ’s righteousness to us.

Imputed righteousness

What does ‘imputed righteousness’ mean? It means that God thinks of Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us – he reckons it to our account. Because of what Jesus has done God chooses to see us as righteous. He has removed our debts and he has credited our accounts (swap a/c cards). Here we have a double imputation. God imputed our sins to Christ who knew no sin. And God imputed his righteousness to us who had no righteousness of our own. He takes our sin, we take his righteousness. As 2 Corinthians 5.21 says, ²¹For our sake he [i.e. God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’

In Romans 4.6 we see that it’s not that we are righteous in and of ourselves, but that God chooses to see us this way; David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness. And v11 says The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well. As we come to believe and trust in Christ, so Christ’s righteousness is counted or credited to us.

Paul writes of how this worked for Abraham, 4.3 "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness." That’s not to say that God looked at his faith and thought ‘now that’s a pretty good faith – you’ve earned your way into my good books by having a top notch faith’. It’s not the faith that’s the key to being justified, it’s where you put your faith. When God sees faith in Christ, he sees union with Christ. And when he sees union with Christ, he sees the righteousness of Christ as our righteousness. It’s like a game where you divide into two teams. When you were at school did you ever play games where there were two captains and they had to pick teams? One captain would say ‘come and play on my team’. And you’d line up behind them. In believing God Abraham lined up on his team and it was counted to him as righteousness. In other words he was justified by faith.

This has important implications for us in the way we read the OT, which is often caricatured as being about salvation by works and that it changes when it comes to the NT. But Romans 4 makes the point clear: obedience to the Law and circumcision have never made anyone righteous. God has always justified people through faith, through trusting in what God has promised. This works for everyone, whether you’re a Jew or a Gentile, Abraham or us. 4.25 ( righteousness) will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for [or literally ‘because of’] our justification. This is important to grasp. Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment for our sins. And because of that we can be justified, put in the right with God. The resurrection shows us that God accepted Christ’s sacrifice so all who now trust in him are justified.

Now when others say ‘he doesn’t deserve to be accepted by God’ we say exactly, no one does deserve to be accepted by God. In the words of Romans 3.10 ‘No one is righteous, not even one’. But God has chosen to justify all those who trust in Christ. That’s why later in the letter Paul declares with such confidence in Romans 8.1 ¹There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…

This is a legal declaration in the courts of heaven. And it has implications for our relationship with God. Our judge and enemy can become our forgiving friend. By justifying us he frees us from our guilt and condemnation. This opens the way for reconciliation.

It’s like the National Trust membership that Jane has. When I go with her I can get in for free. I am not a member, but they count me as a member when I am with her. Her right standing with the National Trust is credited to my account – I get ‘imputed membership’! But I must be with her. The other side of the coin is that whenever we go somewhere and Jane shows her card they never ask me to pay a part of the fee. I’ve not paid anything, and I don’t have to. The fee has already been paid in full.

Seeing that God makes us righteous through the work of Christ on the cross, and that there’s nothing we can contribute to our salvation is a liberating truth. John Bunyan, the writer of Pilgrim’s Progress (which I wholeheartedly recommend you to read) struggled terribly with the problem of his own sin until he came to understand the fact of imputed righteousness. He wrote this…

“One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [i.e. lacks] my righteousness… I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, "The same yesterday, today and, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8).

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.” (John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, [Hertfordshire: Evangelical Press, 1978, orig. 1666], pp. 90-91)

Or as someone put it more recently, when Christ has made me righteous then here is nothing I can do to make God love me more and there is nothing I can do to make God love me less.

Justification includes a legal declaration from God: those who trust in Christ are declared not guilty, but righteous.

2. Justification comes to us entirely by God’s grace, not through any merit on our part.

Romans ch1-3 make clear to us that we deserve death for our rebellion against God, so we can’t in any way say we deserve to be justified. The key question is this: is your legal standing with God as righteous based on what he is or what you are? It must be based on what he is.

It’s nothing to do with how deserving we are it’s a gift of God’s grace. So in Romans 5.17 Paul declares how righteousness comes to us…¹⁷If, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

In ch4 of Paul’s letter he shows us first in vv1-8 that Abraham wasn’t justified by works. In vv9-12 we see that it wasn’t being circumcised that justified Abraham. In vv13-17a we see that Abraham wasn’t made righteous by observing the Law. No, nothing he did made him right with God. He didn’t earn his way into God’s favour.

The only way Abraham could be in the right with God was by trusting in God. We mustn’t try to get right with God by obeying the Law or by performing religious rituals and good deeds. We need to trust in God’s means of justification. We need to trust in Jesus’ death in our place on the cross. It’s only when we go to the cross and have our sins forgiven that we are made right with God. And he chooses to forgive us only through the cross. We can’t get forgiveness by being religious or good. We get forgiveness at the cross of Christ.

Now what difference should this make in our lives?

For John Bunyan the discovery of the imputed righteousness of Christ was the greatest life-changing experience he ever had. For Bunyan it was the end of years of spiritual torture and uncertainty.

What would you give to know for sure that your legal acceptance and approval before God was as sure as the standing of Jesus Christ, his Son?

In one sense there’s nothing you need to do. It’s a free gift. God offers us Christ’s righteousness today as a gift. If we see him as true and precious, if we take the gift and trust in it, we will have a peace with God that passes all understanding. We’ll be secure. We won’t need the approval of others. We won’t need the ego-supports of wealth or power or revenge. We’ll be free. We’ll overflow with love. We’ll lay down our lives in the cause of Christ for the joy that is set before us. So look to Christ and trust him for your righteousness.

That’s what we’ll be celebrating shortly as we come to the Lord’s table. Don’t come like the Pharisee thinking you’re worthy to receive any of God’s blessings. You aren’t – they’re a gift of grace. Don’t make the equal mistake of staying away thinking that your unworthiness must keep you away from God. Remember the tax collector and say his prayer ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner’. Trust in Christ and Christ alone to bring you to God. Enjoy the reconciliation that he has made possible between you and God. And live a life of humble thanksgiving.