You will not love God unless you know He loves you first. You will not love Him unless you know a security in which to enjoy Him. And therefore, justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living. The doctrine of justification by faith alone profoundly shapes the way we view our relationship with God, as well as how we approach the Christian life. You're listening to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm glad to have you with us today as we round out our study in Michael Reeves' series, Reformation Truths. There are three more messages in Dr. Reeve's series that we weren't able to get to this week, but you can continue your study by adding all eight messages to your learning library in Ligonier's Grow app. When you donate today to Renewing Your Mind, if you don't have the Grow app on your phone, you can download it for free today and access all of Dr. Sproles' series.
That's more than 170 teaching series for free. Download the Grow app from Ligonier today to start studying. Let's join Michael Reeves now for a message on justification by faith alone. We come now to the wonderful doctrine of justification, the matter of the Reformation, the matter that made the Reformation the Reformation, as John Calvin put it. The first and keenest subject of controversy between us.
Now, justification is perhaps the ultimate example of a doctrine that quite different Christian traditions can hold to and understand in completely incompatible ways. Both Rome. And the reformers now and then believed and taught justification, in some sense. Both held that God justifies by His grace through faith, which sounds like and has been taken to mean real agreement on this first and keenest subject of controversy. But justification is a prime example of a doctrine that is susceptible to very different readings, and which therefore needs to be closely defined.
So let's start with the understanding of justification Luther was brought up with before the Reformation. And to get it, you really need to go back to the great fifth-century theologian Augustine, who believed that if you want to understand justification, you need to turn to the book of Romans, which you might have been expecting. But chapter five and verse five, which says God has poured His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit He has given us.
Now that is a lovely biblical truth, but it's not justification. But as Augustine understood it, what happens in justification is that God pours His love into our hearts, internally transforming us, making us more and more loving, more and more righteous, more and more just. Eerfed. I'm internally transformed. I'm more and more inherently righteous and holy, more and more personally worthy of heaven as I'm transformed.
And so, justification was a process of internal transformation. What do you think that does to you if you believe that?
Well, the very clear takeaway for Europe was a lack of assurance before a holy God.
So, one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431 was just this: at a trial, the judges proclaimed. This woman sins when she says she's certain of being received into paradise. Seeing on this earthly journey, said the judges, no pilgrim can know if he is worthy of glory or punishment. And that judgment made complete sense. Within the logic of the system, if we can only enter heaven because we have, yes, by God's enabling grace, become personally worthy of heaven, of course nobody can be sure.
By that line of reasoning, I can have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness, and that is why. During a thunderstorm in 1505, the 21-year-old student Martin Luther screamed with fear when a thunderbolt smashed him to the ground. It hit so close he was knocked to the ground. The air was pushed out of his lungs, and he screamed the words. Listen carefully to the words.
Saint Anne, help me. I'll become a monk. He cried, but not to God. For he had never, in his life, prayed to God. For he did not dare to speak to a holy God.
Poor man, terrified of his fate. He couldn't even cry out to God because he had no assurance of how he stood before Him, and so he puts a good word in with Anne, who's the mother of Mary, hoping Anne will speak to Mary, who'll speak to Jesus, who'll speak to the Father, and he thinks that entering a monastery to earn his salvation is going to help, and that's what he did. He did become a monk, and for the next ten years or so, through his monkery, sought to climb what he saw as a steep, slippery ladder to heaven. And said, after that, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience, and I could not believe that God was placated. I did not love.
I hated God, who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, because as he saw it, God must be the sort of monstrous being who makes you earn his love, and he started wrestling. With Romans chapter one verse seventeen, and particularly that phrase, the righteousness of God, that you find there in that verse. And Luther hated that phrase, the righteousness of God, for he couldn't understand how Paul could say that the righteousness of God is gospel, good news. For he thought, how can that be good news if God is righteous? That's not good news for me because I'm unrighteous, and if He's righteous, that just means He's going to judge me.
So the righteousness of God is pure bad news for me, and then. Hammering away that text in his cell, he wrote, "I began to understand the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith," and in that tower experience. Luther discovered an entirely different God who relates to us in an entirely different way—a God who loves us first, before we ever love Him. He saw the righteousness of God is something He shares with us. The righteousness of God is something He shares with failures like you and me.
What a discovery to explain to the world! It transformed His life, and the next year or so, He he devoted to writing fast to explain this. And when he came to explain his discovery, it wasn't. To Romans that he turned, it was to the book of Song of Songs, the story of a romance. For he believed you can best understand the gospel if you understand it like a marriage.
And so Luther told the story of a king, a perfect and wealthy king. Representing King Jesus, and a poor girl, in fact a prostitute, representing us, and there is nothing that girl can do to make herself the queen, for the king and his love woos her, and at their wedding day. She gets to say to him, "All that I am, I give to you, and all that I have, I share with you." And so she shares with him what debts, shame. But he's so wealthy, he can take all her debts. And then the king turns and says to her, my darling, all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you.
And with those words, that poor girl is the queen by status. All kingdom is hers. All that I have, I share with you. And that is the great marriage swap of the gospel, saw Luther. The joyful exchange.
Our great bridegroom has taken all our sin, borne it on the cross, and drowned it. In His blood, and then He has given to us all His righteousness, all His blessedness, all His status before the Father. And so said Luther: the sinner can confidently display her sins in the face of death and hell, and say, "If I've sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned." And all his is mine now, and all mine, my sin, is his. That girl. She'd not learned the ways of the court, how to be queenly, but she was the queen by status.
Just so the Christian is at one and the same time sinful in themselves. In their habits and their lifestyle, but by status now, united to Christ in that joyful exchange, righteous, sinful in herself and righteous, absolutely righteous by status with the righteousness of Christ. That is the joyful exchange. And you see how much stronger this is than simply being forgiven.
Sometimes people talk about justification, saying that it means it's just as if I'd never sinned, which is half helpful. It's what I believed when I first became a Christian. That's what I was taught about justification, and I thought it sounded good for a bit. I thought it was lovely to have my Slate wiped clean when I became a believer, but I messed it up again rather quickly.
So, what do I do with the sins I've committed since I was justified? Do I have to be re-justified now? What I hadn't grasped is that justification involves not only my transferring all my sin to Him, but Not only are my sins counted to him; he's positively given me, imputed, counted to me all his righteousness. I do not just have a blank slate as a believer. My sin is counted to him; his righteousness is counted to me.
So justification, Luther saw, is a legal term, not a transformational term. It fits into the idea that man stands before God, the judge, in the cosmic courtroom, and we are justified when God pronounces the verdict that we have a righteous status before Him. And so, in the Bible, the righteous person is not the person who's never sinned, not the person who's done plenty of good works. The righteous person is the sinner on whom God has pronounced the verdict righteous. Romans chapter four, from verse three, reads.
For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Now, to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift; they are his due. This is the most extraordinary verse, verse five. To the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly. His faith is counted as righteousness. Is that amazing language?
To the one who does not work but believes in the one who not justifies the one who sorted himself out, not justifies the one who's been through a process of internal purification, God who justifies the wicked, the ungodly. This is our God. He goes on. Verse six, just as David, also speaking of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works, and he quotes Psalm thirty-two: "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin." And so, the blessed person here.
In Romans, is not a person who has no sin. The blessed person is the one whose sins are not counted against them. This is legal language, meaning to use Luther's shocking phrase: "The Christian is simul iustus et peccator," simultaneously, at the same time, just or righteous. By status and a sinner in themselves, and you know, in fact, there was no support for the use of the word justification as a process. That's not what the word justification means today, and it's not what it ever meant.
That misunderstanding arose because of a bad translation of the Greek New Testament into the Latin that the Roman Church was using. Because there is a perfectly good set of Greek words the New Testament could have used if it wanted to speak of making us righteous rather than God declaring us righteous. There's a set of words you could use. If that's what you wanted to say, that's not what the New Testament says. And this, in fact, is now granted by many Roman Catholic scholars.
Take, for example, Leslie Rumble, who writes.
Now, it is quite true that Paul made use of a word which, in the Greek language, had the technical meaning of legal acquittal. And if the word can have no other meaning than the one that would scarcely dispute the interpretation of justification as implying no more than to be counted as righteous or not guilty in the sight of God, which makes it sound like he's saying Luther's right. But he goes on. Alas, Luther had not the advantages of modern scholarship. Ah, modern scholarship.
He belonged to an age, he writes, when it was thought that the real meaning of the New Testament could be best ascertained by discovering the exact sense of the Greek language in which the books were originally written. Oh, Luther! But while acknowledging that the meaning of the New Testament supports Luther's understanding, Rumble rejects this on the basis that I quote. The whole religious outlook takes precedence over the fine print.
So, the whole religious outlook takes precedence over the actual words of the Bible. Justification was the matter of the Reformation, and through it, God was glorified as utterly merciful. And good as both supremely holy and compassionate, and therefore people found they could find their comfort and delight in this God. Here, the reformers saw is a God who loves failures first, not one who simply approves those who sorted themselves out. And so the glory of this God became the root of true satisfaction and joy for believers.
It became their guiding light, their ultimate goal. And so, here is how Luther, remember the man who once said he hated God, is how he would come to speak of God in His glory and love. Luther wrote, "The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it. The love of God loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings, in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved." They're not loved because they're attractive.
He's showing how all this still matters, because you will never love God and lean into the Christian life without it. You will not love God unless you know He loves you first. You will not. Love him unless you know a security in which to enjoy him, and therefore justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living. Without it, you will not have a life of joy and integrity before God.
But with it. You can say this with Luther. When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, you ought to speak like this. I admit I deserve death and hell. What of it?
Does this mean I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know one who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and where He is, there I shall be also. For no sin is greater than the blood of this Lamb, and we are clothed in Him.
Justification by faith alone—this declarative act—means that we who know we are a sea of failures. Can approach a holy God with absolute honesty and absolute boldness, absolute honesty about our failure, and boldness because of Christ and not anything we've done. It's hard to do both, isn't it? To have both honesty about our failures. Sinfulness before a holy God and boldness—that is what justification by faith alone gives.
We can approach a most holy God, absolute honesty and absolute boldness because of Jesus. Amen. In listening to Doctor Reeves concluding there, I can't help but be reminded of the final stanza from the well-known hymn: "And can it be, alive in Him, my living head, and clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne and claim the crown through Christ, my own." This has been such an edifying study this week with Dr. Michael Reeves. If you'd like to listen to the remaining messages, we'll add the entire teaching series—that's eight messages in total—and the digital study guide to your learning library in Ligonier's Grow app.
When you donate today, you can also find many other helpful resources exploring the Protestant Reformation to supplement this study, including free teaching series from R.C. Sproul. Download the free Grow app from Ligonier Ministries. Industries today to explore all the helpful features and discipleship resources. What does it mean to have a Christian worldview?
How should we understand suffering in light of God's sovereignty? We'll explore these and other questions next week with R.C. Sproul from his series "When Worlds Collide." Here's a preview. At the heart of the Christian life and world view is a concept of God by which essential to Christianity is the idea that God is triune. And how you understand God is the most crucial ingredient and element of how you understand man and how you understand the world.
Join us Monday here, on Renewing Your Mind.
