THE doctrine of justification by faith, which is the leading theme of the earlier chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, is a doctrine which the word of God invites us to look at under several aspects. On this occasion, in endeavouring to treat of the doctrine of justification in general, and of that aspect of this great doctrine, held forth in this 9th verse in particular, we shall, as enabled, take up the subject under the following heads:—
I.—Notice a fundamental relation between God and men, which lies at the root of justification ;
II.—Very briefly indicate the nature of justification ;
III.—Endeavour to give an answer to the question, “What is the cause of justification?”
IV.—Point out the safety of believers.
I.—Let us notice a fundamental relation between God and men, which lies at the root of justification.
To justify, in the highest sense, is a prerogative of God’s. “It is God,” says the apostle in the 8th chapter of this epistle, “that justifieth.” That God should either finally condemn, or justify, reveals and implies the doctrine that God in very truth stands in the relation of Judge to His morally responsible creatures. It is not an uncommon thing among men that one individual should stand in the relation of father to some, of master to others, and of judge to others. And these are relations which have their prototypes in God Himself. With God the primary and essential relationship is that of Fatherhood. And that relationship respects in the first instance not a creature but the eternal Son, in whom the Father from everlasting to everlasting beholds His own identical infinite divine nature. And to sinners saved of our race, it will for ever be matter for wonder and gratitude that from eternity God not only loved them when they were in a low estate, but that having loved them with a purpose to save them, He should have loved them in His own Son, with a purpose to adopt them into His family, and to bestow upon them the Spirit of His Son whereby they should cry Abba, Father. God, then, is revealed to us in the Scriptures in the relation of Father both to the Only begotten Son and to the many sons and daughters who are children by adoption. And as God reveals Himself in the relation of Father in those regards, so He reveals Himself in the relation of Creator to the universe of creatures which owe their existence to the good pleasure of His will. This relation is as to its actual realisation, one that has a beginning. The creation of the first creature marks the beginning of time, and this relation differing from that of Fatherhood in the highest sense, begins with the creation of the world. The last of the creatures which were created was man. Towards him, as towards angels who are all morally responsible creatures, God stands, not only in the relation of Creator, but of Lawgiver, and of Judge. Man has a conscience, and that conscience is itself a witness to the otherwise revealed fact that retributive justice is an essential attribute of the Godhead.
The truth, then, that, as there are morally responsible creatures upon earth, so God stands in the relation of Judge towards such creatures, lies at the root of the doctrine of justification. In that relation of Judge He will undoubtedly be glorified in regard to every human being, whether the ultimate sentence proceeding from His throne will be one of condemnation or justification. For we must all appear before the judgment of God that we may give account of the deeds done in the body, whether those have been good or bad.
II.—This leads us to explain briefly what in this connection is intended by “being justified.”
To justify means more than simply to pardon. It carries with it the fact that the person justified is accepted by God as righteous in His sight, in other words, that God in His capacity as the Judge of all, declares that all the claims of law and justice have been met and satisfied in respect of the individual under consideration. Now, that God should condemn the wicked, as indeed He condemned angels that sinned, ought not to excite surprise. Sinners deserve to die the second death. Further, it is not surprising, but only what conscience assures us must be, that God should declare with regard to creatures that never sinned against Him, as elect angels, that His law is satisfied in regard to them, or in other words, that they are justified. But what is incomparably surprising is that under the gospel, and in virtue of the gospel, God should justify the ungodly, or in other words, should declare in regard to the personally unworthy that not only are their sins pardoned, but that all the claims of His law and justice have been met and satisfied. Justification is the opposite of condemnation; and it is to be observed, that, as in the case of a righteous judge who condemns a wicked man, the judge does not thereby make the man corrupt by his act of condemnation, so, on the other hand, when the Judge of all justifies the ungodly, He does not in that regard make one that was inherently unholy, inherently holy by that sentence of justification. Justification is the declaration of a fact; it is not in itself a change of nature, but it carries with it a change of state. Now, when God declares regarding the ungodly that believe upon Jesus that all the claims of law and justice have been met and satisfied, He does not so act without good reason. If God justifies, we may be well assured that regard is had to law and equity in this case.
III.—We proceed, therefore, in the third place, to endeavour to give an answer to the question—What is the cause of justification?
Now, to that question several answers may be given, all of which it is necessary we should take into consideration in endeavouring to arrive at the Scripture doctrine of justification. For if the question be asked—
(a) What is the cause of justification?
The first answer that occurs in this Epistle to the Romans is that justification is without a cause. That is the real meaning of the word “freely,” which occurs in Romans iii. 24. “Being justified freely.” The word here rendered “freely” is the same that is rendered “without a cause” in the utterance “They hated me without a cause,” which occurs in John xv. 25. There is positively nothing in Christ why any one should hate Him. It is the just judgment of God that whosoever does not love Christ deserves to be anathema, or a thing accursed (2 Cor. xvi. 22). Those who hate Christ must hate Him without a cause—must hate Him when they ought to love Him. They that hate Him can never assign any good reason why they should be so minded toward Him, and so we say that when God justifies the ungodly He justifies them without a cause; but when we say that, we mean that He does not find the reason for the act in the character of the person justified. On the contrary, if He were to enter into judgment with us, if He were to deal with us on the ground of the covenant of works, He should certainly condemn us as creatures who had brought upon ourselves the wrath of God. It may occur to some that, although the reason of justification is not found in the ungodly (who are justified) prior to their regeneration, that, after regeneration and effectual calling, inherent righteousness enters into the grounds of justification. But that is not so; the sentence of justification has ample grounds, as we shall see later on; but inherent holiness is no part of those grounds. The Psalmist had long been in a state of grace ere he said (Psalm cxliii. 2), “In thy sight shall no flesh be justified.” He certainly includes himself here among all flesh, and his declaration is, that neither those who are dead in sins, nor those upon whom, through grace, a new heart has been bestowed, should miss condemnation, if God were to deal with any of them on the ground of their own personal merits. Not only so, but even in heaven itself, and after believers have been myriads of ages perfect in holiness, they will never regard their inherent holiness as at all entering into the ground of their justification or as constituting their right to heaven. Justification is an act which is without a cause, if only the personal worthiness of the justified be regarded; nay, it is an act which takes place in spite of reasons, which are as the sands of the seashore innumerable, on account of which they justly deserve condemnation.
(b) What is the cause of justification?
And in answer say that the cause of justification is the grace of God. Although we are justified without any cause found in ourselves, we are justified by grace. In other words, the moving cause of our justification is grace, as grace is in Him who is Jehovah—Jehovah, God, merciful and gracious. Grace may be taken as including the pity that thought upon sinners in their low estate, and the love that provided a Mediator whereby a way was found wherein all the attributes of God should be magnified, His justice not less than His mercy in the salvation of lost sinners of mankind. This love that provided a Mediator is the theme of the Apostle in the immediate context. The love which the Holy Ghost sheds abroad in the heart of believing sinners is the love which hath been commended, in that Christ died for His people when they were yet sinners. The highest reason that can be given why God should have purposed to save sinners of mankind at all is that He is God; He found in Himself the reasons why He should pluck brands out of the fire. It is to the praise of the glory of His grace that He should do so.
(c) The Meritorious Cause
But the meritorious cause of justification is stated in the words of our text. It is the blood of Christ. “We are justified by his blood.” The blood of Christ is the righteousness of God, that is, the righteousness which God has provided for those who had no righteousness of their own, in order that He might be just and the justifier of the ungodly who believe in Jesus. The sentence of justification has this righteousness, the obedience of Him by which we are told many shall be made righteous, as its basis in law and equity. Now, righteousness, we may say, is that which the law as a covenant of life demands. That law demanded from our first parents in innocence a continuing in that purity of heart wherewith they were created, and also obedience to God’s revealed will, which obedience, if it had been rendered, would have been as pure streams of water issuing from a pure fountain, and that would have constituted the righteousness of the race. Now, that we are fallen, the law demands not only what it required of Adam in innocence, but also satisfaction for the sins that are past. This is evidently what none of us can render, and thus if we are Spirit-taught we shall join with the Apostle in saying from the heart that by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified. But God hath Himself provided a righteousness for sinners who had left themselves spiritually naked, in the obedience unto death of His Only begotten Son, in Emmanuel slain. The Son of God assumed the nature of the ungodly whom he came to save, so that He was made in all things like unto His brethren—sin only excepted. He came under the law as a covenant to save them who were under the law. And by that obedience of His unto death He put away sin, He made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in an everlasting righteousness. We say with reverence that the loveliest sight God ever beheld on this earth was Christ crucified. Christ crucified was the object of His infinite appreciation, and such indeed is the nature of this unspeakable infinite appreciation that whosoever renounces his own righteousness and seeks acceptance with God, only in virtue of the excellence of Christ’s obedience, is accepted by God, though he might have been before this, in his own and in other people’s estimation, the chief of sinners. The meritorious cause, then, of justification is the blood of Christ.
(d) The Instrumental Cause: Faith
But yet again, when the question is put, “What is the cause of justification?” the Scriptures answer that faith is a cause. We are “justified by faith;” that is, faith is the instrumental cause of justification. It was not God’s purpose to save any sinner apart from an atonement. Neither was it His purpose to save any impenitent unbeliever. On the other hand, it was His purpose to save every believer, and we may say, that as the atonement flows from the unmerited love of God (John iii. 16), so faith itself flows from the atonement. It is given to some for Christ’s sake to believe upon Christ.—(Phil. i. 29.) What, then, is this faith which is an infallible pledge of salvation? It is, in the words of our Shorter Catechism, “a saving grace whereby we receive and rest upon Christ alone for salvation as He is offered to us in the gospel.”
Faith is spiritual eyesight. Men generally possess a power of sight by which in greater or less degree they discern the beauty of natural objects. But we have no eye by nature to behold the matchless beauty, and suitableness of Jesus Christ as a Saviour, nor even to apprehend our own deformity and emptiness in the sight of the Omniscient One. The eye that beholds divine and spiritual loveliness in Jesus is never blind to the utter corruption of the sinner as he is in himself, to the impossibility of a sinner of mankind rendering the satisfaction demanded by divine justice in respect of one that has come short of the glory of God. But Jehovah opens blind eyes, He raises up the bowed down, and in a set time, a time of love, He bestows upon the sinner convinced of sin and misery, the ability to behold such a divine attractiveness and excellency in Jesus Christ as draws the sinner towards the foundation laid in Zion, towards the perfection of moral beauty which is Christ crucified, so as that in contrast with one’s self-righteousness, which is felt to be but a horrible pit and miry clay, Christ is felt to be a rock, a living stone, chosen of God, and chosen of all who receive His Spirit. When, then, Christ the righteousness which God provided, is thus received into the heart, the obedience of Christ is reckoned as fully and as freely to the chief of sinners who thus receives Him, as though all that magnifying of the law which Christ accomplished when His obedience was a sacrifice of a sweet smelling savour, had been rendered by the believing sinner in his own proper person. This righteousness is ours, not by its being infused into us, but by imputation, and is received by faith as by an eye that through grace appreciates Christ crucified as the wisdom of God, and His power unto salvation. This righteousness, being thus reckoned to the believer, is, in that sense, the believer’s righteousness, and God now as the Judge of all, and in virtue of His gracious arrangements towards the salvation of that which was lost, regards the believer as one in respect of whom all the demands of law and justice have been met and satisfied, and the declaration of this primarily in the court of heaven and consequently in the court of conscience is justification.
It is only when the sinner has been called into the fellowship of the Son of God, which is but the Godward aspect of the act or process whereby a sinner comes unto or believes upon Jesus Christ, that Christ’s meritorious obedience unto death is reckoned unto him, and that, as we suggested, in such fulness and freeness as that the sinner to whom this obedience is imputed is spoken of (2 Cor. v. 21) as the righteousness of God in Christ. He who was rich became poor in order that the poor might become exceeding rich, and truly exceeding rich are they who in Christ are the righteousness of God. We thus see that, while justification, which is an act of God in the capacity of judge, is without any cause tending thereto in the sinner, it is an act which has grace even as grace is in God as its moving cause, the blood of Christ as its meritorious cause, and faith as its instrumental cause.
IV.—This leads us, in conclusion, to endeavour to indicate how in the words of our text, the ultimate safety of believers is brought out.
“Much more then being now justified by his blood we shall be saved from wrath through him.” Those, we are here taught, who from being exceeding poor have become in the manner already set forth exceeding rich, are not again to sink into that poverty out of which they were rescued. They are not again to become children of wrath. Being, indeed, during all their sojourn as believers but imperfect in holiness, passing as they do through a wilderness full of pits and snares, and surrounded as they are by many subtle, powerful, and cruel enemies, they should certainly again become children of wrath, if their justification meant merely pardon for sins past, and if after forgiveness they must, in order to live, render, in their own person, full satisfaction to God’s law. But through Christ Himself believers are saved from wrath. “They are saved by His life,” even that life of intercession which He lives for them at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty on high. Now this arrangement of the everlasting covenant to which our text brings us implies—
(1) That when such promises are given as “No one can pluck them out of my hands,” or “He is able to save unto the uttermost,” the most desperate efforts will be put forth, and will be felt by believers to be put forth to pluck them out of the Good Shepherd’s hands.
(2) That yet, notwithstanding all, believers are safe, being manifestly a people for whom Christ died, even in their room and stead, so that the thought is not to be entertained for a moment that after God has given Christ for them, even unto the death of the Cross, with a purpose to save them, they may after all be lost.
(3) Christ did not so die in such a way as that He must needs die over again, if all those, who in a day of His power put their trust in Him, are to be saved with an everlasting salvation.
He did not so finish the work given Him to do, as that, in the case or for the sake of any who put their trust in Him, the work should have to be done over again if they are all to be saved from being ultimately lost. By no means: “by one offering He perfected for ever them that are sanctified.” He suffered once for sins; and now because the advocacy at the right hand is an advocacy that pleads the merits of the obedience which was unto death, that advocacy is always an effective, all-prevailing advocacy. It is true the children of God may sometimes feel more wrath after they become believers than they ever did in their natural state, but that does not imply that they are fallen from grace or that they have again become children of wrath.
(4) That faith by which a sinner renounces all dependence upon mere creature merit, and is drawn to the obedience of Christ as the one meritorious cause of salvation, is itself a sure pledge of Christ’s having died in one’s room and stead, and therefore of a divine purpose of saving one, a purpose which is unchangeable, and from everlasting, and cannot be frustrated.
For as, according to the whole argument of the Apostle in this fifth chapter of Romans, believers are, by the fact of their believing, manifested as the people for whom Christ died, if, notwithstanding His having died for them—done thus the utmost for them—they were not at length completely saved, it were tantamount to saying that God’s purpose and contrivance to save them had failed; and that were blasphemy. Israel shall be saved in the Lord Jesus with an everlasting salvation, and they shall not be ashamed nor confounded, world without end.
This doctrine of justification by faith ought to be highly regarded by all—by those who have not yet entered into the rest which comes from faith, and by those who have, by believing, entered into this rest. For let it be observed by the former, that Christ crucified is the righteousness which God has provided and accepts, that that righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and that sinners, as such, are in the Gospel asked to renounce their own righteousness, and to submit themselves to this God-glorifying and conscience-satisfying righteousness of Christ, with the assurance that if, as is their reasonable service, they so submit, they shall be accepted in the Beloved, and set among the princes of His people. On the other hand, let it be observed that the Word of God and the experience of individuals, make it plain that everyone thus become wise to make the good choice, owes that wisdom to the grace and power of the blessed Spirit; it is in a day of Christ’s power that sinners, heretofore dead in sins, obey the Gospel call. It was, as one has put it, in effectual calling that the Lord’s people got their faith, and if our conscience bears us witness that Christ is being received by us for all the ends for which He has been revealed in the Gospel as the Saviour of sinners, we have warrant to conclude that we have found favour, and that, as our faith is connected with our effectual calling, and our effectual calling connected with the death of Christ, so the death of Christ is connected with an infallible, unfrustrable purpose to save us.