IN approaching the consideration of this great doctrine, if we are to have a true conception of its momentous truth to us as ruined, guilty sinners, it is necessary that we should keep in mind that it has a background solemn and humbling to the sinner. What meets our outlook as we take a survey of that background? Is it not this—God as the Sovereign Judge, the guilty sinner standing speechless before the bar of Heaven, and the Great Advocate standing there in the interests of all that were given to Him in the eternal Covenant? The sinner stands there as one convicted of his sin by the Holy Spirit and convicted in such a way that he has no plea to offer for one of a thousand sins. He is standing before the Judge of the whole earth confronted by the claims of a law which he can no longer ignore. Look wherever he may his case, as far as angelic or human help is concerned, is desperate in the extreme. Nothing he may do or hope to do in the future can relieve him from his guilt. This guilt is the conviction wrought in his conscience by the Holy Spirit of his ill desert. “It is the response,” says Dr. Thornwell, “of the human soul to the justice of punishment, and is utterly independent, as all human experience testifies, of all calculations of expediency. The burden upon the conscience is not simply that we shall suffer, for suffering may be a calamity as well as a punishment; not that the interests of the universe and the safety of God’s throne demand our misery; these are considerations which never enter into the bitterness of remorse. The burden which presses with intolerable weight upon the soul is the terrible conviction, wrung from the depths of our moral nature, that we have done wrong and deserve to die. It is this feeling that we deserve our doom which kindles the hell within us. If we could strip ourselves of the burning consciousness of this fact, no amount of evil could ever be regarded in the light of punishment. Whatever was inflicted for the general good we might nerve ourselves to bear, from lofty considerations of benevolence and self-sacrifice; and to whatever was inevitable we might bow with patience, if not with resignation. But energy and resolution avail nothing against a sense of guilt. . . . This then is the peculiarity which distinguishes guilt—it is a conviction that punishment is due, that it ought to be inflicted, and that under a righteous government, sooner or later, it will be inflicted; and it is precisely this sense of guilt which the truths of natural religion are adapted to produce within us. It is the echo in our hearts of the fearful condemnation of a holy God.” What then can the guilty sinner do? Is there anything within the range of possibility that he can do to remove this guilt? Shall he come before the Judge with burnt offerings? Will he offer thousands of rams and ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall he give his first born for his transgression, the fruit of his body for the sin of his soul? Supposing he did, conscience would find no peace in so doing. Like Luther he may resort to penances, and to all the devices that asceticism ever tried, but that will not take away guilt. The outgate from the sinner’s desperate state must be by some arrangement which will make the punishment cease to be just and give the sinner a right justly to escape from the evils which conscience forecasts. The sinner feels that the justice that calls for his death is just. To quote Dr. Thornwell again: “The sinner feels, in other words, that the justice which calls for his blood must be satisfied, or that blood be yielded to its demand. It is, accordingly, the glory of the gospel that the blood of Christ who, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God, purges the conscience, dispels all its distracting fears, and imparts peace and serenity where despair and guilt had held their troubled reign.” The ordinary believer may say I cannot state the case after this fashion nor analyse my feelings after such a manner. This is, of course, true, for the above words are those of a master theologian; but if we are to derive any comfort from the doctrine of justification by faith, we must in some degree or other have stood guilty before God and been made painfully conscious that all our own efforts or works were unavailing to remove the guilt that had been brought home to us by the Holy Spirit. It is in this Court with God as sovereign Judge and the guilty sinner speechless at His bar that Heaven’s simple, unencumbered plan stands out in its glorious simplicity, so glorifying to God and so satisfying to the guilty conscience of the sinner. The doctrine of justification by faith is a doctrine not only making its appeal to the conscience and understanding but also to the heart. It has a message to the awakened sinner which says: Look this way, for though all seems to be dark, yet there is hope. It was here that Paul got that comfort which shines so brightly in the greatest of all his Epistles—the Epistle to the Romans. It was here also that Luther got the comfort when the burden fell from off his shoulders and as a giant refreshed by the Spirit of God he delivered those smashing blows at the very foundations of Papacy, shaking it to its very foundations. And it is here we also must get the same comfort if we are to successfully wage a war against the Papacy, otherwise we will enter the fray as men with a wooden sword.
Now, though the Scriptures make it plain that it is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His great mercy, He saved us, still men will not accept this plain statement. They go about to establish their own righteousness, and will not submit to the righteousness of God. Upon this rock the Jews who believed not were wrecked. Upon this rock also millions of papists trusting to their own righteousness, and tens of thousands of Protestants are making shipwreck for eternity, for they are not submitting themselves to the righteousness of God.
When the Apostle, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, set before the Roman believers God’s way of salvation, he made it plain that both Gentiles and Jews were guilty before God. Let us have no misconception here; for the doctrine of justification by faith is utterly meaningless for all practical purposes to those who are not sensibly guilty in God’s sight. Hence the Apostle says that he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, and the reason he was not ashamed of it is that “it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith (literally, by faith*) to faith; as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith’ (Rom. i, 16, 17). The burden of his gospel or good news was that therein was revealed the righteousness of God by faith to faith. In other words, the content of his gospel was “the righteousness of God by faith” which was presented “to faith” to be accepted. And isn’t that a wonderful gospel—at least to all who ever stood guilty at the bar of God. How is the very righteousness which God required being presented to faith for acceptance, and who ever received that righteousness in any other way but by faith?
* Luther translates these words by faith. This translation is allowable, for where ek pisteos occurs in other places it is translated in our version by faith, for instance, in Roms. v. 1.