There are reports of a growing trend to deny that the ground of justification is that alien righteousness of Christ which is imputed to us through faith when the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ our Righteousness in our effectual calling. There are also reports of denials of sola fide, the doctrine that faith alone is the instrumental means of justification. In times such as this, it is especially crucial that PCA ministers understand the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of justification found in our doctrinal standards.
The relationship of justification and sanctification in salvation is like the relationship of the two natures of Christ. Christ has a human nature and a divine nature united in His one Person. The key to the proper understanding of the human and divine natures of Christ is that they must never be mixed or confused, and they must also never be separated or divided. You don't mix Christ's divinity and humanity to form a new unified nature that is a blend of the human and the divine. Christ has two natures that are forever distinct; His human nature remains fully human, and His divine nature remains fully divine. Yet these two distinct natures cannot be separated. They are forever united in the one Person of Jesus.
It is the same with justification and sanctification. They are distinct acts of salvation that must not be confused or mixed, but they also must not be separated. They are both necessary elements in the salvation that is ours in Christ Jesus. They are "indissolubly linked as different facets of the single act of being raised (incorporated) with Christ."1 They are like the shining and the burning of fire, and like the heat and the light which come to us from the sun. They are different but they always occur together. Shining is not burning, but fire always both shines and burns. Heat is not light, but both light and heat always emanate from the sun. And justification is not sanctification, but salvation always involves both.2
This is very important because if justification and sanctification can be separated, then we can have one without the other. Some people teach that. They say that we can be justified without being sanctified, that justification is necessary for salvation but sanctification is optional. They teach that God can forgive us our sins without delivering us from our sin. That makes salvation a license to sin, and that is a serious error.
It is also a serious error to mix or confuse justification and sanctification. This is what people are doing when they make justification into a process and base it on one's covenant faithfulness. This is not the proper response to "easy believism." The gospel is like a straight and narrow road. If we separate justification and sanctification, we can end up in a ditch on one side of the road, the ditch of making salvation a license to sin. And if we mix them, we can end up in the ditch on the other side of the road, the ditch of legalism, the ditch of basing our salvation on our own works and efforts. We must avoid both ditches and remain on the straight and narrow.
In our lost condition, we had two problems, our legal standing and our moral condition. As to our legal standing, our sins had separated us from God and we were under his wrath and curse. As to our moral condition, our heart was morally corrupt and we were enslaved to sinful living. Justification is salvation as it relates to our legal standing. When God justifies us, He forgives our sins and accepts us as righteous in His sight based solely on the work of Christ for us. Sanctification is salvation as it relates to our moral condition. When God sanctifies us, He delivers us from sin and enables us to live righteously through the work of the Holy Spirit in us. These two aspects of salvation are distinct, but they always occur together. You can't have one without the other.
There is good Scriptural evidence that justification has to do with our legal standing with God and not our moral condition. Justification is a legal term. We see this in Proverbs 17:15:
This verse says that justifying the wicked is an abomination. If to justify means to make someone holy, then what is wrong with justifying the wicked? There is nothing wrong with transforming the wicked into holy people, but that is not what justification means. To justify means to make a legal declaration that someone is righteous. And for a judge to legally declare a wicked person to be righteous before the law, that is an abomination.
15 He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD. Also, notice that in this verse, justification is contrasted with condemnation. To condemn someone does not mean to make them sinful. It means to declare them guilty. It too is a legal term.
Let's now consider Romans 4:4-8:
4 Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. 5 But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness, 6 just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works: 7 "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin." Romans 4 talks about a righteousness that is imputed to us apart from any of our own works. Some want to restrict the works referred to here. Some say that Paul is saying we are not justified by obedience to the ceremonial law of Moses, but we can be justified by obedience to the moral law. Others say that we are not justified by works done in the power of the flesh, but we can be justified by works done in the power of the Spirit and cleansed by the atoning work of Christ. Yet what Paul says here is that we are justified apart from our own works in general without any of these qualifications restricting the scope of their exclusion as either the grounds or instrumental means of justification.
Romans 4:5 says that God justifies the ungodly person who has faith in Jesus. A study of the word here translated ungodly makes clear that Paul is not here talking about declaring someone righteous based on his having lived a life of covenant faithfulness. Paul uses this word in Romans 5:6 to teach that Christ died for the ungodly, and in 1 Timothy 1:9, which says:
The word obviously does not refer to those who keep covenant. In 2 Peter 2:5,6, the term is used for those destroyed by the flood and those destroyed in Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham uses the term to speak of the wicked in Sodom (Genesis 18:23,25 LXX). Exodus 23:7 LXX and Isaiah 5:23 LXX both condemn justifying the ungodly for a bribe. Deuteronomy 25:1 LXX speaks of a judge's function as justifying the righteous and condemning the ungodly.
9 knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, It is clear that Paul in Romans 4:5 is not talking about justifying anyone based on his record of covenantal faithfulness. Paul is talking about the wicked. The Holy Spirit works faith in a person's heart and enables him to believe the gospel message. At the moment of faith and before he has had an opportunity to do any good works, he is justified. John Colquhoun comments on this verse:
From what has been said, the candid reader may see the meaning of this assertion of the apostle Paul, "God justifieth the ungodly." The meaning cannot be that he justifies an unregenerate sinner. By the ungodly here is not meant the unregenerate, but the regenerate sinner, who has no legal godliness, no righteousness of his own pleadable in law, as a ground of justification in the sight of God. If this were not the meaning, it would follow that justification is before regeneration; contrary to the order mentioned by our apostle, and to that in the Shorter Catechism. A legal ungodliness is in the regenerate sinner before justification. He sees that he has no godliness, no righteousness of his own to rely on, as a ground of justification. That man is to be deemed ungodly who has no title to justification. Because he has not, before the righteousness of Jesus Christ be imputed to him, a perfect righteousness for justification, in the eye of the law he is ungodly, have what he will. If the sentence should pass upon him, on the ground of his principles of holiness, the Judge could not but find him in the eye of the law, ungodly, and as such condemn him. Besides, God justifies him who hitherto was ungodly. The sense of the words may be the same as when our Lord said, "The blind see," and "the deaf hear." His meaning cannot be that those persons were actually blind when they saw, or deaf when they heard; but that having been once so, they now saw and heard. In legal reckoning, that man is ungodly who has broken any of the commands of God's law. That the ungodly should be justified by his own righteousness is therefore a contradiction in the eye of the law; as much as if we should say that the same individual has at once broken the law, and perfectly kept it. For if he is himself ungodly, where are his works of perfect righteousness?3How can God both be just and the justifier of the ungodly person who has faith in Jesus? He does this through imputation as explained in Romans 4:6. We have a concrete example of imputation as an act of mercy in Paul's letter to Philemon. Paul is sending back to Philemon his slave Onesimus, who had run away, with the message that Onesimus is now a Christian. And then Paul makes a plea for Philemon to be merciful to Onesimus in verse 18:
Paul is saying, "Don't hold Onesimus accountable for any wrong he has done. Hold me accountable. Put it on my account." That is what we mean by imputation as an act of saving mercy.
18 But if he has wronged you or owes anything, put that on my account. 2 Corinthians 5:21 describes the imputation that is a part of our salvation:
There is a double imputation here: sin is imputed to Jesus and righteousness is imputed to us. We need first to consider the imputation of our sin to Jesus. Was this a moral imputation or strictly a legal imputation? Did Jesus acquire our sinful nature and inner perversity, or did He remain holy and undefiled while only accepting the legal responsibility for our sin? The answer is obviously the latter. Now note that this verse suggests a parallel relationship between the imputation of sin to Christ and the imputation of righteousness to us. If the imputation in the first case is strictly legal, then so is the imputation in the second case. This verse is not talking about Jesus' imparting a new righteous nature to our hearts (sanctification) but about Jesus' imputing a new legal record to our account before God. God imputed our legal record of guilt to Christ, and God imputed Christ's legal record of a life righteously lived to us. Through this double imputation, our guilt is taken away and paid for, and we receive a perfect legal standing before God, as if we had lived a life of perfect holiness.
21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Calvin comments on this verse:
How are we righteous in the sight of God? It is assuredly in the same respect in which Christ was a sinner. For he assumed in a manner our place, that he might be a criminal in our room, and might be dealt with as a sinner, not for his own offenses, but for those of others, inasmuch as he was pure and exempt from every fault, and might endure the punishment that was due to us -- not to himself. It is in the same manner, assuredly, that we are now righteous in him -- not in respect of our rendering satisfaction to the justice of God by our own works, but because we are judged of in connection with Christ's righteousness, which we have put on by faith, that it might become ours.4Because God has imputed our sin to Christ and Christ's righteousness to us, God can justly justify us, even though the law classifies us as "the ungodly." God justifies us in Christ in the sense of declaring us forgiven and righteous in His sight because of what Christ has done in our place and on our behalf. The ground of our justification is the finished sacrifice and the perfect obedience of Jesus, and not anything that we have done.
Another significant verse in this regard is Romans 5:18:
There is an obvious parallel here between the sin of Adam which resulted in condemnation and the righteous act of the Second Adam which resulted in justification. The question we must consider is how the first sin of Adam resulted in condemnation for humanity. Was this initially through an immediate legal imputation or solely through a mediate moral pollution? Here is how a mediate moral pollution would result in condemnation:
18 Therefore, as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For the sake of argument, let us say that this alone is how the sin of Adam resulted in the condemnation of humanity and that this is what Paul is referring to in Romans chapter 5. Because of the parallelism in the verse, this would imply that justification is based on our covenant faithfulness. Just as Adam gave us an old nature, the Second Adam gives us a new nature. And just as we are condemned based solely on our actual sins, we are justified based solely on our own good deeds or righteous acts. We have, however, in this reasoning traveled down the wrong path and reached a doctrine contrary to Scripture. The teaching that we are saved based on our righteous acts is contrary to Scripture (Ephesians 2:8-10; Titus 3:5). Our reasoning was sound but the starting point was wrong. We must consider the other possible starting point, the teaching that the sin of Adam resulted in the condemnation of humanity through legal imputation.
- Adam's descendants are born sinful.
- They therefore commit sinful acts.
- They are then judged for these actual sins.
- Thus they are condemned.
Verse 12 talks about a death that passes to all men because all sinned. There are humans who have died without ever committing an actual, voluntary sin. This would be true of the child who dies in the womb, especially before conscious existence. Some die while their inherited tendency toward sin is still latent, before it results in any actual act of sin. What is universally true without exception is that all humanity sinned in and with Adam in his first transgression. Thus death has passed even to those who never sin after the likeness of Adam, who never voluntarily transgress a commandment of God. This is what Paul specifically says in verse 14:
Also, the extended passage repeatedly refers to the one sin of Adam as the cause of the race's condemnation and death, not the many sins of the children of Adam.
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. In establishing a righteousness that is acceptable to God, only Christ could have overcome this obstacle due to the imputation of the guilt of Adam's first sin to the human race. Jesus was truly human and yet born without a human father and without the guilt of Adam's first sin. As our Shorter Cateshism states, covenant solidarity with Adam's first sin is limited to those "descending from him by ordinary generation" (Q. 16).
What Paul is establishing in Romans 5 is a federal solidarity between the man Adam and the human race. It is like the relationship of the batter at bat to a baseball team. If the batter strikes out and loses the game, the whole team loses, not just the batter. Similarly, when Adam sinned, the whole human race became subject to death, not just Adam, because Adam was acting as their covenant head. Adam's sin resulted in the condemnation of all humanity through an immediate legal imputation. If that is the case, then the parallelism of the passage points to a legal imputation of the righteousness of Christ as the basis for justification.
A further verification of this is that the negative element in justification is legal forgiveness and not mortification. If justification were a moral transformation, then its negative element would be mortification, the putting to death of the heart's inclination toward sinning. But the negative element of justification is not mortification but legal forgiveness as described in Romans 4:7-8:
7 "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin." If justification is based on the legal imputation of the alien righteousness of Christ, then it is an instantaneous act as opposed to a long process. Here is another major difference between justification and sanctification. Both are based on our union with Christ through faith, but they are different in nature. Sanctification is the beginning of a long process that will not be complete in this life. We are freed from the dominating power of sin at the moment of our salvation, but we continue throughout our life to die more and more to sin and to live more and more to righteousness. This process will continue until we die and our soul is made perfect in holiness. So sanctification is a long process that is not completed in this life, but it only takes a moment for God to impute to us the righteousness of Christ and to declare us legally righteous in His sight.
Justification is like the change that occurs when someone adopts a child. A judge proclaims the child adopted. Nothing changes about the child himself, but his relationship changes. One moment the child has no legal relationship to the adults with him in the court room, and the next moment, they are his parents.
Another illustration would be when a group of aliens suddenly become citizens of a nation by taking an oath of allegiance. In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul reminds us that before we believed in Jesus, we were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Then we believed and established a covenant union with Christ. Suddenly we were no long strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
So it is with justification. We were under God's condemnation as our righteous judge. We believe in Christ, and God becomes our accepting Father. Thus, there are verses that speak of justification as a completed act in this life:
Romans 5:1 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, Romans 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, ... In Romans chapter 4, Paul uses Genesis 15:6 as his primary proof text that justification is through faith and not based on works. Some ask why Abraham is declared righteous at this point in his life. Hebrews 11 makes clear that Abraham believed in God long before the events of Genesis 15. I think the primary reason that Abraham is declared righteous at this stage of his life is because this is the point in redemptive history when God first revealed the concept of justification through faith. Abraham and all the saints who lived before him were justified from the moment they first believed. Yet the concept of the legal imputation of a righteous standing was not revealed until this point in redemptive history. God chose to reveal these details about justification in conjunction with a new revelation about Isaac, who was a type of the Seed-Redeemer to come. Further, by revealing this principle at this point in the life of Abraham, God made even clearer that justification is through faith alone and not through works. By the time of Genesis 15, Abraham had many years of righteous works behind him. Yet God here relates Abraham's legal standing of righteousness only to Abraham's continuing faith in God's promise. God makes no mention of Abraham's good works, which were the fruit of his faith, as an instrumental means of justification or as a legal grounds for justification. Lastly, imputation is both an act and a continuing reality dependent upon union with Christ. Imputation as an act occurs at the moment this experiential union is effected through the Holy Spirit's working faith in our hearts. Yet it is also true that God continues to credit faith for righteousness because that faith is the human experience of our bond with Christ, who is our righteousness. Also, God can repeatedly declare a person's rightous standing. Thus God's crediting Abraham's faith as expressed in Genesis 15 for righteousness does not necessarily imply that Genesis 15 is the time of Abraham's initial conversion.
Footnotes
1 Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., The Centrality of the Resurrection: A Study in Paul's Soteriology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1978), page 131.
2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3:16:1.
3 John Colquhoun, Repentance (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1826,1965), pages 133-134.
4 John Calvin, Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, on 2 Corinthians 5:21.