The Journey of Salvation Pt. 1: Justification
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. – Romans 3:23-25
Often times when we think of salvation, we consider it to be a one-time event. We believe, we are saved. It’s pretty simple. While it certainly is true that we are saved by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ in one sense (Acts 16:30-31), there is more to it. In fact, Scripture teaches us that salvation is something that happens, is happening continually, and will happen in the future. Maybe you’ve heard this phrase or something similar, “We are saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved.” For some that may sound a bit confusing, and understandably so, but this is actually something that Scripture teaches very clearly so it is important that we as believers gain a clearer understanding of what this means. My hope is to explain this by teaching about three doctrines as it relates to our salvation: justification, sanctification, and glorification. In this first of three posts on the topic of salvation, I will give us a bird’s eye view of the doctrine of justification.
Guilty Sinners
To understand what justification is and why it’s important, we need to start with the truth that all humans are, by their very nature, guilty of sin and have no merit in and of themselves to make them worthy of being allowed into God’s presence. We could define sin as anything which transgresses God’s law, or His moral standard. Earlier in Romans 3:10-12, Paul says, “No one is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” This is a combined quote from Psalms 14 and 53. Paul is making the case here that we are totally unrighteous in every way and thereby guilty of sin in God’s eyes and liable to his justified wrath. This is really bad news, especially when we consider that we can’t do anything about it on our own. Someone outside of us has to act in order to change our status as guilty sinners. The great irony of the gospel is that the only one who can save us is the one we have sinned against, God! In His mercy, He has done exactly that by changing our state of unrighteousness and guilt to a state of righteousness and innocence in Christ. Those who were once guilty of sin are declared to be innocent.
The Active and Passive Obedience of Christ
This sounds wonderful, but how exactly does this happen? At first glance, it would seem as though God just shrugs off sin and “gets over it.” While there would be those who would teach that, this is not true in any way. This would make Him unjust and since he will by no means clear the guilty (Exodus 34:7) we can know that God does not ever “get over” sin. So we come back to the question of how God can simply declare us to be innocent when we aren’t. Enter the doctrine of justification. In Christ, we are counted as justified, or declared innocent in the sight of God. In Christ, our sins have been atoned for through his shed blood and we are counted as righteous on the grounds of Christ's work of keeping the law. These two truths are known as passive and active obedience. Passive obedience is Christ suffering and dying for sin as a substitute for the guilty. Christ, as an equal person of the Trinity, willingly submits to the Father and bears the cross so that those in him can have the guilt of their sin taken from them. Christ’s whole life was lived under the law, including the penalty for not keeping it, which he paid even though he kept it. So, we can summarize this by saying that Christ died for our sins so we could be forgiven. He chose the cross for our sake to the glory of God the Father.
But also, the law of God is not void. Christ himself said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). It is not enough to only be forgiven of sin. I know that sounds odd, maybe even jarring, but let me explain. We not only have to be forgiven of the sin of failing to keep the law, but we also still have to keep the law. If we don’t do what God requires we fall short of the glory of God, and what makes this even more potent is that it wouldn’t matter if we were just short of the glory of God or miles short of the glory of God, we’re still short and always will be. The full law needs to be kept to the letter or it is like we kept none of it.
Before I went into the ministry I was an electrician. I remember one time when I was working in a newly constructed house I was doing a wire pull from one side of the house to the other. I was pulling from the main panel to get a circuit to the second floor on the opposite side of the house. I don’t know how far, but it was as far as you could be in that house. So, I pulled the wire all the way there and started stapling it back, got all the way back to the main panel, and saw that I had run out of wire and not realized it. Making it worse, I was only about six inches short. Suffice it to say I thought/said a lot of things that Jesus probably wouldn’t have at that moment. The whole effort I put in was worthless because I came up just short, but realistically, it didn’t matter that I was only six inches short, it may as well have been ten feet or fifty feet. I didn’t have enough. Coming up short is coming up short.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter how good and obedient you are, you fall short. We all do. Some of us may do better than others, maybe we’re only six inches short, or maybe we’re a mile short. It doesn’t matter, we’re short, because every single part of the law that God required for us to be holy needs to be kept. But the good news of the gospel is that all of it was actively kept by Christ. This is what we mean when we say active obedience, Christ actively did all the law required.
So here is what this all means: Christ spend his whole life, from birth to the cross, doing everything God required perfectly. He never failed in any commandment that needed to be kept and he never did anything God forbid. Just as we are completely and utterly unrighteous, he is completely and utterly righteous. When we repent and believe the gospel, that righteousness is given to us, so it is as if we were the ones who perfectly obeyed the law (Active obedience). Then, Christ submits himself to God’s punishment for our failure to keep the law, he suffers and dies on the cross for our failure to keep the law, he takes God’s justified wrath upon himself, so it is like he was the one who failed. (Passive Obedience) If we are to inherit eternal life, we need both of these things and he did both of these things, again, to the glory of God the Father.
Qualified Heirs
This is how we are qualified to be heirs of Christ. Col. 1:12 says, “Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” An heir is someone who inherits something that isn’t theirs. Think of a will for example. Heirs are usually family members who are included in the will and specifically listed as heirs. We write wills and such to pass along our estate to our heirs, but they have to be named in the will. Legally, it has to be in writing, or they are not heirs. In this way, an heir is qualified to be among the inheritors of the estate and is legally allowed to take possession of his portion of said estate. The qualification to be within the covenant people of God is holiness. We must be like Christ, perfect in our obedience and without sin. We cannot do that. We are incapable. So, we are unqualified. What we need, then, is someone outside of us to qualify us as heirs. When we say that Christ is our inheritance, what we are saying is that we inherit what is necessary to qualify us for eternal life in his presence. In fact, let me take this a bit further. We inherit everything he is, and he inherits everything we are.
We inherit his righteousness; he inherits our unrighteousness. We are saved while he is condemned. In theology, we call this double imputation. Christ’s righteousness is imputed, or counted, to us as if it were ours, and our unrighteousness is imputed, or counted to him as if it were his. Here’s how Paul explains it in 2 Cor. 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” The guilt of sin is removed because the penalty is paid. The righteousness of Christ is freely given to the repentant by grace through faith, with the result being eternal life inherited. Out of no obligation whatsoever to fallen, sinful humanity, Christ has become the righteousness we needed, the holiness we needed, to enter into his presence.
Summary
At the moment of salvation, you are given everything you need in Christ to be declared innocent of sin, or justified. You are counted to be righteous even though you are still fighting against a sin nature. God has declared you to be in Christ what you could never be without him: innocent of sin. The reformer Martin Luther explained it with the Latin phrase simul justus et peccator, which is translated as “At the same time righteous and a sinner.” In this way, we are saved and made to be at peace with God (Rom. 5:1). In my next post, I’ll look at the doctrine of sanctification.
Soli Deo Gloria
