← Doctrine Matters with Kevin DeYoung
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Hello, and welcome to Doctrine Matters, a weekly podcast exploring the rich theology of the Christian faith. Each week, we want to take hold of one aspect of our faith and try to understand theological concepts that sometimes have been debated, controversial, or maybe just hard to understand. And hopefully we can look at them in a way that is clear, concise, and accessible. The goal is that believers would be encouraged and edified and that God would be glorified so we can love him more, know him more, enjoy him forever. I'm Kevin DeYoung, your host and teacher, and this is Doctrine Matters. This week on Doctrine Matters, we come to the granddaddy of them all, the doctrine of justification. As we've been moving through soteriology, and in particular, the ordo salutis this week, justification. There's so much we can say. Let's try to hit some of the key terms and concepts of this doctrine. Famously, the reformer said that doctrine on which the church stands or falls. 2nd Corinthians 5, 18, 20. Paul is talking about his ministry of reconciliation, which invites the question, how are we reconciled to God? And you might say, well, yeah, we're reconciled to God. Simple. We say, we're sorry. God says, I forgive you, and it's better. I mean, isn't that the wonderful heart of the good news? We say, we're sorry for our sins, and God says, I love you and I forgive you, and you're my child forever. And that's how we think of it. There is, however, a problem. There's a problem which was uppermost in the minds of the apostles. You see it most clearly in Paul, but you see it in other places in Scripture. And the problem is, God is loving, but he is also just. He cannot simply pass over our sins because he feels like would be a violation of his own nature. I was teaching on this one time, and I said. And it was somewhere in the South. And I just said a line that I've often said when talking about this doctrine. I said, you know, it's not like God just wakes up and says, hey, you know your sins, forget about it. And I had somebody afterward who was very offended and felt like I was being, I don't know, stereotypical of New Yorkers, if that even is a good New York accent. The forget about it. So I said, I am from the North. I mean, no offense to our friends from New York City. I thought it was just a helpful way. So there you go. If anyone is listening, hopefully no offense is taken. My point is simply that God does not forgive our sins simply by saying Forget about it. Like, he wakes up one day and he's having a good God day. And we said, we're sorry. And he says, bada boom, bada bing. Okay, I shouldn't have done that one either. And your sins are gone. No, he is a God of justice. Sin is a personal offense to God. If God were to simply look past our sin just because he really likes us, he would be treating his own name with contempt. Think about the glory and the honor of his name. To think if someone besmirched the good name of my wife, treated her horribly, unspeakably cruel, evil, offensive. And then they said, I'm sorry for what I did to your wife. And I said, you know what? You're sorry. It's not a big deal. So no one would say, wow, what a magnanimous person you are. You say, now wait a minute. What about justice? What about the honor and the glory of her name? And if that's true, to think about a husband's wife, how much more for God to think about his own name? There needs to be some kind of restitution for wrong, some kind of satisfaction of divine justice. Proverbs 17:15 says, he who justifies the wicked is an abomination to the Lord. So here's the issue. How is God able to justify the ungodly, the. The wicked without committing an abomination? And the answer, coming back now to 2 Corinthians 5:21, lies in the great exchange. For our sake, because he loved us, God sent His son, Jesus Christ, who never did anything wrong, never failed His Heavenly Father in the slightest to be counted as sin, so that we who have nothing to offer God but our sin might be counted as righteousness and as righteous in Christ. The gifts conveyed in this justification are both negative and positive. Negatively, justification is the declaration that our sins have been forgiven, our guilt removed. The divine acquittal here is not a process. It is a judicial verdict, a declaration of innocence. Think of Romans 5:1. There is no longer, there is no condemnation. The declaration is based on the substitutionary work of Christ. It's grounded in an alien righteousness that is a righteousness that does not belong to us now. It does through union with Christ, but it is not a righteousness that we have accomplished or achieved. So negatively, justification means sins forgiven, guilt removed positively. So it's not just that. It's not just forgiven. It entails our adoption as children and our our legal right to eternal life. It is now our present possession and what we will enjoy eternal life. So justification, this is important is a forensic term. That's why it's used in the context of judgment or used as the opposite of condemnation. Deuteronomy 25, Romans 4, 5, Romans 8, 33, it's used as the opposite. The opposite of condemnation is justification. That's forensic or legal terminology. The Greek word dikaio speaks of something declarative. Justification refers to a judicial pronouncement. It is the judge declaring that one is righteous, one is in a right standing. To put a very homely analogy, we took the test of obedience, got an F. Now we got an F in Adam when he failed, and we've continued to fail. Christ took the test, got an A. God is a fair teacher. He can't just say, well, I like you. You get an A because you smile. Or you said, you tried hard. We have to get what we deserve. And an F deserves his wrath. But that's not the end of the story, because by faith, we are joined to Christ. Consequently, instead of giving us the wrath we deserve for our F, God determined that Christ's A would be credited to us, and he gets our F. That is the great exchange. Now, how does this righteousness come to be ours? Here we come to the doctrine of imputation, Shorter Catechism 33. Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins and accepts, accepts us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone. That word imputed is essential to a biblical understanding of justification. The controversy between the Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church was not whether we needed God's help. Of course they said, we need God's help and God's grace, or whether we needed righteousness, but whether that righteousness was working in us or a righteousness reckoned to us. So it's the difference between an infused or inherent or imparted righteousness and an imputed righteousness. So I've used the analogy before. I like track and field. You think about a. Let's just say a high jump. Went to the world championships with my two oldest sons a few years ago, and we were there on the night they were doing the high jump, and we were right in the front row. And it's amazing. What's the world record? I had to look it up, but it's close to eight feet. I mean, it's just higher than I am with my hands standing up. It's just amazing. And people can jump over that. And if someone said, okay, now, Kevin, you have to jump over eight feet. Well, that's an impossibility for me. Or you had, let's say, 10ft. You're gonna smash the world record. I can't do it. It is impossible. I cannot do it. So how would I win that gold medal? How would I achieve that world record? Well, a strictly, just, absolutely Pelagian works righteousness as you. Well, you just eat right, you train hard, you work your whole life, and you're going to eventually clear that bar. I know it. Just believe in. Well, very few. Well, I think some Christians think that way. Very few Christian theologians ever talk that boldly about our effort. So another way is to say, well, there's going to be some grace worked in you. And maybe to use the analogy, you know, you get some special shoes, you get a special supplement that's like something worked inside. You know, you still have to work hard, you still to train practice to clear that bar. You are still clearing the bar, but now there is something within you that's a kind of infused, imparted righteousness. Yes, it's grace, but you're still clearing the bar. Now, another explanation before we get to what imputation looks like, another explanation is, you know, you just run up and you run right under the bar. You don't even try. You don't even get over the bar. And the. The judge says, congratulations, you get the gold medal, world record. Anyway, now I give that explanation because that is often how Catholics have caricatured the Protestant doctrine of justification. They have called it a legal fiction, meaning you are getting something that you have no legal right to. So in that analogy, you got the world record, you got the gold medal, and you did nothing. It is just. It's just a wave of the hand. It's just an arbitrary. A legal fiction. Well, this doctrine of imputation points us in a different direction. So here the analogy would be that Jesus, the world's best high jumper, goes and sails over the bar at 10ft and gets the world record in the gold medal. And then by union with him, his accomplishment is credited to our account, so that his gold medal is our gold medal. To use another very homely sports analogy, if you play fantasy football, as I have for many years, and you pick these players, and I'm always telling my wife and my boys, well, actually, my daughter plays too, and we get so upset. We say, our players are doing bad or I'm doing bad. When we score a touchdown, we say, I score. My wife will say, you didn't do anything. Well, yes, but these are my players. And I am in union with them. When they fumble, I lose two points. When they score a touchdown, I get six points. So it is credited to my account. And I consider what they do to be me and pros and cons. So Adam, we had Adam on our fantasy team. Bad news. If you have Jesus on your fantasy team, then you're gonna win. So the high jump is not a legal fiction. It's not God giving to us in justification a legal verdict that's just made up the forget about it. No, it is based on the work that Christ has done, which is then credited to us, not infused, not imparted, but reckoned to us. Say, I am going to count this as belonging to you. Which is why the famous Latin phrase is true, simul justus et peccator sinners, but at the same time justified. Now, the goal, of course, is not to revel in that sin. And may sin increase, that grace may abound. No faith will work itself out in love. But we are at that moment of justification, not righteous in ourselves. We are sinners, and yet at the same time, we have been declared righteous. That instrument. Here's the last point. That instrument by which righteousness is credited to our account is faith, and faith alone. So in Roman Catholic theology, justification is a process begun at baptism, and then you cooperate with grace in hopes of receiving a favorable verdict from God at the end of our lives. One Catholic writer who I actually enjoy says the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone contradicts Scripture. Protestant theology reminds us that none of us can deserve heaven and that the first words should be not I, but Christ. And yet he says to the world's most practical question, what must I do to be saved? God has given us a clear answer. Repentance. Believe, live in charity. So that's what this Catholic author means when he says, justification is not by faith alone. By contrast, I would argue the Bible stresses we are justified by faith apart from works of the law. Yes, we know that. James says at one point that one is not justified by faith alone. And he's talking about justification in a different sense. James does not contradict Paul. James is talking about, what does the life of the justified person look like. Paul is talking about what is the mechanism by which this righteousness is credited to our account. And there he says, we know a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Galatians 3. 21. No one is justified before God by the law. The righteous shall live by faith. Faith is that instrumental cause. We should be clear that although we're justified by faith alone, that faith is never alone. And we don't want to think of the faith as a work, as if God says, well, you don't have any good works, but I'm going to put faith and that's going to count for all the works. No, we don't mean faith. Is that work so great that it saves us? It's the straw that sips up the sweet tea on a hot summer day. It's an instrumental cause. But once justified, we will live transformed lives. The faith that justifies is never alone, though we are justified by faith alone. Turretan says it is one thing for works to be connected with faith in the person of the justified. Another, however, in the matter of justification. So simple yet so profound. Yes, works are part of the equation, but they are connected to the person of the justified, not to the manner in which we are justified. In other words, sinners are not justified by works, but works will always be evident in the lives of justified sinners. You've been listening to Doctrine Matters with me, Kevin DeYoung, your host and teacher. If you'd like to learn more about the topics we talked about today, you can check out my book, Daily Doctrine. It's available in print or audio from Crossway.org and you may want to talk to your pastor or a trusted friend who can recommend other good resources. The Doctrine Matters Population this podcast is produced by Crossway, a non profit ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the truth of God's Word through publishing gospel centered content. To learn more, visit Crossway.org until next week, I'm Kevin DeYoung and this has been Doctrine Matters. Thanks for joining us.