This is an ongoing series of blog posts based on papers originally written for my church’s elder class. This week’s prompt: Please define justification.
Justification is that work of God in our lives that makes us righteous, able to stand before God as holy, when we are most assuredly not by our own human work and reckoning. Justification is what we receive and in which we walk in life after we have been regenerated. It is not just a simple hand-wave of God saying “all right, you’re fine.” It is a Trinitarian work that begins with the Father’s calling of His people, the Son’s sacrifice of Himself for the sins of His people and taking the wrath due to them on Himself, and the Spirit bringing new life to those people which enables them to place their faith in that work of the Son on their behalf.
Justification can be described simply, such as when Paul and Silas told the Roman jailer in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” Yet the closer we look at it the deeper the truth of it runs. It is also a concept that has held heavy controversy and disagreement throughout the age of the church. One challenge I have noted as I’ve written this is discussing justification specifically without moving into its lifelong effect, sanctification. The truth is simple, however: the former begets the latter, always. One who is in Christ will bear the fruit of Christ.
The transforming, heart-changing work of Jesus
Justification is the hinge on which our life in Christ turns. It is the seed which grows into the tree of our faith. It is the root of life that brings dead men to their feet, and puts holy and obedient desires in their hearts. When the Holy Spirit baptizes us, He baptizes us into that truth that we may walk in it. Every good thing we are able to do is rooted in the faith and hope in that justification, authored by the blood of Jesus. It is difficult to speak of justification without addressing the whole work of salvation.
However, it isn’t uncommon for this to be a misconception among many, that salvation is simply mentally assenting to the fact of Jesus dying for their sins, and that’s that. Justification is often treated as a form of spiritual insurance, as though it’s a single transaction rather than the beginning of a transformed life. But if Christ is truly the object of our faith, He must also be our Lord. A mind may hold a fact in spite of a hard and unrepentant heart. But justification is not wrought in us simply because we got the right answer. It is the fruit in our lives of the truth of Proverbs 9:10, where the personification of God’s wisdom tells her listener that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Washed clean, made new
If sin, the thoughts and deeds and desires that make us unholy is like mud covering us, justification is what cleans us off and washes our clothes and wipes our shoes, and makes us ready to reenter our Father’s house. Sin is the thing that brings us deep, heartbreaking shame, the thing that haunts our minds and hearts and separates us from our Father. Justification is the way by which we find ourselves free from this shame and regret, and when we see its work before our eyes, we find not a slavery to religion, but freedom – freedom to rejoice, freedom to trust the One who made us and called us to Himself.
Throughout all their epistles, the apostles seek to emphasize what the life of someone who is following the way of Jesus should look like. Their call is unified and consistent: loving others is a fruit of God’s love for us, and we ought to cultivate this in our lives. James writes in the first chapter of his letter that we must be “doers of the word and not hearers only,” and builds on that in the second chapter by giving examples of what this love looks like – for example, doing away with favoritism over human reasons like money, or truly sacrificing of ourselves for the needs of others.
The greatest passage of Scripture delving into the concept of justification, its nature and its fruit in our lives, is doubtlessly Paul’s epistle to the Romans. He begins the book addressing the “why” of justification. He calls out sin in both Gentiles and Jews, the two groups that made up the church in Rome, describing in great detail that neither has a right standing with God by their own nature. Jews did not, because they found themselves guilty of breaking the very law they were entrusted with, and the Gentiles did not because of the deep and besetting nature of the sins of their lives. Paul concludes this argument in chapter 3 with passages from the Psalms, concluding with this striking statement: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Why is this important?
Let’s break this down more plainly and answer what is probably the most basic question: why do we need to be justified? I’ve talked about “sin” and I think at least for most in the West there’s a general idea that sin is doing things against God’s rules, but that concept is both rather vague and reductive. Let’s define this in the way the Bible does, then.
The first sin, often referred to as the fall of man, is seen in Genesis chapter 3. The garden of Eden is a place where man and God are able to commune with one another, where heaven and earth mingle. God has created humans not simply as another form of animal to roam the earth, but as co-rulers of creation in a sense. We are made to truly know him, and to share in His image, to reflect it to the world in how we love and care for it. However, we don’t share in the entire nature of God, and of course we cannot – we are creatures, bound to the nature of such a being. We have limits, while God has none. We have a beginning, and at least for the moment, we have an end, while God has neither.
God placed a tree in the garden and commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from it. The tree is dubbed the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Knowledge, in this sense, is not simply an understanding that such concepts exist, for certainly they had that idea from the very beginning, since God had told them that to eat from it was forbidden – and to do so carried the stiffest of penalties, which is death. This image is a warning against trying to take the power of declaring what is good and what is evil into their own hands. This is not what we as creatures get to decide, but God has set the boundaries of creation.
Yet Adam and Eve listen to the lies of the serpent, who convinces them that they can in fact transcend their role as creatures and become like God, “knowing good and evil” – again, in the sense that they would define it. They would control the nature of right and wrong outside of God’s wisdom. And yet when they do, they don’t find empowerment or joy or pleasure. They find sadness and guilt, as they immediately recognize that apart from God’s perfect provision they are naked and exposed.
This is why the concept of sin is so much deeper than simply “don’t do it, it’s naughty and God will get mad.” It’s also one of the biggest themes woven throughout Scripture, that the wisdom of God is what governs the world and sin, rebellion against that wisdom, finds its end only in death. In the future I’d like to dig into that subject at length but for now I will settle for quoting one of the most striking verses in the book of Proverbs, from the end of chapter 8: “For the one who finds me [God’s wisdom] finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, but the one who misses me harms himself; all who hate me love death.”
And so, we have humanity, trying to do everything in its power to make itself right and good through its own diverse and foolish efforts. We have aching cries for justice in an unjust, wicked world filled with evil, and our own efforts leave us naked, exposed, and dying.
By His work
We can draw from this the important truth that our first step into finding justification is to discover our true need for it. One of the psalms that Paul quotes from in the Romans 3 passage is Psalm 14, which begins with the bold statement that “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” This is not simply a rebuke to open atheism, but against nominal religiosity that claims perhaps even the name of Christ, yet empties that name of its power through a true trust in human wisdom over God’s. I won’t belabor this point for now, but we’ve discussed ways this idea manifests even within so-called “reformed” Christianity on the podcast many times.
The justified person sees Jesus on the cross with the opened eyes of his heart and sees that but for God’s grace, his fate would be to receive that death himself, leading only to destruction. The justified person cries with the tax collector of Luke 18, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” The justified person is open-handed and joyfully generous not out of obligation or because he believes it manipulates the level of God’s approval for him, but because He has seen God’s great love and generosity on His behalf in the price paid for him. And the justified person is able to be open-handed even with his own life, because he knows that just as Jesus laid His life down and picked it up again, he too will live again with Christ no matter what may happen in this world.
Justification is a fact of our relationship with God in Christ, and it is a truth of the hope we hold in Him. When we stand before the throne our right standing before God will entirely be the work of God in justifying us. This is a tremendous encouragement to walk in it now, and the desire to append works to it is entirely destructive to what Scripture teaches on this matter. As Paul writes in Romans 6, we put sin to death day by day precisely because of the grace God has shown us in this, not in order to deserve it. We honor God by confessing and repenting of sin, and we are shown the fruit of this justification in our ability day by day to walk more clearly in step with our Lord who achieved it for us.
Look to the cross and live
For believers in all times and places, this is why the truth of justification must bear the fruit of repentance, and in that repentance must come humility. We must recognize that we cannot stand on our own two feet, but that God’s great mercy in Christ’s work on the cross is the foundation of our lives. It’s what allows us to endure anything the world throws at us, not in pride and a sense of being better, but in the knowledge that we had absolutely nothing to bring to God that earned us a gold star. He did it all, and we rest in it.
And so must our message be to our neighbors. We aren’t judging them. We’re inviting them. We’re serving them, and loving them. And our thoughts and deeds must be in step with that. Christians must not be legalistic finger-waggers, but we should be pointing out to the people around us that there is a great hope we are telling them about – that they can know the One that made them, and that the empty pursuit of wealth and pleasure is not what we were made for. We were made to live lives that honor God and bless each other, and through that to know the deepest blessings and love the world can share. Christians, place the love of God in justification before your eyes each day, and love your neighbors because of it. For everyone else, hear Jesus’ words:
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
If you are a Christian, how have you seen the justification of Christ worked out in your life? If you are not, or you are not sure where you fall here, how have you felt the struggle to reckon with the darkness of your life? How can we pray for you? What questions can we answer? Comment below or email us.
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