Let us here review, briefly, the ground which
we have already covered. We have seen, first, that "to justify" means to
pronounce righteous. It is not a Divine work, but a Divine verdict, the
sentence of the Supreme Court, declaring that the one justified stands
perfectly conformed to all the requirements of the law. Justification assures
the believer that the Judge of all the earth is for him, and not against him:
that justice itself is on his side. Second, we dwelt upon the great and
seemingly insoluable problem which is thereby involved: how a God of truth can
pronounce righteous one who is completely devoid of righteousness, how He can
receive into His judicial favour one who is a guilty criminal, how He can
exercise mercy without insulting justice, how He can be gracious and yet
enforce the high demands of His Law. Third, we have shown that the solution to
this problem is found in the perfect satisfaction which the incarnate Son
rendered unto Divine Law, and that on the basis of that satisfaction God can
truthfully and righteously pronounce just all who truly believe the Gospel.
In our last article we pointed out that the
satisfaction which Christ made to the Divine Law consists of two distinct
parts, answering to the twofold need of him who is to be justified. First, as a
responsible creature I am under binding obligations to keep the law--to
love God with all my heart and my neighbor as myself. Second, as a
criminal I am under the condemnation and curse of that law which I have
constantly transgressed in thought and word and deed. Therefore, if another was
to act as my surety and make reparation for me, he must perfectly obey all the
precepts of the law, and then endure the awful penalty of the law. That is
exactly what was undertaken and accomplished by the Lord Jesus in His virtuous
life and vicarious death. By Him every demand of the law was fulfilled; by Him
every obligation of the believer was fully met.
It has been objected by some that the obedience
of Christ could not be imputed to the account of others, for being "made
under the law" (Gal. 4:4) as man, He owed submission to the law
on His own account. This is a serious mistake, arising out of a failure to
recognize the absolute uniqueness of the Man Christ Jesus. Unlike us, He was
never placed under the Adamic Covenant, and therefore He owed nothing to the
law. Moreover, the manhood of Christ never had a separate existence: in the
virgin's womb the eternal Son took the seed of Mary into union with His Deity,
so that whereas the first man was of the earth, earthy, "the second Man is
the Lord from Heaven" (1 Cor. 15:47), and as such He was infinitely
superior to the law, owing nothing to it, being personally possessed of all the
excellencies of Deity. Even while He walked this earth "in Him dwelleth all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily."
It was entirely for His peoples' sake that the
God-man Mediator was "made under the law." It was in order to work out for them
a perfect righteousness, which should be placed to their account, that He took
upon Himself the form of a servant and became "obedient unto death." What has
been said above supplies the answer to another foolish objection which has been
made against this blessed truth, namely, that if the obedience of the Man
Christ Jesus were transferable it would be available only for one other
man, seeing that every human being is required to obey the law, and that if
vicarious obedience be acceptable to God then there would have to be as
many separate sureties as there are believers who are saved. That would
be true if the "surety" were merely human, but inasmuch as the Surety
provided by God is the God-man Mediator, His righteousness is of
infinite value, for the law was more "honoured and magnified" by the
obedience of "the Lord from Heaven" than had every member of the human race
perfectly kept it. The righteousness of the God-man Mediator is of
infinite value, and therefore available for as many as God is pleased to
impute it unto.
The value or merit of an action increases in
proportion to the dignity of the person who performs it, and He who obeyed in
the room and stead of the believer was not only a holy man, but the Son of the
living God. Moreover, let it be steadily borne in mind that the obedience which
Christ rendered to the law was entirely voluntary. Prior to His
incarnation, He was under no obligation to the law, for He had Himself
(being God) formulated that law. His being made of a woman and made under the
law was entirely a free act on His own part. We come into being and are
placed under the law without our consent; but the Lord from Heaven existed
before His incarnation, and assumed our nature by His spontaneous act: "Lo, I
come... I delight to do Thy will" (Psa. 40:7, 8). No other person could use
such language, for it clearly denotes a liberty to act or not to act,
which no mere creature possesses. Placing Himself under the law and rendering
obedience to it was founded solely on His own voluntary deed. His obedience was
therefore a "free will offering," and therefore as He did not owe obedience to
the law by any prior obligation, not being at all necessary for Himself, it is
available for imputation to others, that they should be rewarded for
it.
If, then, the reader has been able to follow us
closely in the above observations, it should be clear to him that when
Scripture speaks of God "justifying the ungodly" the meaning is that the
believing sinner is brought into an entirely new relation to the law;
that in consequence of Christ's righteousness being made over to him, he is now
absolved from all liability to punishment, and is given a title to all the
reward merited by Christ's obedience. Blessed, blessed truth for comforting the
conscientious Christian who daily groans under a sense of his sad
failures and who mourns because of his lack of practical conformity to the
image of Christ. Satan is ever ready to harass such an one and tell him his
profession is vain. But it is the believer's privilege to overcome him by "the
blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 12:11)--to remind himself anew that Another has atoned
for all his sins, and that despite his innumerable shortcomings he still stands
"accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6). If I am truly resting on the finished
work of Christ for me, the Devil cannot successfully lay anything to my charge
before God, though if I am walking carelessly He will suffer him to charge my
conscience with unrepented and unconfessed sins.
In our last chapter, under the nature of
justification, we saw that the constituent elements of this Divine blessing are
two in number, the one being negative in its character, the other positive. The
negative blessing is the cancellation of guilt, or the remission of sins--the
entire record of the believer's transgressions of the law, filed upon the
Divine docket, having been blotted out by the precious blood of Christ. The
positive blessing is the bestowal upon the believer of an inalienable title to
the reward which the obedience of Christ merited for him--that reward is
life, the judicial favour of God, Heaven itself. The unchanging sentence of the
law is "the man which doeth those things shall live by them" (Rom.
10:5). As we read in Romans 7:10, "the commandment, which was ordained to
life." It is just as true that obedience to the law secured life, as
disobedience insured death. When the young ruler asked Christ "what good thing
shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" He answered, "If thou wilt enter
into life, keep the commandments" (Matt. 19:16, 17).
It was because His people had failed to "keep the
commandments" that the God-man Mediator was "made under the law," and obeyed it
for them. And therefore its reward of "life" is due unto those whose
Surety He was; yea, due unto Christ Himself to bestow upon them. Therefore did
the Surety, when declaring "I have glorified Thee on the earth: I have finished
the work which Thou gavest Me to do" (John 17:4), remind the Father, "that He
should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him" (v. 2). But more,
on the footing of justice, Christ demands that His people be taken to
Heaven, saying, "Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me,
be with Me where I am" (John 17:24)--He claims eternal life for His
people on the ground of His finished work, as the reward of His
obedience.
"Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came
upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of One the free gift
came upon all men unto justification of life" (Rom. 5:18). The offence
of the first Adam brought down the curse of the broken law upon the whole human
race; but the satisfaction of the last Adam secured the blessing of the
fulfilled law upon all those whom He represented. Judgment unto condemnation is
a law term intending eternal death, the wages of sin; the "free gift" affirms
that a gratuitous justification is bestowed upon all its
recipients--"justification of life" being the issue of the gift,
parallel with "shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ" (v. 17). The sentence
of justification adjudges and entitles its object unto eternal life.
Having now considered the two great blessings
which come to the believer at his justification--deliverance from the curse of
the law (death) and a title to the blessing of the law (life)--let us now seek
to take a view of the originating source from which they proceed. This
is the free, pure sovereign grace of God: as it is written "Being
justified freely by His grace" (Rom. 3:24). What is grace? It is God's
unmerited and uninfluenced favour, shown unto the undeserving and
hell-deserving: neither human worthiness, works or willingness, attracting it,
nor the lack of them repelling or obstructing it. What could there be in me to
win the favourable regard of Him who is of too pure eyes to behold evil, and
move Him to justify me? Nothing whatever; nay, there was everything in me
calculated to make Him abhor and destroy me--my very self-righteous efforts to
earn a place in Heaven deserving only a lower place in Hell. If, then, I am
ever to be "justified" by God it must be by pure grace, and that
alone.
Grace is the very essence of the Gospel--the only
hope for fallen men, the sole comfort of saints passing through much
tribulation on their way to the kingdom of God. The Gospel is the announcement
that God is prepared to deal with guilty rebels on the ground of free favour,
of pure benignity; that God will blot out sin, cover the believing sinner with
a robe of spotless righteousness, and receive him as an accepted son: not on
account of anything he has done or ever will do, but of sovereign mercy, acting
independently of the sinner's own character and deservings of eternal
punishment. Justification is perfectly gratuitous so far as we are concerned,
nothing being required of us in order to it, either in the way of price
and satisfaction or preparation and meetness. We have not the slightest degree
of merit to offer as the ground of our acceptance, and therefore if God ever
does accept us it must be out of unmingled grace.
It is as "the God of all grace" (1 Peter 5:10)
that Jehovah justifies the ungodly. It is as "the God of all grace" He seeks,
finds, and saves His people: asking them for nothing, giving them everything.
Strikingly is this brought out in that word "being justified freely by
His grace" (Rom. 3:24), the design of that adverb being to exclude all
consideration of anything in us or from us which should be the cause or
condition of our justification. That same Greek adverb is translated "without a
cause" in John 15:25--"they hated Me without a cause." The world's hatred of
Christ was "without a cause" so far as He was concerned: there
was nothing whatever in Him which, to the slightest degree, deserved their
enmity against Him: there was nothing in Him unjust, perverse, or evil;
instead, there was everything in Him which was pure, holy, lovely. In like
manner, there is nothing whatever in us to call forth the approbation of God:
by nature there is "no good thing" in us; but instead, everything that
is evil, vile, loathsome.
"Being justified without a cause by His
GRACE." How this tells out the very heart of God! While there was no
motive to move Him, outside of Himself, there was one inside Himself; while
there was nothing in us to impel God to justify us, His own grace moved Him, so
that He devised a way whereby His wondrous love could have vent and flow forth
to the chief of sinners, the vilest of rebels. As it is written, "I, even I, am
He that blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake, and will not
remember thy sins" (Isa. 43:25). Wondrous, matchless grace! We cannot for a
moment look outside the grace of God for any motive or reason why He should
ever have noticed us, still less had respect unto such ungodly wretches.
The first moving cause, then, that inclined God
to show mercy to His people in their undone and lost condition, was His own
wondrous grace--unsought, uninfluenced, unmerited by us. He might justly have
left us all obnoxious to the curse of His Law, without providing any Surety for
us, as He did the fallen angels; but such was His grace toward us that "He
spared not His own Son." "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but
according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and
renewing of the Holy Ghost; Which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ
our Saviour; That being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs
according to the hope of eternal life" (Titus 3:5-7). It was His own sovereign
favour and good will which actuated God to form this wondrous scheme and method
of justification.
Against what has been said above, it has been
objected by Socinians and their echoists that this cannot be: if the believing
sinner is justified upon the grounds of a full satisfaction having been made to
God for him by a surety, then his discharge from condemnation and his reception
into God's judicial favour must be an act of pure justice, and therefore
could not be by grace. Or, if it be purely an act of Divine grace, then
no surety can have obeyed the law in the believer's stead. But this is to
confound two distinct things: the relation of God to Christ the Surety, and the
relation of God to me the sinner. It was grace which transferred my sins
to Christ; it was justice which smote Christ on account of those sins.
It was grace which appointed me unto everlasting bliss; it is justice
to Christ which requires I shall enjoy that which He purchased for me.
Toward the sinner justification is an act of free
unmerited favour; but toward Christ, as a sinner's Surety, it is an act of
justice that eternal life should be bestowed upon those for whom His
meritorious satisfaction was made. First, it was pure grace that God was
willing to accept satisfaction from the hands of a surety. He might have
exacted the debt from us in our own persons, and then our condition had been
equally miserable as that of the fallen angels, for whom no mediator was
provided. Second, it was wondrous grace that God Himself provided a
Surety for us, which we could not have done. The only creatures who are capable
of performing perfect obedience are the holy angels, yet none of them could
have assumed and met our obligations, for they are not akin to us,
possessing not human nature, and therefore incapable of dying. Even had an
angel became incarnate, his obedience to the law could not have availed for the
whole of God's elect, for it would not have possessed infinite value.
None but a Divine person taking human nature into
union with Himself could present unto God a satisfaction adequate for the
redemption of His people. And it was impossible for men to have found out that
Mediator and Surety: it must have its first rise in God, and not from us: it
was He that "found" a ransom (Job 33:24) and laid help upon One that is
"mighty" (Psa. 89:19). In the last place, it was amazing grace that the
Son was willing to perform such a work for us, without whose consent the
justice of God could not have exacted the debt from Him. And His grace is the
most eminent in that He knew beforehand all the unspeakable humiliation and
unparalleled suffering which He would encounter in the discharge of this work,
yet that did not deter Him; nor was He unapprized of the character of those for
whom He did it--the guilty, the ungodly, the hell-deserving; yet He shrank not
back.
"O
to grace how great a debtor,
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let Thy grace, Lord, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee."