The doctrine of justification profoundly shapes the way we view our relationship with God and our approach to the Christian life. Today, Michael Reeves describes the immense joy that a right understanding of this truth should elicit. Get Michael Reeves’ teaching series Reformation Truths on DVD, plus lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide, for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3660/reformation-truths Meet Today’s Teacher: Michael Reeves is president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in the United Kingdom. He is the featured teacher for the Ligonier teaching series The English Reformation and the Puritans. He is author of many books, including The Unquenchable Flame, Delighting in the Trinity, and Rejoice and Tremble. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
You will not love God unless you know He loves you first. You will not love Him unless you know a security in which to enjoy Him. And therefore, justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living.
We've been talking a lot about Martin Luther as we approach October 31st, often referred to as Reformation Day. Luther famously wrote, "...the love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it."
And today on Renewing Your Mind, you'll hear how he came to say that, as his mind was renewed according to the Word of God, and he finally understood the gospel and the truth that we are justified by faith alone. Today is the final day that you'll hear from Michael Reeves and his series, Reformation Truths.
So if you'd like this series on DVD, along with digital access to the messages and study guide, make sure you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends at midnight. Here's Dr. Reeves.
We come now to the wonderful doctrine of justification, the matter of the Reformation, the matter that made the Reformation the Reformation. As John Calvin put it, the first and keenest subject of controversy between us. Now justification is perhaps the ultimate example of a doctrine that quite different Christian traditions can hold to and understand in completely incompatible ways.
Both Rome and the Reformers now and then believed and taught justification in some sense. both held that God justifies by His grace through faith, which sounds like and has been taken to mean real agreement on this first and keenest subject of controversy. But justification
is a prime example of a doctrine that is susceptible to very different readings and which therefore needs to be closely defined. So let's start with the understanding of justification Luther was brought up with before the Reformation. And to get it, you really need to go back to the great 5th century theologian Augustine.
who believe that if you want to understand justification, you need to turn to the book of Romans, which you might have been expecting. But chapter 5 and verse 5, which says, God has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit he's given us. Now, that is a lovely biblical truth, but it's not justification.
But as Augustine understood it, what happens in justification is that God pours his love into our hearts, internally transforming us, making us more and more loving, more and more righteous, more and more just, deified. I'm internally transformed. I'm more and more inherently righteous and holy, more and more personally worthy of heaven as I'm transformed.
And so justification was a process of internal transformation. What do you think that does to you if you believe that? Well, the very clear takeaway for Europe was a lack of assurance before a holy God. So one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431 was just this.
At a trial, the judges proclaimed, "'This woman sins when she says she's certain of being received into paradise.'" Seeing on this earthly journey, said the judges, no pilgrim can know if he is worthy of glory or punishment. And that judgment made complete sense within the logic of the system.
If we can only enter heaven because we have, yes, by God's enabling grace, become personally worthy of heaven, of course nobody can be sure. By that line of reasoning, I can have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness. And that is why during a thunderstorm in 1505, the 21-year-old student Martin Luther screamed with fear.
when a thunderbolt smashed him to the ground. It hit so close he was knocked to the ground. The air was pushed out of his lungs, and he screamed the words, listen carefully to the words, St. Anne, help me. I'll become a monk. He cried, but not to God. But he had never in his life prayed to God. For he did not dare to speak to a holy God. Poor man. Terrified. of his fate.
He couldn't even cry out to God because he had no assurance of how he stood before him. And so he puts a good word in with Anne, who's the mother of Mary, hoping Anne will speak to Mary, who'll speak to Jesus, who'll speak to the Father. And he thinks that entering a monastery to earn his salvation is going to help. And that's what he did.
He did become a monk, and for the next ten years or so, through his monkery, sought to climb what he saw as a steep, slippery ladder to heaven, and said after that, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience, and I could not believe that God was placated. I did not love, I hated God who punishes sinners.
And secretly, if not blasphemously, murmuring greatly, I was angry with God. Because as he saw it, God must be the sort of monstrous being who makes you earn his love. And he started wrestling with Romans chapter 1, verse 17, and particularly that phrase, the righteousness of God, that you find there in that verse. And Luther hated that phrase, the righteousness of God.
They couldn't understand how Paul could say that the righteousness of God is gospel, good news. For he thought, how can that be good news? If God is righteous, that's not good news for me because I am unrighteous. And if he's righteous, that just means he's going to judge me. So the righteousness of God is pure bad news for me. And then, hammering away that text in his cell,
He wrote, I began to understand the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith. And in that tower experience, Luther discovered an entirely different God who relates to us in an entirely different way. A God who loves us first. Before we ever love him. He saw the righteousness of God is something he shares with us.
The righteousness of God is something he shares with failures like you and me. What a discovery to explain to the world. It transformed his life and the next year or so he devoted to writing fast to explain this. And when he came to explain his discovery, it wasn't to Romans that he turned. It was to the book of Song of Songs, the story of a romance.
For, he believed, you can best understand the gospel if you understand it like a marriage. And so Luther told the story of a king, a perfect and wealthy king, representing King Jesus. And a poor girl, in fact a prostitute, representing us. And there is nothing that girl can do to make herself the queen. For the king and his love woos her.
And at their wedding day, she gets to say to him, all that I am, I give to you. And all that I have, I share with you. And so she shares with him what? Debts, shame. But he's so wealthy, he can take all her debts. And then the king turns and says to her, my darling, all that I am I give to you and all that I have I share with you. And with those words, that poor girl is the queen by status.
All the kingdom is hers. All that I have, I share with you. And that is the great marriage swap of the gospel. Saul Luther, the joyful exchange, our great bridegroom, has taken all our sin, borne it on the cross, and drowned it in his blood. And then he has given to us all his righteousness. all his blessedness, all his status before the Father.
And so, said Luther, the sinner can confidently display her sins in the face of death and hell and say, if I've sinned, my Christ in whom I believe has not sinned. And all his is mine now. No, mine, my sin is his. That girl... She'd not learned the ways of the court, how to be queenly, but she was the queen by status.
Just so, the Christian is at one and the same time sinful in themselves, in their habits, in their lifestyle, but by status now, united to Christ in that joyful exchange, righteous. sinful in herself and righteous, absolutely righteous by status with the righteousness of Christ. That is the joyful exchange. And do you see how much stronger this is than simply being forgiven?
Sometimes people talk about justification, saying that it means it's just as if I'd never sinned, which is half helpful. It's what I believed when I first became a Christian. That's what I was taught about justification. And I thought it sounded good for a bit. I thought it was lovely to have my slate wiped clean when I became a believer, but I messed it up again rather quickly.
So what do I do with the sins I've committed since I was justified? Do I have to be re-justified now? What I hadn't grasped is that justification involves not only my transferring all my sin to him, but not only are my sins counted to him, he's positively given me, imputed, counted to me all his righteousness. I do not just have a blank slate as a believer.
My sin is counted to him, his righteousness is counted to me. So justification, Luther saw, is a legal term, not a transformational term. It fits into the idea that man stands before God the judge in the cosmic courtroom. And we are justified when God pronounces the verdict that we have a righteous status before him.
And so in the Bible, the righteous person is not the person who's never sinned, not the person who's done plenty of good works. The righteous person is the sinner on whom God has pronounced the verdict righteous. Romans chapter 4 from verse 3 reads, For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, they're his due. This is the most extraordinary verse, verse 5. To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." Isn't that amazing language?
To the one who does not work but believes in the one who not justifies the one who's sorted himself out, not justifies the one who's been through a process of internal purification, God who justifies the wicked, the ungodly. This is our God. He goes on.
Verse 6, just as David, also speaking of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works, and he quotes Psalm 32, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. And so the blessed person here, in Romans, is not a person who has no sin.
The blessed person is the one whose sins are not counted against them. This is legal language, meaning, to use Luther's shocking phrase, The Christian is simul justus et peccator, simultaneously, at the same time, just or righteous by status and a sinner in themselves. And you know, in fact, there was no support for the use of the word justification as a process.
That's not what the word justification means today. And it's not what it ever meant. That misunderstanding arose because of a bad translation of the Greek New Testament into the Latin that the Roman church was using. Because there is a perfectly good set of Greek words the New Testament could have used if it wanted to speak of making us righteous rather than God declaring us righteous.
There's a set of words you could use if that's what you wanted to say. That's not what the New Testament says. And this, in fact, is now granted by many Roman Catholic scholars. Take, for example, Leslie Rumble who writes, Now it is quite true that Paul made use of a word which in the Greek language had the technical meaning of legal acquittal.
And if the word can have no other meaning than the one, that would scarcely dispute the interpretation of justification as implying no more than to be counted as righteous or not guilty in the sight of God. which makes it sound like he's saying Luther's right. But, he goes on, alas, Luther had not the advantages of modern scholarship. Ah, modern scholarship.
He belonged to an age, he writes, when it was thought that the real meaning of the New Testament could be best ascertained by discovering the exact sense of the Greek language in which the books were originally written. Oh, Luther.
But while acknowledging that the meaning of the New Testament supports Luther's understanding, Rumble rejects this on the basis that, I quote, the whole religious outlook takes precedence over the fine print. So the whole religious outlook takes precedence over the actual words of the Bible. Justification was the matter of the Reformation, and through it,
God was glorified as utterly merciful and good, as both supremely holy and compassionate. And therefore, people found they could find their comfort and delight in this God. Here, the Reformers saw is a God who loves failures first, not one who simply approves those who've sorted themselves out. And so the glory of this God became the root of true satisfaction and joy for believers.
It became their guiding light, their ultimate goal. And so here is how Luther, remember the man who once said he hated God? Here's how he would come to speak of God in his glory and love. Luther wrote, The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it. The love of God loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong.
Therefore, sinners are attractive because they're loved. They're not loved because they're attractive. He's showing how all this still matters because you will never love God and lean into the Christian life without it. You will not love God unless you know he loves you first. You will not love him unless you know a security in which to enjoy him.
And therefore, justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living. Without it, you will not have a life of joy and integrity before God. But with it, you can say this with Luther, When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak like this. I admit I deserve death and hell. What of it?
Does this mean I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means, for I know one who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ. the Son of God, and where he is, there I shall be also. For no sin is greater than the blood of this Lamb, and we are clothed in him.
Justification by faith alone, this declarative act, means that we who know we are a sea of failures can approach a holy God with with absolute honesty and absolute boldness. Absolute honesty about our failure and boldness because of Christ and not anything we've done. It's hard to do both, isn't it? To have both honesty about our failures, our sinfulness before a holy God and boldness.
That is what justification by faith alone gives. We can approach a most holy God with absolute honesty and absolute boldness because of Jesus.
how transforming the biblical gospel is, and how grateful we are that this message was rediscovered and proclaimed by men like Martin Luther during the Reformation. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. These great Reformation truths are explained further in Michael Reeve's series, Reformation Truths.
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