Justification by Faith involves Salvation, Righteousness, and Eternal Life. Being justified implies being saved from sin and from the wrath of God, it signifies being endowed with the opportunity and ability to become righteous, and it involves the enjoyment of an eternal life consequent on righteousness being attained. It appears to be a true, and perhaps a sufficient, account of the meaning of justification, as the term is used by St. Paul, to say that it is the being accounted righteous and destined to eternal life by reason of being saved from sin and put in the way of becoming actually and truly righteous. Or, since eternal life is through righteousness, and salvation from sin is a necessary antecedent to the becoming righteous, justification may be defined more briefly as the being accounted righteous by reason of being endowed with a gift of righteousness.
Justification is no mere fiat of God, no mere arbitrary pronouncement. God reckons the true perfection of life as already ours, because in identifying ourselves with Christ we have entered upon the way of its increasing realization. In the union of the soul with Christ and the consequent participation of His life, there is the pledge and promise of the completion in the believer’s life of the righteousness which is already by anticipation accorded to him. Man is in a sense already what he aspires to be. What we believe in we are. There must be something in us of that moral beauty which we admire in another, and to declare that we believe in Christ and accept Him as the ideal of our faith and endeavour is already to have something of the Christlike in our soul. The implanted seed contains within it the potency of the completed life. There is an element of Pauline truth in Lowell’s poem:
The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment,
Before the Present poor and bare
Can make its sneering comment.
To let the new life in, we know,
Desire must open the portal;
Perhaps the longing to be so
Helps make the soul immortal. [Note: A. B. D. Alexander, The Ethics of St. Paul, 149.]
1. Salvation. — How does justification involve salvation? Because it means not only the acquittal of the sinner but also his restoration to God’s favour. For justification is not merely forgiveness. It differs from forgiveness by transcending it. It does not contradict it; it includes it, being a kindred but greater thing. Forgiveness remits penalty; it allows the offender to depart; at least it need imply no more than this. God’s acceptance of sinful man does this—and very much more. It welcomes him to draw near, it beckons him in, it casts arms of love around him, it bids him be at home. In Christ’s great parable the prodigal was indeed forgiven the gross sin of his vicious and heartless prodigality. But that was not all. He might have been forgiven, and yet kept at a certain distance from his father, at least for a while. But not so; he was accepted. He was met with an embrace and led into a festival. He was bidden to be much more at home than ever.
We do indeed as sinners most urgently need forgiveness, the remission of our sins, the putting away of the holy vengeance of God upon our rebellion. But we need more. We need the voice which says, not merely, you may go; you are let off your penalty; but, you may come; you are welcomed into My presence and fellowship.
Wesley spent a couple of days at Oxford, where he preached at the Castle on Sunday to a numerous and serious congregation. Then he returned to London. Ten days later he saw his mother once more at Salisbury. He was just ready to start for Tiverton to visit his eldest brother, when he received a message that Charles was dying at Oxford. He set out without delay, but found, to his great relief, that the danger was past. By this means he renewed his intercourse with Bailer, who was still at Oxford, and had been at Charles Wesley’s side in his illness. “By him,” he says “(in the hand of the great God), I was, on Sunday, the 5th” (March, 1738), “clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved.” Wesley immediately concluded that he was unfit to preach. He consulted Baler, who urged him to go on. “But what can I preach?” said Wesley. “Preach faith till you have it,” said his friend; “and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” This sound advice Wesley followed. It is interesting to know that the first person to whom he offered salvation by faith was a prisoner who lay under sentence of death at the Castle. Here, in the place to which his friend Morgan had introduced him more than seven years before, he began his work as a preacher of the righteousness of faith. The incident is the more remarkable because Bohler had many times asked Wesley to speak to this man, but he had refused because he was a zealous assertor of the impossibility of a death-bed repentance. Wesley’s prejudices were yielding at last. [Note: J. Telford, The Life of John Wesley, 96.]
2. Righteousness.—Whena man is justified he is accounted righteous. “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness” (Rom_4:3). Now righteousness does not mean one thing in the Old Testament and another in the New. Righteousness is nothing less than conformity to the law of holiest manhood, which is the law of God; and hence, whenever and wherever achieved, it is one righteousness, just as God is one and manhood one. Its requirements are as great for Christian as for Jew, nay, greater, because its standard is more completely and searchingly defined. Among the earliest declarations of Christ’s ministry was the solemn word, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Mat_5:18). Then He took up the old legislation point by point, and showed how much more inward and genuine obedience must thenceforth be than ever before.
When St. Paul contrasts the righteousness which is of the law and the righteousness which is of faith, he designates not two different righteousnesses, but two different means of attaining the same righteousness. His sole purpose is to show how faith accomplishes “what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh.”
Righteousness is called the righteousness of God. For it belongs to the believer yet is not his personal righteousness. It is a thing revealed, to which a man submits. It also belongs to God, yet is not His personal righteousness. It is a “gift” from God to men. It is Divine credit for being righteous bestowed on a man when he believes in, or trusts, God. God accounts one who believes in His grace righteous; He reckons his faith for righteousness.
(1) The righteousness which is by faith is the righteousness of a new relationship to God. The relationship of man to God by nature is one of alienation which passes into enmity, Rom_8:7. “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” But when, each one in his own way, we come to see God in His truth and goodness and mercy, we change our minds toward Him. We stand in a new relationship to Him, a relationship of trust to the Maker of our bodies and the Father of our spirits. Our faith may be no more than a grain of mustard seed, but it is potent to alter our relationship, and to reshape our lives. Now, next to being loved, to be trusted is the most satisfying attitude that one spirit can take up toward another. It brings us into a relationship which quenches all enmity and alienation.
A child may have been wilful and petulant until its mother’s anger has been roused, but when the little arms are clasped in a sobbing confidence round the mother’s neck, the trust confessed in the clinging pressure banishes all alienation. The man who has erred in his word or deed, and wronged us to our wounding, comes to us trusting in our magnanimity and kindness, and his trust brings him at once into a new relationship. In a similar manner, when a human soul, hitherto cherishing base thoughts of God and rebellious in will against His demands, turns to trust in God, he enters into a new relationship. In that new relationship he is forgiven. His sins are not imputed to him, and his faith is counted to him as righteousness. [Note: W. M. Clow, The Evangel of the Strait Gate, 148.]
(2) The righteousness which is by faith is a righteousness of a new principle of life. In the moment in which a man trusts in God and takes up a new relationship to Him he is born again.
In that new birth he is endued with a new principle and energy of life. The germ of the holy character is implanted in his soul.
But it is only the promise and the potency of righteousness. It is the dream of an attainment, a devotion to something afar, the will and purpose of a strength and beauty yet to be. Yet that principle within him determines what he is. Not his emotions, not the expression of his convictions, not the grace of his prayers, and not even the tenor of his commonplace day, but this inward and secret passion of his will marks the man’s true quality. Not only has he been forgiven and accepted, but God has wrought in him the root and rudiment of righteousness, and he stands before God’s all-seeing eye in a righteousness imputed to him in his act of faith.
The gardener plants an acorn in the loam, and soon the green shoot appears. He names that little, tender, almost formless green stem an oak. It bears no resemblance to the oak in the meadow, with its gnarled and knotted trunk, its stubborn arms, and its spread of branch and leaf. But to that frail, little, upspringing thing the gardener imputes the perfection it will one day attain. A painter takes his brush and draws upon the canvas a few initial strokes in an hour of clear conception and fresh inspiration. There may be no more than a rough and hasty sketch of what will yet be a finished masterpiece. The visitor to the studio may be struck more by the crudeness of the colouring and the startling contrast of the light and shade. But to the painter it is a picture, with a name, and when he has spent his thought and time upon it the face will stand out in its beauty. He imputes a perfection it does not yet possess. So the human spirit, at present compassed about with infirmity, whose hours are strangely mingled with effort and aspiration, lapse and indulgence, flushings of joy and tears of remorse, may seem to have no claim to be counted as righteous. But he has believed in God. He has yielded himself to the will and the power of God. The Divine One who knows the hour of self-surrender, and marks the true bent of the soul, accords to him a righteousness not yet achieved —a righteousness which is of faith. The cry of penitence, the craving of the heart for holiness, the girding of the loins to walk in the way of a stricter truth and purity, the throb of a true devotion to Christ, all are yet imperfect, but they are the promise and potency of a perfection yet to be, and the principle behind them is counted by God as righteousness.
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. [Note: W. H. Clow, The Evangel of the Strait Gate, 145.]
(3) The righteousness which is by faith is the acceptance of the righteousness of Christ, in a faith which makes us one with Him. There comes a moment when not only the things we have done in the flesh, the foul procession of thoughts within the soul, the whirl and dance of feeling which stir the blood in our veins, but even our generous deeds, gentle moods, kindly impulses, yes, and even our sob of penitence and our hour of far-visioned faith, are seen to be all flawed and faulty in God’s sight. There comes an hour when we are too conscious that, were God’s great light to be cast upon our souls and our lives, men would hide their faces from us ashamed. In that hour a man cannot trust in the new relationship, or the new principle of life. He comes to see his sin as Christ saw it. He shares, in his measure, in Christ’s grief and burden for it. He consents to Christ’s sacrifice as the means of his reconciliation and the source of his forgiveness. In an act of faith he identifies himself with Christ, and becomes one of that great company, and a member of that body, of which Christ is the Head. He believes not only in the marvel but in the miracle of forgiveness, and he rises to know himself not only forgiven but redeemed, and to stand for ever within the righteousness of Christ.
3. Eternal life.—Eternallife is in Christ Jesus. To have the righteousness of Christ is to have the life that is eternal. Eternal life may be said to be the Johannine phrase that is equivalent to the Pauline justification by faith. And so the faith which is the channel of justifying grace is also the assurance of a life that is to come.
There is nothing in man, no gift of genius, no force of will so marvellous as this faith in God and the Life Eternal which Christ inspires. When we think what men and women of common clay like ourselves have done and suffered for the sake of a God they have never seen and a heaven beyond the clouds—how they have patiently suffered the loss of all things, and have mounted the fiery pile with joy, clasping their faith to their hearts, as a king the crown which is his glory, or a miser the gold which is his treasure—this surely is the most marvellous spectacle earth has to show. We do not half feel the wonderfulness of it. We are conscious chiefly of the flaws and imperfections of our faith. We feel how weak and struggling and ineffective it is. We do not see the glory, or feel the grandeur of it. But one day we shall. What looks mean and meagre under the grey skies of earth will shine out in its proper splendour in the sunshine of Christ’s manifested presence. To have such faith in God, in the eternal life of righteousness and love, is the highest of which the human soul is capable. It is the triumph of the Divine in man. Christ Himself marvels at it.
The winds that o’er my ocean run,
Reach through all worlds beyond the sun;
Through life and death, thro’ faith, through time,
