1. Peace with God is ours by our simple acceptance of it through faith. Christ Jesus “having made peace through the blood of His cross,” our reconciliation with the Father is already accomplished. Faith has only to accept it and rest in it as a part of the Redeemer’s finished work. Here is a matter of fact, not a matter of feeling. Faith does not create anything or change anything; it simply apprehends what is and counts it true.
The lightning’s flash did not create
The lovely prospect it revealed;
It only showed the real state
Of what the darkness had concealed.
“O Lord, open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,” (Psa_119:18). The wondrous things are there already —atonement, redemption, peace—all these are accomplished realities, standing for their support alone in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. We only need sight to behold them, and a believing trust to rest in them. When after a foreign war our nation had sent ambassadors abroad to treat with the foe, and they had returned, only the one word “Peace,” was shouted out from the ship that brought them into harbour, and in a few hours all the city was thrilling with joyful congratulations. It was the truth that a reconciliation had been effected that brought this happy peace of mind to the people; it was not their peace of mind that brought the reconciliation. In other words, fact supplied the ground for feeling, and not feeling for fact.
Faith does not bring to us more than unfaith so far as things visible and tangible are put into reckoning. But it gives us peace, the peace that comes when the whole nature rests on Christ, the peace which in very truth passes all understanding, and which is not an affair of reasoning, and computation, and survey, and measure, but a simple trusting in the name of the Lord, a simple resting upon God. “I am with you always” (Mat_28:20), He said, and He keeps His word whoever may come or go. He does not abolish the old foes, but He transfigures them. The old world despised weakness, and feared labour, and shrank from pain. With Christ out of weakness we are made strong, labour we find the pathway to the blessed and everlasting rest, and we are made perfect by the things which we suffer. Cast down, persecuted, bereaved, we shall often be, but never wholly overthrown, never altogether broken, never quite failing. For having Him with us we have His comfort in the midst of tribulation, His peace in the midst of war.
He said, “I will forget the dying faces;
The empty places—
They shall be filled again ;
O voices moaning deep within me, cease.”
Vain, vain the word; vain, vain :
Not in forgetting lieth peace.
He said, “I will crowd action upon action,
The strife of faction
Shall stir my spirit to flame ;
O tears that drown the fire of manhood, cease.”
Vain, vain the word; vain, vain :
Not in endeavour lieth peace.
He said, “I will withdraw me and be quiet,
Why meddle in life’s riot? Shut be my door to pain.
Desire, thou dost befool me, thou shalt cease.”
Vain, vain the word; vain, vain:
Not in aloofness lieth peace. [Note: Amy W. Carmichael, Made in the Pans, 99.]
2. This simple acceptance by faith of the reconciliation wrought by Christ is on the part of. God our justification. We think perhaps of “justification” as a theological term involving some mysterious significance. That is a mistake. Theological terms, as a rule, have grown out of the ordinary use of words, and in that use their original explanation is to be sought. When we say in the language of everyday life that we are justified in some course of action, we mean that we can appeal with confidence to a verdict in our favour on the question whether we have acted rightly. There is a verse in the Book of Deuteronomy which illustrates this familiar sense: “If there be a controversy between men, and they come into judgment that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked” (Deu_25:1). The judges are to vindicate the position of the righteous man as satisfactory in the eye of the law: they are to pronounce him just: in their judgment he is justified. Pass now from the earthly tribunal to the judgment-seat of God. How shall man be accounted righteous before God? We think of the frailty and sinfulness of human nature, of the depths of degradation into which it is capable of falling, and we often feel inclined to say with the Psalmist (Psa_143:2), “In thy sight-shall no man living be justified.” It seems as if there must be an impassable gulf between the God who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity and the human soul. Yet we also feel that man has the consciousness of an intense longing for a loving and a gracious God. It is just here that the doctrine of justification comes in. It is not merely the need of forgiveness that we feel: forgiveness might still involve banishment from His presence. We want something closer and more tender: we want reconciliation, acceptance, welcome. That is the spirit in which the love of God has bridged the gulf between Himself and man. The doctrine of justification tells us that we are not merely pardoned but accounted righteous. We are received by God whom we have grieved as though we had not grieved Him. The moment the prodigal son draws near, his father runs to meet him and greet him. “Being justified,” says St. Paul, “we have peace in God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom_5:1).
3. Many people regard faith as a mysterious spiritual sense, a subtle power of realizing the unseen and the eternal, almost (it has been said) a second-sight in the soul. But we need not suppose that religious faith means anything very different from what we mean when we talk of having faith in a policy, or in a remedy, or in a general, or in a lawyer. In such cases we simply mean that we have trust, reliance, practical confidence in the person or thing. When St. Paul says that Abraham’s faith was imputed to him for righteousness, is not this just what he means? Abraham was assured that what God had promised He was able to perform. In other words, he felt reliance upon God’s promise. The real difference between religious faith and the other simpler kinds of reliance lies, not so much in the power of faith itself, as in the nature of the object to which the power is directed. What makes religious faith so great a thing is the stupendous nature of the Object upon which the reliance is reposed. When it is reposed on God in Christ, the situation is charged with a mystery which we cannot fathom. It is the contact between finite and infinite; it is the creature laying hold upon the Creator; it is the steadying influence of Divine Omnipotence on human infirmity. The simplest reliance, so that it be sincere, puts at man’s disposal the boundless resources of the Personality of Jesus Christ. “When the dam of the Nile was completed (says the Bishop of Durham) with all its giant sluices, it needed but the touch of a finger on an electric button to let through the river in all its mass and might. So faith, the reliance of the soul—the soul perhaps of the child, perhaps of the peasant, perhaps of the outcast—is only a reliant look, a reliant touch. But it sets up contact with Jesus Christ in all His greatness, in His grace, merit, saving power, eternal love.”
4. Does justification by faith mean, then, that I shall be treated as righteous, not being so? That I shall be forgiven and acquitted? Yes, thank God! But is that all that it means, or is it the main thing that it means? No, thank God! for the very heart of the Christian doctrine of righteousness is this, that if, and as soon as, a man puts his trembling trust in Jesus Christ as his Saviour, then he receives not merely pardon, which is the uninterrupted flow of the Divine love in spite of his sin, nor a crediting him with a righteousness which does not belong to him, but an imparting to him of that new life, a spark from the central fire of Christ’s life, “the new man which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Eph_4:24). Do not suppose that the great message of the Gospel is merely forgiveness. Do not suppose that its blessed gift is only that a man is acquitted because Christ has died. All that is true. But there is something more than that which is the basis of that other, and that is that by my faith in Jesus Christ I am so knit to Him “He that is joined to the Lord” being “one spirit”—as that there passes into me, by His gift, a life which is created after His life, and is in fact cognate and kindred with it.
No doubt it is a mere germ, no doubt it needs cultivating, development, carefully guarding against gnawing insects and blighting frosts. But the seed which is implanted, though it be less than the least of all seeds, has in itself the promise and the potency of triumphant growth, when it will tower above all the poisonous shrubs and undergrowth of the forest, and have the light of heaven resting on its aspiring top. Here is the great blessing and distinctive characteristic of Christian morality, that it does not say to a man: “First aim after good deeds, and so grow into goodness,” but it starts with a gift, and says, “Work from that, and by the power of that. ‘I make the tree good,’ says Jesus to us, do you see to it that the fruit is good.” No doubt the vegetable metaphor is inadequate, because the leaf is “wooed from out the bud,” and “grows green and broad, and takes no care.” But that effortless growth is not how righteousness increases in men. The germ is given them, and they have to cultivate it. First, there must be the impartation of righteousness, and then there comes to the man’s heart the sweet assurance of peace with God, and he has within him “a conscience like a sea at rest, imaginations calm and fair.” “First, king of righteousness; after that, king of peace.”
Being justified in Christ, the believer possesses a “righteousness of God” (Rom_1:17; Rom_3:5; Rom_3:21; Rom_3:22; Rom_10:3; 2Co_5:21; Jam_1:20; 2Pe_1:1) in Christ. This frequent technical expression, once replaced by the phrase “righteousness from God,” is used by St. Paul to describe the normal condition vouchsafed to us of grace by God in Christ. That it is nothing of the nature of a magical transformation is shown by a passage in Galatians which speaks of “waiting for” the desired righteousness: before all men lies the last judgment, which will at length bring definite justification. The justified man is therefore not a completely righteous man: he has still a goal of righteousness before him. In the apostle’s thoughts on justification as elsewhere we see the peculiar dynamic tension between the consciousness of present possession and the expectation of future full possession. [Note: A. Deissmann, St. Paul, 147.]
