Sinner Turned Saint
How can sinners have peace with a holy God? There are few questions as significant as this one. The answer could either lead to eternal life or eternal condemnation; neutrality is not an option. The doctrine of justification offers a convincing answer to this question. To be justified means to be made right with God. Within the definition is an implication that humanity is not right with God and needs something–rather, Someone–to make us right. Reason being is that humans as a whole are cursed with sin; therefore, not right with God.
It goes back to Genesis. Before sin ever entered the bloodstream, humanity was free from it, absent from any wicked distraction. However, Eve and Adam took the fruit and ate. This simple act of disobedience broke the perfect union they had with God. The Lord warned them and the serpent lied to them but they believed the serpent and disobeyed God. Ushering sin into the world. The prophet Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 59:2, “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.” In other words, we are responsible for this condemnation.
Paul describes our relationship to sin as slave and master. Romans 6:20 says that “you were once slaves of sin”. We bow the knee to sin and are unable to resist her call. But it is not just that we can’t, it is that we don’t want to. C.S. Lewis brilliantly remarked, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside”. Enslavement means that we are not just positionally under sin’s rule but we were willfully obedient to her. When we are slaves of sin, we are “free in regard to righteousness”. There is no righteousness in us under the tyranny of sin. Freedom from righteousness does not mean that enslavement to sin liberated us. Rather, the word freedom is synonymous with empty. When we are slaves to sin, we have no righteousness; we are free from it.
It is in response to that righteousness-less dilemma that Martin Luther says we need an “alien righteousness”. A righteousness that is foreign to us but is imputed to us. Luther goes down in history for dusting off the doctrine of justification by faith. Like King Josiah with the Book of the Law, Luther discovered a glorious truth that we are saved by faith in Christ alone. The Lord used both of these men to preserve the truth of salvation for the world. The Reformation of the 16th Century was firmly planted in the doctrine of justification.
The Pauline Epistles are replete with instruction on, examples of, and application toward what it means to be justified. He writes in Romans 3:28, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” The word Paul uses is rooted in the Greek verb dikaioo which my favorite rendering is “to deem right”. The way a person is deemed right is by faith, or trust. That begs the question: What is faith? Is it the existence of faith that produces justification? Or is it faith in someone? Something?
Well, thankfully Hebrews 11:1 provides a helpful definition: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith’s existence is dependent on the “hoped for” or the “things not seen”. But if faith is a verb that contributes to our justification, then it would contradict the rest of 3:28 which details faith as something apart from works of the law. Rather, faith is a noun. Paul writes in Romans 4:5, “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.” Belief is faith. But the thing that distinguishes saving faith from another kind of general faith is the object of the faith–namely, it is faith in the one who justifies the ungodly.
Who is the one who justifies the ungodly? Jesus Christ. He alone is able to deem us right. God alone is the one who we’ve sinned against (Psalm 51:4) therefore he alone has the authority to forgive sins. Not only does Jesus forgive us and set us at zero. But he gives us his righteousness. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Christ was the sinless, spotless, perfect substitute who took what we deserved and then gave us what he deserved–eternal life. We have peace with God on the basis of our trusting in Christ’s sacrifice for us. Or in other words, we are justified by faith alone in Christ alone.