Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Justification

I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the fifth chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. (Tim’s summary of this chapter)

How can I stand before God? This is, I’d think, the number one question on the list of life’s important questions. John Murray phrases it differently, but it’s the same question: “How can a man be just with God? How can he be right with the Holy One?”

The problem is more difficult than it might seem at first glance. We are—all of us—sinful, and “the essence of sin is to be against God.” And

the person who is against God cannot be right with him. For if we are against God then God is against us. It could not be otherwise.

We are ungodly and “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.” Do you see the impossibility of our situation? God is just—always telling and doing the truth—and we are unrighteous. Yet our only hope is to have this truth-telling God declare us—unrighteous ones—to be right with him. The wonderful thing is that there is a solution to this problem: God is both just and the justifier of the ungodly.

Murray spends four pages or so of this chapter establishing that the word justify as used in scripture means to declare to be righteous rather than to make righteous. I won’t go into the details of the argument here because it’s too detailed for a short blog post, but I will say that it is a very strong and very convincing argument.

And not only does God declare us righteous in justification, but he constitutes us righteous.

Justification is both a declarative and a constitutive act of God’s free grace. It is constitutive in order that it may be truly declarative.

I have to admit that this statement threw me off for a bit, because constitute means “make” to me, and it’s already been established that justification is not “making righteous.” But a quick check of my dictionary got things right back on track: constitute is to “establish by law.” We are justified, then, not by a declaration that is “legal fiction” but by a declaration that has sufficient legal grounds undergirding it.

What is the legal grounds of our justification? We are not constituted righteous on the grounds of our faith or on the grounds of a righteousness God works within us, but rather, by our union with Christ whose own righteousness—his obedience unto death—provides the basis for our justification. To answer the question that started this post, I stand before God clothed in the righteousness of Christ.  I am right before the Holy One because He declares me to be perfectly righteous on account of Christ, the one to whom I am united, who was perfectly righteous. Did I say I love the doctrine of justification?

Justification, then, is an act of God, and yet it comes to us through the instrument of our faith. Our chapter contains a page or so establishing this last point, too. I’ve known a Primitive Baptist or two who believed in something called “eternal justification.” They believed that the elect are justified eternally and it’s that eternal justification that coming to faith is an acknowledgement that we have already been justified. It seems that it is teaching something like that that Murray has in mind in his defense of the instrumentality of faith. “We are justified by faith and faith is the prerequisite. And only faith is brought into relation to justification.”

That justification is by faith, says Murray, fits together perfectly with justification being wholly of God’s grace, on the one hand, and on the grounds of the work of Christ on the other, because “the specific quality of faith is that it receives and rests upon another.”

We are justified by faith and therefore simply by entrustment of ourselves, in all our dismal hopelessness, to the Saviour whose righteousness is undefiled and undefilable. Justification by faith alone lies at the heart of the gospel and it is the article that makes the lame man leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb sing.

The chapter concludes with a paragraph defending this doctrine against charges that the doctrine of justification by faith alone leads to loose living. The faith that justifies, Murray says, is a living faith, a faith that trusts God not only for justification, but also for deliverance from sin.

The discussion in this chapter, as we would expect, seems to be geared toward the controversies surrounding the doctrine of justification that were strongest in Murray’s time. If he’d written it today I’m guessing he’d have written a little more on my favorite piece of the doctrine of justification—the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

What do we pray for in the third petition?

In the third petition (which is, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,)[1] acknowledging, that by nature we and all men are not only utterly unable and unwilling to know and do the will of God,[2] but prone to rebel against his word,[3] to repine and murmur against his providence,[4] and wholly inclined to do the will of the flesh, and of the devil:[5] we pray, that God would by his Spirit take away from ourselves and others all blindness,[6] weakness,[7] indisposedness,[8] and perverseness of heart;[9] and by his grace make us able and willing to know, do, and submit to his will in all things,[10] with the like humility,[11] cheerfulness,[12] faithfulness,[13] diligence,[14] zeal,[15] sincerity,[16] and constancy,[17] as the angels do in heaven.[18] 

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Theological Term of the Week

saving faith
The casting and resting of oneself and one’s confidence on the promises  of mercy which Christ has given to sinners and on the Christ who gave those promises;1 a certain conviction, wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit, as to the truth of the gospel, and a hearty reliance (trust) on the promises of God in Christ.2

• From scripture:
  

  But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God… (John 1:12 ESV)
  

  We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified [1] by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
  
  17 But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:15-20 ESV)
  

• From The Heidelberg Catechism:

  Question 21. What is true faith? Answer: True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, (a) but also an assured confidence, (b) which the Holy Ghost (c) works by the gospel in my heart; (d) that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, (e) are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. (f)

• From Big Truths for Young Hearts by Bruce Ware on the answer to the question of the Philippian jailer, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”:

  How would you answer this question? Do you know the Bible’s answer? Do you know how Paul and Silas responded? Well, let’s start with this last point and see what Paul and Silas said. They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” Here, as in many passages of Scripture, we are told that sinners are saved when they “believe” in Christ or “trust” in Christ or put their “faith” in Christ. Belief, trust, and faith in Christ are different ways to talk about the same idea in the Bible. To believe in Christ … means to count or rely completely on what Christ has done in his death and resurrection for my sin, so that my hope of being right in God’s sight is all because of Christ and has nothing to do with any good thing I might ever say or do.
  

• From John Murray:

  The Nature (of faith)—its Constituitive Elements:

  A) Notitia. Faith respects an object and in this case Christ. But there can be no trust without knowledge of the person in whom trust is reposed. We do not trust any person unless we know something about him and, more particularly, things pertaining to that in respect of which we have confidence. So it is with Christ.
  B) Assensus. This has two aspects: a) Intellective…The information conveyed is recognized by us to be true…b) Emotive…It is truth believed as applicable to ourselves, as supremely vital and important for us. Saving faith cannot be in exercise unless there is a recognition of correspondence between our needs and the provision of the gospel. Knowledge passes into conviction.
  C) Fiducia. Saving faith is not simply assent to propositions of truth respecting Christ, and defining the person that he is, nor simply assent to a proposition respecting his sufficiency to meet and satisfy our deepest needs. Faith must rise to trust, and trust that consists in entrustment to him. In faith there is the engagement of person to person in the inner movement of the whole man to receive and rest upon Christ alone for salvation. It means the abandonment of confidence in our own or any human resources in a totality act of self–commitment to Christ.

  This fiducial character, consisting in entrustment to Christ for salvation, serves to correct misapprehensions. Faith is not belief that we have been saved, nor belief that Christ has saved us, nor even belief that Christ died for us. It is necessary to appreciate the point of distinction. Faith is in its essence commitment to Christ that we may be saved. The premise of that commitment is that we are unsaved and we believe on Christ in order that we may be saved…It is to lost sinners that Christ is offered, and the demand of that overture is simply and solely that we commit ourselves to him in order that we may be saved.

  Faith is a whole–souled movement of intelligent, consenting, and confiding self–commitment, and all these elements or ingredients coalesce to make faith what it is. Intellect, feeling and will converge upon Christ in those exercises which belong properly to these distinct though inseparable aspects of psychial activity (Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner, 1977), Volume 2, pp. 257-260).

Learn more:

1. John MacArthur: What is the nature of true saving faith?
   
2. Ernest Reisenger: The Faith of the Saints
3. London Bapstist Confession: Of Saving Faith
4. A. A. Hodge: Of Saving Faith
5. S. Lewis Johnson: What Is Faith, or What Does It Mean to Believe? (mp3 and more)
6. Tom Nettles: The Nature of Saving Faith (mp3)

1 From Evangelism and the Sovereignty of GodE by J. I. Packer
2 From Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhof

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