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.