3: I am Justified
Three
I AM JUSTIFIED
To be “in Christ” is the most basic identity of a Christian, so much so that all other answers to the question, “Who am I?”, are based on, or drawn from, that identity: this is the summation of our first two chapters. In this chapter and those that follow, we will address six implications or aspects of what it means to be “in Christ.”
The most important of these is that, “I am justified.” Although this statement represents the very heart of the gospel, it is not an easy concept to communicate or grasp. The idea understandably raises questions such as:
• What does it mean to be justified?
• How does one become justified?
• How can I make “I am justified” a subjective reality with respect to my own identity question?
What Does It Mean to be Justified?
To begin to answer this first question, let’s look at Galatians 2:15-16.
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified 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.
In this passage, Paul says that we are justified, not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Justified is an evaluative term based on one’s obedience to a law. It is a legal or courtroom evaluation. To be justified means that one has been declared “right” according to the appropriate law. In Paul’s writings, especially in Romans 3 and 4, as well as Galatians 2, to be justified means to be declared righteous by God with respect to his law. It also means to be accepted and treated by God as such.
The great mystery and wonder of justification, and the thing we must grasp if we are to truly understand it, is how God can declare us righteous with respect to his law, when in actual fact we have disobeyed that law, and continue to disobey it on a more or less regular basis.
The Curse of the Law
In understanding how it is that God can justify sinners, we first need to see that we are not justified by works of the law—that is, by our own obedience to the law of God. Paul is emphatic about this. Note that in the one long sentence encompassed by Galatians 2:15-16, he repeats this idea three times.
Why can we not be justified or counted righteous by God through obedience to his law? The answer is found in Galatians 3:10, “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.’” In this verse Paul sets an absolute standard: we can only expect to be justified by works of the law through perfect obedience to all the requirements of God’s law.
Someone has counted that there are just over 600 laws given in the Old Testament, but Jesus summed them all up in two: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind … And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Without unpacking what obedience to these two laws might look like in our lives today, suffice it to say that while Jesus did fully obey both of those commandments, no other human being has ever come close to fully obeying either one of them. Yet Paul says that unless we obey all things written in the book of the law, we are under a curse.
No school I know of requires an overall grade of 100 to pass a course. Usually an average of 70 is sufficient. Most people naturally assume that God “grades” in a similar fashion, and what’s more, that they have probably earned a passing grade. Yet Paul says we must obey all things in God’s law perfectly, and anything less places us under God’s curse. So we see that all who rely on their own obedience to the law as their means of justification, instead of being counted righteous by God, are actually under his curse.
So if we seek to be justified, or counted righteous, by God, we have two options:
1) We can rely on our own righteousness.
2) We can exercise faith in Christ.
Paul calls the first option “works of the law,” and guarantees us that it will result in our being cursed by God, for it is clearly impossible for us to do what God requires. But the second option does, in fact, result in our being justified. Why is this true? The best answer is found in 2 Corinthians 5:21, one of the most important verses in the Bible.
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
There are three “persons” mentioned in this verse, either collectively or individually.
“He.” This refers to God the Father—the actor of this verse.
“Him.” This refers to the Lord Jesus Christ—the subject of the Father’s action.
“Our.” This term, from that opening phrase “for our sake,” refers to all of us collectively. And who are we? You and I are the people described in Ephesians 2:1-3 as spiritually dead; slaves to the world, the devil, and our own sinful passions; and by nature objects of God’s wrath. In Romans 5:6-10, Paul describes us as ungodly, sinners, and enemies of God. This is not a pretty picture. The “our” of 2 Corinthians 5:21 does not refer to nice people seeking to obey God but to people who are enemies of God and objects of his wrath.
The astonishing thing about this verse is that the violent actions of God the Father toward his Son were done “for our sake”—for the sake of the only guilty ones in the entire scenario. This demands further exploration. But before we see what God did toward his Son, let’s first consider the statement that he, the Son, “knew no sin.”
He Knew No Sin
Jesus did not have a sinful nature such as we have because he was not descended from Adam. You and I are slaves to our own sinful passions, but Jesus had no sinful passion. He was tempted externally by the devil (Matthew 4:4-10), and by the sinful environment in which he lived, but there was no internal response to those temptations. He had no sinful desires. His heart was totally united in its devotion and obedience to God. Jesus knew no sin.
Other New Testament writers make the same point. Hebrews 4:15 says Jesus was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. 1 Peter 2:22 says he committed no sin, and 1 John 3:5 says, “in him there is no sin.” So the four major writers of the New Testament letters concur: Christ was sinless; at every instant he obeyed perfectly the moral law of God. But even stronger than the testimony of these four writers are the words of Jesus himself.
In John 8, Jesus gets into an increasingly hostile dialogue with some of the Jews. They claim God as their Father, but in response to them Jesus says, “You are of your Father the devil.” This contradiction of the Jews’ lofty claim would have infuriated them. Then Jesus asks, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” As Jesus spoke those words, gathered around him were not only a group of Jews who hated him and wanted nothing more than to be able to find sin in him, but also present were twelve disciples who had been with Jesus day and night, seven days a week. He could only dare to ask such a question because he knew the answer. He knew he was utterly without sin. He was absolutely and rightly confident that neither his enraged adversaries nor his closest friends could bring a single charge of sin against him.
Earlier in John 8:29, Jesus presents his self-evaluation, saying, “I always do the things that are pleasing to him [the Father].” On this point, we even have the testimony of God the Father. On two occasions—in Matthew 3:17 at Jesus’ baptism, and again in Matthew 17:5 on the Mount of Transfiguration—God the Father speaks from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” God could not have said those words if there had been even one occasion of sin in Jesus’ life. The New Testament could not be more clear regarding the sinlessness, the perfect obedience to his Father, of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Isaiah saw God the Father sitting on his throne and heard the seraphim calling out “holy, holy, holy.” The Hebrew language used triple repetition to speak of something in limitless terms. In his absolute sinlessness, his perfect obedience to God and the law of God, the Jesus who walks the pages of the New Testament is infinite in holiness in precisely the same way, and in exactly the same degree, as God the Father is infinite in holiness. Jesus in his humanity was just as holy as God sitting on his throne. Not one iota of difference.
He Was Made to Be Sin
Next, consider what God did to this absolutely sinless one, this one who lived a perfectly obedient life for 33 years. God made him to be sin.
This is not “made” in the sense of created, for God the Son has always been and always will be. Nor is this “made” in the sense of forced, for Jesus always obeyed the Father willingly. This is “made” in the sense of caused. By this rather strange expression, “made him to be sin,” Paul is saying that God caused Jesus to bear the weight and guilt of our sin. In the plan and purpose of God the Father, he caused Jesus to become sin for us—again, with Jesus’ cooperation, despite the unimaginable anguish and torment involved. God took all of our collective sin down through the ages, all of it, and laid it upon Christ. Every sin that we commit in thought, word, deed, and motive was heaped upon him. He was made to be sin.
Isaiah 53:6 says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—everyone—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” We are all sinners. We have all gone astray, all turned to our own way, yet God has taken all of our sin and charged it to Christ. As Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
Give serious thought to what the Bible is saying here. For the sake of us who are sinners, who are ungodly, who are enemies of God, the Father punished his Son. For us, God took all of our sin and heaped it upon Christ, the Lord Jesus. Consider Isaiah 53:5, “But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” Verse 10 says, “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him.” It could be translated, as it was in the King James Version, that “it pleased the Lord” to do this. That is an astounding statement. It pleased God to crush his own son. Why did it please God to do this? Is God a sadist? Is God the proverbial cruel father who beats his son? No, it pleased God because God wanted to do something for us, for our sake.
Jesus did not go the cross and die involuntarily. Rather, he said, “I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” (John 10:17-18). And Paul in Galatians 2:20 says, “I live by faith in the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” What God the Father did to Jesus, Jesus voluntarily submitted to for the sake of our salvation.
We Become the Righteousness of God
The third truth in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” God made Jesus to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. This raises the question, “What is this righteousness of God?” The answer to that question is found most clearly in Philippians 3:9, “and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”
This righteousness has nothing to do with the striving for righteousness, through the law, that Paul rightly declares to be a futile pursuit. Rather, it is the perfect righteousness of Christ lived out over 33 years, which comes to us through faith.
Second Corinthians 5:21 is often called The Great Exchange, and it works like this. Imagine your life as a moral ledger in which every action, every thought, every word, and every motive is recorded. That’s pretty grim because even our very best deeds are like a polluted garment in the eyes of God (Isaiah 64:6). But God takes your sin and removes it from your ledger and charges it to the ledger of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Savior bears the penalty for all your sin.
You then are left with a clean but empty ledger, so God does something else. He takes the perfect obedience, the perfect righteousness of Christ from his ledger and transfers it to your ledger. In computer terms you might think of this as “copy and paste,” in the sense that the same righteousness, even though it has been given to you, is still available to every other Christian and everyone who will come to Christ in the future.
Now you have a ledger that no longer catalogs your sin, but instead bears only the record of 33 years of absolutely perfect righteousness. How can God do this? How can a just God completely wipe all sin off your ledger, and replace it with the perfect righteousness of Christ? Because we are in Christ. He, as our representative, stands justly charged with our sin and pays its penalty through his death. And because he is our representative, God can justly credit his perfect righteousness to us. So we can say, as Paul essentially says in Galatians 2:20, that when Jesus died on the cross, we died on the cross. And when he lived a perfect life, we lived a perfect life. Because we are in him.
Summary. This is what it means to be justified.
1) Our sins are forgiven because they were charged to Christ.
2) The perfect righteousness of Christ has been fully credited to us.
There are two plays on the word justified that may help us see this more clearly. You can think of it as meaning “just as if I had never sinned.” That is, it does not matter how vile and long-standing your sin is. When you trust in Christ as Savior, God looks at you just as if you’d never sinned.
To state the same thing in the opposite way, you can also think of justified as meaning “just as if I had always obeyed.” That’s the way God sees you because he sees you clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ.
How Does One Become Justified?
Paul answers this question quite clearly and emphatically in Galatians 2:15-16 when he says, three times, that it is by faith in Jesus Christ. What is faith? We sometimes hear someone say, “I took a leap of faith.” If this is a leap toward nothing in particular, a leap into emptiness, the statement is meaningless. Faith always has to have an object, and clearly for Paul, the object of faith is Jesus Christ, who through his sinless life and sin-bearing death made it possible for all who trust in him to be justified before God.
This faith is like the two sides of a coin. On one side is “renunciation.” On the other side is “reliance.” In order to trust in Christ we must first of all renounce any trust in our own perceived righteousness. Then we must rely completely on the finished work of Christ in both his life and death. That’s how we are justified.
How Does Justification Become a Subjective Reality?
For the answer to this question, we go to Galatians 2, which begins to discuss our justification in verse 15, and continues through verse 21. At the end of verse 20, Paul says, “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.”
Paul is speaking in the present tense: “the life I now live.” However, justification is a point-in-time event. The moment you trusted in Christ you were justified. And because justification is a point-in-time event, it is a past event, whether it took place five minutes ago or fifty years ago. That’s why Paul can speak of justification as a past event in Romans 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been [past tense] justified by faith.” But in Galatians 2:20 he speaks of it in the present tense, “the life I now [today] live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.”
So we see that, for Paul, justification was not only a past event but also a present reality. Every day Paul looked outside of himself, to Christ and his finished work, and saw himself righteous in the sight of God because he was in Christ.
We all need to learn to live like Paul. Every day we too must look outside ourselves to Christ and see ourselves justified before God because of our representative union with Christ. Most of us have “good days”—when life pretty much goes along as we desire and we have no serious struggles with sin—and “bad days”—when in one way or another we are conscious of struggling with sin all day long. It may be the sin of wicked imaginations, resentment toward someone, distrust of God, or a hundred other ways in which our flesh (sinful nature) tends to get the upper hand.
On our good days we think God must surely be pleased with us and is smiling at us. We forget, as we saw earlier, that all our righteous deeds are like polluted garments in the sight of God (Isaiah 64:6). On our bad days we tend to think we have lost the favor of God because of our sin. We forget that he no longer counts our sin against us because Jesus has already born that sin in his body on the cross.
This is not to say that we should not take our sin seriously. We do need to confess it and repent of it. But the greatest motivation for doing that is to reflect on the fact that Jesus bore those very sins you committed that day in his body on the cross, and God has forgiven you because Jesus was crushed for those sins.
So in order to experience the subjective reality of our justification we must every day look outside of ourselves to Christ. About twenty-five years ago I heard on a taped message the expression “preach the gospel to yourself every day.” That is what we must learn to do if we are to enjoy the present reality of our justification. That is what Paul did two thousand years ago when he wrote, “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 2:20).
I am justified, I am righteous before God, because God has charged my sin to Christ and credited to me his perfect righteousness.