Justification = Made Acceptable to God
Justification is the work of God in which He declares the guilty sinner (all of us) to be righteous and the rightful demands of the law to be satisfied.
Takes Away Condemnation
Justification is the opposite to condemnation. We are condemned by God because of our sin (John 3:18-20) and if we were to come before His throne we would be found guilty and we’d be sentenced to death – an eternity in hell. That would be the correct legal verdict.
In justification, God, the judge, pronounces us acquitted of the charge. He doesn’t say we’re innocent, because we aren’t. But we are acquitted. We aren’t condemned but declared to be acceptable to the holy God. Bearing in mind our guilt and that we deserve hell, this has to be the supreme demonstration of God’s love and grace.
How can God do this? If we are guilty, how can he pronounce us pardoned and still maintain his honour and integrity? Does he bend the law? Does he turn a blind eye to our sin? Does he forget all of His declarations of judgment that He’s made upon sin?
No, He doesn’t do any of this. He can’t simply ignore sin and still be a holy God. If He’s to justify us, He must do it without bringing His own just-ness into question. Romans 3:12-26 tells us how He does it.
Gives Us a Righteousness
Justification doesn’t just take away condemnation either, but gives us righteousness as well. And it’s with this righteous and justified status that God chooses to deal with us. This righteousness, says Romans 3:21, is ‘apart from the law’; that means that our new status has nothing to do with how good or obedient to God’s law we’ve been. It’s given to us from God. In fact, it’s Christ’s own righteousness that we stand in. We get the credit for Jesus’ righteousness, God’s sinless Son. This is the staggering truth and heart of the Gospel message.
Our own righteousness is like filthy rags in God’s sight (Isaiah 64:6). If we’re to be acceptable to God, we need something better. In Philippians 3:9 Paul delights in the fact that, now that he’s a Christian, he has ‘found the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith’. Isaiah expresses the same joy when he says, ‘I delight greatly in the Lord; my soul rejoices in my God. For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness’ (Isaiah 61:10).
How Justification Works
Romans 3 gives us the answer as to how this works:
- It comes to us through faith (v.22)
- It’s a product of God’s grace (v.24)
- It’s a result of what Christ did:
In giving His Son to die in our place, God demonstrated his justice. Our sins aren’t overlooked. They are dealt with exactly as God had always said they would be. They are punished, but because they had been laid on Jesus and He has taken responsibility for them, He takes the punishment instead of us.
On the grounds of what Jesus has done, God’s able to justify us (guilty sinners) without compromising his own just and holy nature. He acts in a perfectly lawful way. Our sins are credited to Jesus and so God treats Jesus as He should treat us – Jesus is forsaken, not us; Jesus is condemned, not us; He is killed, not us.
In turn, Jesus’ righteousness is credited to us and God treats us as he had always treated Jesus – we are His children, and He owns us as a redeemed people.
‘It doesn’t mean that we are made righteous, but rather that God regards us as righteous and declares us to be righteous. This has often been a difficulty for people. They say that because they are conscious of sin within they cannot be in a justified state; but anyone who speaks lie that shows immediately that they have no understanding of this great and crucial doctrine of justification. Justification makes no actual change in us; but is declaration by God concerning us. It is not something that results from what we do but rather something that is don for us. WE have only been made righteous in the sense that God regards us as righteous, and pronounces us to be righteous.’ – D. M. Lloyd Jones
For more on what Christianity teaches, check out the other topics in our ‘Bitesize Theology’ series:
God; Jesus; The Holy Spirit; The Trinity; Sin; Atonement; Grace; Regeneration; Repentance and Faith; Reconciliation; Redemption
Inspired by Peter Jeffery, ’Bitesize Theology’, Evangelical Press, 2000
