05-The Righteousneness of Faith

V. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF FAITH.

Rom 6:13. “Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” MY endeavour this morning will be to press home to your reasonable convictions the great doctrine of justification by faith. The advance of knowledge has not, I believe, either falsified this doctrine, or made it obsolete. It needs to be guarded against perversion: but, rightly understood, it goes to the roots of our inward nature, and reveals to us both the way of our true life and a danger that will never cease to beset us.

St Paul’s well-known phrase is, that faith is counted, reckoned, or imputed, unto us for righteousness. He borrowed it from the history of Abraham in the book of Genesis, where it is said, Abraham believed in the Lord, and he, the Lord, counted it to him for righteousness. The word impit,tcd, I may observe, means precisely the same thing as counted or reckoned; and it would help to clear away some artificial notions from the doctrine of righteousness by faith, if we were to put aside the word imputed, and to use instead one of the plainer words, counted or reckoned. You will thus perceive that something of a false emphasis has been laid on imputed. “Imputed righteousness” is named, as if it were a particular sort of righteousness; but you could hardly give this significance to “counted righteousness” or “reckoned righteousness.” St Paul’s point is, not that righteousness is imputed or counted or reckoned, but that it is of faith. According to him, a man is righteous in God’s sight when he believes; that is to say, not when he has duly performed a certain set of required acts or observances, but when in his inmost soul he trusts God and surrenders himself to him.

But, if a man is thus righteous, by trust and self-surrender, as Abraham was and as all true Christians have been, whose is the righteousness to be properly called? St Paul gives the profoundly true answer.

It is not the man’s own righteousness; he does not originate what he does; he yields himself to God, and his members as instruments of righteousness unto God. It is Gods righteousness therefore, disposing of him and working in him; and the man is righteous in so much as he does not claim to be righteous in himself, but rejoices to be clothed with the righteousness which is of God. I need hardly add, that when St Paul spoke of righteousness, it was the same thing whether he said that of God or that of Christ: he held that the Eternal Righteousness had been revealed in Christ, and that the form of it which had been seen in Christ was precisely the ideal form for man.

There is nothing arbitrary or artificial therefore in our receiving the righteousness which is of God by faith. All is as real as possible. A man is in his proper condition, is as right as he can be, when he believes in God; and this essential Tightness of faith for man is verified by experience when it is proved that the more thoroughly he believes, the more easily and successfully does he lead a good life.

We need not trouble ourselves about *’ imputation”; what is most necessary for us is to understand as well as we can the nature of the Divine Righteousness, and the meaning of Faith in relation to it.

One way of regarding Righteousness, and the most helpful for our purpose, is to.think of it as bringing forth order. Our understanding is always baffled when we attempt to arrive at ultimate ideas of what God is in himself. But the affirmation that God is righteous has a clear and adequate meaning, if we take it as declaring that God originates and maintains the living Order of the universe. For us, correspondingly, to be righteous will be to conform to this Divine order, to take our place in it, and to go forward, without breaking loose from it, in its progress and development. The order of the external world is a part of that which God, the Righteous Being, originates. The constancy and regularity of the material creation might be called God’s physical righteousness. The inspired men of the Old Covenant were full of admiration and awe towards the order of Nature, and used to speak of it freely as illustrating the righteousness of the Eternal Maker. They did not indeed know the wonders which the inquiries of science have laid open to our view in these later days. But they were accustomed to meditate reverently upon the obvious phenomena of the visible world; and their profound appreciation of Righteousness in the higher sphere prepared them to see with pleasure the signs of Law in the lower sphere. The elements, they perceived, were ruled by the Maker’s eternal statutes. His word ran swiftly through their changes. He had given them a law that was not to be broken. Modern science has enabled us to see in existing phenomena an almost infinite complexity, and has at the same time succeeded in tracing back the growth of things to simpler and simpler origins; but its very boast is that it discovers order and development everywhere, in the remotest past as in the present.

Here then, let us say, we have the physical aspect of the Divine Righteousness. But there is another kind of order, more important than that of the material universe, the order of the world in which spiritual beings and spiritual affections are the elements, and with reference to which we do not speak so much of what must be or will be, as of what ought to be. The will, conscience, responsibility, introduce entirely new conditions into our conceptions of order. Scientific men may delight to shew how certain antecedents making certain consequences inevitable the natural world could not have been other than it is. Organisms and their environments must, they tell us, act and react upon one another so as to bring about the results in which we fancy we trace design. Their language, in expounding this universal necessity, tends to become grandiose and authoritative, as if they had then reached the height of things. But when they come to real human life, they are themselves compelled to change their language. They then praise and blame, reprove, rebuke, exhort, like any unscientific person. They will say “If you do this, such a thing will happen; if you do that, such a thing will happen; you may do which you please, but you ought to do this, and you ought not to do that.” There is plainly something more here than molecules and molecular attractions and repulsions. The mystery of disorder has entered. Whilst we speak of the Divine Righteousness, originating and sustaining a certain order in the spiritual world, we are obliged to recognize z*;/righteousness, which refuses to conform to that order. It is true that the two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, are so subtly interwoven that we know not how to separate matter and spirit. This need not surprise us, when we confess that both come of one Creator. But the most ordinary human being whose conscience is not dead may infer with certainty from the inward conflicts of which he is conscious, that he belongs to another world as well as to that of which he shares the conditions with the plants and the stones; and he cannot doubt that in the ideal order which suffers so many violations, we come nearer to the Creator himself than in the natural order which has received a law which cannot be broken.

Whilst then we Christians look up to an Eternal God who has ordained and constituted the services of men and of other spiritual beings in a wonderful order, we always take for granted that it is in our power to observe or to violate this order. Simple necessity, we affirm, belongs to the inferior kind of order, choice and voluntary action to the higher. The seed cast into the ground has no power to choose whether it will germinate or not; it is subject to what scientific men are fond of magnifying as inexorable law. But man, appealed to by Pleasure and Duty, has the consciousness of making a choice between them. If he chooses Duty, he conforms to the order of God’s righteousness; if he chooses Pleasure, he fails from that order. We do not shut our eyes to the difficulty there is in holding that man may disarrange what God ordains; we confess the difficulty, and hold the belief in the face of it. It is the method of God’s dealing with his spiritual creatures to let them know something of his spiritual order, and not to coerce them as involuntary atoms but to move them as thinking and willing persons to conform themselves to it. But this word which I have been repeating so often will be more significant when we have considered what God’s spiritual order actually is, and so have made the word a living one to our minds.

St Paul’s doctrine of righteousness by faith gives a simple and positive definition of it. God’s order for men is that of a Family of his children. As the Righteous Being, this is the plan according to which he constitutes mankind. He does not set them in motion like whirling atoms, out of whose physical concourse indefinite combinations may proceed; he makes them his children, members of a family, having the two great primary and comprehensive relations of sonship to himself and brotherhood to each other. You can easily see that this is not a mechanical or stationary order. It admits of endless growth and development. It is good for us to think of God as gradually unfolding his Creation, the spiritual part as well as the physical. He is continually making it more complex and wonderful.

There is always something more for men to learn, always something not quite the same for men to be. As the child grows into the man, so the human race has grown from the infantine stage to what it is jiow. And as we see in the child, so it is in the race; it is by living and trying and striving that men grow. They feel forward into the future, along the lines which the Maker has laid down for them, and after the objects which he more or less distinctly presents to their view and aspiration. But at no point do we see or shall we ever see the two great relations disappear from this advancing order, or cease to be primary in it. Still, the highest ideal for men is to be children towards the Eternal God, and to be to one another as children of the same heavenly Father. And now, what is Faith, the Faith by which a man becomes righteous? It is the act or movement which joyfully accepts these relations for the government of the heart and life. When God says to a man, as he does in the Gospel through Christ, “ Thou art my son,” justifying Faith replies, “ I thank thee, O heavenly Father, this is what I rejoice to be and will be; I will trust in thee, will yield myself up to thy purposes, will find my joy in learning and doing thy will. I will be nothing in myself, be thou all to me, and in me, and through me!” Faith is the filial response to God’s fatherliness. All believing has its secret and perfection in the filial attitude towards the true God. By faith, or the filial mind, we may confidently say with St Paul, a man is justified. To accept without reserve the relation of sons and daughters to God, is the appointed and only righteousness for human beings. God requires nothing more of them than this. If they do this, they fall into the order of his spiritual righteousness. They yield themselves to be what he would have them and what by his persevering Providence and discipline he is making them. By faith then a man is justified, and not by works. Not by works. But let us give to “ works” here the sense which St Paul has consistently in his mind. He means acts which can be separated from the inmost self, all that do not involve and express the real feeling of the doer, works which it is possible to do whilst the doer has some other mind and consciousness than what might be represented by his actions. Generally, it is enough to say that works are outward things. But this definition is not adequate or strictly accurate. For the works which do not justify may even be emotions, when the emotions are artificial. To submit the soul or nervous system to the thrills of a revival or a mission, in the belief that this emotion is something that God will receive as satisfactory, is, in essence, to seek justification by works. And on the otherhand, man is and must be a doer, not less in his condition as a believer and child of God than when he is choosing to be independent of God. And the word “ work” is often used for that which is /^/separable from the man himself for what he really does, and therefore for what he really is. In this case, “works “are opposed to profession or person, as reality to show. And as the word faith may very naturally be used for religious profession, you may have this, curious result, that one who says “a man is justified by works and not by faith” may be meaning the very same thing as one who says “ a man is justified by faith and not by works.” Actually the same thing. For they both mean to affirm that God accepts reality, not appearance; the man himself, not something separable from him; the genuine attitude of the heart, and not religious observances or outside works. Who could describe in their infinite variety all the ways in which men have sought to manufacture a righteousness of their own before God? My brethren, there is an all but ineradicable desire in the human heart to put God off with something which is not really itself! The most plausible form of this something is religion, I mean external religion. Sacrifices, confession and penance, Churchgoing, these are express attempts to offer to God what is supposed to be pleasing to him; and surely, men say to themselves, if we abound in such offerings, God will be pleased with us and count us righteous! But it is not difficult to see how hollow these observances may be; and many, emancipating themselves from these, have sought a righteousness of their own in two other principal paths. In morality; in the punctual performance of what men in general recognize as good works. And in spiritual religion, with its professions and phraseology and exclusiveness. These also, the morality and the so-called spiritual religion, though the doers may be flattering themselves that they are not as those formalists who hope to commend themselves to God by religious observances, may be just as truly works, by means of which men may be seeking to establish their own righteousness. Our human nature, like the garrison of a besieged fortress, tries every expedient to avoid unconditional surrender, the blessed humiliation which is really honour and deliverance and happiness! The weakness of all these “ works “ is that they are ineffectual and betray us; they stand in the way of our becoming what God would have us be. The Gospel of God’s grace, persuading us to believe, calls us to real living righteousness. Compare two men together, the one keeping his eye upon some “ law,” and laboriously endeavouring in his own strength to make himself irreproachable by the perfect fulfilment of it, the other casting himself on the goodness of God, rejoicing in hope of God’s glory, and surrendering himself to be the instrument of God’s will. Can you doubt which of the two will be the best man, the most thoroughly righteous, by every test of righteousness? The preachers of Christ who have spoken most boldly of faith as the one thing needful have not been indifferent to practical goodness. No, indeed; it has been their love and longing for it that has made them fearless of misconstruction in denouncing the vain attempts of self-righteousness. They have desired to see men humble, self-forgetful, alive with a joy and strength given them from above, and thus able to do the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. We commonplace Christians are deeply indebted to those who, like St Paul and like Luther, have felt so keenly the obstinacy of self and the need of stripping it of every disguise and of driving it out of every stronghold, so that the Christian may live no longer in himself but in Christ. Life, as they knew, power of life, is what we want; and that is to be had, not through perpetual miserable disappointments and condemnations in vain efforts to keep the law, but through the fellowship of faith with Christ the Risen Son of God. In him we have the Divine forgiveness, free and full; in him the unspeakable gift of sonship. If we realize him as raised from the dead on our behalf by his Father and ours, then we may have courage to call God Father with the full confession and surrender of the heart; then we may feel that we are not our own, but his, bought with a price which secures us to be his for ever. In that consciousness we are righteous, and the Spirit of the Son of God is able to flow into our hearts and through our members, actuating and enabling them for the service of God. Therefore, dear brethren, if any one amongst you feels with inward dissatisfaction that his life is at the best a poor one for a Christian, sadly wanting in happiness and in energy, let him ask himself whether he has entered with any reality upon his inheritance of sonship.

Let him be assured that the filial state is the absolutely right one for him, that from this he must take his start to run the race that is set before him, that on this he must build up his practical life. And that he may learn to be filial towards God, let him contemplate Christ. It is the glory of Christ not only to have proved through suffering his own supremely perfect sonship, but to draw men his brethren to himself and to the Father that they may be sons of God in him.