064. CHAPTER 29 - JUSTIFICATION - FALSE THEORIES REFUTED - JUSTIFICATION BY THE IMPUTATION OF CHR...
CHAPTER 29 - JUSTIFICATION - FALSE THEORIES REFUTED - JUSTIFICATION BY THE IMPUTATION OF CHRIST’S ACTIVE OBEDIENCE CONSIDERED.
HAVING discussed the nature of justification, we now proceed to consider the method by which it is to be obtained. Among those who profess to be guided by the Scriptures, there are several different methods or plans by which this blessing is said to be realized.
1. Justification is said to be by the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness or obedience.
2. It is said to be by the imputation of Christ’s active and passive righteousness or obedience, taken together.
3. It is said to be by works alone.
4. It is said to be by faith and works united, or taken together.
5. It is said to be by faith alone. The last scheme is the one we believe to be taught in the Scriptures; but we will examine each of them in the order just stated.
I.Justification is said to be by the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness or obedience. This scheme has been advocated by high Calvinists, and lies at the foundation of Antinomianism. By it we are taught that Christ’s personal obedience to the moral law of God is so imputed to the sinner as to be accounted his own, and that he is thereby justified in view of his having kept the moral law in Christ. Those who advocate this theory do not reject faith as being altogether unnecessary under the gospel; they hold that it flows from a justified state, as an effect from a cause, and is the manifestation, or evidence, of justification. But they reject faith, and every thing else, as having any thing to do in justification, except the personal and active obedience of Christ to the moral law, imputed to the sinner as though he himself had thus obeyed. That this scheme is unscriptural and absurd, must be clearly obvious to such as will carefully weigh the following considerations:
1.It is perfectly gratuitious, there being not a single text in the Bible to which we can appeal as having announced any such doctrine.
It is true that it is said, in reference to Messiah, Jeremiah 23:6 : “And this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.” And St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1:30, says that Christ “of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” In reference to these passages we remark,
1. There is no evidence that Christ’s personal righteousness is here referred to at all - it is rather “his obedience unto death, even the death of the cross.”
2. It is neither here asserted that Christ’s righteousness shall be ours, nor that it shall be imputed to us.
Only it is said, “The name by which he shall be called is, The Lord our Righteousness;” and, “He shall be made unto us righteousness,” etc. The plain meaning is, that he is the source, or fountain, from which our righteousness or justification is derived. But this is vastly different from saying that his keeping of the moral law is imputed to us, or to be acknowledged instead of our having kept it. Christ, is said to be “the resurrection,” “our life,” “our peace,” etc, But surely we must not hence infer that his rising from the dead, his living, and his possession of peace, are to be imputed to us as though we had done these things in him, and had no right to any farther resurrection, life, or peace! And yet the argument is precisely the same in this and the former case. Indeed, the entire notion that Christ was our representative in such close sense that what he did or suffered we did or suffered in him, is flatly contradictory to the whole tenor of Scripture on the subject. It is nowhere said that we obeyed or suffered in Christ; but the language is, “He suffered for us.” The Scripture doctrine is, not that we obeyed in Christ, but that, through “his obedience unto death,” our disobedience is forgiven.
2.This scheme invokes a fiction and impossibility, nowhere countenanced in Scripture, and irreconcilable with the divine attributes. An all-wise and holy God must view things as they really are. He never can consider one person as having performed an act, and at the same time as not having performed it. For the all-wise and holy One to consider any thing as being what it is not, or to consider any person as having done what he never did, is perfectly impossible and clearly absurd.
I know it has been argued that there is no more absurdity implied in the active righteousness of Christ being imputed to us, than there is in our sins being imputed to him. But, we ask, in what sense are our sins imputed to Christ? Surely not in reference to the formality of fact. Some have even gone so far on this subject as almost to assume the attitude of blasphemy. It has been even said that “Christ was the greatest sinner that ever lived.” This they drew as a necessary conclusion from the principle which they had assumed - that all the sins of the whole world were so imputed to Christ, that, in the mind of God, he was considered to have actually committed them. In reference to such as have thus reasoned, we would say, at least, that their logic is better than their divinity. For, according to the principle assumed, the conclusion, shocking as it certainly is, would be perfectly legitimate. But the position is an absurd and inconsistent fiction. The sins of the world were never imputed to Christ with the formality of the fact, so that the Almighty looked upon Christ as actually having committed them or upon them as being formally and in fact his sins. They were only imputed to him in reference to their penalty. The sins were not made his, nor considered as such; but he endured the penalty due them - he suffered for them. Indeed, to suppose that they were made or considered his in the formality of the fact, would be to say that he suffered for his own sins, and not for the sins of others. It would overturn the vicarious nature of his death, and at the same time destroy the necessity of pardon. For if all the sins of the whole world were imputed to Christ as his sins, they cannot still be considered as the sins of the world; they, by this absurd fiction, have been passed over to Christ; and if so, they cannot still be considered as the sins of the world, as they were previously to the supposed imputation; and consequently there are no sins left upon the world to be pardoned; for certainly I cannot need pardon, nor can the law punish me, for that crime which it does not consider as mine. But this entire position is absurd and unscriptural to the very center.
3. The Almighty never could have considered the sins of the world so imputed to Christ as to be his; for we hear a “voice from the excellent glory, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” In no sense could he be considered a sinner; but “the iniquity of all was laid upon him” - that is, the punishment which it deserved. Hence it now appears that, as the sins of the world were not imputed to Christ so as to be considered his, we cannot infer therefrom that the active and personal obedience of Christ is imputed to us so as to be considered ours in the proper sense, as though performed by us. As our sins were imputed to him in reference to the penalty, so his “obedience unto death” is imputed to us in reference to its benefits. This is the plain scriptural presentation of the subject. The Antinomian hypothesis, that God justifies the sinner by imputing to him the obedience of Christ to the moral law, and considering him as having thus obeyed in Christ, is only an idle dream, without reason or Scripture for its support, involving an absurd fiction, irreconcilable with the divine character.
“The judgment of the all-wise God is always according to truth; neither can it ever consist with his unerring wisdom to think that I am innocent, to judge that I am righteous or holy, because another is so. He can no more confound me with Christ than with David or Abraham.” (Wesley.)
Again:
“If what our Lord was and did is to be accounted to us in the sense just given, then we must be accounted never to have sinned, because Christ never sinned, and yet we must ask for pardon though we are accounted from birth to death to have fulfilled God’s law in Christ; or if they should say that when we ask for pardon we ask only for a revelation to us of our eternal justification or pardon, the matter is not altered; for what need is there of pardon, in time or eternity, if we are accounted to have perfectly obeyed God’s holy law? and why should we be accounted also to have suffered in Christ the penalty of sins which we are accounted never to have committed?” (Watson’s Institutes.)
Thus it is clear that the different parts of this monstrous fiction fight with each other. If, by the above kind of imputation, we transfer Christ’s personal righteousness to us, his sufferings for us are useless, and pardon is not needed. If our sins are, as above, imputed to him, then he suffered, not “for our sins,” but for his own; and the Bible becomes a book of silly dreams, or absurd and inconsistent fictions.
4. This scheme of justification by the imputation of Christ’s personal obedience to the moral law, is irreconcilable with the character of Christ’s personal acts, and could not furnish us a righteousness adapted to our condition. The supposition is, that all that Christ did in his proper person is to be set to our account, or imputed to us as ours, so as to weave out a robe of perfect obedience exactly suited to our case. If, upon a comparison of his personal acts of obedience, or his righteousness, with the description of righteousness, or the peculiar kind of moral obedience, required at our hands, it be found that the righteousness of Christ contains more than we need, the robe thus woven for us will be found to be more than our strength may be able to bear; but, on the other hand, if, upon the comparison, it appear that the righteousness of Christ, or the obedience he rendered to the moral law, contains less than we need, the robe thus woven for us will not be sufficient to shelter our guilty heads from the sword of justice. Either a redundancy or a deficiency, or a redundancy in some respects and a deficiency in others, will evidence such an unsuitableness in this plan of justification as should cause us seriously to suspect that it is a plan of our own devising, and not the Heaven-stamped method arranged by Infinite Wisdom for the justification of “the ungodly.”
Now, in turning our attention to this subject, we think it will be readily perceived that, while the righteousness of Christ, as above claimed by imputation, will be found to contain too much, in some respects, in other respects it will contain too little, to meet our exigencies. The greatest portion of the personal acts of Christ were of a very peculiar kind, such as never were, and never could be, appropriate to any being in the universe but himself. He appeared in our world in the peculiar character of God-man Mediator, and took upon himself the regalia of Prophet Priest, and King, in a peculiar and exalted sense; and in the performance of the duties, and the exercise of the prerogatives, of his official character, he went forth “traveling in the greatness of his strength,” to do the will of Him that had sent him, in the accomplishment of the stupendous work of the world’s redemption, exhibiting in his sublime career a train of magnificent doings and godlike achievements, calculated at once to strike with awe and fill with amazement both heaven and earth. Will a mortal man indulge in aspirations so lofty, as to pretend that all these personal acts of the Saviour’s active obedience are, in the divine mind, considered as having been performed by us, that thereby we may be furnished with a robe of perfect obedience, and thus stand justified before God? Surely actions like these, a righteousness of this peculiar and exalted kind, was never required at our hands: it contains vastly too much, and is far too exalted in its character, to be appropriate to our condition. “He, then, that assumeth this righteousness to himself,” says Goodwin, “and appareleth himself with it, represents himself before God, not in the habit of a just or righteous man, but in the glorious attire of the great Mediator of the world, whose righteousness hath heights and depths in it, a length and breadth, which infinitely exceed the proportions of all men whatever. Now, then, for a silly worm to take this robe of immeasurable majesty upon him, and so conceit himself as great in holiness and righteousness as Jesus Christ, (for that is the spirit that rules in this opinion, to teach men to assume all that Christ did unto themselves, and that in no other way, nor upon any lower terms, than if themselves had personally done it,) whether this be right, I leave to sober men to consider.” (Treatise on Justification.) As we have seen, the personal righteousness of Christ, in one sense, is too exalted, and contains vastly too much, to be adapted to our condition, so, in another sense, it contains too little. Infinitely perfect as the moral and personal obedience of Christ was, as pertaining to his own immaculate character, yet, if we attempt to substitute it for that obedience to moral law which duty enjoins upon us, we should perceive it, in a variety of particulars, not suited to our case.
There are many circumstances and relations in life which never pertained to the Saviour, requiring the performance of peculiar moral obligations. These obligations which rest upon us, and in the neglect of which the law will hold us guilty, the Saviour never performed. Of this class, we might mention parental and conjugal obligations, the reciprocal obligations between master and servant, and magisterial and official duties of various kinds. Here we find not only an endless variety of items under a particular class, but entire classes of duties, which the Saviour was never in a situation to perform. Can he who is deficient in his righteousness in any of these particulars, plead the perfect obedience of Christ? Can the parent or the master who is delinquent in reference to the peculiar duties of that relation, refer to the moral obedience of Christ, and find, in the history of his life, the discharge of the specific obligation with the neglect of which he stands charged? Surely not.
We know it may be urged that, although the personal righteousness of Christ be wanting in reference to many particulars pertaining to us, yet it was perfect as a whole; there was no defect in it, so far as his own moral character was concerned; and this obedience, which was perfect in the aggregate, may be imputed in the aggregate to us. In reply to this, we would say, that the strictness of law can admit no such fulfillment in the aggregate. The legal requirements are specific; and the sentence against the delinquent is equally particular and minute. In righteousness based upon pardon in view of satisfaction rendered, there maybe admitted as satisfaction something equivalent to, though in some respects different from, what the law required; but where righteousness is claimed upon the ground of actual fulfillment of law, to plead the equivalency of one action, or of one course of duties, to another, is perfectly inadmissible. The law can admit no such commutation, but must exact perfect conformity to every jot and tittle of its precepts; and he that “offends in one is guilty of all.”
Thus it appears that justification cannot be based on the personal righteousness of Christ imputed to us as our own; because in some respects it contains too much, and in other respects too little, to be appropriate to our peculiar exigencies.
5. Next, we observe that this scheme of justification is objectionable because it bases the whole matter upon actual obedience to the moral law, instead of placing it on the ground of pardon, in view of the meritorious death of Christ, as the Scriptures expressly teach.
(1) That the scheme of justification in question is fatally defective, for the reason just stated, will be obvious when we reflect that there is no Bible truth more prominently and explicitly recognized than this: that our salvation is to be attributed to the Saviour’s “obedience unto death.” Now, if we ground our justification on Christ’s personal obedience to the moral law, it will be, not a comment on the plan of salvation as clearly revealed in the Bible, but an invention of our own. Is it not to be regretted, if men must invent divinity, that they do not, at least, invent something less inconsistent and absurd in itself? The Scriptures nowhere attribute our justification to the moral purity of the Saviour’s life. This personal obedience to moral precept was essential, that he might present an example for our imitation; and also for the perfection of his own character, that he might be prepared to offer on the cross, for the sins of the world, a sacrifice “without blemish and without spot.” But it is no more to be considered as the direct ground of our justification than the obedience of Abraham or of Paul.
(2) Indeed, this scheme proposes for man righteousness of a kind which it is utterly impossible for him ever to possess. Legal righteousness, or justification in view of law, must be one of two kinds - that is, it must either be based upon perfect obedience, or satisfaction. When once the law is broken, perfect obedience is out of the question. There is, then, no possible chance for justification in the sight of law, but by satisfaction. It will be like “placing new cloth in an old garment”; the breach must first be healed by satisfaction. After the first covenant had been broken, the law no longer demanded perfect obedience; that had been forever set aside by transgression: the demand then was for the execution of the penalty, or satisfaction for the breach. Christ satisfied for the breach, not by keeping the moral precepts, but by “giving his life a ransom for many.”
There is a twofold righteousness or justification - primary and ultimate. The former consists in perfect obedience to law; the latter in satisfaction for the breach of law. Justification in the former sense rests on the fact that we cannot be charged with having violated the command; justification in the latter sense rests upon the fact that, though the law has been broken, satisfaction has been rendered. None can be justified by the same law, and in reference to the same actions, in both these senses, at the same time; for when the law has been kept, satisfaction can have no room. Now the justification presented in the gospel must be of one or the other of these kinds. If we are justified by perfect obedience, then we can admit no breach of law, and of course can neither plead satisfaction nor ask for pardon. If we plead satisfaction rendered, or ask for pardon, we thereby confess our guilt, and renounce justification on the ground of perfect obedience.
(3) Again: justification cannot be by the personal obedience of Christ; for the law did not demand the obedience of another for us, but our own obedience. But even if we could admit that we had perfectly kept the law in Christ, yet we could not then be justified on the ground of perfect obedience; for still we have sinned in ourselves, and for this the law would still have its demands upon us. On the subject in hand, we quote the following from an acute writer: “If our sins have been expiated by the obedience of the life of Christ, either a perfect expiation has been thus made for all of them, or an imperfect one for some of them. The first cannot be asserted, for then it would follow that Christ had died in vain; for, as he died to expiate our sins, he would not have accounted it necessary to offer such an expiation for them, if they had been already expiated by the obedience of his life. And the latter cannot be maintained, because Christ has yielded perfect obedience to the law of God; wherefore, if he have performed that for the expiation of our sins, he must necessarily, through that obedience, have expiated all of them perfectly.” (Piscator.) But hear the language of St. Paul on this subject: - Galatians 2:21 : “If righteousness be by the law, then Christ died in vain.” This whole scheme of justification by the active obedience of Christ drives necessarily to the dreadful consequence here presented by the apostle. It allows no adequate reason whatever for the death of Christ. The apostle argues that justification by the law renders nugatory the death of Christ. And what, we ask, is this scheme of the imputed active obedience of Christ, but justification by law? Even if we admit that the moral law kept by the Saviour was different from that law spoken of by the apostle when he discards justification by the law, the argument will only be the stronger for that admission; for if justification by the Mosaic law renders the death of Christ unnecessary, how much more must justification by that superior law which the Saviour kept render the death of Christ unnecessary! The argument is plain and simple: if we are perfectly justified in the active moral obedience of Christ, we can need no more.
(4) Again: this scheme confounds the two covenants, and makes the covenant of grace, in every particular, the same as the covenant of works; or, in other words, it denies that there is such a thing as the covenant of grace, and puts man under the same law, and requires the same mode of justification, before the Fall and under the gospel. From the arguments which we have briefly sketched, we think it clear that a fallen sinner can never be justified by the imputation of Christ’s active obedience. This Antinomian scheme must be renounced as unscriptural and absurd; and we must look to some other quarter for that acquittal in the sight of God from our sin and guilt which alone can fit us for the enjoyment of happiness. The various other methods of justification already named, we must reserve for a future chapter. On a subject of so much importance, we should endeavor to investigate with diligence and care, at the same time relying upon the teachings of Scripture, and invoking the illuminations of the Spirit.