06.05. Brothers, Live and Preach Justification by Faith
And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted unto righteousness.
Romans 4:5 jp ✦ ✦ ✦ This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone.
It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God; and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour.
Martin Luther ✦ ✦ ✦
Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished, religion abolished, the Church destroyed, and the hope of salvation utterly overthrown. John Calvin
5 Brothers, Live and Preach Justification by Faith
Preaching and living justification by faith alone glorifies Christ, rescues hopeless sinners, emboldens imperfect saints, and strengthens fragile churches. It is a stunning truth—that God justifies the ungodly by faith. “To the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5). History bears witness: the preaching of this truth creates, reforms, and revives the church. This was true in the ministry of the apostle Paul. For example, in Antioch of Pisidia he preached in the synagogue, “Let it be known to you therefore, brethren, that through this man [Jesus] forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him every one that believes is justified (dikaioutai) from everything from which you could not be justified (dikaiōthēnai) by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:38-39 jp). What was the result of this preaching of justification by faith? As Paul and Barnabas were going out, the people kept begging that these things might be spoken to them the next Sabbath. Now when the meeting of the synagogue had bro-ken up, many of the Jews and of the God-fearing proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who, speaking to them, were urging them to continue in the grace of God. And the next Sabbath nearly the whole city assembled to hear the word of God. (Acts 13:42-44 nasb) As we trace this preaching through the history of the church, sometimes we read that Augustine did not see or preach this doctrine. This is probably not true,1 though it may not be as clear as later in Luther and Calvin. The move away from justification by faith alone and the resulting confusion of an alien righteousness with sanctifica-tion as the basis for our right standing before God probably came after Augustine,2 although it is doubtful that it ever disappeared completely. The great Scholastic theologian, Anselm (1033–1109), was prob-ably also an exponent of justification by faith alone. He described his view in a tract for the consolation of the dying, quoted by A. H. Strong:
“Question. Dost thou believe that the Lord Jesus died for thee? Answer. I believe it. Qu. Dost thou thank him for his passion and death? Ans. I do thank him. Qu. Dost thou believe that thou canst not be saved except by his death? Ans. I believe it.” And then Anselm addresses the dying man:
“Come then, while life remaineth in thee; in his death alone place thy whole trust; in naught else place any trust; to his death commit thyself wholly; with this alone cover thyself wholly; and if the Lord thy God will to judge thee, say, ‘Lord, between thy judgment and me I present the death of our Lord Jesus Christ; no otherwise can I contend with thee.’ And if he shall say that thou art a sinner, say thou: ‘Lord, I interpose the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and thee.’ If he say that thou hast deserved condemnation, say: ‘Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts and thee, and his merits I offer for those which I ought to have and have not.’ If he say that he is wroth with thee, say: ‘Lord, I oppose the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between thy wrath and me.’ And when thou hast completed this, say again: ‘Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between thee and me.’” See Anselm, Opera (Migne), 1:686, 687. The above quotation gives us reason to believe that the New Testament doctrine of justification by faith was implicitly, if not explicitly, held by many pious souls through all the ages of papal darkness.3 And there was darkness. The Reformation was needed. And the discovery and preaching of justification by faith alone was the center of the lightning bolt of truth that lit the world. Luther dates his great discovery of the gospel of justification by faith alone to 1518 during his series of lectures on Psalms 4 He tells the story in his “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings.” This account of the discovery is taken from that preface, written March 5, 1545, the year before his death.
I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But up till then it was . . . a single word in Romans 1:1-32 [:17], “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” that had stood in my way. For I hated that word “righteousness of God,” which accord-ing to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmur-ing greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteous wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righ-teousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand [that] the righteousness of God is that by which the righ-teous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Here a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. . . . And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.5
Oh, that pastors in our pragmatic age would “meditate day and night” and “beat importunately upon Paul” until they see the gospel of justification so clearly that they would “enter paradise itself through open gates.” Then we would discover why Luther put such a weight on it: “In it all other articles of our faith are comprehended, and when that is safe the others are safe too.”6 “On this article all that we teach and practice is based.”7 “It alone can support us in the face of these countless offenses and can console us in all temptations and persecu-tions.”8 “This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God; and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour.”9
John Calvin cherished and preached this truth because “wher-ever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extin-guished, religion abolished, the Church destroyed, and the hope of salvation utterly overthrown.”10 Concerning his debate with Roman Catholicism, he said that justification by faith alone was “the first and keenest subject of controversy between us.”11 What was this great and central truth? Calvin defined it this way: As all mankind are, in the sight of God, lost sinners, we hold that Christ is their only righteousness, since, by his obedience, he has wiped off our transgressions; by his sacri-fice, appeased the divine anger; by his blood, washed away our stains; by his cross, borne our curse; and by his death, made satisfaction for us. We maintain that in this way man is reconciled in Christ to God the Father, by no merit of his own, by no value of works, but by gratuitous mercy. When we embrace Christ by faith, and come, as it were, into commu-nion with him, this we term, after the manner of Scripture, the righteousness of faith.12 When he and the other reformers and the Puritans after them were challenged that the justification of the ungodly by faith alonewould lead to loose living (just as Paul was challenged in Romans 6:1; Romans 6:15), he answered:
I wish the reader to understand that as often as we men-tion faith alone in this question, we are not thinking of a dead faith, which worketh not by love, but holding faith to be the only cause of justification. It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone: just as it is the heat alone of the sun which warms the earth, and yet in the sun it is not alone, because it is constantly conjoined with light. Wherefore we do not separate the whole grace of regeneration from faith, but claim the power and faculty of justifying entirely for faith, as we ought.13 The Baptist pastor John Bunyan, who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, loved and lived the truth of justification by faith alone. Just before his release from twelve years in prison, he wrote a book entitled A Defense of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith. Most of all the mes-sage was precious to him because it saved him at a time when he was in hopelessness and despairing in his early twenties.
It’s hard to put a date on his conversion because in retelling the process in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners he includes almost no dates or times. But it was a lengthy and agonizing process. “I was all this while ignorant of Jesus Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and [would have] perished therein, had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by nature. . . . The Bible was precious to me in those days.”14
One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [lacks] my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “The same yesterday, today, and forever.” Hebrews 13:8. Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; . . . now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.15
During the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 40s, the preaching of justification on both sides of the Atlantic grounded the strength of the movement of God. When Jonathan Edwards finally published the sermons he had preached on justification by faith in 1734, he wrote in the preface: The beginning of the late work of God in this place was so circumstanced, that I could not but look upon it as a remarkable testimony of God’s approbation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, here asserted and vindicated.
. . . The following discourse of justification . . . seemed to be remarkably blessed, not only to establish the judgments of many in this truth, but to engage their hearts in a more earnest pursuit of justification, in that way that had been explained and defended; and at that time, while I was greatly reproached for defending this doctrine in the pulpit, and just upon my suffering a very open abuse for it, God’s work won-derfully brake forth amongst us, and souls began to flock to Christ, as the Savior in whose righteousness alone they hoped to be justified. So that this was the doctrine on which this work in its beginning was founded, as it evidently was in the whole progress of it.16
Oh, brothers, do we not want to see souls begin “to flock to Christ as the Savior”? Then let us live and preach this great central truth of justification by faith alone.
Remember what Luther said, and give yourselves to it: “I beat importunately upon Paul.” Take hold of Romans and Galatians and wrestle with them the way Jacob wrestled with the angel of God— until these inspired writings bless you with this glorious truth. In Romans 4:1-25, Paul builds his case on Genesis 15:6, which he quotes in Romans 4:3 : “For what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’” Paul is eager to pick up on the words faith and reckoned in Genesis 15:6 to show why they rule out boasting and support justification by faith alone. Romans 4:4 : “Now to the one who works, his wage is not reckoned according to grace, but as according to debt” (jp). This is why justification by works would not put an end to boasting. If you work for your justification, what you are doing is trying to put God in your debt. And if you suc-ceed in getting God to owe you something, then you can boast before men and God. If you worked for justification and you succeeded, you would not get grace but a wage. God would owe it to you. And when you got it, you would be able to say, “I deserve this.” And that, Paul says, is not what Abraham did.
Well, what did he do? Romans 4:5 is perhaps the most important verse on justification by faith alone in all the New Testament. Three bright signals in this verse teach that justification is by faith alone and nothing but faith. “And to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Notice these three signals that justification is by “faith alone.”
First, he says, “To the one who does not work.” Here is a por-trait of the moment of justification. This does not mean there will be no “good works” that follow in sanctification. Paul takes that up in Romans 6:1-23. We are dealing here with the moment of justification. This moment could happen for any of your people any Sunday morn-ing in an instant because it is not a long process (like sanctification). Justification is a verdict delivered by God in a moment: not guilty, acquitted, accepted, forgiven, righteous! And Paul says it happens to the person who “does not work”! That means it comes by faith alone. The second signal that justification is by faith alone is the word ungodly. After Paul says, “To the one who does not work,” he says,“but trusts him who justifies the ungodly.” This is utterly shocking. It jars all of our judicial sentiments (see Exodus 23:7; Proverbs 17:15). It makes us cry out, “How can this be?” And the stupendous answer is that “Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). God can justify the ungodly because His Son died for the ungodly. The point of the word ungodly here is to stress that faith is not our righteousness. Faith believes in Him who justifies the ungodly. When faith is born in the soul, we are still ungodly. Faith will begin to overcome our ungodliness. But in the beginning of the Christian life—where justification happens—we are all ungodly. Godly works do not begin to have a role in our lives until we are justified. We are declared righteous17 by faith alone while we are still ungodly. And that is the only way any of us can have hope that God is on our side so that we can now make headway in the fight against ungodliness. He is for us. “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died” (Romans 8:33-34).
Finally, the third signal that justification is by faith alone is the last phrase in Romans 4:5, “His faith is counted as righteousness.” Not his works or his love or even his fruit of faith, but his faith—his faith alone—is counted as righteousness.
What does this mean, “Faith is reckoned as righteousness”? The idea is clearly crucial for Paul because we meet it in Romans 4:3 : “Abraham believed God, and it [his believing] was counted to him as righ-teousness.” Romans 4:5 : “His [the one who believes in him who justifies the ungodly] faith is counted as righteousness.” Romans 4:9 : “Faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.” Romans 4:22 : Abraham’s “faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness.’” Does reckoning faith as righteousness mean that faith itself is the kind of righteousness we perform and God counts that as good enough to be our justifying righteousness? Does it mean that justifica-tion, let’s say, costs five million dollars and I can come up with one million dollars (namely, faith), so God mercifully says He will count my one million as five million and cancel the rest? That would make my faith the righteousness imputed to me. So justification would be God’s recognizing in me a righteousness that He put there and that He acknowledges and counts for what it really is—righteous. Is that what Paul means when he says, “Faith is counted as righteousness”? Or is justification something different—not God’s seeing any righteousness in me but His reckoning to me His own righteousness in Christ through faith? My answer is that Paul means faith is what unites us with Christ and all that God is for us in Him. And when God sees us united to Christ—sees us in Christ—He sees the righteousness of Christ as our righteousness. So faith connects us with Christ who is our righteous-ness and, in that sense, faith is counted as righteousness. The function of justifying faith is to see and savor all that God is for us in Christ, especially His righteousness.
Now what is the biblical basis of this interpretation? John Owen gives five arguments,18 and John Murray gives nine arguments19 why “faith counted as righteousness” does not mean that faith is our righteousness. Here are some of the reasons that seem compelling to me.
First, notice at the end of Romans 4:6 and at the end of Romans 4:11 a different way of expressing the “imputation” of righteousness (or the “counting” of righteousness). At the end of Romans 4:6, “God counts righteousness apart from works.” And at the end of Romans 4:11, “that righteousness might be counted to them.” Notice: in both of these, faith is not the thing counted as righteousness, but righteous-ness is the thing counted to us. “God credits righteousness,” not “God credits faith as righteousness.” What this does is alert us to the good possibility that when Paul says, “Faith is counted as righteousness,” he may well mean, “who thus have righteousness counted to them.” What is counted to our account here is not faith but righteousness. This suggests that speaking of faith being reckoned may be a short-hand way of saying that righteousness is counted through faith.
Second, consider Romans 3:21-22, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Notice that God’s righteousness comes to us through faith. Faith is what unites us to God’s righteous-ness. Faith is not God’s righteousness which is imputed (reckoned) to us in our union with Christ.
Third, consider 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Here we have a double “imputation.” God imputed our sins to Christ who knew no sin. And God imputed His righteousness to us who had no righteousness of our own. The key phrases for us are “the righteousness of God” and “in him.” It’s not our righteousness that we get in Christ. It is God’s righteousness. And we get it not because our faith is righteous but because we are “in Christ.” Faith unites us to Christ. And in Christ we have an alien righteous-ness. It is God’s righteousness in Christ. Or you can say it is Christ’s righteousness, which is the way Romans 5:18 speaks (“so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men”). He takes our sin. We take His righteousness, imputed to us.20
Fourth, consider 1 Corinthians 1:30. John Bunyan said that after the experience in the field where the imputed righteousness of Christ hit him so powerfully, he went home and looked for biblical support. He came upon 1 Corinthians 1:30. “[God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” “By this Scripture,” Bunyan said, “I saw that the man Christ Jesus . . . is our righteousness and sanctifica-tion before God. Here therefore I lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God, through Christ.”21
Bunyan’s text (1 Corinthians 1:30) says that Christ became for us (simple dative, hēmin) “righteousness.” And the reason Christ is our “righteousness” in this way is that we are “in Christ Jesus.” “You are in Christ Jesus who became to [or for] us . . . righteousness.” Christ, not faith, is our righteousness. Faith unites us to Christ and all that God is for us in Him. But what He is for us in Him is righteousness.22 My conclusion from these observations is that, when Paul says in Romans 4:3; Romans 4:5; Romans 4:9; Romans 4:22 that “faith is counted as righteousness,” he does not mean that our faith is our righteousness. He means that our faith unites us to Christ so that God’s righteousness in Christ is reckoned to us.
Here’s an imperfect, but I think helpful, analogy. Suppose I say to Barnabas, my teenage son, “Clean up your room before you go to school. You must have a clean room, or you won’t be able to go watch the game tonight.” Well, suppose he plans poorly and leaves for school without cleaning the room. And suppose I discover the messy room and clean it. His afternoon fills up, and he gets home just before it’s time to leave for the game and realizes what he has done and feels ter-rible. He apologizes and humbly accepts the consequences. No game. To which I say, “Barnabas, I am going to credit your apology and submission as a clean room. I said, ‘You must have a clean room, or you won’t be able to go watch the game tonight.’ Your room is clean. So you can go to the game.” What I mean when I say, “I credit your apology as a clean room,” is not that the apology is the clean room nor that he really cleaned his room. I cleaned it. It was pure grace. All I mean is that, in my way of counting—in my grace—his apology con-nects him with the promise given for a clean room. The clean room is his clean room. I credit it to him. Or, I credit his apology as a clean room. You can say it either way. And Paul said it both ways: “Faith is reckoned as righteousness,” and “God credits righteousness to us.” So when God says to those who believe in Christ, “I credit your faith as righteousness,” He does not mean that your faith is your justi-fying righteousness. He means that your faith connects you to Christ who becomes your righteousness in God’s sight—God’s righteousness. For Martin Luther and John Bunyan the discovery of the imputed righteousness of Christ was the greatest life-changing experience they ever had. Luther said it was like entering a paradise of peace with God. For Bunyan it was the end of years of spiritual torture and uncer-tainty. Brothers, what would your people give to know for sure that their acceptance and approval before God was as sure as the standing of Jesus Christ, His Son?
Say to your beloved flock: “Christ offers you this today as a gift. If you see Him as true and precious, if you receive the gift as your greatest treasure in life and trust in it, you will have a peace with God that passes all understanding. You will be a secure person. You will not need the approval of others. You will not need the ego-supports of wealth or power or revenge. You will be free. You will overflow with love. You will lay down your life in the cause of Christ for the joy that is set before you. Look to Christ and trust Him for your righteousness.”
Tell them with joy and passion and power that they can’t give anything for it. It’s free. This is what Christ came to do: fulfill a righ-teousness and die a death that would remove all our sins and become for us a perfect righteousness. Live in the mighty joy and freedom of this gospel. And preach it! Oh preach this to your people again and again.
Notes
1.See the evidences brought forth in The Basic Writings of St. Augustine, ed. by Whitney Oates, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1968), 142ff; and John H. Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, section on the history of justification, found in Jonathan Edwards Collection: A Light for Every Age (CD-ROM), by Michael Bowman and NavPress Software, 1999.
2.See Ian Sellers, “Justification,” in The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. by J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 557.
3.A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Common-place Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students (Rochester, MN: Press of E. R. Andrews, 1886); reprint, three volumes in one (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1972), 849.
4.John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), xvii.
5.Ibid., 11–12.
6.Martin Luther, quoted in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says: An Anthology, vol. 2 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), 703.
7.Quoted in Ibid., 718.
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid., 704.
10.John Dillenberger, John Calvin: Selections from His Writings (n.p.: Scholars Press, 1975), 95.
11.Ibid.
12.Ibid., 96.
13.Ibid., 198.
14.John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Hertfordshire, England: Evangelical Press, 1978; original, 1666), 20.
15.Ibid., 90–91.
16.Jonathan Edwards, “Five Discourses,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Press, 1974), 620.
17.The word justify (dikaioō) means “declare righteous,” not “make mor-ally righteous.” We see this especially in Romans 3:4 where God is “justified” (dikaiōthēs) in His words, that is, declared righteous, not made righteous.
18.John Owen, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 318–19.
19.John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), 353–59.
20.The doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is under heavy attack in our day (again). See for example, Robert H. Gundry, “Why I Didn’t Endorse ‘The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration,’” in Books and Culture, January/February 2001, vol. 7, no. 1, 6–9; Robert H. Gundry, “On Oden’s Answer,” in Books and Culture, March/April 2001, vol. 7, no. 2, 15–16,
39.But this trend in New Testament scholarship may not be able to overthrow four centuries of textual reflection and broad Protestant consensus on God’s righteousness in relation to justification. Careful contemporary New Testament exegetes like George Ladd have admitted what Gundry belabors, namely, that an explicit doctrinal statement about the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers is absent: “Paul never expressly states that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers.” But from 2 Corinthians Ladd says, “Paul answers the question when he says, ‘In him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ was made sin for our sake. We might say that our sins were reckoned to Christ. He, although sinless, identified himself with our sins, suffered their penalty and doom—death. So we have reckoned to us Christ’s righteousness even though in character and deed we remain sinners. It is an unavoidable logical conclusion that men of faith are justified because Christ’s righteousness is imputed to them.” George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, rev. ed., ed. Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 491. In other words, the absence of doctrinal explicitness and systemati-zation may be no more problematic for the doctrine of the imputation of Christ than it is for the doctrine of the Trinity. For a detailed response to Gundry, see John Piper, Counted Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002).
21.Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 91.
22.There is a credible objection to using 1 Corinthians 1:30 to show the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Some say that using the verse to prove the imputation of Christ’s righteousness would seem to prove that wisdom and sanctification and redemption are also “imputed” rather than imparted. But each of these is something we actually experience, not just a declaration about us. So if the text says, “God made [Christ to be] our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” can we pick out only “righteousness” and say it was imputed to us while the others are not merely imputed but applied to us so that we experience them?
One answer is that Paul may well have intended each of the four explicit gifts of our union with Christ to be taken in the way that each functions uniquely in meeting our need, rather than all being taken in the exact same way. John Flavel (1630–1691) saw a progression that points in this direction. Thus in this union Christ becomes wisdom for us which overcomes our blind-ing ignorance of Christ (by illumination). Second, in this union Christ becomes righteousness for us which overcomes our guilt and condemnation (by imputa-tion). Third, in this union Christ becomes sanctification for us which overcomes our corruption and pollution (by progressive impartation). Fourth, in this union Christ becomes redemption for us which overcomes, in the end, all the miseries and pain and futility that come from sin and guilt (through resurrection, “We wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies,” Romans 8:23). See John Flavel, The Method of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977), 14. One could also bring to bear Romans 10:4 at this point, which translated literally says, “The goal [or end] of the law is Christ for righteousness to every-one who believes.” In other words, the law was pointing toward Christ as our righteousness (“Christ for righteousness for everyone who believes,” τέλος γὰρ νόμου Χριστὸς εἰς δικαιοσύνην παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι [telos gar nomou Christos eis dikaiosunēn panti tō pisteuonti]).