Salvation and Godly Rule

Justification

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Justification

Genre: Speech

Track: 36

Dictation Name: RR136T36

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Romans 8:28-30. Justification. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”

The need for justification is an intense and basic need of man. Man, having been created in the image of God, needs to be able to stand before God and before men, and before his own conscience, in innocence and in confidence. Man needs both acquittal and a sense of righteousness. Whenever a man faces the world with guilt, he faces it with a serious handicap. We have, on previous occasions, discussed the implications of guilt, of sin and guilt in the mind and life of man. The first chapter of my Politics of Pity summarizes what a man does when he feels the need for justification apart from Christ. He turns, as we have seen, to sado-masochistic activities. He needs a sin-bearer, and if his bent is sadistic, he punishes others to relieve his conscience. He blames others for what he has done, and his life is one perpetual excuse for his own sin, so that by projecting the guilt onto the world around him, the environment, and by trying to punish that environment, he seeks absolution from his guilt. He seeks justification, or else, he may try to punish himself, and he tries to punish himself endlessly by doing things that bring judgment upon himself, so that he might say, in effect, to God, “Look, I’ve paid for my sin. Look at the trouble I’ve gotten into, the trouble I’ve brought upon myself to pay for my sin.” This aspect again is very deeply imbedded in our time.

I referred some time recently to a survey made of motorists, a test question. If you were driving down a four-lane road, and car on the lane, outside lane going the other direction crossed over and came to you on the outside lane going in the other direction, and hit you head-on, whose fault would it be? There were too many who said, “My fault,” so that the shocked people who conducted the survey said, “Obviously, we have many masochistic people in our midst who have a deep sense of guilt who, in the most obvious circumstances, are anxious to assume the guilt, the punishment, that they might find psychology absolution.”

Man, you see, apart from Christ, indulges in sadistic and masochistic activities in order to, in effect, try to pay for his sin and thereby find justification. Man needs to feel innocent. He also needs to feel that he is doing the right thing, that he is righteous. A guilty past, as we have seen previously, ties a man to yesterday. The exuberance, the joy of life is then gone.

St. Peter, as he speaks of husbands and wives living together, in obedience to God, in 1 Peter 3:7, speaks of being heir together of the grace of life, a very wonderful phrase. Very properly, it has had a place in the marriage service of most churches, because life indeed, in Christ, is a grace. It is a joy. It is a favor, a privilege, but apart from him, it is a burden, and a constant headache.

The last judgment is also very closely associated with justification, also with sanctification. The last judgment presents us with a court, and with a judgment, and it makes plain Christ’s judgment before all creation, either in the form of a sentence upon those who are guilty and a justification of those whom he hast redeemed, so that, before all creation we are openly vindicated. Our justification, our righteousness, our innocence in Christ is made known. All our sins are blotted out and we stand before the whole world justified. The last judgment, the aspect of sanctification appears in that while we are saved by faith, we are rewarded according to works, the last judgment is also a time of revelation, it could be added, when even the ungodly are, within limits, compelled to see, as 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8 says, “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” So that, it is a revelation, a time of revelation when we are publicly justified before all the universe, and the workers of iniquity publically sentenced.

This is an important aspect, because the other side of justification is condemnation, the two words are antonyms. Justification means, very literally, in its original and older sense, “acquittal,” but it means acquittal in the sense also of declaring righteous. Thus, it is a judicial fact, not a psychological fact. There are psychological aspects to justification, but our concern is with the doctrine in its judicial, or juridical, aspect. We are acquitted and declared righteous. Now, sanctification means there is an infusion of righteousness in us, but justification is simply the legal declaration that, in Christ, we are acquitted and declared righteous. It is important to stress the fact that justification is a legal doctrine. It has reference to a court of law. If you take away this juridical aspect, this legal aspect, you destroy justice in the universe, and whenever the legal aspect of salvation, that is, the doctrine of justification, has been underplayed or removed, morality and justice in any objective sense disappear from the world. The legal aspect of salvation, that is, the doctrine of justification, anchors salvation in the act of God, and it relates it to God and His law.

Let us examine the attempts of man to find a salvation without the law, the biblical doctrine of salvation is firmly, in terms of the word justification, anchored in law. It is strictly a legal doctrine. A few weeks from now, we’ll see when we deal with forgiveness, the extent to which the word forgiveness is legal also. But at the same time that the Old Testament was being written, and the New Testament, there was a great culture n the world which was also developing a doctrine of salvation without any legal framework. This was Greek society, Greek civilization. What the Greek philosophers were writing about was precisely salvation, individual and social. Aristotle is very plain-spoken on this score. Aristotle wanted a non-legal, a non-theistic, that is, an anti-God doctrine of salvation, and so he defined the highest or final good that a man could attain, that which constituted his joy and his salvation, as self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency, moreover, he said, is happiness.

As a result, salvation for Aristotle, and this became the whole of the Greco/Roman tradition, and it summed up the whole of the tradition outside of Christ, outside of the Bible, meant being independent of God and man. This is why the Buddhists and their idea of salvation not only have no God, they deny God, but you prove that you’re independent of God and man, and also independent of things. You don’t need food. You don’t need a home and shelter. You can live in a cave. Now, this type of spirituality has infected many Christians and they feel that not being dependent on things, and not enjoying food, and good clothing, a good home, lovely things in the world of art, is somehow a mark of spirituality. It is a pagan spirituality. Now certainly, the Bible teaches us not to put our heart in these things, but definitely it does teach us an appreciation of these things.

Thus, in pagan salvation, you are supposed to be independent of God, man, and the world of things. With Alexander the Great, it was a source of very real grief that he was not independent of food and women. As far as possible, throughout his life, Alexander avoided women. It was necessary to have an heir, so he did, but apart from that, women were a trap. Food and drink were also a snare to him, and he resented the idea that he needed these things. He was a thorough pupil of Aristotle in this respect. Aristotle was his teacher.

Now, Aristotle had a problem here. He was both a thorough-going statist. He said man is a social animal, but he also said salvation is self-sufficiency, so he was at one and the same time, as the whole non-Christian world is anarchistic and totalitarian, and of course, you see this today in the New Left. The New Left is radically infected with this anarchism and with totalitarianism. The state is to be everything and on the other hand, the hippies want to prove that they don’t need people, they don’t need their parents, they don’t need friends, they don’t need clothes, any old rags will do, so that even if they have money, they want to wear patched clothes to prove that they don’t need them, and they like to despise food to prove their self-sufficiency.

Now, Aristotle was much more intelligent than the New Left, so he saw there was a contradiction and he wrote, and I quote from his Epics, “By self-sufficient is meant not what is sufficient for oneself living the life of a solitary, but includes parents, wife and children, friends and fellow citizens in general, for man is a social animal. A self-sufficient thing then we take to be one which, on its own footing, tends to make life desirable and lacking in nothing, and we regard happiness as such a thing. After this, that we regard it as the most desirable of all things without having it counted in with some other desirable thing, for if such an addition were possible, clearly we should regard it as more desirable when even the smallest advantage was added to it, for the result would be an increase in the number of advantages and the larger sum of advantages is preferable to the smaller. Happiness then, the end to which all our conscious acts are directed, is found to be something final and self-sufficient.”

Well, while he was trying to say it includes people and your fellow citizens, he really didn’t make his case. He just said it had to. This is why, of course, in Greece where this kind of thinking was taken very seriously, they never could get beyond the small city states. They were anarchistic even in their politics. Their city states were totalitarian to the extreme. They would dictate the right to have children or not. They would dictate when you could marry and when you couldn’t. This was their goal, and sometimes their practice. They wanted to be totally self-sufficient as small city states, and self-sufficient as individuals, and this is why they collapsed. They were both totalitarian and anarchistic at the same time, and this has been the essential schizophrenia of the non-Christian world through the centuries.

When you have, you see, a non-legal doctrine of salvation, you have no room for God, for law, or for justice. What the biblical doctrine of justification declares is this: as a sinner, you have sinned against God’s absolute law, this is a legal fact. Again, it’s a legal fact that you’re under sentence of death. Again, it’s a legal fact that it will take an act of law to acquit you, and to declare you righteous, and Jesus Christ, by His atonement, renders satisfaction for that justice. As your federal head, he takes on the punishment so that the sentence is fulfilled and you stand clean before the law, as surely as if you owe $1,000, someone pays that debt for you. The note against you is then wiped out. A legal act, this is biblical justification.

In the world of Aristotle, all men are autonomous. They are independent, and no covenant is possible. There is no real conception of humanity. They talk about world brotherhood in the liberal, anti-Christian tradition, but what they have is anarchism. In terms of their totalitarianism, they want a one world order. In terms of their basic anarchism, they continually destroy it. No covenant is possible. No vicarious sacrifice, no substitution by Jesus Christ for us is possible in terms of the non-Christian view of man and the world.

As a result, only in terms of the legal doctrine of salvation is salvation by Christ possible, and an objective, absolute law assured in the universe. The doctrine of justification simply says the universe is operated by God in terms of law. His grace does not destroy law. It works within the framework of law. God’s grace and law are not in contradiction. As a result, any tampering with this is very dangerous.

With regard to the biblical doctrine of justification, A.A. Hodge, a century ago, summed up what scripture teaches, “First, all those, and only those whom God has effectually called he also freely justifies; second, this justification is a purely judicial act of God as judge, whereby He pardons all the sins of a believer and accounts, accepts, and treats him as a person righteous in the eye of the divine law; third, that this justifying act proceeds upon the imputation or crediting to the believer by God of the righteousness of his great representative and surety, Jesus Christ; fourth, that the essential and sole condition upon which this righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believe is that he exercises faith in or on Christ as his righteousness; fifth, that this faith is itself a gracious gift of God; sixth, that no other grace, neither love nor hope nor obedience sustains the same relation to justification that faith does as its essential condition or instrument. Yet this faith is never alone in the justified person but is always, when justified, accompanied with all other Christian graces, all of which have their root in faith.”

This is why, when St. Paul in our text, speaks of justification, he links it firmly in the nature of God, in his absolute law, his eternal decree, his predestination which is his ultimate, final, and absolute law. “Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called [the doctrine of effectual calling]: and whom he called, them he also justified [the doctrine of justification]: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” The fullness of our salvation, our sanctification in the new creation.

The opposite of justification, as we have seen, is condemnation. Justification and condemnation, both, sustain the law of God. If we do not affirm justification as central, as essential, as the key point in the doctrine of salvation, then we become antinomians. Now, the antinomian will still, being semi-Christian, or within the church, talk about salvation, but he drops the word justification and simply takes the broader, more general term, salvation or saved. The Christian must say, “I know I am saved, because Jesus Christ died for my sins, and has gained justification for me. Apart from any good thing in me, or faith in my, and by his sovereign grace has pardoned my sins and redeemed me.” Now, the antinomian will say, “I know I am saved because I believe in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior.” What is he saying? “I know salvation is real for me because I feel it.” In other words, it rests in my emotions, not in an objective, legal act, the justification worked by Jesus Christ. It is because our salvation is an objective, legal act, the act of justification, the opposite of condemnation, that we can say, in terms of scripture, once saved, always saved. We could not say that if it were simply our emotional experience. Where people make it their emotional experience, the ground of salvation then is the personal choice and experience of autonomous man.

Now, at the time of the Reformation, when the reformers asserted, in all its fullness, the doctrine of justification, it is significant to some of their opponents’ work, the Soccinians. That is, the Unitarians. The early Unitarians were ready to use Christian terminology. They were ready to talk about being saved by Jesus Christ, although they didn’t regard him “very God of very God.” They said salvation was simply the pardoning of sins, but an emotional pardoning. They dropped justification. The antinomians also dropped justification, and so forgiveness was reduced to an emotional change in the forgiver, and an emotional release in the forgiven, and it’s not surprising that, having made it an experience of man, they went on to become open humanists.

One scholar, Gordon Clark, has summed up, in a parody, the essential belief of antinomians with regard to salvation. “Free from the law, O blessed condition, I can sin as I please and still have remission.” Unfortunately, Gordon Clark’s statement is not unfair. After all, one very well-known antinomian whose church in Houston is crowded by thousands, week in and week out, and who comes here to Orange County annually to speak to great crowds and whose tapes circulate all over the country, Reverend Robert Theme, Jr. has said, “You can blaspheme, commit adultery, drink, smoke, tie one on, etc., and the Lord has to forgive you on the ground of grace.” “Has to.” Why does he say “has to?” Because God is tied by man’s faith. You bind God. In other words, man is sovereign. This is why when St. Paul speaks of justification, he ties it to the sovereignty of God and to predestination. God is sovereign in justification as judge and as king and creator. “Whom he did predestinate [absolute Lord and God], them he also called [effectual calling, it is entirely of him]: and whom he called, them he also justified [as judge, supreme judge of all creation]: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”

The doctrine of justification then is central to the doctrine of salvation. Apart from it, we drift into humanism, antinomianism, and to a complete disregard of justice. This is why the church today is so impotent. The biggest single group of people in the United States of any particular belief or position are those who term themselves “bible-believing Christians.” There are easily forty million of them, and yet when it comes to influence on the country, these people are the most impotent. A handful of communists, a handful of Fabian socialists, can have a greater impact. Why? Because their position, among all these people who are essentially antinomian, is the most radical antinomianism, and it condemns them to impotence. It is not our feelings that must be determinative in salvation, or in anything. God’s law order, and God’s law order and his grace in the doctrine of the cross of Christ, our justification, are inseparably interrelated, and are inseparably one. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father who, in Jesus Christ, has justified us, and hast made us innocent and righteous in thy supreme court, we give thanks unto thee that our salvation is not dependent upon us or our feelings. It is thy work. We thank thee, O Lord, with thine absolute justice, governs all creation, and thy grace in terms of this absolute righteousness flows unto us through Jesus Christ’s vicarious and atoning sacrifice. We marvel, O Lord, at the majesty of thy government and the glory of thy grace, and we thank thee that thou hast made us thy people. Teach us to walk in gratitude, in humility and in joy, that we might ever praise thee and serve thee as we ought. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, with respect to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] If justification is a legal act, wouldn’t it take place then when Christ paid the penalty, and wouldn’t {?} justify man?

[Rushdoony] A very good question. Now, that point has been raised in the past and the answer is definitely no. The objective fact of justification indeed involved, in part, the fact that Christ justified the Elect when he died upon the cross, but we do not personally receive that justification until we become Christians. You might say, this is a very poor analogy, that there may be a reservoir with water up in the mountains, but not until you draw that water, long after it gets into the reservoir and gets to you is your thirst quenched. So, you are not justified until that moment when, historically, you become a Christian, when you are effectually called and brought to Christ. Then that justification is applied to you. Yes?

[Audience] Would you define the meaning of the word “joy”, as Christ referred to a {?} of joy, versus Aristotle’s joy, as referring to God {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, the question is how to define God in terms of Aristotle and in terms of scripture. Of course, for Aristotle, and for the Aristotelian tradition, joy was in self-sufficiency. The less dependent you became on people and the less you felt anything, the more you experienced joy. I’ve cited before and I think it’s well worth citing again the fact that the Stoics felt that you are truly a happy man and you have achieved self-sufficiency if when you were chatting away with people, somebody came and said, “Your house burned down, and your wife and your children all died in the fire,” and you didn’t feel a thing. You’d found happiness, you see, in yourself. There was your joy, purely in your self-sufficiency. Well, for us that would not be joy; that would be monstrous. So that in terms of the biblical conception, you’d have to say joy is first of all, in our relationship to God in Christ, to finding out place, fulfilling ourselves in terms of him, being able to do that which we’ve been called to do, and then finding it in one another in him. I think perhaps the most remarkable, to me, expressions of joy are in the spring when I hear the birds sing in the trees outside our bedroom window. In fact, it’s almost too bad that you have to drift off to sleep. We have one bird, in particular, that sings like an angel. The song just pours out, sheer joy of existence, the grace of life, and it’s an expression of the bird, of his being, you see, of his life in God’s creation, and as we find ourselves, never perfect in this world because it is a sinful world, and we are not perfect creatures, but the more we find ourselves in Christ, and the functioning of ourselves in his calling, whatever our calling may be, the happier we are. No doubt, as you do something in terms of your work, where you feel you’ve really expressed yourself, there’s a deep sense of joy there. There’s a sense of joy in association with people in the Lord. This is, you see, not self-sufficiency, but it is becoming a part of God’s creation and of God’s calling. So, the two concepts of joy are, of course, very definitely opposed.

Yes, one thing further. You see, in terms of the Aristotelian conception, drugs, are very important, because with the drugs you find happiness without any relationship to the world around you. In fact, you forget the world around you, and a good deal of the philosophy of this was expressed back in the late 40’s and early 50’s by a prominent modern philosopher, Aldus Huxley, who was a resident of Southern California, an Englishman, a resident here, and Huxley wrote extensively on his hope that somehow, there would be a drug developed by science, and in the early days he hoped LSD might be this, which would have no bad side effects or after effects, in which you would find your joy. You see, you could leave the world, forget about it, and find your joy entirely in yourself, and this is the kind of thing that Timothy Leary has been talking about. So, drugs are very definitely a part of the pagan program of salvation. Yes?

[Audience] The other {?} Bible{?}

[Rushdoony] By God’s sovereign grace. When we come to the Lord, it is his calling. When we believe in him, when we enjoy his word, when we are concerned about scripture, when we want to learn more, it’s because God has taught us. It’s not of us, primarily, but secondary. It’s been God’s moving that brings us here, for example. Now, our will is involved in it, but it’s secondarily, and so just as God has brought us thus far, he will take us all the way to glorification, which means that we are then perfectly sanctified. All those rough edges, those habits of ours, those traits that we could kick ourselves a dozen times for periodically, are taken away from us. All our aptitudes are brought to their full potential in the new creation. This is what Revelation tells us.

Any other questions? As I indicated earlier, we are going to be spending several weeks just around this doctrine of the forgiveness of sin, dealing with its aspects; psychological and legal, personal and social, because the doctrine has vast ramifications and the whole doctrine of salvation is centered on and associated with this fact of forgiveness. We’ve dealt with the forgiveness of sins, effectual calling, and justification. We’ll deal next week with adoption, which is extremely important, a very important doctrine, and it’s tended to go to the background precisely because of the same reasons that we’ve discussed today and last week, and then we’ll go onto the forgiver, the forgiven, forgiveness in and of itself, so that we can examine this doctrine from every facet and come to a better appreciation of the meaning of salvation. As I’ve indicated when, in the modern church, the doctrine is discussed by evangelicals, they talk about being saved, which reduces it to just the effect and eliminates all the ramifications such as calling, effectual calling, justification, and forgiveness, and when you emphasize just the effect and forget the rest, you are becoming humanistic. You’re concentrating on what’s in it for me, not on what has transpired, what God has done, and that’s why the emphasis on justification is so essential, because when the word justified drops out of our vocabulary, we are becoming pragmatic.

We are thinking of “what’s in it for me?” and that, of course, is very detrimental to the growth of Christians, and this is why, of course, the sanctification of Christians has not been what it should be, in recent years. There has not been the character, the dignity, the Christian grace in all of us, but in bygone generations existed simply because this anthropocentric, this man-centered emphasis on “what’s in it for me?” has become so prominent, and this is why all of us, and I make no exception of myself or anyone, we are in this sense, children of our times, and need to see again the doctrine of justification, of salvation, in its theocentric, in its God-centered aspect. Without it, the church bricks{?} and Christendom becomes humanistic. Let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape