Systematic Theology -- Salvation

Justification and Sanctification

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 13

Dictation Name: 13 Justification and Sanctification

Year: 1970’s

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that we can come to thee in the confidence that thou art the Lord, that the government is upon thy shoulders who doest all things well, that it is not the counsel of ungodly men that shall prevail, that thy word, thy truth, and thy righteousness. Make us therefore bold with a holy boldness, that we may stand in the confidence that we are more than conquerors in and through Jesus Christ. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of thy word. In Jesus name. Amen.

In our previous meeting, we dealt with regeneration and conversion. Tonight, we shall deal with Justification and Sanctification. First, justification. However, in dealing with justification, it is important to deal with the question of why in that order. Usually, justification is dealt with after regeneration, and conversion, and yet, that order is, in a sense, wrong. It has a psychological soundness, but a theological problem. It is usually dealt with in this order because it is treated as justification by faith.

Now, psychologically, it’s after our conversion that we become fully aware of the implications of this doctrine, of justification by faith, but while there is a difference between regeneration and justification, these things precede our conversion, but our awareness of justification by faith follows our conversion.

Now, one of the great problems that has haunted the church in this century especially, but for about two hundred to two hundred fifty years, is that this doctrine has become warped, to mean exactly the reverse of what scripture teaches. In Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Paul declares in the first chapter, verses 16-17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” What Paul here tells us is that the righteousness, the justice of God is manifested in and through this doctrine, and it is revealed to us by faith. So that what Paul is saying is not that we are justified on account of, or because of faith, but that it is through faith that this is revealed unto us what is the ground of our salvation, and of God’s grace unto us.

Now, unfortunately, in the past two and a half centuries, as a result of the development of pietism in the church, of which more later in our second session, this doctrine has been twisted. So that justification by faith has come to mean we are justified, because, on account of, our faith. Now, this {?} does the whole of the doctrine. The doctrine of justification is the rejection of humanistic salvation. It strikes at the doctrine that man, by his works, by his merit, by his knowledge, by his pietism, by his believing, saves himself, or is accounted saved by God. The Bible says at no point, that we are justified on account of faith, but only through faith, and faith acknowledges that it is Jesus Christ and his righteousness which alone redeems us.

Thus, the term “justification by faith” has come to mean that it is man’s faith which releases God’s saving power and justification. It is, as a result, exactly that which the doctrine speaks against.

William Temple, one-time archbishop of Canterbury, has a great many defects as a theologian, but there was one thing that he said that was very, very telling. He said, “The only thing of my very own which I can contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.” Now, that puts it in a nutshell. The only thing we contribute to our redemption is the sin from which we need to be redeemed. Our faith makes no contribution. The Bible says emphatically our faith itself is the gift of God. It is God’s spirit working in us, bringing us to him.

The Westminster Larger Catechism gives us an excellent summary of this doctrine in question 70-73. It asks, “What is justification?

Answer: Justification is an act of God's free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepteth and accounteth their persons righteous in his sight; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.

Question 71: How is justification an act of God's free grace?

Answer: Although Christ, by his obedience and death, did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God's justice in the behalf of them that are justified; yet inasmuch as God accepteth the satisfaction from a surety, which he might have demanded of them, and did provide this surety, his own only Son, imputing his righteousness to them, and requiring nothing of them for their justification but faith, which also is his gift, their justification is to them of free grace.

Question 72: What is justifying faith?

Answer: Justifying faith is a saving grace, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he, being convinced of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself and all other creatures to recover him out of his lost condition, not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the gospel, but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness, therein held forth, for pardon of sin, and for the accepting and accounting of his person righteous in the sight of God for salvation.

Question 73: How doth faith justify a sinner in the sight of God?

Answer: Faith justifies a sinner in the sight of God, not because of those other graces which do always accompany it, or of good works that are the very fruits of it, nor as if the grace of faith, or any act thereof, were imputed to him for his justification; but only as it is an instrument by which he receiveth and applieth Christ and his righteousness.”

Now, this is a very critical doctrine. One of the sad things that I often encounter is the meet with people who say they believe the Bible from cover to cover, they’re strong church members, they try very faithfully to obey God, and yet they’ll tell you, “I sometimes wonder, ‘Am I really saved?’ I’m not as good as I should be and I often say things and do things I know I shouldn’t, and my faith sometimes gets very weak and I begin to wonder when I look at the way things are going in this world,” and they’re troubled. It’s very, very sad as well as wrong, because salvation does not depend, their justification does not depend on their feelings. That’s pietism. Our salvation depends on what Jesus Christ has done, his justification. He is our showeth{?}, or substitute. He takes upon himself the death penalty for us, as surely as though if I owed some money to the bank, you went there and paid it, the debt would be cancelled whether or not I knew it. So, our debt to God is canceled. By his Spirit, we know it. His word tells us, and we rejoice therein.

This is why Paul’s teaching on justification is so deadly. It undermines that assurance. It undermines that confidence as we face God. The doctrine of justification tells us, very briefly, Jesus did it all, all to him I owe. He has saved us. Justification thus, is the sovereign act of God. Man contributes nothing. It is a legal act. The death penalty is wiped out by Christ who is the head of the new humanity, the new human race. It affects a change in our legal status before God from sentence to death for our sins and trespasses, to innocent because of Christ’s work. It does not change us morally. Christ’s regenerating work in us then proceeds to change us. The process of that change is sanctification. The fact of the initial change is regeneration. Jesus Christ is our surety, our substitute, who makes atonement and for us{?} to effect justification, is justification is an act of both grace and law. It is grace, because he is not, in any way, obligated to do it. It is an act of law because he requires the full penalty of the law against us that provides the one, his Son, to accept the penalty in our stead.

Justifying faith is borne of God’s Spirit and his word, and it is God’s grace. Justifying faith enables us to see our sin, our inability to save ourselves, and to trust in God’s work and Christ’s atonement. It means we rest entirely on Christ and his righteousness for our salvation and justification before God. Justification by faith, therefore, means, not that the faith justifies us, but that the faith leads us to rely wholly on Christ for our justification.

Faith justifies in this sense only. It is the instrument whereby we know that Christ has made atonement for us and justified us. Faith leads to good works, which is an aspect of grace, but the works do not justify. God’s regeneration leads to our faith, but the faith does not justify, Christ’s work does.

Now the effect of justification is this: it frees our conscience from the crippling burden of sin and guilt. There is nothing more devastating and destructive in the life of man than the fact of sin and guilt. Guilt innervates, it cripples. Anyone who is haunted by a sense of guilt has a backward look. He is haunted by his past.

Let me illustrate very briefly. If we make a faux pas, or a blunder when we go out some place, we very often kick ourselves half the night rehearsing the thing and wishing we’d said this or that, instead of that. Now, I’m talking about very minor social errors. Consider the fact of sin. You see, a little faux pas makes us spend our time looking backward, but the burden of sin and guilt gives us a totally backward orientation in our life. We’re constantly dealing with the burden of the past, and the past haunts us, cripples us, paralyzes and determines us.

This is why our Lord said, “If the Son make ye free, then ye shall be free indeed.” There is no freedom apart from him. Without justification, man has a backward look, but with justification, he has a forward look. He’s not worrying about the past. He is concerned with what God wants him to do today and tomorrow. The unjustified are oppressed, by the sentence of death and the sense of guilt. Their lives are therefore, governed by the fact of sin and guilt, and by their efforts to suppress the witness of their being against themselves.

Paul says in Romans 1:18, that the ungodly hold the truth in unrighteousness. Well, the Greek word that is there translated as “whole,” means to hold back, to hold down, to suppress, the truth in unrighteousness. In other words, they spend their time sitting on themselves, as it were, trying to keep their whole being from shouting all the time, “You’re guilty, you’re guilty, you’re guilty before God.” Just as a little faux pas keeps haunting us all night and keeps us troubled, sin continually cries out in all our being and haunts us. Now, the sinner suppresses it, he pushes it back into his unconscious, but it cries out in all his being to his unconscious.

You know, the whole of Freud’s work is build on that fact, the deep sense of guilt that man has. Now, Freud tried to explain away the fact of guilt. He tried to say that that was a hangover from our primitive past, but he could not escape the fact that man has a will to death, because of the fact of his sense of guilt, and this is what scripture says, Proverbs 8:36, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.” So that, the unjustified have a love of death, a suicidal aspect in their being. They are spoken of in scripture as children of wrath. God’s judgment in their own being wells up to condemn them.

You know, it’s ironic that Freud had to admit that Christians, genuine Christians, were not troubled with this sense of guilt, and they didn’t have the neurosis of guilt that the unbelievers did. So he had to dispense with that fact by saying that the Christians reject their personal neurosis by accepting the cosmic neurosis God. That is about as stupid a cop-out as anyone ever made, but you see, the fact was that his own work was witnessing against him. It was witnessing to the fact that it is the unregenerate, the unjustified, who are haunted by the burden of sin and guilt. The unjustified seek self-justification, and self-justification takes two directions. Sadism and masochism, or sado-masochism. Feeling the burden of sin and guilt, we either punish ourselves, masochistic activities, or punish others, sadistic activities. We try to lay our sins upon others, because we will not accept Christ and his vicarious atonement, but those who are the justified of the Lord have a forward look, and for them, the goal of society is the kingdom of God. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” our Lord said. They are concerned then with dominion activity. Having peace with God, they have peace with themselves and with their neighbor. The unjustified, however, have no peace with God and therefore, no peace with their neighbor and no peace with themselves. They are at rebellion, at war with God, and they create a war-like society, a revolutionary society on all sides. They are death-oriented. “All they that hate me love death.”

This is modern society, and they will not go to God for an answer, because the unjustified are determined that the answer is in man, in themselves, and the come up with every kind of absurdity imaginable. We know now, from studies made of the revolutionary students of the sixties, that the overwhelming number of them came from highly permissive homes, and yet, in the face of that, what does Charles Burke write in his book, Aggression in Man? He says, “Actually, if the number of aggressive impulses is ever going to be reduced in our culture, our children will have to be reared with more indulgence. We should rear our children with a love that engenders love, not with a severity that begets aggression.” Now, can you imagine anything more absurd than that? The unjustified are marked by a suicidal blindness to the facts which stare them in the face. To be justified means to be delivered, not only from our sins, but from the folly, the stupidity, and the blindness that marks the unjustified.

Are there any questions now about justification? Yes?

[Audience] This part here where he said our sins and our inability to save us and to rely only on Christ, and faith leads to good works, I was just, the justifying faith enables us to see, that’s what you {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Now, what’s that fine line between regeneration and justification, now which comes first?

[Rushdoony] Justification is the legal act whereby God changes our status from sentence to death to made innocent by Christ’s work.

[Audience] That was done 2000 years ago.

[Rushdoony] That was done by Christ. It is applied to us at the point of our regeneration when we are re-created and made a new creation, we become aware of our justification and its meaning by faith. So that psychologically, our awareness of justification is with our conversion. Actually, our justification and our regeneration take place before our conversion and it took place, of course, at the cross, in its objective act.

[Audience] Right. When you say justifying faith enables us to see, and to visualize ourselves as a sinner, that we are lost, that cannot save ourselves in what we do.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Now, this doesn’t mean that, in our dead state, because as faith we can see, wouldn’t this be that because we’ve been in the life, been given the life, the new life in Christ, and that’s why we can see and know, and understand, and are aware of this?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Right. Any other questions?

[Audience] A good illustration of that would be Lazarus.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] He was given life, otherwise he couldn’t have heard, and he couldn’t have walked out of the tomb.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. Very good. Well, we’ll take a recess and then resume to deal with sanctification.

End of tape