God the Justifier of Man

“To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”—Romans iv. 5.

You have been repeating all this week the prayer, “Almighty Father, Who hast given Thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification, grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may alway serve Thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” Any one who speaks upon the text I have chosen to those who have used that prayer, must expect to be tried by a severe rule. You have been looking up to an Almighty Father, and confessing Him as the sole Author of your righteousness. How will you tolerate me if I ascribe that righteousness to the belief of some tenet or opinion? You have contrasted justification with sin; you have connected it with Christ’s resurrection. You will condemn me of shameful profaneness if I turn it into a symbol or a phrase, to be used like the colours at an Election, for distinguishing one party from another. You have assumed that there is a power in Christ’s justification and in His risen life to make you pure and true. If I shall make any statements respecting justification which weaken your sense of that power,—which divorce it from your moral life—you will at once reject them as inconsistent with that higher apprehension of it to which the act of worship has raised you.

But is not the prayer a protection against another kind of danger, into which I might lead you? That truth which you have confessed with such solemnity on your knees,—that of which nothing but adoration or prayer is an adequate utterance,—has not surely been too highly esteemed. There is no fear of exaggerating its importance; it can require no qualifications; it cannot bear to be frittered away by counteracting notions and opinions. We do not find, as we pray, that those who have rated man’s independent righteousness at the lowest, have spoken too disparagingly; or that those who have exalted God’s righteousness most exclusively, have committed any dangerous excess; or that those who have most confidently sought help in the perfectness of the one from the nothingness of the other, have been making a rash experiment. In the region where there is the greatest awe there is also the greatest courage; he who trembles most ventures most; it is on the dry, cold level of earth that we walk as if on ice, sliding back as many steps as we advance; now proclaiming some hardy sentiment, taking care the next moment to make it innocent of meaning.

The preacher, then, who follows where prayer has gone before, is put to a trial which is healthy for his own soul and for the souls of those who hear him. He is warned that every great truth has its plausible, popular counterfeits, which are easily mistaken for it, till they are brought into the light of God’s countenance, are confronted with His reality; but which, when they are, grow pale and fade away. He is reminded that he is promoting the growth of such counterfeits, and giving them stability, when he enfeebles or narrows the principle they misrepresent; when he does not labour that it may be exhibited in greater strength and largeness than ever. Which end he is most likely, under God’s teaching, to compass, when he follows strictly and painfully the language of Scripture, which is not the language of school logic, fixing terms and establishing propositions, but the language of Revelation, setting forth the Will and Mind of the Creator, and His actual relations to the creature; the language therefore which devotion finds to be its own proper ground, and to be a suitable expression for the wants and longings of all human beings. Acting upon this maxim, we shall perceive, I think, in the words of the text, a beautiful exposition of the principle which the whole Epistle to the Romans is occupied with, and which the Sundays after Easter should specially bring home to us.

I. It has often been observed that we suffer great loss of clearness in studying St. Paul, through the change which our translators have introduced, and which perhaps the necessities of our language compelled, in the use of the words “righteous,” “righteousness,” “justify,” “justification.” If we could have been reminded, it has been said, at every turn, that these are all cognate words, the relations of which to each other can never for an instant have been lost in the Apostle’s mind, we should often have an entirely different impression of his discourse. I admit fully the importance of the observation, but I doubt whether the simplicity of earnest readers does not in great measure suggest and supply the connection which philology demands, and whether the break, so far as it is actual and not verbal, is not mainly owing to the artificial methods of divines. One who studies the Epistle to the Romans for practical ends, perceives that it begins with setting forth God as the Righteous Being,—God as revealing or manifesting His righteousness. Such a person finds in that statement an interpretation of the Old Testament,—of its main purpose, and of all its subordinate incidents. What is the whole book but this—the Righteous and Living Being coming forth out of the secret place, that men may be acquainted with Him Who has formed them after His likeness? The true-hearted reader, whether he may utter this interpretation to himself or not, accepts it when it is offered. He would take it from the humblest teacher, because it is the thing which he is in search of; he certainly will not refuse the lesson or suffer himself to be robbed of it when it is imparted to him, with the profoundest knowledge and experience of all the inward needs to which it corresponds, by an inspired Apostle. God, St. Paul says, is from first to last declaring righteousness, the righteousness of His own Being; that which He Himself is; to which all wrong and all falsehood is opposite. Whatever is implied in the word “justification,”—in whatever way the fact which that word indicates may affect an individual or the human race, this must be the root or principle of it; apart from this it must be unintelligible. It may be painful to a reader, when he meets with anything in the language which loosens the chain of the Apostle’s thought; he may be delighted, by the help of a scholar, to repair the links; but he will not, cannot believe that the effect which is said to proceed from the revelation of God’s righteousness is not essentially akin to that righteousness.

II. When therefore he reads such a text as this, “To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly,” his thought at once fixes upon the last words, “Him that justifieth the ungodly.” He does not speculate first upon the words “working” and “believing”; these, he is confident, will explain themselves in due time. He sees that the Apostle is declaring God to be the justifier; he is certain that no assertion about faith or works can interfere with this primary one, or can be anything save an expansion or development of it. And the expression, “justifying the ungodly,” illustrated by the case of Abraham, to which the Apostle refers, is surely a wonderful help in ascertaining what divine act is denoted by this name. A Being Who is righteous makes Himself known to man, who has been ignorant of Him, but in whose mind there have been strange witnesses and prophecies of One to Whom he owed allegiance,—of One for Whom something within him is seeking, from whom something within him is turning away. All visible things are claiming him for their own; his inclinations are asserting their authority over him; still there is a struggle and protest. What does it mean? One speaks to him Who makes him understand that He can command; that He has a right to command; that He is his Friend. This is—must be—that Righteous Person towards Whom all those questionings of the heart within were pointing; from Whom things without and slavish tendencies within were withdrawing him. The voice speaks to that within him which alone can hear it. He believes it, and obeys it. The Righteous Being has raised him to a new level, taken him out of his confusion and ungodliness, justified all his anticipations, justified him. He is not the servant of these things which claim him as their servant; he is the servant of another. In these things is no righteousness. They have a force in them before which he must often shrink; but it is not a force to which his conscience can bow; that demands another object, another ruler. It has found that the Creator of these things is its Ruler. The order impressed upon them was the expression of that righteousness in Him which they knew not, but which the man is made to know.

III. You see the verb “justify” is not so far unlike our ordinary sense of it as, in the first discovery of its relation to the adjective “righteous” and the substantive “righteousness,” we are ready to fancy. We speak of an anticipation as justified by the event. Supposing that anticipation to be something so inward, so essential to me, that my own very existence is involved in it, I am justified by it. He Who, taking hold of the spirit of man, raises it to the full, distinct apprehension and possession of that which it is meant to apprehend and possess, and yet of which in itself it is destitute, justifies it. If for this expression you substitute that of “making righteous,” you might convey an important truth, but it would still be an imperfect one, and, like that you abandon, liable to perversion. For the man is not made righteous in himself; he is raised out of himself; he is lifted up to acknowledge the righteousness of Him Who has formed him and revealed Himself to him. That is his blessing, that is his elevation. His sheep and oxen are a property; he overlooks them, holds them against others. That is the condition of material treasures. The Righteousness he cannot thus appropriate, cannot thus contemplate in himself, cannot say of it that it is not another man’s as well as his own. He possesses it only when he looks up to it, when he contemplates it as above him, like the sun; yet as truly his as the sun is his while he dwells in its warmth and light, when he does not choose to be in the dark. The history of a man’s exaltation to such a state is perhaps on the whole indicated as satisfactorily by the expression “justify” as by any other. All words must, in their nature, bring some side of the truth into greater clearness, leave the other in comparative shadow. The thought of a personal Being owning His creature, claiming him for his proper state, answering his enemies and accusers for him, enabling him to lift himself above them, is strikingly and felicitously exhibited in it. To complete the idea, and to prevent one part of it from setting itself up in opposition to the other, we have to observe how carefully St. Paul connects Justification with Righteousness; how resolutely he refuses to consider it as an abstraction which can be divorced from the Righteous Being Who is the Author of it; from the man who is unrighteous so long as he is ungodly, but with all capacity of being righteous because created to know God; from the process by which this capacity is awakened in him, and made effectual for its proper end.

IV. And thus the language of the Apostle, “To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness,” commends itself, without cavilling or debating, to the heart and conscience. If God speaks not as the things around us speak, to the eye and ear, but to the man himself—if it is to him as a spiritual creature that the revelation of Righteousness comes,—how must the speech be responded to? how must the revelation be entertained? The Apostle says, The speech is responded to by the man’s believing it; the revelation of the Righteous Being is entertained by the man’s putting his trust in Him. He does not work; does not seek to commend himself to this Being; does not strive by great efforts to climb up to Him. The spirit within confesses its Master; believes that He has sought for that which could not otherwise have sought for Him; believes that it has nothing in itself, that it has all in Him; consents to be raised to its true condition; becomes obedient. Any course but this must be one of self-will; a course of a creature choosing to be apart from its Creator, choosing not to acknowledge Him as its author and its end, resolute to build upon another ground—a ground which must be of sand. The more hills it would heap up to scale Heaven with, the more is it engaged in a Giant’s war with the Omnipotent; the more must it look to be confounded and crushed.

V. And the case, it is St. Paul’s great object to show, is not altered, but strengthened, by the fact that men have become not ungodly only as Abraham was, but conscious of transgression and sin to a degree in which he could not be conscious of them. It is very natural for a man to say, “Having committed actual and numerous offences; having broken God’s law; knowing that I have done it; feeling in myself all the moral corruption which is the effect of having done it; I am in altogether a different position from him to whom the first revelation of God’s righteousness was made; I cannot in his way be justified; I cannot rise up a new man by believing in Him that justifieth the ungodly; for me that is needful which was not for him, a series of acts whereby God’s punishment of the evil I have done may be averted, the stains which it has left in my soul may be obliterated.” That such reasoning is natural, all who know themselves and history will acknowledge. That it is false; that it is a direct inversion of the truth, Experience, Reason, and Scripture equally prove. Not because the man has brought himself into an utterly evil, corrupt, degraded state, is he therefore to labour that he may bring some worthy fruit out of that soil; the more evidence he has had what is its natural produce, the more must he despair of cultivating anything upon it which is not vile, or which he can offer to God. His sin has been, from the first, trying to live without God, distrusting Him, setting up his self-will. That lie he is called upon to abandon when he is called upon to believe in Him that Justifieth the ungodly. He is told that he may stand upon his right ground, upon that which God intended for him, not upon that which he has made for himself—that ground in which God Himself will work, and in which he will work as God’s husbandman, not as his own. David, therefore, fallen into adultery and murder, found himself obliged, St. Paul says, to act precisely upon the same principle as Abraham, for the first time apprehending the Righteous Being at all. If the one was to be delivered out of his filthiness, he must trust in the God of Righteousness, Who hated his evil and desired truth in his inward parts; as much as the other, who only rose out of ignorance and darkness to a recognition of that which God is, and of that which He means men to be. David had less right than Abraham to dream or hope that any good thing was in himself or could come out of himself. He was more bound therefore to renounce himself and seek righteousness and life in another. David was more bound than Abraham to believe that the character of God was not changed because he was changed; for he had more evidence that his own change was a revolt from God, and that he was in a state of contradiction with Him. He was more bound than Abraham was to believe that God did not will that he should remain in that state of contradiction, but desired to bring him out of it. The principle therefore is immutable; applicable to all conditions of human society and of individual feeling. In all cases the man who seeks by working, by efforts external or internal of his own to justify himself and bring himself into a righteous state, is guilty of disobedience, is depriving himself of all power to work freely, truly, completely; in all cases the man who believes in God as a Justifier and Deliverer, and turns to Him, has righteousness reckoned or imputed to him.

VI. Which phrase surely is most naturally interpreted by all that has gone before. To ascribe a fiction to God,—to say that He holds men to be that which they are not really,—is to contradict the primary idea of justification, that it proceeds from a Righteous Being and that Righteousness is the end of it; it is to overthrow the foundations of all confidence in God and among men. From all such notions may God in His mercy deliver us! May He forgive us for having blasphemed His Name by the faintest hint that He is not the God of Truth, and so for having weakened the sense of Righteousness in men’s minds at the very moment when we were professing to set up the standard of it; for having given sanction to falsehoods in the ordinary doings of the world, by mixing one with the most sacred principles and hopes of the Church! The necessity for such perilous inventions arises from our unbelief in the express teaching of St. Paul. We suppose that man looks upon himself truly when he assumes that he is without God in the world. Now St. Paul affirms this to be our lie. We try to ignore the presence of God, we deny our relation to Him; that is the secret of all our evil. Every act becomes contradictory, because this huge contradiction is at the root of it. God treats men as what they are, not as what they are when they yield to the spirit of lies. He affirms them not to be independent of Him, not to be outcasts from Him. And confessing their relation to Him, believing that He accepts them, that He justifies the ungodly, they come into their true, reasonable state. Their faith is not Righteousness; for faith, like sight, is nothing in itself. Our sight carries us to an object beyond ourselves. Our faith does the same. Its object is Righteousness, a Righteous Being. And He Who has called forth this faith gives it what it wants, presents Himself to it. The Apostle’s language, that He reckons or imputes Righteousness to it, is skilfully devised to express how entirely it is in God, and yet in how strict and full a sense the man, by acknowledging it in another, possesses it himself. The forms of sense express naturally what cannot be expressed without a contradiction in the terms of the understanding. And the heart of the simple peasant owns the veracity of the language, and connects it with what he has experienced, not only in his relations with God, but in those with his fellow-creatures.

VII. There is another part of the Epistle to the Romans which cannot be separated from this. It concerns the national justification of the Jew. He was treated by no fiction as the member of a righteous Nation. His circumcision declared him to be set apart by God; his law proceeded from the mouth of God; his history was the history of God’s government. On the strength of one or both of these gifts he claimed to have a righteousness which other men had not. St. Paul examines each pretext. Was it circumcision? But that was the seal of the righteousness which Abram acquired by trusting God when he was uncircumcised. Was it the law? But that, instead of making any man to whom it spoke righteous, convinced him of sin. Was it the mere arbitrary favour of God to a tribe, descending from father to son by hereditary right? But the history spoke of eldest sons being continually set aside, and the younger being the children of the promise. Whither did these arguments lead? Not to the conclusion that the Jew had less claim to be righteous than his fathers, but to the conclusion that he must assert his claim as they did. He must believe in the righteous God. Then he would have the blessing of circumcision; he would appeal from the curse of the law to the mind of the Lawgiver; he would understand his divine election; he would become a blessing to all the families of the earth. For he was elected to be this—elected to tell all nations of the Righteous God Who justified the ungodly, Who condemned sin and delivered from sin, Who imputed His own righteousness to those that trusted in Him.

VIII. This was St. Paul’s own vocation and work. He was to tell Jews and Gentiles that God had fulfilled the meaning of the Jewish election, of circumcision, of the law, by sending forth His elect in Whom He delighted, by enduing Him with His Spirit, by giving up His body to death, by raising Him from the dead, by justifying Him as His Son, by justifying in Him the nature which He had taken. Jews and Gentiles were all alike convicted of being sinners in themselves. Jews and Gentiles were alike declared to be righteous in Him. St. Paul therefore could bid one as much as the other take up their position as redeemed, as righteous, as sons of God. He could say to all who had claimed that position, “Count yourselves dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ, Whom He raised from the dead.”

That was our Easter Day lesson. It explains what Baptism meant to the Roman Christian of the first century. It explains what Baptism means to us in this century. By it we renounce for ourselves and for our children any standing-ground save this, of trust in God, who has justified us by raising Christ from the dead. By it we declare that He endows us with His Righteousness. By it we declare all self-righteousness to be accursed and monstrous. By it we say that the Righteousness of God is bestowed upon all alike in His Son, that He is awakening all to put it on, by His Spirit.

IX. I come back then to the point from which I started. This justification by faith is no tenet of ours, which is to distinguish us from other people, which is to raise us above any. If it does not take from us all pretext and desire to exalt ourselves or to separate ourselves from other men, we have not yet entered into the meaning of it. On the other hand, if it does not lead us to think nobly of the race for which Christ died and rose again, of which He is the Head, which He has invested with His Righteousness, we have not yet entered into the meaning of it. If it does not lead us to give thanks for the faith, hope, manliness, gentleness, that we find in any of His creatures, if it does not show us that He is the final blessedness of His creatures, we have not yet entered into the meaning of it. No dogma of divinity is it, but the staff of the pilgrim, the sword of the fighter, the strength of national as of individual life. If we lose it, we lose that which has given England earnest thinkers, manly doers. For England, like Judæa, is called out to be a witness of God’s Righteousness to the earth. England, like Judæa, will be lost if she glorifies herself on her own. The strongest of her sons will perish if he begins to trust in himself,—the weakest, who trusts in the living God, may defy earth and hell to confound him.