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.

The passage: To the person who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

All this week you have been praying: “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.” Anyone who speaks on my text to people who have prayed this must expect to be judged by a severe standard. You have confessed an Almighty Father as the sole Author of your righteousness. How will you tolerate me if I trace that righteousness to belief in some tenet or opinion? You have set justification against sin and tied it to Christ’s resurrection. You will rightly condemn me if I turn it into a catchword, like party colours at an election. You have taken it for granted that Christ’s justification and risen life have power to make you pure and true. If I say anything that weakens that sense of its power, or divorces it from your moral life, you will reject it as inconsistent with what your worship has taught you.

But the prayer also protects me from the opposite danger. The truth you confessed so solemnly on your knees, which only adoration can adequately express, cannot have been too highly valued. There is no risk of exaggerating its importance. It needs no qualification, and it cannot bear to be frittered away by opposing notions. As we pray, we do not find that those who rated man’s independent righteousness lowest spoke too slightingly. Nor do we find that those who exalted God’s righteousness most exclusively went to a dangerous excess, or that those who looked most confidently for help from the perfectness of the one against the nothingness of the other were taking a rash risk. Where awe is greatest, courage is greatest, and he who trembles most ventures most. It is on the dry, cold level of earth that we walk as if on ice, slipping back as far as we advance, boldly announcing some sentiment and then taking care to drain it of meaning.

So the preacher who follows where prayer has gone before faces a trial that is healthy for him and for his hearers. He is warned that every great truth has plausible, popular counterfeits, easily mistaken for it until they are brought into the light of God’s countenance and confronted with His reality, when they grow pale and fade. He is reminded that he fosters these counterfeits whenever he enfeebles or narrows the principle they misrepresent, instead of working to show it in greater strength and largeness than ever. He is most likely, under God’s teaching, to achieve the second when he follows Scripture closely and painfully. Its language is not that of school logic, fixing terms and establishing propositions. It is the language of Revelation, setting forth the Will and Mind of the Creator and His actual relations to the creature. That is the language devotion finds to be its own ground, and a fit expression for the wants and longings of every human being. Acting on this maxim, I think we shall find in the text a beautiful exposition of the principle that occupies the whole Epistle to the Romans, and that the Sundays after Easter should specially bring home to us.

I. It has often been observed that we lose clarity in reading St. Paul because our translators, perhaps of necessity, break the family of words “righteous,” “righteousness,” “justify,” “justification.” If we were reminded at every turn that these are cognate words, whose relation the Apostle never lost sight of, we should often receive a quite different impression. I fully admit the importance of this, but I doubt whether earnest readers’ simplicity does not largely supply the connection philology demands. And I doubt whether the break, so far as it is real and not merely verbal, is not mainly due to the artificial methods of divines. A person who studies Romans for practical ends sees that it begins by setting forth God as the Righteous Being, revealing His righteousness. He finds in that statement an interpretation of the Old Testament, of its main purpose and all its lesser incidents. What is the whole book but the Righteous and Living Being coming out of the secret place, so that men may know Him who formed them in His likeness? The true-hearted reader accepts this interpretation when it is offered, whether or not he has put it into words himself. He would take it from the humblest teacher, because it is what he is looking for, and he will certainly not give it up when an inspired Apostle gives it, with the deepest knowledge of the inward needs it answers. God, says St. Paul, is from first to last declaring righteousness, the righteousness of His own Being, which is what He Himself is, and to which all wrong and falsehood are opposed. Whatever “justification” implies, and however it affects an individual or the human race, this must be its root, and apart from this it is unintelligible. A reader may be pained when the language loosens the chain of the Apostle’s thought, and glad when a scholar repairs the links. But he will not and cannot believe that the effect of revealing God’s righteousness is anything other than essentially akin to that righteousness.

II. So when he reads, “To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly,” his thought fixes at once on the last words: “Him that justifieth the ungodly.” He does not first speculate about “working” and “believing,” confident that these will explain themselves in time. He sees that the Apostle is declaring God to be the justifier, and he is certain that nothing said about faith or works can interfere with this, but only expand it. The phrase “justifying the ungodly,” illustrated by Abraham, is a wonderful help in finding out what divine act the name denotes. A Righteous Being makes Himself known to a 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, for whom something in him is searching and from whom something in him is turning away. All visible things claim him as theirs, and his inclinations assert their authority over him, yet there is a struggle and a protest. What does it mean? Then One speaks to him who makes him understand that He can command, that He has a right to command, and that He is his Friend. This must be that Righteous Person to whom all the heart’s questionings were pointing, and from whom outward things and slavish tendencies were drawing him away. The voice speaks to the one thing in him that 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, and justified him. He is no longer the servant of the things that claimed him, but of another. There is no righteousness in those things. They have a force before which he often must shrink, but it is not one to which his conscience can bow. Conscience demands another object and another ruler, and it has found that the Creator of these things is its Ruler. The order impressed on them expressed a righteousness in Him that they did not know, but that the man is made to know.

III. You see, then, that the verb “justify” is not as far from our ordinary use of it as, when we first discover its relation to “righteous” and “righteousness,” we are ready to fancy. We say an anticipation is justified by the event. If that anticipation is so inward and essential to me that my very existence is bound up in it, then I am justified by it. He who takes hold of man’s spirit and raises it to the full, distinct apprehension and possession of what it was meant to possess, but in itself lacks, justifies it. If you substitute “making righteous,” you might convey an important truth, but an imperfect one, and one just as open to perversion as the word you gave up. For the man is not made righteous in himself. He is raised out of himself and lifted up to acknowledge the righteousness of Him who formed him and revealed Himself to him. That is his blessing and his elevation. His sheep and oxen are property: he surveys them and holds them against others. That is the condition of material treasures. But Righteousness he cannot appropriate in that way, cannot contemplate in himself, cannot call his and not another man’s. He possesses it only when he looks up to it as above him, like the sun, yet as truly his as the sun is his while he lives in its warmth and light and does not choose the dark. Perhaps “justify” indicates the history of a man’s exaltation to such a state as well as any word can. Every word must bring one side of the truth into clearness and leave the other in comparative shadow. This word shows strikingly the thought of a personal Being owning His creature, claiming him for his proper state, answering his enemies and accusers for him, and enabling him to rise above them. To complete the idea, and keep one part from setting itself against the other, we must see how carefully St. Paul connects Justification with Righteousness. He resolutely refuses to treat it as an abstraction divorced from the Righteous Being who is its Author. He also refuses to divorce it from the man, who is unrighteous so long as he is ungodly, yet capable of righteousness because created to know God. And he refuses to divorce it from the process by which that capacity is awakened and made effective.

IV. And so the Apostle’s words, “To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness,” commend themselves to heart and conscience without cavilling. If God speaks not as the things around us do, to eye and ear, but to the man himself, and if the revelation of Righteousness comes to him as a spiritual creature, how must he answer and receive it? The Apostle says that the speech is answered by the man’s believing it, and the revelation of the Righteous Being is received by his trusting Him. He does not work, does not try to commend himself to this Being, and does not strain to climb up to Him. The spirit within confesses its Master. It believes that He has sought out what could not otherwise have sought Him, that it has nothing in itself and everything in Him. It consents to be raised to its true condition and becomes obedient. Any other course must be self-will, a creature choosing to be apart from its Creator, refusing to acknowledge Him as its author and end, and determined to build on another ground, which must be sand. The more hills it heaps up to scale Heaven, the more it wages a Giant’s war with the Omnipotent, and the more it must expect to be confounded and crushed.

V. St. Paul’s great object is to show that the case is not altered but strengthened when men are not merely ungodly, as Abraham was, but conscious of transgression and sin to a degree he could not be. It is very natural to say: “I have committed numerous actual offences, broken God’s law, and known that I did it, and I feel in myself all the moral corruption that results. My position is wholly different from that of the man to whom God’s righteousness was first revealed. I cannot be justified in his way, or rise up a new man by believing in Him who justifies the ungodly. I need what he did not: a series of acts by which God’s punishment of my evil may be averted and the stains in my soul wiped out.” Anyone who knows himself and history will admit that such reasoning is natural. Experience, Reason, and Scripture alike prove that it is false, a direct inversion of the truth. The man has brought himself into an utterly evil, corrupt state, but he is not therefore to labour to bring some worthy fruit out of that soil. The more evidence he has of what it naturally produces, the more he must despair of growing anything on it that is not vile or that he can offer to God. His sin was from the first an attempt to live without God, distrusting Him and setting up his own will. He is called to abandon that lie when he is called to believe in Him who justifies the ungodly. He is told that he may stand on his right ground, the ground God intended for him and not the one he made for himself. On that ground God Himself will work, and he will work as God’s husbandman, not his own. David, fallen into adultery and murder, was obliged, St. Paul says, to act on exactly the same principle as Abraham, who was apprehending the Righteous Being for the first time. If David was to be delivered from his filthiness, he had to trust the God of Righteousness, who hated his evil and desired truth in his inward parts, just as Abraham, who only rose out of ignorance and darkness to recognise what God is and what He means men to be. David had less right than Abraham to dream that any good was in himself or could come out of himself, so he was more bound to renounce himself and seek righteousness and life in another. He was more bound to believe that God’s character had not changed because he had changed, since he had more evidence that his change was a revolt from God and a contradiction of Him. And he was more bound to believe that God did not will him to stay in that contradiction, but desired to bring him out. The principle is therefore immutable, and applies to every condition of society and every individual feeling. In every case the man who tries by his own efforts, outward or inward, to justify himself and make himself righteous is guilty of disobedience and deprives himself of all power to work freely, truly, and completely. And in every case the man who believes in God as Justifier and Deliverer, and turns to Him, has righteousness reckoned or imputed to him.

VI. That phrase is most naturally interpreted by all that has gone before. To ascribe a fiction to God, to say that He holds men to be what they are not, contradicts the primary idea of justification, which is that it proceeds from a Righteous Being and has Righteousness as its end. It overthrows the foundation of all confidence in God and among men. May God in His mercy deliver us from such notions! May He forgive us for having blasphemed His Name by the faintest hint that He is not the God of Truth. May He forgive us for weakening the sense of Righteousness at the very moment we professed to set up its standard, and for sanctioning the falsehoods of ordinary life by mixing one with the most sacred principles and hopes of the Church! The need for such perilous inventions comes from our unbelief in St. Paul’s plain teaching. We suppose man sees himself truly when he assumes he is without God in the world. St. Paul affirms that this is our lie. We try to ignore God’s presence and deny our relation to Him, and that is the secret of all our evil. Every act becomes contradictory because this huge contradiction is at the root. God treats men as what they are, not as what they are when they yield to the spirit of lies. He affirms that they are not independent of Him and not outcasts from Him. By confessing their relation to Him and believing that He accepts them and 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, and so does faith. Its object is Righteousness, a Righteous Being. He who has called forth this faith gives it what it wants and 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 how strictly and fully the man possesses it by acknowledging it in another. The forms of sense naturally express what the terms of the understanding can express only by contradiction. And the heart of the simple peasant owns the truth of this language and connects it with what he has experienced, not only with God but with his fellow-creatures.

VII. There is another part of Romans that cannot be separated from this. It concerns the national justification of the Jew. He was not treated by a fiction as a member of a righteous Nation. His circumcision declared him set apart by God, his law came from the mouth of God, and his history was the history of God’s government. On the strength of one or both of these gifts he claimed a righteousness other men lacked. St. Paul examines each pretext. Was it circumcision? That was the seal of the righteousness Abram gained by trusting God while uncircumcised. Was it the law? Instead of making righteous the man to whom it spoke, it convinced him of sin. Was it the mere arbitrary favour of God to a tribe, passing from father to son by hereditary right? But the history tells of eldest sons continually set aside and younger ones being the children of the promise. Where did these arguments lead? Not to the conclusion that the Jew had less claim to be righteous than his fathers, but that he must assert his claim as they did, by believing in the righteous God. Then he would have the blessing of circumcision, would appeal from the curse of the law to the mind of the Lawgiver, would understand his divine election, and would become a blessing to all the families of the earth. For he was elected to be this: to tell all nations of the Righteous God who justified the ungodly, condemned sin and delivered from sin, and imputed His own righteousness to those who trusted in Him.

VIII. This was St. Paul’s own vocation. He was to tell Jews and Gentiles that God had fulfilled the meaning of the Jewish election, of circumcision, and of the law. He had done it by sending forth His elect, in whom He delighted, endowing Him with His Spirit, giving up His body to death, raising Him from the dead, justifying Him as His Son, and justifying in Him the nature He had taken. Jews and Gentiles were alike convicted of being sinners in themselves, and alike declared righteous in Him. St. Paul could therefore bid both take up their position as redeemed, as righteous, as sons of God. He could say to all who 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, and what it means to us in this one. By it we renounce, for ourselves and our children, any standing-ground but 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 accursed and monstrous. By it we say that the Righteousness of God is bestowed on all alike in His Son, and that He is awakening all by His Spirit to put it on.

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