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Questions
Read Ephesians 2:8-10.
How does Paul say we are saved?
Read James 2:14, 17, 20-24.
How does James say we are saved?
What roles do faith and works play in our salvation?
First Things First
What is justification?
“Justification is an instantaneous legal act of God in which he (1) thinks of our sins as forgiven and Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us, and (2) declares us to be righteous in his sight.”
- This entire lesson is adapted from Wayne Grudem, in Systematic Theology, 2nd Edition, Zondervan, 2020, Chapter 36.
Simply put to be justified is to be in right legal standing before God.
(Grudem 884)
We are going to look at several passages and any time you see the word justified, justification or righteous, righteousness; they are all translating the same root word in Greek.
The verb Justify in the NT has a range of meaning but it commonly means “to declare righteous”.
(Grudem 885)
So why do we need to be declared righteous?
Because everyone who has lived and is living is a sinner:
Everyone is a sinner, God cannot dwell with sinners, so we have an issue.
Surely there is something we can do to be right with God?
The Apostle Paul answers:
There’s no law we can keep to be right with God, in fact, the law was given so that we might have a knowledge of sin.
Shane & Shane, christian artist sum it up nicely in their song “God Did”:
Maybe dos and don'ts
Were made to show
How much we do
And don't ever make it
Paul doesn’t leave us here, he goes on:
Sinners: Righteous and Forgiven
Okay, everyone’s a sinner and fallen short, but we can be righteous through faith by grace.
Why is everyone a sinner?
To answer that we have to go all the way back to the beginning when no one was a sinner.
Adam and Eve were part of God’s very good creation.
So Man and Woman are unashamed, living in the garden God has planted with eternal fellowship with God possible through the tree of life, but then Genesis 3 happens.
You know the rest of the story: Adam blames the Lord and Eve, Eve blames the serpent, and now we are all sinners, fallen humanity.
You may think, “Wait!
I wasn’t there why am I a sinner because of them?”
The Apostle Paul helps us understand:
Yet, there is good news just a few verses away:
He we see that now in Christ our sins are forgiven, and this is good news.
In fact, Paul will say in Romans 8:1 that
This is only part of our problem though.
Because if only our sins are forgiven then we stand were Adam and Eve stood, without sin, for now.
We know ourselves too well to think that this would last long.
We need more than to be neutral: neither guilt nor righteous.
We must be righteous in God’s sight.
In fact, we must be perfectly righteous in God’s sight.
But how can God forgive our sins and count us perfectly righteous, when we are sinners and we are unrighteous?
Paul helps us understand how this happens by explaining two parts of our justification:
Paul writes it another way in 2 Corinthians 5, by saying:
So Christ, sinless and perfect, takes our sin on Himself, takes our death:
Christ pays for all our sins: past, present, and future, but Paul tells us He goes one step further:
Adam failed to uphold the righteous requirement of God, Jesus perfectly lived every aspect of the righteous requirements of God.
So now when God looks at us, He sees us as justified.
We know we still sin, we know we mess it up, but we, in Christ, fulfill the righteous requirements of the law.
So, because of Jesus we are declared righteous, we are justified.
This is where Paul encourages the Ephesians:
But there more to be said in the next verse:
We were created to live in the presence of God, bringing glory to Him by our right actions, our good works.
God created a good creation, a very good creation.
So our good works reflect His goodness.
Listen to these words of Jesus:
This point is the one James, the brother of Jesus, is making: if faith in Jesus something we can just know, and agree with, but not be changed by?
No, James says,
Can that kind of save him?
No.
James goes on:
It’s important to understand that the words faith and believe share the same root in Greek.
James is saying, “You believe but it hasn’t changed you, can that belief save you?
Even demons believe true things, but they aren’t changed!”
So when James says this:
and
He using justification differently than Paul.
I told you the word justification in Greek has a range of meanings.
It means “to declare to be righteous” but it also means “to demonstrate or show to be righteous.”
James means to show that if you have saving faith, then your life will show it.
Conclusion
So to sum it all up:
We are all sinners just like Adam.
If we will believe, trust, have faith that Jesus took and paid for our sin,
and lived a perfect righteous life,
then God will count our sin paid for
and Jesus’s righteousness as our righteousness.
We will be justified by grace through faith.
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