Salvation And Justification

The Scriptures warn that Calvary is the only safe place from the coming fiery judgment that will someday engulf the world (2Th 1:7-9; 2Pt 3:7) because it is the one place God’s judgment has already been. We are safe from the coming judgment because God already has dealt with us in Christ upon the cross. Justification is not predicated on God ignoring our sins but on his judging us in Christ.

Our union with Christ prevents justification from being merely a legal fiction. If a wealthy man or woman marries a poor spouse, then from that point on both are rich. So it is when the believing sinner is united with Christ; from that point forward, God deals with them collectively. As Erickson points out, “God always sees the believer in union with Christ and measures the two of them together. Thus, he does not say, ‘Jesus is righteous but that human is unrighteous.’ He sees the two as one and says in effect, ‘They are righteous.’” (Christian Theology, p. 965) Justification is not a legal fiction but a legal reality.

Third, justification is crediting, or imputing, to our account the righteousness of Christ. In Romans 4:4-5, Paul used a bookkeeping metaphor to describe how the debt of our sins was imputed to Christ while his righteousness was credited to us. The apostle repeatedly explained that our righteous standing before God is due entirely to the gracious exchange Christ made with us (Php 3:8-9). He declared in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that Christ has taken the sinner’s sin—and paid for it at Calvary (“He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us”) while the sinner has received the riches of Christ’s righteousness (“so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”). It is a glorious exchange, and we are getting an infinitely better bargain.

In summary, the essence of justification is that God accepts, regards, and declares the believer as righteous. It is not a process but an act of God. Justification has two elements: negatively, the believer’s debt to the law is paid; positively, believers are reinstated into a position of divine favor and privilege. The basis of justification is Christ and his work (“They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” Rm 3:24; see also Rm 5:9a). The condition for justification is faith (“But to the one who does not work, but believes on him who declares the ungodly to be righteous, his faith is credited for righteousness,” Rm 4:5). Faith is not the ground of justification, but it is the instrument by which we receive God’s justifying grace. The result of justification is peace with God (“Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” Rm 5:1).

(Content is adapted from Theology for the Church, B&H Academic.)