The scripture reading is in the 15th chapter
of the book of Genesis.
While you are finding that chapter, let me
remind you that in our study of the
book of Genesis, we are in the midst
of that part of Moses' account that has
to do with the life of Abraham.
Abraham has made his way into the land,
then evidently out of the will of God
to Egypt, where God did protect him and
keep him and bring him back into the
land.
Then after the strife between the herdsmen of
Lot and the herdsmen of Abram, Lot chose
for himself the plains near Sodom and moved
there while Abram lived by the oaks of
Mamre in Hebron.
And then in the 14th chapter, the immediately
preceding chapter, we read and studied the account
of the invasion of the kings from the
east after the five rebel kings had rebelled
against them in the land.
And Abram won a great victory and retrieved
Lot and also the spoils which the kings
from the east had taken in their victorious
campaign.
Then at the end of that chapter, you'll
remember Abram was approached by the king of
Sodom who said, give the people to me
and take the goods for yourself.
And Abram, in this very majestic reply, said,
I have sworn to the Lord God Most
High, Possessor of heaven and earth, that I
will not take a thread or a sandal,
thong, or anything that is yours, lest you
should say, I have made Abram rich.
It was a tremendous renunciation.
And now we read in Genesis chapter 15,
verse 1 through verse 7, these words.
After these things, the word of the Lord
came to Abram in a vision, saying, Do
not fear Abram.
I am a shield to you.
Your reward shall be very great.
Incidentally, in the Hebrew text at this point,
it is possible to render this in two
ways.
One way is the way that I have
just read.
I am a shield to you.
Your reward shall be very great.
The other possibility for which there is some
support is, I am a shield to you
and your exceeding great reward.
It's very difficult to be absolutely sure of
the rendering of the text here, but in
the light of what Abram says in verse
2, what wilt thou give me, the reading
in the New American Standard Bible and in
other translations is probably to be preferred.
Verse 2, And Abram said, O Lord God,
what wilt thou give me, since I am
childless?
And the heir of my house is Eliezer
of Damascus.
He refers to his servant, the trusted servant,
evidently the servant who went to seek a
bride for Isaac.
And that is described in Genesis chapter 24.
We do not know in Hebrew tradition of
the heir of someone without a child being
a servant in the household, but we do
know from the newsy texts of the 15th
century B.C., texts that have to do
with life to the east of the Tigris
River, that it was not uncommon for individuals
who were childless to make a trusted servant
their heir in order that proper arrangements and
proper burial might be carried out and other
matters.
And so it is possible that Abram, so
far as his condition was concerned, since he
had no children, as far as he was
concerned, his heir was likely to be Eliezer
of Damascus.
Now Abram was so concerned over this, he
did not bother to give the Lord a
chance to reply to that.
He replied before the Lord replied, and we
read in verse 3, And Abram said, Since
thou hast given no offspring to me, one
born in my house is my heir.
I notice the statement one born in my
house, because of course that could cover a
servant.
Then behold, the word of the Lord came
to him, saying, This man will not be
your heir, but one who shall come forth
from your own body.
He shall be your heir.
And this is a vision.
Remember in verse 1 it says, These things
came to Abram in a vision.
The vision evidently is a vision of Abram
in his tent, because we read in verse
4, the word of the Lord.
Oh, verse 5, And he took him outside,
that is, outside the tent evidently, and said,
Now look toward the heaven, and count the
stars, if you are able to count them.
And the Lord answered, And he said unto
him, So shall your descendants be.
The Hebrew term is a collective term probably,
and it is simply, So shall your seed
be.
But since that may be understood individually or
collectively, personally I think this is a mistranslation.
We should simply have, So shall your seed
be.
And that way the interpreter is able to
look at the context and say, Is this
seed singular or seed plural?
But the translators are correct in this instance,
because surely a plural is meant here.
But the term itself has both meanings, and
sometimes it is good to leave it somewhat
ambiguous and require the student of Scripture to
make the deduction himself.
Then he believed in the Lord, and he
reckoned it to him as righteousness.
And I would like to say just a
word about that too.
Now notice the last two words, as righteousness.
Strictly speaking the Hebrew text says simply, Then
he believed in the Lord, and he reckoned
it to him righteousness.
Now we are left somewhat in doubt as
to the meaning.
Should this be and he reckoned it to
him as righteousness?
Or should it be he reckoned it to
him as the means for obtaining righteousness unto
or with a view to righteousness?
Now you see this introduces a little bit
of a problem.
Is faith itself righteousness?
Or is faith the means by which the
righteousness becomes ours?
Now we believe, that is we who preach
the Word, we believe that faith justifies, but
not in and by itself.
Simply because it grasps the obedience of Christ
in his sacrifice.
In other words, faith is a means by
which we lay hold of Christ.
It's an instrument.
The rest of the Bible makes that plain.
So in this case the translators of the
New American Standard Bible have erred.
Now their translation is possible grammatically, but impossible
theologically.
And since the text permits a different rendering,
we should I think render this, then he
believed in the Lord, and he reckoned it
to him with a view to righteousness.
Now this is confirmed by the fact that
this text is used in Psalm 106 and
verse 31.
And there the psalmist referring to this same
idea says, and he reckoned it to him,
and adding the preposition la, which means to
or for or unto.
Unto righteousness.
And the Apostle Paul in the renderings of
the New Testament also contains the idea of
unto righteousness.
So we are not to think then that
faith itself is righteousness, but faith is the
means by which the righteousness that is found
in the sacrificial work of the Lord Jesus
becomes ours.
Then he believed in the Lord, and he
reckoned it to him for or unto righteousness.
The rest of the Bible makes that very
plain.
May the Lord bless to us this reading
of his word.
In the eyes of many, the greatest problem
with which the Bible deals is how can
a just God justify the unjust?
Our subject this morning, Abraham and justification by
faith, will seek to answer that question.
We know from the study of the Bible
that the law of God condemns all men.
There are certain demands that are made, demands
that mean the perfect fulfillment of all of
the righteous demands of a holy God.
Now there are two ways to meet the
demands of the holy law of God.
One way is to keep the law of
God perfectly.
Anyone who puts himself under the Mosaic law
is responsible to keep that law perfectly.
The Apostle Paul puts it very plainly and
forthrightly in Galatians chapter 3 and verse 10
when he says, For as many as are
of the works of the law are under
a curse.
For it is written, Curse it is everyone
who does not abide by all things written
in the book of the law to perform
them.
So if it is necessary for us to
keep the law of God perfectly in order
to be justified, it's clear from the teaching
of the word of God itself that we
have not done this and therefore we are
under the curse.
If it were simply a matter of a
human judge with whom we have to do,
then things might not be so bad because
human judges may make mistakes.
There is an old story of a brother
who was arrested or a man who was
arrested charged with stealing a gold watch and
chain.
After all the evidence of the complaining witness
had been heard, the judge looked down upon
the prisoner and announced the sentence of this
court is acquittal.
Well, he was not very well educated and
so he said, Judge, I just don't understand
what that means.
He said, Well, the sentence is that you
stand acquitted.
Well, what does that mean?
He said, It means that you are acquitted.
And so he said, Well, Judge, does it
mean that I've got to give the watch
back?
And so it is an evidence of the
fact that human judges, while they are judges,
may err.
In the case of the divine judge, there
is no error.
If we have not kept the law of
God perfectly, we shall not be acquitted by
that law.
Furthermore, this under the law and therefore under
the curse means everyone, not simply the ordinary
person, but it's true even of those who
are most religious.
There is another story of a certain bishop
who was traveling incognito in England.
And on the platform where the trains were
coming, there was also an ardent young evangelist
who was seeking to win people who happened
to want to board the train.
So he went up to the bishop who
was traveling incognito and he said, Are you
saved, brother?
Well, the bishop betrayed his particular profession because
he stood aghast at the thought of question
about his salvation.
And he blurted out, Do you know who
I am?
I am the bishop of Woolwich or Sandwich
or whatever he was.
And the young man said, Well, don't let
that stand in your way.
This morning at the breakfast table, we were
discussing some of these things and one of
the ladies at the table had the nerve
to say that in her opinion, of the
groups that would be in hell, the largest
two groups would be those of lawyers and
preachers.
Well, whether that's true or not, she said
as we left, I know you agree with
me too.
Well, whether or not that's true, we do
know this, that not one of us has
kept the law perfectly and so consequently we
cannot meet the demands of the law by
keeping the law.
Now, the other way is to pay the
penalty.
And we can all pay the penalty, but
unfortunately the penalty for the broken law is
death.
And consequently we cannot pay the penalty and
still live.
Therefore, it is a problem.
How can a just God justify unjust men?
Now, it is with this question that Genesis
chapter 15 deals.
And it is remarkable that in the patriarchal
age, right at the beginning, so to speak,
of the biblical record, we find a clear
-cut answer to the question.
For in Genesis chapter 15 and verse 6,
we read of an unjust man.
Then he believed in the Lord and he
reckoned it to him for righteousness.
Now, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament
will use this same text in order to
stress the fact that the way of salvation
in the New Testament is the same as
the way of salvation in the Old Testament.
H.
C.
Leupold, the Lutheran commentator, has suggested that this
chapter is really a monumental chapter.
Well, it is a monumental chapter because it
is a chapter upon which much of Paul's
thinking in the New Testament is built.
He cites this very text both in the
epistle to the Romans and in the epistle
to the Galatians.
And furthermore, he cites the text of the
Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, chapter 2, verse 4,
the just shall live by faith, which is
built upon this Genesis 15 text at least
two times.
And the writer of the epistle to the
Hebrews, whoever he was, also cites it.
And so we have the text upon which
this text, built upon this text, cited three
times, and we have this very text cited
at least twice in the writings of the
New Testament authors.
And so consequently it's clear that this is
an important section of the Word of God.
Martin Luther said concerning the doctrine of justification
by faith that it was articulus stontis out
cadentis ecclesiae, which means the article of a
standing or falling church.
Now what he meant by that was that
the way in which the church handles the
doctrine of justification by faith determines whether the
church will stand or whether it will fall.
Luther, no doubt, was right.
This fundamental question does determine the Christian character
of a congregation.
If this doctrine of justification by faith is
believed and proclaimed fervently from the teaching platforms
and in the personal lives of the saints
of a particular church, that church will stand.
But if this doctrine is not proclaimed, if
it is hedged, if the doctrine is watered
down, if it is covered over with error
so that it does not firmly and clearly
and accurately go forth, that church will fall.
It is the article of a standing or
falling church.
Back in the Middle Ages and then after
for a few centuries, it was customary for
men who were theologians and preachers to communicate
with each other by the use of Latin.
In fact, this was true for many centuries
before that.
But in the age of the Reformation and
the following decades in which there was a
great deal of theological thought and communication and
also struggle, men communicated with each other by
Latin, because Latin was the scholar's language.
If they did not know one another's language,
they all knew Latin, and so they could
communicate.
Consequently, certain Latin phrases appeared over and over
again in theological writings.
There are five great Latin phrases that occurred
so often that they've even found their way
into English, English writing on theology.
And we often hear of sola fide, by
faith alone.
Sola gratia, by grace alone.
Sola scriptura, by Scripture alone.
Solo Christo, by Christ alone.
Soli Deo gloria, to God alone be glory.
So in the development of the Reformation faith,
these ideas, the Scripture, the Scripture alone is
the foundation for our faith.
Our salvation is traceable to what Christ alone
did, what he did by himself in shedding
his blood for us.
That is a grace salvation.
It is something that comes to us by
faith alone.
And the ultimate aim and goal of all
theological thought is the glory of God alone.
Now when we turn to Genesis chapter 15
and verse 6, we have one of those
texts in which there is stressed sola fide,
by faith alone.
Then he believed in the Lord and he
reckoned it faith to him for righteousness.
Those five solas incidentally have been called the
gospel of the five onlys.
And it is important that we understand them
and really make them a part of our
own thinking.
The Latin adjective solus aum is the background
of this.
It means only or alone.
There are two parts to chapter 15 with
the chief joint as Professor Funrat has suggested
between verses 6 and 7.
In the first section of the 15th chapter,
we have revelation from the Lord.
And then in that revelation, a confirmation of
the promise made to Abraham concerning great reward
to follow through the birth of someone from
his own body.
And then in the latter part of the
chapter, which we want to try to cover
next week, the Lord willing, we have the
ratification of the Abrahamic covenant by blood sacrifice
in what is to my mind one of
the most interesting and most important parts of
this entire part of Genesis.
Well let's look now to first the promise
that was made to Abram according to the
first verse of Genesis chapter 15.
We read, after these things the word of
the Lord came to Abram in a vision
saying, do not fear Abram.
Incidentally it has been said by some students
of the book of Genesis that this do
not fear is a reference to the kings
that he had just defeated.
Do not fear them, Abram, thinking that perhaps
Abram may have thought that they would return
in order to take revenge upon him.
It may be more likely that do not
fear refers to what is evidently upon Abram's
heart.
How is the promise of a seed going
to be fulfilled to me since I am
childless?
Do not fear, Abram.
Don't fear, the promises shall be fulfilled.
I am a shield to you.
Your reward shall be very great.
Now Abram has been tested in the realm
of anxiety.
He has been tested in the realm of
ambition.
But now the pressure will particularly build up
around a new center, and that new center
will be the promise concerning the Son that
is to come.
We know that he came as Isaac.
But Abram now will be pressured by the
fulfillment of the promise of the descendant in
whom all the families of the earth shall
be blessed.
How will this great man of faith deal
with the delay in the fulfillment of the
promises of God?
And in spite of many failures, through this
section you will notice that the faith of
Abram shines forth.
He is a man who fails in many
ways, but fundamentally his faith is in the
Lord and he is looking for that seed
that is to come.
In that respect he is very much like
most of us who are Christians.
We know we fail.
We know that day by day we fail
often.
But fundamentally a transformation has taken place in
our lives.
We have been given new life.
And even though we may do certain things
that are displeasing to the Lord, we do
not want to do them.
And further, we want to do things that
please him.
And the work of the Holy Spirit within
the life of the believer is to gradually
transform him into the likeness of Jesus Christ,
never completed as long as we are living,
completed only when we enter the presence of
the Lord.
It is the fundamental bent of a person's
life that is the important thing.
And you will see in Abram a fundamental
change has taken place since those days in
Ur of the Chaldees.
Do not fear, Abram.
I am a shield to you.
Your reward shall be very great.
He has seen God's protective hand when he
was in Egypt.
He has seen the might of his power
and the defeat of the kings by his
318 men.
But can God fulfill his promise of a
son?
Sarah, so far as he knows, is barren.
He does not have any children.
And God now gives him a promise which
essentially is this.
Abram, you have made a great renunciation when
you said you will not take the spoils
lest the king of Sodom should say, you
have made Abram rich.
Therefore your reward shall be very great.
So the great renunciation is answered by the
great reward that the Lord promises.
Now Abram, I am sure, is like most
of us.
I think that if I had been in
Abram's shoes, I might have replied exactly as
Abram did.
After all, a general reward is not the
thing that is bothering Abram.
It is the specific fulfillment, the son that
is specifically disturbing him.
And so he blurts out then in verse
2, whether in despondent skepticism or not, he
blurts out in expostulation that he has set
his heart upon the promises that have been
made.
And he will not be satisfied with any
general reward.
He wants some definition.
So he says, O Lord God, what wilt
thou give me since I am childless, and
the heir of my house is Eliezer of
Damascus, since thou hast given no offspring to
me, one born in my house is my
heir.
So he expresses the impatient misgivings of his
heart.
Now you might be inclined to think, well,
that's an evidence of Abram's unbelief.
Well, it is a kind of partial unbelief
we would have to grant, but fundamentally he
believes those promises.
He is impatient about them.
He is disturbed they haven't been fulfilled, or
they're not in process so that he can
put his finger upon it.
But he is concerned about the promise, and
he does believe that such a thing is,
has been given to him, and he's interested
in it.
And he doesn't want any legal heir only.
He would like to have someone from his
own body.
And so the Lord gives him a pledge
in verses 4 and 5, the word of
the Lord came to him saying, This man
shall not be your heir, but one who
shall come forth from your own loins, or
rather from your own inward parts, from your
bowels.
The Hebrew word is often translated in the
authorized version.
In other words, Abram, you're not going to
have a legal heir only, but you're going
to have someone who will come from your
own generative organs.
It will be from your own bowels, from
your own body.
And the one who comes forth, that one
will be your heir.
Now I think that that must have increased
Abram's, the paradox of this thing, because the
Lord takes him out and says, Now look
at the stars.
And look at all of those stars and
see how many they are and see if
you can number them.
And if Abram thought about the vastness of
those stars against the fact that he didn't
even have one son, the Lord's pledge makes
it even more difficult for him, if we
look at it from the human standpoint.
Well he takes him outside the tent, this
is all in vision, and he asks Abram
to look toward the heavens and count the
stars, if you can.
Now this would have meant a great deal
to Abram, perhaps more than we understand, because
as I understand it, in the East when
you look into the heavens at night, you
can frequently see vastly more stars than you
can see in our Western world.
And if that is true, then of course
the vastness of the stars was a beautiful
illustrative picture of what God was going to
do.
It was a giant object lesson.
It was something that was put on God's
flannel board, and Abram looked and saw.
And it was a magnificent promise, but if
we remember he only, he doesn't have any
son at all, the paradox is increased.
Now we, at this point, by the narrator,
are turned from Abram, who is stargazing, and
the narrator now turns to us and adds
the words, then he believed in the Lord
and he reckoned it to him for righteousness.
This has been called the biggest word in
the chapter.
Well, I don't know whether it is or
not, but it's one of the big words
of the chapter, and it's one of the
big words of the Bible.
Then he believed in the Lord and he
reckoned it to him for righteousness.
Now I'd like to stop for just a
moment and say a few words about the
three important words of verse 6.
Now you'll remember that this text is the
basis of Habakkuk 2.4, the just shall
live by faith.
So we're going to look at this text
and we have, then he believed by faith
in the Lord, and he reckoned it, live
for righteousness, the just.
So Habakkuk meditated upon this, thought about it,
reflected upon it, and finally wrote under the
inspiration of the Spirit that magnificent compression of
spiritual truth, the just shall live by faith.
That's what he saw from Genesis 15, 16.
And then verse 6, incidentally, that shows us
again how the students, the authors of Scripture
were students of Scripture.
They studied the Word of God.
You must not think of them as being
secretaries who waited in an office for someone
to bring in a new tape so that
they could sit down and type out the
dictation that had been given to them.
They studied the Word of God.
That's one of the reasons why they were
the recipients of the divine revelation.
They were students of Holy Scripture.
They reflected upon Holy Scripture.
They made it part of their morning, noon,
and evening, and even nighttime life, as David
makes plain.
They studied the Scripture and so they came
up with these expressions under the guidance of
the Holy Spirit that have been used by
God.
The just shall live by faith.
That's Habakkuk's exposition of Genesis 15, 6.
Now let's look at the first expression.
Then he believed in the Lord.
Now this is the first occurrence of the
word believe in the book of Genesis, and
it's the first, therefore, in the book of
the Bible.
It is not, this faith is not described.
Someone might say, what is faith?
Well, that's a good question.
Moses would say, well, I didn't bother to
describe what it was.
I simply asserted it.
Now theologians seeking to answer that natural question
have suggested that faith includes knowledge.
That is, if you have true faith, you
must have some substance that you believe.
Knowledge, revelation, some word from the Lord.
So when a man has faith, he must
have some object of his faith.
He must be taught some truth, knowledge, notitia.
Then assensus or assent, he must assent to
the truthfulness of that bit of divine revelation,
the object of his faith.
And finally fiducia or trust.
Now trust is simply the committal of a
person to that particular bit of information which
he has received and to which he has
given assent.
So faith is something that includes knowledge, it
includes assent, it includes trust.
Faith is a strongly intellectual thing then.
It is not simply intellectual, but it is
strongly intellectual.
It is a belief of a particular proposition
which concerns usually a person as well as
a truth.
Now notice here, there's a great deal of
debate in modern theology over the nature of
biblical things.
Are we to think of biblical things as
propositional truths?
For example, is the Bible a collection of
propositional truths or is it simply a means
by which we have encounter in a personal
way with God?
Well of course we cannot solve a question
like that since the truth lies in the
combination.
Notice this faith is personal.
He believed in the Lord.
Now the Lord had just said, so shall
thy seed be, but the text says he
believed in the Lord.
That is, he believed the thing that the
Lord had said.
He had knowledge, he assented to it, he
trusted what the Lord said.
But in so trusting it, he believed in
the Lord.
But it was also propositional.
The proposition he believed was, so shall thy
seed be, as he looked up and saw
the stars.
So it was a proposition to which he
gave assent and credence, faith, but it was
also a proposition of a person.
So his faith is personal and propositional.
Strictly speaking, it was a very broad kind
of faith because when Abraham looked up and
was told, so shall thy seed be, that
particular promise stretched from the time of Adam
all the way down to the last soul
that shall ever believe in the Messiah, the
Lord Jesus Christ.
For they are all the sons of Abraham.
In a sense it was a plan for
history.
It was God's plan of the ages.
So shall thy seed be, for that's what
God is doing.
He is gathering together a vast number of
people called the sons of Abraham who are
believers as Abraham was.
That's why we're all here.
Now, what part in this the gasoline crisis
has, I don't know.
But the reason you're here is that you
might have a particular relationship to this vast
plan that God is carrying out, God's plan
of the ages.
And so when Abraham believed in the Lord,
he was in a sense simply giving faith
or his belief in God's plan of the
ages.
He believed in the Lord as he told
him about that vast number of people like
stars in the heavens who should believe.
When I was in the insurance business in
Birmingham, Alabama after I had gotten out of
college, Dr. Lewis Barry Chafer of Dallas Seminary
came for a weekend of meetings.
And I attended the meetings and we met
on Friday night and Saturday morning and Saturday
night and then Sunday morning in the Wallum
Presbyterian Church and Sunday evening in the Wallum
Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.
One of the messages that Dr. Chafer gave
was a message on justification and he referred
to this text.
Now Dr. Chafer was a man who didn't
know any Hebrew and he didn't know any
Greek, but he had picked up a lot
of things from Bible teachers who knew a
little something about both of the languages.
And he did know that the word for
believe in the Old Testament was the Hebrew
word amen, from which we get the very
common expression in English.
It's been transliterated into Greek as amen and
then carried over into our language as amen
or amen, which we attach to the end
of our prayers.
It means simply truly, verily.
It's the word that the Lord uses when
he attaches verily, verily to his statements.
To believe was fundamentally, it was a word
that meant to be firm, reliant.
And so it has to do with a
kind of firm credence.
But anyway, Dr. Chafer said, now since this
is the word from which we get the
word amen, let's render it that way.
And so he said, when God said, so
shall thy descendants be, then Abraham amened the
Lord.
He simply said amen to what God had
said.
And that is the essence of true faith.
It is to acknowledge the truthfulness of the
words of God and rest upon them.
Now I want to add one other thing
here before we move on to reckon.
You'll notice that there is no legal work
that Abraham is to do before he's justified.
He is simply shown the stars and the
text reads, he believed the thing that the
Lord had shown him.
So there were no legal works to be
done.
He was not to run out and be
baptized in order to be saved.
He was not to run out and do
some other sacramental work in order for the
benefits of the saving work of God to
become his.
No legal work was required.
Furthermore, no cultic work was required.
He was not required to offer a sacrifice
in order to be saved.
So no sacramental work, no legal work was
necessary before he was pronounced righteous before the
Lord.
He believed in the Lord and he reckoned
it for righteousness.
Now in a moment there is a sacrifice
that takes place and his faith works because
he believes and then obeys the Lord.
He gets the animals the Lord tells him
to get and he carries it out.
In a sense he shows that his faith
is genuine faith by the works that he
does.
But it was the faith that saved him
by which he was reckoned righteous.
So he believed.
The second thing is he reckoned it to
him.
Now that's the source of the doctrine of
imputation.
You see what happens in a Christian salvation
is that when he believes in the Lord
Jesus Christ righteousness is reckoned to him.
Righteousness is imputed to him.
He is regarded as being righteous when inherently
he is not righteous.
It is on the basis of this statement
that we have the fully developed doctrine of
imputation in the New Testament.
We'll see more about it in a moment.
But in the Old Testament this term was
used of priestly judgments in the law of
Moses.
When the priest did something according to the
word of the Lord he reckoned a certain
thing to be true.
It was a judgment by the representative of
the Lord in the Levitical law.
So here this is a judgment not by
an intermediary like a priest but by the
Lord himself.
He reckoned Abram to be righteous by virtue
of the instrumentality of his faith.
And then finally the third word is righteousness.
Righteousness refers to a right standing before the
Lord.
Now we've had the adjective righteous before in
the book of Genesis chapter 7 verse 1.
But this is the first time that we
have the word righteousness so far as I
remember.
It's a term of relationship.
It means that the person who is righteous
is a person who is in the right
relationship to the Lord.
Now let me say a few words by
way of a little bit of theology.
Now I know what you're thinking.
My goodness what have you been giving us
up to this point if that's not theology?
Well that wasn't theology.
Really that was simply exposition.
It's a rather interesting thing to me.
We live in an age that is dedicated
completely to precision in its increasingly technological life.
Have you noticed the way people throw around
the letters of the alphabet in different combinations?
Do you ever feel a little ignorant when
they talk about E-R-P or P
-C-R or N-O-P or B
-O-O-B or whatever it may be?
That last is what you feel like isn't
it?
You're so embarrassed you're afraid to even ask
what do those things mean that you're talking
about?
Well it's amazing to me in an age
in which we talk about these technological precise
terms that in the Christian church we should
have people running around insistent that precision in
faith and creed constitutes some kind of menace.
It does not.
To be precise in what we believe is
simply to be true to the Word of
God.
Unfortunately that is the reason that when people
do speak theology others sit and do not
understand anything.
I received a letter last month from a
former student of a theological school.
He said in his letter to me that
it's been two years since he was at
theological school and he said that at this
school he had only one series of lectures
from me which happened to be two lectures
on Bultmann's theology.
But he said since my graduation in 1977
I have listened to all of your 132
tapes on systematic theology and many others on
the books of the Bible.
And then he mentions I say this in
the spirit of the Apostle Paul, not to
glorify myself but to glorify the Lord.
Your clear and pure proclamation of the grace
of God in Jesus Christ has been so
influential on my life and intellect that I
am hardly the same person I was two
years ago.
Understanding not only what it means to be
saved by grace but also what it means
to be kept by grace I've experienced a
new strength to cope with life's battering and
the unleashing of certain abilities which I knew
I possessed but could never marshal by means
of my own rebellious will.
To those who say that doctrine and theology
are not concerned with real life, I have
but one word, bunk.
This man is presently working towards his Ph
.D. in Reformation Renaissance History.
Well, I believe with all my heart that
he's absolutely right.
We have to be interested in the precision
of the teaching of the Word of God.
Now let me for a few moments say
a few words about the ground of justification,
its fundamental principle, and the means of justification.
There are three errors that Christians should be
especially concerned about.
I have and others have called them a
trio of theological relatives, kinsmen.
In that they are each the illegitimate offspring
of natural religion fertilized by the gospel of
Jesus Christ.
That is, they are a combination of natural
thinking and biblical thinking so that they appear
to us in the garb of biblical teaching
but at the same time are heresies.
The first is Pelagianism.
Pelagius was a religious man, but he believed
that man was able to keep God's commandments
and be without sin, and thus he did
not need salvation by the grace of God.
Romanism, which teaches a salvation that is to
be gained by stages through working of a
sacramental treadmill.
It is by virtue of the fulfillment of
sacramental duties that a person may have hope
of justification, but never certainty as long as
he is in this life.
And then the unwitting error of Arminianism in
that salvation is traceable to the decision of
man's free will.
The grace necessary to salvation is added after
man by his free will and his free
will decision takes the first step.
Listen to what the Westminster Confession of Faith
says about justification.
I don't accept necessarily every statement in the
Westminster Confession of Faith, but it is a
good statement of biblical doctrine, and this is
the way it reads in justification.
Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely
justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but
by pardoning their sins and by accounting and
accepting their persons as righteous, not for anything
wrought in them or done by them, but
for Christ's sake alone, solo Christo.
Not by imputing faith itself, the act of
believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them
as their righteousness, but by imputing the obedience
and satisfaction of Christ unto them.
They receiving and resting on him and his
righteousness by faith, which faith they have not
of themselves, it is the gift of God.
There are three great acts of imputation.
I'll just state them for the sake of
time.
These are great reckonings by God.
First, he imputes Adam's sin to all men,
for Adam was the representative head of the
race.
Second, he imputes the sins of believers to
Jesus Christ, so that our Lord Jesus Christ
became sin for us, that we might become
the righteousness of God in him.
And then third, he imputes God's righteousness to
believers, so that we are able to say
that we are saved through grace.
So Adam's sin is imputed to the human
race.
The sins of believers are reckoned to be
Christ's sins, reckoned to be.
He dies under the judgment upon sins of
others, crying out, my God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me, as he was the
sin offering, made sin for us.
And then as a result of the work
of the Holy Spirit, when we come to
faith, God's righteousness is imputed or reckoned to
believers by the unmerited love and favor of
God.
Now the ground of justification then is the
imputation of the righteousness of Christ made available
by the blood that was shed upon the
cross at Calvary.
That's why we preach the blood of Christ,
why we preach his atoning sacrifice, and it's
why we preach also the work of imputation,
by which there is reckoned to us the
benefits of what Christ did for us.
Now secondly, the fundamental principle therefore of justification
is grace.
We do not do anything in order to
obtain this righteousness.
In fact, Peter, to settle the question, in
Jerusalem said in Acts chapter 15 and verse
11 that we believe that by the grace
of God, of our Lord Jesus Christ, we
should be saved even as they.
And Paul in Titus 3 and 7 says
the same thing, that we might be justified
by grace, by the unmerited love and favor
of God.
Now the grace of God is an essential
principle of our salvation, number one, because of
our human sin.
We cannot do anything to please God.
Consequently, if it depended upon something that we
do, we could never be justified, since they
that are in the flesh cannot please God.
So it's necessary that if we be justified,
we be justified as the unmerited love and
favor of God, by grace.
Furthermore, how would you explain the death of
Christ?
If it's possible for men to be saved
apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, why did
Christ die?
Why it would be the greatest blunder in
the history of God's plan of the ages
and the perpetrator of it would be God
himself, because he would permit the only holy,
righteous person who ever lived to suffer that
ignominious death at the hands of guilty men,
wicked men.
And finally, in all of the work of
God, the ultimate aim is the glory of
God.
And if our salvation depended upon what God
did and what we did, then we divide
the glory.
That's the basic unwitting error of the doctrine
of free will, because the result is that
God gets part of the glory and man
gets the other part, the decision of his
own free will by which the grace of
God is added, and justification ensues.
That's why I am an enemy of the
doctrine of free will in spiritual things, and
will be till the day I breathe my
last, unless I lose my mind before then.
G.
C.
Burkhauer said concerning justification by grace that if
it is not holy of God, we cannot
explain the death of Christ, God would be
throwing himself away.
Finally, the means of justification is faith.
Faith is an instrumentality.
It's not a work of itself.
It's an instrumentality by which we receive the
benefits of the work of Christ.
If we regard it as a work, it's
a work given by God, and thus not
a human work.
It's the gift of God, as the Westminster
Confession of Faith has put it.
For by grace are ye saved through faith,
and that not of yourselves.
It is the gift of God, not of
works, lest any man should boast.
Through faith, by faith, upon the basis of
faith, never on account of faith in the
New Testament.
Well, I could go on forever, but that
would be bad, wouldn't it?
So let me close by saying this.
Job expressed the problem in his own words
in the ninth chapter and the second verse
of his book.
He said, I know that it is so
of a truth, but how should man be
just before God, a God who says he
will by no means clear the guilty?
Well, Job's problem and the problems of others
along the same line find their solution in
the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans
chapter 4 and verse 5, But to him
that worketh not, but believeth in him that
justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted as
that which brings righteousness.
If you are here this morning and you
have never believed in the law of Jesus
Christ, you are lost.
Your responsibility before God is to keep the
law perfectly, something you cannot do.
Just take a look at the commandments of
God.
Take a look at the Ten Commandments and
answer the question, Have you fulfilled, kept perfectly
the law of God?
If you have not, you are guilty.
You are under divine judgment and condemnation.
You are headed for a Christless eternity.
You are lost, hopeless and helpless.
But God announces through the coming of the
Lord Jesus Christ that there is an atoning
sacrifice and the forgiveness of sins is possible
for those who brought by the Holy Spirit
come to faith in Christ.
May God bring you to your lost condition.
May he bring you to realize that you
are totally unable in yourself to find forgiveness
of sins.
May you cry out for mercy.
May God the Holy Spirit bring you to
repentance and faith and trust and the experience
of justification.
Righteousness.
William Cunningham used to say the righteousness of
God is that righteousness which God's righteousness requires
him to require.
And the blessedness of the gospel of Jesus
Christ is that when we have believed in
Christ, we stand before him justified, righteous, acceptable
to the Lord God.
The fundamental question of life is answered.
May God speak to your heart.
Come to Christ.
Don't stay in your lost and condemned condition.
Come to him who has offered the all
-atoning sacrifice.
Let's bow together in a word of prayer.
Shall we stand?
Father, how grateful we are for these wonderful
expressions of the fundamental principles of spiritual living.
Abraham believed in the Lord and he reckoned
it to him that he would come as
that which obtained righteousness.
Father, our trust is totally in the atoning
work of Christ.
We do not trust in men.
We trust in thee.
We do not trust in our good works
or even our free will or our sacramental
activities.
We trust only in Christ.
Christ alone is our hope.
Oh, Father, if there are some in this
audience who have not yet believed in Christ,
give no rest nor peace until they rest
in him.
For his name's sake, amen.