at it another way. In the earliest days of the Old Testament, Abraham puts the question—“Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” That is, if there is a city with a mix-up of good and bad people in it, will God treat them all alike? Will he blast them all with the indiscriminating destructiveness of an atomic bomb? No, say the Old Testament. God is the judge of the whole earth, and because he is, he can be relied on to behave with justice. There may be much beyond the righteous dealing of God, but the Old Testament is quite sure that you can build on that as a foundation.
But it is not the Old Testament only, the New Testament also, Jesus himself, teaches the judgment of God. The famous picture of the sheep and the goats is a New Testament picture. It is of course true that there will (according to the New Testament) be a good many surprises in the judgment, some will be astonished to find themselves in white wooly coats, and others astounded at the horns they sprout. The Queen of the South, who had wit and humility enough to listen to Solomon will come off better than the preachers and professors of theology who were too wise and self-satisfied to listen to Jesus. But—the judgment is there. Jesus does not soften the judgment, he makes it more stringent. You know the old saying, he says, “thou shalt not murder, and whoever shall commit murder shall be liable to the judgment, but I tell you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to the judgment.”
The upshot of all this is clear. Between us and God there stands—a judgment, and there is no evading it. Human behavior is to be taken seriously. Voltaire’s saying, “Le bon Dieu, me pardonnera, c’est san métier,” is as fatuous a piece of rationalism as you can find. We are rebellious creatures of an Almighty God. We are sinful and we are guilty. We are not fit to be called his sons and daughters; we are not fit even to be called his servants.
If this is true, what can we do about it? Or better, what can be done about it? There is only one answer to this, the real predicament in which human beings stand. You may know better and more attractive words, if you do by all means use them, but the real substance of the answer lies in this word: justification.
JUSTIFICATION
In essence, this is a perfectly simple idea, and what must be said about it can be said very quickly. The judgment is set, and you and I stand in the dock, with God himself upon the bench. We know well in our consciences that we are guilty, that whatever punishment the Judge has in mind will not be more than we deserve. And then, instead of the sentence everyone is expecting, there is a verdict of acquittal. If you take away the stage setting in the law court, this amounts to pretty much the same thing as forgiveness, but the background of justification requires, as the background of forgiveness would not do, that the seriousness of the offense is borne in mind. That is justification. It has often been misunderstood, and I think we shall understand it better, if we look at the misunderstandings.
First, it has sometimes been said that justification is not this process of acquittal, but means God’s work in actually making people good. When they have co-operated with God’s grace and become good, then they are justified. Now of course it is true that God does this; he does make people good. Incidentally, no one has said this more strongly than Luther. Do you remember his correction of Karlstadt’s revolutionary preaching at Wittenberg? What is faith if it does not issue in love? It is a pity that Wesley, judging Luther by Lutherans, got him wrong at this point. Perhaps by now he knows what it is to be judged by Wesleyans and does not like it! This, I repeat, is true enough, but it is not justification. If you want another theological label, it is sanctification, and important as that is, it is not the foundation of the Christian life. For one thing, it does not deal with the past, for another can we seriously think that we shall ever be good enough to deserve God’s love? No; the essence of justification is that it is something that God’s love does for us while we are still sinners.
Second, it is sometimes objected that justification by faith involves a legal fiction. It means either that God pretends we are good, when we are not; or that he pretends faith is goodness, which it is not. This is calling black, white and we have a strong and very proper conviction that that is something even God has no business doing. But this is no more true than the idea that justification means making people good. Justification is a creative divine act in the field of relations. See Romans 5.10–11. The parallel with reconciliation is very instructive. The Judge does not pretend that after all, the prisoner is a pretty decent fellow. On his own, he brings him into a proper relation with himself.
May I use an old illustration to bring this out? It is the story of a headmaster interviewing a boy who has done things he ought not. In his wisdom, he decides that he will not punish the boy, and the boy, with the strong sense of justice most boys have, rejects it—“I don’t want to be let off.” The headmaster replies, “I’m not letting you off, I’m taking you on.” When God justifies us, it means that he is taking us on, as his children, his servants. He restores the proper relation between himself and us.
But this illustration will take us a stage further. What I have just described could only be done by a good headmaster, exercising a positive creative influence in his school. A weak disciplinarian could not do it. Only a person who was a positive force for righteousness could do it. That is why, in this text, Paul does not speak of justification alone but adds through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
THROUGH THE REDEMPTION THAT IS IN CHRIST JESUS
God’s verdict is not an off-hand pronouncement; it is the result of a mighty creative act. This is not the time to expound the Cross in detail. That needs a sermon in itself, or rather a few hundred sermons. But at least we can see in it a creative divine act, by which the moral balance of the world was changed, out of which sprung the possibility of a new relation with God. Let me say two things about it.
First, it shows, if I may put it so, that God in his school is a good disciplinarian. He pays us the compliment of taking our behavior seriously. He will never say of our sin, ‘That’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ I cannot subscribe to the certain narrow theories of the atonement which represent God as simply inflicting on Christ the punishment that was due to us, as if he must hit someone and didn’t mind whom he hit. Yet there is truth there; and the death of Jesus does mean that God’s doesn’t simply let our sin go by, but deals with it.
Second, the Cross shows that God acts in love, and love in the end is the only creative power we know. He loved us while we were still sinners; his was a love that sought only to give, not to get. And—see how all the ends tie up—when humans, however sinful they may be, respond in faith to love like that, God and humankind are reconciled. We are justified by grace through faith.
How easy, shallow, and perfunctory our religion is! How lightly we trifle with it! How scared we are of anything we can label ‘theology.” So long as we can be respectable and conventional, and God doesn’t trouble us too much, we are content enough. Can it possibly be that a film should shake us out of our sleep? Will it make a difference if we see a fellow human being wrestling for that real peace with God which alone can release us for the work of life? At least we shall be more sober and more steadfast Christians if we know that we are justified by faith; if we recall that someday we shall have to reckon up with God our Maker; and that the Son of God died that we might be restored to the divine family.
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“FAITH AND WORKS: WESLEY AND LUTHER”—Romans 5.1–11
[Preached four times from 5/29/88 at Elvet to sometime in 1993 at M.R.]
John Wesley had a problem, and he was too honest a man to pretend that it was not true. That is perhaps one difference between him and us. We are apt to sweep our personal problems under the carpet and hope that in due course they will disappear (and sometimes they do). Not Mr. Wesley. Before 1738 as well as after it, he was honest with himself; the problem would not go away. Even when he himself went to America, hoping,
