now, since the fall of Adam, no such possibility; it is now a law, because of the weakness of the flesh, only unto death. This is shown in the manner in which the law was given, in “blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest” (Heb 12:18). Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear” (v.21). This all signified condemnation.
The Reformation view tells us that God sent his Son into the world to do what sinful man is incapable of doing. God himself became a man like us, yet without sin, to bring man unto himself. He was born in the natural way, born under God’s law, in order that he might redeem his people from that law (Gal 4:4). He did this through his vicarious obedience to both the law’s penal and preceptive demands. Traditionally this has been expressed in terms of Christ’s active and passive obedience. This formula, if it might be referred to as such, is used simply to, “emphasize the two distinct aspects of our Lord’s vicarious obedience.”9 In the former, Jesus met the preceptive demands of the law by perfectly obeying God’s commandments. God the Father vented his holy wrath against sin by punishing his own Son. In his passive obedience, he offered satisfaction to the penal demands of the law by taking upon himself, as our vicar, the full weight of God’s punishment. In the words of Murray, he “took care of our guilt and perfectly fulfilled the demand of righteousness.”10 One does, however, need to be careful not to disassociate Christ’s preceptive and penal obedience. As Turretin reminds us: “the two things are not to be separated from each other. We are not to say as some do that the ‘satisfaction’ is by the passive work of Christ alone and the ‘merit’ by his active work alone. The satisfaction and merit are not to be thus viewed in isolation, each by itself because the benefit in each depends upon the total work of Christ.”11 What we can say is that, in the words of Witsius: “from his very infancy, and through the whole course of His life, especially the close thereof, he endured all manner of sufferings, both in soul and body, humbling, nay, emptying himself, and being obedient to the Father unto death, even death of the cross…in time he fully performed for his people all that the law required in order to obtain a right to eternal life.”12 Shedd, again emphasizes the importance of Christ’s active and passive obedience:
When a criminal has suffered the penalty affixed to his crime, he has done a part, but not all that the law requires of him. He still owes a perfect obedience to the law, in addition to the endurance of the penalty. The law does not say to the transgressor: “If you will suffer the penalty, you need not render the obedience.” But it says: “You must both suffer the penalty and render the obedience.” Sin is under a double obligation; holiness is under only a single one. A guilty man owes both penalty and obedience; a holy angel owes only obedience.
Consequently, the justification of a sinner must not only deliver him from the penalty due to disobedience, but provide for him an equivalent to personal obedience. Whoever justifies the ungodly must lay a ground both for his delivery from hell, and his entrance into heaven.13
It is because of God’s holy nature that eternal life cannot be granted until the precepts of law have been perfectly fulfilled, nor can sin be forgiven without sin being atoned for. Jesus kept the law that Adam broke, the very law under which humanity stands condemned, as Calvin so rightly expressed, “For we hence infer, that it is from Christ we must seek what the law would confer on anyone who fulfilled it; or, which is the same thing, that by the grace of Christ we obtain what God promised in the law of works.”14 It is all of God, his redemptive work in his Son provides both his just verdict in regard to the sinner, and displays God’s own justice. This is why Paul remarked that, in Christ, God is both the “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26).
Though it might appear obvious, it must be clearly stated that Jesus’ work would count for nothing if it remained external to us. In his mercy, not because he sees anything good in us, God chooses at a moment in time to call those for whom Christ died into fellowship with Jesus Christ (1 Cor 1:9). He regenerates the individual, taking away his heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26). Through God’s gift of faith, God justifies the believer and adopts him into his family. This faith is itself the result of God’s work in the heart, it is said to be a gift because it is nothing less than a natural consequence of the new birth in Christ (Eph 2:1–10).
Luther said that justification by faith alone was a teaching by which the church either stands or falls:
The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines; it preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our consciences before God. Without this article, the world is utter death and darkness... If the article of justification is lost, all Christian doctrine is lost at the same time... This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God: and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour…In short, if this article concerning Christ-the doctrine that we are justified and saved through Him alone and consider all apart from Him damned.15
If Jesus had only fulfilled the law’s penal demands it would still be necessary to provide the necessary obedience to the law’s preceptive requirements. In the believer’s justification, there is a two-way transaction, exchange, or imputation. The righteousness that Christ secured by his perfect life in conformity to the law is imputed to the believer’s account and the believer’s sin is imputed to Christ. In the words of Calvin, “we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.”16 All of this happens because God has by his Spirit, united the sinner with Christ, hence, on the basis of this union, all that Christ achieved becomes the possession of all who believe.
Justification is a forensic and declarative act, whereby the sinner is declared by God to be perfect on account of what Christ has done for him. Jesus could do this for his people because, in the words of Buchanan, “He identified Himself with His people and acted toward God as their substitute and representative. His legal liability on their account depended on His taking their law-place, and becoming answerable for them at the bar of divine justice.”17 The Second London 1689 Baptist Confession tells us that believers are “justified whole and solely because God imputes to them [reckons as their righteousness] Christ’s righteousness. He imputed to them Christ’s active obedience to the whole law and His passive obedience in death.”18
It is important to bear in mind that the person who is declared justified is still, in himself, sinful; while the guilt of sin has been removed its pollution remains. It is the ungodly who are justified (Rom 4:5). Once justification is accomplished, then starts the process of progressive sanctification; that process by which the sinner is conformed to the very image of the glorified Christ. This will not be accomplished until the resurrection of the physical body on the return of Christ.
Justification is not simply, as Wright maintains,19 a judge finding one to be in the right. It is, rather, an announcement, a forensic declaration that one is in the right because one is in Christ; the declaration is made in virtue of the sinner’s identification with Christ. The judge then sees not the sinner’s sin, but all that Christ achieved. The sinner is then viewed by God as being righteous because he has become part of Christ. This is why Paul can speak of a Messiah, “who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness,
