My aim is to consider our righteous­ness before God. The thought of guilty man standing justified in the presence of God through faith in Christ is central to Paul’s argument in the Epistle to the Romans. In Romans 5:1 Paul says, ‘therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Paul begins the verse with ‘therefore,’ for what he is about to say flows logically from what he has already said in the first four chapters of the epistle. In these chapters Paul basically set forth two major propositions. Firstly, that everyone stands guilty before God and because of their guilt are under the sentence of death. Thus Paul is only asserting the Old Testament truth, In Thy sight shall no man living be justified (Ps 148:2).

Secondly, it is fallacious to think that we can change our status before God in any way apart from identify­ing by faith with Christ’s work of death and resurrection.

The Divine Law Court⤒🔗

Because of God’s absolute moral perfection, He requires spotless and perfect righteousness from His peo­ple. In Rom 5:1 Paul is saying that this perfection is provided by God for His people, in that Christ’s right­eousness is imputed to them so that when God looks upon the redeemed He sees them clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ. In this verse Paul is describing the act by which we are acquitted in the words, ‘having been justified,’ using the aorist passive participle of the verb rendered ‘to justify.’ The verb may also be translated, ‘to apply justice to someone,’ ‘to treat some­one justly’ and ‘to pronounce judge­ment.’ It is important to notice that this aorist participle means that for once and for all, the Christian has been ‘pronounced righteous,’ rather than ‘made righteous.’

The verb always has a judicial or forensic flavour about it and we need to think ourselves into the at­mosphere this verb engenders — that of the divine law court, where God demands that we need perfect righteousness if we are to be acquit­ted and then declares and accepts that we have the perfect righteous­ness of Christ, through faith.

This means that God in the act of justification declares that the sinner has a new status of righteousness before Him (Rom 8:33). We know from Rom 4:24 that this declaration is, ‘a free gift of grace.’ Therefore none of us deserve this legal status, none of us can earn it.

The Bible often asserts that salva­tion is of grace because it knows the difficulty that the fallen heart has in coming to the truth that salvation cannot be earned through our own works.

Augustus Toplady in his hymn ‘Rock of Ages,’ expresses the same thought:

Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to Thy cross I cling
Naked come to Thee for dress
Helpless look to Thee for grace
Foul I to the fountain fly
Wash me Saviour or I die

 Augustine too reflected on the grace of God in this declaration on justification when he prayed: O Lord, demand what you will But supply what you demand.

The basis of this justification is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Rom 5:9). God is just, He has set the sentence of death for our sin (Rom 6:23), yet One who is sinless (Heb 4:15) has paid the penalty of death for us that was not His own (2 Cor 5:21). Be­cause it was not for the penalty of His own sin that He died, the pen­alty of death did not have any power to hold Jesus (Acts 2:24) and so Paul makes it clear that it is the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the basis of our justification (Rom 4:25). Thus God is both just and the jus­tifier of sinners because, ‘He is just and the One who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’ (Rom 3:26), because we are linked by faith to Christ, who has paid the penalty for sin, and His once and for all payment appeases God’s wrath against sin.

Judicial Not Ethical←⤒🔗

If we are to understand justification correctly we must have a very firm hold on its juridical meaning — i.e. that it is a declaration of innocence, it is a declaration of righteousness. The great difference between Rome and Protestants is precisely in this area, as to whether justification is merely a legal act or an ethical act. The Roman Church asserts that justification consists of Christ’s righteousness being poured into man. Man is therefore made just and he sanctifies himself by doing good works. In this view a person is made righteous and then declared righteous. But Scripture sees justification as the deliverance from the penalty of sin and sanctification as deliverance from the power of sin — these terms are synonymous to the Church of Rome. The council of Trent made these two terms insepa­rable.

Justification in Scripture is a judicial process which Rome has made an infusion of the quality of righteous­ness. Thus for Rome the external judicial acquittal is used to signify an earlier internal reality. According to this ethical doctrine of justification man is ultimately acquitted by virtue of what he is and what he does, and not through what Christ has done. According to this erroneous view God grants justification to man, but man must do something about it first before he can be justified. Against the judicial view of justifica­tion Rome argues that God would be false to proclaim the guilty guilt­less, but this is to neglect the grace of God by which the wicked receive acquittal. Over against the ethical view of justification we have to cling to the juridical significance of the concept, whereby God the Judge absolves the guilty of their guilt and punishment.

But in Rom 5:1 Paul also shows us the means by which the individual is to appropriate this justification or the declaration of righteousness. It is, Paul says, through or by faith. Even this faith itself is a gift of God (Eph. 2:9) coming to the individual by di­vine grace.

WCF 11 states ... ‘faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and His righteousness is the alone instru­ment of justification...’

Christ Alone←⤒🔗

This simply means that if the indi­vidual is to be clothed in the right­eousness of Christ then he must wholeheartedly rely on what Christ has done and place all his trust in the all sufficient sacrifice of Jesus on his behalf (Rom 3:22). The truth of faith alone cannot be overstated. It means that salvation is not some­thing I do. Salvation does not de­pend on my strength in holding onto God. Rather the events of salvation history, namely the death and resur­rection of Jesus Christ, are some­thing which God has done and to be right before God I must simply rely in a dynamic ongoing way on those events and see them accomplished on my behalf.

This means that every other man­made means of salvation must be abandoned: baptism, church mem­bership, philanthropy, holding out­ward religious office. These are all good things of themselves and per­fectly appropriate for Christian par­ticipation, yet as a means of per­sonal salvation, totally useless. The ground of our acceptance with God is the death and resurrection of Christ. God gives us the righteous­ness of Christ which comes to us as faith is exercised in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour (Rom. 4:5).

Reconciled To God←⤒🔗

But the apostle goes on in the verse and shows us the fruit of ‘having been justified — we have, ‘peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ This peace is not the fruit of the Spirit to which Paul refers else­where (Gal 5:22). This peace which we have means that we are no longer the objects of God’s dis­pleasure and we are no longer to live in dread of divine wrath, for we have been reconciled to God or made His friends, through the death of His Son (Rom 5:10).

The phrase means we have peace with regard to God, that more liter­ally, God is at peace with us and His wrath towards us is removed through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Paul’s main thought here is that we are at peace with God and as a corollary of this peace we have peace within, and so inward peace is also the fruit of justification by faith.

The peace we have with God comes to us only on His terms. Relying on your own good works will not appease the righteous wrath of God. True peace can only be realised when we recog­nise that our sin has been justly punished through the death of the sinless Christ that the justice of God has been satisfied and that God’s law has been honoured and vindicated in Christ.

It is only as the believer sees God’s mercy and peace kissing each other in this manner that we experience true peace. As Calvin says, ‘now if we ask in what way the conscience can be made quiet before God, we shall find the only way to be that unmerited right­eousness be conferred upon us as a gift of God’ (Institutes 13.3). The truth of Rom. 5:1, of an im­puted righteousness coming to us by God’s grace appropriated by faith, based on the finished work of Christ, is the heart of Paul’s teaching on our righteousness and right standing before God. As Christians we need to redis­cover and understand afresh these great truths of Scripture which are the great truths of the Reformation. The great truths which alone can satisfy the heart that hungers after God, the truth which when appropriated, give us peace with God.

Salvation is by grace alone
Through faith alone
In Christ alone
So that to God alone be all the glory.