By Sharon Amari
Justification is a very important doctrine. The verb “to justify” (dikaioo) is built on the same root as “righteous” (dikaios) and “righteousness (dikaisone). It is easy to detect the importance of this doctrine in Paul’s theology. We see that he uses the verb “to forgive” only once (Romans 4:7) while he uses the verb “to justify” (dikaioo) 14 times and “righteousness (dikaisone) 52 times! But what does justification really means and how does one obtain it? There has been much debate about this important doctrine and a major disagreement between Catholics and Evangelicals. Therefore, a careful biblical study and analysis is a vital procedure to better understand the doctrine of Justification. In this article, we shall study the meaning of justification, the basis by which God justifies us and the means or tool by which we obtain justification. I invite the reader to join me in allowing the word of God to teach us and guide us to a better understanding of this vital doctrine.
Here
are some definitions from Greek and English Biblical and theological
dictionaries for the verb “to justify” (dikaioo):
“To
vindicate, to render a favorable verdict, to demonstrate to be morally right,
prove to be rights” (BDAG).
“To
establish as right, to validate” (TDNT).
There is a major
disagreement between Roman Catholics and Evangelicals about the meaning of the
term “justification.” Catholics
believe that the verb “to justify” means to “infuse” or “make righteous” and
thus it refers to “ethical quality of righteousness.” However, the majority of
scholars understand justification as “to involve a relationship rather than
ethical quality and the distinctive Pauline meaning is ‘to be right with God”
(Ladd, 480). Many scholars use the
term “forensic” in referring to the doctrine of justification. Forensic means, “that God is
viewed as the ruler, lawgiver, and judge and justification is God’s declaration
as the judge that a person is indeed righteous” (Ladd, 484). The justified
person has, in Christ, entered into a new relationship with God. God now views that person as righteous
and treats him or her as such.
Justification is the pronouncement of the righteous judge that the
person in Christ is righteous; but this righteousness is a matter of
relationship and not of ethical character. Therefore the doctrine of justification has to do with the
person’s standing and his relationship to God and God’s attitude toward that
person.
In
order to understand the meaning of the verb “to justify”, a word study is
necessary. I have searched for “justify”, “justified” and “justification” in
the entire New Testament using the English Standard Version of the Bible and
then looked up these verses in the Greek New Testament. Most of the data was found in the
letters of Paul especially in Romans and Galatians; there were few in the
synoptic gospels and few in the letter of James. From the biblical data, it is very clear that the verb “to
justify” is used two different ways: “to declare righteous”, or “to prove
righteous.” None of the authors of
the NT used this verb as to mean: “to make righteous.” The contexts clearly
indicate that the one judging is not infusing any righteousness into people,
but declaring them to be not guilty and therefore acquitted. Below are some
biblical examples that illustrate this concept:
1.
Luke 7:29: “When all the people heard this, and the tax
collectors too, they justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of
John.” It is clear here that
the people and the tax collectors did not make God righteous, but rather, they
declared God to be righteous. In
other words, they attributed righteousness to God.
2.
1 Timothy 3:16: “He was manifested in the flesh,
justified by the
Spirit” (evdikaiw,qh
aorist/passive of the verb dikaioo). This simply means that Jesus’
sinless nature and deity were vindicated through the resurrection.
3.
Romans 3:4: “By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is
written, ‘That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are
judged.’” When
Paul speaks of the justification of God by his words he means that the
righteousness of God must be acknowledged by humans. It is as though God were
on trial before humanity and He is to be shown to be just by his word.
4.
Romans 8:33-34: “Who shall bring any charge against
God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the
one who died - more than that, who was raised”. Justification is the opposite of condemnation. Condemnation is not sinfulness of
character or life; it is the decree of condemnation pronounced against a guilty
person. “Similarly justification
is not subjective ethical righteousness; it is the decree of acquittal from all
guilt and issues in freedom from all condemnation and punishment” (Ladd, 487).
5.
2 Corinthians 3:9 “For if there was glory in the
ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in
glory.” Similar to Romans 8:33, this verse further illustrates the forensic
concept of righteousness through making a contrast between the dispensation of
condemnation and the dispensation of righteousness.
6.
2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin
who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness (dikaiosu,nh) of God.” This verse states that Jesus took upon himself the
sin of the world; and at the same time it asserts that he knew no sin. Ladd explains
the significance of this concept as follows:
His
“sinfulness” must then be a forensic sinfulness by virtue of which he stood in
the place of sinners, bearing their sin, their guilt, and the doom of their
sin. In the same way those who are
in him have become the righteousness of God. Righteousness in this context is not an ethical subjective
righteousness any more than the
“sinfulness” of Christ is ethical subjective sinfulness; it means rather that
individual in Christ now stands in the position of a righteous person and
sustains a relationship to God that only the righteous can enjoy. That person is in fact in terms of his
or her relationship to God a righteous person (Ladd, 487).
After surveying the above
verses through studying how the verb “dikaioo” is used, we can easily arrive to
the conclusion that the doctrine of justification means to “vindicate” and
“declare righteous.” In other words, “God has pronounced the eschatological
verdict of acquittal over the person of faith in the present, in advance of the
final judgment”. The resulting
righteousness is not infused leading to ethical perfection; it is
“righteousness” in the sense that God no longer counts a person’s sin against
him or her. In the same manner, when Christ was made to be sin God did not
treat him as if he were a sinner.
Rather, “God made the (ethically) sinless one to be a sinner
(forensically).” Thus the
individual in Christ is actually righteous, not ethically but forensically, in
terms of the person’s relationship to God. Righteousness is both an ethical quality and a relationship;
The latter has to do with justification; the former with sanctification.
We
understood from the previous section that justification means to “declare
righteous” but what does this really mean in more practical terms? God’s legal declaration of
justification involves two important aspects: First it means that God declared
that we do not owe any payment for our sins. We have no penalty to pay for sin, including past, present
and future sins. This means that we are not subject to any charge of guilt of
condemnation because God has forgiven our sins. Grudem explains this concept very well by stating that the idea
of full forgiveness of sins is prominent when Paul discusses justification by
faith alone in Romans 4. Paul
quotes David as pronouncing a blessing on one “to whom God reckons
righteousness apart from works.”
He then recalls how David said, “Blessed are those whose iniquities are
forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord
will not reckon his sin” (Romans 4:6-8).
David wrote in Psalms 103.12 “As far as the east is from the west, so
far does he remove our transgressions from us.” Therefore, justification clearly involves the forgiveness of
sins.
But
if God just declared us to be forgiven from our sins that would not really
resolve our problem. It would
simply make us morally neutral before God. We would be in the state that Adam was in before he fell in
the garden of Aden. Before Adam fell, he was not guilty before God, but at the
same time, he did not earn a record of righteousness before God. Therefore, the first aspect of
justification-the forgiveness of sins- is not enough to earn us favor with God.
We must move from a state of moral neutrality to a state of having positive
righteousness before God, “the righteousness of a life of perfect obedience to
him.” This leads to the second aspect of justification. God must declare us not to be merely
neutral in his sight by forgiving our past sins, but actually to be righteous
in his sight. In fact, “he must
declare us to have the merits of perfect righteousness before him” (Grudem,
725). As a solution to our need
for righteousness, Paul writes in Romans 3:21: “But now the righteousness of
God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the
Prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in
Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Paul also writes in Romans 4:3 quoting Genesis 15:6 the
following: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as
righteousness.” We find similar language in the Old Testament also: He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he
has covered me with the robe of righteousness" (Isaiah 61:10). Therefore, justification is an act of God declaring
the sinful person as righteous by forgiving his sins and proclaiming that this
person is now righteous in his sight.
But
the questions that need to be answered are the following: On what basis does God declare a sinful
person as righteous? How can a sinful human be righteous in the sight of God?
What about the penalty of his or her sins? Where is the justice of God? Simply
put: how can we reconcile the doctrine of justification with the justice of
God? The Bible teaches, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 3:23). Therefore, God cannot simply declare us
righteous by forgiving our sins without somehow the payment for our sins is
paid which is death. Therefore, a
death penalty must be paid in order for us to obtain justification. It is God
who sets the rules. He is the ultimate judge whose verdict is that death is a
just payment for sin. Following
the law will not work. The bible
says: “No human being will be justified in his sight by the works of the law
since through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20).
The Law, rather than bringing justification, brings condemnation since
it is through the Law sin is defined.
The ground of justification is not obedience to the Law, but rather, it
is the death of Christ on the cross.
His death is both the supreme manifestation of God’s love for sinners
and the ground on which justification is secured as we read in Romans 5:9: “We
are now justified by his blood” (Romans 5:9). The shedding of Christ’s blood which points to his
sacrificial death, provides for the penalty of sins and thus the means of
satisfying the justice of God on the ground of which acquittal or justification
can be applied upon humans as a free gift. Therefore for the first aspect of
justification, God is able to forgive our sins because the penalty for our sins
is paid for by Christ’s sacrificial death. The second aspect of justification in which God positively
declares us righteous is through imputing Christ’s perfect righteousness to us.
Imputing Christ’s righteousness to us means that God thinks of Christ’s
righteousness as belonging to us. In other words, he reckons it to our account.
We read in the bible the following: “To one who does not work but trusts him
who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Grudem insists on the importance of
this concept by writing the following:
It is essential to
the heart of the gospel to insist that God declares us to be just or righteous
not on the basis of our actual condition of righteousness or holiness, but
rather, on the basis of Christ’s perfect righteousness, which he thinks of as
belonging to us. This was the
heart of the difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism at the Reformation. Protestantism since the time of Martin
Luther has insisted that justification does not change us internally and it is
not a declaration based in any way on any goodness that we have in ourselves. If justification changed us internally
and then declared us to be righteous based on how good we actually were, then
(1) we could never be declared perfectly righteous in this life, because there
is always sin that remains in our lives, and (2) there would be no provision
for forgiveness of past sins (committed before we were changed internally),
therefore we could never have confidence that we are right before God. We would lose the confidence that Paul
has when he says “Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace with
God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). If we thought of justification as based on something that we
are internally we would never have the confidence to say with Paul, “There is
therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We would have no
assurance of forgiveness with God, no confidence to draw near to him. We would not be able to speak of “the
free gift of righteousness”.
In summary, the death and perfect righteous life of Christ
are the ground for our justification.
The Means for Obtaining
Justification
After
realizing that the ground for justification is the blood of Christ and his
perfect righteous life, it is easy to arrive to the conclusion that obeying the
law is not the means for obtaining justification. In fact, this is what the bible precisely teaches. Paul wrote in the epistle of Romans
that man is not justified by works but by faith in Christ:
For by works of the law no human being will be
justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. 21 But now the righteousness
of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the
Prophets bear witness to it - 22 the righteousness of God through
faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no
distinction: 23 for all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified
by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25
whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had
passed over former sins. 26
It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just
and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. 27 Then what becomes of our
boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by
the law of faith. 28 For
we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law (Romans
3:20-28).
Thus while the ground of
justification is the death of Christ, the means by which justification becomes
available to the individual is faith.
Justification is a gift received by faith and faith means accepting this
free gift which is the work of God in Christ, total reliance on it, and
complete abandonment of one’s own works as grounds for justification.
The immediate result of justification is
peace and fellowship with God through Jesus Christ: “Therefore, since we have been
justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ.” The
second result is eternal life: “So that being justified by his
grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:7).
How
can we reconcile the teaching of Paul with the teaching of James? Paul clearly
taught that justification is through faith alone and not through works. James
wrote in chapter 2:21 the following: “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he
offered up his son Isaac on the altar.” If we continue with our word study, we come to the second meaning of
the verb “to justify.” The verb
“to justify” could also mean “to prove” or “show” righteousness (BDAG, TDNT).
Below are few Biblical examples to illustrate this point:
1.
Luke 16:15: “And he said to them, "You
are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For
what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.” The Pharisees here were not going around making legal
declarations that they were not guilty before God, but rather, that they were attempting
to show themselves righteous to others by their outward deeds (Grudem, 731,
TDNT, 215).
2.
Luke 10:29: “But he, desiring to justify
himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" The lawyer was not attempting to give a legal
pronouncement about himself that he was not guilty in God’s sight; rather, he
wanted to “show himself righteous” before others who were listening. In other
words, he wanted to “vindicate himself
in the debate” (TDNT, 215).
3.
Luke 7:35: “Yet wisdom is justified by all her children." Again, the meaning is that wisdom is ‘shown to be
righteous’ or ‘proven to be righteous’ instead of ‘declared to be righteous’.
4.
James 2:21:
“Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son
Isaac on the altar?” Here, James refers to the fact that Abraham is proven
righteous through his works. Our
interpretation of this verse does not just depend on the second meaning of “to
justify” as “to show or prove righteous.”
But really context here supports this meaning. Grudem explains:
James here is referring to something later in
Abraham’s life, the story of the sacrifice of Issac, which occurred in Genesis
22. This is long after the time
recorded in Genesis 15:6 where Abraham believed God “and he reckoned it to him
as righteousness.” Yet this
earlier incident at the beginning of Abraham’s covenantal relationship with God
is the one that Paul quotes and repeatedly refers to in Romans 4. Paul is talking about the time God
justified Abraham once for all, reckoning righteousness to him as a result of
his faith in God. But James is
talking about something far later, after Abraham had waited many years for the
birth of Isaac, and then after Isaac had grown old enough to carry wood up the
mountain for a sacrifice. At that
point Abraham was “shown to be righteous” by his works and in that sense James
says that Abraham was justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac
(Grudem, 731).
In conclusion, James was teaching about the justification of
an individual before men to be proven righteous while Paul taught justification
before a holy God which leads to salvation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, from the biblical data we have, we can
formulate the doctrine of Justification
as follows:
a.
Justification is a
legal declaration of ‘righteous’ and does not indicate some type of infusion of
righteousness. This is proven by the usage of the verb dikaioo throughout the
New Testament.
b.
The ground of
justification is the blood of Jesus “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by
his blood”, “so one act of righteousness leads to justification
and life for all men.” The ground
of justification is not obedience to the Law; it is the death of Christ. His death is the ground on which
justification is secured.
c.
The tool or mean to
obtain it is faith in Jesus Christ “…not justified by works but through faith in Jesus
Christ”
d.
Done through God’s
grace. “So that
being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of
eternal life.”
e.
Cannot be done by acts
of men. “Yet we
know that a person is not justified by works of the law.”
f.
Immediate result is
Peace and fellowship with God through Jesus Christ “Therefore, since we have been justified
by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
g.
Results in eternal life
“So that being
justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal
life.”
h.
Man is proven or shown
righteous by works. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his
son Isaac on the altar?”
Reference
-George
Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
-Wayne Grudem,
Systematic Theology, Inter-Varsity Press.
-Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT),
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
-BDAG, Software version: BibleWorks 6