Amen. Our scripture today comes from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and only Galatians this morning, beginning in chapter 2 at verse 11. If you’ll turn with me, please. Paul writes, ‘But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles, but when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.’
‘But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you have given us the law, a law which we are meant to obey and to follow and to keep, but we are not able to. We thank you that you did send us one who was able to keep the law perfectly—your Son, Jesus. And that by your mercy and by your grace, through the faith you have given us in him, we may believe and know that we are changed and alive with him because he has justified us and our faith causes us to receive this justification. Help us to understand your words and what you mean for us to believe and know concerning you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
R.C. Sproul commonly quoted a proverb that’s attributed to Martin Luther: that justification by faith alone is the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls. And please understand that without this justification, there is no gospel. There is no good news, for all that remains is enslavement to our sin and condemnation under the dictates of the law—God’s holy law—a standard which no mere man could ever hope to live up to or satisfy.
Now, we Reformed folks certainly do enjoy our five solas, and it is here within Paul’s epistle to the Galatians that Martin Luther rediscovered the key to the gospel: justification by faith alone. The gospel which Paul has defined for us—that Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil age according to the will of our God and Father. And this is something which truly and logically may only ever be understood as an act of cosmic grace—our eternal salvation being enacted upon the cross of Jesus Christ and happening solely by the impetus of God as an act of his purest mercy; especially for those of us who were unborn in 30 A.D. who were still foreknown in the mind of our sovereign Creator. None of you all were here then, right? Okay, didn’t think so. Just checking.
Logically, there is nothing that we could ever do in our lives now to possibly merit this great sacrificial offering by Jesus Christ, God the Son, or ever do to deserve this wonderful benefit already established on our behalf. All that we might now try to do is live in a manner worthy of God because we have been given this gift of divine justification.
Now, justification by faith is a subject which we will touch on repeatedly as we continue to study this epistle of Paul’s, because it is critical to the understanding of our salvation. But today, there are three main things in this passage we are going to emphasize: our sinful human nature and need for justification, what it means to be justified, and the resulting transformation which becomes the consequence of our being justified.
When Paul confronted Peter, he declared, ‘We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners,’ or as the old King James says, ‘We who are Jews by nature,’ suggesting that in their minds there is a fundamental difference between them at the core—something within our very nature. Now, biologically, we are all one race—the human race, period. But under the old covenant, there was an implicit understanding of two separate races: the Hebrew, or Israel, and the Gentiles, who were obviously only different in their ethnicity—the being all of the other nations. But it is still a critical difference, for Israel is the people of God, regardless of a person’s blood ancestry.
Remember that at the time of the Exodus, many of the people there in Egypt came to fear the Lord because of the wonders that he had done. They developed faith in the Lord, and so when Pharaoh commanded Israel’s release, a mixed multitude also went up with them, along with very much livestock—both flocks and herds. Mixed peoples—people who are not all the biological descendants of Jacob—left Egypt as part of this people to be called Israel. They all became part of God’s special chosen people, for ‘You are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.’ They became a kingdom of priests.
Israel, God’s people, from the very beginning, has always consisted of more than just the descendants of Jacob; Gentiles have always been grafted into it. After Mount Sinai, after being established as heirs of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Hebrew people were set apart, divided away from all the Gentile peoples, a division symbolized outwardly by circumcision—the tiniest piece of flesh cut off from the greater body and physically removed. Just as this small ethnic group and people were separated from the greater body of Adam’s descendants, the purity of their ethnic separation was something so important that they were warned and commanded to never marry or mingle their blood with other peoples.
For whenever they did, they were led into idolatry, wickedness, faithlessness, and thus defiled the Lord’s treasured possession, so that they were exiled from the promised land as a divine punishment. When they eventually returned, and the priest Ezra understood that those now in the land had once again violated the Torah and intermarried with the Gentile peoples in the land, repeating the sin of their ancestors, he led all the Jews in a great act of repentance, and thus they all divorced their Gentile wives so as to preserve their ethnic purity—a circumstance largely preserved through the days of Jesus and the apostles and in many areas of the world until this modern day.
So, as we consider their ancient perspective, it is important for us to recognize that in their minds, the difference in nature between Jews and Gentiles was as great as it is between a cat and a goldfish. They could not be more different.
Paul, in asking Peter, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like a Jew?’ accuses him of something as outrageous and impossible as a tiger demanding a leopard change its spots. Paul accuses him of hypocrisy. If Peter, a decidedly Jewish man, would also act like the Gentiles—previously eating with them, eating the same food as them, living, working, fellowshipping, and worshiping the Lord with them—regularly breaking Jewish laws and traditions, then how could he suddenly stop and now force these Gentiles to submit to the rules which he himself had forsaken?
Furthermore, by this same accusation, Paul was demanding Peter to ask of himself: how could he even return to the Jewish rules that he had already forsaken because of his confidence in the finished work of Christ? Paul’s accusation of Peter is firmly grounded in the gospel understanding that neither our nature nor our nurture leads a person to salvation; that it is only by the grace of God and faith in Jesus Christ that anyone may be saved.
Now, ordinarily, when Paul talks about a person’s nature, the Greek word he uses is sarx, or flesh, and by it, he often means the sinful human nature—something that is shared in common between both the Jew and Gentile—something that is equally condemnable under the law because of our shared common ancestry in Adam. Here, though, this nature of the Jew that he references—their physiques being righteous as opposed to being sinful—is an element which is plainly core and fundamental to a person. It is the fundamental state of being and something which he does not deny to those who are ethnically Gentile, but is something which he expects of someone who is born among the chosen people of God.
Paul will go on to write about this later in his letter to the Romans: ‘For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.’
He’s saying that the Jews who had the law but could not keep it were no better than the Gentiles who did not have the law yet somehow managed to keep it. He’s saying that a person’s knowledge of the law or lack thereof could neither affect nor help them to become justified before the Lord, but that those who are already justified by the Lord will obey him and keep his law according to the naturally accepted order of things.
It is only by a person’s obedience to the law—which they cannot achieve except by divine miracle and assistance, or by some other happy accident—that a person might be justified by the law. Neither the Jew nor the Greek is by nature better or worse than the other, and neither is more apt to be justified than the other. Just as the tiger and the leopard are both carnivorous felines, all descendants of Adam are, by our nature, equally sinners in need of God’s grace and incapable of justifying ourselves.
We are the same kind of human animal—either Jew or Gentile—who may only be saved and justified in the very same manner as the other. A position which Peter had been converted to by the time of the Jerusalem council when he said, ‘Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, just as they will,’ declaring that the Jews will be saved in the very same manner as the Gentiles—who are equally sinners. Instead of the Gentiles being saved in the same manner as the Jews, there is therefore no Jewish priority to justification.
So regarding salvation, Jesus Christ—our justification by faith in him—there is no added intrinsic benefit in being a Jew, nor is there a greater natural detriment from being a Gentile by nature, as both are still children of wrath. Our nature does not positively impact our standing before the Lord.
So next, knowing that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, and that a person’s birth as either a Jew or Gentile is completely irrelevant to their justification, we must next ask the question: What does it actually mean to be justified? What is this justification?
The core word that Paul uses here is the Greek dekhios. The recorded history of its Grecian secular usage goes back to the 5th century B.C. to the philosophies and teachings of both Plato and Aristotle, who considered this to be a moral and civic virtue relating to the observance of the civil law— the fulfillment of one’s duty to family and community and the core legislative principle of justice.
The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, also commonly uses the forms of dekhios to translate the forms of zadok—which is ordinarily translated as righteous in our English Bible. Paul is using it here in parallel from both of these streams of thought—of an understanding to describe the benefit which Jesus Christ has imparted to his believers; from the Greek mind where it meant that a person was virtuous by satisfying all ordinary legal norms and fulfilling their civic duty, and from the Jewish mindset where it meant that a person was virtuous, satisfying all theological norms and requirements and fulfilling their duty to the Lord.
When speaking about justification, Paul clearly connects the Jewish Torah and civil law with the divine law, superseding the civil law in moral importance while also still affirming the inherent value of the civil law stemming in application from the divine. Both the civil and divine law are to be kept by us all.
All of mankind actually believes and affirms this to be true, for by this obedience, individuals and whole peoples have always been believed to be virtuous by their peers. Even the current modern secular orthodoxy affirms the same mindset as they’re constantly trying to transform the civil system into conformity with their new laws of divinity—the humanistic divine self—with all of its inconsistent, flexible, variable, and impermanent requirements.
They do truly believe that the law must now conform to these unnatural, unreasonable, and illogical demands, or that even when it does not, yet their fantasies must carry a greater moral imperative than our civic obligation. Thus, we see things like riots being called peaceful demonstrations and harmless peaceful protesters standing up for their divinely and constitutionally affirmed rights being arrested, trampled by horses, and having their assets and pets seized by the government; or remorseless and unrepentant felons receiving early parole merely because of the amount of melanin in their skin.
All in the name of justice and equity, without any regard at all for their crimes or any concern for their victims. Biological men winning swim competitions, receiving medals, and shattering records previously held by girls—being affirmed and lauded for their bravery and courage—celebrated for their physical ability and prowess, all in the name of progress, in the name of women’s equality, and the new brand of feminism.
Or we’re tweeting a photograph of the Bible on social media—verses from the Bible on social media can now be legally considered a hate crime in Finland—or where preaching on a biblical sexual ethic is criminalized in Canada as of this past January, all because the Bible does not conform to or affirm all or any of the things promoted now as being divinely good by the alphabet soup segment of society.
Therefore, they are still, you see, following the same kind of logic of virtue even as they try to change the ancient godly standard into some new relativistic standard devoid of absolutes—an impossible standard even under their new system of doctrine. All are sinners; no one is righteous despite their near-constant virtue signaling, where one single moral failure—a single transgression in the past, in the present, or one day in the future against their changing non-standards—is a violation against their liberal and progressive orthodoxy and so condemns a person to eternal social and cultural damnation, eternal exile from society along with their annihilation from the collective memory of friends and family, with no hope of forgiveness, redemption, or restoration regardless of any apology or acts of repentance.
Adherence to the law—any law—cannot justify a person. We all break the law. Every one of us in some way, and often without any conscious intent and certainly without true repentance or remorse. Now I am reasonably certain that I was speeding on Trimble Road this morning, and I’m also certain that I will surely do so again sometime. I honestly don’t recall what the speed limit there is, as I may not always pay attention to the posted signs while I drive at what I consider and feel to be a safe speed when I’m alone on the road; or maybe I’ll just drive comparable to the traffic around me—whatever the speed—acting as if the certainty of not being caught or having others joining in my same lawlessness somehow excuses my transgression or removes my guilt.
Truthfully, I don’t think about speeding, but I should. I need to stop it. I need to repent of it. I truly am remorseful of my sin, of my sinning, as I confess to you right now. But it is not truthfully repentance when I know I will still surely speed on my way home today. Our sin grieves us, but does it grieve us enough to stop sinning? Do you now understand just how easy it is for us to break the law without our notice or consideration or intent?
Do you see how a person cannot be justified by their obedience to the law? For surely somewhere along the line they missed something or slipped up just once. Therefore, they must be condemned. Perfect law demands perfect obedience and adherence. Remember Jesus saying, ‘You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,’ echoing the Torah command: ‘You shall be holy, for the Lord your God am holy.’
No human civil law is perfect, so I’m glad because I’m not being walked out of the church this morning in handcuffs from my confession of my speeding. I’m also glad Tim Scott’s not here today! But God’s law is perfect, and we cannot hope to keep it perfectly. The law cannot justify us, but it will show us our failings.
Now, we do have some understanding into the teachings of the ancient Jewish synagogue of Jesus’s day, for all modern rabbinic Judaism is derived from the surviving teachings of the Pharisees. Consequently, Jews define three kinds of people spiritually: sadiq gamor, benoni, and rasha gamor—the righteous, the average or middling, and the wicked or unrighteous. The righteous are those who have more spiritual credits than debits. The wicked have more spiritual debits than credits, and the middling have an equal amount of both.
The ultimate goal for the Jew is for them to become a tsadik gamor, as the patriarchs are considered to have been. Yet the best any of them ever hoped for is to be an imperfect sadiq and find being a benoni the acceptable spiritual state. Now during the days of the Temple, during the days of the apostles when Temple sacrifices were still available, a Jew being benoni in general meant that on the Day of Atonement, when their sins were removed by the high priest’s sacrifice, they became declared tsadik.
However, after the destruction of the Temple, when there was no longer any sacrifice for sin available to them, being a benoni meant to them that according to the divine scales, if they’re even slightly better than not, they will continue to receive some grace from the Lord to live another year and continue to hope that one day they might be a tsadik.
You may easily see here how some of the seeds of the commonly accepted but completely heretical idea that a person will be found acceptable before the God of the Bible so long as their good deeds outweigh their bad have their erroneous interpretive roots in the theology of the Pharisees. I suppose that because they thought this doctrine seemed more fair, they thought, ‘I just want to be a sheep.’
Unfortunately, any system or concept of righteousness by our good outweighing the bad totally devalues the terrible enormity of sin. No single righteous deed can counterbalance or offset any one sinful deed or even a sinful thought. Perfect means perfect—flawless and absolute. One sin is more than enough to make a person unrighteous, just as one tiny flaw removes all aspects of flawlessness from a gemstone.
Thus, the human nature—our sinful nature—from our common ancestry in Adam cannot ever be tsadik, cannot ever be dekhios, and cannot ever earn ourselves righteousness under the law. Jews and Gentiles, both children of Adam alike, are born children of wrath and are thus wicked. But not so the offspring of the woman. Jesus Christ, who was born of the Holy Spirit, is the only righteous one and who alone lived the perfect sinless life—perfectly keeping the law.
Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the only righteous one and the only just one; therefore, only this just one may also be the justifier, for he is righteous by divine nature and thus justified by his nature—not by the law. And since he is perfectly righteous, he could not transgress the law, even as he was tempted, thereby doing what we are incapable of, so that his righteousness under the law might be able to count for us justly by our faith and trust in him, according to his mercy.
By faith in Jesus Christ, we who are unrighteous by our original nature become justified. We are declared to be righteous, and having been declared righteous, we are then made to be righteous. We are transformed; we are changed. Our sinful nature is radically and fundamentally altered, with the old sinful nature being put to death and a new righteous nature being raised to eternal life in Jesus.
This is why justification is such an important concept. It is the fulcrum point over which our eternal destination hinges. As Calvin says, ‘Justification by faith is the main hinge upon which religion turns,’ for this is truly the point where the transformation of a Christian occurs.
The consequence of our being justified by faith in Jesus Christ is that our nature is no longer what it once was. We cease to be found in the family of Adam because we have been removed by the Lord and moved into the family of Christ. Because it is here, at justification by faith, that we become the adopted children of God.
Possessing the nature of Adam because of his sin, our old nature was corrupted and sinful. But now, when we are declared righteous by God the Father on account of God the Son, then God the Holy Spirit regenerates us—granting us hearts of flesh and birthing the Spirit of Christ within our souls.
For the righteous blood of Jesus has eternally atoned for and washed away and removed all of our sins—dying under the law unjustly and undeservedly. Christ abundantly satisfied all righteousness, purchasing more spiritual credit than your eye could ever out debit. He alone is tsadik while we are rasha; thus, he alone can make us tsadik.
Only the righteous one deserving of life, by dying for the sake of the many wicked who are deserving of death, could, by being raised to life again, bring those who are dead to life with him. The sinful nature of Adam is dead within us, for it is now the righteous nature of Christ that lives in our flesh.
But if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. The Lord ordains nothing without reason. If there were any easier way to redeem his elect, then surely that would have been done. If we could save ourselves, if we could be made righteous on our own account, if we could justify ourselves as the world likes to teach us, then why don’t we?
We don’t. We can’t. No one ever has, and no one ever will. So we thank God for his grace and mercy. Jesus told Nicodemus, ‘No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.’ Even the two righteous men of the Old Testament who never died—Enoch and Elijah—did not enter the heavenly glory by their own merit or by their works, but were still brought there by the grace and power of God.
So united into Christ by our faith, we have died together to the law on the cross, so that now, still united into Christ by our faith, we have been raised from the empty tomb to live for God. The Son of God descended to earth so that all the elect children of God may ascend into heaven with him.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. If we are Christians, then we are no longer who or what we once were; we have been changed. We are new and different people. Yet the old nature still wars against the new, even though the old selves are dead, for a time their stench of their corpse remains. Thus, we continue to struggle against our sin, against our old nature.
Like the perfume of a skunk, it still just clings to us, and only time and the providence of God will see it removed entirely. And since we are justified by Christ, our nature is changed. We are no longer children of wrath but are now the children of God.
This could only have been accomplished by the grace of God, for our old nature would not allow us his righteousness. Justification is the line we are crossed from being wicked to being righteous, from being citizens of the world to being citizens of heaven, from being found in Adam to being found in Jesus Christ, from being under the impossible, burdensome old covenant of works to being in the merciful new covenant of grace.
It does not matter who or what you are—Jew or Gentile, the color of your skin, your ancestry, your sex and gender. If you have faith in Jesus Christ alone, if the Lord has given you this belief, then know and believe that you are justified. So, by grace, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who loves you and who gave himself for you and your sins, is rescuing you and us from this evil age, and he will give us peace. Amen.