The Gospel as Center by D. A. Carson

Author:D. A. Carson [Feedbooks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1867-6
Publisher: Crossway

The Basis for Justification: Jesus’ Perfect Life and Sacrificial Death

On what legal basis does God grant the gift of his righteousness? The Bible teaches that God “justifies the wicked” (Rom. 4:5). But if we are in fact wicked, how can he declare us to be what we are not? And how can he justify the wicked without being considered wicked himself? It would be an outrage for a righteous God simply to overlook or to excuse sin. If he intends to justify sinners, therefore, he must have some legitimate judicial basis for doing so. “Justification is not a synonym for amnesty,” writes John Stott,

which strictly is pardon without principle, a forgiveness which overlooks—even forgets—wrongdoing and declines to bring it to justice. No, justification is an act of justice, of gracious justice. . . . When God justifies sinners, he is not declaring bad people to be good, or saying that they are not sinners after all. He is pronouncing them legally righteous, free from any liability to the broken law, because he himself in his Son has borne the penalty of their law-breaking.15

How then does God maintain his righteousness while at the same time justifying the ungodly? The answer to this theological problem is that God justifies sinners on the basis of the perfect life and sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. To say that Jesus lived a perfect life is to say that he kept the law of God in all its perfection, without ever committing even one little transgression. “He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father,” The Gospel Coalition writes in its doctrinal statement “The Redemption of Christ.” This is in keeping with Scripture, which says, “he committed no sin” (1 Pet. 2:22). Jesus lived the righteous life that God requires.

Furthermore, when we receive Jesus by faith, his righteousness counts for us, as if we ourselves had lived the righteous life that God requires. To quote again from The Gospel Coalition, in its Confessional Statement, “By his perfect obedience [Jesus] satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God.”

By virtue of his perfect life, when Jesus died on the cross he offered a perfect sacrifice for our sins, and this too is part of the basis for our justification: we “are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:24–25). It is by his life-blood that Jesus secured our justification. As Paul goes on to say in Romans 5:9, “We have now been justified by his blood.” There is no justification without crucifixion. The gospel thus grounds the gift of saving righteousness in the suffering death of Jesus Christ. John Stott writes:

God’s saving work was achieved through the bloodshedding, that is, the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. . . . The death of Jesus was the atoning sacrifice because of which

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