How Can I Be Right with God? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

We tend to evaluate ourselves by our own standard, hoping that God will grade us all on a curve. If we think He can find someone who’s more wicked than we are, we take solace or refuge in that, and we don’t focus on the standard by which we are to be judged.

Luther embodied the struggle of every Christian to have peace with God, and in his victory we too can see the path to hope that is found in Christ.

If we tie together these two ways of using the term forensic—one with respect to the law courts and one with respect to public speaking—we get close to the way the term forensic is used in theology, that is, with respect to legal declarations. Thus, forensic justification means that justification rests upon some kind of legal declaration. In the simplest terms, that means that justification takes place when God declares a person to be just in His sight. If God says, “You are just,” then you have been justified.

In simple terms, what Luther meant is this: The good news of the gospel is that we don’t have to wait until we become perfectly righteous in ourselves before God will consider us and declare us righteous or accept us in His sight as justified people. God makes a provision for justification whereby people who are sinners, while they are still sinners, can be reconciled to Him and declared just in His sight. So Luther’s point was that justification by faith alone means that a person who is justified is in one sense perfectly righteous and in another sense still a sinner.

We are not miraculously changed into sinless people; we are sinners in the process of becoming sanctified.

The first is that our sin must be punished, which Christ’s death on the cross accomplished. But all that did was get us back to a state of innocence, like Adam before the fall. We would still have no positive righteousness to bring before God. So the second thing that is required to effect our redemption is that there must be a provision of positive righteousness for God to declare us righteous. That’s why Christ came into the world born as a baby, born under the law, in order to become the new Adam and to live His entire life in perfect, active obedience before God. For Jesus to qualify as our Savior, He had to live a sinless life in addition to dying an atoning death.

God imputes righteousness to people apart from works.

In justification, two kinds of imputation take place: there is the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us and the imputation of our sin to Christ.

In simple language, God counts the righteousness of Christ for us, and does not count our own sins against us.

The only way God can be exonerated for pouring His wrath upon Christ is if Christ really, truly took upon Himself our sin, transgressions, and guilt. The taking of our guilt upon Himself involves an imputation. When Christ went to the cross, He was saying to the Father, “Father, count their sins against Me. Let Me stand in their place and act on behalf of My people as their vicarious representative. Lay the sins of Your people, O God, upon Me.” This involved a legal transfer, a reckoning—an imputation.

But the metaphor that Scripture uses is a covering—a cloak is put over our sin. Our sin is covered by the righteousness of Christ, the merit that He earned by His perfectly obedient life. When God looks at us, He sees the righteousness of Christ; the Bible says Christ is “our righteousness” (Jer. 33:16). The ground or basis on which we are declared just by God is the justice, righteousness, or merit of Christ.

No wonder the New Testament describes Christ’s coming in judgment as it does: people who are not ready will cry out for the mountains to fall upon them and the hills to cover them. What we need more than anything else when we stand before God is a covering—something that will blot out our transgressions. That’s what the gospel promises to give to all who believe: the covering of the righteousness of Christ.

The Roman Catholic Church historically has distinguished between two kinds of sin: mortal and venial. Venial sin is really sin, but it’s less serious than mortal sin, which is so egregious, so heinous, so destructive, so wicked that it kills something: the infused grace of justification. That’s why, if a person commits mortal sin, he loses his justification and has to be justified again.

The Council of Trent defined penance as “the second plank” of justification for those who have made “shipwreck of their souls.” It allows someone who has committed a mortal sin to receive a new infusion of the justifying grace of Christ and His righteousness, which keeps that person in good standing before God unless or until he again commits mortal sin, for which he can receive penance again, and so on.

In the Reformed view, the righteousness of Christ is imputed by faith to the believer.

What Luther and Calvin meant by that phrase was this: When the New Testament speaks of our being justified by faith, the instrumental cause of our justification—the tool or means by which we are justified—is not the sacraments but faith and faith alone. Faith is the instrument by which we are linked to the righteousness of Christ. It’s the conduit through which His righteousness is given to us. The minute someone has faith, he receives through it the righteousness of Christ and is justified.

Luther referred to the righteousness that justifies us as extra nos, meaning “outside of us.” He meant that the righteousness that justifies us is not our own. He used another Latin phrase to capture this idea: alienum iustitsia, which means “alien righteousness.” When Luther said that the justice or righteousness by which we are justified is an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is extra nos, he meant that the righteousness that justifies the Christian, and the only righteousness that could ever justify a Christian, is the righteousness that inherently belongs to Jesus. It’s given to us and counted for us, but properly speaking, it is Jesus’ own righteousness.

For the Roman Catholic Church, the justice by which we are justified comes from Christ initially, but it becomes ours as we cooperate with it and it becomes inherent within us so that it is properly our own justice, our own righteousness. Then it isn’t alien or extra; it’s inner, a righteousness that is in us, not one that is apart from us.

One beloved hymn of the church is “Rock of Ages” by Augustus Toplady. A verse in that hymn says, “Nothing in my hand I bring—simply to the cross I cling / Naked, come to Thee for dress; helpless, look to Thee for grace / Foul, I, to the fountain, fly—wash me, Savior, or I die.” This hymn directs our attention to where we must put our reliance and confidence for salvation. It must not rest in our own activity, performance, or merit—rather, our confidence must look to Christ, who alone has sufficient merit for us, and whose righteousness is perfect and freely given to all who put their trust in Him. The only merit that we bring to the judgment seat of God of our own is demerit.

The first aspect of saving faith is notitia. It has to do simply with the content of faith, what you believe. How many times have you heard someone say, “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere.” Maybe you’ve even said it. What a ghastly thing, to imagine that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere! Such a notion is antithetical to the Christian faith. At its heart, Christianity is a body of doctrines that were proclaimed to the world, first by Christ and then His Apostles, that we are called to embrace and to believe. It matters what we believe, and it matters eternally.

That brings up the second essential element of saving faith, which the Reformers called assensus. This has to do with agreement or intellectual assent. For Luther and the Reformers, to be justified by faith meant first that you must have the information—notitia—and second, you have to believe that the information is true—assensus.

Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church once observed that, if you have only notitia and assensus, all that does is qualify you to be a demon. The demons were the first to recognize the true character of Jesus, but they weren’t justified. They didn’t have saving faith, because the critical element is called fiducia, which has to do with trust. So this element of saving faith, so necessary for justification to take place, is one of personal trust and reliance.

Many who would say, “Jesus is the Son of God, and did all these wonderful things,” when it gets right down to it, are relying on their own performance. “I’ve tried to live a good life”; “I gave money to those in need”; “I went to church.” The object of their faith is themselves, whereas the biblical object of faith is Christ and Him alone. We must put our trust in Him and rely on Him exclusively to be our Redeemer.

If I have to answer that question, I only know of one solution to guilt: to have it forgiven. I can’t make up for it, deny it, or escape it. My guilt is real, and it’s pressing on my life. This is a predicament that we all experience.

Scarlet is an exceedingly deep and rich shade of the color red. Sin is like a stain that no amount of scrubbing can remove, yet God promises to get it cleaner than we can imagine, so clean that you’d never know the stain was there.

Often the objection is raised against the resurrection of Christ that it’s simply impossible. One thing that we know for sure is that, when a person dies, he stays dead; it’s just not credible to put your confidence in the resurrection, because a resurrection is impossible. Yet Peter declared that it was not possible for Christ to stay dead—He was a sinless man, and death is the punishment for sin. It was not possible for death to hold Christ in its grip for any length of time.