05 Did Jesus Die for Nothing? (Galatians 2:11-21)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for joining me today for the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we'll be studying Galatians chapter 2, verses 11 through 21, and this is the fifth talk in my series on the book of Galatians. Lecture notes for today's talk are on the link below this podcast. You can also find them on my website, Wednesdayintheword.com slash Galatians 5. Thanks so much for joining me. Well, today we're going to finish the second chapter of Galatians, just to review where we are and what's going on in this letter. Paul wrote this letter to the churches in Galatia. These are churches he founded on his first missionary journey. There are two versions of the gospel spreading throughout these churches, and they conflict, and it matters. The difference between the two gospels is how you obtain salvation. A group called the Judaizers have come to town and said it's not enough to believe in Jesus. You also must live like a Jew and keep the laws of Moses. They have argued that Paul neglected to tell them that because it would be an obstacle for them coming to faith. Paul has countered that. He's argued that he is an apostle chosen by God, that he received his calling by an encounter with the risen Lord, and he learned the gospel directly from Jesus. He didn't make it up, he didn't invent it, and no other human being taught it to him. He's also argued that even though he learned the gospel independently from the other apostles, when he had a chance to compare with them, the other apostles added nothing to his gospel, nor did they take anything away, and that they were teaching the exact same thing. Our passage today is quite a switch from last week. Up to this point, we've been reviewing Paul's biography as he has defended both the authenticity of his gospel and his authority to preach it. Last week we were talking about Paul visiting Peter, James, and John in Jerusalem and receiving the right hand of fellowship. This week Peter is visiting Paul in Antioch, and Paul opposes Peter to his face. We have two apostles, two godly and wise believers, two men who knew what it was to be forgiven great sin through Christ. They were both given a specific office and an authority to preach the gospel. They were both known for their leadership, and they were both mightily used by God. And now we find them in open public conflict. Well, that type of conflict is not supposed to happen in the church, especially at the apostolic level. And if it does happen, we're supposed to sweep it under the rug or hide it in the closet. We're not supposed to broadcast it in a letter to multiple churches. So what's going on with this little story? Those are the questions we're going to try to answer today. We're going to look at each apostle in turn and ask three questions. What did he do? Why did he do it? And what resulted from his actions. Then we're going to look at why Paul would air this disagreement in public and what he expected the Galatians to learn from it, and therefore what we're supposed to learn from it. I think Paul mentions this encounter as part of his defense of his authority and his gospel. Overall, his point is Peter and I are completely on the same page. I had to rebuke him when he wasn't living like what we both know to be true, and he agreed with me. But I, Paul, could rebuke him because we have the same view of the gospel. So this incident serves two purposes. It furthers Paul's claim that he and the apostles teach the same gospel, and it also begins introducing this issue of do Gentile believers need to keep the law. I'm going to read the whole section and then we'll go back and walk through it. And remember, in this section, Cephas is the Aramaic name for the Apostle Peter. So this is Galatians 2, 11 through 21. 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 we, 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. Before we tackle the passage, let's try to figure out when this event took place. Paul doesn't give us the exact dates or times, so we have to try to put all the puzzle pieces together. The dating scheme that makes the most sense to me is that this episode occurs in about 48 AD, shortly before Paul writes this letter. Paul and Barnabas have returned from their first missionary journey where they founded these churches. Sometime after their return, Jewish believers from Jerusalem come to Antioch and stir up this debate. It's probably also during this visit that the event with Peter occurs. The debate becomes so fierce that they call the Jerusalem Council, which is recorded in Acts 15, and we looked at that in a previous podcast. And at that council, they come to an official and formal resolution that Paul is right. So I think the sequence of events is Paul and Barnabas return to Antioch from their first journey. Peter comes to visit, then the Judaizers visit and start the debate. Paul rebukes Peter. Then Paul hears the Judaizers are also troubling the Galatian churches and writes this letter. And then later, probably in the same year, they call the Council of Jerusalem. Now, as I said, to tackle this passage, we're going to look at each apostle and ask three questions. What did he do? Why did he do it? And what resulted from his actions? First we're going to look at Peter. So this is two eleven through thirteen. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood contemned. 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. Cephas is another name for Peter, it's his Aramaic name. He's also called Simon Peter, so sometimes you'll see him referred to as Simon. It's all the same man. When Peter first came to Antioch, he ate with the Gentile believers. The verb tense in verse twelve is he was eating, implying that this had been a regular practice or a part of his habit. I suspect the meals probably included ordinary daily meals as well as the Lord's Supper. Then a Jewish delegation from Jerusalem arrives in Antioch, and Peter stopped his practice of eating with Gentiles. These men are probably part of the Judaizers. They were part of the group that's teaching that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, which would include all the dietary laws. This phrase from James is a shorthand for from Jerusalem. It does not mean that James believed what they believed. We know James did not share the view of the Judaizers because of last week's passage where Paul and James were in complete agreement on the gospel, and we know Paul opposes this view of the Judaizers. And we also know from the results of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. The men are from James in the sense that they are both from Jerusalem, but James doesn't share their point of view. And we use these phrases today. Somebody might come to visit your church and say, Oh, I'm from Rick Warren's church, or I'm from John MacArthur's church. And neither of those pastors may have ever met these visitors. It doesn't mean that they share the same views, it means they are coming from the same place. So these Jews come to Antioch and they find Paul and Barnabas and Peter mixing with the Gentiles. They've been visiting each other's houses and sharing meals with each other, and that ruffles their Jewish feathers. They condemn the Jews for this kind of mixing, and in response, Peter stops socializing with the Gentiles. So that's what Peter did. Why did he do it? Well, to answer that question, we have to make sure we know what Peter believed. Prior to this event, God had given Peter a direct special revelation on this very subject, which is recorded in Acts 10. Peter is praying when he has a vision where the sky opens up and a sheet filled with all kinds of animals appears, and God tells him to eat, and Peter refuses, saying he has never eaten anything unclean. I'll pick up the story in Acts 10, 15 and 16. And again a voice came to him a second time, What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy. And this happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky. So after this vision where Peter is told no longer consider these things unclean, Gentile messengers appear at Peter's gate and tell him that God has appeared to them and told them to come. Now the dietary laws were so strict that it would have been impossible for Peter to enter a Gentile home, let alone to eat with them. Nevertheless, Peter goes to the home of Cornelius, stays with Cornelius, and preaches the gospel to him. And we have recorded what Peter learned from all this. Peter says in Acts 10, 34 and 35, and opening his mouth, Peter said, I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him. So we can conclude from that episode alone that Peter believed the rules separating Jews and Gentiles no longer apply. And then we know from 212 he's been eating with the Gentiles, and we know that Peter and Paul agree with each other because of the visit recorded in Acts 11, where they compare what they are teaching and find it to be the same. Peter agrees with Paul, what's he doing now? The clues are in Paul's speech, and we're going to look at that in a minute, and they suggest that Peter has not changed his theology, and Paul never accuses Peter of having the wrong gospel. Paul accuses Peter of hypocrisy. Peter's offense is not living what he believes to be true. His action was wrong, but his theology was correct. He didn't withdraw from fellowship with the Gentiles because he had changed his theological mind and thought law keeping was necessary. He changed his behavior because he feared what this Jewish delegation would think of him. He didn't want to look any different than the other Jews. Peter still believed the gospel, but he failed to practice it. Now, lest we be too hard on Peter, it's easy to see how he could rationalize this choice. Here are these visitors, they're from out of town, they're clearly shocked, maybe upset by this socializing with the Gentiles. They think the problem is because the Gentiles aren't living like Jews, and if the Gentiles would just start keeping kosher, then this problem would be solved. Peter could say to himself, these visitors aren't mature enough yet. They don't understand the freedom we have in Christ, but they're so upset they aren't going to listen to us while they consider us unclinging from eating with Gentiles, so I'd better stop eating with Gentiles while they're here, and then maybe they'll listen to me. And Paul gives advice very similar to that in Romans 14 over the issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul basically says there, put your freedom aside when it's a stumbling block to a weaker brother. But there's a big difference in these issues. In the Romans 14 issue, the truth of the gospel is not at stake, but here it is. This is a public heated dispute over the gospel itself. Everyone knows this debate is going on. This is not a private theoretical discussion in the halls of academia. This is a public dispute over how are we justified? What must we do to be pleasing to God? So this is a foundational truth of the gospel. Peter's actions here are going to further confuse the debate. While being considerate of the Judaizers, Peter is forgetting the impact of his actions on the Gentiles. To the Gentiles, Peter's actions look like he's voting with the Judaizers. The Judaizers are sending the wrong message about the gospel. They're claiming Gentiles must keep the law to be pleasing to God. And when Peter starts acting like them, it looks like he is taking their side against what Paul and Barnabas have been teaching. And Paul says, Peter, you're not assessing the situation rightly. Your actions suggest that you agree with the Judaizers, but I know for a fact you don't agree with them. If you concede and start behaving like they want you to behave, then everyone in Antioch is going to think you now agree with them. Stop pretending to go along with them when you don't really agree with them, because your actions are confusing the other believers around you. This is what he says in 213, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. So why even Barnabas? Barnabas has been named as being on Paul's side in this doctrinal dispute. He's not a casual onlooker who may have been confused. He was an active participant in the debate with Paul. But apparently the scorn and contempt from the Judaizers and the pressure to conform to them became so great that even Barnabas gave in. So to review for Peter, before these people from Jerusalem came, he was eating with the Gentiles. After they came, he stopped eating with the Gentiles. And even if he reasoned that he should appease the Judaizers to try to get them to listen to him, his actions were too confusing to the Gentiles and the other Jews. Now let's look at Paul. We'll start in fourteen. 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? So Paul publicly opposes Peter because Peter's conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel. This is a public debate, it's a widely known dispute, and so Paul opposes Peter publicly. Paul didn't hesitate out of deference for Peter's position. We already know that Paul has called Peter one of the pillars of the church. Paul knew that Peter had been appointed an apostle before him. He knew that Peter had seen the risen Lord, as Paul had, but Peter had also had the privilege of walking and talking and studying with him during his earthly ministry, a privilege Paul had not been granted. And Paul most certainly knew that Peter was one of the inner circle, one of those closest to Jesus during his time on earth. None of that deters Paul. He speaks publicly and openly to Peter. So why did he do it? Well, I don't think Paul was a troublemaker or a rabble rouser. He was not threatened by Peter's reputation, nor was he jealous or zealous to advance his own name. Paul tells us why he did it. This is 214. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, that's why he acts. The truth of the gospel is at stake. This is not a trivial theological or philosophical matter. There is a principle at stake and it is a fundamental issue of the gospel. This debate is not over what kind of music we should have or whether we should have liturgy or not, or whether we should eat meat or be vegetarians. This is a fundamental issue of salvation. Is faith in Jesus Christ enough, or must we also keep the law? Paul says Peter and the others were not walking straight. That's literally how that phrase is translated. The image is the truth of this gospel is this straight line path, and they have deviated from that straight line. They've walked off that straight step. We can imagine another context where Paul arrives in a new town and goes first to the synagogues. There he might keep kosher and avoid eating with Gentiles, but this context is different. This is a big public debate over the very issue of whether keeping kosher and not eating with Gentiles is required. It's a situation where the truth of the gospel is at stake, and so Paul takes a stand. We are not told explicitly that Peter repented following Paul's speech, but it's implied, and we know from later history that Peter did eat with Gentiles, and he did side with Paul against the Judaizers at the Council of Jerusalem. So I think we can safely conclude that Peter recognized the error of his actions and repented. Now let's look at Paul's line of reasoning because I think this is where we're really going to learn. Let's read 2.14 again. If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? Paul's saying, up until the Judaizers came, you, Peter, were living like a Gentile. You rightly felt the freedom to do that. Having done that, how can you now pressure Gentiles to live like Jews? That makes no sense. If Jews have the freedom to live like Gentiles, then why pressure the Gentiles to live like Jews? Behind that question is this idea that law-keeping never got you anywhere in terms of salvation. So why are you now requiring Gentile believers to go back to it? If you, a Jew, came to God by faith, then how can you pressure the Gentiles to try to please God by keeping the law? Basically, he's saying, remember, as a Jew, you tried keeping the law and you gave it up when you met Jesus and learned the gospel. In the gospel, you learn that law keeping could never secure your forgiveness with God, but that Christ's death and resurrection does secure your forgiveness. After learning that, that you can't please God by keeping the law, why are you asking others to try law keeping? Paul then goes on to explain what we call the doctrine of justification by faith. Here's the outline of this little section. In fifteen and sixteen, he defines justification by faith, and then in seventeen through twenty-one he explains a common objection to this doctrine and how he answers that objection. So let's look at the first bit two, fifteen and sixteen. 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 that 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. That's kind of a mouthful. Let me see if I can paraphrase it. We were born into a culture that knew God, and from birth we were taught to seek God and to obey the law. We were not born into a pagan culture which had no knowledge of God. Yet we know that no one can please God by keeping the Mosaic covenant. The law itself forces us to acknowledge that we're sinners. Trying to keep the law forces us to acknowledge how often we fail. Every time we take an offering to the temple, we're acknowledging how unworthy we are and how we failed. We know that the only way to be justified is by having faith in Jesus Christ. Therefore, even we who have been given the Mosaic covenant trust in Christ and not law keeping. This word justified is used three times in verse 16. And Paul is contrasting being justified by works of the law with being justified by faith in Christ Jesus. So we need to make sure we know what he means by justification. This will be reviewed to some of you if you've listened to a lot of my podcasts. But there are always new listeners. Welcome. And so I'm going to go over it again. Before the fall, we are in fellowship with God. You could picture that as we're standing face to face with him. The problem is we rebelled, and in our rebellion, we metaphorically turn our back on God. Our rebellion has two very serious consequences. The first is we now experience death in all its forms. So death is more than just the end of our physical existence. It's all the strife, the bitterness, the brokenness, futility, corruption, evil, pain, anger, frustration, wars, office politics, the fact that everything is broken and futile and falls apart despite our best efforts. That's all death. And we experience all of that because we rebelled against God. God is the only source of life. When we cut ourselves off from Him, we lose life and experience death. But the second more serious consequence is that our rebellion was wrong. It's not just an unfortunate event, it was morally and legally wrong. And God responds to our rebellion in wrath and metaphorically turns his back on us. That is, he, as Paul says in Romans, he hands us over to death. He puts us in the custody of death. And that is devastating because being under God's wrath, if we metaphorically turn back to face him, it does no good because his back is turned to us, metaphorically, and we have to solve this problem of our guilt. There is a legal and judicial penalty that must be paid. So when we rebel against God, the natural consequence of that rebellion is sin, death, and evil, both in ourselves and in our world. The judicial decree against us, the legal consequence against us is the wrath of God. Not just will we experience death, we are now slaves of it. We have no way to get out, and we have to pay this debt to justice because we are guilty. Justification, then, is the forgiveness of our debt to justice, which qualifies us to once again receive God's life. So to be justified is to be in a position where God's justice is satisfied. We have to solve the problem of his wrath and our guilt. The question on the table is how do you get there? How do you satisfy God's justice? It's clear we must be justified if we're going to find any kind of life at all. How do we obtain it? And Paul claims if justification comes by works of the law, then no one will be justified. Because we have this other problem. We're sinners now. The law requires us to be perfectly holy and righteous, but we're not. We are trapped in our sins. The only way we could keep the law is if we were holy and righteous creatures. The only way we can that can happen is if God makes us holy and God is not making us holy because he has metaphorically turned his back on us. He's not offering that gift anymore because we're under his wrath. When our kids were little and we were teaching Sunday school, we explained this concept to them by saying, we have broken choosers. The thing inside us that makes us choose chocolate over vanilla, ice cream over broccoli, or good over evil is broken. It chooses the wrong thing. It no longer recognizes what is truly good and what's not. Because our chooser is broken, we can't just choose to be good. It's broken. We can't fix it. Only God can fix it. Only God can give us what's necessary to keep the law because only God can fix our broken choosers. And he's not fixing them any longer because we're under his wrath. So we can never be justified by keeping the law on our own efforts. So how do we solve the problem of God's wrath? Well, we don't, but Jesus does. His death on the cross paid the penalty for our guilt. God accepts his death on our behalf as payment for our guilt and now metaphorically turns back to face us. Now we are in a position to be justified. Now if we repent and humble ourselves before God, ask his forgiveness and trust in the blood of Christ, we can be forgiven because Jesus has paid the debt of our guilt. We can be right with God because of the cross of Jesus, and then God can give us his spirit, and his spirit fixes our broken choosers. The only thing we contribute to this process is belief, and even that is a gift. We acknowledge that we are sinful. We acknowledge there's nothing we can do to save ourselves from our sin. We long to be freed from sin and be made holy, and we trust that God will forgive us and show us mercy because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So to be justified is to be in a position where God can once again grant us life. And Paul is arguing we get there through the cross of Christ, not through keeping the law. So no one, all mankind without exception, no one is justified by keeping the law, despite our religious upbringing, our social standing, our educational background, our societal privilege, our lack of privilege, doesn't matter, none of us can be justified by works of the law. If we are to be justified, we must be justified through faith in Jesus Christ. Now in seventeen through twenty-one, he tells us of an argument his critics often leveled against him and he refutes it. He says in seventeen, 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. Paul's critics say your gospel is dangerous because if law keeping doesn't matter, if obedience to the law is no longer a requirement, then what's the point of being good? Your gospel, Paul, gives people a license to sin. If law keeping no longer matters, then we're free to act as we please, and that promotes sinful behavior. We know that God would not promote sinful behavior, and so Paul, your gospel must be wrong. And Paul says, absolutely not. In 18, for if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. In other words, if I go back to lawkeeping, if I rebuild what I tore down, I think he means if I go back to lawkeeping, all I do is prove myself to be a transgressor. If I go back to trying to please God and seek his favor through keeping the law, I will only fail and prove once again that I am a sinner incapable of becoming righteous on my own. Because what's the result of law keeping? I fail. The requirement of the law is that we keep all of it all the time, every day, inside and outside. And we can't do that because we're sinners, or as we told the kids, we have broken choosers and we choose the wrong thing. He goes on, for through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. What he's saying here is the law taught me that I'm not righteous. Through the law I died to the law. Trying to keep the law showed me my repeated failures, and those failures taught me to seek God another way. Every time I brought a sin offering or a guilt offering to the temple, I knew I was guilty. So I died to the law. That is, I gave up trying to keep the law as a means of obtaining justification, and I now live to God. That is, I put my faith in Jesus as the way to please God and obtain justification. So he's basically saying, I did a 180. I gave up law keeping as a means of pleasing God, and I now seek him through Christ. As he says, going on, in 20 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. Here he's saying, I agree that all sin deserves God's wrath. I agree the appropriate judgment and penalty for sin is death on a cross. I accept that Christ died on the cross in my place. That's what he means by I've been crucified with Christ. Therefore, I no longer try to please God by keeping the law through my own efforts. Instead, now I trust that Christ produces life in me, that Christ will change me from the inside out, and having been justified by his death, he will now make me righteous by his life. Any law keeping or obedience or acts of righteousness I do now is a result of having faith in the Son of God, who loved me so much that he paid the penalty for my sins by dying on the cross. This pardon, this justification is not like a criminal who gets off on a technicality and then returns to his life of crime. This is more like the prostitute who's been freed from a life of slavery and despair, and who has been given freedom and a chance to prosper. So Paul is saying, My gospel does not mean that we cannot sin again, but that we do not want to sin again. We have metaphorically died to that way of life. Everything is different now because we ourselves are different. We have been given the desire to be freed from sin. We have been given the hunger and the thirst for holiness. And miracle of miracles, God through his grace has freed us from the prison of sin and death, so that righteousness is now possible for us in a way it was never possible before. And then twenty-one, I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. He's saying, My gospel does not contradict the grace of God, for if anyone could have been righteous and gained life under the Mosaic covenant, then Christ would not have needed to die. Trying to gain righteousness through our own efforts at keeping the law, that's what nullifies the grace of God, because if I could gain righteousness on my own, then Christ would not have needed to die in my place. He wouldn't have needed to pay the penalty for my sins, and his death would be no benefit. Now, why is Paul bringing up this argument now? Remember, Paul's argument with Peter was over the same issues that are now troubling the Galatians. The Galatians were being swept up by the message of the Judaizers that law keeping is a necessary part of being a believer, and they want to require Gentiles to live like Jews. And Paul's laying the foundation to contradict this view. He opposed Peter, one of the pillars of the church, when Peter's actions were confusing, and he's setting the Galatians straight now in this letter. He could correct Peter because he and Peter believed the same gospel, and so he appealed to Peter on the basis of what they both know to be true. For our application to close today, I want to give you a small theology lesson. Central to Paul's argument in our passage today is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was the central assertion of Martin Luther that provoked the Protestant Reformation. It is one of the main themes of Reformed theology, though it is shared by many other denominations. But this is not a debate over the finer points of theology. The Reformers believed that this was a central issue of salvation. Luther called this belief, justification by faith alone, the article upon which the church stands or falls. Calvin said this doctrine is the hinge on which everything in the Christian life turns. And in our day, J.I. Packer likened this doctrine to the mythological figure of Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders. He said, so the doctrine of justification by faith alone is the doctrine upon which the world rests. It holds everything else up. All of that is to say that this idea, this doctrine, touches the very heart of the gospel because it is the issue of how we are redeemed. So I want to spend a little bit more time on it. You may be familiar with this, but I want to make sure you know what it is and what it isn't. The fundamental question of solafide or justification by faith alone answers the question, how can a sinner survive the judgment of God? And this is what David asks in Psalm 133 if you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? In other words, if God kept track of sins, if God kept a record of failures or iniquities, who would stand before him blameless? No one. Everyone is going to be condemned. The flip side of the question is how can a just and holy God accept sinful people? God can't overlook sin without compromising his integrity and his holy character. So he can't just say, oh yeah, you're totally evil and committed all these wrongs, and we'll just pretend you didn't. Because he can't throw out his standards, he can't compromise his morals and ethics, and he can't call things that are wrong right in order to forgive us. The way God created for justifying guilty people like us has to maintain both his justness and his holiness. Or as Paul says in Romans, he is both just and the justifier. He has to offer forgiveness in a way that maintains his righteous character, and the answer to that is justification by faith. The doctrine of justification by faith alone is sometimes called forensic justification. That's a term you can throw out at your next Starbucks coffee chat and impress your friends. Forensic justification. Today we think of forensic in terms of criminal trials and legal settings, so you hear the term forensic evidence, forensic medicine. But the word forensic also refers to legal declarations. Forensic justification means that God declares that we are justified legally. Forensic justification is God's legal ruling that someone is considered redeemed and regarded just in his sight. He counts us as justified, it's a legal ruling. Luther's famous summary of this was the Latin phrase simulustis et picato. There's another term you can throw out over coffee to impress your friends. It means simultaneously just and sinner. It means that those who are justified are at the same time both justified and sinful. Now here's what you have to understand. This is not a contradiction. Luther did not mean this as a paradox, like declaring that we are both black and white. We are not just and sinner in the same way and in the same relationship. We are just in a different sense than the sense in which we are sinners. And the good news of the gospel is precisely at this point. The glory of the gospel is that God pronounces people just while they are still sinners. He declares people who have faith in Jesus just in his sight while they are still sinful, and they remain sinful after that declaration. The incredible, wonderful, glorious news is you don't have to make yourself perfect to gain God's justification. You don't have to earn it or get your act together. God offers it to you while you are still sinful. Now the charge leveled against the reformers was that they were claiming that God engaged in a kind of legal fiction. The critics charged the reformers with saying God called someone righteous who was not in fact righteous, and that compromises God's integrity. It's a kind of fraud. The criticism is that God can only declare someone righteous who is in fact actually righteous, and anything else is legal fiction. But notice the difference in term. We have this term righteous, which can mean both justified or holy, and those are different things. If I am holy, I am morally perfect and without sin. If I am justified, I am right with God and I may still be sinful. And that's the distinction that we need to make. We can be both justified and sinful, but not yet holy. And that brings us to one more distinction I want to make. Some theologians claim we are infused with Christ's righteousness, and others claim we have imputed righteousness. And I want to talk about that. How are we justified? Are we justified because there is something inherent in us, or are we justified by something that is outside of us? On the one side, theologians claim that Christ's righteousness is infused into us, and then we are cleansed of sin and are in a state of grace. So think of pouring red food coloring into a glass of water. The red color infuses throughout the glass. The formerly clear water now becomes red throughout. And some people think that justification means that, that God can declare us just because we are now in fact holy, because the holiness of Christ has now been infused into us, just like you would infuse red food coloring into a glass of water. And so we are in fact justified because we are holy and God can declare us so. Well, the problem with that theology is why do we still sin? If we have Christ's holiness infused into our soul, why do we still sin? And what atones for our sins after having received Christ's holiness? Luther and the other reformers claimed that's the wrong understanding. The righteousness or the holiness we have is outside of us at this point. It is not inside us. It is not infused into our souls, it is imputed to us. And you will hear that term imputed righteousness. So in Luther's terms, righteousness or holiness does not adhere to us, it is earned for us by Christ. So Christ's righteousness is not given to us like the red food coloring, it is credited to our account. It is put on the ledger book, so to speak. It's not legal fiction, it's a legal application of his actions. The word imputed just means to ascribe or attribute something to someone else. So if something is imputed to me, it is counted on my side. Christ's life and death and resurrection are credited to my account, but we have not been infused. We are still sinners. We are forgiven sinners who have been justified and will be made righteous or holy in the kingdom of heaven. This is what Luther meant by simultaneously just and sinner. The glorious freedom of the gospel is I have something I did not earn. I have something I could never possibly have gained through my own efforts. One day, all of us who Believe will be completely free from bondage to sin. Not because we've gotten our act together and kept the law good enough and tipped the scales of justice in our favor. We have not earned it. We never could earn it. Rather, we will be freed from our sin as the incredible free gift of God based on the gift of his son. God did for us what we could never do for ourselves. He found a way to solve the problem of his wrath and to solve the problem of our guilt while maintaining his holiness and his integrity. The message of the gospel is not love wins, the message of the gospel is Jesus saves. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. If you've been blessed by what you heard, please rate and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really does help others find the podcast. You can find out more about Wednesday in the Word or hear all previous episodes in this series on my website, WednesdayInTheWord.com. Our theme music is graciously provided by my friend and favorite musician Reggie Coates. You can listen to his wonderful music at heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krissan Morata, and I hope I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word. In the meantime, please visit my website and take advantage of some of my free Bible study materials.