What is the foundation of our justification as Christians? In Romans 4, the Apostle Paul points to the life of Abraham to help us address this question. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul preaches on the doctrines of imputation and justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

We will continue now with our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans. We are in chapter four. Last week, we focused our attention on the apparent conflict between Paul’s appeal to Abraham as exhibit A for those who are justified by faith, and James’ appeal also to Abraham for his case that justification is not by faith alone, but by works as well. We examined and, I hope, resolved that apparent conflict to your satisfaction.

In passing, I mentioned a couple of verses that I would like to repeat again this evening and really pick up the text tonight at verse five and read through verse twelve. So, it will be Romans 4:5–12. I would ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness, just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works:

“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
And whose sins are covered;
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.”

Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, O Lord, our hearts leap with joy at the sound of the good news that promises us a righteousness that is the ground of our justification, which righteousness is not our own. It is the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us, that counts for us, that is reckoned to us by Your mercy. As we continue to examine this glorious gospel, we pray that the Spirit of truth would give us insight to these things even tonight. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Blessedness

Last week, we focused our attention on Paul’s appeal to Abraham as the supreme example in Scripture of one who was justified by faith. As time was running out, I rushed quickly over the last few verses, in which Paul for a moment interspersed another argument from the Old Testament, first appealing to Abraham, to whom he comes back in a few moments.

But before Paul returns to Abraham as his primary witness, he calls upon David as another example par excellence of justification by faith in the Old Testament. He says in verses five and six, “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness, just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.”

At the risk of being repetitive—which is not a perilous risk because we learn through repetition—I want to spend some time talking about the use of the term blessed in sacred Scripture. It disturbs me not a little bit that modern commentators, seeking to be relevant to the today’s culture, prefer to translate the word that is translated here as blessed by the word happy instead.

If any word would cheapen the concept in this text, I can think of no word that would cheapen it more than the word happy. The terms happy and happiness have been used to such a superficial degree that they have lost the force of their import. We say, “Happiness is a warm puppy.” The kind of happiness that is in view in such adages is miles away from the happiness contained in the biblical word blessed.

Woe and Weal

To pursue it further, on other occasions in another context, I have pointed out that in the Old Testament, when prophets were anointed by the Spirit of God to proclaim the Word of God and to be agents of revelation, the favorite device the prophets used to communicate God’s message was the oracle. In doing so, they became mouthpieces or spokesmen for God Himself so that they could preface their announcements with the words, “Thus saith the Lord.”

Oracles were uttered by prophets even in the secular world of the Old Testament, such as the Oracle of Delphi. Oracles from God were of two types: the oracle of woe and the oracle of weal. The oracle of woe communicated an announcement of God’s wrath, and the oracle of weal pronounced God’s good news upon His people.

To understand this, I have called attention to the Hebrew benediction in the Old Testament, which was an integral part of the religious life of the people of Israel:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Num. 6:24–26, ESV)

This great Hebrew benediction is expressed in a poetic form called parallelism. In this case, you have three stanzas, and each one says the same thing, only with different words. In those three lines are two parts, and it is with the first segment of those three lines that we are most concerned:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Num. 6:24–26, ESV, emphasis added)

The parallels here help us see how the Jew understood the word blessed. The two lines “The Lord bless you” and “The Lord make his face to shine upon you” form what is called a synonymous parallelism. The second line contains the same idea that is contained in the first line. To be blessed of God is to have God make His face shine upon you. That idea is reinforced even more strongly in the third line, “The Lord lift up his countenance upon you.” The Jew understood blessedness always in terms of one’s proximity to the presence of God.

In the garden before the fall, Adam and Eve rejoiced when God came in the cool of the day. They rushed to be in His presence and enjoyed the light of His countenance. But once sin marred that relationship, mankind was expelled from the presence of God, and the mandate came from God: “My face shall not be seen.” As He said to Moses, “You cannot see My face; for No man shall see Me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). In fact, the imagery in the Bible of hell itself is the place of outer darkness where not the slightest glimmer of light penetrates from the countenance of God. To be cursed of God is to have God turn His back upon you, remove His grace from you, and take away all hope of peace.

The curse of God is communicated through the oracle of woe. Jesus said to the Pharisees: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. . . . Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are filled with dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:15, 27). Over and over again Jesus pronounced the oracle of doom with the expression of the woe and curse upon those who were removed from the presence of God.

In bold contrast to the oracle of woe is the oracle of weal, pronounced by God with the oracular expression blessed. David says in the first psalm:

Blessed is the man
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2)

What will be the result of this blessed man delighting in and meditating on the law of the Lord?

He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season. (Psalm 1:3)

Notice the pronouncement of the blessing in the first verse: “Blessed is the man.” But David continues:

The ungodly are not so,
But are like the chaff which the wind drives away” (Psalm 1:4).

Fast forward to the New Testament and Jesus Himself. In the Sermon on the Mount, the prophet par excellence uses the same device of the oracle to pronounce the joy God gives to His people:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 5:3–10)

We tend to cheapen this. We will say, “Bless you, my friend,” or, “God bless you.” Yet the highest experience and joy of the human soul is to experience the blessedness that only God can give.

The Greatest Gift of God

When Paul talks in our text about the gospel, about justification by faith alone, he calls attention to this great beatitude, to the supreme state of blessedness, by calling attention to David. We read this: “Just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.” If we transformed this into our oracular form, we could say that David is saying, “How blessed is the one who receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.”

What do you give a man who has everything? What do you give him that he does not have? Righteousness. The greatest gift that you could ever receive from the hand of God is the blessed gift of the righteousness of Christ. How can we put our arms around this? How can we understand that in God’s eyes, He counts us as righteous as Jesus?

This is what Rome protests against vociferously. They claim that the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, based on the concept of imputation, is a doctrine that involves a legal fiction and makes God a liar because it has God counting people righteous who are not righteous. This is not a legal fiction. Rather, it is a legal declaration. There is absolutely nothing fictional about God’s act of imputation.

The righteousness of Jesus is real righteousness. The imputation of that righteousness to our account in Christ is a real imputation. If it were only a fiction, we would despair. But the reality of that imputation is to us the reality of blessedness that all who receive such imputed righteousness enjoy, “the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.”

Lawlessness Forgiven

Paul then quotes directly from David:

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
And whose sins are covered.

Just take those two lines. It is not, “Blessed are those who have obeyed the law, whose meritorious deeds, whose lawful deeds have justified him,” but rather, “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven” (emphasis added).

One of the most frightening titles for the antichrist in the New Testament is man of lawlessness because that is what sin is: sin is lawlessness. We are a nation of scofflaws. We are a nation that has become immunized against obedience even to the civil law. There are so many of those laws that we tend to discount their significance. It is one thing to scoff at the laws that are made by men, but to scoff at the law of God is the deepest kind of evil. That is why the antichrist himself is described as the man of lawlessness.

Do you remember the end of the Sermon on the Mount. It is the scariest sermon that Jesus ever preached. He concluded that wonderful sermon with the statement that many will come to Him on the last day saying to Him: “Lord, Lord. Didn’t I do this in Your name? Didn’t I do that in Your name?” Jesus warns us in that sermon that He will turn to these people who call Him “Lord, Lord,” and say to them: “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!” (Matt. 7:23).

It is a fearful idea that people will claim to know Jesus—to know Him intimately—and claim to be involved in the ministry, yet He will say, “Please leave; I don’t know your name.” Why will He say that? Because those people will be characterized by lives of lawlessness. Those are unrepentant sinners, who profess to be Christians but who have never trusted in Christ and His righteousness alone.

By nature, that is who we are: lawless people before God. To be a lawless person before God is to earn, to merit, and to deserve the wrath of God. But instead of the wrath of God, we get the blessing of God. That is why David cries out, “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven.” That is at the heart of our justification. In justification, God forgives our sins. He removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west.

Transformation of Forgiveness

When our daughter, Sherrie, was five or six years old, she was with us at an evening service when I was serving on the staff of a church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ever year at that church, we had a week called a “preaching mission week,” where we brought in a minister who would proclaim the gospel. We had altar calls every night during that week.

I was going to the service one evening and was taking Sherrie, and I dropped her off in the nursery for the children. Then I went over to the sanctuary and introduced the speaker, and the speaker gave a powerful message on the cross of Christ. He then called for people who wanted to give their lives to Christ to come forward and commit themselves to Jesus.

I looked up and saw people coming down the aisle like they were at a Billy Graham crusade, and then to my utter horror I saw my daughter walking down the middle aisle. I was thinking: “This is an emotional thing. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing. I’m going to have a talk with her afterwards about this commitment.”

On the way home, I asked her, “Honey, why did you do that?” She answered: “Daddy, I didn’t want to. I was embarrassed to go down there. But something seemed to make me get up and go. And now I feel clean. I feel like a newborn baby.” I told her, “I think you’ve got it there, honey.” She did understand the simple message of the forgiveness of sins. She was a blessed little girl to understand that her sins were forgiven.

Long before I studied theology, I did not know any theology. I had never heard the word justification in my life. But on September 13, 1957, in a dormitory room at eleven o’clock at night, by myself, I was on my knees confessing my sins to God. When I got up, I arose a Christian. The experience I had that night was an experience of forgiveness of sin, the greatest blessedness I had ever known, the most life-transforming event of my entire life. So, I can relate to David when he said, “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered.”

The Covering of Christ

I mentioned last week that on Christmas Eve I told the children’s story of the priest with dirty clothes. Why did I use that story? Because it is the simplest way I know to give a graphic explanation of what happens in our justification.

When Adam and Eve committed the first transgression in human history, they experienced shame and guilt. In the creation account, we read that the two of them, the man and the woman, were both naked and unashamed. That was their condition until the first transgression. As soon as they first sinned, the Bible tells us that their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked, and they were embarrassed about it.

There is no one in this room as I’m preaching who is starknaked. But look at the rest of the animals in the universe. How many of them wear shirts and dresses and coats and trousers? Anytime you see an animal with a hat on as if it is a mule in New Orleans—where somebody puts holes in the hat and sticks it on the head of the mule—or you see a dog wearing a sweater in the wintertime, it is always made by humans.

Mother Nature does not make clothes for the creatures of this world, except for man, whom  Desmond Morris called “the naked ape.” We are the only ones who go about with artificial coverings. Where did that start? It started in the garden with the first sin. The first experience of sin was an experience of guilt, and it manifested itself in a profound sense of shame and embarrassment. From that moment, the human species became fugitives, headed for cover, headed for the darkness.

Men love the darkness rather than light. Why? John tells us this is because their deeds are evil (John 3:19). Adam and Eve went to the bushes to hide themselves from God. When God came to them, He said, “Where are you?” They said, “We’re hiding.” God asked them why, and they answered, “Because we’re naked and we’re ashamed.” God then asked: “How do you know that you’re naked? Did you eat from the tree?” And Adam said, “The woman that You gave me, she made me.”

There were the creatures, trembling before the Creator, guilty of sin, debtors who could not possibly pay their debt. This is our universal condition, and everyone, Christian or non-Christian, knows that they carry a burden of guilt they cannot fix for themselves. The very first act of redemption in the Bible was when God condescended to make clothes for His embarrassed creatures and covered their nakedness. He could have said, “Go ahead; stay embarrassed; stay ashamed.” Instead, He covered them. “Edengate,” if you will—the original coverup.

This is the gospel: we, whose righteousness is as filthy rags, receive a new set of clothes because the clothing of the righteousness of Jesus is given to us as a covering. This was dramatized constantly by ritual, first in the tabernacle and then in the temple of Israel. On the Day of Atonement, when the animal was slain and his blood was carried into the Holy of Holies, that blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat. The blood was a covering on the throne of God in the Holy of Holies.

Habakkuk 1:13 tells us that God is too righteous to even look at evil. Unless we are covered, He will avert His glance from us; He will never make His face to shine upon us; He will never lift up the light of His countenance upon us unless we are covered. The only adequate covering we can ever possess to be able stand in the presence of God is the covering of Christ’s righteousness.

Christ Cursed for Us

What David said in a positive fashion, he repeated poetically in a negative way, saying, “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.” Let me turn that upside down for a second. The opposite expression would be this: “Cursed is the man to whom the Lord imputes sin.”

Does that ring a bell? What does Paul say in his letter to the Galatians about what happened on the cross? There, sin was imputed, transferred, counted, reckoned to One who was sinless, to One who was perfectly righteous. God imputed your sin and my sin to Christ and then cursed Him. That is why Paul says that on the cross Christ became a curse for us by imputation, by the transfer of sin from our account to His. He was cursed.

The opposite of the curse is the blessing. The blessing is stated here: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.” Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not count their sin. That is you. That is me.

Abraham’s Faith Before Circumcision

Paul continues with a question: “Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also?” That is, is this blessedness of which David spoke that comes in justification by faith alone only for Jews? Is this something tied to the Old Testament sign of the covenant, the sign of circumcision? Do only the circumcised receive this blessedness? To answer this question, Paul comes back again to Abraham: “For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised?”

Last week, we looked at the comparison and contrast in Abraham set forth by Paul in Romans 4 and and by James in James 2. I mentioned that both James and Paul appealed to Abraham to make their case, to prove their point. But the difference was this: Paul went to Genesis 15, while James went to Genesis 22, where we have the record of Abraham offering up Isaac on the altar.

If we go back to Genesis 15, the point Paul makes is that Abraham was justified before he offered up Isaac on the altar, and not only before he offered up Isaac on the altar, but before he was even circumcised. The sacrament of circumcision, the sign of the covenant, was not the ground of Abraham’s justification. The ground was the imputed righteousness of Christ, so that when Abraham believed the promise of God, God counted him righteous. Paul is arguing that Abraham was not justified by works, nor was he justified by circumcision, because God declared him just before he was ever circumcised.

Signs and Seals

Let me give an aside on this. Because our church has people from all kinds of denominational backgrounds, one of the things that people who come to our new member’s class struggle with more than anything else is the question of infant baptism. They often ask: “Why do you baptize babies? Babies can’t respond in faith. Doesn’t the New Testament say to believe and repent? Doesn’t the New Testament record only adults who are baptized? Why do you baptize babies?”

Our answer is that baptism is the sign of the new covenant. The sign of the covenant has always from time immemorial been given to the believer and to his seed. Baptism is not the same as circumcision, but both circumcision and baptism are signs and seals of God’s promise. But the promises themselves are only realized by faith. That is true in the New Testament, and it is true in the Old Testament.

Abraham had faith before he was circumcised. His son Isaac had faith after he was circumcised. The faith to which circumcision pointed was not tied to the time in which circumcision was rendered. Again, Abraham had faith before he was circumcised; Isaac had faith after he was circumcised. The point is that the sign of the covenant is the sign of all the benefits that God promises His people who believe. The sacrament does not justify anybody. Circumcision did not justify anybody. Baptism does not justify anybody. The sole instrument of justification is faith.

What is baptism? What is circumcision? Not only are they both signs of the covenant—circumcision the sign of the old covenant, baptism the sign of the new covenant—but they have in common that both are signs and seals.

Notice what Paul writes: “How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe.” This is what circumcision has in common with baptism: it is a sign and a seal.

What does a sign do? If you are on your way to downtown Orlando and you come to a sign that says, “City Limits of Orlando” or “Welcome to Orlando,” is that sign Orlando? No, a sign points beyond itself. The sign of circumcision pointed beyond itself to the promise of God, to the covenant promise that God made with His people. This is a sign.

When God destroyed the world in the flood, the flood waters receded, and Noah and his family emerged from the ark safely. What did God do? God put His bow in the sky, by which He promised Noah and his progeny that He would never again destroy the world by water. That was the promise: there will never be another deluge that will wipe out the world. Every time it rains and the sun shines behind the raindrops, we see the bow in the sky, for God said: “This is My sign. Every time you see that sign, it is to remind you of My promise.”

Circumcision was a sign of the promise of justification by faith alone, and so is baptism. It does not confer what it signifies. It signifies the promise of God to all who believe. But it is not only a sign; it is also a seal. That term sealing is important in the Scriptures.

The New Testament Greek word for “seal” is sphragis. It goes back to the idea of the signet ring of the king. If the king issued a decree, at the end of the document, he would put wax on the paper and then take his ring and press it down into the wax, and that became the seal that identified the promise of the king. The Scriptures tell us that those who are in Christ are sealed by the Holy Ghost. We are not just saved; we are sealed. God has put His indelible mark upon us.

The Old Testament ritual of circumcision and the New Testament sacrament of baptism are not just signs; they are seals whereby God guarantees the consequences of justification to all who believe, not to all who receive the sign. We have previously seen where Paul argues that not everyone who is of Israel is an Israelite, but rather those who are circumcised internally, or spiritually. The external sign does not guarantee salvation. The same is true of baptism.

By Faith Alone

Paul said that Abraham received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith he had while still uncircumcised that he might be the father not just of the Jews, but the father of the faithful. Father Abraham is the father “of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.”

The circumcised Jew is justified by faith and faith alone. Those who are uncircumcised are justified the same way: through faith alone, through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

We are taking our time on this text. As I said, understanding justification by faith alone is not hard. Anyone can grasp it intellectually. But to get it in the bloodstream is hard, because the voices all around us are telling us: “No, that’s too easy. You have to earn it. You have to merit it. You have to deserve it. You must have your own righteousness.” But your righteousness accomplishes nothing. The only thing you and I can ever merit is eternal damnation. If God would give us what we have earned, if God would give us what we deserve, we would perish from His wrath. But thanks be to God that He gives us what was earned by His Son, what was merited by Christ, what was deserved by Jesus. Jesus got what He did not deserve while we got what He did deserve, the righteousness that is by faith. How blessed is that? Let us pray.

Father, indeed we are blessed, blessed beyond measure. We look forward to when we can actually see through the veil, see You face to face, see You as You are, that our souls may bask in the direct apprehension of Your face as it shines radiantly, as You lift up the light of Your countenance upon us and flood our souls with its sweetness. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.