No one is righteous, and everyone has sinned. In light of this reality, how can we possibly stand before a holy God? In this sermon, R.C. Sproul considers the incredible gift of salvation and what it means have our sin covered by Christ’s righteousness.

Tonight I will be reading from Romans 3:27–31. That is a very short portion of the epistle, but I think that it is important enough to spend our whole time on it. With that, I would like to ask you to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law.

What you have just heard is not the opinion of a first-century Jewish scholar, but the veritable Word of God. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Father, we understand that there is no more important question with which we can wrestle than the question of how we who are unjust can be justified in Your sight, since You are perfectly just and perfectly righteous. We rejoice that You indeed are both just and the justifier of those who come to faith in Christ. Be with us now as we continue our study of this doctrine of justification. Amen.

Where Is Boasting?

In our last session, I talked about the tremendous importance of our understanding of the doctrine of justification, and that it was the pivotal issue in the sixteenth-century Reformation. I mentioned that Luther declared that the doctrine of justification by faith is the article upon which the church stands or falls, and it is the article upon which we stand or fall.

I mentioned that Calvin used another metaphor of a door on its hinges, saying that justification is that upon which everything in the Christian life hinges. I mentioned an observation of early J.I. Packer, in which he used the metaphor of Atlas holding up the world. He said that sola fide, or justification by faith alone, is the Atlas that carries everything else in the gospel upon its shoulders. If Atlas should shrug at that point, and the doctrine of justification by faith come crashing down, so the whole of the gospel would crash with it. I also mentioned the importance of the Latin phrase that Luther introduced, simul iustus et peccator—we are by faith “at the same time just and sinner.”

Let us pick up at verse 27, where Paul asks a question: “Where is boasting then?” He gives a strange response to his own question. It is a response that we need not only to understand with our minds but to get into our bloodstream; it must penetrate the deepest core of our being. This question and its answer determine our attitude before the graciousness of a sovereign and holy God.

When Paul says, “Where is boasting?” his answer is emphatic: “It is excluded.” We live in a culture of pluralism and relativism that hates anything having to do with exclusivity. No one likes to be left out. In this case, it is not people who are being left out, but rather what is being excluded and left out of consideration is boasting.

The boasting that is excluded is any boasting that any human beings might have in the presence of men or God whereby they brag or bring to consideration their own merit, their own significance, or their own achievement as contributing in any way to the ground of their justification. This again touches the eye of the tornado of the sixteenth-century Reformation

Faith Alone

So much of what was at stake in the Reformation controversy had to do with the relationship of works to faith. I mentioned before that the word alone became so much a part of the controversy because the Protestant Reformers were saying that our justification is not merely by faith but by faith alone; our justification is not only by grace but by grace alone; the salvation of our souls is not wrought merely by Christ but by Christ alone.

That word alone was a large part of the controversy then, and it is often controversial in today’s culture. Given the history of conflict since the sixteenth century between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, when Protestants critique Roman Catholics, they often distort, make caricatures, and even slander the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It goes something like this: “We believe that justification is by faith; they believe it’s by works. We believe it’s by grace; they believe it’s by merit. We believe it’s by Christ; they believe it’s by our own effort.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Roman Catholic Church in every one of her definitive doctrinal declarations has insisted, particularly against the rank Pelagianism of the early centuries, that there can be no justification apart from Christ, there can be no justification apart from faith, and there can be no justification apart from grace. The Roman Catholic doctrine of justification insists that justification comes through Christ, by grace, and with faith.

What is missing, of course, from the Roman Catholic formula is the all-important word alone. For Rome, it is always Christ plus us. It is faith plus works. It is grace plus merit. In the sixth session of the Council of Trent, which was a Roman Catholic ecumenical council similar to Vatican I and Vatican II but in the sixteenth century, Rome met with their great theologians in response to the Protestant Reformation and gave their definition of justification. At Trent, they spelled out the importance of faith, saying that faith is necessary for justification.

Oxygen for a Flame

Let me take a moment to explain the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition.

A necessary condition is a condition that must be met for a desired effect or consequence to take place. If you want to build a fire in the fireplace, you need the presence of oxygen for the fire to burn. In fact, if you have a fire that is burning and you want to quench that fire, if it is contained enough, you can cover it with a blanket, stop the source of oxygen from the fire, and the fire will go out, because oxygen, or the air, is a necessary condition to have a fire. However, it is good news that the very presence of oxygen does not meet the criterion of a sufficient condition to cause a fire, because if that were the case, we would all be aflame all the time. The mere presence of oxygen does not guarantee that a fire will take place.

Follow me with this. A sufficient condition is a condition that, if it is met, will make it certain that the desired result takes place. If you have your necessary conditions around, you have the oxygen, paper, twigs, and so on, they are not sufficient to create the fire. It will take a match or a lighter. It will take the flame to ignite the paper and twigs. That flame becomes the sufficient condition to make the fire come to pass. I hope you understand, and it is not too difficult to follow that kind of analogy.

With respect to faith, Rome teaches that faith is a necessary condition for justification. You cannot be justified without it. In the sixth session of Trent, Rome says three things about faith. It describes faith in terms of three words, saying that faith is the initium, the fundamentum, and the radix of justification. Those are the three ways in which faith contributes as a necessary condition for justification to take place. It is the initium; faith initiates justification. It is the fundamentum; it is the foundation upon which justification is built. Finally, it is the radix; it is the root of our justification. All three of those descriptive terms point out that faith is extremely important. If it is the foundation, initiation, and root of our justification, then certainly the Roman Catholic Church is not dismissing faith as just excess baggage.

But the problem is this: in Roman Catholic theology, as much as faith initiates, as much as it is the foundation, and as much as it is the root of justification, faith is not sufficient to give you justification. You need something else besides faith before you can be in a state of justification. In fact, Rome goes to great lengths to point out that a person can have true faith and not be justified. A person can have true faith and commit mortal sin, and that mortal sin destroys his grace and destroys his state of justification, even though true faith remains present.

Let us make that clear: for Rome, you can have faith, true faith, genuine faith, and not have the desired consequence of that faith—namely, justification. In other words, faith needs something else added to it before justification can take place.

Three Levels of Merit

In my last sermon, I talked to you about the sacrament of penance being at the heart of the Reformation controversy. It was not the priestly absolution, nor the confessing of sins to a priest, but rather the last part of the sacrament of penance that was controversial. After the sinner comes into the church and says, “Father, I’ve sinned, and it’s been so long since my last confession,” he does his act of contrition, then the priest gives absolution and prescribes works for him to perform. Those works are called “works of satisfaction.” They are works that serve to satisfy the demands of God’s justice.

The works given by the priest may be as simple as saying a few Hail Marys and a couple of Our Fathers, or it may require almsgiving or some other good work that the Church requires. Those works of satisfaction gain for the penitent sinner what Rome calls “congruous merit,” or meritum de congruo, if you want to be technical.

Congruous merit is carefully distinguished from condign merit and from works of supererogation, or supererogatory merit. So, Roman Catholic theology has three different levels or three different kinds of merit.

Let us start with condign merit, meritum de condigno. Condign merit is merit that is so righteous, so meritorious, that if God is going to be a just and righteous God, He is required to reward that work. In other words, Condign merit is merit that accompanies works that are so righteous and so pure that a just and holy God is obligated to reward them because those works merit or earn His favor.

Congruous merit is merit that is not as high as condign merit. It is true merit, but it is mixed with some weaknesses and frailties. It does not have perfect purity attached to it. It is not so good that it requires God to honor it or to reward it, but it is good enough to make it congruous, or fitting, for God to reward it. If we stated it another way, we would say if God did not reward it, God would be acting in a manner that was incongruous or unfitting to the occasion. Do you see the distinction between the higher condign merit and the less meritorious but nevertheless real merit of congruity?

Then we have the third kind of merit, which was at the heart of the controversy in Wittenberg during the Reformation, and that is supererogatory merit. According to the Roman Catholic Church, most Christians still have impurity in their soul when they die. They have not reached pure righteousness. Insofar as they have an abiding impurity in their souls, they must go to purgatory, the purging place. The fires of purgatory will cleanse those impurities from the soul. It may take three weeks, or it may take three million years, but sooner or later—in most cases later—the impurities are removed so that the person can then finally enter happily into heaven.

However, there are a few people in church history who have died without any impurities on their soul, having died not only with congruous merit to their credit but condign merit. Even more, they had enough merit to go straight to heaven without any time spent in purgatory. A handful of the great saints—people like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Mother Teresa—have done works above and beyond the call of duty. Those are supererogatory works, works above what is required. Those people accrue for themselves more merit than they need to get into heaven.

Notice that central to the discussion is the word merit. In the case of supererogatory merit, certain people have been so righteous that they have earned more merit than they need to get themselves into heaven. They have a surplus. What happens to the surplus? It is deposited in what the church defines as the “treasury of merit.” The treasury of merit is the bank account placed as a depository where the merit of Christ goes, along with the merit of Mary and Joseph, of Peter and Paul, of Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and so on. Their merit is put into the treasury of merit.

The Church, of course, owns the key to the treasury. It has the power of the keys, which is the power to distribute that excess merit to people who do not have enough merit to get out of purgatory. That was what the indulgence controversy in the sixteenth century was all about.

The Lightning Bolt to Levels of Merit

When Tetzel came to Germany, he promised, “Every time a coin in the kettle rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” People were paying money to get indulgences, which promised that merit from the treasury would then be credited to someone’s account who lacked merit.

Luther was saying in the sixteenth century, in light of his lectures on Romans, that this portion of the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is like a bombshell. It is like a lightning bolt that crashes against all claims of merit, whether supererogatory, condign, or merely congruous. Paul is teaching us in this text that there is no place in the Christian life for any merit whatsoever except the merit of Christ, and the merit of Christ alone.

Who could possibly add to the treasury of the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ? The idea is scandalous, and it detracts from the singular achievement of our Lord, who alone was sinless and perfect in His righteousness.

Nothing in My Hand I Bring

Paul says in verse 27: “Where is boasting? It is excluded.” In other words, take your boasting and park it in the parking lot, because it has no place in the kingdom of God. Paul elsewhere says, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31, NASB). That is what we boast about: His righteousness, His merit, the grace of God. Augustus Toplady had it right in that great hymn, “Rock of Ages,” when he wrote,

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling.

It is not difficult to understand this doctrine. I teach it to seminary students. I used to teach it to college students. I teach it to Sunday school students. I can give them a written test on this, and they can make a perfect score on it. They can make an A. It is not all that tough. But it is another thing to get it in the bloodstream, to get boasting excluded from the heart. We might harbor the idea that somehow God owes us our justification and a place in His kingdom. We might think, somehow, “No, we’re not perfect, but we’ve lived good enough lives to lay some claim on the kingdom.” If you push an Arminian all the way in his Arminianism, he takes credit for making the decisive act by which he is included in the kingdom of God. He may not want to boast about it, but he harbors to himself something of which to boast, which the grace of God excludes altogether.

Rome teaches grace plus merit. You could not earn the merit if you did not get the assistance of God’s grace. God helps you earn the merit, but with that help, you still have to earn it. Luther, Paul, and Augustine say that all the help in the world will never have you merit anything from a holy God. Even our best virtues, said Augustine, are but splendid vices. There is a pound of flesh in everything that we do.

Remember what Paul elaborated earlier? “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). That is true even after we are converted. Even then, there is so much sin hanging on to our lives for the rest of our days that we would have very little reason to have a hope of heaven.

This is why this doctrine is so important existentially. If I have to wait until I am pure before God will declare me just, if I have to be sanctified before I can be justified, I have no hope. I would have to fool myself to think that I have some merit to bring to Him. I have no merit to bring to Christ. So, Paul in this section asks another question. He says: “By what law (is boasting excluded)? Of works? No, but by the law of faith.”

Faith’s Object

Now Paul comes to his conclusion: “Therefore we conclude”—that is a little redundant because the word “therefore” in and of itself signals the coming of a conclusion. But lest we miss what the Apostle is trying to get us to understand, he doubles it up for emphasis: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” There is sola fide with a vengeance. There is the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Some people—people who are Philadelphia lawyers—have asked me, “How can you say that justification is by faith alone when you still must have the righteousness of Christ, and you must have all those things in addition to your faith?” The answer is that faith is not enough in and of itself to save you. Faith is simply that which links you to Christ. Certainly, when we say that we are justified by faith alone, we do not mean we are justified by faith in anything. That is shorthand for saying we are justified by faith apart from works. We are not justified in faith apart from Christ. We must understand that truth.

We live in a culture that repeats a lie every day, and if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. The lie you hear day in and day out in our culture is that it does not matter what you believe, as long as you are sincere. Now there is justification by faith alone in a way that Paul never understood it, nor did Luther. Genuine faith has an object, and that object in biblical terms is Christ and His righteousness. A person can have faith in Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, or the devil. But that faith is not going to justify anyone, because it is faith in Christ and faith in Christ alone that justifies.

Faith Apart from Works

When we say that justification is by faith alone, we mean that faith, as Paul says here, is apart from the works of the law. When we say that we are justified by faith apart from the works of the law, that means, beloved, that the works we do have no part whatsoever in our justification.

Please hear me carefully. I did not say that works have no part in the Christian life. They have a particularly important part to play in our sanctification, in living out our salvation. But as contributing to the grounds of our justification, they have no part, and that is what the whole dispute is about: Are we justified by faith and works, or are we justified by faith apart from the works of the law? I do not know how the Apostle could be clearer. I do not know how he could say it more convincingly than when he says, “Therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”

I am going to put an asterisk next to that for anyone who is at all involved in studying the New Perspective on Paul. The New Perspective on Paul, which is an old distortion of Paul, is trying to argue that both Rome and the Protestants were wrong, and that the New Perspective on Paul has finally gotten it right. According to the New Perspective, Paul is not talking in this text about moral deeds. He is not talking about obeying the moral law of God. Rather, they say, he is simply talking about our justification apart from the ceremonial law—apart from the dietary laws and that sort of thing. For the New Perspective, justification does not refer to our being made right in the presence of God and redeemed but simply has to do with defining our status in the church.

I cannot think of many more serious distortions of the gospel than that, and I am not going to get into that all tonight as an excursion. But I simply say to you that if someone comes to you proclaiming the so-called New Perspective on Paul, run for your life because it is a really serious diabolical distortion of the gospel.

Another aspect that created no small amount of controversy is that when Luther translated the New Testament from the Greek into German in verse 28, “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law,” he wrote, “We are justified by faith alone apart from the works of the law.” The criticism leveled against Luther and the Protestants in their translation of Romans 3:28 is that the word “alone” does not appear in the Greek text of the New Testament. That is true.

Luther in his Bible wrote, “allein durch den Glauben,” “only through faith, or “through faith alone.” It is interesting to me that the Nuremberg Bible of 1483, the Roman Catholic edition of the Bible written in German, translates the verse this way: “nur durch den Glauben.” It does not use the word allein, “alone,” but it uses the word “only,” “only through faith.”

The plot thickens. The Italian Bible of the fifteenth century, sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Geneva in 1476, added this to the text that we are justified per sola fide, “through faith alone.” The exact same words were used in the Roman Catholic translation of the Bible into Italian in Venice in 1538. So, Luther was not the only one who rendered the meaning of this text of Paul to mean that justification is by faith alone.

Luther was trying to ensure that people understood the import of what Paul is saying. Whether the word “alone” is there or not, the concept is plainly present. If we are justified by faith apart from the works of the law, it is no different from saying we are justified by faith alone. Merit is excluded. No merit of our own as a result of our works can contribute to the ground of our justification.

Nothing More than Christ

Now, I said, “No merit of our own.” There is some merit that is the ground of your justification. There are some good works at the heart of your justification: the good works of Jesus, the merit of Christ. It is Christ’s righteousness that fulfills the law of God. It is Christ’s righteousness that fulfills the requirements Moses gave to the people of Israel. Christ kept the law perfectly every day of His life.

That is why I labor the point that we are not just saved by the death of Jesus, but we are saved by His life—His life of perfect obedience. Christ’s perfect righteousness under God’s covenant merits God’s reward. But what does Christ do with what He earns? He gives it to us, as we have no merit of our own. That is why the real issue in the Reformation was this: What is the ground of your justification? Is it your goodness, your righteousness, your works, and your merit, or Christ’s? That is what the Reformation was about.

When anyone—whether an institution, a whole church, or the whole world—begins to think that your righteousness adds anything to the ground of your justification, then that person, church, or world needs to be reformed because that is a distortion of the gospel. The good news is that the righteousness that you lack, the righteousness that you cannot achieve on your own, has been achieved for you, and you cannot get it by earning it or meriting it.

If you talk to a knowledgeable Roman Catholic theologian, he might say: “Yes, we believe that Christ’s righteousness is at the basis of everything. He’s the One who provides the merit to satisfy God. But for me to get hold of His righteousness, for me to get Christ’s merit, I have to merit the merits.” Do you see what Roman Catholicism teaches on this point? The idea is that I have to earn His righteousness, which I cannot do. I am a debtor who cannot pay his debt. We are all beggars trying to tell other beggars where to find bread, because the only One who can provide the bread of life that we need is Christ.

If there is anything cluttering up your faith that removes your view from focusing on Christ and His righteousness alone, it must be excluded. It has to be removed, because when you try to add anything of your own, you are subtracting from Christ, and you put your confidence and your faith in your performance rather than His. What we need is Christ. Nothing more, nothing less.

A Double Transfer

This is why Christ came to the world. Jesus came as our Savior and saved us by imputation—by taking upon Himself the transfer of our sins, the transfer of our guilt, so that He stands in our place as our substitute to receive the judgment of God. He takes God’s wrath upon on Him that belongs to me. He takes my liabilities and my indebtedness. He takes my debts and pays the price.

Yet, at the same time, it is a double transfer, a double imputation. My guilt is imputed to Him and His righteousness is imputed to me so that when I put my trust in Christ and in Christ alone, God looks at me and sees Christ. If He looked apart from Christ, He would see a miserable wretch who has nothing in his hand to bring, nothing to contribute whatsoever to his justification. But the good news of the gospel is that He looks at me and sees Jesus. I am covered by the cloak of the righteousness of Christ.

Christ is my righteousness. Is that hard to understand? No, but the soul of man is too proud. We just cannot believe it. We think: “Let other people get in the kingdom by grace alone. I’m not so dependent that I can’t contribute something. I want to do something to earn a piece of my salvation.” Despair of that thought forever because there is nothing you could ever do that would be good enough to satisfy the demands of God’s law. Only Christ’s righteousness is good enough to do it.

The Only Justifier

Christ’s righteousness alone being able to satisfy God’s law is why Paul comes to this conclusion: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles?”

That is an interesting question, is it not? Let me ask you this question to bring it up to date: Is God the God of Christians only? Is God the God of Muslims? Is God the God of Buddhists? Is God the God of atheists? Is He the God of governments, of judges in Pennsylvania?

If He is God, He is the God of everything and everybody. Just because He focused His redeeming grace on the one little nation of Israel to call them to be a light to the gentiles, which they were not, does that not mean that He is not also the Lord God omnipotent over every gentile on the face of the earth? Of course He is.

If God is God, He is sovereign over everyone and everything. If you conceive of a god whose domain is simply the church and not the pagan world, then you are not thinking of the God of Christianity. You are not thinking of the God who is, the God who made heaven and earth and everything in it.

So, Paul asks that question: “Is God just the God of the Hebrews, the Jews, the Israelites?” Paul answers, “Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” There is only one God who does the justifying. The church cannot justify you. You cannot justify yourself. There is only one God who can pronounce you just in His sight. There is only one God who will justify, and He will justify the circumcised, that is the Jew, by his circumcision, right? Wrong. The Jew is justified not by his circumcision; the Jew is justified by faith.

When we get to chapter 4, Paul will show how this doctrine of justification by faith alone is not something new that Paul’s perspective brings on the scene. Rather, it is something that has been taught from age immemorial, back through the very foundation of the people of Israel, going back to father Abraham, the father of the faithful, who was justified by faith alone. That will be exhibit A next week.

In the meantime, Paul says, “There is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.” In other words, it does not matter whether you are a Jew or a gentile; there is only one way you can be justified, and that is not by your works, but by faith alone.

The Law Fulfilled

Then Paul says: “Do we then make void the law through faith?” It is as if Paul is saying: “I’ve been emphasizing faith and telling you the conclusion that a man is justified by faith and not by works. Rather, he is justified apart from the works of the law. When I say that, do I intend to empty the significance of the law? Am I now saying that because justification is by faith alone, the law of God is null and void? Am I saying that we can now dispense with the law? Since the law won’t save us, what good is it? You might as well get rid of it, right? To the gallows with Moses!”

“No,” Paul says, “we do not make the law null and void.” He says: “Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law.” The law was never given as a way to justify anyone. The purpose of the law, as Paul will expound more fully, is to drive us to Christ. The purpose of Moses and of the Prophets was one and the same: to show us our desperate need for a Savior. The law is the schoolmaster to take us to Christ, and the law demands perfection, which is only achieved by Christ.

If we look at the law, first of all, we see the righteousness of God. Second of all, by looking at the standard of the righteousness of God, we understand that the law is a mirror that reveals to us our unrighteousness, our moral hopelessness apart from a Savior. Then the law drives us to the One who is perfectly righteous so that we may put our faith in Him because He kept the law perfectly. It was His meat and His drink to do the will of His Father. He was without sin. His righteousness is measured by the perfection of the law.

Paul is not disparaging the law. Paul is not dismissing the law as insignificant. No, the doctrine of justification by faith fulfills the law because the law teaches us that it is the only way we can be justified. The person who thinks he lives a life good enough to justify himself does not understand himself, does not understand God, and does not understand the law of God.

All We Have Is Christ

What is the great commandment? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” I do not know everything about everyone in this room. There are some people in this room who names I don’t even know. So, of course I do not know everything there is to know about anyone in this room. But I know this: there are no people in this room who have ever loved the Lord their God with their whole heart. We will not love God with our whole heart until we are totally purged of our corrupt nature in your glorification in heaven.

The law of God tells me that I have to love God with my whole heart, with all my mind, and with all my strength, and I do not do it. It exposes me. It strips me. It says: “Sproul, you don’t love God with all your heart. If you walk around in a pious posture, pretending that you do, you are the worst of hypocrites, because you know that your heart is not 100 percent sold out to God.”

I would like to be able to say that I love God with all my heart, and I know that there will be a day that I will. I love Him, but I do not love Him perfectly. Neither do you. If I really meditate on the law of God, day and night, it does not just hint at my need of a Savior; it screams at me. It shoves me, grabs me by the scruff of the neck, and drags me kicking and screaming, if necessary, to the cross.

That is why I say that at the end of the day, all you have is Christ and His righteousness. That is all you have. But that is all you need because “by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified,” but through the works of Christ all shall be justified who put their trust in Him (Gal. 2:16). Let us pray.

Father, how we love the gospel because we need it so much, and we love Your law, for in it we see the beauty of Your holiness. We are embarrassed when it reveals the ugliness of our sin, yet without that understanding, we would not know our need for Christ. So, we thank You for the way in which the gospel so ironically establishes the sweetness and excellency of Your law. We thank You for this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.