Dr. Sproul starts this section by reviewing chapter 4 verses 23 and 24, continuing the discussion of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness for all who believe. Then Dr. Sproul discusses the spiritual war that we are in, comparing it to World War 2.

Last week, we looked at the last portion of chapter four of Romans, and I said that “if we have time and God is willing,” I would begin the first portion of chapter five. But those who were here last week know that God was not willing, and so we did not begin to look at the start of chapter five. I also said at the end of the message last week that I wanted to speak a little further on the last line of chapter four, and I plan to do that this evening. It is still my earnest hope that the Lord would be willing that we would be able to begin chapter five. So, trusting in that divine benevolence, I will read from the beginning of Romans 5:1–5, and I ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

These few verses summarize the sweetness of the gospel that we have been studying. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Our Father, stoop from Your divine glory, lisp to us as babes, condescend to our low estate, that You would help us to see just a little bit more of the glory of the gospel that we have been studying. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Great Double Transfer

Before we get to chapter five, let me comment a little further on the last section of chapter four that we looked at last week. Romans 4:23–25 reads:

Now it is not written for his [Abraham’s] sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification.

We have been looking relentlessly at the central importance of the doctrine of imputation. The idea of the imputation of the merit and righteousness of Christ to our account is at the very heart of the gospel, and without that imputation we have lost everything. It is only by His righteousness that we have any standing in the presence of God at all.

I have been laboring the point in recent weeks using Abraham as the prime example of the nature of imputation. The Apostle Paul does the same when he quotes Genesis 15:6, where God made His promise to Abraham. We read that Abraham believed God and “it was accounted to him for righteousness” (Rom. 4:22). We saw that this idea of imputation—this reckoning, counting, or transferring from one person’s account to another—is of the very essence of salvation.

I’ve mentioned also that in our salvation there is a double imputation, and I will remind you of that again. In Christ’s work for us in His atoning death upon the cross, God reckoned or imputed our sin to Him in His death. So, when we say that Jesus died for us, we mean that His death was vicarious, that He was doing something for us in our place, acting as our substitute, and that God accepted the transfer, reckoning, or imputation of our guilt to His Son.

But I said also, if you recall, that this imputation is dual in the sense that not only is our sin reckoned to Christ, transferred or imputed to His account, but His righteousness is imputed to us. He gets our guilt; we get His merit. In this double transfer, this double imputation, is the great benefit of the redemption that Christ has won for us. It would almost seem that once we have double imputation by virtue of the life of Jesus and death of Jesus, that would be sufficient to secure our justification. However, there is one more element that we have not yet addressed: the resurrection of Christ.

Raised for Our Justification

Paul introduces the idea of the resurrection at the end of the fourth chapter, saying, “It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead”—there is the introduction of this matter of the resurrection—“who was delivered up because of our offenses [as our substitute], and was raised because of our justification.”

It is an interesting statement that Christ was raised for our justification. We could understand how the Apostle would say that Jesus was raised for His justification—that is, for His vindication. It would make sense to say that Jesus was raised to declare to the whole world His innocence and righteousness, showing that His conviction by an earthly court of accusers was false and fraudulent, and while men said no to Jesus, the Father said yes and refused to allow death to hold Him. It would make sense plainly that Jesus was raised for His vindication, for His justification, and indeed that is also an essential element of the resurrection of Jesus.

But here Paul is saying that Christ was raised for our justification. So, I ask you, what does that mean? Having raised the question, I could say, “Let us go on now to chapter five, and I will let you wrestle with the answers.” But I would’nt do that. To understand what Paul means, we want to take a few moments to revisit what happened on the cross and what happens in our redemption.

Two Scoops and Moral Debt

On other occasions when I have preached about the atoning death of Jesus, I’ve used an illustration from past theological inquiry to illustrate an important distinction about our situation as sinners before a righteous God as debtors who cannot pay their debt. I have noticed that the language of the New Testament with respect to our condition of guilt before God is often expressed in this category of indebtedness.

So then, what is the nature of the debt we owe God because of our sin? We make the distinction, as the church fathers did, between a moral debt and a pecuniary debt. A pecuniary debt is a monetary or financial debt. You understand what a pecuniary debt is when you get a statement at the end of the month from a vendor, your bank, or whoever loaned you money to buy your house. It tells you that you owe a certain number of dollars. That debt must be paid, and it is a monetary debt. That is not the same as moral debt.

In order to illustrate the difference between a pecuniary debt and moral debt, I have used elsewhere the simple illustrative story of a young boy who goes into the ice cream parlor, orders an ice cream cone from the attendant, and wants two scoops of ice cream on the cone. Then the attendant scoops the two scoops and puts them on the cone, hands it to the little boy, and says to him, “That will be two dollars.” Then the little boy’s lip starts to quiver, and he says to the woman, “But my mommy only gave me a dollar.”

You see, the boy has a problem. He now owes two dollars for the ice cream cone, but he only has one dollar. Now, I am standing there watching this drama unfold in front of me. I do the same thing that any one of you would do in that situation, and say to the attendant: “Excuse me, ma’am. If it would be all right with you, I’d be happy to make up the difference between what the little boy has and what he needs.” So, I produce the second dollar.

My question is this: Is the woman running the store under any obligation to accept the dollar that I offer to her? Yes, she is, because the debt is a pecuniary debt, and I am offering her the legal tender, and legal tender means she must accept it in payments of debts. I am perfectly legally able to step forward and pay this young boy’s debt. She, the one who is owed the money, must accept the debt.

But let us change the story just a little. Let’s say I am standing in line at the ice cream counter and the young boy runs in, grabs a cone, runs behind the counter, puts two scoops of ice cream on his cone, and starts running out the door with the attendant in pursuit. The attendant is calling for the police, saying, “Stop, thief!” The policeman on the corner sees what happens, grabs the urchin by scruff of his neck, brings him back into the store and says: “Is this the boy? Did he do something?” The attendant says, “Yes, he just stole two scoops of ice cream, not to mention the cone.”

Then I say: “Wait a minute. Officer, ma’am, let’s just forget about this.” I reach into my pocket and take out two dollars. I hand the two dollars to the attendant, and I say: “The boy’s debt is paid. Can we just all go home and forget about this?” The policeman says: “Ma’am, you don’t have to accept that money. This boy has broken the law. He’s violated the law. He’s guilty of petty larceny, at least. Would you like to press charges?”

The woman has every right under the law to press charges and is under no obligation whatsoever to accept my vicarious payment of the little boy’s debt. If the woman is a gracious and merciful person, she may say to the officer: “No, it’s okay. Let him go. I’ll accept payment for his debt by this gentleman who has offered to be a substitute payer.” She has the option of accepting my payment, but she is not bound by my offer.

Do you see the difference? When a moral transgression has taken place, when there is a moral debt, the person offended by that immoral act is under no obligation to accept the payment of a substitute on behalf of the guilty party. But Christ lays down His life for His sheep on the cross. He offers Himself in His perfect righteousness, in His perfect innocence, taking upon Him the sin of His people, and offers His death to the Father.

If Jesus died on the cross for your sins and stayed dead, you would have no justification. But when the Father raised the Son from the dead, He said to the world, “I accept this payment for those debtors who cannot pay.” So, the resurrection of Jesus is not simply for His vindication, but it is for our justification, because it is God’s demonstration to His unjust people, to those debtors who cannot pay, that He accepts the payment in full for the moral debt that has been incurred by us.

Contenders for the Faith

We make the distinction in theology between the active obedience of Jesus and the passive obedience of Jesus. We have been looking at His active obedience for several weeks. Jesus’ perfect obedience to the law of God was such that He earned for Himself, by His own merit and righteousness, eternal felicity with the Father in the Father’s kingdom. He fulfilled all the terms of God’s covenant with man, the promise for which was blessedness.

By His perfect obedience, eternal blessedness was the reward of Jesus. It is that reward that He trades for our sin. His perfect active obedience is then followed by His perfect passive obedience when He submits Himself to the curse of the law and the wrath of the Father by willingly bearing our sins upon the cross. In His life He shows his active obedience; in His death He manifests His passive obedience. Both active and passive obedience are essential for our justification.

I have been thoroughly enjoying reading John Piper’s recent book titled Contending for Our All, in which Dr. Piper points out that every Christian is called to profess faith in Christ. We are not only called to profess our faith in Christ, but we are called to defend the faith of Christ to the world around us. But beyond the responsibility of professing and defending the faith, we are called to contend for the faith.

That is where many Christians get off the boat. They say, “I’ll profess my faith, and I’ll even defend it, but don’t ask me to contend for it. Don’t ask me to get in the arena and fight for the truths of the gospel.” Our culture constantly tells us that doctrine divides. We hear voices saying: “Let us not contend about the truth of God. Doesn’t the Bible say that we’re not to be contentious?”

It is true that we are not to have the spirit of contentiousness or to fight over every point of doctrine or engage in battle at the drop of a hat. But where the gospel is under siege in any generation, where the controversy is hot and the truth of the gospel is at stake, every Christian is called to contend with all his might. In Dr. Piper’s book, he gives a cameo examination of three great contenders for the faith through Christian history.

Athanasius Against the World

The first person Piper looks at in his book is Athanasius, whose tombstone read Athanasius contra mundum, or “Athanasius against the world.” No single individual in church history fought longer and harder for the church’s affirmation of the full deity of Christ than did Saint Athanasius in the fourth century, who was exiled time after time because of the Arian heretics who sought to destroy him. But they could not silence him, as he was contending for the whole of the gospel in the person of Christ.

John Owen’s Gladness in Providence

The second person Piper studies in this book is John Owen, the English Puritan of the seventeenth century, who many believe is the most brilliant writer of Christian truth in the English language ever to grace the world. Many others rank him second to Jonathan Edwards. I would rank him second to Jonathan Edwards, but people will argue forever about who was greater, John Owen or Jonathan Edwards. But that is really a moot point. The point is that both of them were giants whom God gave to the church. Both entered into controversy, and where essential truths of the gospel were at stake, they contended with their all for our all. It is a wonderful thing to see these examples of men in history who suffered greatly for the gospel.

Perhaps the closest friend John Owen had in his ministry was John Bunyan. John Owen was a brilliant scholar, an academician, the head of Oxford, and then the chief lieutenant to Oliver Cromwell. He had the ear of those in high places, including Charles II at the time of the Restoration. John Bunyan, on the other hand, was uneducated yet totally committed to the truths of the gospel.

At one point, King Charles II asked why John Owen was seeking the release from prison of this lowly man. Charles said to John Owen, “Why would you show any concern at all for this man who’s so poorly educated?” John Owen said, “I would trade all of the knowledge I had if it would please your Majesty, if I could preach just once like John Bunyan.”

All of John Owen’s efforts to get Bunyan released from prison failed. He wrote to everyone he knew. He tried to persuade all those in high places. He put his own reputation on the line to get Bunyan out of jail. Nothing worked.

Finally, when Bunyan was released from prison, he came out with a manuscript that he had written in isolation titled Pilgrim’s Progress. The number one book in terms of all-time best sales in the English language is the Bible, and in second place is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. John Owen was glad that in the providence of God his efforts to get Bunyan released prematurely ended in failure.

J. Gresham Machen’s Joy in Christ’s Active Obedience

The third person Piper examines in this book Contending for Our All is J. Gresham Machen. You may never have heard of J. Gresham Machen. He died on the first of January, 1937. He was the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was the one who brought the theological elite from Princeton Seminary to found that seminary in Philadelphia to keep the Reformed faith alive in America.

At the age of fifty-five, during a Christmas break in December of 1936, Machen was invited to travel by train from Philadelphia to Bismarck, North Dakota to carry out a few preaching assignments in little churches in the Dakotas. His friends on the faculty at Westminster who knew that his health was frail profoundly urged him not to make the arduous journey. They said: “Take the Christmas holidays to get some rest. You need it, Dr. Machen.”

Machen would not listen. He got on the train and traveled all the way to North Dakota. When he arrived, he became ill. He was stricken with pneumonia, which proved to be fatal. He died on the first day of January in 1937, at 7:30 in the evening. Before Machen died, the last thing he wrote was a telegram to his good friend who was on the faculty with him at Westminster Seminary, Professor John Murray.

Many of you have heard of John Murray. Many of you who are studying Romans perhaps have read his classic commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. The fact that Murray was involved in this transaction had some personal interest to me. Though I was born after Machen died, I was alive when Murray was teaching at Westminster, and I met him on more than one occasion.

When Murray retired and married at the age of seventy, he had two children after he was seventy years old and returned to his native Scotland. The last thing that he wrote for publication was an essay that was part of a compilation of essays presented to Dr. John Gerstner, my mentor, on the occasion of a Festschrift for that professor. I was the editor of that particular undertaking. So, it was to my hands that the last written document from John Murray was delivered. That is my link to this history, and I get excited about it because the last statement of Machen was to Murray, and the last thing that Murray wrote came to me.

Listen to the words of the telegram. Machen was dying, and he wrote to his friend by telegram: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” On his deathbed, Machen was thinking of the perfect active obedience of Jesus, which active obedience was the sole ground for the justification of J. Gresham Machen, and the sole ground for your justification and for mine.

It is one thing to study theology in the abstract, but when the end of your life comes and you know you are dying, to find joy in the perfect active obedience of Jesus is the mark of a true saint. It is glorious to read stories of people like that. Oh, that God would raise up more contenders of faith in our day like these men from the past.

Justification Now

Having said that, let us now press onward to the fifth chapter of Romans, for in the fullness of time, God in His mercy has allotted me six minutes to look at this text. The first thing I want us to see about the beginning of chapter five is the word “therefore.”

In the original texts of Scripture there were no chapters or verses. When you write letters to people, you do not write “verse one, verse two, chapter one.” These chapters I am sure were written by an itinerant preacher on horseback falling asleep in the saddle, because why else would anyone start a chapter with the word “therefore”? “Therefore” signifies a conclusion and is tied inseparably to what has just preceded it.

At the beginning of Romans 5, the Apostle Paul is not turning to a new subject. He is still treating the doctrine of justification, on which he has been expounding throughout the epistle to this point. Now he comes to an extremely important conclusion. Having said all the things he said about our justification being by faith and not by works, using Abraham as his exhibit A, he gets down to the bottom line: “Therefore, having been justified by faith,” comma.

We could say that the whole Reformation was fought over that clause. In the Roman Catholic Church, you are not justified until you possess inherent righteousness, which can elude you for your entire life, forcing you to a detour between this world and heaven for a stay in purgatory that can last millions of years.

For Rome, there is no such thing as a justification that is a fait accompli, that has taken place and can never be lost in this world or in the next. You must be sanctified before you can be justified in Rome’s conception. The biblical doctrine is that justification takes place, then we are involved in the process of sanctification for the rest of our lives.

But notice how the Apostle talks here: “Therefore, having been justified . . .” Paul is looking at the doctrine of justification as something that has already taken place, just as he said with Abraham. Abraham was justified in chapter fifteen, seven chapters before he offered up Isaac on the altar.

The great truth here is that the “therefore” gets us to the conclusion that we can be justified now. Those who put their faith in Jesus Christ do not have a prolonged wait for their justification. The moment you believe in Jesus, the second you put your trust in Him, God declares you just, once and for all. “Having been justified” refers to an action that is in the past. It is accomplished. The work of Christ is finished. He has secured the justification of all who put their faith in Him by His death and resurrection.

The point we must see in the text is that justification is a past action. You received it the moment you believed. Now, the question is, What are the consequences? What is the fruit of that justification? What are the benefits of that justification? “Having been justified by faith,” then what? You will have to tune in next time to find out, because the benefits are so great and marvelous that I hope you will begin to ask: “What do I gain from my justification?”

Peace with God

Before I close, let me say this: I will never forget the first time I preached on Romans 5:1–5. I preached in 1972 to a women’s association in an extremely wealthy church comprising “up and outers” we call them. They were very wealthy—I am talking Mellons and Hillmans, that kind of wealthy. It was in a high Episcopal church. They invited me to lecture to them about biblical doctrine, and so I lectured to them on Romans 5:1–5. I lectured my heart out.

I knew when I walked out of the room that they had no idea what I was talking about. I was talking to them about the chief benefit of our justification being peace with God. But they could not get excited about a peace treaty with God because they did not know that there was a war.

People who have been convicted of their sin by the Holy Ghost know that there is a war that can only be won by the one Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the Righteous. We will look at that benefit that He wins for us in our justification, God willing, next week. Let us pray.

Father, may our dying words say how thankful we are for the active obedience of Christ, for without it we have no hope. But with it, we have a hope of which we cannot be ashamed. We thank You, God, for our Savior, for His righteousness, for His atonement, and for His justification on our behalf. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.