Dr. Sproul investigates the specific controversy that sparked the reformation—the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He looks into the areas of agreement and disagreement between Roman Catholics and Protestants of the reformation. Further, he looks at the double transfer of Christ's righteousness in exchange for our sins and concludes this section by defining propitiation and expiation.

We will continue with our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans this evening, and I will read from Romans 3:21–26. Please stand for the reading of the Word of God:

But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

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

As we attend now, O Lord, to this short passage of Scripture that we have just heard, may we indeed approach it in a spirit of fear and trembling, for in these things we have just heard is our only hope in life and death, for we have heard the very essence of the gospel that Paul promised to set forth in this epistle. Help us to grasp it tonight in a manner that previous to this time, we have never fully understood, that we may get this doctrine not only in our heads, but in our bloodstream, that the just may live by faith. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Atlas Doctrine

Last Sunday evening, we came to the end of a severe indictment regarding the measure of our natural corruption. The Apostle Paul mounted a litany of citations from the Psalms and Isaiah to declare that there is none righteous, no, not one. There is none who does good; altogether we have gone out of the way, and none seek after God.

Then we came to the conclusion last week in verse 19, where Paul wrote: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

Before Paul gives us his exposition of how we are positively justified before God, he introduces the doctrine of justification by telling us in the first instance how we are not justified: no person will ever be justified by performing the works of the law.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone provoked the most serious controversy in the history of the Christian church, culminating in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which focused on the material cause of the doctrine of justification. It was asking the simple question, How can an unjust person ever hope to stand before the just judgment of God? In a word, How are we saved? How are we justified? This is a matter of eternal consideration.

The Reformation was not a tempest in a teapot. It was not a question of theological shadow boxing. What was at stake in that controversy, during which many paid with their lives, was the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which is central to the New Testament gospel. Yet today, there are few professing Christians who even can define the meaning of the term justification.

Luther warned at the end of his life that unless the gospel were proclaimed clearly and persistently through the ages, it would surely and soon fall once again into eclipse, and people would begin once again to entertain the idea that they could be right with God on the basis of their good works. Luther, in insisting on the biblical doctrine, declared that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is the article upon which the church stands or falls. In other words, if the church does not get this right, it ceases to be an authentic church. If the church denies or obscures the doctrine of justification by faith alone, it is no longer a Christian body.

Calvin added the sentiment to Luther’s that the doctrine of justification is the hinge by which everything else turns. Earlier, J.I. Packer used another metaphor, where he said that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is the Atlas that carries the whole of the Christian faith on its shoulder. If justification by faith alone stumbles, the whole Christian faith comes crashing to the ground. So, if you are not clear on what the word justification means and what the doctrine is all about, then it is time that you become clear on it.

A Declaration of Righteousness

Let me begin by saying further what justification does not mean. When we are justified in the sight of God, that act of justification is not an act of divine pardon. In justification, God does not pardon the sinner. When a governor or president extends executive clemency and pardons a convicted criminal, that person is deemed to be guilty. In spite of that guilt, the person in authority grants the mercy of giving a pardon, more or less forgiving him of his crime and setting him free. Justification involves forgiveness, as we will see, but let us not confuse the act of divine justification with an act of pardon.

In justification, God makes a legal declaration, what we call a “forensic” declaration. If you watch trials on television, or pay attention to shows like Numbers or CSI, you are aware that there are people who gather what is forensic evidence, evidence that is used in trials in criminal cases. Forensics has to do with judicial judgments or declarations.

When we find it in the New Testament, what happens in the act of justification is that God makes a judicial declaration about a person’s status before His judgment. What happens in justification is not a pardon but an act whereby God declares a person to be just. Justification is that act by which God judicially declares a person to be righteous in His sight.

Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestants in the sixteenth century agreed that in the final analysis, the act of justification is something that God does, and it is a judicial declaration. Even Rome, for those of you who have studied this in a theological manner, has its own view of forensic justification. Both sides agree that justification does not happen until God declares a person righteous.

The Only Sufficient Righteousness

The issue on which Roman Catholics and Protestants disagree, both then and now, is this: On what grounds does God declare a person righteous? Why would God look at you—one who is dead in sin and trespasses, who by nature does no good, does not seek after Him, and has no understanding—and ever say from heaven, “You are a just person,” when manifestly you are not a just person?

The good news of the gospel is that God pronounces people just, astonishingly enough, while they are still sinners. This was the debate with Rome. Rome set forth the doctrine, then and now, that God will never declare a person just until that person actually, under divine scrutiny, is found to be just.

At the sixth session of the Council of Trent, in the middle of the sixteenth century, at the heart of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church defined her doctrine of justification, which it has echoed through the centuries, even as recently as the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Rome declared without equivocation that before God will ever declare a person to be just, righteousness must inhere within that person. The Latin is the word inhaerens. That is to say, when God looks at you, He will not say you are just until He sees that you really are just.

Rome says you cannot be just without grace. You will never become just without faith. You will never become just without the assistance of Christ. So, you need faith, you need grace, and you need Jesus. You need the righteousness of Christ infused or poured into your soul. You must cooperate with that grace to such a degree that you will, in fact, become righteous. If you die with any impurity in your soul by which you lack complete righteousness, you will not go to heaven, but if no mortal sin is present in your life, you will go to purgatory, which is the place of purging. The point of purging is to purge off the dross to make you completely pure. It may take three years or three million years, but the object of purgatory is to get you actually righteous so you can be admitted into God’s heaven.

Part of the reason for Rome’s belief that justification is rooted and grounded in an inherent righteousness in the sinner is based upon an unfortunate thing in church history. In the early centuries when the Greek language passed away from the central attention of the church fathers and Latin became the dominant language, many scholars in the first few centuries read only the Latin Bible, not the Greek, and they borrowed the Roman or Latin word for justification, from which we get the English word justification, iustificare.

In Latin, the verb ficare means “to make,” “to shape,” or “to do,” and iustus means “righteousness” or “justice.” So, iustificare literally means “to make righteous,” which we believe is what happens in sanctification, not in justification. But the Greek word that we are dealing with in the text is the word dikaiosynē, the verb from of which is dikaioō, which does not mean “to make righteous,” but rather, “to declare righteous.”

In the Roman view, God will never pronounce a person just or righteous until, by the help of God’s grace and of Christ, that person actually becomes righteous. Now, if God were to judge you tonight, what would He find? Would He find sin in your life? Could He possibly rightly declare you just if all He considered was the righteousness He found in your life today?

The Apostle Paul said, “By the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified” (Rom. 3:20). Paul labors the point in this text that all have sinned and do sin and fall short of the glory of God. That is precisely why the ground for our justification cannot be found in us or any righteousness that is inherent in our souls. That is why we so desperately need what Luther called a iustitia alienum, an alien righteousness, a righteousness that comes from outside of ourselves, a righteousness that is extra nos, outside of or apart from us.

In simple terms, the only righteousness sufficient for you or me to stand before the judgment of God is the righteousness of Christ. The doctrine of justification by faith alone is theological shorthand for the affirmation that justification is by Christ alone, by His righteousness, which is received by faith. So, when Paul speaks here about justification, he is not talking about pardon, and he is not talking about God’s declaration of what He finds in us and in our behavior. He is talking about something else altogether.

Simultaneously Just and Sinner

Let me give one more piece of historical background before we return to the text. One of the slogans formulated by Luther that was widely repeated in the sixteenth century was a little Latin phrase. Now, you may get sick of hearing Latin, but I commend a few of these phrases to you because one of the advantages of Latin is that we do not overuse it to the degree that it becomes meaningless. If you want to become precise and hang your hat on something to help you remember it, sometimes these Latin phrases can serve in that capacity. If you learn no other Latin phrase as long as you are a Christian, learn this one from Luther said: simul iustus et peccator. What does it mean?

Simul is the root from which we get the word simultaneously. It means “at the same time.” Iustus means “just,” or “righteous.” Remember when Caesar was assassinated, he looked at his killer and said, “Et tu, Brute,” then fall Caesar. That is, “And you too, Brutus.” Et is simply the word for “and.”

So, we have simul iustus et, “at the same time just and,” peccator, “sinner.” We say that if someone is without sin, he is impeccable. We use the term peccadillo to describe a little sin. But Luther’s slogan was that the Christian is someone who is at the very same time righteous and a sinner. How can that be?

If a person is considered in and of themselves, that person is a sinner. If God would come and examine my life, He would discover quickly that I am still a sinner. Yet at the very same time, while I am still a sinner, I am righteous in His sight by virtue of the legal transfer God has made by assigning the righteousness of Jesus to me if I put my trust in Christ. So, by virtue of this transfer, or imputation, of the righteousness of Christ to the believer, the believer is declared to be righteous, while in and of himself, that person is still a sinner.

That is the good news. You can be declared just by God while you are still a sinner. That is the heart of the gospel. I do not have to wait to become perfectly righteous before I am acceptable to God.

This is the point the Apostle labors when he says, “But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.” When we get to chapter four, Paul will show that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is not a novelty. This is not a new doctrine that Jesus announced with His incarnation or that the Apostle Paul dreamed up during his ministry. Rather, this doctrine of the gospel is rooted and grounded in the testimony of the Old Testament.

The whole point of the law is to drive us to the One who possesses righteousness that we do not have. It is in the teaching of the prophets. Paul will show us in chapter four that the same way you and I are justified today on this side of the cross was how people in the Old Testament were justified, how Abraham was justified. I do not want to get ahead to that illustration. I will wait until it appears in the text. But the point that he mentions now by way of foreshadowing what is to come is that now the righteousness of God is revealed, “being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe.”

The Instrumental Cause of Justification

Before I go on, let me stop for a moment to address something significant. When we say that justification is “by faith” or “through faith,” we must be careful that we do not misunderstand what that means. This does not mean that if you have faith, your faith is such a righteous thing and such a good response to the call of the gospel that God looks at you and says: “You have faith. There’s your righteousness. You’ve made the right decision. You’ve responded to Christ. You’ve done a good thing. Your faith counts for your righteousness. Because you have faith, I will declare you righteous.”

To be justified by faith is not to be justified because you have faith in the sense that your faith now is the supreme work that makes you righteous. No, the language of being justified by faith or through faith simply means that faith is the means by which we lay hold of Christ. It is the means by which the righteousness of Christ is bestowed upon us.

Let me give you some theological distinctions between the Roman Catholic Church then and now and the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes faith as important—and indeed, essential—to justification. For Rome, faith is the foundation for justification. It is the root of justification. But the instrumental cause of justification according to Rome is the sacrament of baptism.

That idea of an instrumental cause is probably not something that is part of your daily vocabulary. You may not talk about instrumental causes in normal conversation. Where does that idea come from?

To understand the significance of that language, we have to go back before Jesus. We have to go back to the philosopher Aristotle, who examined different ways in which change is brought about. He said that the word cause in and of itself is too general, too vague. We need to be more specific if we are going to be scientific in discerning various types of causes.

Aristotle used the famous illustration of a piece of sculpture. He said that a piece of sculpture starts out as a block of stone. It has no beautiful shape to it; it is just a block of stone. How does that block of stone change into a gorgeous statue, such as would be created by Michelangelo?

Aristotle said that first, there is the material cause, the stuff out of which something is brought to pass. He said that the material cause in the case of the sculpture is the block of stone. He also said there was the formal cause, the idea that the sculptor or the artist has before he creates his piece of art. Maybe a painter has a sketch, or even just an idea in his head, and he follows that blueprint or format in order to produce the sculpture. That is the formal cause. The efficient cause is the one whose work brings about the change. In the case of the sculpture, the sculptor himself is the efficient cause, the one who makes the changes happen. The final cause is the purpose for which something is made, perhaps it is to beautify an emperor’s garden.

In all those distinctions of causes, Aristotle also spoke of the instrumental cause. That one is simple: it is the means by which the sculptor shapes that stone into a beautiful statue. The instruments he uses are the chisel and the hammer. The instrumental cause of Rembrandt’s paintings are his brushes. They are the instruments he uses. He did not make finger paintings that are now hanging in the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum. He used brushes. Those are the instruments, the means by which the change takes place.

For the Christian, Rome says the instrumental cause is baptism in the first instance, and in the second instance, the sacrament of penance, whereby if you lose your justification through mortal sin, you can have it restored through the sacrament of penance, which includes doing works of satisfaction. But Rome declared the sacraments as the means by which a person is made righteous.

The Reformers said: “No, the instrumental cause of our justification is not the sacrament. It’s faith.” Faith is the lone instrument by which you are linked to Christ and receive His righteousness transferred by God to your account. That is why it is so important for us to understand what faith is, why we call people to faith, and why the New Testament calls us to faith. It means that we place our trust in Christ and His righteousness. We do not trust our own righteousness because we do not have any. But when we trust Christ’s righteousness on our behalf and embrace Him, then God legally transfers His righteousness to us.

Grace Freely Given

Do you see that, in your salvation, a double transfer is involved? Christ died for our salvation, but He also lived for our salvation. On the one hand, your sins are transferred to Jesus. He died on the cross for you because He bears our sins. How does that happen? Does God reach down into your soul and grab part of your sin and then reach over and place it on the back of Jesus? No, it is a legal transfer. God assigns your guilt to His Son. He transfers it from you to Christ.

But that is only half the transaction. The other half is that God takes Christ’s righteousness and assigns it to you when you believe. When God looks at me, if He were to look at me in my nakedness, knowing that all my righteousness is as filthy rags, I would perish. But He gives me the cloak of the righteousness of Jesus.

This is the righteousness of God that Paul introduced in the first chapter of Romans, that righteousness not by which God Himself is righteous, but the righteousness He makes available to all who put their trust in Christ. This is “the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

If I were righteous inherently, it may be gracious to say that I am justified because the only way I could have been righteous inherently was through the help of God, such that I needed God’s grace to make it possible for me to become righteous. But that is not what Paul is talking about in this text. He is talking about a grace that goes so much deeper than that. It is the grace by which God freely gives the gift of the righteousness of Christ to a sinner, who is at the same time just and sinner.

Two Glorious Words

Paul continues, saying that we are “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed.” Before I go on, let me go back to another word that is not part of your daily conversation, but is in this text: “propitiation.”

There was a storm of controversy when the Revised Standard Version appeared in English because the words expiation and propitiation were removed from the English text. The rationale went like this: “People in this day and age don’t use words like that, and if people are going to understand the New Testament, we need to get rid of strange terms like propitiation and expiation.”

Do not ever get rid of the words propitiation and expiation. These are two of the most glorious words we find anywhere in the New Testament. What do they mean?

Propitiation means to satisfy the demands of justice. In terms of the biblical concept, it means to satisfy the demands of God’s wrath. God places sin and all evil under His judgment and decrees that He is going to pour out His wrath upon all sin.

The New Testament, when it speaks of our salvation, says that we are saved from God. We are saved by God from God because in justification, we are saved from the wrath that is to come. People today are not concerned about justification because they really do not believe there is any wrath coming. That is why we spent time earlier in Romans when Paul talked about the danger of storing up wrath against the day of wrath.

Propitiation completely satisfies the demands of God’s wrath and justice. That is what the cross was all about. On the cross, Christ as our substitute took upon Himself the wrath that we deserve to pay the penalty that was due for our guilt and to satisfy the demands of God’s justice. In His work of propitiation, Jesus did something on a vertical level. He did something with respect to the Father, satisfying the justice of God for us.

Expiation has to do directly with us. The prefix ex means “away from” or “out of.” One of the benefits of justification is the remission of sin. Remission of sin is when our sin is removed from us. It goes away. I recently talked to one of my closest friends from high school, whose wife has been fighting cancer for several years. I asked, “How is she?” He answered, “She’s in her fourth remission.” That means, at least for the time being, the cancer has gone away. It has been removed.

Let’s say that you get a bill from a store. You have bought something on your credit card, and the bill comes and asks you to remit payment. That means to send it in, so that the money is transferred from your account to the vendor or merchant. When the New Testament speaks about expiation, it speaks about that sense in which Christ removes our sin from us. He takes it away. We are told that as far as the east is from the west, so far are our sins removed from us. In the work of Christ, there is propitiation and there is expiation.

I have given our church members a way to remember this that they might never forget. Our sanctuary is in the form of a cross. It is called a “cruciform.” We have the center beam of the cross, the vertical beam, coming down the middle. If you looked at this sanctuary from an airplane, you would see that is in the form of the cross. The side cross pieces are the various transepts. I said: “Every time you come into church on Sunday morning and walk down that aisle, think of the vertical dimension of your justification, which is the propitiation, the satisfaction that Christ has done before the Father for you. That’s the vertical bar. The horizontal bar of the cross represents your expiation, whereby Christ has not only satisfied the justice of the Father, but He’s also removed your sins from you.”

That is why I do not want to lose these words. I would rather take the time to explain them and learn them because they so richly capture the essence of the gospel that stands upon what Christ did. On the cross, He paid for our guilt, and in His life of perfect obedience, He earned a righteousness that He freely gives to us.

Just and Justifier

God set forth Christ “as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness”—and here is one of my favorite texts in all of the Bible—“that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

There is no such thing as cheap grace. Do not think that the gospel is simply an announcement of pardon. Do not think that in your justification, God just decides unilaterally to forgive you of your sins. The prevailing idea today is that in the gospel, God freely forgives you of sin simply because He is such a loving, dear, wonderful God, and it does not disturb Him that in our sin we violate everything that is holy.

Beloved, God never negotiates His own righteousness. God will never lay aside His holiness to save you or anybody else. God demands and requires that sin be punished. That is why the universal symbol of Christianity is the cross. Christ had to die because the propitiation had to be made. God said: “I will not negotiate my justice. Sin has to be punished.” Your sin has to be punished.

In the drama of justification, God remains just. He does not stop being just. He does not set aside His justice. He does not waive His righteousness. He insists upon His righteousness. You cannot be justified without righteousness. But the glory of His grace, which He demonstrates along with His justice, is that justice is served vicariously through a substitute whom He appoints.

By basing your justification on the righteousness of Christ, God’s mercy is shown. It is not your righteousness that saves you; it is someone else’s. You get in on someone else’s coattails. That is grace. But that someone, your Redeemer, is perfectly righteous. He has fulfilled the justice of God for you perfectly. That is the glory of justification. In it, God demonstrates that He is both just and the justifier.

If God were only the justifier, by negotiating His righteousness, He would not be just. If all He did was maintain His own righteousness without extending the grace of the imputation of someone else’s righteousness to you, He would not be the justifier. But He is both just and the justifier. That is the marvel of the gospel.

In this text, Paul is just introducing this marvel. He will be expanding and demonstrating it further from sacred Scripture as we continue to study the terms of what he teaches on justification. Let us pray.

O Lord, if You would mark iniquities, who would stand? We know that we could not possibly stand on the basis of our own righteousness, but we thank You for the glorious gift You have bestowed upon us freely in Christ, for You have given to us His righteousness when we put our trust in Him and Him alone. Help us, O Father, to despair of any hope of resting our case on any righteousness that inheres in us by grace or any other means. May we look to Christ and to Christ alone for our righteousness. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.