What is justifying grace?

It is a righteousness wholly of God. It is the righteousness of God, apart from the law, and man, and experience altogether. But righteousness, or God revealed to be righteous, in justifying the sinner: whether those who were justified before, or now, by the death and resurrection of Christ. Not that (as is said by many) by which we are made righteous personally in ourselves, but that by which God is righteous in reckoning us so: and treating us as righteous before Him. So that the blood of Jesus having put away our sins from the sight of God: we are so justified from them by His blood, that God cannot in righteousness remember them against us any more.

It is that act by which God accounts the believer righteous in His holy presence. He is cleared by virtue of the death of Jesus of every charge of guilt. Scripture amply proves this: “To him that works not, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness” (Rom. 4:5).

But it is time we address ourselves to the question, (4) What is justification? Refer, please, to Rom. 4:3 for God's answer to our inquiry: "Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness." Again, in verse 5: "To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." And also in verse 9: "Faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness." The simple answer then is that justification is judicial righteousness; in other words, God's accounting or adjudging us to be righteous before Himself - on what ground we shall see by-and-by. At present we must be clear as to the thing itself, and would emphatically impress upon the reader's mind this simple, but profoundly important truth, that justification signifies the being accounted by God and before God to be judicially righteous, which is the positive, absolute, and changeless standing of the believer now and eternally. This and this only is justification. Thus it is not merely pardon or forgiveness, which is rather of a negative character, but a positive state of accomplished and ever-subsisting righteousness in Christ before God that we are already brought into by God's own act, as the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.

Justification means that God reckons a believer righteous. Justification is by blood (Rom 5:9). That is, the blood of Jesus is the moral basis upon which God is able to justify a believer. By reason of the blood, God is satisfied that the question of sins is fully settled according to the estimation of the judicial requirements of His throne. Justification is by grace (Rom 3:24) because there is nothing of merit in the believer. He is but guilty, yet, by reason of the blood, God justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5). It is God that justifies (Rom 8:33); God works entirely from Himself (Rom 1:16). Justification is by faith (Rom 3:28; 5:1). A person whose faith relies on Christ risen and the God who raised Him is justified (Rom 4:24 & 25). Justification by works (James 2:24 & 25) is the practical demonstration of the righteousness the believer already has before God and men.

“It is God who justifies” (Rom. 8:33). Justification is an act of the Judge — a sentence of declared righteousness pronounced by Him in favor of the one He justifies. Justification is not something that happens in the heart of a sinner, but a change in his standing before the Judge. Once guilty and awaiting the sentence of eternal banishment from the face of the Judge, the sinner is now justified (declared not guilty) and received into eternal favor with God. This is what God does for the repentant sinner who puts his trust in the work of Christ on the cross.

and 5: now added to this is grace in verse 7. Grace justifies, for it lifts one completely out of a condition of guilt, and sets him rather in a condition of established righteousness before God. Mercy is not said to do this, for mercy is that which has come down to meet souls in the circumstances of their need, of distress, or poverty, or misery, and has had compassion upon them in those circumstances. Grace justifies, that is, it both clears from every charge of guilt, and imparts to us a positive credit of righteousness.

Justification is by the grace of God. It comes to men according to His desires for their blessing, and not according to their deserts, because of what He is and not because of what they are. God looks for no reason in them why He should bless them, He has found all the reasons in His own heart. He justifies freely by His grace.

The grace of God is the motive or proximate cause for justifying the unjust; and this is what is meant in such scriptures as speak of justifying any by the grace of God (Rom. 3:24, Titus 3:7). In His pure, spontaneous, unmerited favour it originated. We were not only not just but ungodly, even if moral or religious after a fashion "we were yet sinners." But God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. There only was the efficacious sacrifice for the defiled; there the ransom most precious to God.

This lays the ground for a new kind of righteousness — for God's righteousness in justifying him who, having no righteousness for God, believes in Jesus at the call of God. It was righteous in God to raise from the dead Jesus Whom unrighteous man crucified; it was righteous to set Him at His own right hand in heaven (John 16:10). But, further, it is His righteousness to justify the ungodly one, not in working for it, but in believing on Him as the God of grace in Christ (Rom. 4). For to him that works for it the reward is not reckoned for righteousness. For this cause it is of faith, that it may be according to grace; and this, not more that the glory may be to God, than that the blessing may be sure to the soul that believes. For, as the Lord Himself taught us in the parables, it is the joy of God to save the lost (Luke 15). By His grace the believer is justified.

We may observe, by the way, that Scripture speaks in three ways of justification as the need of man naturally unrighteous: — justified by His grace (Titus 3:7), if we speak of the source; justified by His blood (Rom. 5:9), if we seek the procuring cause in the work of our Lord Jesus Christ; and justified by faith, if we ask the way by which the soul is individually brought into the blessing (Rom. 5:1).

Thus we see that God’s grace is the source of the believer’s justification; Christ’s blood is the righteous basis of it; the believing sinner’s faith is the means of its reception, and the believer’s works are the evidence of it.