Justification is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow
Romans 4:1-5 · Mike Doyle · May 21, 2023
Romans (2022-25), No. 24
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261931255082

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. So we're only doing a few verses. We're starting in chapter four of Romans. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh has found? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now, to the one that works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.

So we'll cover those five verses today. So, what we've been working on is justification by faith. And these verses in chapter four we begin to see some examples of it put together. So far we've, in terms of justification, chapter 3 verse 21 through 31, the argument has been justification by faith with a focus on the righteousness of God.

Now we talked about the righteousness of God, and I had a conversation with Andrew before we started. I'm learning through the study of these verses that the biggest disservice, the biggest disservice that Reformed theology has placed upon Christianity, they've done it without ever announcing it, but here's what they do. They make that word righteousness, God's righteousness, You picture in your mind, God as God, everybody under sin, and all you're doing is waiting for the hammer to fall. That the word God's righteousness means He's going to get you because you're a sinner.

But if you think about what we've talked about, God took every human being, Jew and Gentile, and He places them under sin. They're all guilty. We were all guilty. And the second thing he does, he gets them all in the same room, and they have to be quiet. So here they are, all humanity in the one room, and he's going to reveal his righteousness to this group. What are they thinking? Here it comes.

And what does God do? in revealing his righteousness, that he starts out by saying, I love you, and I gave my son for you. So the righteousness of God is not a fearful thing, it's a wonderful thing. That the God of the universe has made every provision for you, the sinner. Every single thing that offended Him, He got rid of it, so that if you just believe Him, you can enter into all the fullness of what He's prepared.

That's the message that Reformed theology doesn't give you. That's the message that law-based does give you. So when we get to chapter 4, we're going to try to answer some questions. How has God, or has God always saved this way? from Adam forward? Has he always had the same method that he used to save men? Have men always been justified by their faith, accounted righteous? Did he do it differently in the Old Testament than he does now in the New Testament? Well, Romans 4, I think, was written to show that God has always, always saved the same way. by faith or believing what he says. Real simple equation. Just what he says. And so, righteousness without works. This is a kind of an interesting quote from William Newell.

If God announces the gift of righteousness apart from works, why do you keep mourning over your bad works and your failures? We all do that. Do you not see that it is because you still have hopes in these works of yours that you are depressed and discouraged by your own failures? If you don't admit to that, you're lying to yourself. Because I'm guilty of this.

If we truly saw and believe that God is reckoning righteousness to the ungodly, which we all were, To those who believe in Him, we would hate our struggles to be better. Christianity is not a system of being better. We would see that our dreams of good works have not at all commended us to God, not in the least, and that our bad works do not at all hinder us from believing on Him, the One who justifies the ungodly. from William Newell.

So on seeing our failures, we should realize that if you add it all up, we're nothing but failures. But God is dealing with us on an entirely different principle than whether we succeed or fail. That principle that has nothing to do with our works, whether they're good or bad. The principle does not involve how you work and how you do.

Every one of us is anxious, I think, to be pleasing to God and to be filled with the Spirit. We're all anxious for that. But God, in justifying us, acted wholly and only on the basis of the shed blood of Christ on our behalf. It was not our goodness or our badness. It's all about the blood of Christ.

So I think we can arrive from that, or think from that, an attitude is being developed. First of all, we know that Christ is in heaven before God for us. We know that. and that we stand in the value before God of His finished work, not yours. And that God sees us nowhere else but in a dead, buried, and risen Christ, and that His favor is toward us in Christ, and it's limitless, and it's eternal. It won't ever change, and it won't ever stop.

The second thing we ought to realize is towards the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Our attitude is a desire to be guided into the truth. Yep. To be submissive to the truth as we learn it. To be child trained by God, my Father, if I'm disobedient. To learn to pray in the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit and be filled with the love. for the Scriptures and for all the saints and for all men.

Yet none of these things, these two paragraphs, none of those things would qualify us to be righteous. I had justification from God as a sinner, not as a saint. Do you get that point? We were saved because we were sinners, not because we were saints. My sinlessness does not increase, nor praise God, and my failures don't decrease His praise or His opinion of me. It's the same because it isn't based on me.

So, in the verses we're going to talk about today, Paul does a really cool thing. This is a technique that only he uses. And he uses it here in Romans. He says, What shall we say then that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? What should we say about that? And this phrase, what shall we say, is a phrase that anticipates that he's going to have objections. And it presupposes that there's going to be conclusions drawn. It's used only by Paul, and it's used only in this epistle and in its argumentative portions.

So, who was Abraham? Well, first of all, Abraham was a Gentile. But it turns out that God called him to be the head of a race. So he is the patriarch of the whole entire Jewish race. But the Jews sometimes forget that the head of their race started out as a Gentile. It's like if someone said, well, who is your forefather? I would say George Washington, from a country standpoint.

Abraham was called a friend of God in James 2.23.

His seed was the source of all human blessing, if you look at Genesis 12.3. So what qualified him? Why would Paul select him? Because if he were to be justified by God, his good works would not suffice for justification. He was not an exception to justification by faith.

And I'm going to expand on that a little bit as we go. So if we take a look at this word, What shall we say then? Abraham our forefather. The word forefather is not the word the Jews like to say right here that we're talking about father. He's our father. But this word is only used one time and it's used here in Romans and it means forefather. And the Jews talked about Abraham as being their father. We finished up John's Gospel this last week, so we went through John chapter 8. The Jews thought that Abraham, being their father, not forefather, was the same thing as God is our Father.

If you go ahead and look at those verses, you will see that in John 8.39, they answered Jesus when He said, who is your father is the devil. Their answer was, Abraham is our father.

Jesus said to them, if you are Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God, this Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father." And they said to him, we are not born of fornication.

We have one father and it's God. So what are they saying? Well, if God is our father, we don't need to be justified. We already are. What do you think Nicodemus was thinking when he went to see the Lord and the Lord said to him, you must be born again? He's thinking, what? God is my father. I'm a Jew. I do everything that I'm supposed to do. There's no need for me to be saved. I already am. And the Lord Jesus said, no, you have to be born again.

So when Abraham began his journey with the Lord, what did he discover? What did he find? That his efforts did not increase or decrease or qualify him to have a standing before God. According to the flesh, the question was, was Abraham justified by anything which pertained to the flesh? What did he find? No, it wasn't. But you know what? Like all of us, he had to learn. He had to learn. So what shall we say that our forefather Abraham found in the way of natural human effort, as opposed to the way of grace and faith? So is the true inference from the history of Abraham, if justified by works, certainly the credit would be his.

If we stand before God and say, I did, then I can say, and God says, oh yeah, you did, and so I'll accept you. The problem is, that doesn't work with God. You never are found, any of us, including Abraham, to have any standing before God based on our own efforts. And would this Scripture agree if it speaks not of his goodness before his call or acceptance, but expressly of his faith in God's Word, as that which he exercised and which was accounted as righteous? Genesis 15, 6. But then he believed the Lord, And he reckoned it to him as righteousness. I've told this story before, so bear with me.

I live in a neighborhood with Hasidic Jews. It's great. A Jewish guy who is a realtor, tries to dominate our neighborhood in terms of sales. And of course, he planned to have a garage sale, a neighborhood garage sale yesterday. And I thought, aren't you, isn't that the Sabbath? So I noticed that all the signs went up Friday night and they didn't come down until last night. And people were driving through the neighborhood and there wasn't any Jewish families having garage sales. You know, anyway. I got to be really good friends when they first started moving in with the assistant rabbi that lived across the street from me, Rabbi Zev Pomerantz, just the neatest guy. And we would have these discussions in the middle of the street. We'd stand in the middle of the street and like he would say, well, we're kibitzing. Oh, is that what we do? We stand in the middle of the street and talk? That's kibitzing. Yep.

So I told him one day, I said, you know, I've been studying Abraham, and I discovered that he was accounted righteous before God. And he said, yeah. And I said, why did you think God did that? He said, because he was circumcised. I said, well, I said, my Bible says that he was circumcised 14 years after God accounted him righteous. And it says in my Bible that he accounted him righteous because all he did was believe God.

You know, that ended the conversation. He turned around and went home. And we talked after that. But he couldn't accept the fact that Abraham didn't do anything to be accounted righteous of himself out of his flesh. All he had to do was believe God. And he didn't have to believe God about the Gospel. He just had to believe what God told him.

I'm going to make you a great nation. I'm going to bless you. All the nations of the earth are going to be blessed. And he said, okay. And God accounted him righteous. Now if you follow the history of Abraham, he wasn't exactly a stellar guy. at first. But then forty years after God accounted him righteous, God said, I want you to take Isaac, your only son, the one I promised you, and I want you to sacrifice him to me. And he goes ahead and doesn't even question God, he goes ahead to do it. And God blazes his hand. The point is that Abraham's faith, when he was accounted righteous, And what God called him to do in terms of an act grew. And he trusted God so much that even though he's 130 years old or so when he takes Isaac to sacrifice him. And Isaac was probably 30 years old. He wasn't nine. And he goes along with it.

And all that was about was to prove that a man of faith will trust God no matter what the circumstances were. So, if Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about. He could brag. But he didn't have anything, not before God. The word if here means assuming that Abraham was justified by works or The word by means out from works. Vincent explains, in speaking of the relationship of works to justification, Paul never uses the word dia, which means by means of or through, but he always uses the word ek, which is out of works or out from works, being regarded by the Jews as a meritorious source of salvation. If Abraham had been declared righteous before God on the works principle, he definitely would have something to brag about. And we all know believers who brag about their salvation. And I think a lot of that is found because wherever they fellowship, they are told, this is how you do it.

You do this work, and this work, and this work, and write this check, and do that, and then God will find you. You know, He grades on the curve, by the way, and if you have more good than you have bad, you're in. And then, you know, one denomination has come up, well, you get in, but after you die, you still got to pay for some of the stuff that you weren't so good about. But the church, if they'll contribute more money, then maybe we can get you out sooner. I mean, the systems that man comes up with that are so convoluted compared to the simplicity of God's method. If you believe Him, you're accounted righteous. So, very interesting verse.

Paul says, well, what does the Scripture say? This is something that we should be saying about every thought that comes in our mind when it comes to God, by every discussion we have, about everything you hear that comes out of my mouth this morning, go to the Scriptures and find out if I'm telling you the truth. And that's what Paul says here. What does Scripture say? Every question.

There's only one place to check out the truth of it, and that's Scripture. But the Scripture record showed There was nothing of which he could brag or boast about before God. That's what the scripture said. Because the scripture said, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. So, more directly and definitively, Abraham, salvation, his righteousness, God is very specific about how He is declared righteous.

So, I found this quote from Newell, and I thought, you know, rather than paraphrase it, I'm just going to read it to you because I thought it was so great. To discover that the greatness that the greatness saints have, no other standing than the weakest saint, is a lesson that is difficult for all of us. You know how we think. We all think we're on a ladder and I'm way up here and most of you guys are below me. You're not quite as righteous as I am, when in fact we're probably on the bottom rung. So now for the Jew to find out, to find that great Abraham has nothing in the flesh but must be justified by simple faith like any sinner is a shock to them. It's a shock to anybody who's religious. There's no honor, no merit in Abraham's believing the faithful God who cannot lie. The honor belongs to God. When Abraham believed God, he did the one thing that a man can do without doing anything.

Do you understand what he's saying there? It's really interesting. When you exercise faith in God, and what he says, you do the one thing that has no merit at all for you. All the merit goes to what you believe and who you believe. So, Newell says, He did the one thing that a man can do without doing anything. I'll spend some more time on that in a minute.

God made the statement, the promise, and God undertook to fulfill it. Abraham believed in his heart that God told him the truth. There's no effort here. Abraham's faith was an act. It was not an act, but it was an attitude. His heart was turned completely away from himself to God and what God promised him. This left God free to fulfill that promise. Faith was neither a meritorious act by Abraham nor a change of character or nature in Abraham. He simply believed God, that God would accomplish what he had promised.

In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." It's really simple. We came to Christ exactly the same way. Exactly the same way. None of us are saved because we went to God and said, well, I did this and this and this, what do you think? Or if I do this and this and this, will you? And God says, nope, all you have to do is believe Me. For what does the Scripture say?

Abraham believed God and was credited or reckoned to him as righteousness. And this is that great word, logizimae. We see it and we're going to see it a lot more. Paul uses it 41 times in the New Testament, 35 times which are in Paul's epistles, and 11 here in chapter 4. where it was used, as in verse 3, here of God, as always a court word. God acting as judge and accounting or holding as righteous those who, as Abraham, believed him. On the contrary, it's implied that in verse 8, blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not lo gizimai, sin. He will not reckon sin to you. implying that there are those of whom he will reckon sin and guilt to. But when God says it, it's finished. When we get to Romans 6, we will talk about reckon yourself indeed dead unto sin and alive unto God.

Why do I reckon it? Why do I look at it as a credit? It's because I The first example I heard that made sense to me, if you live in Corinth, there's this canal, or it's a skinny isthmus where on one side is one sea and on the other side is another sea. Corinth was wealthy because the boats would all come in, they'd unload them, take all the merchandise over to the other side and loaded them up and out they'd go and they wouldn't have to sail around Greece. Well, if you're the guy that inventories what is taken off of this boat and put on this boat, when you're done, you say, I reckon that it's all there because I saw it.

I counted it. I know it's true. So when God says, I reckon, he's like a judge that says, I account you righteous because of my Son, and because you believe in Him. I do the reckoning." You don't do the reckoning about your salvation. He does. I mean, you eventually do, because you understand it. So what does the Scripture say? Really interesting word here, a little word, it. What's it referred to?

Alfred says this very clearly. He says the whole question is so much muted between Protestants on the one hand and Romanists and Armenians on the other as to whether this righteousness was reckoned. Does it mean God's righteousness accredited to a sinner or that God made Abraham righteous on account of the merit of his faith? Faith in this sense is strictly and entirely a work. and as such would be the efficient cause of man's justification." Maybe I can simplify it. Is it okay for you when you're praying to the Lord, say, well, listen, I know I'm saved because you told me to believe and I did, and my faith counts for something. Is that okay to say that? What do you think? No, it's not.

Your faith doesn't account for anything. It isn't your meritous faith that gets you saved. It's the fact that you believe in the one who's the Savior, and He's the one that saves you. And your act of believing Him is just receiving. It's not the act of believing which is reckoned to Him as a righteous act, or on account of which the perfect righteousness was laid to His account, but that the fact of a trusting God to perform His promise introduced Him into the blessing.

Now, I've got an example that's kind of interesting. Under the heading, does this mean that this is a meritorious act? It could not be. It's simply extending the credence to one who cannot lie. Therefore, without being itself righteousness, it is reckoned As righteousness, the ground of such reckoning being, of course, the work of Christ on the cross. Thus, God put to Abraham's account and placed on deposit for him, credited him with righteousness.

If I'm a drowning person, and I'm out there in the water, And I'm going under. And the last thing I do is I reach my hand up, hoping that I can grasp onto something that will keep me from drowning. And God reaches down and grabs my hand and pulls me out of the waves. Who gets the credit for that? Me, because I put my hand up? No, God, because He grasped it. and took and saved me from drowning. That's the concept. The problem is, in a lot of contemporary Christianity, the focus goes on what I did, rather than what the guy pulling me out of the water did. I've got to catch up with my notes. So what does the Scripture say?

Abraham believed God and it was credited for him. So it therefore refers to the outstretched hand of faith of a sinner reaching out for salvation that God grasped his own to lift him out of the mire and sin and placed him on the rock, Jesus Christ. In other words, it was the act of Abraham placing himself in such an attitude of trust, in an acceptance of God's blessings, that made it possible for God to bestow righteousness. When you come to understand that you can't save yourself, you start thinking about, well, how is this going to happen? Who or what is going to save me?

And it turns out it's going to be a who, not a what. So, now principle. Now to the one who works, his wages are not credited as favor, but what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited for righteousness. Say it this way, the interlinear, I think, put the words better. It said, to the one now working, the reward is not accounted according to grace, but according to debt. The word work here, to do that form from which something else results, a workman in order to earn wages. No matter what you've done in your life in terms of employment, what really is taking place?

I agree to work for you, and you agree to pay me. So if I show up for work on Monday, and I work all week, and you're going to pay me on Friday, you're not being gracious by paying me. You owe me. And so if you have a boss, you never go to the boss and say, based on your grace, would you mind paying me? No, you go to him and say, give me. I did the work. Pay me.

This word here for favor is the word that is dues paid for wages earned. You earned them. And then this word for favor is the word we know, charis, which is grace. It's the word for grace, but it's used here in a classical sense of just favor. And the favor that's done out of the goodness of the heart of the giver. And the word debt, that which is justly and legally due. Lots of us think sometimes, well God, I've done this, now you've got to do this.

You ever met anybody that a Christian has said to you, well, boy, you know, I'm just not walking with the Lord. I'm mad at him. Because he said that if I asked him anything, he would do it. Well, I asked him A, B, C, and D, and he didn't do it, and I'm mad. Really? So you earned his response. You say, well, I did what he said, and so now he owes me. Really?

What does he owe you? in and of yourself in Adam, condemnation, grace. You know, we talk a lot about grace. We've adopted a college definition of grace as the unmerited and unlimited blessings from God based on a totally adequate work of Christ. Key words, unmerited and unlimited. So I'm blessed unlimitedly. There's no end to it. And I didn't earn any of it. And it's all based on Christ. Now, I think this is the last point that I have. To him that casts his deadly down doing from Newell, who seeing his guilt and his entire inability to put it away, ceases wholly from all efforts to obtain favor by his own doings or self-denying, even by his prayers.

Now, the point that I'm going to get to here is who does God save? Who does he save? Does he save the really good guy? The really nice guy? Through the glad tidings we know God is justifying the ungodly. And we could never know him in this character otherwise than by the glad tidings, according to Ironside.

The word ungodly, it describes a person who is destitute of reverential awe towards God and impious person. Every sinner who has not trusted the Lord Jesus for salvation falls in this category. And if you talk to a lost person and you get them down to cases a little bit, you'll see this come out of them. Or they'll assume that God doesn't save the way He does. And they'll assume that they somehow have met the qualifications or that God has lowered the standard.

It's not the godly or the good that God saves. And you say, well, wait a minute, God can't declare a man godly if he's really ungodly. Really? Now, did God not say godly? Or did He say righteous? So you take an ungodly man, you don't make him godly, you make him righteous. That's what He's saying. God can't reckon to an ungodly man who declares or who dares cease trying to change himself and relies on God as he is a sinner, God can and does reckon to such a one the glorious benefits of Christ's death and resurrection on behalf of the sinner. When you start to think about it, we spent the last three Sunday schools talking about the calling out of the bride Christ's bride and how the Holy Spirit is involved in that calling. And what does it take to be the bride?

Well, we started out way back in Romans 1.18 and we said that God's righteousness is revealed from heaven to all ungodliness and unrighteousness.

Those are the two premises. Ungodliness, in other words, if you're not like me, I'm going to show you what being like me is. And none of you measure up to that. And none of you are righteous. And through that process, we find out that if the desire is to be saved, you have to become godly and you have to become righteous.

How does that happen? It happens because I believed in the person and work of the Lord Jesus. And what does God do? And we'll find out about the mechanics of this in chapter six. He puts us on the cross with Christ. We die with him out of this whole creation of unrighteousness. We're buried and we're resurrected into the righteous one, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And so as a believing sinner, God declares that my faith is counted as righteousness. But I can't overemphasize the fact that God saves unrighteous people. If you think you're good, you're not a candidate. If you think you've got something to offer God, you don't qualify for salvation. You have to understand that you're destitute. You're the one drowning, reaching out.

So, as this bottom line says, I can't emphasize the words ungodly in verse 5. Holy shut out of any other class for justification. The burning question is, have you or have I been so really convinced of the fact of our sinnerhood and guilt and our utter helplessness and lost state as to be able to believe on God who can and does declare righteous the ungodly, those who believe as ungodly in Him." Newell said that.

A child without Christ is ungodly in the sense that you were born by nature a child of wrath. In sin did my mother conceive me. We're all born lost and guilty. Through the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners. The many is every human being. We're all ungodly.

That's what qualified us. When we place our faith in the God who is in the business of declaring righteous the ungodly, who trust Him as they are on the sole ground of the shed blood of Christ, we're justified. We are counted righteous by God. So, we're going to find out as we go forward, too, that this ungodliness, this, what we like to call it, the sin nature. I'm beginning to think that the reason that God has left us with the sin nature is to keep this attitude of, I need Him because I act unrighteously a lot. I sin a lot.

And that's a power within me. And I'm learning, and you're learning, that what God did on the cross with the Lord Jesus Christ not only saved me, but it rescued me. And it's possible now, as Paul says in Titus, to live righteously, to live that way. But it's all based on dependence on him.

So let's close. Dear Father, we thank you for your grace. how we thank you that you're the one who reached down and grabbed our hands as we were sinking. And you continue to do that. You continue to hold us. And we're so thankful that not only did you save us, but what you have in store for us going forward is It's almost hard to understand it's so gracious, but we know that you're causing us to expand and understand and know the grace that we live under. We thank you, dear Lord Jesus, and we pray in your Son's name. Amen.