Encore Post: When you talk to people about what they believe, you hear a bunch of ideas that sometimes do not seem to fit together. More often than not, they tell you more about what they do and not why they do it. A catholic might tell you they go to mass every Sunday and do not eat meat on Friday. A Seventh-Day Adventist might tell you they go to church on Saturday or a Muslim that they pray five times a day facing Mecca. If they do get to what they believe, the teaching might seem random. What you need to know is their most important teaching — the one on which all the rest are built.
For Lutherans, the teaching on justification is the doctrine on which the faith stands or falls. The question is how does God make a sinner a saint. We believe that justification is a legal proceeding. a forensic action. From his throne God declares sinners not guilty, even though he knows full well that we are guilty. He does this because there is no longer a penalty to pay for our sin. Jesus took the sins of the whole world and paid the full price for them there. In our place, God declared him guilty and sentenced him to death. When he said, “it is finished” the debt we owed was stamped “paid in full.”
Yet justification does more than grant us forgiveness. When God said, “Let there be light” it was created by the power of his word. When he says, “not guilty” we are recreated. A new Adam or Eve is born in us. So it is not simply a legal fiction. We really are righteous because God says so. And that changes everything.
When we use a computer to write something, we can chose to right, left or fully justify the document. What we mean is that all the letters will line up at the left, right or both margins. In theological terms, God lines up our actions with his will and the law by a process called sanctification. It is not completed in us before we die. God completes in when we enter his presence at the end of our mortal life. But that is another post. It is on this point that we differ with Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Holiness denominations among others.
Yet God’s word clearly teaches the truth of the Lutheran teaching of Justification. The gospel is really true — we are justified only because God is gracious to us, that we believe and trust that it is true, all because Jesus was born, lived a perfect life, suffered, died and rose again for our sake. It is what makes the gospel such sweet, good news.
Rev. Robert E. Smith
Concordia Theological Seminary
Fort Wayne, Indiana
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