Rom. 3:19-28; 4:23; 5:1-11
If you plant a tree in your garden, and want to know what it is, you wait and see what kind of fruit it bears. What then was the fruit produced by man? The latter half of Rom. 1 to the first half of chapter 3 is the answer. Read first that awful category of evil, which blackens the page of ancient history, for these are historical facts, and facts, I may add, that live to this moment. Who but God knows the sin and the misery in this town the groanings of those poor brokenhearted wives and children, the wickedness which is crushing hearts into the dust, even here and now? Will you say that some were better than that? The apostle answers by going on to show, that there were those who were in the schools of philosophy and the seats of government, moralists, magistrates, and the like, who assumed to judge of right and wrong, but then the very things which they condemned they practiced themselves. Then he proceeds to prove that the chosen people, the Jews, were no better. They might have God's law, but they broke it before all the world. Is not this terrible, that professors are no better than the world which makes no profession at all? If a man kept the law it would be excellent, but what good is it if not kept except to condemn the man who is under it? He then quotes in chapter iii. the Jewish scriptures, to prove that they were as bad as, and so more guilty than the Gentiles. The aim and the object of all this must inevitably be, not to improve man's case, but to demonstrate what it is. Yet the fact that man has no righteousness whatever, no strength, that he is the slave of sin and of Satan, utterly dead to everything that is good before God, his heart and his ways as well, yet the very badness of his condition commends the righteousness of God. The greatest sinner that bows to God is welcome to the Lord Jesus, because he is the Savior of the lost.
Still, how can a righteous Judge justify a sinner? how get over from his sins righteously? How is God righteous in justifying the believer? What then is righteousness? Righteousness is what one does consistently with relationship. Holiness is what one is according to God's nature. If the righteousness of man is what he does, the righteousness of God is what God does, or has done. Now man is found to have no righteousness at all, nor is there anything but sin in him, and the law brings it out evidently in transgression; so that, as you know, the more a man tries to keep the law, the more he finds himself breaking it. Nay, I will go farther, and assert that when you come and question a man converted if not delivered you will find the same principle true. As I, the other day, asked of a lady elsewhere, How can God say to us, “There is therefore now no condemnation?” “This,” she said, “is just my difficulty, for the longer I live the more I condemn myself.” Look at a Christian or at an unconverted person, the difficulty remains. How can you as a man stand before God and say that there is nothing in you that He can condemn when you are every day condemning yourself? Did you ever abhor yourself so much as to say, “Oh! that I had never been born?” As you walked along the streets, did you wish to sink into the earth from the gaze of men? If this was your judgment of yourself, what, think you, will God say to you, who knows the very thoughts of the heart, and every sin, infinitely better than you? God who cannot look on sin with the least allowance? Does He say of you, “I do not see anything in that person that I can condemn?”
Let us see how this can be, this wonderful non-imputation. But we shall have to take it bit by bit, “line upon line, and precept upon precept.” How can God justify the very worst sinner before Him here? It will not do to try to mend your case, so as to make it look as well as possible, for God knows all about it far better than you do yourself.
I will illustrate my meaning by an anecdote, which may help you to see this a little more plainly. A German prince was visiting the prisons at Toulon, and, in honor of the presence of so great a personage, the governor gave him liberty to pardon one prisoner. “Well,” said the prince, “you must give me time to go round the prisoners, that I may select my man; I do not want to act at random, but must see who is fit for it.” Permission was given to visit and examine the criminals; and, as he went round, he asked each one of his case. “What brought you here?” “Oh!” said the first prisoner, “my offense was not a very bad one, only a trifle, but the jury and the judge were against me, and they made my case out much worse than it really was; I did not deserve nearly so heavy a punishment as I got.” “This will not do,” said the prince. Number 2 made his case look still better, and Number 3 said he was not guilty at all; he had been arrested and convicted on a fable charge! At last he came to a poor broken-hearted-looking fellow; and on asking, “Well, what brought you here?” “Oh!” said the poor man, in anguish, “I was the greatest wretch that ever lived, and my punishment has not been half so great as it ought to be; I deserve to be broken to pieces on the wheel. You do not know how wicked I have been, and it is a mercy I am here at all.” “That is the man for the pardon,” said the prince. Why? Because he was honest and upright, not like the rest trying to make their ease look as well as possible, but confessing the truth. The upright man is the man who owns the truth, and he is the man to be pardoned.
We see this distinctly in Job 33:27: “He looketh upon men, and if any say, I have sinned, and have perverted that which was right, and it profited me not, he will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light.” “I have sinned:” this is uprightness. A sinner's uprightness consists in owning his condition. God says he is a sinner, and his uprightness is to own it. This is the way God is going to aim some at this time. The truth must be out, and owned, as to what you are. God will not, as it were, electro-plate you over, and make you look like silver, when you are nothing but dross. The very first step in the conversion of a soul is the owning of his sins before God, not to your fellow-man, not to a priest, but to God. Sin confessed is sin forgiven. Do you say, “I never thought that before; I thought I had to become better in order to be fit to be forgiven?” You have been occupied with your own thoughts about yourself, with self-righteousness; but what we have to bring before you is God's gospel about His Son, and God's righteousness revealed in it. If you put yourself under law to obtain righteousness, and God deals with you on the ground you take, He must curse you. Now where is the man who will take this position under law, when God has already been at such pains to show how bad we are, and how utterly powerless to keep it? The world stands already guilty before God; how can it be anything else? It has murdered the Son of God. Man cannot be more guilty.
Measured thus, can he do worse than he had done? He has been tried in every way, and shown to be entirely worthless in all. What further trial is necessary or conceivable? He cannot be made worse, nor can he do worse than is already done. Hence, when I hear of dreadful crimes committed by men, through allowing their evil passions to flow over, I am not in the least surprised; for my heart turns to a still worse exhibition of human evil—to the cross of Christ. And the guilt is as bad, or worse, of disbelieving it. Every rejecter of Christ is morally judged already, just because he is not subject to the Son. (John 3:36.) “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” If you are not justified by God on His principle of faith, then you must be condemned by the righteousness of God, which will by-and-by judge those whom it does not justify now. God must act in consistency with all His attributes, and every person stands justified or judged morally—one of the two.
Now God is absolutely consistent in what He has done. He has given the Son, His Son, the Creator of heaven and earth; He has set Him forth as a mercy-seat. There was in the mercy-seat wood and gold, symbols of the humanity and the divinity of Christ; and the boards rested on sockets of silver, made from the redemption-money. Redemption is the basis of all. The blood was shed, and sprinkled on the gold of the mercy-seat, and before it. There was thus a place where God could righteously remit sins and pardon sinners. The blood of the Son of God has been shed, and accepted; and God now sends out the gospel in virtue of the infinite sacrifice of His Son, by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, to every creature on earth; He is perfectly righteous in proclaiming forgiveness of sins to every soul that believes, and He put on every believer the whole value of the person and work of Christ. Thus does He accept the believer, not according to what he is, but according to what Christ is and has done.
God comes out now, and deals with men on the ground of the death of the Lord Jesus. This death shows how God forbore to judge, and could justify, saints of old, the Abrahams and the Davids, on the ground of what was to come. But if Abraham could look forward in faith to what God would do, we have to declare unto you; what is still more blessed, what God has done. If we believe on Him who raised Jesus from the dead, righteousness is reckoned to us. Believing God about His Son, in virtue of the death and the resurrection of Christ, we stand righteous in the presence of God. Such is the efficacy of Christ and His work. “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.” (Rom. 5:1.)
The last time I was in Glasgow, a lady said to me after the preaching, “I do not understand it; but I have been seeking peace with God for many months, indeed for some years, and I cannot find it.” My answer was simply, “Peace with God is a thing that you will never find in yourself: God never produces it in any human heart.” “I do not know quite what you mean,” she said. “Well, suppose you had a garden,” I said, “and in that garden an old dead tree, and you tried to produce apples on that old tree; you could not. Impossible to get any fruit from a dead tree. But suppose a friend brings a basket of apples from a living tree, and gives them to you, it is a very different thing, is it not? In fact peace is a thing you cannot grow in your garden; it is not produced in our hearts, but given by God to you.” And the poor woman said, “Why, then, I must go home and pray for it?” “No,” said I, “peace is preached to you, not prayed for; God gives it to faith as distinctly as a person gives you a basket of apples.” Peace is not something grown in the heart, but made by the blood of Christ's cross, and given to the believer. Are you without spot in the presence of God? And are you quite sure there never can be a cloud nor a spot upon you there Unless you have got Christ thus, you have not peace solidly. Can this be found in man's heart?
But I must ask you for a few moments to drop your religious life, or anything concerning yourself. Let not self occupy you in the least, but let every eye be fixed now on Another. Turn to two scriptures that are well known, probably, to all here; for I wish to read to you things that you know, that you may get to know things that you do not know. In Isa. 53 we have the death of Christ distinctly foretold. “He was wounded for our transgressions.” See also Zech. 13, where we find that in the latter days the Jews are to ask, “What are those wounds?” and He replies that He received them in the house of His friends. This will be the discovery to the Jews in those days, as I pray it may be also to many a soul here now. But fix your eye on the person of the Lord Jesus. I do not dwell on the sorrows of His life, as given in the opening verses, but come at once to the great point—His death—in Isa. 53:5. Now, do you really believe that the Lord was judged, condemned, bruised, put to death for our sins “He was delivered for our offenses.” Not the Jews did so, save instrumentally, but God really. Do we believe that? Forget yourselves altogether, and look at the Son of God under divine judgment on the Cross. Did He not cry from the center of that darkness which foil at least on the land, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Whatever needed to be judged in me has been judged and condemned to the uttermost, beneath the stroke of unsparing judgment, in the adorable Substitute. Read Isa. 50:6-8. Did God help Him? Did He not justify Him? Not, of course, from aught His own—sins He had none. “He who knew no sin was made sin for us.” The very sin of our nature was judged on Him. For this the holy, the infinite, Son of God bowed His head in death, and His body was laid in the grave among the dead, Aaron's rod, you remember, was laid among the other rods, but it alone budded. So with Christ: He was laid down among the dead, but lies He there yet? Is He condemned yet? Is He bearing sins still? Far be the thought. God raised Him from the dead. The King of Righteousness arose, the everlasting gates opened, the King of Glory ascended, entered, and sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. But not this only: “He was raised from the dead for our justification.” The Man that was condemned to the cross, that bare our sins, that cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the Lord of glory, has finished the work given Him to do, and God has raised Him from the dead, and seated Him at His own right hand. Was it not “for us?” Tell me, do you think He has peace with God? Look not at yourselves, but at Him. What do you mean by peace with God? There is One seated in the unclouded presence of God, where a cloud or shadow can never come, that One, the beginning and head of a new creation, crowned once with thorns, now with glory, and this, too, after bearing in His own body our sins. He is seated in the unclouded presence of God. Can sin and death have any more to say to Him? Do not you think he has peace? Assuredly; and more than that, if I turn to Eph. 2:14 I find something still more blessed: “He is our peace.” And if He is our peace, the peace that He has in the presence of God is ours, not as a thing apart from Himself, but His very Person in glory is the believer's peace.
(To be continued, if the Lord will.)