Justification by Faith Alone

But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. ROMANS 4:5

In November 1734 Edwards preached a series of sermons at Northampton on justification by faith alone. He was answering a drift in New England towards a comfortable moralism in which decent behaviour was quietly assumed to secure God’s favour. What followed was not a theological controversy. It was a revival. Within months the town was transformed, and Edwards always maintained that the doctrine and the awakening were connected — that people were converted precisely when they stopped trying to contribute.

Justifying the ungodly

The scandal is in the text, and Edwards would not let his hearers soften it. Paul does not say that God justifies the repentant, or the sincere, or those doing their best. He says God justifies the ungodly. The person declared righteous is, at the moment of the declaration, not righteous.

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus …Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. ROMANS 3:24, 28

Justification is a legal declaration, not a description of our condition. God does not inspect us and find us acceptable. He credits to us a righteousness that belongs to another and treats us accordingly.

And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. PHILIPPIANS 3:9

How faith justifies — and how it does not

Here Edwards made a distinction of great precision, and it protects the doctrine from the most common way of ruining it. The natural assumption is that faith is the one thing God accepts in place of works — that whereas the law demanded obedience we could not render, the gospel demands only belief, which we can manage. On that view faith has become a very small work, and we are back to being saved by something we do. Edwards rejected this firmly. Faith does not justify as a virtue, as though God were rewarding us for believing. Faith justifies because it unites us to Christ. Its whole value is in its object. The illustration usually given is exact: a drowning man is not saved by the excellence of his grip but by the strength of the one who holds him. A weak hand on a strong rescuer is enough. A strong hand on nothing is not. This is why assurance need not depend on the quality of our believing. The question is not whether your faith is impressive but whether Christ is sufficient.

Justification and the life that follows

Edwards was equally firm at the other boundary, and this matters, because he is sometimes read as though his emphasis on holy living compromises free justification. It does not. He held both, and he held them in the biblical order. Justification is by faith alone, entirely apart from works, received at once and complete. And the faith that justifies is never alone — it invariably produces a changed life, because it unites us to a living Christ, and union with Him cannot leave a person as he was.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. EPHESIANS 2:10

Works are the evidence, never the ground. Edwards’s later insistence on Christian practice as the great sign of grace, which we shall come to, rests entirely on this footing. He was not adding works to faith. He was pointing out that a tree is known by its fruit without the fruit having grown the tree.

There is a reason this doctrine produced revival rather than complacency, and it is worth understanding, because we might expect the opposite. Moralism is exhausting and it never delivers assurance, because the standard is always just beyond reach and the conscience is never quiet. What it produces is either despair or self-deception. Free justification ends the exhaustion. And the person who has actually stopped paying discovers that gratitude motivates far more powerfully than fear ever did. Edwards watched a whole town discover this in a single winter.

The great exchange

Behind the doctrine of justification lies a transaction that Scripture states with startling economy.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:21

Two transfers in a single sentence, running in opposite directions. Our sin is reckoned to Christ, who had none. His righteousness is reckoned to us, who have none. Neither transfer is a legal fiction in the sense of a pretence; both rest on a real union, which is why faith — the instrument of that union — is the means by which the whole thing is received. Edwards laid stress on the completeness of what is credited. The righteousness imputed is not a fresh start, a clean sheet, or a reduced sentence. It is the entire active and passive obedience of Christ — everything He did in His life and everything He bore in His death — placed to our account. This means the believer does not stand before God as forgiven but unproven. He stands as one who has kept the law perfectly, because Another kept it for him.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. ROMANS 5:19

The practical weight of this falls on assurance, and it addresses the most common disorder among sincere Christians. Believers who understand that their sins are forgiven often still live as though their standing fluctuates — better after a good week, worse after a bad one. The reason is that they are thinking only of the first transfer. Forgiveness removes a debt and leaves the account at zero, and from zero one must presumably begin earning again. The second transfer ends that arithmetic. The account is not at zero; it is full, and it was filled by someone whose performance does not vary. There is nothing to earn, because nothing is missing.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. ROMANS 8:1

Edwards preached this to a congregation that had spent generations quietly assuming that respectability counted for something with God. Within months, a town that had been trying to be good enough discovered it had never needed to be, and could not stop talking about it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask whether you are trusting Christ or trusting the quality of your trust. The difference determines where you look when assurance falters. 2. Identify one way you are still trying to earn God’s favour. Name it, and renounce it specifically. 3. Read Romans 4:5 aloud and let the phrase justifieth the ungodly stand without qualification. 4. Check the order in your own thinking: are good works your ground of acceptance, or the evidence of it? 5. When you fail this week, do not set about repairing your standing. Return to a righteousness that was never yours in the first place.

A PRAYER

Father, I have been trying to bring You something.

You justify the ungodly, and I have laboured for years to arrive at Your court as something other than that. Forgive the pride hidden in all my striving.

I have no righteousness of my own. I take the righteousness of Christ, credited to me, which I did not earn and cannot lose.

And now that nothing depends on my performance, let gratitude do in me what fear never could. Amen.