If your faith is in your good deeds, the idea that being a “good person” is enough to get you into heaven, than that faith is worthless. It has no power, nor worth, to gain you entrance into the celestial kingdom. True saving faith will show itself in the obedience the redeemed give to the revealed testimony of the Lord found in the Scriptures.
After a little break due to some sickness on my account we are back at it with our Thursday looks at the Larger Catechism. We’ve gone from considering Church membership and the advantages of the body of Christ for the believer to now contemplating some of the aspects of the work of the Lord in our redemption. The first thing we are going to look at is the way God grants forgiveness of sins to the believer. Yet, as we will discover, justification is about a lot more than merely the slate being made clean, because what was wrong with us in our depravity cannot be reduced to the fact we broke some commandments. The totality of our sinfulness should never either be undersold or ignored when it comes to the salvation we have received wholly by the grace of our Heavenly Father.
In today’s help (and next week’s) we’ll explore more about how justification particularly sets the stage for all the other benefits which come from our union with Christ. Here’s todays Q/A’s:
Q. 70: What is justification?
A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.
Q. 71: How is justification an act of God’s free grace?
A. Although Christ, by his obedience and death, did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice in the behalf of them that are justified; yet in as much as God accepts the satisfaction from a surety, which he might have demanded of them, and did provide this surety, his own only Son, imputing his righteousness to them, and requiring nothing of them for their justification but faith, which also is his gift, their justification is to them of free grace.
As with their Shorter Catechism counterparts these questions make abundantly clear that justification is in every way an act that God performs, not a cooperating effort between the deity and the sinner. As Paul says if it was not of grace, then it would be of works. (Rom. 11:6). Grace by definition is freely offered and provided. (Eph. 2:8-10). The freeness of the act has its genesis in the reality that God at no point was required either by justice or fairness or any other type of attribute to relieve us of our condemnation due to us because of sin.