Forensic Justification
Forensic Justification
Mystery, agree? Disagree? Why?
If there was a great material principle of the Reformation it was the doctrine of justification. The Reformers sought to correct the confounding of justification with sanctification dominant in the church at the time, stressing its legal character, and representing justification as an act of the free grace of God, wherein God pardons our sins and accepts us as righteous in His sight, but does not change us inwardly. What emerged from the Reformation was that justification is a judicial act of God, in which God declares, on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, that all the claims of the law are satisfied with respect to the sinner.
Justification and sanctification are distinguished by the following:
1. Justification removes the guilt of sin, restoring the sinner to all the filial rights involved in his state as a child of God, including an eternal inheritance. Sanctification removes the pollution of sin and renews the sinner ever increasingly in conformity with the image of God.
2. Justification takes place outside of the sinner in the tribunal of God, and does not change his inner life, though the sentence is brought home to him subjectively. Sanctification takes place in the inner life of man and gradually affects his whole being.
3. Justification takes place once for all. Justification is not repeated, nor is it a process; it is complete at once and for all time. Man is either fully justified, or he is not justified at all. Whereas sanctification is a continuous process, which is never completed in this life.
4. While the meritorious cause of justification and sanctification lies in the merits of Christ, there is a difference in the efficient cause. God the Father declares the sinner righteous, and God the Holy Spirit sanctifies him.
We can easily find these the forensic or legal nature of justification within the Scriptures.
In the Hebrew, "to justify" is hitsdik, which in the majority of cases means to declare judicially that one's state is in harmony with the demands of the law, (see Exodus 23:7; Deuteronomy 25:1; Proverbs 17:15; Isaiah 5:23). Occasionally piel tsiddek has the same meaning, see Jeremiah 3:11; Ezekiel 16:50-51. From this, the meaning of these words is strictly forensic or legal.
Others, especially liberal theologians, will attempt to ascribe the term to morality, “to make righteous”, “to make just”. Yet, for example, we can see from a passage like Proverbs 17:15 that to assign a moral view would yield an impossible sense, if the word meant "to make just."
In the New Testament we find the verb dikaio-o, which generally means to declare a person to be just. Sometimes dikaio-o refers to a personal declaration that one's moral character is in conformity with the law, see Matthew 12:37; Luke 7:29; Romans 3:4. In the Pauline Epistles the soteriological meaning of dikaio-o is explicitly in the foreground—to declare forensically that the demands of the law as a condition of life are fully satisfied with regard to a person—see Acts 13:39; Romans 5:1; Romans 5:9; Romans 8:30-33; I Corinthians 6:11; Galatians 2:16; Galatians 3:11. For dikaio-o, just as in that of hitsdik, the forensic meaning of the term is clear from the following:
(a) the word can bear no other sense of meaning in many instances: Romans 3:20; Romans 2:28; Romans 4:5-7; Romans 5:1; Galatians 2:16; Galatians 3:11; Galatians 5:4
(b) the word is placed antithetically with respect to ‘condemnation’ in Romans 8:33-34
(c) there exist interchangeable and equivalent expressions that convey a judicial or legal idea, John 3:18; John 5:24; Romans 4:6-7; II Corinthians 5:19
If the word does not hold this meaning, there is no real distinction between justification and sanctification.
The word dikaios connected with the verb dikaio-o above, is peculiar for it never expresses what a thing is in itself, but always what it is in relation to something else, to some standard outside of it, to which it ought to correspond. In this respect dikaios differs from agathos. For example, in classical Greek, dikaios is applied to a horse, a wagon, or some other thing to indicate that it is fit for its intended use. Agathos expresses the notion that a thing in itself answers to the ideal. In the Scriptures a man is called dikaios when, in the judgment of God, man’s relation to the law is what it ought to be, or when man’s life is such as is required by his judicial relation to God. This may include the idea that he is good, but only from a certain point of view, namely, that of his judicial relation to God.
We also find in the New Testament the noun dikaiosis, ‘justification’. There are only two places in the New Testament where this word is found: Romans 4:25 and Romans 5:18. The word describes the act of God's declaring men free from guilt and acceptable to Him. The resulting state of this declaration is described by the word dikaiosune.
Scripturally, “to justify” is to effect an objective relation, the state of righteousness, by a judicial sentence. We see this done in one of two ways: (1) by bringing into account the actual subjective condition of a person (to justify the just or the righteous), as seen in James 2:21; or (2) by imputing to a person the righteousness of another, that is, by accounting him righteous though he is inwardly unrighteous. This last case is the usual sense of justification in the New Testament—that through the righteousness of Christ the believer is accounted righteous—a debt the sinner owed to God that has been paid in full by Another.
