Justification

This morning, we're going to continue our look at the story of redemption. I hope you've been enjoying it. It's been great going back to the basics of God's story of salvation, of how He has rescued us or is in the process of rescuing us. And you will remember the first few weeks that we have looked at election, regeneration, how God renews us, gives us a heart that is alive to Him. And then conversion, how God moves us from acknowledging Him or knowing Him to converting our lives to Him through repentance and faith.

And then this morning, we're going to look at justification shortly. God clears us. We're going to look at that moment where conversion moves on and the process has happened with us. We have moved from a life of sin, of rebellion towards God, and we have turned. We have turned. We have converted.

We have repented and have placed our trust in Jesus Christ for salvation and for God's redemption. And the moment of that conversion, something else happens. When we have placed our trust in Jesus Christ, something else happens, and this is called justification. And so we're going to turn this morning to the foremost theologian on justification, and we're going to look at the Apostle Paul and what he has to say about this. And in particular, I love this part of scripture because it talks about this theology, this central part of salvation within a real life context.

What this means for us as human beings having to deal with other human beings in a place that is still marked by sin and chaos. So turn with me please, if you have your Bibles, to Galatians 2, and we're going to read from verses 11 to 21. Galatians 2:11. This is Paul the Apostle writing. He says, when Peter the Apostle came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong.

Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles, but when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, you are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.

So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by observing the law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified. If while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. For through the law, I die to the law so that I might live for God.

I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be attained through the law, Christ died for nothing. So far, our reading. So just to give a quick recap, we have an opening sentence here, an opening statement of two of the heavyweights in the church going at it.

They're opposing each other. On the one hand, we have Paul the Apostle, and on the other hand, the Apostle Peter, and there was a disagreement between them. Paul recalls that he opposed Peter to his face because he was clearly in the wrong. So what had caused this? Paul explains that the Apostle Peter had changed his eating habits.

That at one point he had a clear conscience about eating food that had once been deemed unclean, and he had also been eating with Gentiles. That was something that was not kosher, something that was not acceptable under the Jewish law. Now this was a big problem for Paul, because Paul saw this as a fundamental flaw in the outworking of the life-changing power of the gospel. This was not something just a cultural thing, a cultural nuance. This was a central part of not understanding the power of the gospel message.

Doing just a quick history check. For a first century Jew, we have to understand this: for a first century Jew, the fact that Peter had started eating with Gentiles was something that was heart-stopping. The combination of cultural and Jewish laws had created a complicated set of regulations that they had to maintain in order to be ceremonially clean or ceremonially acceptable to God. If you were to disobey this, you would distance yourself from God, whom you were seeking to please. So people couldn't come close to God, for example, if they had eaten certain foods, including pork, if they had touched dead things, for example, if they had a disease, or if they had touched someone who did, and so on.

And you can look at Leviticus 11, 15, and 20 for those examples. Now the amazing thing is that Jesus, in His time on earth, in places like Mark 7, said that these laws had been fulfilled on His arrival. They had been completed by Him. And not only this, but Peter himself, if you remember the story in Acts, Peter himself had received a vision from God saying that there was a change happening, and he saw in this vision a sheet coming down from heaven, a white sheet with loads of different types of food, including unclean food. And in this, in Acts 11:7-9, God said to him, get up, kill and eat. Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.

Peter, at that moment, also then meets or gets to know a Gentile believer called Cornelius, who comes to faith, who is born again, receives Christ, receives the Holy Spirit, and the penny drops for Peter. Even Gentiles can meet Jesus. Even Gentiles can come into the people, the family of God. What an amazing change. Acts 11 shows that Peter then ate with Gentiles despite people sort of frowning upon it, despite criticism.

Peter changed. And years later, it seems Peter had a crisis of confidence and sort of started withdrawing again after this. And so Paul says that when this started happening, that Peter was falling into the trap of hypocrisy. But that wasn't the worst. What had caused this hypocrisy?

Paul makes it clear that it wasn't simply rudeness or sort of diplomacy, trying to play the field a little bit. It wasn't poor etiquette. It wasn't being unwelcoming. Fundamentally, the problem was much deeper. Verse 14 in Galatians 2 says, Peter wasn't acting in line with the truth of the gospel.

Interesting. Peter wasn't acting with the gospel in mind. And friends, the truth is not only is it our job to understand and accept the gospel or the message of Jesus Christ being our Saviour, that He rescues us from spiritual deadness and makes us alive to God, but our job is to bring everything in our lives in line with the implications of the truth of the gospel. We are to think out its implications in every area of our lives and to seek to bring our thinking, our feeling, our behaviours in line with it. Peter's hypocrisy, Peter's sin, was basically the sin of nationalism.

By removing himself from Gentiles, he insisted that Christians can't really be pleasing to God unless they become Jewish. And this, of course, is just another form of what is called legalism. Legalism is looking to something besides Jesus Christ in order to be acceptable and clean before God. And this thing called legalism still exists today. It is something that is so tempting for us as human beings, and it takes shape in an infinite number of ways.

I'll make mention of a few. One way is to take, for example, even as Christians, our preferences of church structure, of worship, or these distinctions, and we take that in order to demonstrate ourselves as superior to another group. It means we take our preferences too seriously and endow them, perhaps with a moral significance, and yet fail to see that some of these things are only cultural. It could be that some churches from backgrounds that are very emotionally expressive with a modern style of music could feel superior to churches that are emotionally more reserved with their style of music. It could be that a church with traditional music could feel somehow superior because they literally sing entire slabs of scripture, and yet we can't simply see that there is a different culture at play here.

We want to believe that our styles and our customs are somehow spiritually better. Another form of this legalism, and this is really uncomfortable. It's easy to talk about other forms of legalism, but this is uncomfortable. Another form of this type of legalism that Peter fell into is being classist. Being nationalistic or even racist, and bringing those attitudes from the world into the church.

So that could look like working class tradies, blue collar workers may have a distaste for white collar Christians or vice versa. Christians from one political persuasion may be upset at the presence of others: Labour, Liberal, Greens. Socially polished Christians may be a little distant from believers who are more socially awkward or marginal. And just like Peter, we may decide to respond in a similar way by distancing ourselves from them.

We won't become good friends with them. We won't socialise with them. We won't share our homes with them. We might keep our relationships formal and it may end here on a Sunday morning. All of this, all of this actually comes from not understanding the gospel.

Without the gospel, we have to manufacture self esteem. We have to create a ladder system of comparing ourselves and our group perhaps with another group, ourselves with other people, and that's how we move up this ladder in our thinking, how we move closer or further away from God. But the story of redemption tells us that we are all unclean apart from Christ. Yet we are all cleaned up by His death on the cross. This is why Paul corrects Peter by referring to the important phrase justification by faith.

In verse 16, Paul says that instead of throwing out another Christian cliche to Peter, Paul directs Peter's attention to the implications of the gospel as being a springboard to change behaviour. You may know or have noticed my beautiful new car that I bought, but in my old car that I actually deeply loved, my Commodore, I had a very annoying car clock. I was always running late. It was always slow. And it just didn't keep time well, no matter how many times I adjusted it.

Perhaps you know of that as well. Perhaps you've got a wristwatch or a clock at home that does the same thing. No matter how many times you change it or correct it, after a while it just gets out of sync again. Now let's take this watch for example. You could be continually changing it and recalibrating it every few hours or every few days, but we know that it is not a good watch. It doesn't do what a watch should be doing, and that is by keeping the correct time.

Now the easy thing is to adjust it every hour or every day a little bit at a time, but the fundamental problem we know lies with the internal workings of that clock. The springs and the cogs behind this watch face are not calibrated correctly. And it's the same for us. We spend our lives hearing cliches and listening to nice moral teachings on how to be good and kind, and we get that even from non-Christian sources. We can spend our time then making adjustments and tweaking our behaviour, but the problem lies much deeper than that.

It lies with our springs and our cogs. In order for a watch to become a good watch that tells the right time, a watchmaker needs to wind up those springs again and recalibrate those cogs. You see, Paul could have told Peter to change his behaviour or else. Or else he might lose his position of authority. Or else he may be doomed to hell.

Or else he may lose his status or his self esteem. But that's not what happens here. Paul takes Peter to the only thing that can change internal cogs, and that is the gospel. And Paul's speech climaxes in verse 16 when he says, we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by observing the law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified. And this is how we come to our topic this morning.

The theology of justified by faith is the most central teaching of Christianity. It is the heartbeat of our faith. It is the nutshell summary of the gospel. Now the word justify in the Bible is a legal word. It is taken from the legal realm.

And it is used to express a spiritual exchange that happens in this story. The word talks about a person who is on trial, and although they are clearly guilty, they are somehow justified, meaning they are not liable to pay the penalty, but rather are entitled to all the privileges due to someone who has kept the law perfectly. That is what justification means. To justify someone is the act of a judge pronouncing the opposite sentence to condemnation. They are acquitted.

They are set free. Now justification through Christ means that although we are actually sinners, though we have not been able to walk blameless before our God, the God who is a perfect judge, who has a perfect law, which He gave us in the Bible. Because of Christ, we have been acquitted. Because of Christ, we have been set free from condemnation. God accepts us, in other words, despite our sin.

And so we are not acceptable to God because we can actually be righteous, because we can actually be good enough for God, tweaking and changing and adjusting our behaviours, but we become actually righteous because we are accepted by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. And that is what Paul does here. He drives this truth deep into Peter, and then obviously in this context to the Galatian church that are wrestling with this understanding. He's injecting it like an antibiotic into the wound. And Paul says, Peter, you have removed yourself from the Christians of another race because they are considered unacceptable by some other Christians.

But you don't realise that you yourself were once unacceptable to God. You don't realise that Christ has made you acceptable to God, and so you have been justified. You have been made clean in the sight of God. And this, Peter, hasn't come from obeying a certain set of laws or regulations. This has come by grace.

This has come by free mercy, by love. Remember that. Therefore, if we are not justified by keeping the law perfectly, Peter, but by faith in Christ, then the opposite is true as well. It also means that by failing to obey these very laws, these things can't condemn us either. And this is why Paul says in verse 19 that I have died to this law.

It is as if I'm dead to it because it doesn't hold any power over me anymore. For us, it means this. If I'm feeling condemned by my guilt, and by my struggles, and my inability to do the right thing perfectly by God, if I'm feeling distant to God, then I have simply forgotten that I am dead to that law. I've forgotten that my own sinfulness cannot separate me from God's love. So how does realising this change the cogs and the springs inside of us?

How can understanding justification by faith lead to much more than just another adjustment that will eventually just get out of sync again? Well, it comes down to that moment of Jesus' death and His resurrection. This is the moment where justification, being made right with God, happened. Justification also means the price needed to be paid. In order to be justified, in order to have justice done perfectly, someone needed to pay a penalty.

There's no way for God's justice to have been met any other way. People say, people argue, why doesn't God just simply forgive? You know, sending His son to die is a divine act of child abuse. But God could not simply ignore sin. His justice would not allow that.

And friends, we do not want to serve a God who would overlook this. Because He wouldn't be fair. He would not be completely just. We don't want to serve a God who does not uphold fairness. And so there was a problem.

He loved humanity, but He hated sin. He is supremely just, and yet He desires for His people to become His children again. But He overcame this dilemma, we believe, because He sent His son Jesus to earth, and it led to a moment where God's justice and God's love overlapped in an astounding way, in a perfect way that could not have happened in any other method. His son Jesus had to die, and a penalty had to be paid. Imagine that your house was burning down, and you had managed to escape, but you still had a baby inside the house.

And this house is overcome with smoke and there's flames just ripping through it. And I, as your neighbour, came to you and I said, this is how much I love you. I want to show you how much I love you. And I ran into this house. And I got to your baby and I was able to throw your baby out the window into your arms, and you caught the baby, but I perished in the flames.

You would say, wow, that man really loved me. Imagine another story where there was a fire in your house and your whole family escaped and everyone's standing on the lawn, and I came to you and I said, this is how much I love you, and I just ran into the flames and died. You wouldn't say, wow this man really loves me. You would say, that's stupid. How pointless is that?

If we could save ourselves, Christ dying was pointless. If we were out on the lawn outside the flaming wreckage, Christ dying was pointless. It's irrelevant. It's a tragic event in history. But Jesus' death is eternally significant.

If we could fix ourselves, if we could expertly tune our springs and our cogs to work perfectly, then we wouldn't need the watchmaker to come and do it for us. But if we realise that we cannot save ourselves, then Christ's death on behalf of our sin will mean everything to us. And we will spend the rest of our lives in joyful and grateful service to Him. We will bring our whole lives in line with the implications of this gospel. We will live out 1 John 4.

We will love because He first loved us. And we will in fact then choose to live according to God's laws. We will now have the only real powerful motivation to be a clock that ticks according to the right rhythm. Why? Because we have been set free from the penalty of failing.

We are now free to live by God's character and His laws. We have come in this process to know God, to come to know His character. We have been swallowed up by His love, and now for the first time we can say yes and amen. I want to live according to God's laws. I want to please Him because I realise what He has done for me.

Friends, is Christ's death everything to you? Or is there still something that you're holding onto to make you better? To make you more holy? To make you feel closer to God, to make you feel worthier of being in a relationship with Him. Get rid of that.

Get rid of that. Meditate, grow, reflect on the good news of Jesus Christ and what His death meant for us as a justification of our sin. As a justification that we could come to Him and be set free. That last verse or two sums it up for Paul. He says that I have been crucified with Christ.

He owns it. He owns it. I have been crucified with Christ. And it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me. And so the life I live in this body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and who gave Himself for me.

That is our motivation for every good work we do. And that is the reason we know God and can know Him. We have been set free. Amen. Lord, I pray that we will never ever understand justification as some sort of distant clinical legal action of a courtroom setting that's removed from us, that's depersonalised, but that we will see Your heart and Your love and Your character supremely displayed in that eternal spiritual exchange.

Lord, it was our sin and our brokenness that was nailed to that cross. And Lord, it was a sacrifice that was made for us once and for all, and that is the greatest news, that we have been justified and set free. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son for us as an atoning sacrifice. Lord, may our lives be changed by this.

May joy rise up in our hearts because of this. May any voice, any dissenting thought, any attack from the evil one, be overcome and conquered by this great truth, that it is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me. Thank you that we have this freedom, Lord. Thank you that You have loved us to this extent. Grow this truth and cement it in our hearts.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.