One of the ugliest features in the history of our sorry world has surely been misery and oppression caused by religion. Atheists have often and rightly pointed out that, as the ancient Roman poet Lucretius put it, ‘again and again religion has given birth to sinful and unholy deeds’.11 The particular barbarity cited by Lucretius was Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his virgin daughter Iphigenia on the altar of the pagan goddess Artemis, in order to gain that goddess’s favour. But pagan superstitions have not been the only, or the worst, culprits. Christendom has its shameful record too: crusades by so-called Christian nations against infidels, and myriad burnings and torturings of supposed heretics, all of it in plain defiance of Christ’s own prohibition on the use of violence to further or protect his kingdom (see John 18:36-37). In England, at various times professing Christian [p 63] monarchs even had people burned at the stake for possessing and reading the words of Christ in the Bible!
The Bible itself, of course, protests against this kind of thing as loudly as any atheist. Christ himself lamented his own Jewish nation’s long history of persecuting the prophets; he drove out of the temple those who were exploiting religion for the purpose of making money and thereby oppressing the poor; he denounced certain religious professionals (Pharisees) who seemed outwardly to be holy men but inwardly were morally corrupt; and then with utter impartiality he warned his disciples that from time to time there would arise in his own kingdom and church, men in high office who would beat their fellow servants and live immoral and self-indulgent lives (Luke 12:45–46). The fact is that religion in the hands of men who have never experienced personal regeneration can often foment the worst features of fallen human nature; though, to be fair, political ideology, when adopted as a quasi-religious faith, has often provided hideous examples of the same kind of thing.
Serious as all these scandals are, however, they are self-evidently corruptions of true religion. More dangerous, because not so self-evidently wrong, are doctrines and practices which appear to be religiously respectable, but which, if adopted, would turn the very gospel of Christ into a form of spiritual slavery, less lurid than other perversions such as we have just considered, but fundamentally more serious. Indeed, in the next section of Acts (Acts 12:25–16:5) it is one of Luke’s major concerns to record the reaction of the apostles to early attempts to incorporate such doctrines and practices into Christianity.
[p 64] Luke tells us (Acts 15:5) that certain ‘believers’ (though in what sense they were believers he does not say—presumably they believed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God; and that, of course, was good!) began so to misconstrue the terms and conditions of salvation, that Peter declared that their teaching would put ‘a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear’. Peter regarded the imposition of such spiritual slavery on people, when the whole purpose of the gospel is to set people free, to be tantamount to ‘putting God to the test’ (Acts 15:10). Strong words! But they are matched by the fervour of Paul’s appeal to the Christians in Galatia when they were subsequently troubled by similar misrepresentations of the gospel: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Gal 5:1).
In this connection Luke first gives us a summary of what Paul preached in the Jewish synagogue at Pisidian Antioch on the topic of salvation (Acts 13:14–41). Paul makes it clear that what God is offering mankind through Jesus Christ is primarily a salvation that sets people free: ‘God has brought to Israel a Saviour, Jesus .&nbps;.&nbps;. to us has been sent the message of this salvation. .&nbps;.&nbps;. “that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth”’ (Acts 13:23, 26, 47).
But salvation in what sense? To illustrate his point, Paul reminds them that their nation had already experienced God’s salvation at various levels. When they had been forced to work as aliens without civil rights in the slave labour camps of ancient Egypt, salvation had meant being set free from tyrannous economic, social, and political oppression. It also meant freedom for self-determination as a nation, and freedom to worship and [p 65] serve God according to their conscience. Later, when compromise with the idolatry, immorality, and vice of the surrounding nations eventually brought them under their domination, salvation had meant liberation from the enslaving consequences of their own sinful practices and disobediences against God.
So now with Jesus Christ, the descendant of Israel’s prototypical deliverer, King David: salvation meant liberation and freedom. But from what?
First of all from mankind’s universal enemy, death (Acts 13:32–37). For what is the ultimate sense of existence, if all our social and political freedoms, all our progress to a new world order, only advance each individual, each nation, each civilization, and the whole universe to the emotional and intellectual frustration of universal, meaningless death? By the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has demonstrated that the universe is not a closed system of internal cause and effect. One day it will be restored and set free from its bondage to decay and corruption.
Marvellously good news, then—but many people do not feel it so. Instinct tells them (and the Bible confirms) that if there is going to be a resurrection of all mankind, there will also be a final judgment. There must be. The idea that God would raise all mankind to a glorious eternal life and simply ignore the sins and injustices committed in this life is self-evidently a fairy tale, devoid of moral sense. But it is this fear of having to stand one day before God as judge that makes religion seem to many people oppressive, so that they prefer to think that there will be no resurrection. Paul knew it well; the congregation in the synagogue at Antioch had their own personal [p 66] reasons, as we all have, for fearing a judgment after death; but in addition, their fellow-countrymen in Jerusalem and their religious leaders had crucified Jesus out of religious animosity. His resurrection, they must have felt, would carry implications too awful to contemplate.
It is in this historical context, then, that the relevance of the second element in salvation is most clearly seen. No reiteration of the demands of the law on God’s part could have changed the hostility in hearts that had crucified his Son. No promise on the people’s part to try to keep God’s law in future could have wiped out the guilt of their sin and made it possible for God justly to forgive them. The gospel is this: that God himself undertook the task of removing this spiritual impasse.
At this pivotal point in world history God used the occasion of man’s hostility against his Son to do what the Old Testament prophets had foretold he would do (Acts 13:27–35). In his love, God, in the person of his Son, took upon himself the penalty of human sin which his holiness demanded, paid it by his own suffering, thus making forgiveness possible for all who would repent and believe. And not only forgiveness—for that could be construed as simply forgiveness for this or that particular sin or even the single sin of crucifying Christ—but ‘justification from all things’; which, whatever it means, is said to be something that no one could attain to, not even by the most sincere efforts to keep God’s law given through Moses (Acts 13:39).
When we say that someone’s action was justified, we are declaring that he was right to do what he did, and that we approve of his action. Again, if someone is accused of a crime and at the trial the court justifies him, [p 67] it means that the court declares him to be innocent of the charge brought against him. But when the Bible says that God justifies those who believe, it clearly does not mean that God approves of everything they have done or even that God regards most of their life as having been on the whole acceptable. And it certainly does not mean that God regards them as innocent; for God declares all to be guilty sinners.
What does the word ‘justify’ mean, then, in the Bible? The famous statement in the New Testament that God ‘justifies the ungodly’ (Rom 4:5) quite obviously does not mean that God regards ungodliness as innocent, or even as generally acceptable, behaviour. Does it then mean, perhaps, that God makes the ungodly man just, by changing him and gradually turning him from a sinner into ‘a good-living person’? No! God certainly does that for everyone who truly believes; but in the Bible the process by which he does it is called, not justification, but sanctification. And the difference in meaning is not a matter of splitting hairs. Sanctification is necessarily a long drawn-out process, involving much effort on man’s part and often considerable suffering. And such are God’s standards of holiness that in all realism he reminds us that we shall never be perfect in this life. At life’s end, we shall still merit his verdict: ‘all have sinned [in the past] and [still do] fall short of the glory of God [in the present]’ (Rom 3:23).
If then our acceptance with God depended on our progress in holiness, no one could be sure in this life of final acceptance with God; and no one with any concept of God’s standards would dare to presume it. And since for a person not to enjoy acceptance with God is the ultimate [p 68] disaster, the attempt to gain that acceptance by progress in holiness, dogged by constant and inevitable awareness of having come short, would turn the whole procedure into an oppressively impossible task, into a kind of slavery. It would be like telling a teenager who had taken his father’s brand new car without permission and wrecked it in an accident, that he must restore it to its original perfection, and that, not until the restoration was complete, could he be sure of his father’s unrestrained love, forgiveness, and acceptance. A conscientious boy would be oppressively burdened by what would be, for him, such an impossible task. A less conscientious boy would turn into a rebel. These are precisely the positions that many people find themselves in with God!
How different it would be if the father first assured the boy that he was already completely forgiven and that his acceptance did not depend on his success in repairing the car; but that, in the confidence of being already accepted, he was expected to co-operate with his father in repairing the car, and to do so more and more as he grew older. That is exactly what God does for people when in the biblical sense of the word he justifies them. Justification is not the long, drawn-out process of putting the wreckage of our lives right. It is the instantaneous declaration made by God the moment a person repents and believes, that God forgives him and accepts him now and for ever; that God’s acceptance does not depend on that person’s success in putting the wreckage right; he is already clear, now and for ever, of any charge that God’s holy law could bring against him; but in that confidence he is expected in fellowship with God to begin the long process of developing a holy life.
[p 69] But, says someone, How can that be? How can God declare a man to be quit of any charge that God’s law could bring against him while the man himself, however sincere, is still a sinner and far from perfect? The principle according to which God can do this is enunciated by Paul in his Letter to the Romans (Rom 6:7); only we must once more be careful to translate Paul’s Greek exactly. What he says is (literally translated): ‘The man who has died has been justified from sin.’
Suppose a country in which murder is a capital offence. As long as a murderer lived, he would stand under the law’s condemnation and be liable to its penalty. But once he is executed and has paid the law’s penalty, he is justified, and he passes out of the law’s jurisdiction for ever. Now the penalty of our sin against God was eternal separation from God, that is, eternal death. We could never come to the end of paying that penalty if we had to pay it ourselves. But what we could never do, God has done for us in Christ. For all who put their faith in Christ, God is graciously prepared to count Christ’s death as their death; and so for them the law’s penalty is paid and they can be declared justified.
But how is it just that an innocent party—Christ—should suffer the law’s penalty for other people’s sins? The answer is that, in that sense, it is not a question of Christ dying for other people’s sins. For now, consider what believing in Christ involves. It does not mean simply believing that Jesus is the Son of God. It means becoming one with him. Just as marriage makes a man and woman physically one, so, the Bible explains, whoever puts faith in Christ and receives him becomes spiritually one with [p 70] him (1 Cor 6:17). For Christ is not just one more human being. He is the God–Man, the great representative man, who incorporates into himself all who trust him. In death he bore their sins and paid their penalty; risen from the dead, he shares with them his resurrection life. Joined to him, they are accepted by God as fully as he is, and given the permanent status of children of God. And here lies the secret of how it is that justification by faith does not lead thereafter to irresponsible and lax living. The believer finds himself joined in a practical, living partnership with Christ, with new motives and new power to pursue progressive holiness.
But it has proved notoriously difficult for some people, when the gospel speaks of justification by faith, to grasp what ‘faith’ means in this context. This was, for instance, the difficulty that according to Luke lay behind the dispute in the early churches, to which we earlier referred. Some Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, still felt that the initiatory rite of circumcision followed by the keeping of the law of Moses was absolutely necessary for salvation (Acts 15:1, 5). And since then many people, thinking that baptism is the Christian equivalent of Jewish circumcision, have maintained that baptism and the keeping of God’s law are necessary and indispensable conditions for being saved. The inevitable result of believing this: no one can know in this life that they are accepted with God, since no one can know that they have kept God’s law well enough to do what is in fact impossible anyway, namely to qualify for salvation. And so, as Peter declared, they turn the very gospel of freedom into a yoke of bondage. Luke, being the [p 71] perceptive historian he was, saw how crucial this debate was for the very survival of the Christian gospel, and carefully recorded, for all time, the unanimous freedom-giving verdict of all the apostles: ‘We believe that we will be saved [not by circumcision and the keeping of the law but] through the grace of the Lord Jesus’ (Acts 15:11).
Notes
11 De Rerum Natura, Book 1, ll. 82–83.
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