Definition of the Doctrine of Imputation:
-->Teaches that we are "justified," that is, declared "not guilty," we're justified in God's sight because while we we were sinners, God attributed (He imputed) --> attributed our sins to Jesus and inflicted on Him the just punishment we deserve. And God also attributed Christ's righteousness to us, bestowing on us every bless He deserved. That's Imputation.
*What Martin Luther called, "The Great Exchange" --> I exchange my sins for Christ's righteousness!
*Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness just as I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine, and given me what is yours. You have taken upon yourself what you were not, and have given to me what I was not.
--> This is the HEART of the gospel- it IS the gospel.
I want to point out to you three (3) points:
1) How the Doctrine of Imputation is under attack
2) Review the critical texts of the New Testament that teach the Doctrine of Imputation
3) Return to the point on the attack on Imputation, only this time I want to close by warning you of what I believe is the single most greatest threat to the Doctrine of Imputation.
-The Doctrine of Imputation has been under attack, and the two (2) places from which the Doctrine has been assailed is
--> On the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC)
--> And on the other hand (on the protestant side of things) from the so-called "New Perspective" on Paul.
- From the Reformation Era forward, the RCC has repudiated this Doctrine.
*The Council of Trent is the best example. --> In Canon II, it says, " If anyone says that men are justified by the sole imputation of the righteousness of Christ, let him be anathema."
*"anathema" --> means to be detested or loathed; a person who is accursed or consigned to damnation or destruction; a formal ecclesiastical curse involving excommunication.
--> very clear in Catholic Catacism on the Doctrine of Justification as a whole.
- says things like this: "justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man." --> In other words, justification isn't just God declaring a sinner to be just, while they're simultaneously a sinner, but justification is that God declares them just because there's a sanctification, a wholeness, and renewal of the inner person. In other words, mixing sanctification with justification.
-Also from the Roman Catholic Catacism: "No one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification. Moved by the Holy Spirit and love, we can then merit for ourselves and others the graces needed for our sanctification for the increase in grace and love, and for the attainment for eternal life."
--> That's saying: you get grace at your conversion which is infused to you (and this is usually vcv infant baptism). You have this grace, but it's not grace for sinners, who are yet sinners, it is grace given which results in us having the power to "earn" our salvation.
- That's what the Roman Catholics are told. So for Rome, justification does not involve imputation at all- and more than that, from their perspective, justification includes sanctification. It includes our moral and spiritual renewal, and finally it involves our merit.
*Threat #2: Over the last thirty (30) years or so, the Doctrine of Imputation has been eroded by protestants in what has come to be known as the "New Perspective on Paul."
-Robert Gundry from Westmont College: "The doctrine that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believing sinners needs to be abandoned. The doctrine of imputation is not even biblical! Still less, is it essential to the Gospel."
--> This significantly blurs the line between justification and sanctification; effectively blends the two into one.
** As soon as justification becomes more than God's declaration of our innocence on the basis of Jesus' blood and righteousness, at that point it ceases to be justification!!
--> It turns Christianity into some system of works-righteousness, however subtle. where our participation with God through our obedience, effectively if not explicitly, becomes the ground of assurance of our acceptance with God, It drives me to say, "Well, what really gives me assurance? Is it the blood and righteousness of Christ, or is it my obedience?"
- False teachers smuggle sanctification in justification and turns salvation into a product of human effort. --> This massively distorts the gospel and leaves Christians without hope.
*John Piper: "You may wonder if this apparent obscuring of the distinction between sanctification and justification really matters. It does. Our only hope of progress in gradual sanctification (that's growing in Christ's likeness) is that we already have a right standing with God by grace alone! If the battle of sanctification is made part of our justification, a great part of the foundation for triumphant warfare against sin is removed, and we are made to fight a battle that we can't win!"
- Oh, there's a battle to be fought my friends, but what is distinctive about the Christian warfare is that we can only kill the sin that has already been killed when we were killed in Christ. OR, to put it positively: we can only achieve practical righteousness as a working out of the imputation of Christ's righteousness.
**This is massively important! We have this battle to become more like Christ, and if you take justification out of the equation, if you take imputation out of the equation, you're not standing on a foundation anymore, and the whole thing becomes a house of cards and is reduced to works-righteousness.
--> *Explaining those two threats leads to my second point: If we are going to defend this doctrine, [and we should] our only recourse is to the bible. Because are beliefs are only legitimately Christian to the extent that they're truly biblical, and so we have to make recourse to the scriptures.
***Six (6) Key New Testament Texts on Imputation***
#1: Romans 5 (and when you see these texts you'll chuckle at anti right when he says, "Paul never comes right out and says it!") --> okay, back to Romans 5, beginning at vs 15
--> What is righteousness? It's a free gift of salvation. * and it must be righteousness of Christ because we're talking about what is Christ's righteousness? It's his life! Perfectly lived. It is his life lived in accordance to all the commandment of God; the life we can never live. He was obedient, *and that obedience is what constitutes that gift of righteousness that if you're a Christian, you receive by faith.
#2: Romans 8:3-4 --> Jesus NEVER sinned. So you can't somehow take this to mean that Jesus is a sinner. Sin gets "attributed" to Him. And by this, the Father condemned sin in the flesh in order that (vs 4) the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us.
*You see both sides of imputation? Here's our sin being condemned in Jesus, and now here's the righteous requirement of the Law now being attributed to us.
#3: 1 Corinthians 1:30 --> So no longer so i boast in my own record, no longer do i boast in my own achievements, no longer do i boast in my own resume, but instead i boast in the Lord who has become for me, through/in Jesus, my righteousness.
-imputation.
#4: 2nd Corinthians 5:21 --> He made Him who knew no sin (Jesus) to be sin- did he sin? No. He "attributed" our sin to Jesus. He made him who knew no sin to be seen on behalf of us, so that we (in the same way sin is attributed to Jesus) might become the righteousness of God through union with Christ.
- what makes this text so important is that there's a parallel here: the same way that sin is imputed to Christ, the righteousness of God is imputed to us.
- Double imputation. Our sin for Christ's righteousness. (The Great Exchange)
#5: Galations 3 --> here we see the sin side of imputation. He's bearing in himself the penalty we deserve for our sins!
#6: Philipians 3:3-
--> *vs 7: what is he sharing with us? It's his resume!
**I want to be found in Christ not having a righteousness of my own (vs. 7): "but whatever gain i had, i count it lost for the sake of Christ.."
--> As Luther called it, "Alien Righteousness," which means "righteousness outside of me."
--> So then, it seems fairly clear even with these series of text, that we can say with some authority that the Great Exchange- our sins for Jesus' righteousness; the doctrine of imputation- IS biblical!!
- This doctrine so central to our faith is under attack with the RCC on the one hand, and the protestant "New Perspective on Paul" on the other.
Point # 3: There's another threat, far greater than the RCC and the protestant New Perspective-->
*It's far more sinister because it is far more subtle--> the single greatest threat to the doctrine of imputation is YOU!!
(threat level #1 = yellow)
* The greatest threat to imputation is not from its obvious detractors, but from its most ardent supporters!
- The greatest threat comes from people like us, who give lip-service imputation, but we live our lives as if our salvation is by works!
--> We smuggle into our justification sanctification and we rely on our works to assure us of our acceptance with God.
- We say, "That's not me man. I don't believe in salvation by works. My salvation is by the blood and righteousness of Christ. It's totally of grace. I would never say that salvation is by works. It is by grace alone, and through Christ alone, plus or minus nothing." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
--> To which i say- I'm not talking about your CONFESSIONAL theology. I'm talking about your FUNCTIONAL theology! I'm not talking about what you SAY you believe! I'm talking about the way you live!! Where the rubber meets the road, as justification- BOTH SIDES! Where does the doctrine of imputation worm its way into your daily life?!
- The church of Jesus Christ, that is to say the church that affirms the doctrine of imputation, doesn't get it! I don't think we realize how much we're trusting in our own performance for a sense of assurance that we're accepted by God.
*demostrate: Take a bad day- and a bad day is a day where you've been especially disobedient to God. You know those days right? Well on a bad day, do you ever feel guilty when things go well for you? Like it's wrong for things to go so smoothly for you because you've been so bad? Or how about when things go wrong on a bad day? Do you ever feel like, "Well that makes sense. I wasn't very obedient." Let's take the flip side--> Let's take a good day: a day where you haven't had any outright high-handed acts of disobedience. Do you ever feel like something goes well for you, you have the opportunity to share the gospel with someone and you feel totally awesome? And you're like, "well that makes sense. I got up early, had some private worship time or devotional- whatever you call that- and it went really really well. I was nice to my wife/husband, kids/parents, etc" It makes sense! You were good... so good things should happen. Or how about this: you're having a good day and things go poorly for you. You ever feel angry about it? [psalm 73]
** The thing with this good day/ bad day approach is that on either side, you're looking to your own performance to gage the Father's acceptance of you, or the blessings he's pouring out on you in your life.
**There is never a day when you were so good that you're beyond the need of God's grace, and there's never a day when you're so bad, that you're beyond the reach of God's grace! ~ (Jerry Bridges, 1994) - "The Discipline of Grace" chapter 3....
- When you have sinned in a particular way, especially in a way you tend to sin repeatedly, do you feel like you want to make up for it? Like you were lazy for an hour, so you're going to get up an hour early tomorrow?
--> See what this is? That's performance mode. You know what you're doing? YOU'RE DISBELIEVING IN IMPUTATION!!! --. as soon as you move into performance mode, rather than robustly confessing and repenting of your sins, you've forgotten the doctrine of imputation. In fact, add to your list of sins the sin of self-righteousness, thinking that somehow you could make up for your sins by adding some good works to your resume!! And Jesus says it's the pimps and prostitutes that enter Heaven before you, self-righteous person!!
-this merit mentality, this performance posture we adapt is far more pervasive within the ranks of people who say their hope is built on nothing less than Christ's righteousness than we may even care to admit. And the reason we have this tendency to slouch towards self-righteousness is because since The Fall, we have been towards ourselves to make up for the nakedness, shame, guilt, misery that we can't get away from. And you know what, we're so proud, i don't want the handout of the blood + righteousness of Christ from God. I don't want it! I don't want his covering for sin and failure, i want to establish my own.
--> Mike Horton: "The Gospel Driven Life" : "Like the fig leaves that Adam and Eve designed to cover their sense of shame after The Fall, we search frantically for moral, therapeutic, pragmatic, cosmetic, and spiritual ways of making ourselves more presentable and acceptable. Yet it is not until God strips us of our own fig leaves and covers us with his own garments of righteousness in Christ, that we find acceptance with God, and therefore the source of a stable identity. Everything else is cosmetic. It doesn't really address the source of our anxieties, stress, depression, and pride."
- He's right.
**Until God strips you of your own fig leaves and covers you with his garments of righteousness in Christ, you're walking around in the world in self-righteousness and you see because we look to our own righteousness, rather than resting in Christ, our focus becomes not the glory of God, in the face of Christ, the focus becomes ourselves, and we rob Jesus of the glory he is due, which then has catastrophic effects for us!!
--> Richard Loveless (1979) "Dynamics of Spiritual Life" : "We all automatically gravitate towards the assumption that we are justified by our level of sanctification, and when this posture is adopted, it inevitably focuses our attention not on Christ, but on the adequacy of our own obedience. We start each day with personal security, not resting on the accepting love of God, and the sacrifice of Christ, but on our present feelings or recent achievements in the Christian life."
****YOU CAN'T SAVE YOU!!!!!****
--> "It's been two (2) weeks since I acted like that!" etc. - These arguments can't quiet the human conscious. You know they don't work! And because of that, we are inevitably moved either to discouragement and apathy- what's the point? Or to a self-righteousness that falsifies the record to achieve a sense of peace.
*Until you see yourself as someone who has inclined towards self-righteousness, you will continue to look to your own fig leaves to cover what only God can cover by imputation.
--> Luke 18:9 -- Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
2 Things :
#1: (vs 9) : Luke is the reason why Jesus tells this story. Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.
--> We're describing a person that trust in their own achievements, and their own attainments, and their own accomplishments to be right with God, and looks down on other people who haven't gotten with the program.
#2: I want you to see how subtle it is- (vs 11&12) --> What's wrong with thanking God that i'm not sinful like that? I'm not taking credit for it- i'm thanking God that i'm not like that. Well according to Luke, Jesus has a big problem with this. He says that praying like this is evidence that you trust yoursef that you're righteous and look at other people with contempt.
- what makes the pharisees self-righteous is when he says, "i thank you that i'm not like the others..." --what makes him self-righteous is that he thinks he's not like other people!!
*** when you see a crack addict, a prostitute, a sexual abuser, a serial killer, etc, YOU ARE LOOKING IN A MIRROR!!! Jesus means to say, " what do you mean you thank God you're not like other people? You ARE like other people!" --> That's precisely your problem: you think that you're not like other people. You think that when you look at the tax collector, you don't see yourself, you see someone worse than you, but in fact it is you that is worse than he is because you don't see yourself as you really are.
So *What Jesus is saying is this: you want to know how/ when you're trusting in your own self-righteousness? What the sign that you're trusting in your own righteousness?
Answer- Feelings of superiority. Looking down on people, treating them with contempt. We all feel superior to somebody, sometimes because without a growing relationship with Jesus, that's really what life's all about- I need to feel superior to somebody to live with myself and the more people that i feel better than, the better i'm going to feel about myself.
-self-righteousness.
-It's that very sense of superiority that demonstrates that we are seeking to establish a righteousness of our own, rather than the one that comes through faith in Christ.
- In part, the reason why we feel superior (and feelings of superiority are signs of self-righteousness) is because the idea of righteousness isn't just walking rightly before God, or living in conformity to God's will, but the idea of righteousness is your record- it's your resume. (*Remember Paul's resume from Philippians)
--> look at how great, look at how wonderful, this is my resume. and so, i look to my resume, my righteousness is my record, and that from there, whatever kind of record i have amassed becomes the thing that for me, justifies my existence. --> So whatever you look to, to justify your existence is your righteousness! In other words- i might not be a,b,c, but at least i accomplished x,y,z. That's your righteousness.
- is my pedigree strong enough to get into that grad school? Is my economic status strong enough to be accepted by that woman? Is my appearance strong enough to land that job?
**That's what righteousness is--> "What it takes" --> so what is your "What it takes?" - we all look to something: being qualified in your field of study, being attractive to the opposite sex, your scholarly or athletic accomplishments, being a good parent, being generous, being cool/stylish, funny, witty, you can find your righteousness in cleanliness and neatness, and orderliness; you can find your righteousness in your home of origin, or your race, or your state ("Go Florida!!") For you, it may be your sweetness, or your kindness, or that you don't shy away from a conflict. You can find your righteousness in your loyalty to your friends, there are thousands of forms of righteousness!! Thousands of places that we look to in order to define what our "what-it-takes" looks like. You want to know what that is? Maybe i didn't name it. *Here's an easy way to find out: "What makes you the most defensive?" -What do you get the most defensive about?
Example--> Let's say you're a competent person (and a lot of husbands have this). And let's say the wife comes in and asks you, "hey babe, it's Wednesday. Did you take out the garbage?" And the husband is like, "Am I an idiot? How many years have we lived here and you bring the garbage out on Wednesday?!"
- She's just asking a question! Why am i getting so worked up in a lather? Because she's threatening my competence! And i'm banking my hopes on my resume which says, "This person is competent!"
- and the reason why you have to defend your forms of self-righteousness is because deep down you know your own righteousness needs to be defended. It's not strong enough! Deep down you know that there is no record you could amass that would be sufficient to meet the standard of Jesus' righteousness! It's as if we get the resume of Jesus, and add "my competence" in the corner with a crayon. (Threat Level #2= Orange)
(Threat level #3: red)
-John Piper wrote an article in 2007 issue of Christianity Today, and he was talking about how lots of young people are being lost to the cause of Christ's mission because of a knowing sense of guilt and unworthiness that they have over their sexual failures. The problem here is that we listen to the plausible lies of the devil, who after your 2 am encounter, whether TV or in bed told you "see, you're a loser. you may as well not even worship. No way you're going to commit your life to Jesus now, etc"
---> Lots of kids get lost this way because they feel ashamed. The problem with this shame is that it forgets the gospel! Do we believe in imputation or not??! If you think your sexual sin somehow especially disqualifies you from a vibrant, sold out, revolutionary Christian life, you don't have shame, not real shame. You have inverted self-righteousness. It's inverse because you say this to yourself, " I should be better than this!" You're discouraged--> Listen to that: you should be better than that? Really? Then why did Jesus come??! Why did you need Jesus' blood and righteousness?? Yes, You really ARE that bad.
--> Jack Dilly used to say, "Cheer up, you're worst than you think." For those of you who feel so unworthy because of your sexual sins, do you feel equally as unworthy to be a christian when you're impatient? or lack self-control? or gossip? Or are envious? My guess? You'd feel a ton more guilty and shameful about that sexual sin than you would about your gossip.
- and if for the "respectable" sins you don't need Jesus all that much, then for this "un-respectable" sin you need Jesus and then some! Right? This isn't that bad, so i don't need Jesus that much. But that' really really bad so i need Jesus PLUS something else!
-hopelessness is a form of self-righteousness because when you're there, you say, " Jesus' resume isn't enough, i need something more!"
- The puritan, Thomas Brooks says, "we need to repent for being discouraged by our sins."
--> because the discouragement "springs from refusing the richness, fullness, and everlastingness of God's love. It springs from refusing the power, glory, sufficiency, and efficacy, of the death and sufferings of Christ. And it comes from refusing the worth, glory, fullness, and completeness of the righteousness of Christ. In other words, you're so discouraged because you say, "i don't want that!" your hopelessness is a form of self-righteousness pride, which is angry or not better than you are, by that hopelessness, you really wish you didn't need Jesus' righteousness and blood at all! You really wish you could have gotten there on your own!
--> That's why It's threat level red! Because this stuff is nasty and subtle.
**The bottom line is that we threaten the doctrine of imputation everyday by living as if Jesus' blood and righteousness are not enough.
--> Living Waters talks a lot about repentance - i commend you for repenting of your sins, but how often do you think about preaching about repenting from your self-righteousness??
-Oh, we're guilty of sin, as the church, but i think we're way more guilty of self-righteousness. Jesus says the holy spirit will come and he's going to convict the world concerning sin, and concerning what? Righteousness! Convict concerning righteousness? Yes! Convict concerning your self-righteousness! Your self-salvation project! And just like you don't repent of your sin once when you become a Christian, but that the whole Christian life is a life of repentance from sin, don't you think you would have to continue to repent from your righteousness??! The doctrine of Imputation is under attack...and we're the main culprits.
--> I encourage you to put down your weapons. The great part about this: Jesus' blood and righteousness is big enough to envelop and destroy all your self-righteousness!!
- yes, we're all self-righteous, all hypocrites! BUT Christ is bigger than our hypocracy!!
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