The Urgency of Justification

The Apostle Paul often included the subject of justification in his epistles.Justification has two sides; the more familiar aspect is forgiveness. The other side is the imputation of righteousness, which is the focus in Philippians 3. Inverse 1 Paul introduces his new topic by saying, “Finally … ” It might seem odd to find a note of conclusion in the middle of a letter.What follows the finally is a doctrinal segment which takes up the entire chapter. What follows that is directed to friends in chapter 4 as he counsels them and repeats his thanks for their support of his ministry. We begin with his “Finally”. In this epistle there is no correction of teaching that was held by the Philippian church, but that does not prevent Paul from warning them. It was an urgent matter of their safety to review the gospel again. And Paul has no trouble doing so, because he is not embarrassed to repeat himself often on this theme in anything he wrote.

A. Dangerous False Teachers

We have a sudden shift. Paul’s words, “rejoice inthe Lord” are a concise remark of how we are saved. The rejoicing is in the Lord, so it is not in ourselves.Any delight in his personal conduct is absent; he calls for rejoicing in the Lord. Soon such rejoicing is expressed as glorying, worshiping, and believing(3:3,9). Paul began by speaking of the gist of justification, but then right away he takes up the huge danger of not rejoicing in the Lord. If not in the Lord, the confidence will go elsewhere.

Anyone who seeks to steer your rejoicing away from Christ to anything else is a false teacher. The assault against proper trust changes from one setting to another.A person may attend mass every day, or put faith in baptism, or work in a soup kitchen, or take a pilgrimage up a mountain to a guru – anything that assures you that you can “increase your chances”. [1] When that occurs, the rejoicing is away from Christ and has become a false hope. Rejoicing in Christ is incompatible with self-confidence, a faith that replaces Christ. Such ugly thinking has people who energetically promote it. Energetically? Well, this is how the Lord put it:“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as you yourselves” (Matthew 23:15).

come the false teachers. We should observe two things in Paul’s response to them. He views them as destroyers, and he combats their teaching with explicit identification of it. Paul is not politely disagreeing with them. He does not think, “Well you have your views, and we have ours.” He pronounces curses on them in Galatians1:9 and 1 Corinthians 16:22. Here in Philippians 3:2 he describes them as dogs,vicious ones with sharp teeth; they clamp down with a strong bite and violently shake their victims, tearing flesh off the body. The people Paul had in mind were not sweet puppy dogs.

Just as wild animals can take away life, false teachers who change what you rejoice in do the same. They are “enemies of the cross of Christ,” and Paul often warned about them (3:18). False teachers often claim to be loyal servants of God; back then they portrayed themselves as true apostles, but they were deceitful Satanic servants disguised as “angels of light” (2 Corinthians 11:13-15). [2] Paul is not half-hearted in his descriptions of them. In Acts 20:29 they are “fierce wolves” that will not hesitate to devour the flock, and they emerge within churches, which makes them more difficult to identify. The letter from Jude is mostly about this specific danger. Thus we have a double urgency about justification. The doctrine is positively needed for it is the gospel, and it must be defended urgently from threats of all kinds.

The specific challenge to the gospel that Paul fought against the most was the idea of keeping the law in order to be saved. Acts 15:1 puts it this way: “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” Years later Paul was still battling this error. He said of these evildoers that they mutilate the flesh, as if a knife cutting off some foreskin could make one acceptable to God. Of course the false teachers would eventually demand obedience to the entire law as a condition of salvation. They replaced the saving action of God on the cross with the shedding of the sinner’s blood.This use of the law created a personal record of obedience to present to God for him to accept. No wonder Paul was agitated against such a horrible replacement of Christ. He felt an urgency to warn as in Galatians 5:2-6:

Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you [you will not improve your chances]. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything,but only faith working through love.

B. The Delightful Alternative

When God required the circumcision of members in the covenant, he was using an analogy. Circumcised men are cleaner. This ritual was an adult’s or a child’s introduction into the covenant. God said He would be that person’s God, but our holy God did not sidestep the issue of His holiness. Circumcision declared(without words) that the person in his sin, though claimed by God, is unacceptable in his native condition and MUST be cleansed in order to be received into fellowship with the Lord. It is either that God must become dirty, or the covenant member must be cleansed. In the sign of circumcision God shows his requirement of the sinner’s cleansing, but also it is God alone who saves. The same truth is found in baptism. No one baptizes himself, and no one does it with mud. Circumcision and baptism are signs of cleansing which come only by the blood of Christ. What Paul fought against was a perverted ritual in competition with Christ, as if a knife producing the wrong blood can save.

Yet we who worship God by the Spirit and glory in Christ Jesus are really circumcised people; “we are the circumcision” (3:3). We are a cleansed people but not by self-cleansing.Instead we worship the divine Cleanser, and worship is the opposite of boasting. We “put no confidence in the flesh” (v.3). Our rejoicing, glorying,worshiping, and believing are all directed away from ourselves to the Lord.

The gospel is that the Lord who requires righteousness gives it. And Paul knew where that righteousness came from. It surely was not Paul’s production, not from the law, and not from a bloody mutilation of his flesh. It was righteousness he received by faith, but since he received it he did not produce it. Paul is most relieved to be able to say that he had gained Christ, and was found in him, not having a righteousness which he provided God but a righteousness that came from God (3:8,9). Therefore Paul had confidence. Jesus was tempted by the Master Tempter who failed to induce any sin into him. Jesus lived as a man under the scrutiny of God, and the Father with his holy all-knowing eyes found no fault in him. His righteousness is perfect; it is the righteousness credited to us when we believe.

C. The Clear Example

Paul does not present justification simply by stating the doctrine. He delves into his own experience and his radical change of mind. It is better to call it a radical change of trust. For much of his life he did not believe in Christ, and then he did. What happened in that man’s heart?

We have encountered something unusual. In modern times, people imagine a testimony as sharing a personal story, though at one time a testimony was a witness of something outside the witness. To testify in a court about an accident is not to give an impression of how the accident has affected the life of the witness. It is objective, a testimony of what happened, seen by a witness.

Paul had elements of testimony which we find in other Scriptures. A personal one is in Galatians 2:20: He testified of what Christ had done for him and all Christians when he referred to the Lord Jesus as “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” He testified to what Christ did outside his experience. This is wonderfully better than people going on and on about their own lives. Many testify today with no reference to the action of God in Christ to save us. They are out of step with the Bible.

The Book of Acts reports the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, a piece of Christian history greatly needed to grasp the unusual thing God did in making Paul an apostle to the Gentiles (Acts9:15,16). In that chapter Luke describes the event. Later Paul recounts his conversion focusing on the intervention of God to turn a persecutor of the church into a promoter of the faith he had tried so hard to destroy (Acts 22, 23, 26).

What we read in Philippians 3speaks of what happened in his confidence. He began to rejoice in the Lord with a different faith. He tells in Philippians 3 of his former trust in himself replaced by faith in Christ. Paul challenges that if anyone wants to glory in his religion flesh, he has been there and done that. He could surpass them in piling up reasons for confidence in the flesh. He uses himself to show what a radical change is needed in all of us. He became what every Christian is a rejoicing worshiper of God who gloried in Christ and turned away from a trust that had no place in it for Christ.

Jesus interrupted the mission of Paul the self-righteous Pharisee, a man intent on wiping out faith in Jesus of Nazareth. Acts 9 is an account of a sudden faith not anticipated by Paul.The rejection by Paul of all that he prized about himself was a huge change of faith. He could list high sounding credentials that must impress God, or so he once thought. He was circumcised on the right day, born in the right people, [3] even within a loyal tribe, a good Hebrew if there ever was one, a member of the most law observing religious group, a man dedicated to the defense of the faith, zealous to put down the false doctrine spreading among his people, or so he once thought. Would anyone dare to top that?

D. The Real Answer, Real Righteousness

In coming to Christ, Paul saw that his confidence in the flesh was all garbage (v.8). He deserted his worthless object of faith and turned to the real righteousness that God approves, that God has provided in Christ, and that God gives to all who receive the Savior. In this way Paul’s story is the same for all of us. We throw away the worthless and embrace the Lord Jesus, and when we do, our faith is in the right person not ourselves. We are rejoicing in the Lord (v.1)! We immediately receive forgiveness of all our sins, and the righteousness God gave us is looked upon as ours, as if we had obeyed God ourselves. Paul’s story is remarkable and unique. All conversions are unique, and Paul’s unique one was the same kind of conversion all believers have.

Justification simply stated

God requires and forbids.

God requires obedience to his law. We call that obedience righteousness. God rewards obedience with eternal life. But none of us have been obedient; all of us lack righteousness.

God forbids sin, which is disobedience to God. He penalizes sin with death to the sinner, denies him eternal life, and imposes eternal death. We have sinned, so we are utterly helpless, rightly condemned, and face eternal judgment.

God provides.

But God sent his Son to obey for us and die for us. By faith we rest in his shed blood and in his obedient life. Jesus’ death and Jesus’ obedience were in our place. [4] We believe when we trust in Christ alone as the one who has satisfied all the requirements of God concerning us. Trusting in Christ always means that we discard every other hope.

E. The Inevitable Consequence of Justification: Sanctification

We might expect that when Paul rejoices in his reception of the righteousness that comes from God that he might pause and remain on that topic. His status with God was reversed when he gained Christ. His words, however,speed on to knowing Christ in Paul’s conduct. This Christ of his is worth knowing. Paul does not stop with things that are settled (justification). Paul wanted the full package. He believed that the purpose of election is that we should be holy in our lives (Ephesians 1:4), so he lusted after knowing Christ,sharing his suffering and knowing in his life the power of Christ’s resurrection (v.10). He had his eye on his own resurrection and thus glorification,something better than his experience so far (1:23). In other words, he knew he was accepted because of gift righteousness when he believed, but that was a justification of Paul as a person, not a declaration that his conduct was righteous. He craved the righteousness of Christ to be produced within his life. To this end he “pressed on” (3:12,14) “straining forward” (3:13) to see the full goal of his salvation implemented in his life.

The apostle knew of the complete righteousness imputed to him. And he knew in this life that God’s goal of complete personal obedience was not yet his. He knew its completion would come at the coming of Christ(1:6). But God was working a holy desire in him to pursue the upward call of God (2:13; 3:14). That became Paul’s personal goal. Thus the will of God and the will of Paul were in agreement. What was unattainable in this life (3:12) did not frustrate progress in the here and now. He rejoiced that Christ had made him his own (3:12, Romans 5:11). Being the possession of his holy Lord could not make room for complacency and a static experience, a sanctification going nowhere. Paul was on the move by choice, but his growth in godliness was also the agenda of God. The full righteousness already given in justification will be matched eventually by full righteousness in us. Only once in history has complete holiness been found in a human life, and that obedience of Christ was not imputed to him, but produced in him.

I write of things beyond us but begun in us. The urgency of justification is that all that is lovely in human life can never get started until justification occurs. Paul is emphatic on the need for it, and then he wanted to know Christ, join him, and become like him in all that humanity was meant to be. Paul had more than his share of moralizing when he was a devout Pharisee.When he trashed his worthless confidence by rejoicing in the Lord and his righteousness, he was then on his way to real righteousness within.

A Theological Appendix:

There is a sense in which our righteousness is natural to us. When Adam was righteous before the fall, there was no imputed righteousness and no need for it. Adam, needing no mediator, would simply obey and enjoy life with the Lord. He was created to think that way. The loss of such fellowship would come only if he sinned. Adam could have obeyed on his own. The ‘default position’ within man is that blessing would come from one’s own righteousness. When man fell, the Covenant of Works still demanded righteousness but could never provide it. It was a broken covenant. The gift of righteousness (Romans 5:15,16) was not wired into man. The gospel is never ours by instinct; it can come only by revelation. So sinful man, with the old unchanged default setting, would expect to gain eternal life by his own righteousness, not by the obedience of someone else. Self-righteousness, in spite of awareness of sin in the conscience, was natural. A great benefit of the law was to produce guilt, but the guilt could only be relieved by the obedience and sacrifice that would come in an entirely new covenant (the Covenant of Grace) in which there is a Mediator, Christ, and vicarious righteousness produced outside us is a gracious gift to us. Christ by disobedience and death has fulfilled the Covenant of Works in our place.

[1] This suggestion of increasing one’s chance of a favorable decision from God was on a sign I saw years ago in Quezon City.

[2] See also Romans 16:17,18 and 2 Timothy 4:14,15. The latter text shows that Paul still faced false teachers at the end of his life. It is the same in our day.

[3] This is what is meant in John 1:13. We are born of God and received as his children but not on account of our ethnic heritage or blood line.

[4] We call Jesus’ life and death in our place: vicarious.

 

Notes to parallel the sermon of November 11, 2018
Davao Covenant Reformed Church, Davao, the Philippines
Rev. David H. Linden