The Atonement Part 9: Legal Atonement Framework 1 of 2- Righteousness and Justification

observed on justification.

1.The question of justification is a matter of covenant membership. The underlying question in (for instance) Gal. 3 and 4 is: Who are the true children of Abraham? Paul’s answer is that membership belongs to all who believe in the gospel of Jesus, whatever their racial or moral background.

2.The basis of this declaration is the representative death and resurrection of Jesus himself. The resurrection is God’s declaration that Sin has been dealt with and Jesus and his people are in the right before God (Rom. 4:24-25).

3.Justification establishes the church, the renewed Israel, Jew and Greek alike, transcending racial and social barriers (Gal. 3:28). Pagan converts to Christianity did not need to become Jews in order fully to belong to God’s people, the attempt to do so was in itself a renunciation of the gospel, implying that Christ’s achievement was insufficient or even unnecessary (Gal. 2:21; 5:4—6).

4.Justification by faith’ is thus a shorthand for ‘justification by grace through faith’, and in Paul’s thought at least has nothing to do with a suspicious attitude towards good behavior. His polemic against ‘works of the law’ is not directed against those who attempted to earn covenant membership through keeping the Jewish law (such people do not seem to have existed in the 1st century) but against those who sought to demonstrate their membership in the covenant through obeying the Jewish law. Against these people Paul argues that the law cannot in fact be kept perfectly — it merely shows sin. And that this attempt would reduce the covenant to a single race, those who possess the Jewish law, whereas God desires a world-wide family (Rom. 3:27-31; Gal. 3:15-22).

Justification in short is not ‘how someone becomes a Christian’. It is God’s declaration about the person who has just become a Christian. They are a covenant member. It’s about the church more than salvation. Ecclesiology is primary, salvation is secondary (a benefit of justification, not justification itself).