Justified by Faith.
"Being therefore justified by faith."
i. Therefore.
1. The Apostle Paul has been called "the great ergoist," because the word " therefore " is of such frequent occurrence in his writings. It is one of the keynotes of his Epistles, as "verily" is of the preaching of Christ. The difference is significant. " Therefore " is the word of argument ; while " verily " is the word of authority. Here the word " therefore " refers to the whole argument, begun at iii. 31 and ended at iv. 25, but especially to the statement of iv. 25 itself : " Who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification." Christ's death and resurrection have not been in vain : there are those who have actually been justified in consequence. Let us therefore have peace with God.
2. It is an argument from experience. It is very interesting to observe this prominent use in the reasoning of the Apostle Paul of what we have learned to call " the argument from experience." Some appear to fancy this argument one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century ; others look upon it with suspicion as if its use were an innovation of dangerous tendency. No doubt, like other forms of argumentation, it is liable to misuse. It is to misuse it to confound it with proof by experiment. By his use of the argument from experience Paul is far from justifying those who will accept as true only those elements of the Christian faith the truth of which they can verify by experiment. There is certainly an easily recognizable difference between trusting God for the future because we have known His goodness in the past, and casting ourselves from every pinnacle of the temple of truth
ROMANS v. i, 2 287
in turn to see whether He has really given His angels charge concerning us, according to His word.
T[ It is a matter of common knowledge how in Luther's experi- ence the experience of the Apostle Paul was almost repeated in the strangest and most effective fashion. He, like the Apostle, had been living the life of the law, had been trying to win favour with God by doing things, had been trying to make himself a clean and honest man by his own efforts, and had failed. He was utterly miserable, because of his failures ; and — as Paul was too — perhaps Luther was miserable because of the failure of the whole Church and the people round about him. He tells us how his desire is to do anything and everything that this Christ requires. Under the impulse of it he takes his journey to Kome that he may obtain whatever merit the pilgrimage may bring. He tells us with what feelings he faced the Eternal City, and journeyed on the road trodden by all the pilgrims of the past. In order, as he says, to leave no stone unturned, and to do whatever a man might, he began to crawl on his hands and knees up that sacred Santa Scala staircase, in the vain hope that he might win peace and freedom from purgatory. It was as he was creeping up that a voice came to him : " The just shall live by faith." And he felt in a moment what a fool he had been. He realized how it was not penance or pilgrimage or anything that he could do that would bring him nearer to Jesus Christ. What he needed was not what he was doing, but what Christ had done. From that moment, just as from the moment when the Apostle Paul saw a light on the road to Damascus, his whole horizon changed. Life became a new thing to him, and he understood that his business henceforth was simply to accept in gratitude the grace and pity of God, and not to go on striving to work out his own salvation and so attempt an impossible task. Thus the essence of the work of Jesus Christ came to be for Luther the fact that in Him God was giving Himself to and for men, and that in Him there was no longer any condemnation for sin, but an utter and absolute expression of the love of God. As he puts it, using the Apostle Paul's words, he was justified by faith. And for that reason the word justification became the great key-word of the Reformation.1
ii. Being justified.
There are two, and only two, possible meanings to be attached to the word which we translate "justify" in Paul's writings. It may mean either make righteous or count righteous,
1 W. B. Selbie.
288 THE HARVEST OF THE JUSTIFIED
i.e. it may be either a moral term or a legal, judicial, or forensic term. And the great question is, In which of these two senses did Paul use the word ? ' There can be no hesitation about our answer. It is the latter sense only which he uses. With him the term is a purely forensic one, and means to count or reckon as righteous. In spite of much opposition this meaning has gradually vindi- cated itself against the other, and is now almost unanimously held by all scholars who have a right to speak on the subject.
T[ A poet has described the secret moment when new life stirs within the earth at spring-tide, and which, though no man sees it, carries with it all the rich bloom of summer —