Jesus Was Raised Because of Our Justification

#Easter2024 #Resurrection #Christianity #Bible #Romans #Salvation

Excerpted from Frederic Godet's Commentary on Romans*

"Who was delivered on account of our sins and was raised again on account of our justification" (Romans 4:25).

In the title our Lord there was involved the idea of a very intimate relation between Jesus and us. This mysterious and gracious solidarity is summed up in two symmetrical clauses, which in a few clear and definite terms present its two main aspects.

He was delivered on account of our offenses (Romans 4:25a). Perhaps Paul intends in the phrase being delivered to remind us of the description of the servant of Jehovah in Isaiah 53: "His soul was delivered (παρεδόθη) to death" (verse 12). He who delivers him, according to Romans 8:32, is God himself, "who spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all." Paul has told us, in Romans 3:25, for what end this act was necessary. It was required to manifest conspicuously the righteousness of God. Every sinner needed to be brought to say: "See what I deserve!" Thus justice was satisfied and pardon possible.

And he was raised again on account of our justification (Romans 4:25b). Commentators are unanimous, if I mistake not, in translating: for our justification, as if it were πρός or εἰς, and not διά (on account of). This for is explained in the sense that the resurrection of Christ was needed in order that faith might be able to appropriate the expiation which was accomplished, and that so justification, of which faith is the condition, might take place. But what a roundabout way of arriving at the explanation of this for! And if the apostle really meant for (with a view to), why repeat this same preposition διά which he had just used in the parallel proposition, in its natural sense of on account of, while the language supplied him with prepositions appropriate to the exact expression of his thought (πρός, εἰς; see Romans 3:25, 26)? I am not surprised that in this way several commentators have found in this symmetry established between the facts of salvation nothing more than an artificial distribution, belonging to the domain of rhetoric rather than to that of dogmatics, and that one has even gone the length of reproaching the apostle "for sacrificing to the mania of parallelism." If we were shut up to the explanation referred to, we could only join regretfully in this judgment. But it is not so.

Let us take διά in its natural sense, as we are bound to do by its use in the first proposition. In the same way as Jesus died because of our offenses, that is, our (merited) condemnation, He was raised because of our (accomplished) justification. Our sin had killed him; our justification raised him again. How so? The expiation of our trespasses once accomplished by his death, and the right of God's justice solemnly demonstrated, God could pronounce the collective acquittal of future believers, and he did so. Over the blood of the sacrifice a sentence of justification was pronounced in favor of guilty man; his condemnation was annulled. Now, in view of this divine fact, a corresponding change must necessarily be wrought in the person of Christ himself. By the same law of solidarity whereby our condemnation had brought him to the cross, our justification must transform his death into life. When the debtor is proved insolvent, his security is thrown into prison; but as soon as the latter succeeds in clearing the debt, the debtor is legally set free, and his security is liberated with him. For he has no debt of his own.

Such is the bond of solidarity formed by the plan of God between Christ and us. Our lot is as it were interwoven with his: we sin, he dies; we are justified, he lives again. This is the key to the declaration, "If Christ is not risen, you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). So long as the security is in prison, the debt is not paid; the immediate effect of payment would be his liberation. Similarly, if Jesus were not raised, we should be more than [merely] ignorant whether our debt were paid; we might be certain that it was not. His resurrection is the proof of our justification only because it is the necessary effect of it. Therefore, Paul had to use διά, on account of, and not εἰς, with a view to. If in the death of Christ humanity disappeared condemned, in the rising of Christ it reappears absolved.

*This exposition of Romans 4:25 is from the first edition of Frederic Godet's (1812-1900) Commentary on Romans (1879 in French, 1883 in English).

Never Wise To Be Wiser Than Scripture

The Legacy Standard Bible's Translation of the Tetragrammaton

#JohnMacArthur #GraceCommunityChurch #LegacyStandardBible #LSB #Tetragrammaton

If you have participated in a worship service at Grace Community Church any time within the last couple of years, you may have noticed during the reading of Scripture by the senior minister John MacArthur, or by one of the other ministers, that the word "Yahweh" is repeatedly substituted for the word "LORD" in familiar Old Testament passages. So, for example, if Psalm 23 were to be read from the pulpit, you would hear it begin with the words "Yahweh is my shepherd" instead of the familiar words "the LORD is my shepherd." This is because MacArthur and scholars at the seminary connected with his church have modified the New American Standard Bible to create a new Bible translation called the Legacy Standard Bible. The stated objective for the project was to create a translation of the Bible with an unprecedented level of precision. In one video, MacArthur refers to it as the "most accurate" and "most consistent" translation. One of the most notable features of this new translation is the replacement, almost seven thousand times, of the word "LORD" in the Old Testament with the word "Yahweh." Does this translation decision constitute a change for the better?

The four consonants that make up the underlying Hebrew word where this translation change takes place, יהוה, are collectively known as the Tetragrammaton. In God's providence, we don't definitively know how this Hebrew word was originally pronounced, because we don't definitively know what vowels went with the Tetragrammaton. Beginning at some point in the history of the ancient Jews, out of reverence for this name, they would not utter it, but instead would substitute another name for God, often using the Hebrew term for "Lord," when they came across it. This is why the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and virtually all modern translations of the Old Testament translate the Tetragrammaton as "Lord." Some translations capitalize all the letters of the word for "Lord" in order to signify that it is a translation of the Tetragrammaton — e.g., "LORD" in English, "HERRN" in German, and so forth. When vowel markings were added to the Hebrew Text in the early middle ages, the Jewish scribes applied the vowel markings for the Hebrew word for "Lord" to the Tetragrammaton, so that the vowel markings for that word in the Hebrew Bible intentionally do not help us with the correct pronunciation. In light of all this, what are we to make of the decision by MacArthur and his team of scholars to translate the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" in the Legacy Standard Bible?

First, and a very short point, the church should always be suspicious of anyone who comes along after more than 2,000 years of church history with the claim that he sees something important that the church has until that time missed. This is not to say that such a thing is impossible, but it certainly bears scrutiny. Essentially, MacArthur and his team of scholars, by their choice to translate the Tetragrammaton "Yahweh" and not "LORD," are implicitly claiming that Scripture translators, extending back in history even beyond 2,000 years, to the time of the Septuagint translation, got this wrong, impairing to some degree the faithfulness and precision of their translations relative to the original text. To say the least, that's a rather lofty claim. This relatively small group of men, discipled under John MacArthur, and associated with Grace Community Church in Southern California, are setting their understanding of how the Tetragrammaton should be translated over and against a consensus of scholarship which has spanned not decades, or centuries, but millennia.

Second, and perhaps a shorter point, as alluded to above, it is not definitively known how the Tetragrammaton was originally pronounced. Most scholars are in agreement, based on other words in the Old Testament, that the first syllable contained an "a" sound. So the "Yah" portion of "Yahweh" is almost certainly correct. However, the same cannot be said of the remaining vowels, whose identity is not at all clear. Therefore, the translation of the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" rests on unstable ground, if the goal of the translation is to accurately capture the original pronunciation.

Third, and most importantly, this translation decision by MacArthur and his team of scholars seems to represent an (unwitting) attempt to be wiser than the Scriptures. What do I mean by that? Well, the translation of the Tetragrammaton with the equivalent of the word "Lord" in the Septuagint, the Vulgate, Luther's German Bible, the King James Version, and so forth does not settle this question because none of these translations are "inspired" in the sense of being absolutely directed by the Holy Spirit so that they are infallible and contain no error. However, there does exist a translation of the Tetragrammaton that is fully verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit. Which one would that be? The original Greek New Testament. Hopefully MacArthur and the scholars connected with his church would agree that the original Greek New Testament is God-breathed, and therefore infallible and verbally inerrant. In other words, it is an absolute standard to follow in translating the Old Testament Scriptures. In light of this consideration, how does the Greek New Testament translate the Tetragrammaton?

Reading an English translation of the fourth chapter of Luke this morning, I came across the passage where Jesus reads from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me, that I should preach the Gospel to the poor" (Luke 4:18a). These words came directly from Isaiah 61:1, which contains the Tetragrammaton. One can already see that my English Bible translated the Tetragrammaton "Lord," but what about the original Greek New Testament? Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, what Greek word did Luke use to translate the Tetragrammaton? If you guessed Κύριος, which means "Lord" in Greek, you would be correct. And this is not an isolated case, but exactly how the Tetragrammaton is consistently translated throughout the Greek New Testament. The citation of verses one and four of Psalm 110 in the Greek New Testament are another notable example of this.

In short, taking the original Greek New Testament as our fully inspired model for how to translate the Tetragrammaton, we find that the scholarly consensus that has spanned over two millennia is correct. Believers don't need to expend precious time re-memorizing deeply comforting familiar passages of Scripture, such as "The LORD is my Shepherd," using new terminology.

To state the obvious, it's never wise (even inadvertently) to be wise beyond Scripture. The Legacy Standard Bible's repeated translation of the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" represents exactly that. Grace Community Church is a good church, with an overall sound ministry, but the new translation it is using has the potential to undermine that legacy. Hopefully, the error will be acknowledged and corrected by MacArthur and his team of scholars for the good of the church.

Justification Is Complete For The Believer

#Justification #SolaFide #Gospel #Presbyterian #Luther #Calvinism

At some point during the Middle Ages, the church began to conceive of justification for the believer as a process instead of as a once for all act, and to confound it with sanctification. As a result of this declension in understanding, justification was made dependent on good works and could never be fully settled in this life. In fact, according to the theological system of the church just prior to the Protestant Reformation, justification was not even fully settled for the believer at death, since the faithful were still required to suffer for a requisite period of time, which could to some degree be mitigated through various rites and offerings to the church by the deceased person's loved ones, in a (fictitious) place called purgatory. The Protestant reformers, through the lead of Martin Luther, recovered the Biblical truth that justification is the judicial declaration of God that the believer is not only "not guilty" but also "righteous", solely based on the vicarious atoning death and perfect life of obedience of another, Jesus Christ, by faith alone.

That is why the apostle Paul repeatedly refers to justification as a completed event for the believer, received solely through faith, apart from all works. For example, after expounding the doctrine of justification in chapters one through four of Romans, Paul says at the beginning of Romans chapter five, "Therefore, having been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand."

Perhaps no better or more concise definition of justification can be found than that provided by Question 33 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which reads, "Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ, imputed to us, and received by faith alone."

Today, regrettably, a number of the very men who purport to follow in the footsteps of the Protestant reformers, and especially in the footsteps of John Calvin, are either directly or indirectly undermining the biblical doctrine of justification, recovered during the Protestant Reformation, by calling into question its completeness for the believer.

To provide just one recent example, David Briones, professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary California, in the abstract of a 2020 article entitled "Already, Not Yet," writes, "For now, Christians live in great theological tension: we already possess every spiritual blessing in Christ, but we do not experience the fullness of these blessings yet. In one sense, we are already adopted, redeemed, sanctified, and saved; in another, these experiences are not yet fully ours." Anyone who is aware of the source of Briones's statement, the theology of Dr. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., former professor of biblical and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, will know that although Briones omits justification here, justification is certainly, in his view, one of the spiritual blessings that is not yet fully experienced by the believer. This is made explicit in the article itself. Briones, following Gaffin, teaches that justification, for the believer, is "already, not yet."

What is wrong with this?

To begin with, the whole notion of "already, not yet," as construed by today's reformed Presbyterian theologians, is a construct foreign to Scripture, that has been appropriated from 20th-century European neo-reformed theologians. If the meaning of "already, not yet" were merely that believers already experience God's blessings in this life, but will not experience the fullness of God's blessings, such as, for example, being completely freed from all inclination and even the ability to sin, or having resurrected, glorified bodies, until a future time, there would be nothing novel about it. Certainly, believers in every age of the world have understood the basic and obvious truth that there are blessings which await a future world. However, despite qualifications to the contrary, today's reformed Presbyterian theologians effectively take "already, not yet" as something that is true of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time: a notion which even Aristotle, who unfortunately was not a believer, would call them out on. Such a construct seems to have more affinity with Hegel than Aristotle. It also leads Briones to mischaracterize the Christian life as one of "great theological tension" between the "already" and the "not yet."

Beyond the fact that "already, not yet" is a construct foreign to Scripture, affirming that a believer's justification is in the mode of the "already" and the "not yet" radically departs from the doctrine of justification revealed in Scripture, and recovered by the Protestant reformers, in which justification is, for the believer, exclusively (if we have to use the term) "already." If the believer's justification were a grammatical tense, it would be the perfect tense. Foisting the "already, not yet" construct on justification turns it back into a process. Though many spiritual benefits that flow from justification are either ongoing or to be enjoyed in the future, and though the open manifestation of the believer's justification to the eyes of the universe awaits the last day, justification itself is a completed past act for the believer. This is because the meritorious basis for the believer's justification is the perfect, all sufficient righteousness of Jesus Christ, comprising his sacrificial, atoning death on the cross, which completely washes away the guilt of all the believer's sins, past, present, and future, and his perfect life of obedience under the law, which secures for the believer a title to eternal life. That is the basis for the believer's right standing before God in this world, and that will remain the basis for the believer's right standing before God through all eternity. Applying the newfangled "already, not yet" construct to the believer's justification undermines this truth and is, therefore, dangerous.

Hand in hand with making justification a process that will not be completed until the final day of judgment, this neo-reformed teaching attributes to the believer's good works a non-meritorious causality in the believer's supposed final justification. It is easy to miss the legalism in this view, because adherents to this teaching always make the point that works are in no way the ground or basis of the believer's justification. That is, they say that works are not meritorious. However, making works in any way causal in justification, or, to put it another way, making justification in any way or sense causally dependent on the believer's good works, is essentially to make them meritorious.

The men who created the Westminster Standards were certainly aware of this principle, as they guarded against the notion that works could be construed to be in some way co-instrumental with faith for justification, by affirming that "faith is the alone instrument of justification." As has become customary for followers of the new teaching, Briones says, "we must remember that Christian judgment [meaning the time when the Christian stands before God on judgment day] is in accordance with our good works and never on the basis of our good works," but does not explain what is meant by "in accordance with." The reader is thrown off from suspecting any legalism in this statement because of the denial that good works could ever be the basis of justification. Briones does not tell his readers that in accordance with means something beyond the Biblical truth that good works are evidential of a believer's justification. That is, this neo-reformed teaching makes the believer's good works in some sense co-instrumental with faith in justification.

Since this new teaching is being inculcated in many presbyterian seminaries, it is rapidly becoming the predominant view in presbyterian and other reformed churches. As a practical recommendation, I would encourage believers to spend more time reading, with Bible in hand, the theological and expository works of Reformed teachers and preachers from past ages-----especially the Protestant reformers themselves, such as Luther, Heinrich Bullinger, and Calvin, and men like Charles Hodge, J.C. Ryle, Charles Spurgeon, and Louis Berkhof-----than reading contemporary authors. If you find a book with favorable references to the work of Herman Ridderbos or G.C. Berkouwer, or which touts "already, not yet" as a sort of central or foundational Christian doctrine to be reflected on with wonder, you are reading an author who has come under the influence of the neo-reformed teaching on justification.

Far better to reflect on the Biblical truth expressed in the following words by Bullinger:

Vitae enim & salutis nostrae firmamentum & basis stabilissima est iustificatio [For justification is the most stable ground and foundation of our life and salvation].

Beware, beloved.