It is, of course, a wonderful privilege to be here, to be able to stand on the platform, and most of all, to be able to open the Word of God and to expound it. I am particularly excited about the theme of the conference this year, the glorious gospel of Christ. Because the gospel is the center of Christianity. It is the indispensable center of the Christian faith. If the gospel is damaged, Christianity dissolves. And if the gospel is the center of Christianity, the center of the gospel is the doctrine of justification. Justification is the single most important aspect of the gospel. It is, so to speak, the integrating point of the entire gospel, so that if we lose the doctrine of justification, the gospel goes away. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us to discover that no aspect of the Christian faith has been more attacked with greater consistency and greater frequency in a greater variety of ways than the doctrine of justification. And even today, the doctrine of justification is under attack in a number of ways. Let me talk about some of the contemporary attacks upon the doctrine of justification. Of course, there has been a sustained attack from the Romanist Church for hundreds of years now on the doctrine of justification. Our Romanist friends would tell us that God doesn't justify us. That is to say, God does not pronounce us to be righteous until we actually become righteous. Before God will justify us, we must be living holy lives. And for most of us, that doesn't occur during our mortal lifetime. That's why there's a place called purgatory, where our remaining sins are burnt away and we come up to the level of holiness. And only when we are actually holy, only when we have begun to live righteously, will God justify us. For the Roman Catholic, justification is the end of the Christian life. There is a certain hyper-Arminian theory out there these days, represented among others by Robert Gundry, that says that God justifies us or pronounces us righteous on the basis of partial obedience. God knows that we could never obey Him perfectly, and so what God is pleased to do is to accept token obedience, partial obedience, in the place of the whole. And the partial obedience that God expects is faith. So faith is a work. It is an act. It is a step of obedience. And when we believe God, God takes our faith and imputes it to us for righteousness. In other words, God takes partial obedience, he treats it as if it is complete obedience, and on the basis of this magical transformation, God is then able to justify us. There is another attack upon the gospel called the new perspective on Paul. And if I understand N.T. Wright and Brian McLaren and others correctly, justification isn't about dealing with our personal sins or our individual guilt. Justification is simply the vindication that we receive eventually for having lined up, so to speak, on God's side here and now. And then there is a kind of ultra-reformed theory of justification that says that God justifies us on the basis of, as a reward for, our perseverance. Now, let me make it clear. I believe strongly in the doctrine of perseverance. I believe very strongly that the moment I am regenerated, God goes to work on me and He begins to transform my life, initially in ways that I may not even realize. And the one who has begun a good work in me doesn't stop doing it until the day of Jesus Christ when I am perfected in His presence. But I think there is a danger in treating justification as if it were a reward for perseverance. That seems to me to fall into a category of thought that could be called Calvinistic Arminianism. And again, my purpose is not to attack either Calvinism or Arminianism, it is simply to say That when you introduce works into the equation, if justification is made to rest upon our obedience or our works or our perseverance, then it does represent a change in what at least I was taught and have understood, and I think most of you have been taught and understood, to be the gospel. Which leads to this question. What is the gospel? And in particular, what does justification mean? And in order to answer that question, I need to do two things. First, I need to set up a problem for you. This problem is one that is actually set up for us in the text of Scripture itself. The Apostle Paul is the one who constructs this problem. Thanks, Paul. But it's there for a reason. It's in the Word of God for a reason. And once we have grasped the dimensions of the problem, then we are in the position to go on and ask, how is it that God, our God, can justify the guilty? How is it that God can justify sinners without becoming unjust Himself? So we're going to stop in three places today. The first sets up the problem. The other two texts that we will look at may all occur in the early chapters of Romans. The other two texts that we will look at, I believe, solve the problem. The problem that we want to look at is posed in Romans chapter 2. Let me read Romans chapter 2, verses 5 through 13. Paul says, but after thy hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds. In other words, Paul says, sinner, you are destined for wrath because God is a perfectly just judge. And before the end, God is going to give you what you have earned. God is going to give you what you deserve. Now, so far, that's not a problem, is it? The problem comes in the very next verse, verse 7. To them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality eternal life. But unto them that are contentious and do not obey the truth but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek. But glory, honor and peace to every man that worketh good to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, for there is no respect of persons with God, For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law. For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified." Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Paul is saying, before the end, God, because He is just, is going to administer to every human being exactly what he deserves. We get what we earn. And there are two kinds of rewards that are possible. Paul talks about two categories of individuals here. On the one hand, you have people who patiently continue in well-doing. They persevere in well-doing. They seek glory and honor and immortality. They work good. They do the law. They don't simply hear the law. They do the law. They obey the law. What does God give to such people, according to Paul? The answer is they get eternal life. On the other hand, there is a different sort of person who is in view in this text. This person is contentious and doesn't obey the truth. Rather, what this person obeys is unrighteousness. He's a person who does evil. And although he may hear the law, he may not. If he does hear the law, he simply hears it and he never obeys it or does not obey it. This is the person that receives indignation, wrath, tribulation, and anguish. Now you stop and think about what the Apostle Paul says here. Doesn't this sound an awful lot like God lets people into heaven on the basis of their works? In fact, several years ago I had the opportunity to attend a debate between an evangelical theologian and apologist, on the one hand, and a Roman Catholic theologian and apologist, on the other hand. Now this Roman Catholic actually grew up Protestant. He was a Presbyterian. He went to Westminster Seminary and trained for the Protestant ministry. He knew how we think. He knew what we believe about the gospel. And there came a point in the debate at which these two men were to lock horns over the question, is justification through faith alone or is justification through faith plus works? Now, I'll give you three guesses what passage the Roman Catholic theologian headed for. It was this one right here. and he read the passage and he explained it not only to his opponents but to the entire audience just as I have explained it to you a moment ago and then he drew the conclusion that this is proof that God does reward works and part of the reward for works is salvation and so it is entirely wrong to argue that salvation is through faith alone. In other words, this is a man who was using Romans 2, 5 through 13 to attack justification and thereby to attack the gospel. Now the sad part of the story is that it looked as if this evangelical theologian and apologist had never even realized that this passage was in the Bible. He was completely blank. You've seen a deer in the headlights. That's just what he looked like. His eyes were wide, he stammered, and he changed the subject. And the Roman Catholic apologist brought him right back here and said, now what do you make of this? And he changed the subject again. And the Roman Catholic apologist brought him back again and said, now If you knew what you were talking about as a Protestant, here is the reply you ought to make." And the Roman Catholic made it for him, which was very convenient because it allowed him to make the wrong reply and then to offer his response to it. It was a disastrous evening. Sitting near me was an upper middle-aged gentleman, rather scruffy looking, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was sort of slouched in and slouched down in his seat and was listening to the whole thing. And as this debate proceeded, this man sat up straighter and straighter and straighter and began to lean forward and forward. And at this point in the debate, the man got up and he walked out. And I thought, well, where's this fellow going? Five minutes later, he walked back in wearing a black suit, black shirt, and a Roman collar. He was a priest who had come incognito because he was pretty sure his guy was going to lose the debate. But he found boldness in Romans 2, 5 through 13 to declare himself openly, I believe in salvation through works. Let me suggest that we need to do two things with this passage. Number one, we need to believe it because it's in the Bible. By the way, if it's in the Bible, we need to believe it, we need to teach it. We never need to protect our people from the Word of God, okay? Number two, we need to understand it rightly. I want you to look at this passage again. Is there anything in this passage in which Paul indicates that a person who starts as a sinner and then does some good stuff can cancel his sins on the basis of his good works? It's not there, is it? Paul is not saying that works are a mechanism of salvation. Paul is saying that if you are a truly righteous person, that is to say, in Paul's words, a person who patiently continues in seeking glory and honor, a person who patiently continues in well-doing, a person who consistently pursues immortality, who works good, a person who not only hears the law, but who does the law and who does that consistently every time, you're a person who doesn't need to be saved. God owes you eternal life. God could not justly keep you out of heaven. God, you have a claim on God. You can stand at the gate and when St. Peter asks you, or when Jesus Christ asks you, why should I let you into this heaven? You can say, because this is where I belong. I've earned it. Now the bad news is, there's nobody in this room who qualifies. including me, of course. There's nobody in this city who qualifies. There's nobody in the state of Illinois who qualifies. Nobody in the United States who qualifies. In fact, there is nobody in the world today who has lived the life that Paul is describing here. Every single one of us, if we are honest with ourselves, have to admit that we are among those who do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness. And therefore we deserve indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish. We are among those who have worked evil. We are among those who may have heard God's law, but we didn't love it. We didn't embrace it. We didn't obey it. We broke it. And therefore, we deserve nothing from God's hand except his condemnation and his wrath. Now, there's a certain kind of person who will try to argue, I haven't broken God's law all the time. There are plenty of instances in which I've kept God's law. I haven't done evil all the time. There are plenty of instances in which I've done good. Well, let me ask you this. If you're arrested for murder and they haul you into court and you're standing there before the judge and jury, is it any defense to point to all the people in the world who you have not yet murdered? The answer is no. The question isn't, are there people you didn't murder? The question is, are there people you did? And when it comes to God's law, the question isn't, are there times when you didn't break it? The question is, are there times when you did? And if you did, the wages of sin is death. It's as simple as that. Now, that's not the good news. That's the bad news. But let me tell you this. The good news is only as good as the bad news is bad. And the bad news for us is unspeakably bad. We are sinners. We are rebels. We have thrown off God's law. We stand condemned before Him. And we deserve a Christless eternity in hell. That's the only application that we can make of Romans 2, 5 through 13. What our Protestant evangelical apologist ought to have said to his Roman Catholic counterpart was, have you patiently continued in well-doing, seeking glory and honor in immortality? Have you consistently all of the time worked good and always obeyed God's law? He should have asked that question point blank. Because any honest man must answer, no, I have not. And if we have not, then we do not qualify for life under Romans 2, 5-13. All we qualify for is condemnation. And that's what creates the problem. If God is going to deal justly, if He deals out life to those who deserve it, and if He deals out death to those who deserve it, then how can He possibly give us life? Let's go to our second stop, Romans 3. Romans chapter 3 beginning in verse 20. Therefore by deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight. For by the law is the knowledge of sin. We can never make ourselves righteous by keeping God's law because we don't keep God's law. All God's law can do is not to justify us. All God's law can do is to condemn us. But now The righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe, for there is no difference. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God. To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Now I want you to notice for the moment exactly one word in this passage, and it is the word propitiation. That word is the key in answering our question. How can God give life to those who deserve death? The answer is propitiation. How do we define propitiation? Well, in some circles, propitiation is defined as the appeasement of God's wrath. I don't mind that definition, but it's easily misunderstood. It's a good definition as far as it goes, but the problem is that it leaves the impression that God is a sort of a celestial curmudgeon, a heavenly killjoy who gets irritated and when he is out of sorts, you'd better pacify him or else somebody's going to get it. And we know our God better than that. That is not the kind of God whom we serve. Who was it? H.L. Mencken, I think, defined a Puritan as a person who was terrified that somehow, somewhere, someone might be having fun. I'm afraid that many people think of God in exactly those terms. And so we go have our fun, but then God needs to be placated because He's upset about it. Here's the way I prefer to say it. And by the way, I'm not objecting to the idea that propitiation is the appeasement of God's wrath, but I think it's more clear when we say that propitiation is the satisfaction of God's justice. It's all about justice. Because if God is anything, He is a judge. And as a judge, He judges just judgment. What that means is that he holds all human beings in all places at all times accountable for every injustice that they commit. And he's doing this not because he is some calculating heavenly machine of vengeance, but because injustice really is a hideously ugly thing. Because of the fact that we are sinners and we have immersed ourselves in injustice, we lose sight of how truly awful our sins are. We lose sight of the kind of moral pain that our sins must cause to a holy person, and we lose sight of the loathsome nature of our sins. I have a sister the other Dr. Bowder, who is a physician with the United States Army, currently deployed in Iraq. She's in Tikrit, biblical Nineveh, and her job is to patch up soldiers and others that they bring into the unit there. She's an emergency physician. She's trained for this all her life, worked for years in inner city hospitals, and finally came to the conclusion that she'd rather help somebody who really needed it and join the army. She's in Tikrit. Her quarters are built over what used to be a latrine. And she's figured out that underneath her floorboards, something's living down there. Probably more than one something. And she hasn't figured out what it is yet. She just sees little glimpses of it at a time. The other night, it started to crawl out from underneath her dresser. Not really a dresser, but what she's using as a dresser over there. And this thing starts to come out, and she should have just frozen and let it emerge, got a good look at what it was, but instead of doing that, she grabbed her boot and whipped it right over there at the thing. Missed. Scared the thing away. She didn't get a good look at it. The other night she woke up and whatever it was, was crawling down her back. Now, your reaction tells me you're getting it here. We still don't know what it was. I've reminded her, Martha, you've got that Beretta 92. You know, just empty the magazine and either you'll get it or they'll move you. We won't discuss where they'll move you to. When we encounter creepy crawlers, we almost instinctively recoil, don't we? And it's not necessarily because we're afraid of them. The other day, my son, last week, my son was up spending, I think it's his third year as a camp counselor. And he loves it. He loves dealing with young people, and he loves the camp environment, and he loves the ministry that he gets. When he gets home, we always ask him, you know, what's the most exciting part of the week? Well, he says, this week the most exciting part was when the youth pastor's wife was walking into the women's showers and a snake dropped on her head. Whoa! We'd recoil from that. Now, would it help if somebody assured us it's not a poisonous snake? Well, it might help some things, but an awful lot of us can't get rid of that thing soon enough. When we suddenly encounter something like that, spiders, snakes, rats, our instinctive reaction is to reach out and smash, reach out and crush, get rid of that thing, kill that thing. That's the attitude that God takes towards sin. Sin is a horror to God. Not because he is afraid of it, but because sin is so hideous, so loathsome, that our God, as a holy God, can't stand to behold it. When our God beholds sin, He wants to reach out and crush. He wants to smite and to smash. He wants to condemn. And because He's a holy God, He can't ever overlook sin. He's the perfectly just judge. I ask people all the time, what would you think of a human judge who simply overlooked guilt, who simply cleared the guilty? Somebody breaks into your home, robs you, harms your family. This person is caught, brought into court, convicted, and the judge says, well, you promised never to do it again. I'll let you go. Don't your insides just get twisted up with that kind of injustice? Because a judge who clears the unguilty becomes guilty. If our God could simply overlook our sins, he would become guilty. But our God has not simply overlooked our sins. What God has done is to take the guilt of our sins and to impute them to Christ. Now we've talked about propitiation. Let's talk about imputation for a moment. Because you can't separate those two. You don't have propitiation unless you've got imputation. What does imputation mean? Well, imputation means to charge or to credit an account. Because I'm president of Central Baptist Seminary, I carry with me a Central Baptist Seminary credit card. And when I'm out on seminary business, rather than using my own money and then submitting receipts for reimbursements, a very complicated process, I simply use the seminary credit card and charge what I need, submit the receipts when I get back, justify the expenses, and they're all put together by our bookkeepers. Every month the bill comes in and the bookkeeper looks to see if the charges on the bill match the receipts that I had submitted. Well, here about a year ago we got a bill that showed that I had been in Cincinnati and charged about $3,500 worth of electronics equipment, while simultaneously I was in California charging, I don't know, $800 or $900 worth of, I think it was wine. No, I'm a whiskey man myself. No, I'm not. Of course, I wasn't in Cincinnati. I wasn't in California. I never charged those things at all. Evidently, somebody had got a hold of the credit card number and engaged in a little bit of what is now called identity theft. Do you know what identity theft is? Identity theft is simply charging your purchases to someone else's account. Now, in our case, we have the kind of account that has built-in protection against identity theft. So we called the credit card company. We explained what had happened. We explained that these were not my charges. The credit card company asked us to fill out a certain amount of paperwork so they could get law enforcement involved, which they did. I think they caught the culprit and eventually put the culprit in jail. We never heard that complete story, but at the end of the day, it was our choice whether we would actually pay the charges that had been imputed to us. We didn't have to pay them because they weren't our charges. The biblical doctrine of imputation is partly this. I'll talk about the rest of it in a moment, but it's partly this. God has taken the guilt of our sins and he has charged the guilt of our sins against the account of Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ had a choice as to whether He would pay for that account or whether He would reverse the charges and send them back to us. If He reversed the charges and sent them back to us, we would have no choice but to suffer eternity in hell. We were guilty. But Jesus Christ did not refuse the charges. He looked at the guilt of our sins. As horrifying as that guilt might be, And he embraced the charges. He voluntarily chose to take upon himself the guilt of our sins. And upon the cross of Calvary, he paid the penalty that would have taken us forever to pay. The wages of sin is death. We'd have suffered an eternal death in hell. He suffered the death on the cross. And when he embraced the charges that were imputed to him, he became our substitute. He Himself bear our sins in His own body on the tree. God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin in order that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Jesus Christ paid for our sins and has wiped them off the books. If we will believe on Jesus Christ, what we find is that He has taken our sins and utterly erased them. As far as the East is from the West, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us. We will never, ever come up against our guilt again. God has blotted away. And imputation accounts for propitiation. Because our guilt was charged to Christ. Because He paid for it. God can now look upon you. He can now look upon me as believers in Christ Jesus. And He no longer sees our sins. We are no longer an offense to God. And it's for Jesus' sake. That's only half the problem. Think back to Romans chapter 2. Did Romans chapter 2 say that for people who were guilty of no offense that God would give them life? Was it not more along these lines that if you are engaging in patient continuance, read that perseverance, if you are persevering in well-doing, If you are seeking glory and honor and immortality, if you are working good, if you are keeping the law, isn't that the person whom God rewards with eternal life? You see, here's the problem. If all that Jesus had done for us is to take away our sins, that would get us out of hell, but it could not get us into heaven. Why? Because heaven is no place for moral ciphers. If we're simply a big moral zero, we cannot enter a place of perfect righteousness and justice and holiness. We still aren't qualified for fellowship with God. And that is why this text tells us in verse 21, that now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe. For there is no difference. Jesus Christ had to do more than take our sins. Jesus Christ had to provide for us the righteousness that we had no other way to get. How did he do that? Well, let's make our third stop. Romans chapter 12. I think we get at least a strong hint of how the Lord Jesus did this. Verse 12, Romans 5, 12, Wherefore, as by one man sinned at the end of the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. And we understand what that means. We sinned in our first father, Adam. Adam's guilt was imputed to us and because Adam's guilt has been imputed to us, we are held accountable for sin and we die. Even people who never reach the age of discretion, infants or people of very low mental capacity, even these people die. Why? Because Adam's guilt, Adam's sin has been imputed to them. Okay, go down now to verse 18. Therefore, as by the offense of one, that's Adam, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness, or you could say the righteous deed of one, that's Christ, The free gift came upon all men unto justification of life, for as by one man's disobedience many were made or constituted sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made or constituted righteous." How can God declare us to be righteous? How can God justify us? Think back to Romans 2. Has there ever been a person Any person who actually has patiently continued persevering and doing well, who has consistently under every and all circumstances sought glory and honor and immortality, who has without exception worked good, and who has always perfectly obeyed God's law, has there ever been such a person? The answer is there has been exactly one. Jesus Christ the Righteous. Why is He Jesus Christ the Righteous? Because that's how He lived. Not only did He never commit a sin, but He always perfectly obeyed everything that His Father wanted Him to do, no matter how hard it seemed. You remember that night in the Garden of Gethsemane? as He sweats great drops, as it were, of blood and He prays. Do you remember what He prayed? He said, Father, let this cup pass from Me. If it's Your will, nevertheless, not My will but Yours be done. That was the motto of His life. Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God. That's our Lord Jesus Christ. He's the one righteous man who has ever lived. And His righteous obedience came most into focus as He hung upon the cross. He didn't have to be there. His presence on the cross was voluntary. It was the ultimate act of obedience to His Father. To undergo the condemnation that we deserved. And when we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, Not only do we find that our guilt has been imputed to Jesus, we also discover that His righteousness has been credited to us. So that when God looks upon us, not only does He no longer see our guilt and sin, but in the place of our guilt and sin, He sees the righteousness of His own Son. The righteous character of Jesus Christ is written after our names in God's book. And so God can look down at a vile, loathsome sinner like Kevin Bowder and say, the guilt has been removed. And this one is as righteous as my son. I pronounce him righteous. And Kevin Bowder can be justified. Folks, the good news is only as good as the bad news is bad. And that's the good news. That's the gospel. That God can be just and justify the ungodly. That's the gospel that we believe. That's the gospel that was preached by the Apostle Paul. That's the gospel that has come down to us through the hands of faithful men and women ever since. It's the gospel that is taught in Scripture. And it's the only message that we have to proclaim to a lost and dying world. Jesus Christ has died for your sins. And He offers you His righteousness. And He does it when we simply believe. And the belief is not any work. It's not any act of obedience. It is simply trusting God to do what He says He will do. Praise God. Praise God. We have a wonderful gospel to proclaim. We have a wonderful gospel to defend. It's under attack today. But you know what? Here's the great thing. The gospel of Jesus Christ has its own power, and nobody is ever going to defeat it. You know, when I was in seminary, I had a professor who used to say, if you've got a sword and somebody argues with you about whether your sword is sharp or not, you don't give them arguments about the sword. You cut them with it. And the gospel is exactly that way. There are plenty of people we'll go and talk to who don't believe the Gospel. We don't need to argue with them about the Gospel. All we need to do is to cut them with it. The Gospel has its own power. The power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Let's pray. Father, we give you glory and praise for the Gospel. Lord, you've given us the Gospel. You've given us Jesus Christ. You've saved us gloriously. and you give us the opportunity to proclaim the gospel to others who need it. Oh Lord, thank you for these marvelous blessings, these wonderful privileges. We glorify your name in the name of Jesus. Amen.