Having been justified by faith

So this chapter begins, I'm going to go back and talk a little bit about chapter four, but this chapter has this wonderful statement, having been justified by faith. So we're going to talk about that, and we've kind of learned about that somewhat already, but Paul's going to go into overdrive here. He's going to just really tell us the many blessings that a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ has, and he just starts out And in verse one it just keeps on, once he says, having been justified, having been declared righteous by God, by our faith, by faith alone, he then just goes into overdrive. He tells us all these wonderful blessings that a believer has as a result of putting his faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

So let's just look at some background from chapter four. So we start, you know, Jim's kind of read part of it already. You know, in chapter four we saw... that Abraham, even though he was 100 years old and Sarah was 90, they had children. It was a miraculous birth of Isaac.

And all through that whole experience, and his faith grew stronger through all that, which is just amazing. We learned that in the last couple weeks. And then we learned that Abraham's faith wasn't unique. Our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the same kind of faith that Abraham has. It's putting our faith in another. Abraham had faith in his particular case in the birth of Isaac the miraculous birth of Isaac, but our faith as it says and It kind of defines what's nice.

It defines what a believer is in the last part of 23 I think it is a believer and and that's a believer today right now in 2023 a believer is a person who has put his faith upon God who raised Jesus Christ our Lord from among the dead then he kind of expands that in the last two parts of the A and B part of verse 24 that he believes that Jesus Christ was delivered over for our transgressions that we committed and that Jesus Christ was raised for our justification that was accomplished. So that's really the gospel if you think about it. Christ died for our sins, he was buried, and he was raised according to the scripture. So Paul, so that's what a believer is all about. And then based upon a person having put his faith and trust in the Lord Jesus, he's going to tell us the blessings of justification.

And just in case you're kind of scratching your head and you think, justification, that's a big word, right? Lots of letters, it sounds kind of big. Can we get it in shoe leather? I'm not sure it's exactly shoe leather, but this definition helps. It's from Schaeffer.

Justification is really a declaration. You're not doing anything if you're justified. You've already done it. You've already believed on the Savior, but God is doing something in your behalf. Justification is a declaration by God, not by you. You're not going around, I'm justified, I'm justified. No, you're not doing that. God is justifying you.

It's a declaration by God representing, respecting the Christian that he has been made forever right and acceptable to him. I'll read that again. It's a declaration by God respecting the Christian that he has been made forever right and acceptable to him. So that's what justification means.

Okay, so now, So now I thought we start into this section, we're going to talk about something that people have used the term that might be, most people here probably are familiar with, position, our position, our position in Christ, our position before God, versus our condition before God. And this chart, I've kind of chopped it up with the chart that Hal Malloy did many years ago and he borrowed it from Barnhouse. And so I kind of chopped it up and put some other bullets in between here. So here's the chart.

Hopefully it will help us to understand what we're going to call positional truths from God's Word. And Paul's going to tell us a lot of these wonderful positional truths. But he also, Paul also teaches about our condition, our daily walk as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. So I'm going to kind of contrast these two.

So first of all, you can think of your position in Christ or your standing, you use that word too. Your position is something that it talks about that this is something that is true of you and is true of you because of what you've done. You put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. You trusted him, and God has placed you in Christ, and this is who you are. You might say, I'm an American, and American has certain characteristics. You're an American because of your citizenship. Well, you're a Christian because of your faith in Christ. And so this is who we are in Christ. That's called our position or our standing. and is eternal and unchangeable.

And so I kind of put some bullets here. I kind of borrowed some from Hal, our brother. So here's a couple ones. So how do we know, how do we know our position in Christ? Once again, it sounds kind of, well, position sounds kind of, you know, what is that? God's Word tells us about our position. We're going to see four, four of those in today's lesson, four vital truths about us as a believer. He tells us what Christ has done on our behalf. He reveals his truths of who we are in Christ.

These truths never change, no matter how we walk. These truths are true of you the moment you believe, and they're never taken back. God never says down the road, well, oh, by the way, well, you're not doing too well, I'm gonna take one of those back. No, these truths are true of you because of your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And they're established eternally.

And Paul's method, and we notice it in many of his writings, almost all of his writings, he will talk about our position in the Lord Jesus Christ, who we are, and then he'll follow that sometime later in his writings, he'll follow that by our condition, how we should walk based upon that.

So let's talk about our walk. So our walk, this picture of walking on the earth, so to speak, we're walking our daily lives. This is our moment by moment lives. And that's changeable. You know, sometimes we walk We walk as we should walk. We walk as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. We walk in fellowship with Him. And sometimes we don't. Sometimes we sin. We fall short. So it's a changeable situation. And God's desire is that we walk in accordance with who we are. So let's, and again we know that, we know how this from God's Word, God's Word tells us that.

And one of the many things it tells us, this is from Galatians 5 verse 16, it says, walk by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh. So in Galatians there it talks about this, the believer's struggle between the flesh and the Spirit. And it says basically to walk by the spirit and you won't carry out the desires of the flesh. And then another one in another verse says, this talks about where you came from. You were formerly darkness, but now you're light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. So the concept here is that where our Christian walk is to reflect our position, who we are. We're to walk in light of who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Okay, with that kind of in mind, we'll start into the verses for today. Okay, so I have two verses. I have four things in blue and six or seven things underlined. So what's that all about? Well, one's in blue. So it says, therefore, we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God, through the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained our introduction by faith into the grace in which we stand, we exalt in the hope of the glory of God. So the ones in blue, that's talking about what God has, the blessings we receive from God, and it's a position we hold in our Savior.

We have peace with God, and the ones underlined are prepositions. with God's gonna be important. It's one of those special neat words and through is important. All these little prepositions are underlined. They all add to the context. So we have peace with God. We've obtained an introduction by faith into grace. We stand in that grace. We exalt in the hope of the glory of God. So that's kind of where we're headed. We're gonna kind of go through each of these in detail.

But this is just such, you know, it's actually almost, If you think about it, the fact that you can tell a person, a Christian can say, I have peace with God. There's no barrier between myself and God. To most ears, to most people that think about God and maybe they don't they understand the God of the Bible they think well God is way off he's way far up there I can't ever attain to that well this says we have peace with God and we're going to understand that in a few moments here so it's pretty amazing verbiage here Okay, therefore having been justified by faith. So therefore, I think it looks back, people in kind of listening and studying this, it looks back almost through all the first four chapters, Paul's just spent all this time building his case. about there's none righteous, there's none who deserves God, there's none who's done anything of his own merit to achieve God.

It all has to be through the Lord Jesus Christ, and he's built that entire case. He's given us Abraham's example, and he says our example is to be the same. So therefore, and this is one word in the original, diakau, something like that, having been justified, And that word is defined as a declaration by God that the believer has been made forever right and acceptable to Him. Sounds much like justification, this word. And it's related to that, I think, from the Greek language. A declaration by God that the believer has been made forever right and acceptable to Him.

And it's Aris Passive. And maybe that's a little bit too geeky. So let's just, what I like here, in a second here I'm going to give you a little bit, okay. One more point. This Diakao is the first letter, if you were to look in the Greek language or interlinear Bible, you'll see the order of the language.

It's the first word in the Greek text. And several teachers take note of that when they teach. They say, well, that word occurred first, and that means, in the Greek language, it was the most important word in that sentence, if you will. So having been justified, diakao was the most important word in this first verse. So here's what I was talking about. Vine here kind of defines the aorist tense, if you will.

So in Romans 5.1, being justified, diakaiō, is in the aorist tense, indicating a definite time, or even better, a definite event.

So this is an event at which a person, upon exercising faith, was justified. So it's a point in time, it's your date of salvation, the point that you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. So that's already occurred, so that's water under the bridge, it's already passed by, at that point you're a believer, you've been justified. God has performed the action, you didn't do it, he did it, it's a fact. It's an erroneous, indicative, passive, it's a fact tense, he did it, your faith was what was involved. And it was, and how'd that happen?

It came, ek, this bi is, can be, is the Greek word ek. It's out from, out from faith as a source. And there's no other way, there's no other method, there's no other plan, scheme, whatever. Man, according to scripture, can only come to God by faith. Abraham came to God by faith, and we come to God by the same way. It's the only way it can happen. Out of faith as a source.

So now, the rest of this verse and on the rest of verse two, we'll talk about these wonderful truths by Paul about the believer's position that are unchangeable. So he gets right to business here. First one, we have peace with God. So we're gonna look at Actually, three words in detail here. Three of those five words we're gonna look in detail. We have, peace, with, and God is, you know, God is God, the us.

Okay, we have. Literally, in the tense of the verb there, it's we're having. It's present tense. If I say I'm having lunch today at Holly Hills. We're having lunch today. This is the ongoing tense. Hopefully we stop having lunch at some point, you know, continue on. So we're having, and this is an ongoing process.

We're having, and this is true of every single believer in the Lord Jesus, we're having, we're having this peace with God. And it's true, you know, some people say, I don't have peace with God. I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm still doing something wrong and God knows about it, and I feel guilty about that. I haven't done something.

Well, if you truly trusted him, you can be at rest. God's word tells you, you have peace with him. And he's gonna use this, a very intimate word, that word with is a very intimate word we're gonna see here in a second. Every true believer has this peace with God. And it's true the moment you believe, and it's true every moment of your life until you go home. And it describes the person that you are. We have peace with God, so let's look at peace. That's a state of harmony. Boy, that's something that's needed in our world today, right? How about some harmony? You can't even listen to anything or read anything or see anything that's in harmony today, it seems like. Everything is in disharmony.

Well, God says, as a believer, you can have, your relationship with me is in harmony because of who you've trusted. And there's a verse that talks about that in preaching peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. And we see that peace with God is only possible for those who believe in the gospel, the good news about Jesus Christ. And this is to be distinguished. And here we have a case where we're going to see, I believe, position or condition Our position is we have peace with God. That's a fact, unchangeable.

But later on in scripture in Philippians it talks about the peace of God. It talks about that in context of being anxious for nothing. So there's a peace of God that comes via the Holy Spirit that is to settle us down as we walk by faith. So we positionally have peace with God and conditionally we receive the peace of God as we walk by faith, as we trust and abide in our Savior. So there we have a case of peace with God and peace of God being position and condition. Okay, let's go on. Peace with God continued.

So now we get to the, this is one of the coolest words. I can remember, there's some brother or sister, I think it was actually Courtney, he's not here today, but he was amazed when our brother Hal kind of shared this, he shared a preposition with us. It sounds kind of strange, sounds like too English, too much. But you think, we have peace with God. And the concept here is it's toward or face to face. And it just kind of blows your mind.

God wants us to have such an intimate relationship with Him that we are face-to-face. Think about the Old Testament. You remember the Old Testament, any man who saw God would die? I mean, if they saw any part, death was almost for sure that was going to happen. Well, now we're told, Paul tells us that he's given us this face-to-face relationship.

And I edited Weiss just a slight bit here, but his definition A justified person has peace facing with God, face-to-face. He stands in the presence of God, guiltless, uncondemned, righteous, in the righteousness which God accepts, the Lord Jesus. We stand face-to-face with our God in Christ's righteousness, none of our own, totally based upon what He has done. I mean, the picture is just incredible. We're face-to-face with our Savior, face-to-face with God.

And again, Paul doesn't leave any doubt out of it. How did that happen? It's through Diyah, through our Lord Jesus Christ. It's on his merits and merits of another. Peace is now made available, not through man's merits. There's none of man's merits, only of God's merits, of Christ's merits. God makes peace with himself a reality in our lives by justifying us, declaring us righteous.

And then, those are from Malloy, and then one last statement from Merriman about this. He points out this whole chapter, chapter five, and I think there are 21, oh man, that might be a little bit too many. Anyway, there's close to 20 references to something through Dio, through Jesus Christ. It just emphasizes this blessing we have through our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Okay, so let's go on here. Okay, now we come to the next part of the verse. So actually, I wanna start here, the verse starts with through whom, I'm gonna kinda start in the middle, kinda connects, so we have, we're having peace with God 24-7.

Now Paul says, I wanna tell you something else that you have. Also, and also kind of focuses on what's gonna follow it, it stresses the words that precede it, Is after preceding, I get confused. Preceding is before or after? Okay, I want it to follow. Anyway, okay, never mind. Let's go on. I'm gonna have to think about this a little bit. Okay, the also is that my mind is connected to, we have peace with God, we have another blessing, we have obtained our introduction. And literally, we have had, it's a perfect tense.

We obtained our introduction in the past when we first trusted our Savior. We continue to have this introduction up into the present. It's a permanent introduction. And it's actually a better word than obtained introduction, I think, and it's the word access. We've obtained our access. So we have obtained access, and it's into his grace we're gonna see. It's this wonderful access.

And I'm gonna talk about access here in a second. So access is associated with the thought of freedom to enter through the assistance or favor of another. So the picture here is the assistance or favor of another is our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

So I was gonna just tell you a little story about my employment history. I started out, once I graduated from college, my first job out of college was with McDonald Douglas Corporation in Huntington Beach, California. I was going out to be with it. That was back in the 60s. Oh, it's great. Gonna go out and have a great time. It was okay. I had a good time. It was fun. I had my first job out of college.

So I got to the facility and over time, six months passed and they said, well, Roger, we want you to come to the special room. We want to tell you something that we've done on your behalf. We've given you special access. Oh, wonderful. Got special access. And this special access, you know the way this works, Roger? this special access to this part of this program which the Air Force was running, it's not to be known by everybody, so you're one of the few people, you're one of the select few, you have to sign your life away, you'll go to jail for 1,000 years if you ever tell anybody about it.

So they take me to this room and they say, okay, here's the way it works. Whenever you come to this room and you want to do your business, you want to do something, find out about some black box or do something, you have to get an introduction. You have to have somebody to introduce you to another person that you can talk with. You can't talk with anybody. You have to be introduced to every person one by one. People that have been in that environment know that. That actually over time seemed to fade, but it was the first time I ever experienced it. You have to be introduced.

I have this third party that introduces me to this party. Well, that's a perfect example of this. Our Lord Jesus Christ has introduced us to the Father through His death on the cross. assisted us to be introduced to the Father. We have access to the Father.

So hopefully that wasn't too much off the point, but all right, there's my employment history there. I'll start my employment history. So it says, through whom, so through whom focuses back to our Savior again, through whom we've obtained our introduction by faith, through whom access is through Jesus Christ alone, You have no access, and just like in my case, it had to be a person that knew me and knew the other party, had to know both of us. Think about the Savior.

He knows me, and he knows God. He's my access, just like in the human realm. There's no access otherwise. By faith, into his grace. So once again, faith is at center stage here, and faith is not a work, it's a trusting in another, Faith always has an object. We don't have just faith and faith alone. We have faith in a person. We believe that he is the only one worthy to give us access.

Okay, so I got there. All right. Okay, so let's go on from here. So a couple more things about this. So it's, we have this introduction, this access by faith into his grace. And grace is this marvelous environment. This is God's operating system. This is how he works. It's his unlimited, unmerited blessing of God based upon the totally adequate work of Christ.

Our access into grace could not be gained by our own efforts. So I had a little picture here. I like little pictures. We have access, we were told. It's through Jesus Christ. It's by faith into his grace. We have access through Jesus Christ by faith into his grace. Just incredible.

Okay, let's go on. Now we're gonna get to the next part in which we stand. So the witch looks back to the word grace. So you could say this. Literally, we stand in grace. We were introduced to this system by another, by a worthy person, our Savior, and we stand in this grace, in this environment of grace. And stand here is the idea to set in place, establish, And again, it uses this perfect tense where we, it's a past completed action. We stood in grace when we first believed in the past and we continue to stand in grace into the present.

We don't change. We don't change from a PC to a Mac or a Mac to a PC. We stay in one operating system their entire Christian lives. We're always in grace. We never change. We don't go to law sometimes and then back to grace and back to law. No, we say it's permanent. Again, God has accomplished this in every believer's life. The idea is immovable, and this is a term that our brother Hal used a lot.

We are entrenched in God's grace. We're in this where it's like we We're put in there and we can't, it's like being stuck in concrete or mud. You can't get out. We're entrenched in his grace. And that's a wonderful thing. The only thing that can take us out is our fallen nature. When we think that we may have fallen out of there by chance. Something happened and I did. No, you can't get out. God established it. He maintains it. It's our permanent, this is cool. This is our permanent living quarters. It's wonderful. Okay. So through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand. And the last part, number four, we exalt in hope. Exalt is the idea to boast, to glory.

I think rejoice is probably the best word here. We rejoice in hope And it's present tense, so we're to continually be rejoicing. And think about, in this context, we had peace, we have access, we have a standing, and now we're rejoicing in those facts. And we're rejoicing in the God of those facts. The idea is that we are constantly rejoicing. Middle voice, so it's the idea it's for our benefit that we're rejoicing and we're personally involved in that.

And it's in hope. We rejoice in hope. And hope in scripture is not hope so, hope. When it's God's source, it's an absolute certainty. So we're rejoicing in the absolute certainty. And we see that kind of verified. Hope does not disappoint. God's hope does not disappoint.

And Mike's gonna be teaching on that next week. of the glory of God, and God's glory is who He is, His essence. And I think a verse that really kind of speaks to that is this verse here. It speaks to this whole point about rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God.

In Titus 2.13 it says, looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Looking for the blessed hope. And that's what we're doing, we're looking for that blessed hope.

Okay, so now, so I thought I'd just summarize those four points. So these are the unchangeable positions that we have based on verses one and two. So first, we have this wonderful face-to-face peace with God. And we've obtained our access, and it's really access into his grace. And we stand in that grace. and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. So we have peace, we have our access, we stand in God's grace, and we exalt in all those facts.

All right, so to kind of close things up here, some final thoughts, and then I have a little thing from our brother Hal Malloy from 1998 that I want to share. So let's do this first. So this is, I kind of came across, this is some definitions that were put together by our brother Hal again. And these are from Barnhouse. Let me make, I got my notes here. Three people you know, Donald Gray Barnhouse, Miles Stanford, and J.B. Stoney. And they talk about the concept of, what we've been talking, position and condition, and some of the truths about that. Our position is the way God sees us in Christ. Our position is what God made us the moment we believed.

Our position, the source of the Christian life, is perfect. It's established in the Father's presence. The Holy Spirit credited us in this position that was established through the work of Christ on Calvary. The Holy Spirit created us in this position that was established through Christ's work at Calvary. Our position is eternal and immutable. God gives us a power in order that our condition should be in keeping with our position. He gives us the power by the Holy Spirit to abide in Him, to trust in Him, to make our condition equal our position. If we live in the Spirit, that is our position. You know, I had one, and this is from J.B. Stoney via Hal.

And I said, if we live in the Spirit, is there any question? I just taught that we're in the Spirit. Now anyway, I think it might be since we live in the Spirit, that's our position. In contrast, if we walk by the Spirit, we may not, that is our condition. So that's my little last moment correction. I would have it since we live in the Spirit, that is our position. If we walk by the Spirit, that is our condition.

And this is a combination of Barnhouse and Stanford and Stoney, and actually there's a, three or four page thing that Sue typed up many, many years ago. I probably could find, if you guys want more of this, I could find it for you. So let me know, and I'll dig it up for you.

Okay, so here's an in-house message that he gave on this back in 1998. He talked about these verses in 1998. He had a little message, and I kind of wondered, why did he have this little message? And it was kind of like a sidelight Like, you know, we've gone through these wonderful possessions and positions we have in our Savior, and this is sort of like, well, what if there's somebody here that doesn't have those? What if it's a person that has missed out on that? How do I connect up with that?

So this is our little Brother Hal's message here. And I put in Tom or Sally. He had, hey, Joe, or hey, Sam. I'm gonna make it, you know. We have friends that call Tom and Sally, anyway. Hey, Tom and Sally, do you know God is not mad at you? He loves you.

The chasm or that great distance between you and God because of your sin has been removed by the death of Christ, burial and resurrection. God is not putting your sins to your account. He has placed them all on Christ. You can have peace with God, Just believe the gospel. And the gospel is Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and he was buried and he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures. And lastly, faith, belief is not a work. You're not working to please God. You're trusting what the Savior has done for you.

So hopefully that maybe will reach some hearts. We'll see. All right, so let's close. We thank you, Father. We thank you so much for your wonderful love. We thank you that you care for us so much that you sent your son to Calvary. We're thankful also that you've given us these wonderful blessings. And we see so many of those in this chapter 5 of Romans. We thank you that we can consider them and see them and study them and understand them so that we would walk in light of what we have, our wonderful position in our Savior, and that our life would moment by moment be trusting Him. We ask it in His name. Amen.