The Five Solas: Sola Fide

The Five Solas and the Reformation’s Formal and Material Causes

All right, so as you can see, we are on Sola Fide, and this is part of the series we're doing called the Five Solas of the Reformation, which are Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Sola Christus, Sola Deo Gloria, and Sola Scriptura.

Now last year, we talked about the formal cause of the Reformation. Can anybody tell me what the formal cause of the Reformation was? Wonderful, I've not done my job.

Go ahead.

Sola Scriptura, right. Why is that the formal cause of the Reformation? It's a question of authority. It's a question of authority. Who has the supreme authority over the Christian? Is it a magisterium, is it tradition, or is it the scriptures alone?

The scriptures alone are God breathed. Today, we're gonna talk about the material cause of the Reformation. Who wants to tell me what the material cause of the Reformation is? Yes, Sola Fide, faith, faith alone, right?

So today, we're gonna go through faith alone. What is, before I ask the question,.

Why don't I just do this?

Justification by Faith Alone and the Imputed Righteousness of Christ

So, Sola Fide is the issue. And this is a question of how mankind is made right with God. Is it by faith alone, or faith plus works? Martin Luther said it this. How is a sinner made right with God? Luther called justification by faith alone in the article upon which the church stands or falls.

This is a gospel issue. This is a sin qua non, without which you do not have the gospel. The good news of the New Testament includes not only the announcement of the person of Christ and his work on our behalf, but a declaration of how the benefits of Christ's work are appropriated by, in, and for the believer.

So what is Christ's work? What do we call that? Say again? The atonement, yes. Includes the atonement, for sure. What did he do for us? His redemptive, it's, yes, all of those are correct answers. I'm probably phrasing the question the wrong way.

He lived the life that we needed to live. It's by his righteousness. He earned, right, he lived a perfect life. Righteousness, right? So the logic followed by the reformers goes like this. Justification by faith alone is essential to the gospel.

The gospel is essential to Christianity and to salvation. The gospel is essential to a church's being a true church. Therefore, to reject justification by faith alone is to reject the gospel and to fall as a church.

This is why the reformers deemed the Roman Catholic Church to be a false church. They did not hold to justification by faith alone, and we're gonna go through that. I'm going a little bit quick because there's a lot of information.

So the reformers concluded that when Rome rejected and condemned sola fide, faith alone, it condemned itself, in effect, and ceased to be a true church. This precipitated the creation of new communions or denominations seeking to continue biblical Christianity and to be true churches with a true gospel.

They sought to rescue the gospel from the impending danger of total eclipse. Here's a nice little quote. An eclipse of the sun does not destroy the sun. An eclipse obscures the light of the sun. It brings darkness where there was light.

The Reformation sought to remove the eclipse so that the light of the gospel could once again shine in its full brilliance, being perceived with clarity. So after the Reformation, a slogan came out, post-Tenebrox Lux, after darkness, light.

We now have the light of the gospel once again presented to the world, not obscured by what Rome did. So what is sola fide? It's based on justification. What is justification? Justification is a divine act where God declares the sinner to be legally innocent of his sins.

It is a legal action in that God declares the sinner righteous as though he has satisfied the law of God. Now, is there any human being in and of themselves that are righteous before God?

No.

So what has to happen? We need a foreign righteousness imputed to our account so that we can be declared righteous. When somebody commits a crime and they pay their time, whether it be in prison or a fine, maybe it's a speeding fine, once that person pays the fine, they're declared innocent, even though they still committed the crime.

Once the penalty is paid, then they're declared righteous or innocent. And we have that verse, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, declared innocent, by grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Romans 3, 23 and four.

Justification is the Greek word dikai, dikaiou. And it means to cause someone to be in a proper or right relationship with someone else, to put right with, to cause to be in right relationship. So because we're the offending party to God, we don't set the terms, he does.

So once we place faith in him because we were created to be dependent on him, he now puts us in right relationship with him. So he's the one who draws us to him, makes us right and resolves the issue that we have between us and God, which is sin.

It must be clearly understood that in the New Testament, the verb dikaiou, to justify, never means to make anyone righteous or to do away with his violation of law by himself bearing the condemnation and the imposed sentence.

So what this is saying, that word dikaiou, means that the person is not made righteous because of what they do. They are declared righteous because of what God does for them. It's a big, big difference.

In the New Testament, man in his fallen condition can never do anything in order to pay for his sinfulness and thus be liberated from the sentence of guilt that is upon him as it happens in the mundane world.

In other words, when a guilty person has paid the penalty of a crime, he is free from condemnation, okay? He doesn't do anything to make himself righteous. It's only the righteousness of God that gets imputed to us that makes us righteous.

Put it this way, if anybody has ever bought a new car, the moment you drive it off of the lot, it is no longer new, it's used. You can never sell it as a used car. You may have less than 10 miles on it.

It's not a new car anymore. When we're born into a state of sin, we are born damaged goods. That's why we need to be born again. Romans 8 through 33, who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies.

God is the one in this equation that justifies us. We do not justify ourselves. So what is it? Calvin wrote, justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

This justification by faith alone in Christ is the very heart of the gospel. Since we have no inherent righteousness that allows us to stand blameless before God, we need a righteousness outside of ourselves.

Luther called it extra nos, an alien righteousness, as Luther put it, a divinely approved righteousness that is earned for us. That is the righteousness that Christ provided to us. So not only does he take away and make atonement for our sins, bringing us back up to neutral, he now puts positive righteousness into our camp that we need to be right before God.

Now the word impute is important because it means to set someone's account or reckoning something to another person. God reckoned, imputed righteousness to believing Abraham. This means that God credited to Abraham that which he did not have in himself.

And this is gonna be different than Rome. Rome talks about infused righteousness, actual righteousness being infused into us. This does not mean that God accepted Abraham's faith instead of righteousness as the accomplishment of meriting justification.

Rather, it means that God accepted Abraham because he trusted in God rather than trusting in something that he could do. You're brought back to the original state, you were created to be dependent on God for everything.

Some of you will say, we're gonna go and we're gonna do this or that. James says, unless the Lord says, if the Lord wills, you do this and that, right? Every breath out of our mouth is because the Lord has willed it.

No one has the power to say, I'm definitely gonna be alive tomorrow. You don't know the day you're gonna die and you can't forego that, right? That's a gift from God. Life is a gift from God. So why is this important and what is the system that's behind it?

It's called penal substitutionary atonement. Penal means law, substitutionary means in the place of, and atonement means made payment for. So Jesus made atonement by being our substitute, paying the penalty of the law against us.

You might see it, the acronym is PSA. If people talk about it on Facebook, you'll understand what they're talking about. Penal substitutionary atonement. And there's many verses that go through this, but I'm gonna give you four.

1 Peter 2 .24, he himself, Jesus, bore our sins in his body on the tree. He bore our sins, substitution, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed. Notice, he says, by his wounds, you have been healed.

A lot of faith preachers take that to mean physical healing. It's like, no, he's talking about the healing that you need before God because of your sinfulness. 1 Peter 3 .18, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

So he's the one, he's the righteous, he dies for, in the place of the unrighteous, substitution. Colossians 2 .14, by canceling the record of debt, that's ours, that stood against us with its legal demands, this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

When were your sins paid for?

At the cross.

When are you saved? When you place faith in Jesus, that he paid for your sins at the cross. So it was at the cross that your sins were paid for. Hebrews 2 .17, therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

Propitiation means to satisfy, to make atonement, to turn God's wrath away from us. Jesus did that on our behalf. So penal substitutionary atonement is a biblical doctrine. Some people reject it. They say, no, no, no, that's not what Jesus did.

Jesus died in our place to satisfy the demands of the law against us. For Rome, the righteousness of Christ is not imputed to the believer, but infused into the believer. When the believer cooperates with this infused righteousness the believer then possesses an inherent righteousness, which then becomes the ground of justification.

This is important. At this point, the righteousness by which the Roman Catholic is justified is neither extra nos, not outside ourselves, nor an alien righteousness, someone else's righteousness. It's his own righteousness in cooperation with God's working in him.

You see the difference? We're saved by someone else's righteousness being imputed to our account. Roman Catholics believe that the righteousness from God is infused in us. And now as long as we cooperate with God, that righteousness is gonna grow and grow and grow to the point where we can stand before God, always by grace, God's given us that infused righteousness and he helps us along the way.

But we're the ones working it out and eventually it's our righteousness that we're gonna be judged by. Heaven forbid, heaven forbid. That's why the gospel is good news. Roman Catholic doctrine denies justification by faith alone and says, this is the Council of Trent, if anyone saith that by faith alone the impious is justified, in such wise as to me that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtaining the grace of justification and that it is not in any way necessary, let he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will.

Let him be anathema. Last week we learned what that word anathema meant, eternally cursed. So as a Protestant, when I stand up and say I'm justified, made right with God by faith alone, they would say, no, you're not.

You're anathema, you're cursed eternally. Now, they've never renounced the Council of Trent, although they've softened, they call Protestants their separated brethren, and I reject that. I said, we're not brothers.

You don't hold to justification by faith alone. You hold to justification by your own righteousness, obviously with God's help. If anyone saith that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified because he assuredly believed himself absolved and justified, or that no one is truly justified but he who believes himself justified, and that by this faith alone, absolution and justification are effected, let him be anathema.

You see what they're saying? If you actually believe that you're righteous and you're in good relationship with God because of Christ, you need to be anathema because you don't know if you're in good relationship with Christ because at any moment in time, you could commit a mortal sin and be separated from the grace of God.

You don't have true peace with God on Roman Catholic theology. So let's take a look at what this means. Justification, on our view, is righteousness imputed. He who began a work in you is faithful to complete it.

So righteousness that's imputed to us is by faith alone. We place our faith in Christ. We're now in right relationship with God. Then we move on to sanctification, righteousness actuated. In other words, we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, right?

We continue to rely and depend on God for everything that we have and it's a faith walk. You're not growing in righteousness, you're growing in faithfulness. Your behavior is gonna look more righteous, but you don't have a righteousness in and of yourself because if you stumble at one point in the law, you've broken all of it.

You'll stand condemned. And then finally, glorification is righteousness consummated. This is where God completes the work. Once you cross over to the other side, now you'll be glorified. Never to be in the presence power of sin again.

There's a little diagram I'm gonna show you. This is the center on the Protestant view. He's born, at some point in time, he places faith in Christ and that's justification. He now receives the imputed righteousness of Christ.

He lives his life until he dies and then he's glorified. So you're born, you're born again, you work out your salvation with fear and trembling, you die in right relationship with God and then you're glorified.

On Roman Catholic theology, you're born and then you're baptized and you have this infused righteousness that should stay with you your whole life unless you sin. And once you sin, now you gotta do penance and the sacraments to get you back in right relationship with God.

And then hopefully by the time you die, you're justified and if you're justified, probably because you're not perfect still, you have to go through purging. To purge, to get off the excess sin that you've accumulated over the years.

Then you'll be glorified. And then notice this equation, you're justified at the end of your life, not at the beginning of faith. So a Roman Catholic does not know if he's in right relationship with God until the day he dies.

And then he finds out if he's in right relationship with God. Is that peace with God? No, this is why the gospel is good news. We get the verdict before the trial. Jesus nailed your sins to the cross and paid for them in full.

You place your faith and trust in him, you are now in right relationship with God and you work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don't base your salvation on the good works, the good things that you do, you base it on the good works, the good things that Jesus has done.

Can you have confidence of your salvation if it's based on what you do? No, because none of us tomorrow, next week, next are not gonna sin. Jesus, however, is the same yesterday, today and forever. He was born, he never sinned, he died in our place, rose again and lives seated at the right hand of the father, interceding for us.

We can be confident of our salvation because it's based on what he's done for us, not what we've done for ourselves. You were created to be dependent on God for everything, including your own righteousness, okay?

Luther’s Breakthrough in Romans 1:17

Very important, that's a dividing line, this is why we had a reformation. The reformation's emphasis on faith alone was the result of Luther's tortured struggles to resolve the issue of how a fallen sinner can be saved.

He said, my situation was that although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in conscience and had no confidence that my character would satisfy him. And rightly so, because Luther was a sinner.

He couldn't stand before God and say, look what I did. God's gonna say, yeah, let's look what you did, you got a problem. So the breakthrough for Luther came when he read Romans 117. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

In other words, those who are justified, right relationship with God, will live by faith, not by works, okay? So you stop relying on yourself, you start relying on God fully, wholly, completely. And that's what, the door swung wide open, I think that's what he says next.

He says, Luther later wrote, then I grasped that the justice of God is the righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us through faith, immediately I felt myself to have gone through open doors into paradise.

That was what led him into a relationship with God, the just shall live by faith. Ask yourself, am I living by faith, or am I basing my relationship with God on something that I'm doing? So, we're gonna go to the scriptures.

Why do we go to the scriptures? They're our authority. Are the scriptures ever wrong? No, is man ever wrong? Yep, so here's what I'm gonna tell you, even though I'm up here teaching you, don't believe a word I say, just believe what comes up on the screen, okay?

Because if I'm wrong, that's bad. The scriptures are never wrong. So let's read what the scriptures have to say. It's my favorite verse in all of scripture. For grace you have been saved by faith, and this not of your own doing.

It's the gift of God, not as a result of work, so that no one can boast. Saved through faith, not of your own doing. What could, what, how could I misinterpret, how could anyone misinterpret that? Not by what I've done.

It's a gift.

So if I, Danny, if I came to you tomorrow and I brought you a nice, solid gold Rolex watch, you'd be like, whoa, Pastor Anthony, what's this for? Oh, it's a gift. And you're like, this is like a really expensive thing.

In the awkwardness of the moment, you stick your hand in your pocket and you offer to give me $20. How would you make me feel? You'd insult me, right? You'd think you're gonna give me $20 and that's gonna offset what I pay for the Rolex watch.

Now, if I was to take the $20, what would the Rolex watch no longer be?

It would no longer be a gift.

Fantastic deal on a Rolex, but not a gift, okay? Eternal life is a gift. The moment you offer to pay something for it, you insult the giver. You receive that by faith alone. All you have to say is thank you, thank you.

Romans 3 .21, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Christ Jesus for all who believe, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

The righteousness of who? God through Jesus is received by faith. So you receive the righteousness of God by faith. It's not your own righteousness. It's righteousness from outside of you getting placed into your account.

Galatians 3 .25, but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through good works. Keep fighting to be a good son of God. No, you're son of God by faith, trusting in what God has done for you already, not what you're gonna do for yourself.

Again, you're gonna insult the giver. More scriptures, Romans 4 .20. He, Abraham, grew strong in his faith and gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. This is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness.

In other words, when he trusted God, there were counted beings reckoned to. It's an accounting term. God placed the righteousness in his account, so to speak, and made him right with God, okay? So it was because of faith.

Now, Abraham's Old Testament or New Testament? Old Testament, right? So how were the Old Testament saints and the New Testament saints saved? By faith alone. No one in the Old Testament was saved by keeping the law, because no one kept it.

There were Old Testament saints that recognized the coming of the future Messiah, like Adam, right? God said he's gonna send someone to crush the head of the serpent, right? All the Old Testament saints were looking forward to the cross and the payment that was gonna be made on their behalf.

Us, as New Testament saints, we look backward at the cross. It's all focused on the cross.

Why?

Because it's at the cross where our sins were nailed, the debt that we owed was nailed to, right? That's the point. But the words, it was counted to him, were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also.

It will be counted to us who believe, trust in him, who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. This is all God-centered. He is the one who bestows salvation.

We don't earn it. Romans 5 .1, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we also have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

Notice this, have been. Have been, past, present, or future tense. Past tense. Therefore, since we have been, past tense, justified by faith, we have peace with God. Roman Catholic theology says the absolute opposite.

Therefore, since we hope to be justified by faith, we'll have peace with God. They can never have current peace now because they think justification is future, not past. Once you place your faith and trust in Jesus Christ and you're born of his spirit, you now stand in right relationship to God.

You don't look forward to justification. You have been justified, as per Paul in Romans 5. Romans 10, one, this is another crucial verse. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them, the Jews, is that they may be saved.

For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God, the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

For Christ is the end. And that doesn't mean the law goes away. It means the goal, the point, the tell us. Christ is the goal of the law for the righteous to everyone who believes. So we don't jettison the law.

That's still our standard. We seek to keep it because that best magnifies and glorifies God and represents him properly. We don't base our salvation on that. We base our salvation on the righteousness that comes from God to us, not the righteousness that we bring to God, right?

So our eternal life is a gift. The gift that God gives us is his righteousness. If it depends on our righteousness, then we give a gift to God and then he saves us. That's the opposite way around. Philippians 3 .9, indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

How can you misinterpret this? I mean, it's crystal clear that it's the righteousness of God that's going to be put into your account or accounted to you, reckoned to you so that you don't have to stand before God in your own righteousness.

Because if you do, along with your own righteousness, comes your own sinfulness. That's a problem. So those are the scriptures. That was easy, right? Seems so easy. We're justified by faith. That's it, faith alone.

Beautiful, smooth sailing.

Not so fast.

James 2 and the Vindication of Living Faith

James, you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

Now what do you do?

See, you Protestant reformers? The only time the word alone appears is when it's not by faith alone. And you mean to tell us that we're justified by faith alone? Yes. Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?

Now if you're a good Protestant, how are you going to explain that? Are you going to work around it, pretend like it doesn't exist, or like Luther says, rip it out, it's an epistle of straw? We don't need this one.

That blows my whole idea of justification by faith alone. Well, let's see what the scriptures have to say. Romans 4 .1. What then, shall we say, was gained by Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh?

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due, what he's supposed to do.

And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

So James points us to Abraham. Abraham is justified before God by faith alone. Now we know the scripture can't contradict itself, so there must be a way to reconcile this. This scripture does not contradict Paul's clear teaching that Abraham was justified before God by grace alone through faith alone.

For several reasons, James cannot mean that Abraham was constituted righteous before God because of his own good works. Number one, James already stressed that salvation is a gift of God. That's number one.

Number two, in the middle of this disputed passage, James quoted Genesis 15 .6, which forcefully claims that God credited righteousness to Abraham solely on the basis of faith. And the work that James said justified Abraham was his offering up to Isaac, an event that occurred many years after he first exercised faith and was declared righteous before God.

So what does all this mean? Instead of Abraham's offering of Isaac, instead, Abraham's offering of Isaac demonstrated the genuineness of his faith and the reality of his justification before God. James is emphasizing the vindication before others of a man's claim to salvation.

James' teaching perfectly complements Paul's writing, salvation is determined by faith alone and demonstrated by faithfulness to obey God's will alone. So when you go back, I would suggest you go back in James 2 and read that.

The person that he's addressing says, I say that I have faith. James says, you say you have faith, show me your faith. James is attacking a said faith. How many people in the church say, oh yeah, I have faith?

And then they go out and live like heathens. You say you have faith, show me your faith. Real faith produces real works. And here's something that we have to understand as Protestants, because all too often, we can fall on one side or the other of the ditch.

No, no, no, works, you're not saved by good works. And then on the other hand, we have, you don't need to do good works. All you need to do is have faith, as if faith didn't produce good works. So today, I want to talk to you about what is the role of good works.

And it's a story I call A Tale of Two Candles. Now look at those two candles, right? The one on the left has a real flame. The one on the right, this is the LED candle that my wife buys, you know, so that on Thanksgiving or Christmas, when somebody hits the candle, it doesn't cause a fire and burn the whole thing up, right?

She's not afraid, you can knock this over, it's no big deal, right?

Think about it.

Both of them look like candles. Both give off light, hmm, look like candles, they both give off light. However, only one gives off heat. Only one changes its appearance, it melts. That represents dying to self.

Only one is actually on fire. Romans chapter eight, Paul says, if you do not have the Holy Spirit, you are none of his. The Holy Spirit is fire inside of you. It brings you to a point of faith and good works.

Only one is real. They look alike, they both give off light, only one gives off heat. True faith will produce heat, it will produce good works. That's how we will be known. You will be known by your fruit.

As trees, I talked about a couple weeks ago, scripture talks about men as trees, trees are made to bear fruit. If you're walking as a tree or a candle and you're giving off light but not heat, you need to examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith.

Bible says, test yourselves. Are you walking in faith? In other words, are you truly trusting God to the point where you're doing what he says? Jesus says, why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I say?

You still have to obey God. Without holiness, no one shall see the Lord. Is that saying that we have to base our salvation on our works? No, it's the fruit of our salvation, not the root of our salvation.

In other words, we're not standing on our good works. We're standing on the righteousness of Christ alone and that should bear fruit. We should be the most grateful, joyful people on the planet doing whatever God asks us to do because he saved our souls from the curses of the law.

He saves our souls for all eternity. You are not your own, you were bought with a price. Now we need to act like it. James 2 .14, what good is it, my brothers, if someone says they had faith but does not have works?

Can that faith save him? There is no real contradiction between James and Paul regarding faith for Paul's teaching about faith and works focuses on the time before conversion and James' focus is after conversion.

In other words, there's a lot of people in the church today say, oh yeah, no, I'm a Christian, yet they do not have the works that would properly reflect what a Christian is. As Douglas Moos pointed out, Paul denies any efficacy to pre-conversion works but James is pleading for the absolute necessity of post-conversion works.

Paul was fighting against tradition which promoted a false work salvation. James was fighting against the light faith which minimized the necessity of works after coming to Christ. Paul says works cannot bring us to Christ and James says after we come to Christ, they are imperative.

That's Kent Hughes, he's the one who wrote Disciplines of a Godly Man. Very, very sound teacher. Okay, so just in case you think I'm waffling, this is my favorite verse when it comes to faith and works.

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.

All right?

You're not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. To be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the law because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.

Like three times in that verse alone, he sums it all up. This is like a conversation that I have with my kids. I gotta repeat myself like three times in the thing.

So that they get it.

Take this from God and you're his children. You are not justified by the works of the law. You're justified by placing your faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone. What does Paul go on to say? I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

In other words, if you could get to heaven or get in right relationship with God based on something that you did, crucify Jesus needlessly. You make a mockery of what God has done. He sacrificed his own son to draw you to him, to rescue you because you were created to be dependent upon God for everything.