Justified by Faith

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Justification by Faith Alone and the Council of Trent

Well, today I get to preach on what I think is the best theme in all of the Bible. I have the preacher's text. I have the text in Genesis today to preach. If there is a passage that one must preach in the book of Genesis, it is Genesis 15.

And that makes my task even harder because I will never preach it the way it needs to be preached. I will never meet the standard that this passage deserves. And yet, with God's help, I will seek to preach it.

And I want to frame our time speaking about this grand theme that is before us, justification by faith alone. I want to frame it historically. I want to show us where we are on the map of our understanding of justification by faith alone.

It was almost 500 years ago when a council of 30 Roman Catholic bishops met in a city called Trent in northern Italy. And initially, Pope Paul III had called this council together to respond to the growing problem that was the Protestant Reformation.

And so this council came together, and for 18 years, from 1545 to 1563, they met to discuss what they saw as a groundswell of heretics and schismatics. And as the Reformation grew, so did the council.

It started in 1545 with 30 bishops. By the time it was concluded, it consisted of 255 bishops. You can almost get a sense of the difficulty they saw. It might have been a growing problem when they first met.

It was a real problem by the time the council was over. And for the Roman Catholic Church, it was their line-in-the-sand kind of moment. It was their occasion to formally denounce all that the Protestant Reformation held dear, and to distinguish themselves from this movement.

And when everything was said and done, the council had accomplished this. They had articulated a host of new decrees and canons, as they called them. They produced a universal catechism, because the church needed to be better insulated.

The church needed to be better insulated from the truths of the gospel, in reality. They had a standardized liturgy, and then they indexed a list of prohibited books. And among all of these publications that they produced, within that list of publications, they produced a list of decrees, of counter-Reformation decrees, in an effort to undo what the Protestant Reformers had started.

And among these decrees is a famous list that was produced in the council's sixth session. This was published in January of 1547, on the 13th day of January, and it dealt with the topic of justification.

And if you were to go, you can go on to the Roman Catholic Encyclical's website and read the Council of Trent for yourself. You can read the decrees and the canons. I did that this week, reading many of the canons that came out of the sixth session.

And noteworthy amongst one of those canons was one in particular, it's Canon 12. And I want to read Canon 12 for you. Council of Trent, Canon 12, reads like this. If anyone shall say that justifying faith is not, is nothing else, but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sin for Christ's sake, or that it is this confidence alone by which we are justified, let them be anathema.

I want to translate that into modern English, it's a bit archaic, it's in archaic English. So let me say it this way. If anyone says that justifying faith consists of trusting alone in God's mercy in Christ for the forgiveness of sins, let him be accursed.

If anyone believes that you can be saved simply by believing in Jesus, you are damned. That is Canon 12 in the sixth session of the Council of Trent. And so what the Roman Catholic Church then did was put forward a wholesale denial of the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Moreover, they decree that those who believe this doctrine were not only in error, but they were under the curse of Almighty God. That it did not get worse than believing this. And now 500 years later, 500 years, or nearly 500 years has passed since that decree, and yet the doctrine of justification by faith alone is no less spurned than it was then.

If you talk to Roman Catholics today, some will say that they believe in justification alone. I recently had a conversation with someone about this who was Catholic, and they said, no, we believe in justification by faith alone.

And I said, what is faith? And they provided a monstrous definition of some kind of sentimental feelings combined with meritorious works. Meanwhile, if you go to maybe more mainstream Roman Catholic apologists, they will say that the justification by faith alone is nothing more than legal fiction.

They call it this because it's a legal declaration of righteousness where there is no material righteousness. And so in their eyes, justification by faith alone is nothing more than a kind of divine slight of hand where God pronounces righteousness where there is no righteousness.

And if that weren't enough, within the Protestant church today, there is growing opposition to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Perhaps you're familiar with the name N .T. Wright, who popularized a theory known as the new perspective on Paul, which says that justification is little more than dealing with the Jewish exclusivism of the first century.

It's not about believing on Christ that you might be saved. It's simply the inclusion of the Gentiles that they might engage in their own sort of covenant faithfulness. In seeker sensitive circles, there's an unwillingness to discuss sin and therefore justification by faith alone is irrelevant.

What is really important in those circles is the meeting of felt needs or within our own hearts, within our own souls. Is it not true that we are all prone to wander from the biblical reality of justification by faith alone in favor of some form of moralistic therapeutic deism where Christ's work is little in my performance as much.

It doesn't matter whether we look from without or from within, that we are surrounded by enemies as it were. Surrounded by those who would wage war and defeat the idea, this understanding of justification by faith alone.

And yet, I want to tell you, that's why this is the text of Genesis. There are few things, I can think of almost nothing more important than the doctrine of justification. And this doctrine of the justification of sinners by faith alone.

John Calvin famously said, justification is the main hinge on which salvation turns. Similarly, Martin Luther famously wrote, justification is the article by which the church stands or falls. And I'm here to tell you that there is almost nothing more important about your deeply held beliefs, your views, your theology, than your view on justification.

It is. This is not me trying to have a dramatic introduction. It is the difference between joy and sorrow. It is the difference between delight and duty. Justification by faith alone is the difference between zeal and apathy, fruit and thistles, happiness and misery, hope and despair, life and death, even heaven and hell.

Genesis 15 and the Gospel of Justification

Hinge on this reality of justification by faith alone. And we've spent a few weeks away from Genesis. As we come back to Genesis 15. Wouldn't you know it? Genesis 15 is all about justification by faith alone.

Here, again, in contrast to the Marcionites, you might remember we spoke about them who tried to put away the Old Testament. In contrast to those claims, Genesis 15 articulates one of the most important Christian doctrines under the sun.

And what we see from this passage is nothing short of a clarion declaration of the gospel itself. That Genesis 15 preaches the gospel. And what we see as we look here is that God saves sinners. But He doesn't just save sinners.

He saves sinners by faith alone in Him. He saves sinners by faith alone according to His covenant faithfulness. And He saves sinners at His own expense. Genesis 15 is one of the best chapters in the Bible.

It's my favorite chapter this week. And it should be yours too. I hope we get to the end of this and you see why. So we're in Genesis 15. We're going to look at all 21 verses. We're going to divide the passage under three headings.

And the first one that I want to show us or bring before us is this. That we are justified by faith alone. We stand or fall before God by nothing else but by faith in Him and in Him alone. And we will look at that with a greater degree of specificity still.

This is what we read in verse 1. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I am your shield and your reward shall be very great. But Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me for I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?

And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring and a member of my house will be my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir.

And he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and number the stars. And if you are able to number them, if you are able to number them, then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. And he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness.

As we land back here in Genesis 15, I want to set the scene for us again. You'll remember that Abram has just returned from his heroic rescue of Lot in the chapter that just went before us. You'll remember there were the great four superpowers that were developing northeast of Israel who came down to settle the score when those five kings in the Valley of Sedim said, We're not going to honor that vassal treaty anymore.

11 years we've done it. The 12th year, we're not going to do this. And so the four kings came down. They defeated the five kings that were in the Valley of Sedim, in the Salt Valley. And then they made a fatal mistake, didn't they?

In that they kidnapped Abram's nephew, Lot, and carried him and his family away with the plunder. And you'll remember from Genesis 14 that Abram the Hebrew, as he is called in verse 13, that he was notified of this.

And so he gathered his 318 fighting men and they went in hot pursuit of these four kings and their captives. They went as far as Dan and then even further beyond Damascus, pursuing them some 280 kilometers.

And of course we know that they defeated these kings. They gained all of the spoil back. And of course they rescued Lot from his captors. And then what happened? You'll remember in the latter part of Genesis 14 that Abram went outside of Salem, a place we know now to be Jerusalem.

And there he was met by Melchizedek, the priest king of Salem, who proved to be a type of Christ, who met Abram and who blessed him. And informs one of the important points on the royal priesthood, the lineage of royal priests that finally bring us to Christ.

Now, as we land in Genesis 15, Abram is now enjoying maybe, I'm not sure, maybe some peace and quiet after the events of verse 14 or chapter 14. And as he does this, we read in verse 1 that the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.

Now it's an interesting word, that word vision. It's used often in the Bible to describe prophetic visions. So here we see Abram engaged now in a prophetic vision of sorts. And God tells Abram that he is his shield and that Abram's reward shall be very great.

And some might look at that and go, well, what is the point of that? Well, you might remember that Abram had just returned from battle. And we see here that it was not Abram's victory, but it was God's victory.

That God was the shield. And you'll remember that Abram received a blessing. He received food from Melchizedek, but he declined the gifts of Bera, the king of Sodom. Remember, king evil of Sodom. But what do we see here?

Not only was God with Abram in the battle, he was his shield, but he is going to provide the reward. Abram doesn't need the reward of the king of Sodom. He needs God's reward, and God will provide it.

But as the Lord speaks to Abram in verse one, we see something that's altogether new in this passage. And that is that up until this point, Abram has always remained silent in these exchanges. That God speaks to Abram, and Abram, he's mum.

His lips are zipped. And he simply does what it is that God would have him to do. If we look in Genesis chapter 12, in verses one through four, we see it for ourselves. That the Lord said, go from your country to the land that I will show you.

He continues on, and what does Abram do? Abram doesn't say, well, when should I go? Where should I go? How should I? Not at all, but verse four. We read, Abram went. There's no dialogue. There's no questions.

There's a command and then unquestioning obedience. But as we come to Genesis 15, something changes. We go from a monologue to a balanced dialogue, where God speaks and Abram responds, and God speaks and Abram responds.

And this is what we see. Here, the word of the Lord comes to Abram in verse one. And for the first time, we hear Abram's voice in this exchange with God. And he says, oh Lord God, what will you give me?

For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. There is something that has been nagging Abram as he has wandered up and down through the land of Canaan. If you'll recall, what is Abram's name?

What does Abram's name mean? It means exalted father, that it's in his name, that he will be the father of many descendants. And we remember from Genesis chapter 12 and verse seven, that as Abram was called out of Ur of the Chaldees, that God promised him, not only that he would inherit a land, but that his offspring would inherit a land.

And so here Abram is, he just wants to be like all of his ancestors up until this point. He wants to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. He wants the glory, the joy of a family and of a lineage that comes after him.

God has promised this very thing. And yet years have passed and Abram and Sarai are still wandering the land without children. And so we see here, Abram bring this appeal to the Lord God. And it helps us when we appreciate the historical context of it, that if you lived in the days of Abram and Sarai and you did not have children, what did that mean?

But it meant you weren't under the divine blessing, you were under the divine curse. That whatever deity it was who you served, well, you were not in good graces with that deity. And so here Abram is, God says to him, I am your shield.

I'm the one that took you through that battle and your reward is going to be very great. And Abram says, but what about the promise? What about this expectation that I've had since I left Ur of the Chaldees?

I have no children and I'm gonna give all of my possessions. We've heard all about Abram's possessions. I'm gonna give all of these possessions to my chief servant, to the servant that lives in my house, which was a common thing.

It was a tragic thing in Abram's day. If you were childless, you had great possessions and at the end of the day, you just gave them to your servant because there was no one else to give them to. God was promising protection.

He was promising a great reward, but Abram was waiting for the fulfillment of these promises. And surely this was growing heavy, weighty in Abram's soul. But I want you to see something here. That in verses two and three, Abram doesn't grumble.

He doesn't complain. Instead, he does something remarkable in that he faithfully appeals to God in the most reverential way possible. When he says, Oh Lord God, he uses an expression. If you look in the Hebrew, it is Adonai Yahweh.

Abram only uses this expression twice in all of the accounts in scripture. We see it in verse two and then we see it again in verse eight when he makes his second appeal that we'll look at in a little bit.

It's an expression that's used four times in total in the Pentateuch. And what scholars see Abram doing as he uses this expression, Adonai Yahweh, Oh Lord God, is that he is addressing God in the most reverential of terms.

He's coming to God as a servant would come to his master. It reminds me of raising children. And one of the things that we did, I just gave a book to our brother and sister as they seek to parent Alan.

And one of the things that we read in that book that was very helpful was as often as you can say yes to your kids, you should. But when you say no to your kids, knows the law, right? No means no. And one of the things that we sought to do in our children is when we say no, for them to bring a polite appeal.

Sometimes we say no and the kids say, but, but, but, and we would say no, you need to make a polite appeal. Well, here we see Abram making a polite appeal to God. He appeals to God in a posture of a faithful and humble submission.

And we see that God does not look down on this appeal for in verses four and five, we see the promise reiterated by God that he would not only have offspring, but that Abram would have a son and that from this son would come offspring that are as numerous as the stars in heaven.

And so what you see here then is a picture of a faithful man and then even more a picture of a more faithful God who will always keep his word. I like what one commentator says on this point, maybe it's tangential, but I think that some of us need to hear it, that Abram was learning the basic lesson that every believer in turn has to learn, namely that God's delays are not God's denials.

There are times when we will experience a delay, it is not a denial. We must patiently wait for the promise to be fulfilled. And then comes one of the most important, not only one of the most important chapters in scripture, but now one of the most important verses in one of the most important chapters in all of scripture.

In verse six, we read this, he that is Abram believed the Lord and he that is God counted it to him as righteousness. Now this is a truly remarkable statement that Abram believed the Lord and that God counted it to him as righteousness.

Maybe we take this for granted because we've heard it quoted in Galatians and in the book of Romans, but I wanna just frame this for a moment, how extraordinary this verse is that in a world filled with man-made religions, we would expect God to say something like this and Abram engaged in works of faithfulness and thus God acknowledged his righteousness or we might expect to read and Abram continued to be righteous, thus securing God's favor.

But no, that's not what we read. It does not say that. In fact, we know, don't we, that Abram was not righteous. We've seen Abram's life up until this point. Where did he come from? He came from Ur of the Chaldees where they worshiped pagan idols.

Then what? He was called to the land of Canaan and we all know about the Egypt fiasco where the famine came and he took his wife down into Egypt and what did they do in Egypt? He said, she's my sister.

He allowed his own wife to go into the Pharaoh's harem so that he might preserve himself. In the coming chapters, in the coming weeks, we are gonna hear more about Abram's sinfulness and yet God saw not Abram's performance, not his meritorious works, not his righteous deeds, but God saw Abram's faith, weak and wavering as it might have been and he counted that faith as righteousness.

Now thus far, we have heard a great deal of the gospel in the book of Genesis. We heard the Proto-Ewangelion. You'll remember that in Genesis 3 .15, the first gospel, that there was going to be a serpent who was going to crush, sorry, an offspring who was going to crush the head of the serpent.

We heard how God saved a people through the flood in the ark in Noah's lineage. We saw how God effectually called Abram out of his sinful life to come after him and follow him and now we discover how it is that a sinful man can be made right with a holy God.

It is by faith. It is by faith and faith alone. It's not meritorious works. It's not religious rituals. It is by faith in God and his perfect promises. Now I want, I need to arm you with something here.

That some people will come to you and say that this passage doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't mean what you think it means. But I want to show you that no matter how you look at this, if you do not come away from this text understanding that it is teaching the reality of justification by faith alone, then you've got the passage all wrong.

It is not legal fiction. This is biblical truth. So let's look in verse 6 for a moment. I don't want anyone coming here shaking you saying no, no, no. It's not justification by faith. It's justification by faithfulness.

Whatever it might be. In verse 6 it says this. He believed the Lord. Now what does it mean that he believed the Lord? That word believed, it has the same, the Hebrew word has the same root as the word amen.

It is as if Abram heard the promise and in his soul he uttered an amen to God. And this is how we translate that Hebrew word. It means to have trust, to have faith, or to have confidence in something.

It's the exact faith that we read about in Hebrews 11 .1 when we read that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Abram was assured, he was convicted that God's promises were true even though they were not yet realized.

He had faith as we would define faith. But more than that, because he believed the Lord, we read that God counted it to him as righteousness. Counted. What does it mean that he counted it to him as righteousness?

Some would say, well, he's simply recognizing Abram's righteousness. He sees his faith and he recognizes righteousness. But is that what Genesis 15 .6 says? The term here that God uses for counted is the Hebrew word hashav, which means to credit, to reckon, or to impute.

It is a word that is used not to speak of someone who internally possesses something for themselves, but of someone who is regarded as having something that isn't theirs. So we count, we credit, we impute.

It's not a recognition of something. It's the giving of something that you do not have. And then righteousness. What does it mean here to be righteous? When Moses used this word righteousness as he authored the book, it is just the word that we would expect to find.

It speaks to the state of being just or right. It conveys the concept of innocence. Sometimes it even conveys the concept of prosperity, of having an abundance of something. And so what we find in this passage is truly extraordinary.

That this is the first text in all of the Bible that explicitly teaches the justification, the imputation of righteousness by faith alone. The first mention of justification by faith alone is not in John.

It's not in Romans. It's in Genesis. And we find it here in Genesis 15. And it is the same justification then that is preached all throughout the New Testament. I'm gonna take you a couple of places just in case you're falling asleep.

I want you with me. Let's go to Galatians chapter 3 and verse 6. In Galatians chapter 3, Paul the apostle takes Genesis 15 and he doesn't just apply it to Abram, but he applies it to all the people who are Abram's descendants by faith.

Galatians 3, 6. Just as Abram believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abram. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, In you shall all the nations be blessed.

So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law and do them.

Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law. What? For the righteous shall live by faith. If you go another place with me, let's go together to Romans chapter 4. I want you to see how the apostle Paul uses Genesis 15 there.

In Romans 4 and verse 1. As Paul is speaking to this mixed church, maybe I'll, just as you turn there, I'll go on a brief tangent. But as Paul is dealing with the church in Rome, do you know what he is doing?

See what happened was, as the church was formed in Rome, it's very likely that some of the proselytes from Pentecost returned to Rome. It was largely Jewish in its constitution. But in AD 49, Claudius excommunicated, he cast out all of the Jews and it became almost overnight completely Gentile.

Five years later he died and eventually all of the Jews began to make their way back to Rome. And so you had a church that was exclusively Jewish, exclusively Gentile, and now mixed Jew and Gentile. Hence why we read so much about the distinctions between Israel and the Gentiles, right?

Hebrews, or sorry, Romans chapter 9 through 11. Well, in chapter 4, as Paul is dealing now with Abraham, he says, what 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. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

And if we go just a few verses over to verses 22 through 25, just so you know, it's not speaking only about the Romans in the first century. That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness. 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 in him who raised from the dead, Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. One of the things that we see here is that Abraham not only believed the promise that God was going to provide him children, but he believed still in a future promise.

Jesus himself said in John 6, no, he didn't say that. Maybe I removed it from my notes. I think I did. But he said that, it's in John chapter eight, he said that Abraham saw my day. That he looked forward to the day that Christ was coming.

And for those of us who place our faith in this Christ, not by works, but by faith, that faith is counted to us as righteousness. This has always been the way that God has saved his people. God has never saved his people by the works of the law.

God has never saved his people by covenant faithfulness. God has only ever saved his people by faith. And what a glorious gospel this is. Like Abraham, our record is tarnished. Psalm 51 tells us that we were conceived in sin.

We come out of the womb with debt. We come out of the womb with a sin debt, not our own, as descendants of Adam. What we have accrued, I was thinking about it this week. I remember when I was going through my law enforcement training, thinking about how terrible it would be to have a criminal record.

Right? To have a criminal record, it might hinder your ability to travel. It might hinder your ability to have certain jobs. Certainly would have hindered my ability in that way. And I thought, what an interesting thing that everyone in this room has a criminal record.

It's not something as insignificant as a criminal record that's kept in the CPIC database in Canada so that you can run my name and determine if I have a criminal record. No, you have a criminal record and that record is kept in heaven.

It's a criminal record, a record of treason against almighty God. That we, like Abraham, have all sinned and yet, what a marvel, God justifies us, not by our sinlessness, but by our faith. If he were to require one pure, just one pure, one undefiled meritorious work, if you were to say, I will set the bar low, just do one good thing, we would be damned.

Because even our motives would ruin us. But God justifies the ungodly by faith. He set the standard, the only standard that we could meet. That is by looking to him and trusting in him alone. We talked about it in our Bible study this past week in John chapter 6.

No, it wasn't our Bible study. It was when we did evangelism on Wednesday. What must we do to be doing the works of God? The people came across the lake from Tiberias. They wanted food and they asked Jesus, what must we do to be doing the works of God?

Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him whom he has sent. The work that God requires of his people is faith. It is belief and nothing more. I like what Spurgeon says on this.

He says, look through the Hebrews list of the heroes of faith. Some of them are exceedingly imperfect characters. Some we would hardly have thought of mentioning. But they had faith. And although men in their faulty judgment think faith to be an inferior virtue and often scarcely look on it as a virtue at all, yet in the judgment of God, faith is the supreme virtue.

This, said Christ, is the work of God, the greatest of all works, that you believe on him whom he has sent, to trust, to believe. This will be counted to us for righteousness even as it was to Abram. And what a righteousness it is that in one of my, you've heard me quote it several times, it is increasingly becoming one of my favorite texts in scripture from Hebrews 10, 14, for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

That we exist in this room, if you have faith in the Lord Jesus, we exist, as the reformers would say, with this experience of simul justus a peccator. We are simultaneously sinners, it is true, we are being sanctified and yet in the sight of God by faith we are just so that he sees us, not for who we are, but for who Christ is in our stead.

In Romans chapter 10, as Paul was dealing with this debate between the Jews and the Gentiles, he's speaking about how it is that people are made right with God. And in Romans 10, 2 he says, for I bear them witness, speaking of the Jews, that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

What a righteousness it is that we receive that is imputed to us by faith. John Flable says of it, Oh what a complete, finished, perfect thing is the righteousness of Christ. The searching eye of the holy and jealous God cannot find the least flaw or defect in it.

And if you have believed, the gospel, that righteousness is yours. Now I had to set, as I always do, a big foundation. I want to look now at how this justification by faith is confirmed, is further secured.

Justification by Faith in Covenant with God

And there's a second truth that we see here. That not only are we justified by faith alone, but that we are justified by faith alone in covenant with God. We see this in verse 7. And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.

But he said, that's Abram, Oh Lord God, Adonai Yahweh, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.

And he brought him all these things, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs.