October 20, 2017 Show with C. Matthew McMahon on “Christ’s Righteousness Imputed: The Saint’s Surest Plea for Eternal Life”

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We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 20th day of October 2017.

So delighted to have back as a returning guest one of my favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind, and he's going to be addressing an important book that is also on a very important theme, especially as many of us in Reformed Protestantism are celebrating

Reformation Day coming up very soon, and that theme is

Christ's Righteousness Imputed, the Saints, the Saints, wow

I'm going blind here, the Saints surest plea for eternal life, and that is a book by Michael Harrison, an 18th century, well actually a 17th and 18th century

Puritan, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

C. Matthew McMahon. Thank you Chris, happy to be here, especially on this important subject matter, look forward to talking with you about it.

Yes, and obviously this is a pillar doctrine of the

Reformation, it's a pillar doctrine of the New Testament, it's a pillar doctrine that separates true biblical

Christianity from the Church of Rome and all other false religions, and that is about Christ's Righteousness Imputed, and not only is it the

Saints surest plea for eternal life, it's the Saints only hope for eternal life, and before we get into that very important topic, let me just quickly announce our email address for anybody listening who would like to join us with a question of your own, it's

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com,

please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking, and the

Puritan's mind, or should I say a Puritan's mind, tell us something about that ministry before we go into the subject,

Dr. McMahon. Well, a Puritan's mind began as a desire to see more people read some of the same great books that I was reading.

It was just the time when the Internet started getting exciting, and in the late 90s, and so what

I wanted to do is take some of the key writings of some of the key

Puritans that I was personally reading at that time, and place them out on the Internet for other people to enjoy, just excerpts, pieces of things that I thought were important.

So William Ames, Christopher Love, even in dealing with Francis Turretin, Jeremiah Burroughs, and a few others,

I started posting some of that information, and just since that time, it's just cumulated and culminated and become this gigantic snowball of a site with thousands of pages, and books, and Puritan bios, and links to their works and such, that it's just,

I think, become a blessing in the Reformed community to be able to share that good meat with Christians who desire to eat some solid food.

And out of a Puritan's mind, I think naturally, after so many years, it came

Puritan publications, where we started taking many of the Puritans, and taking their writings, and not simply republishing them, we had obviously lots of publishers doing that, but we wanted to take them, and we wanted to update them, and make them readable, so that not only would

I enjoy reading, for example, Michael Harrison, but my wife would enjoy reading him as well, and so that's what we've done in all of the books, most of the books that we've published.

The first few, we had just gone in and published a few important works, but after we had done that, we saw the need to be able to make things as updated and readable as possible, and so that's what we've been doing ever since.

And so that was really a short background of a Puritan's mind, and Puritan publication.

And have you done anything with one of the most difficult Puritans to read,

John Owen? We have not done anything with Owen just yet.

He's posted all over a Puritan's mind. We have whole books of his original works there. There are a couple of works that I think are exceedingly important by Owen.

The Death of Death and the Death of Christ? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that was the first Puritan book

I ever read, so Owen was my introduction to Puritanism.

I can distinctly remember where I was when I was reading that book. I was about halfway through it.

I was on campus of early college days during summertime when I didn't have a class, and I was reading

Owen's Death of Death and walking across campus, and I was about halfway through the book, and I said to myself, of course, who would disagree with any of this?

And come to find out in my naive mind at that point that most people would disagree with what

Owen was saying, at least in our contemporary Christian age. But I think that's one of the most important books that he wrote, along with, coupled that with the glory of Christ.

I think that's another one that needs to be updated and put out in a manner in which makes it readable. But neither of those have had that happen to them yet, so, you know,

Owen's on the list. He's on the list for some work at some point. We just haven't got that far. Great.

Well, before we go into our topic of Michael Harrison's work on Christ's Righteousness Imputed, you have a new book coming out.

It's, well, it's a, should I say, a new publication to Puritan publications.

It's not a new book. It's a Jeremiah Burroughs book, and that book is titled

Christ Inviting Sinners to Come to Him for Rest. I love that title. That is a beautiful title.

That is a title that should make the heart of every

Christian beat, and hopefully the Lord will use that book as a tool to make the heart of every lost person who reads it beat for the first time as a born -again believer with a new heart.

But if you could tell us about that book. Well, you know, Burroughs' book actually fits very well with the actual subject matter that we're dealing with today, because generally you would be thinking on a broad level that Matthew 11, 28, "'Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy -laden, and I will give you rest,' that that's particular to sinners and their initial conversion.

Well, Burroughs waves his finger back and forth and says, no, no, Christian, this is not only the initial convert, but it's also the lifelong manner of the

Christian. The Christian is to continually come to Jesus Christ for rest, and what he does in 49 chapters, this is a 450 -page monster book, which is fabulous from beginning to end, he says that Christians themselves come to Jesus Christ for rest, because what they do oftentimes is that they try in some kind of legal performance to merit something before God.

And he says, no, no, the Christian, the sinner, both of them come to Jesus Christ, and they come to him for rest from the law.

And he shows all through the book all of their various ways and manners that legal performance will never get you any kind of merit before God.

It demonstrates that a person is converted when they are doing what the

Lord commands them to do, yet in order to merit something, no, no, he says, you come to Christ for rest, and there's all sorts of ways that that actually occurs, and that is what the substance of the book is about.

So generally, we would be thinking, yes, it's about sinners coming to Christ, and he's certainly not going to discount that, but it's also that the

Christian comes to Christ, and he does that daily, and he does that for rest, and all of the little intricacies of what makes that important is what

Burroughs talks about. On curates and publications, we have that on the front page right now. Literally, that has just come out today.

We just started sending emails and such about that. It's both an e -book, and it's in a hardback form.

We actually created a very, a higher -level book than maybe like a case wrap or a paperback.

We decided to go with linen -stitched and a dust jacket and all of that good stuff because we thought this book is so valuable.

We just do not hear preaching like this today, which is unfortunate. People will touch on certain things, but to go to the length that Burroughs has, and all of the information that he covers in it, because it's such an important relationship, how the

Christian relates to the law, and what Christ has done, and how he gives us rest, it's just an amazing work.

Amen. Well, I will be repeating this later, but the website to order any book that has been brought back into print by Puritan Publications is

PuritanPublications .com. PuritanPublications .com, and also the main website for Dr.

C. Matthew McMahon is APuritansMind .com. APuritansMind .com,

no apostrophe in that website. Well, what can you tell us, first of all, about Michael Harrison?

I have to admit that I first learned of Michael Harrison through you and through Puritan Publications.

I know that, as I mentioned earlier, he was a Puritan in both the 17th and 18th centuries.

He went home to be with the Lord at the age of 89 in 1729, but what can you tell us about him to prepare us for this book that he has written on in this most important subject?

Well, it's interesting. We deal with a lot of Puritans that are generally unknown, because part of what we want to do is bring out some of these amazing works.

With Harrison, there's no full biography of him anywhere. What we know of him basically comes from little fragments that are found in some of Edmund Calamy's works, some of Thomas Coleman and other writers making mention of him in conjunction with historic information on other

Puritans, which is interesting. You're right, he was born in 1640, died in 1729, that's a longer time than most of the

Puritans lived. There are a few, you know, that lived long lives. He was one of them, and he was constantly in ministry throughout his life in various ways.

He began studying at Oxford. He was part of the

Dissenters, we know that. He was part of the Church of England for a long time. After he left there, he began a

Congregational Church, which he for a good amount of time, and then after that he became a

Presbyterian. And then past that, all we know is based out of his works.

Now here's the other sad thing, that there are relatively few works that Harrison actually has even available on the planet.

So there's a sermon that we have yet to get our hands on, which

I'm actually working to find right now, and there's also one other book that he has dealing with the

Church, and that's another one that's difficult to find, but he has one book on baptism that we've done, and he has one book on Christ -imputed righteousness, that was the one we're talking about today.

Past that information, there is nothing else. We don't know anything else about him.

However, once you start reading his works, and they are short, you find that he was very pastoral in the manner in which he dealt with his people.

Why do I say that? Well, he went, the place where he ministered for the longest time was called

Pottersbury. It was in Northamptonshire. He went into this town where there's all sorts of crazy doctrine going on, and he began ministering in that town, and in doing so, by the end of his ministry, by the end of his life there, most of the town was converted.

It was very much like a Baxter -ish conversion of Kidderminster, where in the beginning,

Baxter went into Kidderminster, and everybody was a drunkard and prostitutes, and all sorts of stuff going on.

The same thing, yet in terms of all of the craziness of odd doctrines that people were hearing about or believing, and so what

Harrison did is he went in and he laid out a couple of long, important sermon series, one of which was about Christ's righteousness imputed.

So even the book itself that we've put out is a synopsis.

All of, both of the works that we have of him, they are a synopsis of his longer sermon series, which they just don't even exist.

Unless somebody has, you know, some rare copy in an actual book itself, these these don't exist anywhere, and all we have are the cliff notes, so to speak, of those longer sermon series.

And so what we've done is we've put them together, which is like in this particular book, it's only about 50 pages long of his particular explanation of Christ's righteousness, but his depth and richness to it is so well done, so biblically founded, so orderly,

I mean everything you would want in cliff notes, that's what Harrison gives you. And so in dealing with this particular book and this particular topic, you know, he says that the very strength and bulwark of the

Christian religion is the doctrine of justification. Justification, as you mentioned, as Luther said, as Calvin said, as many of the

Reformers said, Calvin said it was the hinge upon which the door of the

Church swings. Luther said that it is the pillar on which, or the foundation of which, the

Church stands. And looking at those kind of explanations, in thinking about Christ's righteousness imputed in the doctrine of imputation, because we don't hear a lot about the doctrine of imputation in that way, we always hear about justification by faith alone, because that's what the

Reformation was about. However, when you're talking about imputation, imputation is like the patent of the hinge.

It is the thing that makes the mechanics of the hinge actually work, so that the door will swing, which is the door of the

Church where salvation is found. But without someone really understanding Christ's righteousness imputed and what that means, they really don't understand justification.

We hear that phrase, justification by faith. We read that in Romans. We read that in Habakkuk.

But when we think about what that actually means in relationship to the justice of God, the righteousness of God, why the

Lord Jesus had to come and die, what's actually going on, this is a doctrine which is exceedingly, it's terrible even just to say it's exceedingly important.

It is everything for the Christian religion in that particular way. And Harrison, what he does is he immediately places it in contradistinction to Rome, which he calls the

Romish Antichrist, and he says there's a great deal of a reason to contend earnestly for this doctrine, this one which he sets in the context of Jude, the faith given to the saints, because it's not only important theologically, but it's important salvifically in the sense that it's been sealed by the blood of many martyrs dying for this particular doctrine and the reality of the

Gospel. And so he actually, in his cliff notes in this book on Christ's righteousness imputed, he stems from Isaiah 45, 24, and 25, which says, "...surely

shall one say, in the Lord I have righteousness and strength, even to him shall men come, and all that are incensed against him shall be ashamed.

In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified and shall glory."

Now it's interesting, you know, he starts with the Old Testament. Now one of the things

I think that Christians misunderstand is they think that the Gospel, when you think of the Gospel in general, you think of it as one thing.

That Jesus died on a cross, and that historical narrative of them is the Gospel. But it's like if I said to you, listen, if I preach a sermon that, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ in order to be saved, and that's my text and that's what

I tell you, and I explain that you have to believe on Him and have to have faith in Him, and He is the

Savior, and I say to you, is that the Gospel? Everybody that would be listening would say, well, yes, that's the Gospel. But I didn't say anything about repentance there, so I didn't add in the doctrine of repentance.

If I don't add in the doctrine of repentance on a sermon talking about faith in Christ and believing on Him, is that still the

Gospel? Well, yes, it's still the Gospel. Well, what if I give, you know, a sermon on repentance, and I say you have to repent and be saved, and I talk about that, but I don't talk about believing.

Is that the Gospel? Well, yes, that's the Gospel as well. And what Christians tend to do is they think that this one little piece, this one little historical narrative of the

Messiah coming and dying on a wooden cross at a particular time, they think that is all of the

Gospel. Where, in fact, the Gospel is all of Scripture and everything that God has given as the

Good News, which is why Isaiah, case in point, Harrison is in Isaiah here talking about Christ's righteousness imputed.

In Isaiah 52, it talks about what the message is of those who have beautiful feet who bring

Good News. What is the message? Your God reigns. And so, if the

Good News encompasses, first and foremost, the supremacy of God in preaching in that way, that your

God reigns, and all of those other myriads of doctrines that come out of it in order to understand what the

Gospel, that Good News, is all about, I mean, it's no wonder why God spent three -quarters of the Bible pounding this into his people, so that they would understand what would be fulfilled when

Christ came. So that's one of the reasons why it's not an odd thing for Harrison to begin at that particular point.

Now the thing that people don't realize, or many, I should say, don't realize, is what makes, one of the things that makes the

Church of Rome so horrific and so heretical when it comes to how one is made right with God.

They take this beautiful scenario, this God -ordained scenario, the

Great Exchange, where our sins are imputed to Christ on Calvary, and his righteousness is imputed to us.

They diminish both of those things, because even the best of Catholics, unless this person is a saint and is transported directly into heaven, which even according to Rome is a very rare thing, the best of Catholics is still going to be punished for an undetermined amount of time.

The Catholics don't even know, the scholars, the theologians, it could be hundreds of years or millions of years, they don't know.

But the person is tormented in purgatory, and also on the other side of the coin, it's not fully because of the merits of Christ and his righteousness that they are being welcomed into heaven after that period of time in purgatory.

It's their own righteousness, and it's St. Peter's righteousness, it's St. Paul's righteousness, it's

Mary's righteousness, it's the righteousness in the treasury of merit of the saints.

So this is really a horrible doctrine of Rome that strips

Christ of the glory that he deserves, because he deserves indeed 100 % of the praise, honor, and glory and thanksgiving for our salvation, and even in particular our justification, which is what we are talking about today, am

I not right? 100%. On that particular note, let's pause for a second and just talk about why that's the case, because that's an exceedingly important aspect to what

Harrison was dealing with, just with the people in the town that he had been ministering to.

So you know, when we think about Adam, Adam placed, I'm gonna assume for sake of the listener, that the has read his

Bible, I'm just going to assume that. Adam is made by God, pinnacle of creation, he's made righteous and holy with knowledge, placed in the garden, and he's placed under a covenant of work.

He is to do this and live. What was he to do? He was not supposed to eat the knowledge of the tree of good and evil, and so in doing that, he was set there in order to act righteously before God, and if he did that, he would be like God.

Now the temptation that came into the garden was, there's a quicker road to be like God.

The serpents beguiled Eve, Eve at that point already messes up in the temptation itself, what

God had specifically said, because God did not say, do not touch the tree. He only told Adam not to eat it.

They could have chopped it down and made it, made a tree house out of it, or they could have examined it scientifically, they could have done anything they wanted to do with that tree, but they were not supposed to eat it.

Well, she had already started changing things, and the thing that I get in terms of reading through that narrative is,

Adam looks at that temptation and thinks about the quicker road to get to be like God.

Instead of doing what God wants, he listens to the serpent, he takes the fruit, he eats, he wanted the quick fix, but he apostatizes.

And so at that particular point, though, when he does that, he is the federal head of mankind.

He is the representative for all mankind, for all time.

Romans, therefore just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.

So Adam's apostasy, as a representative for all people, instantly sends everyone to eternal condemnation and hell without them, i .e.

all of his children, all of his progeny, you and I and everyone else, doing anything to get ourselves there.

His apostasy was reckoned to our account, i .e.

it was imputed to us. Who did that? God imputed Adam's sin to all of his children.

So we start out in the whole, the moment that we're conceived. We're already born in sin in that particular way, just as David talks about in Psalm 51, that in sin,

I was conceived. I don't have to become a sinner at 10, 11, or 12 years old in some kind of odd, crazy doctrine of the age of accountability.

He's a sinner the moment that those two selves come together and that he is who he is. The psalmist even says that children come forth from the womb speaking lies immediately.

Why? Because they're depraved. They are reckoned fallen before they had done anything good or evil.

And so at that particular point, once we start sinning, we just dig the hole deeper.

We aggravate our sin and our sin condition and the eternal condemnation that we have in going to hell by sinning in various ways, which is why

Jesus said to the Pharisees, these shall receive greater condemnation.

There are degrees of condemnation in that particular manner. What we do aggravates that situation.

Yet, at that particular point, we run into the problem of how, then, do we recover from that particular dilemma?

Adam has placed us all into this apostasy. We're all going to hell. How do we get out of it? Well, different guys in different times popped up here and there.

For example, Pelagius, he was a heretic. He said, when God speaks to us in Scripture, when he says you ought to do something, you ought to be holy, you ought to follow my law, he says, ought implies can.

And that was Pelagius' gigantic mistake. Ought does not imply can.

It doesn't give men ability just because God tells them to do something that they can't do, because what he missed, utterly and completely, was that God doesn't change his character, nor change the way he deals with human beings, simply because Adam fell.

He still speaks in the same manner. This kind of falls right into Jeremiah Burroughs' work that we talked about, in that legal performance and trying to appease

God in some way. You can't. And you can't because you're already in the hole.

You already have reckoned to you a depraved mind. In fact, let's pick up right where you left off when we return from our first break.

And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. C. Matthew McMahon about our topic today, that is the imputed righteousness of Christ, give us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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Thursday, October 26th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at the Carlisle Fire and Rescue Banquet Hall here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Send me an email to register at chrisarnson at gmail .com. Before the break, we were talking about the fact that all of mankind, unlike what

Pelagius had to say, we all had the sin of Adam imputed to us at the moment of our conception, and we all, therefore, are born with a totally depraved nature.

And if you want to pick up where you left off there. Okay, so the idea behind what

Pelagius was saying was that he thought that just because God tells us to do something that we then have the ability to do it, which was obviously faulty, because he said that Adam's sin had absolutely nothing to do with us.

That was Adam's sin, not our sin. God, in complete and utter rejection of that, talks about imputation in a number of places in Scripture.

Psalm 32, 2, Romans 4, again here in Isaiah 45,

Romans 5, there's all sorts of places that talk about what that means. And so when we talk about being justified before God, we're talking about a reckoning that has to happen.

Because now, what is the problem? The problem is that men are then in the hole as a result of being credited with Adam's sin and reckoned that way.

Now they aggravate their sins and make the hole deeper and it makes hell worse for them under God's just condemnation because they aren't like him.

And Jesus was one of the biggest advocates of speaking this way about people, saying, you know, you being evil, give good gifts to your children.

Or he tells them that you have to be perfect. You shall be perfect as your

Father in Heaven is perfect. And so men can't do that. They're already in the hole. How can they be perfect?

The vase is already fallen off the shelf and it's smashed all over the floor. Gluing it together doesn't make it perfect.

So in considering that, what Harrison does is he talks about the solemn, glorious benefits which people can enjoy by the gospel.

Those that are changed by the gospel. The good news that God reigns and that by God's righteousness they can be justified.

Now we don't know what either of those two things necessarily mean just yet. We tout often the

Reformation, oh, the just shall believe by faith, justification by faith alone.

But when we start talking about it, as you begin to get into it, which is what will then happen?

How do people actually get righteous before God? One of the conversations that I had with a

Roman Catholic, somebody that's part of our family, said, I just don't understand how you can say that everything that you did quote unquote doesn't count anymore.

That was a good word that they used. Because in terms of thinking about what it is that the

Lord Jesus does for Christians, those things do not then count against them, us, me.

Instead, they are reckoned to Christ's account and His righteousness is reckoned to my account.

So the righteousness that believers have from Christ is twofold. It's a righteousness for their justification, by which they are accounted and esteemed righteous at God's judgment seat.

And it's also an inherent righteousness of sanctification that He gives us. Though the latter is not necessarily intended in Harrison's verse because he's principally dealing with the righteousness by which people are going to be justified.

The righteousness of sanctification is hinted to us when he says, when

Isaiah says, he uses the word strength, that the

Lord, I have righteousness and strength. And so Harrison talks a bit about what that means.

That when we deal with being changed, the converted

Gentiles, specifically where Isaiah was talking about, that God is the one that will make them change.

He is the one that gives them the righteousness. It's through the righteous branch.

It's through the Messiah. It's through the Christ. And scripture says exactly what

Harrison utilizes. Jesus, come to me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, the

Burroughs book. The whole idea, all of this is placed together. It's not simply the initial coming.

It is the lifelong righteousness and strength that the Christian receives from the

Lord Jesus Christ. So when you had mentioned talking about Rome, you see there was a difference between the way the

Romanist thought about how someone was saved and the way then that the Reformation rescued the gospel from their deviant scriptural ideas.

It's the difference, I'm going to use a couple of technical words here, it's the difference between analytic justification and synthetic justification.

Analytic justification is when, it's the way a sentence is construed or an idea or concept is construed where you learn nothing from the actual sentence itself.

It's like if I were to say to you, the tall man is tall. You see, there's nothing to that.

In relationship to the way they thought about justification, they were saying that God justifies the righteous man.

So for the Roman Catholic, he would have to go out. He would have to work or do penance or get the infused righteousness back inside of him that he lost by committing some particular sin.

He goes into the confessional, he does some kind of act of contrition and penance, the priest tells him that he has to say a certain number of Hail Marys and a certain number of Our Fathers or some kind of work or merit that then the infused righteousness that he receives, which comes out of the treasury of merit, it's actually the extra righteousness that the bank of Roman Catholicism has treasured up from the extra righteousness of Paul and Jesus and the rest of the apostles and certain saints, that that can then be applied to you.

But if you sin, you lose it again. You have to go back and you have to continue to keep doing this.

Now, synthetic justification is different. This is the Protestant idea. The sinner cannot be justified unless Christ's righteousness covers them.

So you will learn something in that sentence. It's like, if I use the same kind of sentence, it's like, the tall man is a soldier.

It's different than saying, it's like Captain Obvious. You just don't say, the tall man is tall.

There's something else that needs to go in there that makes the sentence synthetic in that way. The sinner cannot be justified unless Christ's righteousness covers them.

So when you talk to a Roman Catholic and they say to you, well, I believe in justification, because they'll say that. You say, oh, well, wait, is it analytic or is it synthetic?

And then they'll say, oh, well, this is how it goes. And they'll show you the deviancy of it. It has to be something that covers them in a manner in which is not of themselves.

It's what the Reformers referred to as the alien righteousness of Christ.

It's alien because it's outside of us. I put together a little children's book called

Sophia and the Umbrella. And it's a children's book about Sophia, who lives in this city where it's raining all the time and everybody's wet.

They're wet because there are no roofs. There's nothing that covers them. Everything is always soaked.

They can never escape the rain. Everybody is miserable until one day Sophia is walking down the street and she sees this preacher standing on top of a wooden box preaching in the middle of the street underneath an umbrella.

So he talks to her and explains what the umbrella does and such and gives her the umbrella and she opens it up and places it over her head.

Now, the reason I bring that up is because if you want to use a simple illustration of thinking about the covering, imagine, for example, as when

God talks about in Genesis when He's looking down at the Tower of Babel, trying to come up to Him.

He says, let us go down and do such and such. And here, imagine God up on the clouds, let's say, looking down and He sees all of these different people in the city.

They're all wet, but then He sees an umbrella. He doesn't see the person underneath the umbrella. He sees the umbrella.

The umbrella is the covering that protects them. It's the very first thing that God did in covenant for Adam and Eve when they sinned.

Instead of killing them, He killed the two animals and covered them with those skins.

And so, imputation is a covering. Every time you look at all of the typical sacrifices all through the

Old Testament, there's always this sprinkling of blood. It's always a mess, and it's always covering everything.

And it's constant until Christ comes and He fulfills everything that God requires in the law to cover us.

And so, what God sees in the justified person is

Christ. He's the umbrella, so to speak. He is the covering for His people.

Now, two things happen in that, um, in that transition, in that transaction, rather.

When Christ fulfills all things, He dies on the cross, He says it's finished.

A lot of people don't believe it's finished. It's finished. Jesus said it was finished right then and there.

Two things happen. One, all of the sins of all of the people for whom

He died were imputed to Him. And two, all of His righteousness, all of the things that He did in upholding

God's law perfectly every moment since the time that He was conceived to the time that He died were imputed to us.

A double transfer takes place. A double cure. One, our sins are given to Him.

Two, His righteousness is given to us. So, on the cross, we call this virtual justification, because it actually happens to individual people in time, whereas Jesus virtually did this for all of those people for whom

He died for all time. He did not die for the fallen angels.

He did not save them. Rather, He saves those for whom became guilty before God, and that were elected and chosen of God to be heirs of eternal life,

Ephesians 1, 4, chosen before the foundation of the world. So all of this rests inside the wall of covenant, because of the way that the

Lord covenants with the Father and the Spirit before time began to be the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.

So these people who get justified virtually on the cross actually in time, they are elected and chosen of God.

They have to be sinners. Whoever is justified has to first be ungodly to be justified.

They have to be given to Christ. John 6, 37 says, All the Father hath given me shall come to me.

And whoever is justified has to first be accused of something in order to be justified afterwards.

Paul says in Romans 7, For I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, been revived, and I died.

So they have to also be a repenting and a returning sinner, because though repentance isn't meritorious,

Harrison will explain that it's not meritorious as the cause of justification, yet it's absolutely necessary for pardon.

Isaiah 55, 7 says, Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thought, and return to the

Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon.

So Harrison says that it's an utterly fruitless dispute, whether justification or sanctification is first in the order of nature, because they both spring from one and the same root, from free grace, and they never go alone.

It's a packaged deal. So it's certain that a person can never have the one without having the other.

This translates directly into the current intercession of the

Lord Jesus Christ, which that in and of itself really demonstrates the way that God saves, because Christ right now is interceding and applying the merits of everything that he did constantly on behalf of Christians for those for whom he died.

He does that before the face of the Father. His very presence in heaven in that way demonstrates that.

Hebrews talks all about his intercession in that particular manner. So whoever's actually justified, they have to believe, because they're saved by faith, they're justified by faith, but the nature of justification revolves around what

Jesus did in his active obedience and his passive obedience.

Let's talk about that for two seconds. When we talk about his active obedience and his passive obedience, these are set under the obedience of Christ.

Everything that Christ did to be the faithful one in order to impute to his people that which was proper for justification.

And his active obedience and passive obedience both accompany each other at every point in the

Savior's life. So Romans 10 .4, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

So he's the termination, he's the teller of the law for all those who believe by faith that his obedience forensically justifies them eternally.

We'll talk about that in a moment, but I just want you to think for a second about active and passive obedience in that way.

In fact, we have to go to the next break, so pick up on active and passive obedience when we return from our midway break.

And I also forwarded you a question from Daniel in San Jose, California that you can answer after you're finished completing your thought on active and passive obedience.

If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be back. This is our longer than normal break.

This is our midway break, but we'll be back right after these messages from our sponsors, so please be patient and don't go away.

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