June 16 LD 24, Day 6: Good Works, The
Fruit of Justification
by Prof Herman Hanko
Read: Romans 6
Never,
never ought we to make our good works the ground or reason for our
justification. Many may do that very thing, as they have done it
throughout the new dispensation. But to make our works in any way a
contributing factor to our salvation is to lose our salvation.
Put yourself once as
standing before the judgment seat of Christ at the end of the world, where
Christ sits blazing with all the holiness of God Himself, in dazzling garments of
white. It is your turn to be judged as worthy or unworthy of heaven. You are
commanded to produce your works, which would then
be judged to determine whether you ought to go to heaven or hell.
You pull a book from
your pocket and say to Christ: On February 10, 1989 I prayed three times
during the day. On June 5, 1997, I took care of one of the sick members of my
church. On November 2000, I brought a cake over to a friend in the block next
to ours. Do you think that Christ will order the angels to escort you into
heaven?
Our best works are
corrupted and polluted by sin. What then can we say about the myriads of our
other works? We will, I am sure, try to hide our best works behind our backs so
that Christ cannot see them.
But what about these
good works? We surely do them. And we are admonished in Scripture, again and
again, to do them. We do pray. We do sing praise to God. We do visit the sick.
We do hate sin and struggle to walk in obedience.
Yes, we do these things,
and many more. But we do them not to be justified because we do them; we do
them because we are already justified. They are the fruits of justification,
not the grounds.
Consider a prisoner who
is put in prison for the crime of theft. He is sentenced to prison for he is
guilty. So the sinner is sentenced to the prison of spiritual depravity and
death because of his sin.
But someone pays the
debt for the thief. He is then innocent of his crime. Can a just judge,
nevertheless, keep him in prison for that crime? No, he must let the prisoner
go free. So, Christ paid our debt, and we are justified; that is, we are
declared by the Judge of all the earth to be innocent.
Can God then keep us in
the prison of depravity and death? No! He who has
justified us, now delivers us from the slavery of sin and death. That is, He
sanctifies us. We are made holy as He is holy.
It takes us a long time
to be made holy; all our life. Our souls are made holy when we die, and our bodies in the resurrection from the dead.
But we are holy in
principle. And because we are holy in principle, we do good works. They too are
of God.