Justification
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
Definition
Justification is God’s forensic act of pardoning a sinner and declaring him righteous on the ground of Christ’s righteousness imputed to him, received through faith alone. It is a legal declaration, not an infusion that changes the sinner inwardly: imputing sin to Christ did not make him sinful, and imputing Christ’s righteousness to the believer does not make him subjectively righteous. What it gives is a legal standing, “a right to the full pardon of all his sins and a claim in justice to eternal life.”1 Justification is a single, complete, once-for-all act, unlike sanctification, which is a lifelong process.
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that those God effectually calls, he “freely justifies, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone… by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.” Their justification is “only of free grace, that both the exact justice and rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners.”2
Biblical Basis
Paul states the doctrine as bluntly as Scripture ever states anything: “to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Rom. 4:5). This justification produces real, objective consequences: peace with God (Rom. 5:1), access into grace (Rom. 5:2), and the hope of glory (Rom. 5:2). It rests on the double transaction the confession names — Christ’s righteousness reckoned to the believer, and the believer’s guilt reckoned to Christ: God made Christ, “who knew no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Because this righteousness is Christ’s own, received by faith rather than achieved by obedience, Paul can insist that justification and human merit are mutually exclusive: “if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Rom. 11:6).