How is this to be understood? Is it the Person of the Christ who takes us into partnership?
And, since God has no longer to reckon with our poverty, but can now depend upon the
376riches of Christ, does He therefore count us good and righteous? No, brethren, and again,
no! It is not so, and it may not so be presented; for then there would be no justification on
God’s part. You have a bill to collect from a man who failed in business, but who was accepted
as the partner of a rich banker, who discharged all his debts. Is there now the slightest mercy
or goodness on your part, when you indorse that man’s check? Doing otherwise, would you
not flatly contradict solid and tangible facts?
No, the Lord God does not act that way. Christ does not blot out the debt, and obtain
us treasure outside of God; nor does the ungodly enter, through faith, into partnership with
the wealthy Jesus independently of the Father; neither does God, being informed of these
transactions, justify the ungodly, who already had become a believer. For then there would
be no honor for God, nor praise for His grace; it would be not the ungodly, but, on the
contrary, a believer that was justified.
The matter is not transacted that way. It was the Lord God, first of all, who, without
respect of person, and hence without respect to faith in the person, according to His sovereign
power, chose a portion of the ungodly to eternal life; not as judge, but as Sovereign. But
being judge as well as Sovereign, and therefore incapable of violating the right, He who has
chosen, that is, the Triune God, has also created and given all that is necessary and required
for salvation; so that these elect persons, at the proper time and by appropriate means, may
receive and undergo the things by which in the end it will appear that all God’s doing was
majesty and all His decision just.
And, therefore, this whole ordering of the Covenant of Grace; and in this Covenant of
Grace the ordering of the Mediator; and in the Mediator that of all satisfaction, righteousness,
and holiness; and of that satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness, first the imputation, and
after that the gift.
Wherefore God does indeed declare the ungodly just before he believes, thathe may
believe, and not after he believes. This justifying act is the creative act of God, in which is
also deposited the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, and from which flow
also the imputation at a granting of all these to the ungodly. Wherefore there is in this act
of justification not the slightest mistake or untruth. He alone is declared just who, being
ungodly in himself, by this declaration is and becomes righteous in Christ.
377In this way alone it is possible fully to understand the doctrine of justification in all its
wealth and glory. Without this deep conception of it, justification is merely the pardon of
sin, after which, being relieved of the burden, we start out with newly animated zeal to work
for God. And this is nothing else than genuine, fatal Arminianism.
But, with this deeper insight, man acknowledges and confesses: “Such pardon of sin
does not avail me. For I know:
XXXIII. Certainty of Our Justification.