Devotional 62: The Instrument of Justification: Faith Alone, Yet Not Alone

The Confession Read

Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification: yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 11, Section 2

Introduction

Imagine a man standing at the mouth of a river. Behind him lies a desert he has crossed, parched and exhausted behind him: the desert of his own sin, the wasteland of a conscience that accuses without ceasing. Before him flows living water. He knows, because he has been told, that one draught of this water will save his life. But how shall he drink? His hands are empty. He has no vessel, no cup, no coin to purchase one. He must simply bend his knee, lower his face to the stream, and receive. The drinking saves him; the drinking is all he does. Yet no one would call that drinking a work that earns the water. It is the hand of the soul, stretched out to take what is freely given. This is the picture our Confession paints of justifying faith. Faith is the alone instrument of justification: the empty hand, the open mouth, the soul's receptive act that adds nothing to Christ's finished work but receives everything from it. And yet the Divines add a clause that has preserved countless souls from shipwreck: this faith, though alone in the work of justifying, is never alone in the person justified. It lives. It breathes. It works. It loves. A faith that does not is not faith at all: it is a corpse dressed in Christian vocabulary, and corpses cannot receive anything. In Section 1 of this chapter, the Divines established the ground of our justification: the imputation of Christ's righteousness, received by faith — faith that is itself the gift of God. But having laid that foundation, they immediately anticipate an objection that every faithful pastor has heard from anxious souls and every unfaithful professor has twisted to his ruin. If faith alone justifies, what becomes of love? What becomes of holiness? What becomes of the transformed life that Scripture everywhere demands of those who name the name of Christ? The Divines give us Section 2 to answer these questions. In a single sentence, they guard the doctrine of free justification against two mortal enemies that have threatened it from opposite sides. On the one hand stands Rome, teaching that faith must be formed by love — fides caritate formata — before it can justify, making love a co-instrument and justification a process rather than a verdict. On the other hand stands the antinomian, who severs faith from holiness, claiming justification while despising the law, turning grace into license. Against both, the Confession raises its clear and steady voice: faith alone justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, sets down the great declaration of free justification with a clarity that still speaks to the conscience today. "Therefore we conclude," he writes, "that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law" (Romans 3:28). The Greek verb dikaiousthai, to be justified, is forensic. It belongs to the law court. It does not mean to be made inwardly righteous, as though justification were a slow medicinal process of moral improvement. It means to be declared righteous, to receive the verdict of the divine Judge in one's favor, solely on the ground of Another's righteousness. And the instrument by which this verdict is received is pistei, by faith, and faith alone. When Paul adds "without the deeds of the law" (choris ergon nomou), he is not speaking of ceremonial works only, as some have tried to argue. He is speaking of works of every kind that the law requires. The contrast is absolute: faith, not works of law. The instrument is singular. Nothing else may touch the sacred work of uniting the soul to the righteousness of Christ. But Paul does not leave the matter there, and neither may we. In the same epistle, he speaks of "the obedience of faith" (Romans 1:5), and when he summarizes the entire gospel in a phrase, he calls it "faith which worketh by love." The verse is Galatians 5:6, and it is the precise text the Divines had in mind when they wrote that saving faith "is no dead faith, but worketh by love." Paul writes, "For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love" (pistis di' agapēs energoumenē). The Greek participle energoumenē carries full weight. It can be taken as a middle voice: faith energizing itself through love, expressing its own living nature in works of charity toward God and neighbor. Faith is not a dormant principle, a mere intellectual assent that leaves the soul unchanged. It is dynamic, active, alive. It works. And its characteristic work is love. This is not a second instrument of justification alongside faith, as though Paul had suddenly abandoned everything he wrote in Romans. Rather, it is the necessary outflow, the visible breath, of a faith that is truly alive. Where there is no love, there is no living faith. And where there is no living faith, there has been no justification. If Paul emphasizes the instrument, James emphasizes the evidence. His epistle has troubled many a reader who has heard only half the Reformation message, and it is precisely to such readers that our Confession speaks. "What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?" (James 2:14). The question is not whether faith justifies. Paul has already settled that. The question is what kind of faith justifies. James uses a word that Paul never quite deploys with the same force: nekra, dead. "Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2:17). A dead faith is a corpse in the pew. It may have the outward shape of orthodoxy. It may recite the creed, attend the ordinances, argue theology with precision. But it does not love. It does not give. It does not visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. It remains unstirred by the misery of the world and the glory of God alike. Such a faith, James insists, is the faith of demons, who believe that God is one, and tremble, but are not saved (James 2:19). There is no contradiction between Paul and James, no tension that needs to be resolved by pitting apostle against apostle. Paul looks at the root; James looks at the fruit. Paul asks what instrument lays hold of Christ's righteousness; James asks what evidence demonstrates that the laying hold was genuine. Paul is answering the man who wants to add works to faith for justification; James is answering the man who wants to subtract works from faith entirely. The Divines answer both in a single sentence. Faith alone justifies. The faith that justifies is never alone. The fourth text that anchors this doctrine comes from Paul again, and it is a concentrated statement of justification by faith. "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Romans 4:5). The contrast could not be more stark: "him that worketh not" (tō de mē ergazomenō), the one who does not work, who brings nothing, who contributes no merit, who has no righteousness of his own to offer. He simply believes. And his faith is logizetai, counted, imputed, reckoned, as righteousness. Not because faith itself is a righteous work, a substitute obedience that God accepts instead of perfect law-keeping. The Divines had already excluded that error in Section 1 of this chapter, where they insist that God justifies "not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them as their righteousness." Faith is not the ground of justification. Christ's righteousness is the ground. Faith is the instrument: the hand that receives what Another has purchased.

What the Divines Meant

The men who gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber had seen what happens when the doctrine of justification is distorted on either side. They had read the Tridentine decrees, in which the Council of Trent pronounced its anathema upon anyone who taught that justifying faith is "confidence in the divine mercy remitting sins for Christ's sake" — that is, upon the gospel itself. Rome had formalized its position: faith justifies only when it is fides formata, faith formed by love, faith that has received the infused grace that makes the soul inherently righteous. Justification, in the Roman system, is not a declaration but a process, a progressive transformation by which the sinner becomes actually, intrinsically just. And on the day of judgment, God does not look to an alien righteousness reckoned to the believer's account; He looks to the righteousness that has been wrought in the believer through sacramental grace and meritorious cooperation. The Westminster Divines understood exactly what was at stake. If faith must be formed by love before it can justify, then justification is no longer by faith alone. Love has been smuggled in as a co-instrument, a co-condition, something in the believer that contributes to the ground of his acceptance. And if anything in the believer contributes to the ground of acceptance, then grace is no longer grace. The sinner can never have peace, because he can never know whether his love is sufficiently formed, his cooperation sufficiently earnest, his infused righteousness sufficiently complete. The whole system collapses back into the very uncertainty from which Luther fled into the arms of a gracious God. Yet the Divines were equally aware of a danger from the opposite direction, not from Rome but from within the Protestant camp itself. There were those in England who, having grasped the truth of free justification, concluded that the moral law had no claim upon the justified believer. If works contribute nothing to justification, they reasoned, then works are irrelevant. The believer may sin freely, because grace abounds. This was the antinomian error, and it had found advocates in the decades leading up to the Assembly. The Confession's response is clear: faith is the alone instrument, yes, but it is "not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces." The justification of the sinner does not leave the sinner as he was. The same Spirit who unites the soul to Christ by faith also begins the work of sanctification, implanting love, hope, humility, repentance, patience, and every other grace of the new creation. These graces do not justify. They never could. But where justification has truly occurred, they are invariably present, just as warmth is invariably present where there is fire. The Divines drew here upon the pastoral wisdom of the Puritan movement that had shaped so many of them. They knew that the doctrine of justification by faith alone, preached without this necessary qualification, could produce two kinds of spiritual ruin. It could produce the presumptuous sinner, who takes comfort in a faith that has never changed him, a faith that is merely intellectual assent to propositions about Christ. The dead faith of which James wrote. And it could produce the terrified saint, who sees the remaining corruption in his own heart and concludes that because his love is cold, his obedience spotty, and his repentance shallow, he cannot have true faith and therefore cannot be justified. To the first, the Confession says: your faith is dead. It does not work by love. You have no reason to think yourself justified. To the second, the Confession says: you are looking at your graces as though they were the ground of your standing with God, when the ground is Christ alone. Your graces are the evidence, not the instrument. Look to Christ first; then, as you find your heart warmed toward Him in even the feeblest love, take it as the Spirit's witness that your faith is genuine. One further phrase demands attention: "the alone instrument." The Divines chose their word with care. An instrument is not the efficient cause, nor the material cause, nor the ground. A workman uses an instrument; the instrument does not supply the power or the material. So faith does not supply the righteousness. It does not produce it. It does not merit it. It simply receives it. There was a third error in the air, less discussed than Rome or antinomianism but equally destructive in its own way. The Socinians, who denied the deity of Christ and the substitutionary nature of His atonement, taught that faith itself, the act of believing, was accepted by God as the believer's righteousness. On this view, God did not impute Christ's perfect righteousness to the sinner; rather, He graciously accepted the sinner's imperfect faith as though it were righteousness. This was a subtler corruption of the gospel than Rome's, for it used the language of faith while emptying it of its biblical meaning. The Divines answered it in Section 1 by insisting that God justifies "not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them as their righteousness." And they answer it again here by defining faith precisely as an instrument, not a substitute righteousness. An instrument is not the thing received; it is the means by which the thing is received. Faith is the hand; Christ's righteousness is the treasure placed in the hand. To confuse the two is to lose both. The Reformers often used the image of the hand. A beggar's hand contributes nothing to the gift it receives. The hand does not earn the coin placed in it. It does not make the coin more valuable. It does not add to the giver's treasury. It is merely the organ of reception. So faith is the empty hand stretched out to receive Christ and all His benefits. But a living hand is warm and moves and works. A dead hand, cold, stiff, immobile, can receive nothing. The hand that receives Christ is a hand that has been quickened by the Spirit, and it will inevitably, in the days and years that follow, reach out in love toward God and neighbor.

Theological Depth

Calvin addresses this matter with clarity. In the Institutes, having established that we are justified by faith alone because faith unites us to Christ and His righteousness, he turns to answer those who charge the Reformation with loosening the bonds of morality. "We deny that good works have any share in justification," Calvin writes, "but we claim full authority for them in the lives of the righteous." He then uses an image: the sun does not borrow its brightness from the rays it casts, but it is never without its rays. So Christ's righteousness, received by faith, does not depend on the good works it produces, yet it is never without them. Where the sun of righteousness rises, light follows. Always. Not as the cause of rising, but as the necessary consequence. Calvin goes further, addressing the exact distinction the Confession makes. "It is one thing to inquire whether faith alone justifies," he writes, "and another whether justifying faith is alone. The first we affirm; the second we deny." This is Calvin at his most precise, balanced, pastorally acute. He understood that the Roman Catholic polemic against sola fide drew much of its emotional force from the antinomian abuses that had attended some strains of the Reformation. But he refused to abandon the biblical doctrine to answer those abuses. Instead, he insisted that the doctrine itself, rightly understood, provides a powerful motive for holiness. The justified sinner does not obey to be accepted; he obeys because he is accepted. Gratitude, not anxiety, becomes the wellspring of obedience. And gratitude is a far sweeter and more powerful motive than fear could ever be. Thomas Watson, in his Body of Divinity, takes up the pastoral implications. He notes that justifying faith is a "grace that lives in a bleeding heart." It is always accompanied by repentance, because the faith that sees Christ's righteousness sees simultaneously the depth of one's own unrighteousness. "The eye of faith and the eye of tears are both fixed on the same object," Watson writes. "Faith looks on Christ as a Saviour; repentance looks on Christ as one pierced." He warns against what he calls "the painted fire of presumption," a confidence that Christ has saved while the heart remains cold toward Christ. True faith, Watson insists, is "a living principle that diffuseth life into all the affections." It makes the soul love what it once despised and despise what it once loved. A man who claims to have faith but continues in sin without struggle, without grief, without turning again and again to the throne of grace for pardon and power, is a man whose faith exists only in his imagination. The Genevan Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology served as the standard Reformed textbook for generations, provides a rigorous analysis of the instrumentality of faith. Turretin distinguishes three things that must never be confused: the meritorious cause of justification (Christ's righteousness alone), the instrumental cause on God's side (the Word and sacraments, which offer Christ to the sinner), and the instrumental cause on man's side (faith, which receives Christ as He is offered). Faith, in Turretin's careful formulation, is not the causa meritoria; it merits nothing. It is not the causa materialis; it supplies no righteousness of its own. It is purely organon leptikon, a receiving instrument, the hand of the soul stretched out to lay hold of Christ. And precisely because it is a receiving instrument rather than a working instrument, it excludes all boasting. The beggar does not boast in his hand; he boasts in the gift his hand has received. Turretin also addresses the Roman Catholic objection with scholastic precision. The Roman doctors argued that if faith alone justifies, then love is not necessary to salvation, an absurd conclusion. Turretin replies that love is indeed necessary to salvation, but not as an instrument of justification. It is necessary as a fruit of faith, as a companion of faith, as evidence that faith is genuine. But it is not the instrument. To confuse necessity of presence with instrumentality of function is a fundamental error. A man's limbs are necessary to his life; a man without limbs is either dead or gravely maimed. But a man does not eat with his limbs; he eats with his mouth. So love is necessary to the Christian life, but the Christian does not lay hold of Christ's righteousness with love; he lays hold of it with faith. The Puritan John Owen, one of the most able English theologians, wrote an entire treatise on the doctrine of justification. In it, he addresses the same question with his characteristic combination of exegetical rigor and spiritual penetration. Owen argues that the union between Christ and the believer is the foundational reality of salvation, and that faith is the bond of that union on the believer's side, the act by which the soul cleaves to Christ. But union with Christ, Owen insists, is a union with the whole Christ: Christ in His offices as Prophet, Priest, and King. The same faith that receives Christ as Priest for justification receives Him as King for sanctification. You cannot receive half a Christ. You cannot take His righteousness and refuse His rule. If the faith by which you profess to be justified does not also submit to Christ's kingly authority, does not also love His person, does not also long for His likeness, then it is not the faith that unites to Christ at all. It is a counterfeit, and it will not bear the weight of a soul on the day of judgment. William Ames, whose Marrow of Theology was studied by nearly every member of the Westminster Assembly, summarizes the matter: "Faith alone justifies, but the faith that justifies is not alone, just as the eye alone sees, but the eye that sees is not alone in the head." The eye does not need the ear or the hand to help it see. Seeing is the eye's work alone. But a living eye is never found in a head by itself; it is surrounded by all the other organs that together constitute a living body. So faith alone lays hold of Christ for righteousness. But living faith is always found in the company of love, hope, repentance, patience, and every other grace of the regenerate soul.

Puritan Application

The first application concerns the nature of your own faith. The Confession compels us to ask a question that is never comfortable but always necessary: Is my faith a living faith or a dead one? You profess to believe the gospel. You attend the ordinances. You would be offended if anyone questioned your Christianity. But does your faith work? Does it produce love — love for God that delights in His presence, love for His Word that draws you to it, love for His people that moves you to serve them? Does it produce holiness — a genuine, though imperfect, turning from sin, a real though often faltering obedience to Christ's commands? Be honest with yourself. The Confession is not teaching you to look to your works for the ground of your justification. The ground is Christ, and Christ alone. But it is teaching you to examine your works for the evidence of your justification. A tree is known by its fruit. If there is no fruit — no love, no repentance, no hunger for righteousness — then whatever you call your faith, Scripture calls it dead. And dead faith does not unite the soul to a living Christ. The second application brings comfort to the tender conscience. There are dear saints who read James and tremble. They see the poverty of their love, the weakness of their obedience, the coldness of their hearts, and they conclude that their faith must not be genuine. To such souls the Confession speaks with pastoral gentleness: the question is not whether your graces are perfect, but whether they are present. The faith that justifies is accompanied by all other saving graces — but those graces are in their infancy in this life. Your love flickers; it does not blaze. Your repentance is shallow; it does not reach the depths of your remaining corruption. Your obedience limps; it does not run. But a candle is still fire, however small, and the faintest pulse is still life, however weak. If you mourn your lack of love, that mourning itself is evidence of a living faith. Dead faith does not mourn. Dead faith is content with its own condition. If you find in your heart a sincere longing to love Christ more, to obey Him better, to walk more closely with Him — then take comfort. These are not the motions of a corpse. The third application warns against a subtle error that has shipwrecked many a profession. There are those who, having rightly understood that faith alone justifies, have come to treat faith as though it were a work of their own — something they produced by a sufficient effort of will or a correct intellectual decision. But the Confession's teaching guards against this. In Section 1, the Divines had already stated that faith itself "is the gift of God." The faith that justifies is not a native capacity of fallen man. It is the creation of the Holy Spirit in the soul, wrought through the hearing of the Word. You did not generate your own faith any more than Lazarus generated his own resurrection. If you have believed, it is because God gave you the gift of faith. This should produce profound humility, not pride. The believer has nothing to boast of — not even his faith. Everything, from first to last, is of grace. The fourth application addresses the relationship between faith and assurance. Many believers spend years in spiritual darkness because they are looking for assurance in the wrong place. They examine their love and find it wanting. They examine their obedience and find it defective. And because their graces do not satisfy them, they conclude they cannot be justified. But the Confession teaches us to distinguish between the instrument of justification and the evidence of justification. The instrument is faith, which looks away from self to Christ. The evidence is love and holiness, which testify that the faith was genuine. When you need assurance, look first to Christ — to the objective reality of His finished work, to the promise of the gospel that all who believe are justified. Then, and only then, look to your life for the confirming evidence that your faith is real. If you reverse the order — if you look to your works first, trying to find enough holiness to feel worthy of looking to Christ — you will never find peace. Christ receives sinners, not the righteous. Come to Him as a sinner, and you will find works enough in Him. The fifth and final application concerns the public profession of the faith. The Confession teaches that saving faith is never alone — it is always accompanied by all other saving graces, and it works by love. This means that the Christian life is not a private, invisible affair. Faith that works by love will be seen. It will be seen in how you treat your family. It will be seen in how you conduct your business. It will be seen in how you respond to those who wrong you. It will be seen in the generosity of your giving, the warmth of your hospitality, the patience of your bearing under affliction. A hidden faith that produces no visible love is a contradiction in terms. This does not mean that every act of love must be publicized — our Lord warned against doing alms to be seen of men. But it does mean that a genuine faith cannot be hidden any more than a city set on a hill can be hidden. If no one who knows you would describe you as a person marked by love — love for God, love for His people, love for the lost — then let the silence of your life speak to you as a warning. Saving faith works by love, and a faith that does not work is not saving faith.

Prayer

O most gracious and merciful God, who dost justify the ungodly through faith in Thy Son Jesus Christ, we come before Thee with hearts that are humbled and mouths that are stopped. We have no righteousness of our own to plead, no works to offer that could satisfy the demands of Thy holy law. All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and our very best deeds are stained with the corruption that yet remains within us. We confess that if Thou shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But we bless Thee that Thou hast provided a righteousness that is not our own — the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Thy dear Son, who loved us and gave Himself for us. We thank Thee for the gift of faith, that empty hand which Thou Thyself hast fashioned within us by Thy Spirit, whereby we receive and rest upon Christ alone for our acceptance with Thee. We acknowledge that this faith is not of ourselves; it is Thy gift, lest any man should boast. Grant us, we pray Thee, a faith that is living and not dead — a faith that worketh by love, that manifesteth itself in holiness, that produceth the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Suffer us not to rest in a vain profession, content with the form of godliness while denying the power thereof. But let our faith be ever accompanied by repentance for sin, love for Thy majesty, hope in Thy promises, and delight in Thy commandments. Make us zealous of good works, not as the ground of our justification, which is Christ alone, but as the grateful fruit of hearts that have been freely pardoned and freely received. And for any who hear these words and find in themselves no love, no hunger for righteousness, no sorrow for sin — O Lord, have mercy upon them. Awaken them from their deadly slumber. Show them that a faith that leaves the soul unchanged is not the faith of God's elect. Grant them repentance unto life, and that true and living faith which embraces Christ in all His offices — as Prophet to instruct, as Priest to atone, and as King to rule. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, who was delivered for our offences and raised again for our justification, and in whose perfect righteousness alone we rest. Amen.