Devotional 65: The Recipients of Justification: Those Effectually Called and Believing

The Confession Read

God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified; and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God's fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 11, Section 5

Introduction

He could not lift his eyes to heaven. The man who had walked with God for decades, who had known seasons of sweet communion such as few ever taste, now sat in silence while the afternoon light faded from the room and the shadows gathered like accusers round his chair. A single sin, a word spoken in anger, a compromise embraced in weariness, a secret indulgence he thought long since mortified, opened a fissure between his soul and his Saviour. He was still a believer. He knew that. He could no more cease to believe than a child could cease to be his father's son. But the sweetness was gone. The sense of God's smile had withdrawn. When he opened his Bible, the words lay flat upon the page like dead leaves. When he knelt to pray, the ceiling seemed to press down upon him, and his petitions fell back into his own heart unanswered. What had happened? Had he lost his justification? Had the verdict of the heavenly court been reversed? This is the question that Section 5 of our Confession answers with a pastoral tenderness that can only have been forged in the furnace of real souls and real struggles. The Westminster Divines were not academics constructing a tidy theological system in the quiet of a library. They were shepherds. They had sat with broken saints. They had heard the sobs of men and women who feared that their post-conversion sins had undone everything Christ had done for them. And they had also encountered the opposite error, professing Christians who treated sin in the believer's life as a trifling matter, invoking grace as a license for carelessness. Against both errors, the Divines set down a doctrine of careful balance: the justified sinner is secure forever, yet his sin has real and painful consequences in his relationship with his heavenly Father, and those consequences can only be remedied through humble, believing repentance. This chapter has traced a path from the ground of justification in Christ's righteousness, to faith as its alone instrument, to the full satisfaction rendered to divine justice, to the eternal decree brought to pass in time by the Spirit. But now a new question presses upon us: once justified, what happens when the justified sinner sins again? Does each new sin require a new justification?

Scripture Foundation

Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the very prayer he taught his disciples to pray, embedded a petition that makes no sense unless justified people continue to need forgiveness. Matthew 6:12 "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." The Greek word for debts here is opheilēmata, what is owed, a moral obligation unmet, a duty left undone. It is the language of the ledger, the account book, the balance that remains. And Jesus places this petition not on the lips of the unregenerate world but on the lips of his own disciples, those who had left everything to follow him, those to whom he had already said, "Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven." These men were not strangers to grace. They were the friends of the Bridegroom. Yet the Bridegroom taught them to pray daily for forgiveness. If justification rendered all subsequent forgiveness unnecessary, the Lord's Prayer would contain a superfluous petition. But our Lord does not deal in superfluities. The justified sinner accumulates fresh debts daily, not debts that reverse his justification, for the ground of his standing is Christ's righteousness, but debts that cloud his communion and require the Father's restoring mercy. The petition is not "justify us again" but "forgive us," aphes hēmin from aphiēmi, to send away, to release. The same word Jesus used to the paralytic: "Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee." Daily sins require daily sending-away, daily application of the blood that was shed once for all. Now turn to the Apostle John, who addresses this matter plainly in his first epistle. 1 John 1:7-9 "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." John writes to believers, those who have fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And yet he insists, with the present tense, that the blood of Jesus continues to cleanse them. The Greek verb katharizei is present active indicative: it denotes ongoing, continuous action. The fountain filled with blood is not a cistern that was emptied once and now stands dry. It flows still. The believer, walking in the light, experiences the continual sprinkling of that blood upon his conscience. But there is a condition. "If we confess our sins." The word homologōmen, from homou (together) and legō (to speak), means to say the same thing about our sin that God says about it, to abandon all excuses and stand before the Lord with the same verdict on our lips that is written in his book. And when we do this, God is "faithful and just to forgive." Faithful because he has promised. Just because Christ has already paid. The Father's forgiveness of his children is not arbitrary leniency. It is strict justice. The debt has been paid; to demand payment again would be unjust. John continues with a pastoral care that reaches into the very heart of our fears. 1 John 2:1-2 "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." The address "my little children" breathes tenderness. This is not the voice of a distant theologian but of an aged pastor who has seen Christians stumble and has helped them rise. John's purpose is holiness: "that ye sin not." The gospel never makes sin safe. But the gospel does make a provision for sin, not a provision that excuses it, but a provision that covers it. "If any man sin" and John knows that every man who reads his letter will, at some point, sin, "we have an advocate with the Father." The word paraklētos is rich with legal connotation: one called alongside to plead a case, a defence attorney who stands before the bar of justice on behalf of the accused. And who is this Advocate? Not a mere creature, not an angel, not a saint whose merits must supplement our own. It is "Jesus Christ the righteous," the very One whose righteousness has already been imputed to us, the very One whose blood has already satisfied the Father's justice. Our Advocate does not plead our innocence, for we are guilty. He pleads his own propitiation. He points to his wounds. He presents his finished work. And the Father, who delights in his Son, always receives his Son's plea. From the apostolic witness we turn now to the Old Testament, where we find the same reality portrayed in vivid, personal colours in the life of David. Psalm 32:1-5 "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." This is the testimony of a justified man. David knew the Lord. He had been anointed king, filled with the Spirit, favoured with covenant promises that stretched to a throne that would never end. And yet he sinned, grievously and shamefully, with adultery and murder and months of hardened cover-up. Was David un-justified during that year of unconfessed sin? The Confession's answer is clear: he could never fall from the state of justification. But look at what he did lose. "My bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long." The Hebrew word for roaring, she'agah, is the sound of a lion in distress, a groaning too deep for words. "Thy hand was heavy upon me," the hand that had once protected him, guided him, and delivered him from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear, now pressed down upon him like a weight he could not shift. Not the hand of a judge crushing a criminal, but the hand of a father chastening a son. "My moisture was turned into the drought of summer," the lashad, the vital sap of life, withered as a Palestinian wadi dries to dust under the August sun. And then the turning point: "I acknowledged my sin unto thee." The Hebrew verb yada in the hiphil stem means to make known, to declare openly. The silence was broken. The cover-up was abandoned. "And thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." The verb here is nasa, to lift up, to bear away. The same word used of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, upon whose head the sins of Israel were confessed and who bore them away into the wilderness, never to return. In the moment of honest confession, David experienced what he had always possessed positionally, the forgiveness of sins. The subjective sweetness of pardon was restored to his soul, because the objective ground of pardon had never been removed. In Psalm 51, the companion psalm, we hear the cry of the restored sinner: "Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation." Not "Restore unto me thy salvation," as though it were lost. David never prays, "Create in me a clean heart and justify me afresh." He prays for the joy, the felt delight, the conscious awareness, the experiential sweetness, of a salvation that remains secure. What had fled was not the reality of grace but the comfort of grace. What had withdrawn was not the Father's eternal love but the light of his countenance. The prophet Nathan, confronting David, had declared: 2 Samuel 12:13 "The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die." The Hebrew he'evir means to cause to pass over, to remove entirely. Before David had penned Psalm 51, before he had shed a single tear, the verdict of the divine court was pronounced. The sin that deserved death was put away. And yet David still needed to confess it, to weep over it, to feel the hand lifted and the joy restored. The objective fact and the subjective experience, though inseparable in the economy of grace, are not identical in the experience of the saint. One further Old Testament passage illuminates the fatherly character of God's dealings with his sinning children. Psalm 89:30-33 "If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; if they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments; then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes. Nevertheless my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail." Here is the charter of the chastened saint. The Lord contemplates the worst-case scenario, covenant children who forsake his law, break his statutes, and abandon his commandments. And what is his response? Not disinheritance. Not a reversal of adoption. Not a return to wrath. The response is the rod and stripes, measured, purposeful, loving chastisement. The Hebrew shevet, rod, was the shepherd's instrument, not the executioner's axe. And then the glorious "Nevertheless." Ve'chasdi, "but my hesed," my covenant lovingkindness, "will I not utterly take from him." The word hesed is the deep Old Testament word for covenant faithfulness, the love that binds God to his people not because of what they are but because of who he is. The God who justified you knew every sin you would commit after your justification, and he justified you anyway. The Apostle to the Hebrews brings these threads together in a single, majestic statement: Hebrews 10:14 "For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." The Greek teteleiōken, "he hath perfected," is in the perfect tense, a completed action with abiding results. And the word eis to diēnekes, "for ever," means continuously, perpetually, without interruption. The perfection spoken of here is not moral perfection in our conduct but forensic perfection in our standing. Christ's one offering has done something that no repetition of Mass, no penance, no purgatory, no new act of faith can add to or take away. It has perfected the believer's standing before God, and that perfection is perpetual. And the very same book of Hebrews that declares the believer perfected forever also insists that the believer may experience the painful chastening of his heavenly Father. This is the pastoral genius of the Confession's balance. Hebrews 12:5-6 "My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." The Greek word paideia encompasses the whole process of child-training: instruction, correction, discipline. It is what a loving father does for a son he intends to inherit everything. Chastening is not the mark of a rejected child but the proof of an accepted one. The father who sees his son running toward a precipice does not shrug. He runs after him. He seizes him. He may even strike him. The blow is love; the pain is grace; the bruises are the fingerprints of a Father who would rather see his child weep in time than perish in eternity.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly took up their pens to draft this section, they were addressing a question that arises in every generation of the church: what is the status of sin in the life of the justified? The question is not theoretical. It presses itself upon the conscience of every honest Christian who, having believed the gospel and tasted the grace of God, finds to his dismay that the old nature has not been annihilated. The flesh still lusts against the Spirit. The tongue still speaks words it ought not. The heart still harbours thoughts it should have crucified. And the question comes with piercing urgency: if I am truly justified, why do I still sin like this? And when I do sin, what becomes of my standing before God? To answer this question properly, the Divines drew a distinction that lies at the heart of all sound pastoral theology: the distinction between the believer's judicial standing and his filial experience, between the verdict of the heavenly court and the smile of the heavenly Father. These are not two separate realities as though God were divided against himself. But they are distinguishable aspects of the one relationship between the justified sinner and the God who has both declared him righteous and adopted him as a son. The opening phrase, "God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified," is striking in what it implies. It assumes that the justified will continue to sin and will continue to need forgiveness. The Confession nowhere teaches sinless perfection in this life. The purest saint on earth carries within him a principle of remaining corruption that will not be fully eradicated until glorification. And because he continues to sin, he continues to need the ongoing application of Christ's once-for-all sacrifice to his daily defilements. This is what our Lord taught in the upper room when, after washing the disciples' feet, he said to Peter, "He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit." The bath of regeneration is once for all; the foot-washing of daily forgiveness is an ongoing necessity, for the pilgrim's feet grow dusty on the road to Zion. The second clause is the anchor of assurance: "although they can never fall from the state of justification." Here the Divines speak with the absolute confidence of men who have understood that justification is not grounded on the believer's performance but on Christ's righteousness. If the ground of justification were anything in us, our faith, our obedience, our love, our perseverance, then it would be only as stable as we are. And we are not stable. We are dust. We are grass. We are a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. But the ground of justification is not in us. It is in Christ. It is his obedience counted as ours. It is his satisfaction accepted for us. It is his righteousness imputed to us. And because Christ cannot fall, because Christ's righteousness cannot be diminished, because Christ's satisfaction cannot be undone, the state of justification is irrevocable. This is not a license to sin. The man who says, "Since I cannot fall from justification, I may sin freely," has never understood what justification is. Justification unites the sinner to Christ, and union with Christ brings not only the imputation of his righteousness but the impartation of his Spirit, the Spirit of holiness who wages war against the flesh. A man content to live in sin has no evidence that he has ever been united to Christ. The Confession's assertion of final security is not a pillow for the sleepy professor but a life-raft for the trembling saint. But the Confession does not stop with security. It immediately balances it with sobering pastoral realism: "yet they may by their sins fall under God's fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance." This is the neglected half of the doctrine. The believer's security is absolute, but his experience of that security is not automatic. A father whose son has disobeyed does not cease to be a father. The relationship is unaltered. But the fellowship is broken. The son cannot look his father in the eye. The easy conversation that once flowed between them is replaced by awkward silence. The son may still sit at the table, but the food has lost its savour. He may still live in the house, but the house has become a prison of his own making. This is not judicial wrath, that was exhausted at the cross. It is fatherly displeasure, the necessary response of holy love to the sin of a beloved child. The language of "the light of his countenance" is drawn from the Old Testament Aaronic blessing: "The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee." The shining face of God is the experiential knowledge of his favour, the sense of his smile, the inward testimony of the Spirit that we are his and he is ours. This light can be obscured, not extinguished, for it burns in the unchanging heart of God, but hidden from the believer's sight by the clouds of unconfessed sin. When David sinned, the light did not go out; but David could no longer see it. The sun still shone behind the storm clouds, but the storm clouds were real, and the darkness they cast was genuinely painful. The remedy the Confession prescribes is precise and comprehensive. Four steps mark the path of restoration: humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance. Notice the order. Humbling comes first, the breaking of pride, the acknowledgment that we are not what we ought to be, the refusal to justify what God condemns. Then confession, speaking the truth about our sin to the One who already knows it fully. Then the begging of pardon, not demanding forgiveness as a right but pleading for it as a mercy, relying on the advocacy of Christ and the promises of the covenant. And finally, the renewal of faith and repentance, not a first-time believing and turning, but a fresh exercise of the same graces that first united us to Christ, a rekindling of the flame that has burned low. All of this is the work of the Spirit. The believer does not restore himself. He does not manufacture humility by sheer force of will. He does not produce repentance from the exhausted soil of his own heart. But the Spirit, who first gave faith and repentance, renews these graces in the proper season. The bruised reed he will not break; the smoking flax he will not quench. The very desire to return to God is evidence that God has not abandoned you. The tear of penitence is the Spirit's gift, not the flesh's achievement.

Theological Depth

The Geneva reformer John Calvin, reflecting on the Lord's Prayer in his Institutes, observed that the petition for daily forgiveness is given to the Church "not only for the beginning of the day, but for the whole course of our life." Calvin was addressing those who thought that baptism washed away all past sins so completely that post-baptismal sin required a whole new sacrament of penance. His answer was that the gospel itself provides the ongoing remedy: not a new sacrifice, but a fresh application of the one sacrifice; not a novel absolution, but a believing plea upon the absolution already pronounced. Calvin recognized that the believer's entire pilgrimage is lived under the shelter of continual pardon. The justified man does not graduate beyond the need for forgiveness. He grows deeper into the knowledge of his need and deeper into the wonder that forgiveness never runs dry. The Puritan Thomas Manton, whose sermons on Psalm 119 run to three thick volumes of searching, practical divinity, addressed this section's themes with his characteristic wisdom. In his exposition of the petition "forgive us our debts," Manton noted that the child of God sins against more light than the unregenerate man. The unbeliever sins in darkness; the believer sins with the lamp of God's Word shining upon his path. This makes the believer's sin, in one sense, more heinous, for greater privilege brings greater responsibility. Yet Manton also observed that the believer's sin, though more aggravated, finds a readier pardon because the believer has an interest in the covenant and an Advocate with the Father. The same light that exposes the sin also reveals the remedy. Manton urged his hearers to make short work of sin, not to let the sun go down upon an unconfessed transgression, not to allow the wound to fester through delay. "A bone out of joint," he wrote, "is sooner set at first than when it hath lain long." Richard Sibbes, that mellifluous physician of the soul whom his contemporaries called "the sweet dropper" for the honeyed comfort of his preaching, applied the balm of this section to those whose post-conversion falls had left them doubting their very salvation. In The Bruised Reed, Sibbes addressed the case of the believer who sins grievously and then concludes that he was never truly converted in the first place. Sibbes answered that the evidence of true grace is not the absence of falls but the response to them. A dead man feels nothing when he falls; a living man feels the pain. The hypocrite brushes off his sin and carries on as though nothing had happened; the true believer is stopped in his tracks, his conscience aflame, his soul disquieted within him. The very grief you feel over your sin, Sibbes taught, is proof that the Spirit has not abandoned you. You would not mourn your hardness of heart unless there remained some softness still. You would not lament your distance from God unless some homing instinct still pulled you toward him. "There is more grace in a drooping Christian," Sibbes wrote, "than in a flourishing hypocrite." John Murray, the Scottish-born theologian of Westminster Seminary, contributed a careful analysis of the distinction between God's judicial and paternal displeasure. In his volume Redemption Accomplished and Applied, Murray insisted that the doctrine of perseverance does not mean that the believer's sins are inconsequential. The Father does not regard the sins of his children with indifference. His anger toward his children is not the anger of a judge toward a criminal, it is the anger of a father toward a son he loves too much to let run unchecked into destruction. Murray pointed to the manifold ways Scripture describes the Father's response to the sins of his children: rebuke, chastening, the hiding of his face, the withholding of conscious communion, temporal judgments. These are not incompatible with the Father's love; they are expressions of it. The father who does not discipline his son, Murray observed, hates his son, for discipline is the proof of sonship, not the revocation of it.

Puritan Application

First, distinguish carefully between your standing and your state. Your standing, your judicial acceptance before God, is grounded entirely on Christ's righteousness imputed to you and is as immutable as Christ himself. When you sin, your standing does not change, for it never depended on your performance. But your state, your felt communion with God, the sweetness of your walk with him, may fluctuate dramatically in response to your sin. If you think your standing fluctuates with your state, you will live in perpetual anxiety. If you think your state does not matter because your standing is secure, you will grow careless and grieve the Spirit. Hold both truths together: you are as secure as Christ is faithful, and your sin has real consequences in your relationship with your Father. Second, keep short accounts with God. The Confession assumes that the justified will continue to need daily forgiveness. Do not let sins accumulate like unpaid debts gathering compound interest. The Puritan practice of evening self-examination, reviewing the day before the Lord, confessing specific sins, and pleading the blood of Christ afresh, is not morbid introspection but the hygiene of the soul. A surgeon who operates on his own wound the moment it appears does less damage than one who waits for gangrene to set in. Deal with sin while it is fresh, before it hardens into habit and the light of God's countenance grows dim. Third, do not mistake fatherly chastening for judicial wrath. When the hand of God lies heavy upon you, when providences cross your will, when afflictions multiply, when spiritual comforts are withdrawn, do not conclude that God has ceased to love you or that you have fallen from your justification. Chastening is the mark of sonship, not the mark of rejection. The father who sees his son wandering toward the precipice does not let him go. Examine yourself: is there an unconfessed sin, a neglected duty, a secret idol that the Lord is seeking to expose? If so, humble yourself, confess it, and return. The rod is in your Father's hand, and your Father's hand is guided by your Father's heart. Whatever he does to you, he does for you. He would rather afflict your body than lose your soul, and the affliction that drives you back to the cross is worth more than the ease that lulls you into carnal security. Fourth, look to your Advocate, not to your performance. When you have fallen, and you will fall, the tempter will urge you to do one of two things: either minimize the sin, or despair because of it. Both are stratagems of the evil one. The gospel calls you to a third path: acknowledge the sin in all its ugliness, confess it without excuse, and then fix your eyes not on the sin but on the Saviour. You have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He does not plead your merits, you have none. He does not plead your repentance, it is imperfect. He does not plead your faith, it is weak and wavering. He pleads his own blood. He points to his own wounds. He presents his own righteousness. And the Father, who loves the Son with an infinite love, will never refuse the Son's plea. Your confidence is not in the quality of your confession but in the competence of your Advocate. Fifth, let the certainty of final perseverance fuel present holiness, not present carelessness. The doctrine that a justified person can never fall from the state of justification is not a doctrine designed to make men comfortable in their sins. It is a doctrine designed to make men confident in their Saviour, and that confidence is the root of true holiness. The man who believes he can lose his justification is driven by fear; the man who knows he cannot lose it is drawn by love. Which is the stronger motive? Fear may restrain the outward act for a season, but only love transforms the inward heart. When you know that Christ has perfected you forever, that your sins, past, present, and future, are covered by his blood, that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, then the sweet constraint of gratitude takes hold of your soul. You do not obey to be accepted; you obey because you are accepted. You do not pursue holiness to keep your justification; you pursue holiness because your justification is unshakeable, and you long to live in a manner worthy of the gospel that has saved you.

Prayer

O most merciful Father, whose compassions fail not and whose mercies are new every morning, we come before thee as children who have grieved thy heart and brought dishonour upon thy name. We confess that even as justified ones, adopted into thy family through the blood of thy dear Son, we have sinned against the light thou hast given us. Our thoughts have wandered from thee; our words have been idle and unprofitable; our deeds have fallen short of the gratitude we owe thee for so great a salvation. We have not loved thee with all our heart and soul and mind and strength; we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves; we have done those things we ought not to have done and left undone those things we ought to have done. And there is no health in us. But we bless thee, O Lord, that our standing before thee rests not on the shifting sand of our own righteousness but on the solid rock of Christ's. He is our Advocate, pleading his own propitiation for the sins we have this day committed. He is our Righteousness, whose perfect obedience is counted as ours. He is our Peace, who has broken down the wall of enmity and brought us nigh by his blood. Restore unto us, we pray, the joy of thy salvation. Lift up the light of thy countenance upon us, which our sins have obscured, and cause thy face to shine once more upon thy servants. Give us the grace of true humility, that we may own our transgressions without excuse and without evasion. Grant us the Spirit of confession, that we may speak the same verdict upon our sin that thou hast spoken in thy Word. Renew our faith, that we may rest afresh upon Christ alone for our acceptance with thee. Renew our repentance, that we may turn from every false way with genuine grief and sincere resolution. Chasten us as thou seest needful, O Father, we would rather be afflicted with thy presence than prosper without it. Only let not thy lovingkindness depart from us, nor suffer thy faithfulness to fail. Thy covenant is our only plea; Christ's blood is our only hope; thy promises are our only confidence. Bring us at last to that land where faith shall be sight and hope shall be fruition, where sin shall vex us no more and the light of thy countenance shall never be hidden. Until that day, keep us in the hollow of thy hand, and grant that we may finish our course with joy. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Amen.