Devotional 66: Justification Before and After the Cross: One Gospel in Both Testaments

The Confession Read

The justification of believers under the old testament was, in all these respects, one and the same with the justification of believers under the new testament.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 11, Section 6

Introduction

The old man stood beneath a sky so thick with stars it must have seemed to him the very floor of heaven had cracked open. He was childless, an alien in a land not yet his own, and the years behind him were far more numerous than the years ahead. Yet the voice that had first called him out of Ur spoke again, and the promise was staggering: "Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be." And then we read what must be the most quietly explosive sentence in the Pentateuch: "And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). There it is — justification by faith. Not at Calvary. Not at Pentecost. But two thousand years before the Word became flesh, in the breast of a wandering Aramean beneath the Mesopotamian night sky. Abram believed God, and God counted that faith as righteousness. Not Abram's obedience, which would falter. Not Abram's circumcision, which had not yet been commanded. Not Abram's covenant fidelity, which would buckle at least twice more. Faith alone — and God reckoned him righteous. This is the question that Section 6 of our Confession addresses with a brevity that belies its importance. Are we — New Testament believers who look back upon a finished cross and an empty tomb — justified in the same way as Abraham, Moses, David, and the faithful remnant who looked forward to a promised Redeemer through shadows and types? Or did they have a different gospel, a lesser justification, a salvation on layaway until Christ came to make the final payment? The Westminster Divines answer with one sentence, and that sentence is a battering ram against every system that would divide the people of God into two classes of the saved. One and the same. In all these respects. The substance of justification does not change from the first promise in Eden to the last trumpet on the final day.

Scripture Foundation

The entire argument of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans turns upon this very point. It was not an academic question for him, nor was it for the church in Rome, where Jewish and Gentile believers were asking whether they shared the same standing before God. Paul's answer was to summon two witnesses — Abraham and David — and to demonstrate from the Old Testament itself that justification has always been by grace through faith. He begins with Abraham. "What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness" (Romans 4:1-3). The word Paul seizes upon is the Greek logizomai — to reckon, to count, to credit to one's account — which renders the Hebrew hashav, the very word Moses used in Genesis. This is accounting language, the language of the ledger. God did not infuse righteousness into Abraham as a medicinal quality; He credited righteousness to Abraham's account as a gift received by the empty hand of faith. The transaction was forensic, not transformative — though transformation would follow. Abraham was declared righteous, not made righteous by degrees. And Paul is emphatic that this happened before Abraham was circumcised (Romans 4:10-11), before the law was given, before any distinctively Jewish ordinance existed. Abraham was justified as a Gentile, that he might be the father of all who believe, whether circumcised or uncircumcised. Then Paul turns to David, and the argument sharpens. "Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin" (Romans 4:6-8). Notice what Paul does here. He does not quote a psalm about David's righteousness — there are none to quote. He quotes Psalm 32, the confession of an adulterer and a murderer who had been brought to the end of himself. David knew, not theoretically but experimentally, that his only hope was the non-imputation of his sin and the imputation of a righteousness not his own. And Paul says this is the same blessedness that belongs to every believer. The Hebrew of that psalm uses nasa — to lift up, to bear away — for the forgiveness of sin, and Paul renders the idea with logizomai for the crediting of righteousness. Sin lifted away; righteousness credited in its place. This is the grammar of justification, and David spoke it a thousand years before Paul wrote it. The same apostle makes the point even more directly to the Galatians. "Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed" (Galatians 3:6-8). The gospel was preached beforehand to Abraham. Let those words settle. The gospel — not a proto-gospel, not a preparatory announcement, not a dim foreshadowing that would later be replaced by the real thing, but "the gospel" — was proclaimed to a man who lived four centuries before Moses and two millennia before Christ. The content was the same promise: blessing for all nations through Abraham's seed, which Paul explicitly identifies as Christ (Galatians 3:16). The instrument was the same: faith, not works of the law. And the result was the same: righteousness credited to the believer. When the prophet Habakkuk cried out in the gathering darkness of the Babylonian invasion, the word that came to him was this: "Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4). The Hebrew word emunah carries the sense of steadfast faithfulness, but in this context it is clearly the trusting reliance of the believer upon the promise of God. The proud man trusts in himself and perishes; the just man trusts in God and lives. Paul, in Romans 1:17, and the author of Hebrews, in Hebrews 10:38, both quote this text as the cornerstone of their theology of justification. And it was written six hundred years before Christ, to a people facing exile. Then there is the great catalogue of faith in Hebrews 11. This chapter does more than list Old Testament saints; it describes their relationship to God in terms that are indistinguishable from New Testament piety. "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous" (Hebrews 11:4). Righteous — declared so, on the basis of a sacrifice offered in faith. "By faith Noah... became heir of the righteousness which is by faith" (Hebrews 11:7). Heir of righteousness by faith — the very language Paul uses for Abraham in Romans 4. "By faith Abraham... looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:8-10). The object of their faith was more shadowed, more typological, less fully revealed than ours — but it was faith in the same God, resting on the same promise, looking to the same Redeemer. The author of Hebrews is at pains to show that these saints did not receive the fullness of what was promised in their lifetime, "God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect" (Hebrews 11:40). But the perfection he speaks of is the consummation of history, not their individual justification. They were perfected in conscience already, or they could not have been welcomed into the presence of God at death. Enoch walked with God and "was not, for God took him" — justified man, translated. At the Jerusalem Council, when the question of Gentile inclusion threatened to split the church, Peter arose and spoke words that settled the matter: "We believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they" (Acts 15:11). Not "even as we," but "even as they." The direction of the comparison is startling. The Gentiles are not saved like the Jews; the Jews are saved like the Gentiles — by grace alone, through faith alone, apart from the works of the law. The Old Testament saints were saved on precisely the same terms as the thief on the cross. There is one gospel, one Mediator, one faith, one justification for all the people of God in all ages.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the 1640s, the question of the unity of justification across the testaments was not a marginal curiosity. It was contested ground, pressed from multiple directions by errors that the Divines had to answer with precision. On one side stood the Socinians, who taught that the Old Testament saints were justified by their own obedience to the law — that the promises of the old covenant were earthly and temporal, and that the gospel introduced an entirely new way of salvation through the teaching and example of Christ. Against this, the Divines insisted that there has never been but one way of justification. The law was never given as a covenant of works for the justification of sinners; it was given to drive men to Christ, as Paul argues in Galatians 3. The sacrifices of the old covenant were not human works that merited forgiveness; they were types and shadows pointing to the one sacrifice that would actually take away sin. The Socinian error was to read the Old Testament as though Christ were not its substance, when in fact — as Christ Himself taught — Moses wrote of Him (John 5:46). On the other side stood the Church of Rome, which in the Council of Trent had canonized the distinction between the old law and the new gospel in a way that undermined the unity of justification. For Rome, the sacraments of the new covenant conveyed grace in a manner that the ordinances of the old covenant did not. The fathers of the old dispensation waited in the limbus patrum — a border region of the afterlife — until Christ's descent released them. Their sins, in this scheme, were not fully remitted but only suspended, covered by the patience of God until the satisfaction of Christ was applied retroactively. The Confession's insistence that justification was "one and the same" in both testaments cuts clean through this. The Old Testament saint who died in faith went immediately into the presence of God, not because his sins were on layaway, but because Christ's satisfaction was already credited to his account through faith. The efficacy of the atonement is not limited by chronology. Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8), and the merit of His death reached backward as surely as it reached forward. Then there was the error of Enthusiasm — the claim that the Spirit's work under the new covenant rendered the external ordinances of the old covenant obsolete in such a way that Old Testament saints belonged to a lesser economy of grace. The Confession answers by affirming that the substance of justification under both testaments is identical. The outward administration of the covenant of grace changed — more types under the law, fewer under the gospel; more shadows then, more clarity now. But the covenant itself, and the justification that flows from it, is one. The Spirit who enabled Abraham to believe the promise is the same Spirit who enables us to believe the gospel. The righteousness credited to David is the same righteousness credited to the believer in Corinth. The blood that cleansed Abel's conscience is the same blood that speaks better things than Abel's (Hebrews 12:24). The Divines were also answering, though more indirectly, the early stirrings of what would later harden into full dispensationalism — the notion that God has two distinct peoples, Israel and the church, with two distinct plans of salvation, and that the Old Testament saints belonged to a different spiritual economy altogether. Against this fragmentation of the covenant of grace, the Confession insists upon a profound continuity. The church did not begin at Pentecost; it began in the garden with the first promise. Abraham, Moses, and David were not members of a different spiritual body but officers and members of the same church, albeit in its infancy. The Westminster Assembly's commitment to covenant theology — the one covenant of grace administered in two dispensations — is the theological architecture beneath this brief final section. The substance is one, though the circumstances vary. The key phrase in the Confession is "in all these respects." This is a deliberate backward glance at everything the previous five sections have taught. The ground of justification — Christ's righteousness imputed — is the same. The instrument of justification — faith alone, though never alone — is the same. The satisfaction made to divine justice — full, proper, and real — is the same. The eternal decree and temporal application — God's plan from eternity, worked out in due time — is the same. The continuing forgiveness and fatherly restoration of sinning saints — daily pardon, renewed repentance, the light of God's countenance restored — is the same. Abraham enjoyed every benefit of justification that we enjoy. He may have seen the day of Christ from a greater distance, but he saw it and was glad (John 8:56).

Theological Depth

Geerhardus Vos, the father of Reformed biblical theology, devoted much of his scholarly life to demonstrating that the Bible is not two books bound together by an accident of history but one unfolding drama of redemption, with a single plot, a single hero, and a single way of salvation. In his Biblical Theology, Vos insists that "the Old Testament religion is essentially a religion of grace, not of works." He traces the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15 through the patriarchal promises to the Mosaic covenant and demonstrates that the law was never intended as an alternative path to justification. The law was "a pedagogical instrument" — Vos uses the Greek term paidagogos from Galatians — designed to tutor Israel in her need for a Redeemer. When the Israelite brought his lamb to the tabernacle and laid his hand upon its head, confessing his sin, he was not performing a work that contributed to his justification. He was enacting, in visible form, the same transfer of guilt to a substitute that we contemplate in the cross. The difference between him and us is not the essence of justification but the clarity of its revelation. "The Old Testament believer was saved by Christ through faith, just as we are," Vos writes, "but the Christ in whom he believed was the Christ of promise, not the Christ of history." The promise was sufficient because the God who promised is faithful; the ground of justification is not the strength of our apprehension but the reality of the thing apprehended. Charles Hodge, in his commentary on Romans, addresses the Pauline argument of chapter 4 with characteristic thoroughness. He notes that Paul's selection of Abraham and David as his two witnesses is rhetorically devastating. Abraham is the father of the faithful, the one who received the promise before the law, before circumcision — the representative of the Gentile believer. David is the king of Israel, the man after God's own heart, the representative of the Jewish believer under the law. If both were justified by faith apart from works, then there is no room for any other way. "The Apostle's object," Hodge writes, "is to prove that the method of salvation has always been the same. It is not one thing under the Old Testament and another under the New. It was faith then; it is faith now. The righteousness of God was revealed then; it is revealed now." He draws attention to the verb in Genesis 15:6 in the Septuagint — episteusen — which suggests not a single act of faith but a settled posture of trust. Abraham's faith was not a momentary impulse but the abiding orientation of his soul toward the God who promises. And this is precisely the character of justifying faith in every age. Wilhelmus à Brakel, the Dutch Second Reformation divine whose Christian's Reasonable Service remains one of the warmest practical theologies in the Reformed tradition, addresses the question with pastoral urgency. There were believers in his day — as there are in ours — who imagined that the Old Testament saints had a more difficult path to salvation, or a lesser one, or somehow both at once. Brakel will have none of it. "From the beginning of the world," he writes, "there has been only one way of salvation for the elect, namely, by the Lord Jesus Christ. Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and all the prophets have been saved in this way alone." He emphasizes that the Old Testament sacrifices did not atone for sin in themselves; their efficacy was entirely derived from the sacrifice of Christ which they prefigured. The lamb on the Israelite altar had no power to remove guilt except as it was received in faith as a pledge of the Lamb that God would provide. And the faith that so received it was the same saving faith we exercise. Brakel is particularly concerned to comfort believers who feel the inferiority of their own faith when they read the Psalms and hear David's confidence. "Do not imagine that David was justified by the strength of his faith," he warns. "He was justified by the righteousness of the Christ in whom his faith rested, just as you are. The strength or weakness of faith does not alter the object of faith. A trembling hand that holds a diamond holds as much wealth as a steady one." Thomas Boston, the Scottish theologian whose notes on The Marrow of Modern Divinity reintroduced the free offer of the gospel to a generation strangled by hyper-Calvinism, saw in the unity of justification across the testaments a pastoral goldmine. The Old Testament saints, he argued, are not merely our predecessors in the faith but our companions in justification. When we read of David's sin with Bathsheba and his subsequent restoration, we are reading the biography of a justified man who sinned grievously, fell under the fatherly displeasure of God, and was restored through confession and renewed faith — precisely as we are, for precisely the same reasons, on precisely the same grounds. "The covenant of grace," Boston writes, "is one covenant from first to last. There are not two covenants of grace, one for the Old Testament and one for the New, but one covenant administered differently. And since justification is a benefit of that one covenant, it must be one in substance across both administrations." He takes particular aim at the notion that the Old Testament saint lacked assurance. "David had as much assurance as the strongest believer under the New Testament," Boston insists, "for his assurance was not built upon the clarity of revelation but upon the faithfulness of the Revealer." This corrects the notion that we stand on higher ground than our spiritual forebears. We have more light, but we do not have a better standing. The ground is Christ, and Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Puritan Application

Consider, first, what this doctrine does to your reading of the Old Testament. If the saints of the old covenant were justified in precisely the same way that you are — by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone — then when you open the Psalms, you are not reading the prayers of people who related to God on fundamentally different terms. You are reading the prayers of your brothers and sisters who stood upon the same Rock, drank from the same Fountain, and rested in the same Mediator. David's cry, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions" (Psalm 51:1), is not an inferior plea that would later be replaced by a proper Christian confidence in the finished work of Christ. It is the same plea you make when you come to the throne of grace, with the same confidence in the same mercy. Let this transform your engagement with the Old Testament from a sense of historical distance to a sense of spiritual kinship. Abraham is not a figure from a different religion; he is your father in the faith, and you stand beside him, not above him. Second, this truth humbles any tendency toward dispensational pride. There is a subtle temptation for the New Testament believer to imagine that he enjoys a fundamentally superior salvation to that of Moses or Elijah — that because we live on this side of the cross, our justification is somehow more real, more complete, more secure. The Confession will not permit this. The only advantage we have is clarity of revelation, not quality of salvation. The Old Testament saint saw Christ through the lattice of types and shadows; we see Him in the full light of the gospel. But the Christ they saw — dimly, distantly, yet truly — was the same Christ, and their union with Him was as real as ours. When Elijah was taken up in the whirlwind, he went to the same heaven you hope to enter, through the same merit, on the same terms. The thief on the cross was justified in a moment, but Abraham was justified over a lifetime — yet both were justified by the same righteousness credited to the same kind of faith. Let this flatten every notion that we are the premium saints and they the economy class. Third, it strengthens your confidence in the unity of Scripture. The Bible is not a patchwork of evolving religious ideas, with a primitive works-religion in the Old Testament gradually giving way to a grace-religion in the New. From the moment God clothed Adam and Eve with the skins of slaughtered animals — the first visible gospel — to the final "Come, Lord Jesus" of Revelation, there is one scarlet thread of substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness running through every book. The critics who claim that Paul invented justification by faith, or that he distorted the simple ethical teachings of Jesus into a complex theological system, have never understood the Old Testament. Paul's doctrine of justification was not an innovation; it was an exposition of what was already there, hidden in plain sight, from Genesis 15 onward. When you doubt whether the Bible holds together, return to this section of the Confession. The unity of justification across the testaments is a proof of the unity of the Testaments themselves — one divine Author, one plan of redemption, one gospel. Fourth, it comforts you in the matter of assurance. If the confession of David in Psalm 32 is the confession of a man who was justified in the same way that you are justified, then your own falls into sin — grievous as they may be — do not place you in a different category from the saints of old. David sinned against greater light than most of us will ever receive, and he sinned in ways that make our own sins seem ordinary by comparison. Yet he was restored, and the righteousness credited to him was never revoked. "The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die" (2 Samuel 12:13). This was spoken to David, under the old covenant, by the prophet Nathan. If the Lord put away David's sin fully and finally — and the Confession says he did, in the same way He puts away ours — then your own sins, confessed and forsaken, are put away with the same finality. The ground of your assurance is not the recency of your last faithful act but the antiquity of the covenant sealed in blood before the world began. Fifth, and finally, this doctrine expands your vision of the church. When we sing the Psalms in worship, we are not borrowing the hymnbook of another religion. We are singing the songs of the justified, penned by men and women whose standing before God was identical to ours. When we gather at the Lord's Table, we sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — not as honored guests admitted by special arrangement, but as fellow heirs of the same promise, partakers of the same grace, members of the same body. The invisible church spans all ages, and justification is the golden thread that binds every believer, from Abel to the last convert before Christ returns, into one communion of saints. The Old Testament faithful are not our predecessors in a different company; they are our brothers and sisters in the same company, and we will spend eternity with them, not explaining to them what they missed, but joining them in praising the Lamb who was worthy to receive the reward of His sufferings — the same reward, purchased by the same blood, for the same people.

Prayer

O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who art the same yesterday, today, and forever, we bless Thee that the way of justification hath never varied, though the light by which it hath been seen hath grown from the dimness of the first promise to the noonday brightness of the gospel. We thank Thee that Abraham our father was justified by the same faith that we exercise, resting in the same Redeemer that we embrace, and clothed in the same righteousness in which we hope to stand before Thee on the last day. Forgive us for the pride that would imagine we stand on higher ground than the saints of old. Teach us to read Thy Word with eyes that see one scarlet thread running from Eden to Calvary and beyond — the blood of the Lamb that speaketh better things than the blood of Abel. Bind our hearts to the whole company of the redeemed, those who looked forward and those who look back, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. Grant us the grace of Abraham, who against hope believed in hope, trusting Thy promise when every circumstance declared it impossible. Grant us the repentance of David, who when he had sinned grievously fled not from Thee but to Thee, casting himself upon the mercy that is from everlasting to everlasting. And grant us, at the last, to sit down in Thy kingdom with all the justified from every age and every nation, to sing the song of Moses and the Lamb, world without end. Through Jesus Christ our only righteousness, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever praised. Amen.