Justification by Christ’s Imputed Righteousness

The Greatest Question a Sinner Can Ask

Job asked it long ago: “How should man be just with God?” (Job 9:2). It is the most important question a human being can raise, for upon its answer hangs his eternal destiny. A holy God of infinite purity, who cannot look upon iniquity, sits as Judge of all the earth; and before Him stands fallen man, guilty, condemned, and utterly unable to clear himself. The Scripture has already pronounced the verdict over the whole human race: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10), and “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). How, then, can such a sinner ever stand accepted before such a God?

The answer is the doctrine of justification, and at its heart lies one of the most precious words in all of theology: imputation. To impute is to reckon, to credit, to charge to one’s account. The gospel announces that God justifies the ungodly — not by overlooking sin, not by lowering His standard, not by accepting an imperfect obedience, but by a great and gracious exchange in which the sinner’s guilt is charged to Christ and Christ’s perfect righteousness is credited to the sinner.

The Problem: A Perfect Law and a Guilty Race

Before the remedy can be valued, the disease must be understood. God’s law does not grade on a curve. It demands perfect, perpetual, personal obedience, and it pronounces a curse upon every failure, however small:

“All things” — not most things, not the important things, but all. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). The law is like a chain holding a man above the pit: it does not matter which link breaks. And every son of Adam has broken not one link but thousands, in thought, word, and deed, from his youth up.

Man therefore needs two things he cannot supply. He needs his guilt removed, for the penalty of a broken law is death (Romans 6:23). And he needs a positive righteousness, for heaven is not merely closed to the guilty but opened only to the righteous. A pardoned criminal is no longer condemned, but neither has he thereby earned a place at the king’s table. The sinner needs both a clean record and a perfect record — and he can produce neither.

Two Adams: Imputation Is How God Has Always Dealt with Men

Some object that it is unjust for one person’s righteousness to be counted to another. Yet the very ruin of the human race came by imputation. When Adam, the head and representative of mankind, sinned in the garden, his guilt was reckoned to all whom he represented. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). Paul then draws the great parallel between the first Adam and the last:

Here is the whole gospel in a single sentence. We were not made sinners by our own acts first; we were constituted sinners in Adam, and our own sins followed from that fallen nature. In the same way, believers are not made righteous by their own acts; they are constituted righteous in Christ, by “the obedience of one.” The man who stumbles at imputed righteousness must stumble also at imputed sin — and the Scripture will not allow him to deny either. God deals with men through two heads, and every soul stands either in Adam or in Christ.

What Justification Is — and Is Not

It is vital to understand what justification means, for here whole systems of religion have gone astray. To justify is a legal or forensic term; it is the opposite of to condemn. When a judge justifies a man, he does not make him good — he declares him righteous in the eyes of the law. The Old Testament uses the word exactly this way:

No judge in Israel was being told to make the righteous man righteous. He was told to declare him so. Justification is therefore not the same as sanctification. Sanctification is the work of God in us, making us actually holy over time; justification is the act of God for us, declaring us righteous in an instant. The one is a process; the other is a verdict. Confusing the two has been the ruin of much false teaching.

Justification does not mean God finds something good in us and rewards it. It means God, the righteous Judge, pronounces the believing sinner fully acquitted and accepted — not because the sinner is innocent in himself, but because a righteousness not his own has been placed to his account.

God’s Own Dilemma — and Its Answer at the Cross

The same law that defines justification seems to forbid the gospel. “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15). Yet Paul says God “justifieth the ungodly” (Romans 4:5). How can the holy God do the very thing He calls an abomination in a human judge?

The answer is that God does not justify the wicked by ignoring their wickedness. He justifies them because their wickedness has been fully judged in a Substitute. The cross is where God solved His own dilemma:

“Just, and the justifier.” An earthly judge who acquitted the guilty would be corrupt. But God acquits the guilty only after the full penalty has been paid by One who stood in their place — so that in justifying the believer, God is not setting aside His justice but displaying it.

The Two Halves of the Exchange

The great transaction has two sides, and both are necessary. The single clearest verse in all of Scripture sets them side by side:

Consider first what was done with our sin. Christ “knew no sin” — He was spotless, without a single fault — yet God “made him to be sin for us.” Our guilt was charged to His account. He was treated, on the cross, as though He had committed every sin of every one of His people. “The LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). He bore in His own body the penalty our sins deserved, and the wrath of God against them was exhausted upon Him.

Consider second what was done with His righteousness. “That we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Just as our sin was reckoned to the sinless Christ, so His righteousness is reckoned to the unrighteous believer. We are not merely pardoned, as though set back to a clean but empty slate; we are clothed in a positive, perfect righteousness — the very righteousness of God Himself, wrought out by Christ in His sinless life and obedient death. This is the double imputation: our sin to Him, His righteousness to us. This is the great exchange.

The Obedience of Christ: His Life as Well as His Death

What exactly is the righteousness that is imputed? It is not merely that Christ died in our place, though that is gloriously true. It is also that He lived in our place. For thirty-three years the Son of God, “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” (Galatians 4:4–5), rendered to His Father the perfect obedience that Adam failed to give and that we have never given. When He came to John for baptism, He explained why: “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15).

His sufferings and death paid the penalty of the broken law; His holy life fulfilled the precept of the law. The first removes our guilt; the second supplies our righteousness. Were Christ’s death alone counted to us, we would stand pardoned but empty-handed. But “by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Romans 5:19) — His whole obedience, from the manger to the cross, is placed to the believer’s account. This is why Scripture can call Him by the name the prophet foretold:

Not “the Lord who helps us become righteous,” but “THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” Christ Himself “of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

The Witness of Romans 4 — Righteousness Reckoned, Not Earned

Nowhere is imputation taught more fully than in Romans 4, where Paul takes Abraham as the great example. He reaches back to Genesis 15:6 — “And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” — and builds his whole argument upon it. “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Romans 4:3). The word “counted” is the language of the ledger — righteousness was credited to Abraham’s account. And Paul is careful to show that this was not a payment owed for work done:

Mark the astonishing phrase: God “justifieth the ungodly.” He does not wait until a man has made himself godly and then justify him as a reward; He justifies the ungodly man who simply believes. Paul then cites David, who described “the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works” (Romans 4:6), and adds, “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin” (Romans 4:8). Both sides of the exchange appear together: sin not imputed, righteousness imputed.

Paul then asks a pointed question: when was Abraham justified — before or after he was circumcised? “Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision” (Romans 4:10). Abraham was declared righteous years before he received the sign of the covenant, which was only “a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised” (Romans 4:11). The lesson is plain and far-reaching: no religious rite justifies. Neither circumcision then, nor baptism nor any sacrament now, confers the righteousness that God reckons to faith. Ordinances may follow justification as a testimony to it; they never produce it.

And lest anyone think this was for Abraham alone, Paul closes the chapter by applying it directly to every believer:

Pictures of Imputation in the Scriptures

Long before Paul set down the doctrine in plain words, God painted it in pictures throughout the Old Testament and in the teaching of Christ.

The coats of skins. When Adam and Eve first sinned, they tried to cover their shame with fig leaves of their own making. God set their handiwork aside: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). An innocent animal died, and a covering God Himself provided replaced the covering man had sewn. From the very first chapter of fallen history, the sinner’s own covering would not do.

Joshua the high priest. In Zechariah’s vision, Joshua stands before the angel of the LORD with Satan at his right hand to accuse him — and the accusation is true, for Joshua is “clothed with filthy garments.” Yet the LORD does not answer Satan by pointing to any cleanness in Joshua. He calls him “a brand plucked out of the fire,” and then gives the command:

There is the double imputation drawn in a single scene: iniquity taken away, a new garment put on — and all of it done to Joshua, not by him.

The wedding garment. In the Lord’s parable of the marriage feast, one guest is found who has come in his own clothes. “Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless” (Matthew 22:12). He was cast into outer darkness. The garment was provided by the king; to refuse it and appear in one’s own attire was an insult to the host. So it will be for every soul who stands before God in his own righteousness rather than in the robe God has provided in Christ.

A Righteousness Not Our Own

Paul the Apostle, who had more grounds for confidence in his own religious attainments than almost any man, counted them all as refuse for one reason: he wanted to be found in Christ clothed in a borrowed righteousness, not his own.

Here are the two righteousnesses set in stark opposition: “mine own” and “the righteousness which is of God by faith.” Every man must be clothed in one or the other. The first — our own — is, at its very best, but “filthy rags” in the sight of a holy God (Isaiah 64:6), wholly insufficient to cover us. The second is the spotless robe of Christ’s righteousness, received freely by faith. The believer’s great desire, like Paul’s, is to cast away every shred of his own supposed merit and to stand before God in nothing but the righteousness of his Saviour. “He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10).

This was precisely the error of Paul’s own countrymen, and it remains the error of every works-religion in the world: “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Romans 10:3–4).

Justification and the Sovereign Purpose of God

Justification is not an isolated event floating free of God’s eternal counsel. It is one link in an unbreakable chain forged in eternity and completed in glory:

Not one link can be broken. Those whom God justifies were predestinated before the world began, and they will certainly be glorified. The righteousness of Christ was wrought out for a people given Him by the Father, and it is applied to each of them in time when, by the effectual call of the Holy Spirit, they are brought to believe. Justification is thus decreed in eternity, purchased at the cross, and received through faith — and all of it is of grace. “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us… That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:5, 7).

Even the faith that receives this righteousness is itself God’s gift: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). “For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ… to believe on him” (Philippians 1:29). The sinner contributes nothing to his justification but the sin from which he needs to be justified.

By Faith Alone, Apart from Works

How is this imputed righteousness received? By faith, and by faith alone. Faith is not a work that earns justification; it is the empty hand that receives the gift. “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28). “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). Were justification by works even in the smallest part, then salvation would be partly of debt and the sinner would have ground to boast; but God has so ordered it that “no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Corinthians 1:29). Faith looks away from self entirely and rests wholly upon Christ and His finished work.

A caution is needed here. When Scripture says Abraham’s “faith is counted for righteousness” (Romans 4:5), it does not mean that God accepts our act of believing as a substitute for the perfect obedience the law requires, as though faith were a smaller, easier work that God agrees to accept in place of the whole law. That would make faith itself our righteousness and turn the gift back into a wage. Faith is the instrument, never the ground. Its value lies entirely in its Object. A weak faith in a strong Christ saves; a strong faith in anything else destroys. The righteousness reckoned to the believer is Christ’s, received by faith — “the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Philippians 3:9).

It must be added, lest any abuse this truth, that the faith which justifies is never alone in the person justified. True saving faith works by love and brings forth the fruit of good works — not as the ground of justification, but as its evidence. We are justified by faith alone, but the faith that justifies is never alone. Good works are the fruit of a justified man, never the root of his justification.

Paul and James: No Contradiction

Every defender of justification by faith alone will sooner or later be pointed to James 2:24: “Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” Does James contradict Paul? Not in the least, once we ask what question each apostle is answering.

Paul is answering the question, How is a guilty sinner accepted before God? James is answering a different question: How is a man’s profession of faith shown to be genuine? James’s whole concern is the man who “say[s] he hath faith, and have not works” (James 2:14) — a mere profession, a dead faith. “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). His challenge is, “shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works” (James 2:18). The word “justified” in James carries the sense of shown to be righteous, vindicated, proven.

The example James chooses settles the matter. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2:21). But Abraham offering Isaac is recorded in Genesis 22 — decades after Genesis 15:6, where God had already “counted it to him for righteousness.” James himself quotes that very verse: “And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness” (James 2:23). Abraham was justified before God by faith in Genesis 15; his faith was proven genuine by his works in Genesis 22. Paul describes the root; James describes the fruit. Both men preach the same gospel: a living faith that alone receives Christ’s righteousness, and that never fails to bear fruit.

Against the Error of Infused Righteousness

This doctrine was the great recovery of the Reformation, and it stands against a deadly error that persists to this day. There are those who teach that God does not impute a righteousness from outside the believer, but infuses righteousness into him, making him gradually righteous by an inward change, so that he is finally justified by a righteousness that has become his own through cooperation with grace. This is the teaching of Rome, and it is a different gospel.

Rome has not left her position in any doubt. At the Council of Trent, in its Sixth Session (1547), she formally answered the Reformation’s recovery of this truth with a series of anathemas — solemn curses — upon anyone who believes it (quoted here in the standard Waterworth English translation):

Canon 11 condemns, by name, the very doctrine of this article. Canon 24 condemns the Scriptural teaching that good works are the fruit of justification rather than a cause of it. These canons have never been withdrawn. The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats Trent’s definition that “justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (§1989), and teaches that justification is “conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith” (§1992) — the very thing Romans 4:10–11 shows cannot be so.

Much has been made of the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed at Augsburg by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, and since associated with by several other Protestant bodies. It declared that the old condemnations no longer apply to the teaching each side presented. But Trent’s canons were not repealed; the Catechism still teaches infused righteousness conferred through the sacraments; and Rome’s system of penance, indulgences, and purgatory still stands upon it. What changed in 1999 was not Rome’s doctrine but the willingness of many Protestants to stop objecting to it.

The difference is not a matter of words. It confuses justification with sanctification; it makes the sinner’s acceptance rest, even partly, on a righteousness worked within him rather than wholly on the righteousness of Christ reckoned to him; and it robs the troubled conscience of all sure peace, for an infused righteousness is always imperfect and incomplete in this life. The believer who must look even partly to his own progress can never know with certainty that he stands accepted. But the believer who looks wholly to Christ’s finished and perfect righteousness, imputed and complete, may have full assurance — for his standing rests not on what grace has yet made him, but on what Christ has already done. Paul’s warning to the Galatians, who were tempted to add law-keeping to Christ, applies with full force: “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace” (Galatians 5:4).

Modern Challenges Within Professing Protestantism

The attack on imputation does not come only from Rome. In recent decades a school of scholarship known as the “New Perspective on Paul” has argued that justification in Paul is chiefly about who belongs to God’s covenant people — Jew and Gentile together — rather than about how a guilty sinner is accepted by a holy God. Its best-known popularizer, the Anglican scholar N.T. Wright, has written that in the language of the law court “it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant” (What Saint Paul Really Said, 1997).

But this answers a claim the Scripture never makes. The Bible does not teach that God transfers His own attribute of judicial fairness to the sinner. It teaches that the sinner is united to a Substitute and Surety — the last Adam — whose actual obedience is reckoned to those He represents: “by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). The prophet foresaw exactly this: “by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (Isaiah 53:11). And far from being merely about table-fellowship, Paul’s argument in Romans begins with the whole world “guilty before God” (Romans 3:19) and the wrath of God revealed from heaven (Romans 1:18). The question of justification is the question of how a condemned sinner escapes that wrath. Any teaching that shifts the centre away from that question, however learned, leaves the sinner with no answer to Job’s cry.

Common Objections Answered

“Is imputation just a legal fiction?” No. A fiction is a pretense that something is so when it is not. But the believer’s sin was really laid upon Christ, and Christ really bore its full penalty; the obedience of Christ is really perfect, and the believer is really united to Him by the Spirit through faith. God reckons according to truth. What He counts to the believer is not imaginary; it is the actual righteousness of an actual Saviour, belonging to the believer by an actual union.

“Does this doctrine encourage careless living?” Paul anticipated the objection and answered it with horror: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (Romans 6:1–2). The same union with Christ that brings justification brings a new heart. A man who uses free grace as a license to sin shows only that he has never received it. The doctrine that most humbles a sinner is the doctrine that most powerfully makes him hate sin and love holiness — as the history of the Reformation churches, and of every true revival, testifies.

“If I am justified already, why must I pursue holiness?” Not in order to be accepted, but because you are accepted. The child does not obey his father to become his son; he obeys because he is his son. Sanctification is the necessary fruit of justification, and both flow from the same Christ, who “of God is made unto us… righteousness, and sanctification” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Separate them in thought, but never in life.

The Comfort and Glory of This Truth

What unspeakable comfort lies here for the believing sinner. His acceptance before God does not rise and fall with the fluctuations of his own holiness. On his worst day and his best, he stands before God clothed in the same unchanging righteousness of Christ — no more accepted when he is strong, no less accepted when he is weak. He can never add to it, and he can never lose it, for it was never his own doing to begin with. When Satan accuses and conscience condemns, the justified soul may answer with the apostle: “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth” (Romans 8:33). “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) — not less condemnation, not reduced condemnation, but none.

This is the confidence the church has sung for generations. Edward Mote’s old hymn “The Solid Rock” rests every hope on Jesus’ blood and righteousness, and pictures the believer standing faultless before the throne, dressed in His righteousness alone. That is not poetic exaggeration; it is Romans 5 set to music.

And what glory redounds to God. In this great exchange, justice and mercy meet and embrace: God remains perfectly just, for sin was fully punished in Christ; and God is the justifier of the one who believes, for the penalty has been paid and a perfect righteousness provided. He is shown to be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). The sinner is saved, the law is honored, and God receives all the glory. Not unto us, but unto His name be the praise.

Where Do You Stand?

In the Lord’s parable, two men went up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee stood and recited his righteousness. The publican would not so much as lift up his eyes, but smote upon his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” And the Lord Jesus gave the verdict: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other” (Luke 18:13–14). The man who brought his righteousness went home condemned; the man who brought nothing but his sin went home justified.

Every one of us will stand before God clothed either in our own righteousness or in Christ’s. There is no third garment. Let every soul that trembles under the weight of its own sin look away from itself entirely, and rest upon the righteousness of Another. There is no peace in our own poor doings; there is perfect peace in the finished work of Christ. To be found in Him, clothed in His righteousness, is to stand before the throne of God without spot and without fear, now and forever.