It is important to state for the sake of such as may not be clear, that justification is one act. Justification is from something. Hence it says:"All that believe are justified from all things;" we are cleared from all charge, and pronounced righteous by God Himself. At the end of Romans 4:we are justified from our sins. At the end of Romans 5:we have justification of life which is simply Christ's risen life to which no charge of sin can ever be attached. We are completely severed from all the responsibility of Adam, which involved death and condemnation, and we are now connected with Christ – the last Adam. He is our life, and our righteousness before God.
I never can lose my justification by anything I may do, however grievous it may be in God's sight. I may do many things I ought not to do, and grieve the Holy Spirit who dwells within me, and defile my conscience, and have to hang my head down before God, or even before my fellow-Christians. David and Peter had to do this.
When both these men sinned so grievously, we do not read of them seeking to be justified again, though we well know that each of them turned to the Lord, and sought restoration. The difference between justification and restoration is simply this, that justification is from a state in which I was by nature, but in which I can never be before God again. Restoration is to a condition of soul which I may have lost through my carelessness and unwatchfulness.
David prays, "Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation; and uphold me with Thy free Spirit. Then will I teach transgressors Thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto Thee." (Psa. 51:12, 13.) The Lord, having warned Peter of Satan's desire to have him, before his failure said to him:"When thou are converted (or restored) strengthen thy brethren." He would know himself better through his sad failure and consequently would be able to warn others of danger, and encourage them also through the Lord's grace to His failing servant. After his restoration the Lord committed His most precious treasure to Peter's keeping. What grace! How unlike man it is, but how very like the Lord!
In i Cor. 6:ii, Paul distinctly says to the Corinthians:" Such were some of you:"-speaking of their past state-"but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." Notwithstanding that the Corinthians were justified in the full value of the Name of the Lord Jesus, which involves all that He is before God, their ways were not satisfactory, but the very contrary. They were a great grief to Paul's heart. He had to weep and break his heart over them. Yet for all that he did not un-Christianized them. He rebuked them very sharply, but in the deepest love. He tried to awaken their slumbering consciences to the sense of their moral state. He exhorts them to "awake to righteousness, and sin not for some have not the knowledge of God." This does not mean that they were not converted, but that they had become utterly insensible as to what suited God's presence in their conduct here.
Paul's love for them, in seeking their restoration, represented the Lord's love for them. He loved them as a father loves his children. If a child sins ever so much against his father he does not thereby break the relationship that exists. The father might reprove the child, and even put him at a moral distance from him that he might be led to feel the gravity of his offence against his father. But if the child was humbled and broken, and came before the father in the spirit of self-judgment owning his offence, if we understand a father's affection what father would then keep the child at a distance? The father would only be too glad to have the distance removed that there should be no restraint upon his affections flowing out in the fullest manner to the child.
Though the scriptures exhort the believer against committing sin, and exhort us also to be holy as God is holy, yet we may and do sin. "In many things we all offend," To please oneself is the very essence of sin, and not to walk before God with a perfect heart is sin. If we were always abiding in Christ, and thus in communion with God, we should not please ourselves. The pleasure of God would control our whole life But who would dare to say that they never please themselves, and always walk before God with a perfect heart? Sin is not measured by our poor thoughts, but by what suits the divine presence. The light of God's presence so penetrates and searches the hidden springs of our moral being that we could not stand before God for one moment but for the consciousness that the blood of Jesus Christ God's Son cleanseth us from all sin. No matter what the light detects or exposes in us the blood is the abiding witness that all has been cleared away from before God.
"If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." (i John 2:1:) We never could restore ourselves, nor could we seek it were it not for Christ's Advocacy. He is there in heaven in the unchanging value of His own work. He maintains our cause before the Father, and in face of our Accuser, the devil, who ever seeks to hinder us in our approach to God, and in our testimony for God by his accusations whether true or false. The Holy Spirit who dwells within us, in response to the Advocate makes us feel our state. He takes us back to the point of departure, and if truly humbled we not only confess our sins, but we judge ourselves-turn from and repudiate, what we may have fallen into. We then get a more just estimation of what we are in God's sight, and a deeper fuller sense of what His perfect grace is. It is helpful to remember what another has said, "We cannot mend the past, but we cannot be right in the present without judging the past, and if truly humbled, and we had to live our life over again we will not think we could do it any better."
Salvation is all of grace. Those who know themselves best will be the most ready to confess it. Grace at the top, grace at the bottom, and grace all the way between! God has taken us up to exhibit His rich grace in us even now. In the ages to come He will shew what is the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us by Christ Jesus.
May the deep sense of grace cause our hearts to abound in praise continually. Amen. P. W.