{"id":1219,"date":"2020-03-18T06:35:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T11:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=1219"},"modified":"2020-03-18T07:00:58","modified_gmt":"2020-03-18T12:00:58","slug":"psalm-51-and-justification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/18\/psalm-51-and-justification\/","title":{"rendered":"Psalm 51 and Justification"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Any discussion of salvation in general, and that described by St. Paul in particular, will necessarily include the concept of justification.\u00a0 Exactly how justification works was the central argument of the Protestant Reformation in the West.\u00a0 Despite a massive disagreement about its functionality between the Roman church and Protestant groups, they shared, for the most part, a common definition of the term.\u00a0 To be justified was to be made, or declared, to be righteous.\u00a0 Righteousness was something that was possessed and must be possessed in order to enter into eternal life.\u00a0 It must be possessed in complete perfection.\u00a0 Righteousness, therefore, formed a certain bar that needed to be cleared in order to receive eternal life from Christ.\u00a0 In the Roman system, grace and corresponding merit were infused into a human person which, over the course of a lifetime of repentance and good works, would ultimately merit salvation.\u00a0 It was possible to accumulate excess merit through a holy life, which formed the treasury of the merits of the saints, a reservoir of grace dispensed through the Roman church and its pontiff.\u00a0 In the classical Protestant system, in contrast, Christ lived a life of perfect righteous obedience and his righteousness and merit are imputed to believers wholesale and at once upon belief.\u00a0 In both cases, the measure or standard of this righteousness is seen as the perfect keeping of the Mosaic law, the Torah.<\/p>\n

As has already been seen, however, this was never the purpose of the Torah<\/a>.\u00a0 The promise of theosis, of union with God and his sharing of his life and dominion with humanity, was given to Abraham<\/a> centuries before the Torah was given and the Torah was not an addition of a whole series of conditions for that promised salvation (Gal 3:17-18).\u00a0 Rather, the Torah was given to deal with sin until Christ came to deal with it permanently.\u00a0 Justification, then, which St. Paul equates with not only the full forgiveness of sins (Rom 4:5-8) but also with becoming sons of God (Rom 8:14-19) cannot come through the Torah.\u00a0 Both of these come through Christ, which is St. Paul’s argument in both Galatians and Romans.\u00a0 Justification does not come through the Torah, neither through a human person keeping it perfectly nor through Christ keeping it as a list of conditions that merit eternal life in the kingdom.\u00a0 It is not a product of anyone’s works of the law (Rom 3:20-28; Gal 2:6; 3:1-10).<\/p>\n

It is critically important that St. Paul did not, in contrast, argue that justification was therefore completely passive.\u00a0 He argues that it is the product of faithfulness (Rom 3:28).\u00a0 Faithfulness, loyalty, and allegiance are expressed through not only words but through actions.\u00a0 The Torah is still a guide and an aid to human persons in expressing that faithfulness and a guide to sin and repentance and to worship which is transformative into the likeness of Christ.\u00a0 It is not, however, the means of that transformation in and of itself.\u00a0 It is powerless to do this.\u00a0 The power involved in justification and in the transformation of the human person into one of the sons of God is, according to St. Paul, the Holy Spirit and therefore God himself (Gal 3:1-10).\u00a0 St. Paul’s identification of the power of the Holy Spirit as the source of justification is grounded in two things:\u00a0 the prophecies surrounding the coming of the Spirit upon all flesh in the Scriptures and the definition of justification as St. Paul understands it.<\/p>\n

When the promise of salvation was first given to Abraham, it came with a command to walk before Yahweh and be righteous (Gen 17:1).\u00a0 While Abraham was faithful and this was credited to him as righteousness (Gen 15:6), he was neither perfect nor blameless.\u00a0 Nor were his immediate descendants.\u00a0 The Torah was added to deal with human sin, to contain and control it, but could not cure it nor positively transform a human person into the likeness of his creator.\u00a0 One of the most significant promises regarding the new covenant found in the Hebrew Bible is directly related to this problem.\u00a0 Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant thus, “Because this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares Yahweh, ‘I will put my Torah within them and I will write it on their hearts.\u00a0 Then I will be their God and they will be my people.\u00a0 Then, no longer will everyone teach his neighbor and every man instruct his brother by saying, \u2018Know the Lord.\u2019 They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares Yahweh, because I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer 31\/38:33-34).<\/p>\n

The Torah is not made irrelevant by the new covenant but is written in the heart of every person who is part of Israel.\u00a0 Because of the Torah’s presence within the heart, all will know Yahweh himself directly.\u00a0 This communion with God and the transformation it brings will result in the removal of sin and iniquity, to the solution of it as a problem rather than merely its management.\u00a0 In speaking of this time of the new covenant, Ezekiel connects the writing of the law upon the heart of the Israelites to their receiving the Spirit:\u00a0 “Because I will take you from among the nations and I will gather you out of all regions.\u00a0 I will bring you into your own land.\u00a0 Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.\u00a0 I will purify you from all of your filth and from all of your idols.\u00a0 I will give you a new heart and I will put a new Spirit in you.\u00a0 I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.\u00a0 I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.\u00a0 Then you will keep my judgments and do them.\u00a0 Then you will dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers.\u00a0 Then you will be my people and I will be your God” (Ezek 36:24-28).<\/p>\n

The way in which the indwelling of the Spirit, as prophesied in Joel 2:28-32 and fulfilled in Acts 2:1-4, the forgiveness of sins and purification from stain, and the proper role of the Torah are brought together in these texts should be immediately familiar to those familiar with St. Paul’s argument in Romans and Galatians.\u00a0 Ezekiel adds another element, the re-creation of the human heart.\u00a0 This theme of a new creation is also very clearly present in St. Paul’s writings (eg. Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17).\u00a0 It is at this point that these other themes connect with the concept of justification.\u00a0 Due to past debates, justification, as already described, has become laden with legal connotations.\u00a0 There is another usage, however, which is common even in contemporary usage and familiar to anyone who has used a word processor.\u00a0 To justify text is to line it up along one side, the other, or both.\u00a0 In the same way, this term is used, for example, in Daniel to describe the eventual restoration and rededication of the temple, i.e. that the temple will be ‘justified’ (Dan 8:14).\u00a0 Here it is clear that both the elements of cleansing and of being set in order are included.<\/p>\n

The Holy Spirit’s role in the re-creation of the human heart is directly parallel to his role in the creation of the world.\u00a0 At the beginning of the creation of the world, the Spirit broods over the waters (Gen 1:2).\u00a0 Creation in Genesis 1 is a series of actions in which God brings order to chaos<\/a> and then fills his newly established order with life.\u00a0 This is accomplished through the Spirit and through the Word (John 1:3).\u00a0 The justification of a human being, then, the setting of that person in order, is an act of re-creation.\u00a0 The human person who emerges afterward is a new person of a new humanity (Col 3:9-11).\u00a0 This new human person is created in the image of God who is Christ himself (Eph 4:20-24).\u00a0 Bringing about a new birth or re-creating a human heart is not, by definition, something that the Torah can do, even if kept perfectly.\u00a0 This was never its function or intent.\u00a0 It is not why Christ gave it into the hands of Moses.<\/p>\n

Through Christ’s incarnation, the entirety of human salvation is accomplished.\u00a0 Our shared humanity is united to God himself in the person of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The power of death has been stripped from the Devil and all of humanity has been made alive.\u00a0 The powers and principalities which had enslaved the nations have been defeated.\u00a0 Atonement for sin, its purification and the cleansing of its corruption have been accomplished.\u00a0 All of these, however, have an element of definitive fulfillment and an element which will be brought to completion at the end of this age, at Christ’s glorious appearing.\u00a0 Death has been defeated, but it is at Christ’s appearing that all of the dead will rise.\u00a0 The gospel has gone out to the nations and all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ, but the demonic powers have not yet all been confined to the lake of fire prepared for them.\u00a0 This gap between accomplishment and perfection is the result of the third element of man’s salvation, purification of sin and its resulting curse (2 Pet 3:15-16).<\/p>\n

As Ezekiel prophetically described, the new covenant is administered and justification takes place through baptism with water and the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 This makes a person a Christian, not only a new person but a new kind of human person.\u00a0 As the Orthodox baptismal service pronounces, “though art justified, thou art sanctified, thou art washed” (1 Cor 6:9-11).\u00a0 Justification, then, is something which can be said to have occurred for the faithful, just as it did for Abraham apart from the Torah (Rom 4:9-12).\u00a0 At the same time, Abraham and his descendants continued to fall prey to sin and its corrupting effects upon themselves and the rest of creation such that the Torah needed to be added (Gal 3:19).\u00a0 Just as the management of ongoing sin was necessary under the old covenant in preparation for the coming of Christ, so also must sin be dealt with when those in the new covenant, though justified and a new creation, fall prey to sin and need to receive once again the forgiveness and purification of Christ’s sacrifice.\u00a0 On one hand, having put on Christ in baptism, the old person is done away with and the new has come into being (2 Cor 5:17).\u00a0 On the other, the old self must continually be put off through repentance (Rom 6:6; Eph 4:22; Col 3:9).\u00a0 It is in the resurrection that our justification will be complete as part of an entirely renewed creation (Rom 4:24-25).<\/p>\n

David the prophet and king is remembered by the Church for a number of reasons.\u00a0 Chief among them, however, is his repentance.\u00a0 He has not only given us a model of repentance through his life, but he has given us in Psalm 51 (50 in the Greek numbering) a poetic image of the experience of that repentance and forgiveness, of justification, as it happens within the life of a human person in real-time, in real life.\u00a0 Justification and salvation itself are not theological abstractions or systems or mechanisms, but rather the lived experience of those receiving the promises first made to Abraham and being made alive in Christ.<\/p>\n

In the Psalm, David’s experience of his sinfulness and the depths of his corruption is not just a matter of having broken rules.\u00a0 It is a corruption that has infected his very bones (Ps 51:8).\u00a0 Sin and wickedness seem to him knit into the very fiber of his being from his coming into being in his mother’s womb (v. 5).\u00a0 This hearkens back not primarily to David’s literal mother but to Eve, the mother of all living, who brought forth her children into this present world corrupted by human sin.\u00a0 David has not ‘made some mistakes’.\u00a0 He has rebelled against God in hatred (v. 4).\u00a0 His hands are soaked with the blood of those who have become his victims (v. 14).\u00a0 This blood, like Abel’s, cries out to God for justice against David.<\/p>\n

The answer to this is for David to be justified.\u00a0 For him to be recreated and set right.\u00a0 He needs to be washed and made clean again from the filth into which he has wallowed (v. 1-2, 7, 9).\u00a0 This washing and cleansing will precede God’s creation of a clean heart within David and the renewal of the presence of his Spirit (v. 10-12).\u00a0 Within him, the Spirit will teach him the law (v. 6).\u00a0 David understands that this will take place through repentance, through his humbling of himself in honesty regarding his sin and wickedness and his state as one accursed (v. 3, 17).\u00a0 It will not come through a mechanical or magical ritual (v. 16).\u00a0 In return, David has but one thing to offer:\u00a0 sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving (v. 14-15, 18-19).<\/p>\n

David does promise one further thing if the God who created him will show him his mercy.\u00a0 He promises to teach his fellow sinners the way of salvation (v. 13).\u00a0 He has kept this promise by being the instructor of the faithful for nearly three millennia.\u00a0 St. Paul describes for us the road which leads to salvation through the cross and the grave.\u00a0 King David describes for us his journey down that road.\u00a0 It is a journey which begins in the mire of sin, curse, and corruption and which ends sitting down at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Matt 8:11).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any discussion of salvation in general, and that described by St. Paul in particular, will necessarily include the concept of justification.\u00a0 Exactly how justification works was the central argument of the Protestant Reformation in the West.\u00a0 Despite a massive disagreement about its functionality between the Roman church and Protestant groups, they shared, for the most part, a common definition of the term.\u00a0 To be justified was to be made, or declared, to be righteous.\u00a0 Righteousness was something that was possessed and must be possessed in order to enter into eternal life.\u00a0 It must be possessed in complete perfection.\u00a0 Righteousness, therefore, formed a certain bar that needed to be cleared in order to receive eternal life from Christ.\u00a0 In the Roman\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"Psalm 51 and Justification - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/18\/psalm-51-and-justification\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Psalm 51 and Justification - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Any discussion of salvation in general, and that described by St. Paul in particular, will necessarily include the concept of justification.\u00a0 Exactly how justification works was the central argument of the Protestant Reformation in the West.\u00a0 Despite a massive disagreement about its functionality between the Roman church and Protestant groups, they shared, for the most part, a common definition of the term.\u00a0 To be justified was to be made, or declared, to be righteous.\u00a0 Righteousness was something that was possessed and must be possessed in order to enter into eternal life.\u00a0 It must be possessed in complete perfection.\u00a0 Righteousness, therefore, formed a certain bar that needed to be cleared in order to receive eternal life from Christ.\u00a0 In the Roman\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/18\/psalm-51-and-justification\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-03-18T11:35:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-03-18T12:00:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2020\/02\/248324.x.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. 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