Dr. Sam Waldron:
Will Christ Return Before the Tribulation at the End of the Age?
Are The Church and Israel Two Different Peoples of God?
Monthly Archives: July 2023
End Times Made Simple (Discussion)
Engaging Jehovah’s Witnesses
Engaging Mormon Missionaries
Justification And Sanctification
We can make a distinction between the body and the head of a man and he suffers no loss, but if there is a separation, the man will be dead. The head and the body must stay together for life to continue. Similarly, though we can make a distinction between justification and sanctification, we must never separate the two.
JUSTIFICATION
Justification is a legal court room term defined as the act of God when He declares a person just or righteous in His sight. This takes place the moment a sinner places their trust in the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. For the sinner who has faith in Jesus, God pronounces the sentence “I find you not guilty! I reckon (I count, I declare) you righteous in My sight, and you and I are forever at peace with each other. All of your sins were transferred to your sin bearing Substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ, who took the full brunt of My holy wrath for you, and what has been transferred to your account is the righteousness of My Son, who lived not only a sinless life, but a life fully pleasing to Me. This very real righteousness is yours now and forever.”
Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Christian is a justified person. God has declared him right in His sight because of Christ.
What is amazing to us (and what is at the heart of the gospel message) is that God does not wait until we are inherently righteous before He declares us righteous. He justifies “the ungodly.” Romans 4:5 says, “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
How can God do this without compromising His holiness and justice? He does this because the very real righteousness of Christ has been given as a gift to the one who believes in Him. Christ’s righteousness is a real righteousness and “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ is our righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30).
What about sanctification then? Justification happens in an instant – the moment a sinner places faith in the Savior. Sanctification is the process of becoming more and more holy and separated to God in daily life.
SANCTIFICATION
In the Old Testament, vessels used for the house of God (the Tabernacle or the Temple) were “sanctified” and set apart for that purpose, never to be used for more mundane purposes. In one sense, the Christian is already sanctified in that he is set apart to God (1 Cor. 6:11). Yet there is another dimension of sanctification for although set apart to God, there is still much work to do because in all actuality, no Christian on earth is entirely sanctified. The battle between the flesh and spirit is a life long battle. The flesh still wants its independence, and in contrast, the spirit wishes to live in absolute dependence upon God. Sanctification is an ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian.
Having made the distinction between justification and sanctification, let me affirm straight away that these two cannot be separated. That is because the truly justified person will be involved in this process of sanctification. If someone claims to be justified, but there is no desire to be sanctified, the claim to justification is proven to be fraudulent. The justified man possesses the Holy Spirit and He sets about the task of sanctification the moment He comes in to the human heart. He desires holiness, and He stirs up that desire in the heart of the true Christian. The Christian still sins, but there is now a struggle against sin, whereas before there was no struggle at all. The fact that you wish to be free from sin is an indication that the Holy Spirit is at work in the heart. When a person is happy to stay in a lifestyle that knowingly displeases the Master, it raises huge red warning flags to indicate that we need to analyze any claim to true justification.
Martin Luther gave the following analogy: When we are justified, it is as though a doctor has just administered a sure and certain remedy for a fatal disease. Though the patient may still endure a temporary struggle with the residual effects of his illness, the outcome is no longer in doubt. The physician pronounces the patient cured even though a rehabilitation process must still be carried out.
So it is with our justification. In Christ, God pronounces us just by the imputation of the merits of His Son. Along with that declaration, God administers something to us; He gives us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit begins immediately to work within us to bring us to holy living.
It is both a reality and comfort to know this truth – once He begins the work, He will complete it. Scripture says, “those whom he justified he also glorified” (Rom. 8:30). So certain is Paul that this is the case, he writes of glorification in the past tense. Though glorification has not yet happen for the Christian in this world, its future certainty is assured. It’s as good as done. No one fall through the cracks.
Imagine being a sports fan and your team is in a big final. Due to a pressing commitment, you are not able to watch the game live and so you record it for later viewing.
You are finally ready to sit down to watch the recorded game and a friend calls and, before you can stop him, he congratulates you on your team’s big win. You really didn’t want to know the final score… you wanted to watch the game not knowing the final outcome. You wanted to watch with all of the emotions of a live experience. But you cannot do that anymore. The fact is that because you now know the final result – because you know that your team wins the game – you watch the entire encounter knowing that no matter how bleak things may look, even if your teams falls behind in the score, you know… in fact you know with utter certainty… your team will win! You watch the game with this comfort: victory is inevitable.
In a similar way, in the battle for sanctification there are often struggles along the way. There are even moments when we might even feel a measure of despair at our seeming lack of spiritual progress. Yet the big picture reality is this: God the Holy Spirit having started the work will complete the massive sanctification project bringing every true Christian all the way to future glorification. All the justified are glorified. He who began the good work in you will complete it, until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).
Clouds Without Water Seminar
Jude: 12 These are the men who are hidden reefs in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves; clouds without water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted; 13 wild waves of the sea, casting up their own shame like foam; wandering stars, for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever. (NASB)
Justin Peters:
Session 1 – History of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement: An Overview
Before Time?
Ken Ham writes:
What was God doing all that time before creation?
One reason some people have given me for rejecting a young universe is that they think it somehow “limits God.” After all, what was he doing all that time before creation? But this question reflects a basic misunderstanding of God and time.
Because of my stand on a young universe, a man approached me and said, “But it makes no sense to believe in a young universe. After all, what was God doing all that time before he created?”
I answered, “What time do you mean?”
The person answered, “Well, it doesn’t make sense to say that God has always existed, and yet he didn’t create the universe until just 6,000 years ago.” Apparently, he was worried that God once had a lot of time on his hands with nothing to do.
I then went on to explain that because God has always existed, then it is meaningless to ask, “What was God doing all that time before he created?” No matter how far you were to go back in time, you would still have an infinite amount of time before he created! So even if the universe were billions or trillions or quadrillions of years old, you could still ask the same question.
I then answered, “But you are missing the fact that there was no time before God created.”
Time is actually a created entity. The first verse of the Bible reads: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
A study of this verse reveals that God created time, space, and matter on the first day of creation week. No one of these can have a meaningful existence without the others. God created the space-mass-time universe. Space and matter must exist in time, and time requires space and matter. Time is only meaningful if physical entities exist and events transpire during time.
“In the beginning . . .” is when time began. There was no time before time was created!
When I’m teaching children, I like to explain it this way. There was no “before” God created. There was not even “nothing”! There was God existing in eternity.
This is something humans, as finite created beings, can never really understand. That’s why the Bible makes it clear there is always a “faith” aspect to our understanding of God. Now, biblical faith is not against reason, but such things go way beyond our finite understanding.
“Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).
In Psalm 90:2, we read: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”
So, what was “before” creation? God existing from everlasting to everlasting—God existing in eternity.
Do you remember what God said to Moses when he asked God who he should say sent him to lead his people out of Egypt’s oppression?
“And God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you”’” (Exodus 3:14).
God is the great “I AM.” He exists in eternity. He was not created.
In Revelation 1:8, we read, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,’ says the Lord, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’”
Isaiah 43:10 records these words from God: “‘You are My witnesses,’ says the Lord, ‘and My servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after Me.’”
In other words, it’s a mistake to talk about what God was doing “before creation” because the concept of time (before, during, and after) did not come to be until day one of creation week. God exists—he is—he is the eternal self-existent One. He is outside of time.
The Bible makes it clear that God’s existence is completely separate from the history of this universe, which began in Genesis 1:1. In other words, there is no such thing as “prehistoric.” History began when it was first recorded—the first verse of Genesis.
Now, when we understand this truth and then also understand that the whole of creation, including Genesis 1:1, was accomplished in six days, we can begin to calculate how long ago God created the world.
Exodus 20:11 makes it clear that the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) and everything else (all that is listed in Genesis 1) were created in six days: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”
Based on the way the word “day” is used in Genesis 1 (qualified by number, the words morning and evening, etc.), creation had to be six ordinary (approximately 24-hour) days. Many technical and popular articles on our website show that the context requires this meaning.
Then the Bible lists very specific genealogies of the Messiah’s line in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. We are told that Adam was 130 years old when he begat Seth. When Seth was 105 years old, he begat Enosh—and so these lists continue. When you add up all the dates and other time references throughout Scripture, then it is clear that “In the beginning . . .” was about 6,000 years ago.
Now some Christian leaders have claimed that the Bible doesn’t give an absolute date for creation, so we can’t know how old the creation really is. But of course the Bible doesn’t give a date for creation. You see, if the Bible recorded that creation was 6,000 years ago, then because the Bible was completed about 2,000 years ago, the creation would be 8,000 years old! And the Bible doesn’t use terms like BC or AD because they are man-made conventions, based around the birth of Jesus.
The Bible, however, does give us something much better than a date—a very specific history that allows us not only to determine the age of the universe but also to know all the essential details about God’s plan of redemption from the beginning of time, including the line of the promised Messiah.
One final point: Nowhere in the Bible do we find any suggestion of millions or billions of years. Belief in millions of years is really part of secular man’s religion, which attempts to explain life without God, instead of believing the true account of origins in Genesis that begins, “In the beginning . . . .”
Our ability to trust God’s promise of salvation relies upon our ability to trust everything he says about history—from beginning to end. If we can’t trust his claims about the past, how can we trust his promises about the future?
Thankfully, we serve a God we can trust in every detail. Though he is beyond space and time, he humbled himself to become a man and die on the cross for our sins. He also has given us a record of this history in his Word so that we can know it’s really true.