Paul wanted the church to be able to stand when the winds shift. He longed for believers to grow up, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). His answer was maturity, the kind that can receive what is true and refuse what is false without panic. “Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). That is the work in front of us.
Discernment also means recognizing genuine gain. There is a recovery underway in some corners of the church, and parts of it are worth celebrating. The Bible really does tell one long story, and that story does not end with us escaping earth for a disembodied heaven. It ends with God coming down to dwell with His people. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation 21:3). The Old Testament is not a husk we discard once we reach the New. The new creation is not a consolation prize. When these truths are recovered and pressed on us, I find myself nodding, and I thank God for the reminder.
A recovery becomes a loss when it denies what it only needed to rebalance. That is the danger here. Genuine gains have come at a serious cost, and that cost must be faced plainly. So let me name the three doctrines at stake. The first is the comfort of being consciously with Christ at death. The second is the imputed righteousness of Christ, the heart of justification. The third is the reality of eternal judgment, which a gentler telling quietly softens. These three are not all of one weight. The first robs grieving believers of real comfort. The other two reach nearer the center, to the sinner’s standing before God and to the judgment from which Christ came to save. These claims do not always travel together, and I am not suggesting that anyone who presses one of them presses the other two.
The Comfort of Being With Christ
The storyline does climax in resurrection and new creation. That is our final hope, and we ought to preach it plainly. Yet Scripture never makes us choose between that hope and the comfort of heaven, as though loving the one required denying the other. Paul did not speak only of the renewal of all things still to come. He wrote, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23), and that to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). To the dying thief our Lord promised a present welcome: “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The book of Hebrews can speak even now of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). And the promise that crowns it all is His own: “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3).
This is where the denial costs the most. Stand at a graveside, a widow’s hand in yours, and tell me whether it is a small thing to be able to say where her husband is. The believer who dies is not lost in the ground awaiting a bare future. He is consciously and safely with Christ, which is far better, until the morning of resurrection makes him whole in body as well. Our confession says it without flinching: at death the souls of the righteous “are then made perfect in holiness and are received into paradise. There they are with Christ and behold the face of God in light and glory” (1689, chapter 31). We lose nothing of the new creation by holding this. We forfeit a deep comfort if we let it go. Why surrender what the Lord gave to steady the dying and comfort those who weep?
The Heart of Justification: A Righteousness Credited
The second denial cuts deeper, because it touches the very mechanism by which God saves. One of the clearest and most memorable forms of the objection comes from N. T. Wright. Righteousness, he wrote, is not “a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom,” and a judge does not transfer his own righteousness to the defendant (What Saint Paul Really Said, Eerdmans, 1997, p. 98). If imputation meant passing a substance across the room, the objection would land. It never meant that. And he is right about something further: a judge cannot simply hand his own righteousness across the bench. But the transfer he rejects is not the one the Reformed have ever taught. The righteousness credited to the believer is Christ’s own, the obedience and satisfaction of the incarnate Mediator and covenant head, reckoned to everyone joined to Him by faith.
Imputation, at its root, is a forensic reckoning. Forensic is simply a courtroom word. In justification it describes the verdict God hands down and the standing He grants, rather than the inward renewal He works in regeneration and sanctification. The word Paul reaches for again and again in Romans 4, eleven times in that one chapter, is logizomai. It can mean to consider or to calculate, but here its accounting sense is unmistakable: to credit, to reckon, to set to one’s account. Paul takes up Abraham: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3, citing Genesis 15:6). And lest we think faith is itself the merit being counted, he adds that God “counts righteousness apart from works” (Romans 4:6). Not infused. Not earned. Counted. Picture a ledger rather than a gas tank. The Judge does not pour a substance into the defendant. He enters a verdict and assigns a standing, and He does so on the basis of a righteousness that is truly Another’s.
Whose righteousness? “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). There is the great exchange: our sin reckoned to Christ at the cross, His righteousness reckoned to us. “By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Paul’s own longing was to be found in Christ, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but … the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9). A righteousness from God, received, never manufactured.
Now notice something. Those who deny imputation often love the language of being “in Christ,” of union with Him. Good. But that is exactly where imputation lives. Union with Christ is no rival to imputed righteousness; it is the saving bond by which Christ and all His benefits become ours. We are not credited with a righteousness hanging free in the air. We are credited with the righteousness of the One to whom the Spirit has joined us through faith. Calvin saw this and called it a double grace (Institutes 3.11.1): united to Christ, we receive at once both justification and sanctification, never the one without the other. It is what the older preachers meant when they turned a trembling sinner away from himself and toward “The Lord our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6). So the man who treasures “in Christ” has every reason to keep imputation and none to deny it. To let it go is to saw off the branch he is sitting on.
And this is why it is the heart. Justification is more than the canceling of our guilt. Forgiveness deals with the debt, and thank God it does. But the law does not only forbid sin; it requires righteousness, a positive obedience we have never offered. Pardon alone, were that all God gave, would leave us with a clean record and still no righteousness to show. God gives more. He does not only refuse to count our sins against us; He counts us righteous in Christ. Our Lord kept the whole law in our place and bore its curse in our stead, and His obedience and satisfaction are counted as ours. We are justified, the 1689 says, as God “imputes Christ’s active obedience to the whole law and passive obedience in His death as their whole and only righteousness by faith” (chapter 11). Take imputation away, and the verdict “righteous” has nothing behind it. You are left to supply a righteousness of your own, which is the very thing the gospel came to spare us.
The Warnings Are the Lord’s
The third denial is the quiet one, and the quiet ones do their damage before anyone notices. It leaves no one troubled about hell, no one pressed to flee the wrath to come. The cartoon of pitchforks and boiling oil is softly set aside, and with it, too often, the thing itself.
But the warnings are not medieval inventions. They are the Lord’s. It was Jesus Himself who warned of judgment, plainly and often, and He set the two destinies side by side in a single breath: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). The same word, eternal, describes them both. If the life is everlasting, so is the punishment. He spoke of the place “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). John heard that “the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” (Revelation 14:11), and saw the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15). I did not write these words, and I will not argue with the One who did.
We can grant the objector something. Scripture’s warnings are weightier and stranger than the caricatures, and we should preach the texts rather than the cartoons. But the cure for a caricature is never denial. It is the sober biblical reality, spoken in love. A gospel that troubles no one about the judgment to come is not the gospel the apostles preached in the open air. Paul reasoned about “the coming judgment” until Felix was alarmed (Acts 24:25). The warning is itself a mercy, the lighthouse set on the rocks. To dim it for the sake of comfort is the cruelest comfort of all. So here is a question to sit with: when did any of us last warn a soul, kindly and plainly, of what is coming?
Eat the Fish, Leave the Bones
So let us glean gladly. Where this recovery calls us back to the Bible’s true horizon, God making His home with us, the new heavens and new earth, our calling as image-bearers in His world, let us receive it with thanks. There is real nourishment here. Eat the fish.
But leave the bones, and name them for what they are, because a flock is fed by what we keep as much as by what we praise. Keep heaven and the new creation together. Keep the credited righteousness of Christ, which is the ground of every weary believer’s peace. Keep the warnings of our Lord, and the urgency they lend to our pleading with those who are perishing.
And keep your eyes on the cross, where our sin was laid on Him, the guilt that was ours reckoned to Him and borne in our place. And the righteousness Christ rendered, across a whole life of obedience crowned at Calvary, God reckons to everyone He joins to His Son by faith. We do not stand before God in a righteousness of our own, thanks be to God. We stand in His. That is no doctrine to trade away for a fresh emphasis. It is the only ground any of us will have to stand on when the books are opened. And when you see what that righteousness cost Him, and how freely He gives it, what is left but to bow and adore? To Him be the glory, now and forever. Amen.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV), 2025 Text Edition. Confession quotations are from the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English (Founders Press).