Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ as Taught by William Ames

In William Ames's treatment of Lord's Day 23 in his recently re-published work, A Sketch of the Christian's Catechism, we find an example of yet another early orthodox Reformer speaking clearly for the doctrine of the imputation of Christ's active obedience as necessary for our justification. The Catechism questions covered in Lord's Day 23 are:

59. Q. But what does it help you now that you believe all this?
A. In Christ I am righteous before God and heir to life everlasting.[1]
[1] Hab. 2:4; John 3:36; Rom. 1:17; 5:1, 2.

60. Q. How are you righteous before God?
A. Only by true faith in Jesus Christ.[1] Although my conscience accuses me that I have grievously sinned against all God's commandments, have never kept any of them,[2] and am still inclined to all evil,[3] yet God, without any merit of my own,[4] out of mere grace,[5] imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ.[6] He grants these to me as if I had never had nor committed any sin, and as if I myself had accomplished all the obedience which Christ has rendered for me,[7] if only I accept this gift with a believing heart.[8]
[1] Rom. 3:21-28; Gal. 2:16; Eph. 2:8, 9; Phil. 3:8-11. [2] Rom. 3:9, 10. [3] Rom. 7:23. [4] Deut. 9:6; Ezek. 36:22; Tit. 3:4, 5. [5] Rom. 3:24; Eph. 2:8. [6] Rom. 4:3-5; II Cor. 5:17-19; I John 2:1, 2. [7] Rom. 4:24, 25; II Cor. 5:21. [8] John 3:18; Acts 16:30, 31; Rom. 3:22.

61. Q. Why do you say that you are righteous only by faith?
A. Not that I am acceptable to God on account of the worthiness of my faith, for only the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ is my righteousness before God.[1] I can receive this righteousness and make it mine my own by faith only.[2]
[1] I Cor. 1:30, 31; 2:2. [2] Rom. 10:10; I John 5:10-12.

In his treatment of this Lord's Day, Ames expounds the doctrine of justification from the text Romans 3:24-25: "So that they who are justified by grace, that is, by His grace, through the redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ, whom God offered as a means of appeasement by faith in His blood, as a demonstration of His own justice."

In lesson 3, Ames treats of the doctrine as stated, The obedience of Jesus Christ imputed to us constitutes us righteous and is the foundation of our justification. In this part of his exposition, Ames is focusing on the final portion of verse 25: "as a demonstration of His own justice." Ames's contention is strongly put - there is no justice without the imputation of Christ's full righteousness to His people - both His passive payment of the penalty of sin, and His active obedience, imputed to His people for the righteounsness that God requires. Ames writes:

"It is deduced from the text 'through the redemption accomplished.' For (1) whoever is justified through redemption by another, the free value of the latter is imputed towards the free redemption of the former." (p. 119, A Sketch of the Christian's Catechism, William Ames)

That is, if one looks at the Old Testament teachings concerning redemption, the full price of redemption was exchanged for the redeemed. That is, whatever was required for the redemption of whatever or whomever was being redeemed, was paid and accounted in its full value unto that which or whom was redeemed. Complete righteousness under the Law is required for acceptance by God… this is impossible for those bearing Adam's sinfulness (i.e. all of us) and their own sins. Christ's full value, His complete virtue must be accounted to believers for them to be rendered acceptable before God. He continues:

"(2) If Christ is the appeasement for our justification, then we are pleasing to God. As it is said in the text, then we are pleasing to God on account of whatever has been offered by Christ toward our good.

(3) If faith justifies to the degree that it regards Christ and His blood, then whatever is in the blood of Christ or in His obedience all the way through to the death, we are justified by His virtue.

Moreover, the obedience of Christ with respect to our justification has the following reasons, (1) It has the means of a meritorious or effecting cause, because the means was what the justice of God was demanding be furnished to Him, before grace could justify us; and (2) it has the means of a formal cause, to the extent that it is thus accepted on our behalf, as though we look to be clothed in that obedience by God, while He carries out the sentence of our justification. From these phrases there is in that obedience the fact of not having my own righteousness, but that which is Christ's (Phil. 3:9)" (p. 119, A Sketch of the Christian's Catechism, William Ames)

One thing that cannot be denied is that whatever God requires has been granted the elect in Christ - if perfect righteousness before the Law, then that is what we who are in Him have. That perfect righteousness includes the fullness of Christ's obedience. To parcel out the passive submission to the penalty of death as though that were all that was necessary for us and for our justification is to miss a critical factor, as Ames next points out with a memorable and edifying set of reasons:

" This was especially suitable to God's justice and to His mercy together. For if our justification had been in the bare remission of sins without the imputation of justice, then only the mercy and grace of God would have a place in this business; there would be no means considered for divine justice to make satisfaction for it." (p. 119, A Sketch of the Christian's Catechism, William Ames)

Yet the end of Romans 3:25 requires that justice be served. Divine justice requires the full righteousness of complete adherence to the Law - not simply payment of any penalties due. Without imputation of Christ's active obedience, we are left without that which justice requires, and God's act of justification of sinners would be without this important component. Mercy, yes - grace, yes - but not justice. Ames continues:

"If we were to be pronounced righteous apart from any imputation of justice, then there would be no foundation for the conclusion that, of course, that person might be pronounced righteous who has no righteousness, either inherent or imputed." (p. 119, A Sketch of the Christian's Catechism, William Ames)

Here's the kicker, and the reason the denial of the active obedience of Christ is such a damning error. There is no way possible for a person to be declared righteous - that is, to be justified - apart from it! No justice, no peace. No way for salvation, for God cannot deny Himself. Thanks be to God, as Gresham Machen noted, for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. (for a fantastic biography of Machen, see Defending the Faith by D. G. Hart)

The Marrow of Modern Divinity

As a summer exercise, I'm planning to read through The Marrow of Modern Divinity, a work that was not without its controversy in its day, but which is still praised by many as a classic text on covenant theology. I would suggest it for anyone who'd like a solid introduction to the concepts of covenant theology. It is written in something that's reminiscent of Pilgrim's Progress, that is, it takes the form of a dialog among several characters - Nomista, a legalist, Antinomista, you guessed it - an antinomian, Neophytus, a new Christian, and finally Evangelista - the pastor. Through their dialog, the author (Edward Fisher? This is somewhat disputed as the identity of this Edward Fisher isn't necessarily on very solid ground) exposits the covenant of works and the covenant of grace in a lively and edifying manner. Extremely helpful, too, are the extensive notes of Thomas Boston, which serve to expand upon and explain the dialog to the reader.

I'm very much looking forward to reading this wonderful work and will post notes here as I do. For those interested in the subject of the Marrow and its controversy, please see these audio files from Sinclair Ferguson, and a very recent video lecture by Bill VanDoodewaard, which are extremely edifying.

The Lord's Plenteous Redemption

Fellow follower of Christ: let not your heart be troubled if ever the slightest difficulty arises in your life. Recall the words of Psalm 130, which broke upon my heart this morning with fresh dispersals of God's grace to me.

1 Out of c the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
2 O Lord, hear my voice!
d Let your ears be attentive
to e the voice of my pleas for mercy!

3 If you, O Lord, should f mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could g stand?
4 But with you there is h forgiveness,
i that you may be feared.

5 I j wait for the Lord, k my soul waits,
and l in his word I hope;
6 my soul m waits for the Lord
more than n watchmen for o the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

7 O Israel, p hope in the Lord!
For q with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.
8 And he will r redeem Israel
from all his iniquities.

(Psalm 130, ESV)

If ever you are challenged, rest your heart here. If ever you fail at something, take shelter in these words. The Lord indeed is good.

Comprehensive Armor Required

When we survey the world around us and all the temptations to sin that it offers, I fear we frequently err on the side of complacency and false confidence that "we can handle it". After all, we're AmeriCANs, not AmeriCAN'Ts. This is folly, as William Gurnall plainly shows in the next section of The Christian in Complete Armor. Speaking of the necessity of the Christian's being outfitted with the WHOLE armor of God, as his text says, Ephesians 6:11, Gurnall argues that the reason we must be outfitted with the WHOLE armor of God is that the enemy's attack on the church is complete: Global Thermonuclear War. Every weakness that we have, the enemy aims for - so we must prepare ourselves with God's armor - which is complete.

Hence, Gurnall writes:

"He must be armed in every part cap-a-pie, soul and body, the powers of the one, and the sense of the other, not any part left naked. A dart may fly in at a little hole, like that which brought a message of death to Ahab, through the joints of his harness, and Satan is such an archer as can shoot at a penny breadth. If all the man be armed, and only the eye left without, Satan can soon shoot his fire-balls of lust in at that loophole, which shall set the whole house on fire. Eve looked but on the tree, and a poisonous dart struck her to the heart. If the eye be shut, and the ear be open to corrupt communication, Satan will soon wriggle in at this hole. If all the outward senses of a man be guarded, he will soon by his own thoughts be betrayed into Satan's hands. Our enemies are on every side, and so must our armour be, 'on the right hand and on the left,' (2 Cor. vi. 7)" (p. 58, The Christian in Complete Armor)

The comprehensive nature of the enemy's attack is well known to anyone who desires to live godly in this world of sin. Try as you might on your own, you only have 20 fingers and toes to stop up the holes in the dike. The only recourse is God's armor, which is prescribed in Ephesians 6, and which Gurnall explores in great detail in this, his masterwork.

Weakness of Faith and the Christian

William Gurnall is such a pastorally sound writer - in taking up the question of weak faith, he makes clear the difference between those who fall prey to temptation through weakness of faith, and those who fall prey to temptation in rebellion against God. There is a stark contrast between the two, and Gurnall anticipates the question of a concerned hearer of his words concerning the believer's need to arm himself with God's armor:

"Objection: But is all armour that is of God thus mighty? We read of weak grace, little faith; how can this then be a trial of our armour whether of God or not?" (p. 57, The Christian in Complete Armor)

Gurnall answers, then, declaring the importance of setting an appropriate test for the weak of faith -

"I answer, the weakness of grace is in respect of stronger grace, but that weak grace is strong and mighty in comparison of counterfeit grace. Now, I do not bid thee try the truth of thy grace by such a power as is peculiar to stronger grace, but by that power which will distinguish it from false. True grace, when weakest, is stronger than false when strongest." (p. 57, The Christian in Complete Armor)

This couples with what I've recently quoted from Gurnall - that NO armor that derives not from God has ANY efficacy whatsoever with the enemies of God. There is no personal resolve, no individual resource that can stand up to the temptation to sin. While the believer does fall, and the new or immature believer, often, this is no necessary indicator that his armor is false. Gurnall takes pains to outline some thoughts concerning the fall into sin of the believer, and how it may be distinguished - and how one's concerns about the reality of his God-given armor may be assuaged:

"Speak, O ye hypocrites, can ye show one tear that ever you shed in earnest for a wrong done to God? Possibly you may week to see the bed of sorrow which your sins are making for you in hell, but ye never loved God so well as to mourn for the injury ye have done to the name of God. It is a good gloss Augustine hath upon Esau's tears - Flevet quod perdidit, non quod vendidit - he wept that he lost the blessing, not that he sold it. Thus we see an excellency of the saint's sorrow above the hypocrite's.... while the Christian commits a sin he hates it; whereas the other loves it while he forbears it." (p. 57, The Christian in Complete Armor )

The hypocrite, in falling prey to a temptation and giving in, will never lament the fact that he has sinned against God... the Christian, when falling into a sin, will frequently do so, and pray strength for recovery and resistance in the next instance of said temptation. This is a huge comfort to me, and to any Christian, who still recognizes his weakness and propensity to sin in various ways. If perfect obedience and perfect standing against all temptation were the rule of justification, none of us would pass the bar. Thanks be to God for His gift of Christ in atoning for us, and for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives to help us gain that maturity and the dexterity with the Armor that He alone provides us, so that as we walk with Him, we'll stand firmer and firmer, and be better and better able to withstand as the battles with sin and temptation come at us daily.

Christ's Announcement of His Anointing

From the M'Cheyne calendar this morning:

1 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has t anointed me
to bring good news to the poor; [1]
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and u the opening of the prison to those who are bound; [2]
2 v to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,

(Isa 61:1-2a, ESV)

What a surprise Christ's brief exposition of this passage must have been to the synagogue hearers that day mentioned in Luke 4:16ff. What a wonderful announcement, that "today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21), must have been for those whose hearts were the soil well-prepared by the Spirit for the seed of the Word. What a strange statement for the rocky soil, the thorny soil and that along the pathway... How these words, coming from this person whom those in the Nazareth synagogue knew as the grown child of Joseph and Mary, must have resounded with the eschatological pronouncements Isaiah makes next in chapter 61 concerning the overturning of mourning into gladness, the identity of the people as a nation of priests, prosperity in the land, and the great day of vengeance. With Christ proclaiming the fulfillment of his anointing for the announcement of the gospel and healing of the nations, the days of His brief ministry began. The appointed time had come. The world was turning upside down.

William Gurnall Resonating with Recovering the Reformed Confession

Okay, so it's a little anachronistic - but I came across something in my reading of Gurnall's The Christian in Complete Armor that reminded me distinctly of some of the points Scott Clark is trying to get our post-modern church to listen to in his Recovering the Reformed Confession (RRC), which I am still reading with much delight and edification.

Much of the first half of RRC involves a discussion of what Clark describes as the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience - something one might describe in terms of the desire in our everyday church experience for "wow" moments that are reminiscent of the Great Awakenings. Today's Christians are dissatisfied with the blessings God has given His church through the ordinary means of the preaching of His Holy Word and the Sacraments. The cause of the historic practice of Reformed piety is not helped by today's societal dependence on immediate delivery of visceral satisfactions, whether they be gastronomic, visual or sensual. Everyone wants to "feel" their faith, and to worship with immediate feedback and physical enjoyment. People don't want to sit for 45 minutes and listen to a man plainly exposit the Scriptures. If it doesn't come at them with the "wowza" bam, bam, bam rapidity of Holywood big-budget action dramas, or ESPN's Sports Center, people leave bored and unimpressed. If it doesn't have the postmodern gloss, it isn't seen as useful for their lives. The ordinary means of grace are not seen by so many today as THE means of standing firm in the faith! Yet God has ordained these for just that purpose! Where are people who reject these blessings left when the enemy attacks? What defense against the wiles of the devil (Eph. 6:10) have they? They are as Jerusalem was in Nehemiah's day prior to the rebuilding of the wall: open for conquest, defenseless. And we wonder why the American church is in such a shambles.

All of this is hard to compare to Gurnall's situation in the 17th century, but he faced the same problems of people looking to satisfy their craving for religious experience and equipping in all the wrong places and by all the wrong means. We are no different today. Listen to Gurnall, and see if you can hear him resonate with Clark's ideas. He has been describing the kind of armor necessary for the Christian, as found in Ephesians 6:11 - "the whole armor of God." His first observation (on p. 50 for those following along with my reading) is that the armor used by the Christian for defense against the enemy and for spiritual growth "must be of God's appointment":

"The Christian's armor which he wears must be of divine institution and appointment. The soldier comes into the field with no arms but what his general commands. It is not left to every one's fancy to bring what weapons he please; this will breed confusion. The Christian soldier is bound up to God's order; though the army be on earth, yet the council of war sits in heaven; this duty ye shall do; these means ye shall use. And those who do more, or use other, than God commands, though with some seeming success against sin, shall surely be called to account for this boldness....

God is very precise in this point; he will say to such as invent ways to worship him of their own, coin means to mortify corruption, obtain comfort in their own mint: 'Who hath required this at your hands?'....

And what is the gospel of all this -- for surely God hath an eye in that to our marching to heaven, and our fighting with these cursed spirits and lusts that stand in our way -- but that we should fight lawfully, using those means which we have from his mouth in his Word?" (pp. 50-51, William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armor)

So far are we in today's church from considering the mortification of sin as a daily responsibility that some of Gurnall's concerns, I'm sure, would fall flat. However, for those who are in fact concerned with their own sanctification, and walking a Christlike walk in their daily lives, but who desire a "worship experience" that rivals the best of Hollywood entertainment, what recourse have they when they are hit with a debilitating temptation? To what will they resort who do not have a regular diet of clear, plainspoken exposition of God's Holy Word? Will the strains of "Shine, Jesus Shine" help them when they are overtaken by an unmortified lust? Will remembrance of the worship band's awesome riffs in the instrumental break between praise Choruses help them when trying to overcome their fleshly desires? I have grave concerns about the helpfulness of much of today's churchly practices when it comes to the possibility of raising up a new generation of Christians bold to stand forth for Christ in the world we live in today...

When God's ordained means of grace are rejected as old-fashioned and boring, ineffective and irrelevant, the church is in a world of hurt. God promises results, indeed, when His people study His word, when the gospel is purely preached, and the sacraments rightly administered. This is indeed "boring" when compared to the glitzy entertainment provided by many churches today... but where should our desires be? What should be pursued? God-ordained means, or man's playthings?