“The just shall live by faith.”

(Habbakuk 2:4; Galatians 3:11; Romans 1:17)

Drumsheugh in Ian Maclaren’s beloved story, Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush, calls in his trusted confident, Doctor MacLure, tells him the secret of his life and binds him by a solemn oath: “Swear to me that when I’m dead you will clear my name. I want you to clear my name here in Drumtockty.” Circumstances prevented in the man’s lifetime. Too many others were involved, but eventually, in posterity and among some few straggling contemporaries, Drumsheugh wanted his name cleared. So, within each of us fervently burns the desire to get right with society — to be understood and reconciled to our fellowmen.

Even more intense is our desire to get right with friends or members of our own family when misunderstanding or neglect or sin bring estrangement. We want our motives and actions understood. We want restoration to fellowship. Two men who had been life-long friends, college chums, and business associates, had a falling out. It was a big bust up. Everybody knew about it. With what clear insight into human nature and human situations someone who knew them both said: “Why, they will carry the scars of this thing to their graves.” Yes, they will, for the soul of man longs to get right with his own. One of the most damning aspects of divorce or separation between a husband and a wife is that the soul of each must writhe interminably under the persistent compulsion: “I ought to do something to get right with him, or to get right with her.”

But more compellingly poignant than all is the soul’s desire to get right with God — come to an understanding with our maker — to feel the inner assurance that fellowship with Him is established upon a free and unshakable foundation.

But how to get right with God? What shall we do? Men have tried in the main three distinct methods. First, there is appeasement. To propitiate an angered or offended deity, men have tried to get right with God by offering gifts and sacrifices. “Bring an offering and come before the Lord.” Appeasement was at the bottom of the ancient Hebrew system of burnt offerings. The suppliant attempted to buy favor by offering an animal out of his own flock, at cost to himself, as an odor for a sweet smell in the nostrils of deity.

In pagan cults the appeasement sometimes went to awesome extremities, as in the worship of Molech where babies and small children were sacrificed to be burned alive on the idol’s red- hot arms.

This old idea of getting right with God by appeasement is with us yet. We still practice it. When in a tight spot, confronted with death or calamity, we may rush to make a bargain with God, saying: “O Lord, if you will just give deliverance here, I’ll promise to do thus and so.” What’s that but attempting to get right with God by appeasement?

But as we ought to have known as well as Mr. Neville Chamberlain, appeasement fell into disrepute long ago. Some of Israel’s more devout souls early began to question the moral and ethical rightness of getting right with God by appeasement. “Can a man buy God’s favor?” they asked. The Prophet Micah put the whole business in its proper dramatic contrast when he said: “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn (like the worshippers of Moleck) for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? (Is that what God wants? Is that the way to get right with Him?) He hath showed thee, O Man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Amos the prophet, found his fellow-countrymen believing that their bond with God was a natural one and indissoluble, that so long as the people paid their dues in the form of sacrifices God was under obligation to bless them. It was the genius of Amos that he understood and proclaimed that the bond of Israel with her God was not natural, but rather moral — that the way to stay right with God was to live by the moral code and that inevitably the bond would be dissolved by unrighteousness. “I hate, I despise your feasts,” comes the word of the Lord by Amos, “I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; but let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

So, in the development of Israel’s religious life, under the guidance of the prophets and the inspired lawgivers, men came to pin their hope of getting right with God not on appeasement, but on achievement. As God had made known the moral and ethical uprightness of His character, so he demanded of man that man become perfect in righteousness in order to enter into fellowship with him. Getting right with God then was seen to be something for man to achieve by climbing rung on rung the ladder of moral excellence.

How deeply ingrained is this philosophy in men today — of getting right with God by achievement. How many folks are straining themselves to accomplish it, operating on the principle that they can achieve the state of rightness with God by their own efforts. They won’t come into the church until they have rid themselves of their bad habits and pulled themselves up to a state of moral perfection.

It was St. Paul who utterly blasted this idea of man’s getting right with God by keeping completely the moral law. No mere man could ever do it. For sin resides in every man’s body and soul. Sin dooms him to failure. No man every tried harder than Paul, the devout Pharisee, to fulfill the law’s complete demands. But he knew he had failed miserably and cried out in despair: “O miserable man that I am, who shall deliver me from the bondage of this death to sin?”

St. Augustine, following Paul, brushed aside as futile the schemes of getting right with God either by achievement or appeasement: “No one can be so foolish,” says Augustine, “as to imagine that God is profited by any oblation or property or even of righteousness. A fountain is not benefited by our drinking from it.”

Yes, “Those who have struggled for saintliness, as did Luther and Wesley, know that not only have they fallen short, but that human nature is incapable of saintliness by its own moral resources or by devotion to the sacraments. Men are healed, not by their own struggles for integrity, or by mystical raptures, but by the trustful acceptance of what is done for them by God.” (Primer for Protestants — John Hastings Nichols)

We cannot get right with God by appeasement, not by achievement. How can we get right with Him? The gospel says by Atonement. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life … God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us … Him who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him … We are saved by grace through faith … It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Yes, what man could never achieve for himself, God in His mercy made available to all penitent souls who come to Him through Christ. We get right with God not by anything we could ever do but by accepting humbly and gratefully through faith the salvation, the forgiveness, the restoration to fellowship with God through Christ.

St. Paul and the Protestant Reformers had a special name for this amazing method of getting right with God by the Atonement. They called it justification by faith. And of all the theological terms which puzzle most the ordinary layman, I believe this phrase, “Justification by faith,” is the most puzzling. “Why,” says the man in the street, “as far as I can see St. Paul is wrong. In the city, in the shop and factory, a man is considered justified by what he does, not by what he believes in — not by his faith.”

‘Tis here that Paul’s illustration of Abraham from the Old Testament comes to our aid. Abraham lived before the giving of the law through Moses. He practiced a simple sort of sacrifice. But Abraham, Paul says, was justified, made right with God, by his faith. “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.” In other words, Abraham got right with God through his faith and that alone. What was Abraham’s faith? Why, when God spoke to him and promised to make of his family a great nation, Abraham believed God. He lived by that faith. The Bible story presents to us Abraham living out his long life, still believing, still counting God’s promises the final reality. This is what made Abraham right with God and kept him right with God.

Whenever any man takes the attitude of soul that whatever word God has spoken to him is the final and ultimate value in His life, then that attitude, that faith God counts to him for righteousness. It makes him right with God — open for fellowship.

God has spoken supremely to you and me through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He is God’s word to my soul and yours. He is the ultimate — the final — the last word. The only way we can get right with God, our Creator, the Just Judge of the universe and our Heavenly Father, is to receive that living Word, that saving friend, as the supreme and ultimate reality in our lives and, cleaving to Him always, live by that faith for Him alone.

Justification by faith then means when faith has wrought such a radical change in a man’s life that he has done an about-face and is living for God rather than self, he is allowed to start on his career with a clean record, his sin-stained past is not reckoned against him. As with the Prodigal Son in the Parable, the breakdown of his pride and rebellion in the one cry: “Father I have sinned,” is enough. The Father does not wait to be gracious. He does not put him on a long term of probation, but reinstates him at once to the full privilege of sonship, so he may begin in that favored position within the orbit of the Father’s love to draw divine spiritual power for his healing and his help. When we see the process of justification by faith reduced to its simplest terms, there is nothing so strange about it. Here is simply the divine forgiveness — free forgiveness. The Parable of the Prodigal is the picture of it on two sides, as an expression of the attitude of mind required in the sinner, and of the reception accorded him by God.” (Sanday — Romans)

When Flora Campbell ran away from her home in the Highlands to the big city and lost herself in its swirl of temptation, she renounced every principle and precept of her strict Christian upbringing. Her widowed father, a poor highland shepherd, was left alone in his wee cot way up on the Moor. Lachlan Campbell was inconsolable. His grief turned to bitterness; he disowned Flora and erased her name from the family Bible. But finally through the intercession of a friend and the mysteries of the Spirit, Flora was reclaimed and brought back to her father’s house, penitent.

Then the rough old shepherd brought out the family Bible: “There is something I must be telling,” he said, “and it is not easy.” He opened the Bible at the family register where his daughter’s name had been erased; then he laid it down before Flora and bowed his head. “Will you ever be able to forgive your father?”

Flora took the pen, wrote for a minute, and when Lachlan Campbell raised his head, here is what he read: “Flora Campbell * Missed, April 1873 — Found September 1873. Her father fell on her neck and kissed her.”

Are you one of His missed who has not been found? Well, no matter how far you have strayed, your name has not been erased. It is written in the precious blood of the Savior in the Lamb’s book of life. When with genuine repentance you return to God through faith in Christ, you will receive a warm welcome home. There is but one way to get right with God — through faith in His son.

• Scripture Reference: Habakkuk 2:1-4 • Secondary Scripture References: Romans 3:19-31 • Subject : Faith; Justification by faith; Self-transcendence; Fallacies re: gaining God’s approval; 638 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: Series on Pauline concepts • First Preached: 6/11/1950 • Last Preached: 4/7/1957 • Rating: 2 • Book/Author References: Primer for Protestants, John Hastings Nichols; Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush, Ian Maclaren