Lloyd-Jones,
What is the ultimate object of this Christian message, this Christian faith? It is to make us holy. We can never emphasize this too much. In Scripture the first thing, the great thing, the central thing, is that we be made holy. . . In the first chapter of his First Epistle John says: “If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth”. And again in his second chapter: “He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments is a liar” — there is nothing else to say about him, he is just a barefaced liar! — “and the truth is not in him”. In the very last book of the Bible, as if to remind us, just at the very end, of a thing we are so prone to forget, we find it written, “There shall in no wise enter into it (the holy city) any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life . . . Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” [Rev 21.27; 22. 14-15]. Oh! this is an eternal distinction — without! there they are, the people that John is talking about, that have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God, they are without, and outside eternally, and there they remain. They have no entrance into this holy city. Our Lord Himself said the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” [Matt 7.21]. This is New Testament Christianity. Scripture speaks about holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they” — and nobody else — “shall see God.”
But a very subtle danger arises at this point, and I have no doubt the Apostle had it in mind when he wrote the very words we are considering. There are people who will argue, “But wait a minute; are you not preaching the law to us? You are to be a minister of grace, and yet you seem to be preaching pure law. You are reminding us of the Being and the character of God, as expressed in the Ten Commandments and in His moral law; are you not just putting us back under the law? Are you not excluding every one of us from the kingdom of God? Surely you are forgetting the gospel! you have been referring to the original kingdom, and the original law that God held before mankind; but now the Lord Jesus Christ has come, and we are confronted by something quite new; we are no longer confronting the law; all we are asked to do as Christians is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. We could not be saved under the law, for the law made it impossible, saying, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’. But now God has brought in another way which makes it easier for us; we are no longer confronted by the demands of the law and the tremendous holiness of God. It is just a matter of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, and we shall be saved”. Now that is their argument, but I am bound to say that it is one of the most subtle, dangerous heresies that can ever be offered to men and women. And yet it characterizes a great deal of modern evangelism.
But someone may say, “I cannot reconcile these things in my mind as principles; theologically I do not understand what you are saying. Surely by putting it as you have done, you really are teaching justification by works again. Are you not saying that it is our life that admits us into the kingdom? Are you not saying that if a man is guilty of these things he is outside, whereas if he is not guilty he is inside? Is not that going right back to justification by works? Are you saying in effect that a man is justified by his sanctification? That if he is a sanctified man he is justified, but that if he is not sanctified he is not justified and is outside?” People are often in trouble about this. They are in trouble in exactly the same way about the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. They say, “Look at those terrible warnings there; we are told that if this man who believes goes back, then he is outside for ever; we cannot reconcile this justification by faith only, and this pure grace teaching of yours, with this other emphasis which seems to put it all back upon us and upon our conduct and behaviour. How do you reconcile these things?”
A very important question! We reconcile them by asserting again that God justifies the ungodly, not the godly. Justification is by faith alone. It was while we were yet enemies that we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son; it was while we were ungodly, while we were sinners. There is no question about that; it is a cardinal doctrine, a first great principle. But justification is only one step, an initial step, in a process. And the process includes not only justification but regeneration and sanctification and ultimate glorification. Justification and forgiveness of sins are not ends in and of themselves; they are only steps on a way that leads to final perfection. And that is the whole answer to the problem. Some Christians persist in isolating these things, but they are not isolated in the Scriptures. “Whom he called, them he also justified and whom he justified, them he also glorified!” “But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption!” There is the whole process. And the truth is, that if you are in it at all, you are in at every point. We cannot divorce justification and forgiveness from other parts of truth. And the remaining steps are put very clearly before us in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “Such”, says the Apostle, having given his terrible list of sins — “Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” [6.11]. It means that God does not justify a man and leave him there. Not at all! If God justifies a man, God has brought that man into the process. If you can say that you are justified, I say about you that you have been washed, that you have been sanctified, that you have been taken out, you have been removed from the old, and you have been put into a new realm, into a new kingdom; you are in this process of God that is leading to your ultimate, entire perfection.
I remind you again of the words of the Apostle John in his First Epistle: “Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” [3.3]. Of course, a man may say glibly, “I want to go to heaven, I have got this hope in me”. “You have not!” says John. Here is the test. If you have really got this hope in you — the hope of entering the holy City at the end, and of spending your eternity in it — every man that really has this hope in him, purifieth himself — of course he does, he is bound to — even as He is pure. But the man who has only got the hope on his lips and not in his heart does not purify himself, he goes on living the old life; and the truth about him is that he has no inheritance at all in the kingdom of Christ and of God. He does not belong there. He says, “Lord! Lord!” but speech is cheap and easy.
The question is, Is the hope in our hearts? If it is, we recognize the truth; we say, Yes, we do know this, that people who cleave to sin obviously cannot have any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. There is no contradiction between these statements and the doctrine of free grace and justification by faith only, for the God who justifies goes on with the process. And unless we are giving evidence of being in the process and of being perfected by it, there is but one conclusion to draw — we have never been in the kingdom at all, we must go back to the very beginning, we must repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
taken from: Iain H. Murray, “Will the Unholy Be Saved? A review article on R. T. Kendall’s Once Saved, Always Saved.”
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