Oh! OK!. Tell me where he was wrong and explain to me what imputation is---biblically
Our sins were not imputed to Jesus. And Adam's sin was not, is not, imputed to us. Even worse, he says the imputation of Adam's sin to us makes us guilty and therefore we need to be saved. At the same time he says that the imputation of our sins to Jesus did not make him guilty. It can't be both. He doesn't understand imputation.
And if he doesn't understand imputation, then he doesn't really understand Justification.
It is important to see that justification is thus not a change in our character or in our inner nature; it is a change in our relationship to God and especially to God’s law. The change is objective, not subjective. It solves the problem of guilt, not the problem of corruption. It is also important to see that this change is not a gradual process, but is an immediate and complete change in our status before God. By God’s pronouncement, at a specific, instantaneous moment we are changed from being 0% forgiven to being 100% forgiven before God. The abiding state of justification begins in that instant and continues in its fullness (100%) for as long as we remain in union with Christ. Justification is not just the forgiveness of individual sins, but the forgiveness of the entire person. The following is based upon the work of Jack Cottrell in his book,
The Faith Once For All. published by College Press Publishing Company.
We need to ask what the basis for justification is.
Justification is defined as a divine declaration. It means that God as Judge declares us to be righteous with respect to his law. On what basis does God make this declaration? Because God himself is righteous, he cannot say or do anything that violates his own holy nature or that ignores the requirements of his holy law. Thus if God justifies us or declares us righteous, there must be a basis or rationale for that declaration. What is it?
One possible basis for justification would be the individual’s own personal righteousness, his own works or accomplishments. This would be the case if the person were completely righteous with respect to the law’s commandments, i.e., if he were 100% innocent. In this case the Judge would be required to say, “No penalty for you,” since the person is literally not guilty of any sin and does not deserve any punishment. Such would be a true justification by works. This possibility will never become a reality, though, since all have sinned and no one is 100% innocent (Rom 3:20,23).
There is another possible way for a person to be justified (declared righteous) by his own personal righteousness. This would happen if one did indeed break the law but then he, himself, actually took the full punishment for doing so. In this case the person would be righteous with respect to the law’s penalty rather than its commands. Once the penalty was paid, the Judge could declare, “No further penalty for you.” This happens on a human level when a criminal serves his full sentence, thus “paying his debt to society,” and is released from prison. The reason this will never happen in the divine Judge’s courtroom, though, is that the penalty for sins is eternal suffering in hell. Because the penalty is eternal, condemned sinners will never reach the point when they have completely satisfied the law’s penal requirement. They will forever be paying their debt of punishment.
Thus because of the fact of universal sinfulness, and because of the nature of the punishment deserved by sin, no one will ever be justified on the basis of any type of human righteousness. What is the alternative?
The only alternative, and the only true basis for justifying sinners, is God’s own righteousness imputed or credited to the sinner’s account. If we attempt to stand before God on the judgment day dressed only in our own righteousness—a “filthy garment” (Isa 64:6)—we will be condemned, not justified. That is why God offers to clothe us with “a robe of righteousness” that he himself has prepared (Isa 61:10). This leads Paul to say that on that day he wants to “be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith” (Phil 3:9). The gospel is the power of God for salvation because “in it the righteousness of God is revealed,” to take the place of our own futile human righteousness (Rom 1:16-17). Anyone who rejects God’s righteousness and seeks to establish his own righteousness as a basis for acceptance by God is doomed to be rejected (Rom 10:3).
The righteousness of God that serves as the basis for justification is not the divine attribute of righteousness or justice as such, especially if this is understood as God’s own perfect moral character and his perfect legal justice that requires sin to be punished. The righteousness of God that justifies is rather a gift given to sinners, like a robe woven by God then offered to and accepted by the sinner, who wears it as if it were his own (Isa 61:10). It is a righteousness that is outside of God and “comes from God” (Phil 3:9) and is applied to us. When God sees this righteousness in our possession, he declares, “No penalty for you!”
Specifically, this righteousness of God is the righteousness of God the Son in the person of Jesus Christ. In fact the main purpose of the incarnation was to establish a divine righteousness that could be used as the basis for justifying sinners. An image frequently used to represent this transfer of righteousness is imputation, which is based on the Greek verb logizomai. When used in the context of justification, this word derives its meaning from the way it was used by Greeks in the field of business or commerce. It was a technical term that described the procedure of entering a credit or a debit to someone’s account. It is properly translated “to credit, to set down to one’s account, to impute, to reckon, to count as, to regard as.” An illustration of the concept is Paul’s exhortation to Philemon (v. 18, NKJV) regarding any debt owed to him by his runaway slave Onesimus: “Put that on my account.” This concept explains what was happening on the cross; and it explains what is happening in justification, when Christ’s righteousness is imputed or credited to us.
Exactly what is the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to our account? We will remember that strictly speaking righteousness means “conformity to a norm.” Where salvation from sin is concerned, the relevant norm is the law of God, and justification can happen only when the requirements of the law have been satisfied as mandated by God’s own holy nature. This is what Jesus came to accomplish. In essence the righteousness of God and the basis for our justification is the fact that Jesus satisfied the requirements of the law in our place, and in justification his satisfaction of these requirements is imputed to our account.
Most Protestants are in agreement up to this point, but here a serious error is usually made. It is often assumed that the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us includes his active righteousness, i.e., his satisfaction of or obedience to the commandments of the law. With Christ’s perfect obedience put down on our account, God can look at us and declare us “not guilty,” thus treating us just as if we had never sinned. But this is not correct. Christ did indeed obey the law perfectly, but he did so because as a human being this was his own personal responsibility and duty. It was necessary for his own sake; it was what he ought to have done, even apart from his saving purposes. Thus in terms of his active righteousness, even the sinless Christ is an “unprofitable servant” (Luke 17:10, KJV). He has no extra merits left over, so to speak, to share with anyone else. (This does not mean, of course, that his perfect obedience is irrelevant to our salvation. His perfect life was a prerequisite for his perfect sacrifice. Without the former, he could not have been the latter.)
What, then, is imputed to our account as the basis for our justification? Not Christ’s active righteousness—his doing, but his passive righteousness—his dying. Jesus not only satisfied the commandments of the law; he also satisfied the law’s requirements for penalty. He took its punishment in our place through his substitutionary and propitiatory death on the cross. This is the “one act of righteousness” that constitutes the righteousness of God: “Even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men” (Rom 5:18). Thus the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel and imputed to our account is Christ’s satisfaction, on our behalf, of the law’s requirement for penalty. In essence the righteousness of God is the blood of Christ.
This is why to be justified (declared righteous) does not mean to be treated just as if I’d never sinned, but just as if I’d already paid the penalty of eternal hell. As sinners justified by the blood of Christ we do not have to worry about hell because (as far as God is concerned) we have already been there, have paid our eternal debt, and have been released (Rom 8:1).
That is the basis for God's justification. It remains to establish the means for God's justification. That is, whom God justifies.
