Romans chapter 4, we'll begin
reading in verse 16. Therefore, the promise comes
by faith, so that it may be by grace, and may be guaranteed
to all Abraham's offspring. Not only those who are of the
law, and by that he's referring to the Jews, but also those who
are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. As
it is written, I have made you a father of many nations. He
is our father in the sight of God, in whom he, that is Abraham,
believed. The God who gives life to the
dead and calls things that are not as though they were. Against all hope, Abraham in
hope believed, and so became the father of many nations. Just
as it had been said to him, so shall your offspring be. Without
weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as
good as dead, since he was about 100 years old, and that Sarah's
womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through
unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened
in his faith and gave glory to God being fully persuaded that
God had power to do what he had promised. This is why it was
credited to him as righteousness. The words it was credited to
him were not written for him alone, but also for us. to whom God will credit righteousness,
for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the
dead. He was delivered over to death
for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. I've entitled this message, A
Gracious Pretense. Now we might not want to say
that God pretends. After all, when we pretend, we're
not being completely honest, are we? And yet, we have written here
in verse 17 that God calls things that are not as though they were. Now, while we may say, well, we don't
want to think that God pretends, That he would never say that
something exists when it actually doesn't. Yet if we cannot accept the fact
that that's what God does, and we'll explain how he does it
in a few minutes, but first, just let us accept the fact that
that's what he's doing. And if he doesn't do that, we
are lost. We are lost. Because the thing
that he's saying that does exist, when in all reality it does not,
is our righteousness. He is calling us righteous, when
in point of fact, we aren't. That is, from heaven's throne,
he declares wicked people to be righteous. Look in verse 5. However, to the man who does
not work, but trusts God who, what? Justifies. Now what's that word justify
mean? It means to declare righteous. One place that this word would
be used was in courts of law. And if a person was accused of
a crime and yet was found to be not guilty of it, then the
judge would say, not guilty. And in so doing, he would be
justifying that man. And so it says here that God
declares to be righteous, the wicked. Now that seems strange,
doesn't it? Why would God declare a man to
be righteous when in all reality he is wicked? And maybe more importantly, how
can he do that and remain a just and righteous judge when he does
it? After all, we figure that if
a judge knows a man to be guilty, and nonetheless declares him
to be not guilty, he's an unjust judge. And we would have no respect
for his judgments. And yet we have here that God,
the judge of all, is looking upon one who is by nature, by
birth, and by practice a wicked person, and God looks upon such
a one and says, he's righteous. He's not guilty. No sin is upon
him. To get an explanation of this,
in verse 6 it says, David says the same thing when he speaks
of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness
apart from works. Blessed are they whose transgressions
are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose
sin the Lord will never count against him. Now on the one hand
we think of justification as being declared righteous But
the way Paul describes it here, using one of David's Psalms, to be simply forgiven, to have
sins covered, to simply have God not count our sins against
us, that's the same thing as being declared righteous. Now, this righteousness, is declared
by God without us doing anything that could be called righteous. Now let that sink in for a minute.
This is part and parcel of the gospel. This is what makes our
salvation possible. You see, the Lord had said to
Moses, I will by no means clear the guilty. And the only means then by which
we can be saved is for Him to declare us to be not guilty. God credits righteousness apart
from works. Now in verse 4, He says when
a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but
as an obligation. Now, if you are an employee and
you work by the hour and you put in your week, your 40 hours
or whatever it is, you come to the end of the week and you get
your check from your employer. Now, do you look at that and
say, how gracious my employer was to me to give me this check? No, you take the check because
it's owed to you. You worked for it, you earned
it. It's not a gift. It's the payment of a contract.
You agreed to work for him for so much time, and he was supposed
to pay you so much money. So when you worked, at the end
of that time, he owed you the money. And therefore, when he
paid it to you, he wasn't doing anything virtuous. He was doing
what he's obligated to do. Now that's what people under
the law are trying to do. When people try to live under
the jurisdiction of the law of God, what they are saying is,
I will do what the law commands, and once I have done it, God
will be under obligation to give me the blessings of the righteous.
Well, you know what? If you could do what the law
required, And you did do it, God would be obligated to give
you the blessings of the righteous. But there is none righteous. There is not anybody of the descendants
of Adam who has ever, for even the shortest moment of time,
fulfilled the very least of God's law. There's only one man who's ever
done it, and he was not a direct descendant of Adam, and that
is the man Christ Jesus. He did. According to the book
of Galatians, he came into the world born of a woman, born under
the law. And you realize the Bible says
if you're under a law, you're under a curse. But he's the only
man that ever came into the world and he was under the law, but
he was not under a curse. And the reason he was not under
a curse is he never broke it. The Lord Jesus Christ came and
from the moment of His conception until the moment of His death,
He never did anything that transgressed God's law in the least bit. And it wasn't just a matter of
discipline on His part that He had to resist His urges, because
He had no urge, He had no desire to go against God. You and I,
we're full of sinful desires. In fact, all the desires we have
are sinful. Therefore, everything we do is
corrupted with sin. But Jesus Christ, the Bible says,
He knew no sin. It wasn't in Him. Satan, that
one who loves to tempt us to sin, the Lord said of him, that
the prince of this world has come, but he's found nothing
in me. Oh, the devil looked for something to work with in the
Lord Jesus Christ. You think of it now. The devil
comes to you, he's got lots to work with, doesn't he? If He can't make your temper
flare up, He'll make your covetousness fire up, or your lust, or your
rebellion, or your irreligion, or your self-righteousness. He's
got so much to work with. He can play us like a piano.
But He came to the Lord Jesus Christ, and there was absolutely
nothing in Him to work with. The only way He could tempt Him
was to tempt Him with things that were rightfully His, but
would have disqualified him as a savior were he to do it, or
would have required him to commit some sin. For all the devil said to him,
showed him all the kings of the world and said, I'll give these
to you if you'll just bow down and worship me. You know, there
was absolutely no sin in the Lord Jesus Christ desiring to
be king of the world. That's one thing he came to do. But it would have been sin for
him to gain the kingdoms of the world by worshipping the devil. He said to the Lord Jesus Christ,
he said, if you're the Son of God, why don't you turn these
stones into bread? Now, the Lord was hungry. He
hadn't eaten anything for 40 days. He was hungry. Nothing
wrong with being hungry. And when you're hungry, there's
nothing wrong with wanting food. And if you're the son of God,
you can turn one thing into anything else you want. And there would
have been no sin had the Lord actually done that. In fact, the Lord could have
said, well, I'll just show you, Mr. Devil, I can turn all of these rocks
into bread if I want to. But you know what our Lord said,
man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds
out of the mouth of God. And part of the word that had
proceeded out of the mouth of God was that he who is to be
the substitute for God's people must live like God's people do.
And you know something? I can't turn stones into bread. Therefore, if he's to be my savior,
he must not care for himself by miraculous means that I can't
use. He's got to live life just like
I have to live it. Though he was not under the curse,
because he'd done no sin, he lived as a man who was under
that curse, for the Lord had cursed Adam with these words,
by the sweat of your brow shall you eat. And our Lord ate by
the sweat of his brow, just like I have to, just like you have
to. So you see, when the Lord was
tempted, the devil had nothing to work with in him. He was perfect. Seeing that he was not a descendant
of Adam, Adam's transgression had not been charged to him.
Seeing that he was not a descendant of Adam, Adam's nature was not
in him. And without that nature, he therefore
did no sin. The only one like that there
ever was. The rest of us, a lifetime. of transgression,
of sin, of iniquity, of rebellion. So much so that even now if we
profess to believe the Lord Jesus Christ, if we claim to have been
saved by His grace and justified from all those things we never
could have been justified in the law of Moses. Yet still,
do we not confess this? Everything we do is corrupted
with sin. So much so, we often feel more
like saying, nothing that I do is made glorious with any righteousness. All we'd like to do good. If
we're believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we desire to be like
him. And if we're like the Lord Jesus Christ, we even try to
be like him. But when we're all done with
our wanting to and our trying to, we must confess this. We didn't get it done, did we? We're not that way. We must confess,
as did Paul a few chapters later, O wretched man that I am, who
shall deliver me from this body of death? When I would do good,
evil is present with me, and I find that the things I want
to do, that's not what I'm doing, and the things I don't want to
do, that's exactly what I do. We give it all we got, but all
we got's nothing. We're nothing but sin. But blessed are they whose transgressions
are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose
sin the Lord will never count against him. What do you consider to be blessing? But it gets a little tight and
you ask God to put some room in the budget, and he does, and
you say, oh, I've been blessed of God. The last year, God's
been so, so great blessing towards me, I made more money than I
made the last year. Well, good. Do you know there's some people
to whom God gave more money than he did last year, and it's a
curse to them. Money's not necessarily a blessing. Or we're sick, and
then we get healthy, and we say, God has blessed me. Well, maybe
he has. But there's a lot of people who are healthy, and their
health is no blessing to them. A lot can be said about a man's
spiritual condition by what he counts to be a great blessing.
Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven. Imagine, if you can, the great
mass of your sin. Now, I don't think that it's
a good idea for us to spend a whole lot of time, as they say, doing
that belly button gazing, you know, where we look within as
though there's some virtue in an inward look in order that
we might kind of marinate in our own guilt. But there is a
value in understanding our sin if it leads us to a greater appreciation
of the blessing of forgiveness. When we, by the grace of God,
can look at our sin and all its ugliness, and the huge pile of
it that we've done, and quite frankly, how much bigger that
pile would have been if we weren't just scared of going to hell
for it. Or how much bigger that pile would have been if we thought
we wouldn't have got caught by other people and messed up our
lives with it. Think about that. What would
you do if you thought there were absolutely no evil or bad consequences
to come from your actions? Oh, what a heap of sin that would
be, wouldn't it? Well, that's how big the heap of sin is. And
so imagine that. A mass that you could never move.
A mass like a mountain. And God comes, and by grace,
puts it away. Doesn't just chip off the top.
Doesn't just chisel in a set of stairs for you to climb to
the top. Removes it. Our Lord said to his disciples,
if you had the faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say
to this mountain, be cast into the sea. And it would. And to
this mountain that he was speaking of was the mountain they were
standing by, Mount Zion. That place that symbolized God
and all His holiness and righteousness and justice. Yes, it displayed
His grace too in the sacrifices, but it was the big monument to
the old covenant which said, do this and live. And therefore,
what the law did, according to the writer of Hebrews, it was
an annual reminder of sin. And so our Lord says, this mountain,
which is an annual reminder of your sin, this mountain, which
is your sin, if you've got the faith of a grain of mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain, be gone and it'll be gone. Why? Because the Lord will remove
it. Every bit of it. Not just the little ones. He
won't just take care of what you couldn't get taken care of
because you can't take care of any of it. He doesn't get rid of all the
sins that you did before you called on His name, but anything
you do after that, you're on your own. No. The whole of our
sin, from the beginning of our existence to the end of our lives
on this world, all of it is forgiven by the grace of the Lord in His
Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. If we're in Christ, those sins
are gone. The sins are covered. And not just covered that they
might be uncovered at a later date, they've been covered by
the blood of Christ. And he who put the blood there
will never let anyone remove it. Blessed is the man who sinned,
the Lord will never count against him. We may understand a little bit
of what this means. If we think about someone we
love who has offended us deeply, but we choose on the basis of
our love, even though we're fully aware of what they did, we don't
hold it against them. We just let it go. We don't make
them pay. We don't withdraw our friendship
from them. And if they come to us broken
and in sorrow for what they did, and they say to us, oh, could
you possibly forgive me for what I did? We say, I forgave you
a long time ago. I've never held this against
you. Do you know, that's what our God does. Under the old covenant,
there is a continual remembrance of sin. Because sins are never
put away under the Old Covenant. But under the New Covenant of
the Gospel, the blood of Jesus Christ purifies us from all sin. And the greatest promise, at
least in my mind, the greatest promise of the New Covenant is
this, their sins and iniquities I will remember no more. And
that word remember doesn't simply mean that God forgets they happened,
God knows everything. It means He won't bring them
up again. Remember that song, it's an old
folk song and it was made famous in the 60s or early 70s, but
Are You Going to Scarborough Fair? And one of the lines in
it is, remember me to one who lives there. What do I mean by
that? Remind that person, bring me
up in their presence. And what God says, I won't remember
your sin, I'm not going to bring it up. There's a day that's coming
when all of us here will stand before God. to be judged. And in that day, if we are in
Christ Jesus, now you think about this, in that day, if we are
in Christ Jesus, God's not going to bring up our sin. He's not
going to make mention of it. He's not going to say you did
this, that and the other. Well, how do you explain that?
What excuse do you have? No, it says in that day that
Judah's sin will be sought for, that Israel's sin they're going
to look around for. But in that day, it shall not be found. They'll open the books and there'll
be nothing written there. Is that not an amazing thing
to think about? Oh, in my conscience, there's so much written there.
There's so much evil written, line after line after line, sin
after sin after sin. Sins I vowed to quit and then
broke my vow. Sins I've struggled with and
never been victorious. There they are on the book of
my conscience. But God's not going to look in
the book of my conscience. He's going to look in the book
of His divine decrees. He's going to look in the book
of His justice. And he'll turn the page to my name and there
will be nothing there to bring up. What's more, he will look at
the page under my name and there will be a record of doing those
things that I never did. No record of what I actually
did, but a record of things that the Lord Jesus Christ did in
my behalf. He said in the days of his flesh,
I do always those things which please my father. I would have
to say I do always those things which grieve my father. And that's
what my conscience tells me. But the book in heaven says I
do always those things which please the father. I must say that the God of this
age or the prince of this world has come and he's found so much
in me. It's embarrassing. I wouldn't even tell you about
it. Yet, in the book under my name it's written, the prince
of this world came and couldn't find anything in him. I know sin. I know what it is. I know what it is to do it. I
know what it is to feel the condemnation of it. I know what it is to feel
the shame of it. I know sin. But you go to the
book in glory, God's book, and it'll say, he knew no sin. Paul says, let God be true in
every man a liar, and I must confess, I'm under the category
of men. That makes me a liar. And yet
it says, there was no deceit found in him. How can this be? How can that
which I know exists, not exist? and be treated as
though it's not there. And how can that which I know
doesn't exist be declared as though it does?
Well, if this was up to you and me, we'd get nowhere, wouldn't
we? Because we can't get rid of our sins and we can't produce
the righteousness. We can't wipe the slate clean
and we can't write anything good on that slate once it's been
Wiped clean. But salvation never was of us,
was it? Salvation never has been about
what we could get rid of or what we could produce. It was never
about us changing what we do. Brethren, if we could change
what we do, we wouldn't need a Savior. No, our hope is in
God. God who gives life to the dead
and even calls things that don't exist as though they do. I will tell you, and confess
openly, I am not a righteous man. Not by any stretch of the
imagination. But you know what? God says I
am. And when judgment day comes,
whose opinion do you think is going to carry the day? That's why Paul could later say, Right over here, in verse 20
of chapter 5, the law was added so that the trespass might increase.
All that the law could ever do to us is accent and aggravate
our sinfulness. And so the more that a person
lives under the law, the more the law reveals to him what a
wretched sinner he is. And in all reality, the more
that a man lives under the law, the more it promotes a sinful
attitude in him. It's not the law's fault, it's
the sinner's fault. We're so corrupt that that which
is good and righteous and holy works sinfulness in us. So the
law causes the trespass to increase. But where sin increased, grace
increased all the more. Do you see what a glorious thing
this gospel is? That where sin increased, and
you might think, if you're a believer, you might think as you're going
through life, my sin just keeps increasing. I thought it was
going to diminish. I thought it was going to get
better. I thought as I grew in grace and knowledge of the Lord
Jesus Christ, I'd have less desire to sin and sin wouldn't have
the power on me that it used to have. And yet now I've been
many years following the Lord and I must confess I feel worse
now than I did before I knew Him. Where sin increased, grace
increased all the more. Your sin may be a Mount Everest
in your eyes, the tallest mountain on the earth, But understand
this, if your sin is Mount Everest, Mount Everest is no longer the
tallest mountain on earth. God's grace is. Brethren, I do
not rejoice at all in the greatness of my sin, but I do rejoice in
this. Great as it is, God's grace is even greater. Under the law, sin reigns unto
death. Under grace, grace reigns unto
life. through the righteousness that
is given to us through the Lord Jesus Christ. He calls what is not as though
it is. And I who am not righteous am
called righteous. I who am not worthy is declared
to be worthy. And this is true of every believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, such a declaration may seem
dishonest on the part of God. It may seem as though He's been
an unjust judge. But the reason God can do this
is twofold. First of all, He declares us
to be righteous from the viewpoint of His eternal and timeless existence. And He declares us to be righteous Because He knows that through
His Son, that's what He's going to make us. Now, it's never our righteousness
that justifies us. We are justified by the righteousness
of Christ. But God is no liar when He declares
us to be righteous. Because by His grace, that's
what we shall be. And what does not exist here
does exist in glory. When our Lord taught us to pray,
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
That word translated done is better understood made real.
Thy will be made real on earth just like it is in heaven. And
this thing of history, this history we live, this experience of life
we go through is simply time catching up with God's decree.
These things have already been decreed, and in the mind of God
they are already true, they are already real. And so He declares
them to be so, even though in our experience they are not. He declares me to be like His
Son, though I am not. He declares me as being seated
with his son in the heavenly places, though I'm not. I'm down
here. He declares me to be perfect,
though I'm not. Now, if we doubt that he can
do that, if we doubt that he can do that, notice this. This
one who calls things that are not as though they were is the
God who gives life to the dead. God made Adam and made a body,
but it was just a corpse. All the parts were there, but
there's no life in it. And God breathed into him, and
Adam became a living being. However, an even greater resurrection
was done some 4,000 years later, when God's own beloved Son, died
under the penalty of the sin that was laid to his account. And three days later, God gave
life to the dead and brought him out of the tomb. You know, you can imagine how
discouraged the disciples were when they saw our Lord Jesus
Christ die. He had mentioned such wonderful things to come.
He'd spoken of such great and wondrous works of God. But all that word means nothing
now. He's in the tomb. What good are the words of a
dead man? And you can imagine they're full
of fear, they're full of confusion. They can't reconcile what he
said with what they see. And they're sitting there in
that room for those days, hiding in fear that they're next. And the women go to the tomb
on the first day of the week, because even though they're confused
about him, they still love him. Even though they don't understand
how he could be dead and still be Messiah, they're going to
go to the tomb and do for him what love would demand. And they
went there, and he wasn't there. And then they came back and they
told the disciples that some angels had appeared to them and
said that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. And over the period of a few
days, the Lord revealed Himself to His disciples, and they came
to the realization that He who is dead is alive. Now, it was a terrible three
days. of discouragement and frustration and confusion. But it was three
days necessary to bring them to this glorious realization
that the salvation that they had heard about, which was so
great as to seem impossible, why, it's not impossible after
all. If God can raise the dead, He can call things that are not
as though they are. The example given to us is Abraham
and a promise had been made to him. And the promise was that
he would have an heir. And yet here he is a hundred
years old, and Sarah is ninety. I don't know about you, but I don't
think I could sire a child at a hundred. Or my wife could have one at
ninety. That's pretty far-fetched, isn't
it? Why, for them to have a child would just be like raising the
dead. Because so far as burying children is concerned, Abraham
and Sarah were as good as dead. But God said they'd have an heir.
And God said that heir is not Eliezer, the steward of the household.
That heir is not Ishmael, the child of the bond slave. The
child that's promised would be one from his own body and from
Sarah's own body. And so Abraham believed God.
You say, Abraham, that's impossible. He said, well, it's impossible
for me and Sarah, but it's not impossible for God. And when
the promised time came, behold, a child came forth, and he who
could not be now is. God called that which was not
as though it was, and behold, it came to be. God has declared us, who are
in Christ, to be righteous, though we are not. And He's been able to do this
because He did something that nobody else could or would do. It says back here in chapter 3, verse
25, God presented Christ as a sacrifice
of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate
his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed
beforehand unpunished. He'd forgiven them. Blessed are
they whose transgressions are forgiven. He'd covered them.
He wasn't holding them against his people. That's not right.
Just judge has got to condemn the wicked. In his forbearance he left the
sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his
justice at the present time. So as to be just and the one
who justifies those who have faith in Christ Jesus. How can
God declare me to be righteous when I am not and neither be
a liar nor an unjust judge when he does so? Because He justifies
me on the basis of the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ, freely
given up for me. My sins were not just taken off
of me and thrown in the trash can and discarded. My sins were
dealt with. When they are forgiven, they
are justly forgiven. Because they were laid upon Christ
and dealt with there. I've been forgiven of them, but
Christ was condemned for them. My sins may be covered, but they're
not covered by some phony self-righteousness that I can patch up. They're
not covered up, it's simply that we're trying to sweep it under
the rug so nobody sees it. They've been covered in the blood
of the Lord Jesus Christ, a token of justice satisfied for those
sins. And that which justice has said
is enough, no one can ever bring them back again. Verse 23 of chapter 4, the words,
it was credited to him. Righteousness just declared.
Abraham wasn't a righteous man. He's a sinful man. His conduct
proved it. But God declared him righteous.
And that declaration of righteousness was not written for him alone,
but also for us. For us who believe in Him who
raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, and we look at the resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we say, if God can do that, and
if God has done that, He can declare me to be what I am not,
and make it happen. He was delivered over to death
for our sins. That is, because of our sins
is what the sense of it means. Because we sinned, he died. And
then it says, and he was raised to life for our justification. It's not saying that his resurrection
to life is what justified us. Again, the word means because
of. He was raised to life because his death was such that it put
away our sins and we were thereby justified. and his work having
been completed, and the sins that he bore having been fully
put away by his suffering. God justified him and raised
him from the dead. Now what does this tell us? It
tells us that even though our experience testifies that we
are sinners, God's word testifies that all who are in Christ are
righteous. Even though our works testify that we are worthy of
eternal condemnation, the Word of God testifies that in Christ
Jesus we are worthy of eternal life. Now that's impossible to
believe apart from a work of God's grace. And even we who
have God's grace to believe it struggle with it, don't we? But
you say, oh, I'm such a sinner, how can I be saved? Because he
who can raise the dead has said you're righteous, even though
you're not. And if he says it, that's the
way things are gonna go.