The Doctrine of Imputation. Genesis 15:6
Notice Genesis 15:12, “And when the
sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great
darkness fell upon him.” Notice he starts off with this command not to fear,
and then as soon as he does what God says he is put into a deep sleep and he is
terrorized in the midst of that sleep. The word that is used for fear here is a
word that is used for the most intense kind of fear possible. Fear is not a
thing that is a stranger to any of us, but what is the solution? The solution
is the faithfulness of God, and that is the theme of this whole passage, that
everything is being grounded in the faithfulness of God. So God reminds us
about Abraham in verse six, that he had already believed in Yahweh, and the word that is chosen in
that passage among several possible Hebrew words for faith is the word aman in the hiphil stem, meaning to rely
upon something that is steadfast, something that is solid, something that is
immovable and unshakable. And so the undercurrent of this whole chapter is that
God is faithful to His promises. He reiterates the promises related to the seed
in the first part of the chapter and in the second part of the chapter He is
going to reiterate and define even more precisely the promise related to the
land. But what under girds all this is that no matter how uncertain things may
be for Abraham, no matter how much he might fear today for his safety because
of potential threats from foreign enemies, no matter how he may perceive a
threat to his own personal safety and security, his plans, his hopes, his
dreams, God is saying, “I am always there, I am always faithful and am not
going back on my promises.”
Abraham had learned this when he was
saved, Verse 6 is just a reiteration of this and in verse 7 God is going to
strengthen that foundation through the Abrahamic covenant. But what we have
already mentioned is that verse 6 sits in the center of this passage as the
anchor point for the first conversation, verses 105, and the second
conversation, verses 7-21. In verse 6 there is this reference which is picked
up and commented on and utilized by Paul in Romans chapter four as the
foundation for understand the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and we
are told that he believed or trusted in Yahweh,
and this is a significant statement here because of a couple of things in the
Hebrew text here. He believed in Yahweh, and Yahweh, the sacred tetragrammaton
for a Jew is always reminiscent of God as the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob and the God who gave the covenant on Mount Sinai, because it was to
Moses God revealed the significance of His name, I AM THAT I AM, and so that is always tied to His faithfulness and stability. Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob understood that that was God’s name and they used that name,
but they didn’t understand its significance in the way that the later Jews
understood it in terms of the meaning given and revealed in relationship to the
Exodus event. And that deliverance at the Exodus event, interestingly enough,
is rooted and grounded in the prophecy made by God right here in Genesis 15.
That shows how the Bible connects all these things together.
The issue that underlies this is
anxiety that Abraham feels about his own life, his own security, his own
destiny, and God is going to show what that is based on; that he can have
certainty and stability even when the details of life are very loose and fluid
and uncertain. All certainty in the Christian life is grounded on the character
and person of God. The underlying doctrine here is the doctrine of
justification and the doctrine of imputation. To understand the doctrine of
justification we have to understand the doctrine of imputation. This is an
important doctrine, it underlies our whole understanding of salvation, and it
underlies our whole relationship to God. Everything is built on this doctrine.
1)
The doctrine of
imputation is the action of the justice of God whereby either condemnation or
blessing is assigned, credited, or attributed to a human being. It is the
action of the justice of God, which means that is flows from His holiness. The
foundation of this is His integrity, His holiness—His righteousness that
forms the standard of His character, and the justice, which is the application
of that standard. It is fascinating that in both languages that God used to
reveal Himself to man, in both Greek and Hebrew, the word for righteousness and
the word for justice are the same word. In Hebrew that word is tzaddeq, and in Greek it is DIKAIOSUNE [dikaiosunh]. Each of
these words, depending on the context, can either mean righteousness or
justice, which indicates that when we are talking about these things, because
they are represented by that same word, we are talking about the same thing but
we shift in terms of its orientation. So that when we are talking about the
standard we talk about righteousness; when we talk about the application of
that standard to creatures we talk about justice. At the very root of man’s
whole problem with God is the problem of failing to meet a standard. That is
why when we get over in to the New Testament one of the major doctrines related
to salvation is the doctrine of reconciliation. Reconciliation means to have
something be re-conformed to a standard. That standard was breached when Adam
sinned. So at the very core of everything is the issue of God’s righteousness
and His justice so that before anything can happen in terms of our relationship
to God this has to be resolved. The important thing is to understand how it is
resolved. It is not resolved through our own personal ethics or morality
because essentially that is not the problem. What we will see is that the
reason we are condemned has nothing to do with our personal sin, it has to do
with Adam’s sin. Once we really understand that (very few Christians do) it
starts to change our perception of what happens at salvation. At its very core
imputation is a legal concept. Genesis 15:6, talking about imputation as a legal
concept, is wrapped right into this covenant context where God is making a
legal contract with Abraham. There are two categories of imputation: real
imputations and judicial imputations. The term “real imputation” isn’t
contrasted to something that is unreal. It is in contrast to a judicial
imputation. This distinction, interestingly enough, originated with Dr. Chafer
at Dallas Seminary.
2)
Real
imputations credit something to a person, which truly belongs to him, i.e.
there is a similarity; there is an affinity between what is imputed and
something that is possessed by the person to whom it is imputed. Therefore,
when you say that eternal life is imputed to a regenerate believer there is an
affinity there because he is already regenerate. When we say that the personal
sins of man have been imputed to Jesus Christ there is not an affinity there,
there is no relationship between our personal sin and the perfect Savior. So
because we are fallen and our sins are imputed to Him that is called a judicial
imputation, whereas a real imputation exists, for example, as when Adam’s
original sin is imputed to our sin nature. That is a real imputation because
there is an affinity between the two, a correlation between the two.
3)
Judicial
imputations occur when the justice of God credits to a person what is not
antecedently his own, in other words, there is not this correlation or affinity
between what is imputed and the person receiving it. That is referring to the
imputation of our sin to the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross.
4)
What is the
meaning of imputation? The English word “imputation” derives from the Latin
word imputare, which means to reckon
or to charge to one’s account. The English means to charge someone with a fault
or responsibility, or simply credit something to someone. It means to reckon,
to charge to one’s account, to assign something. It is a legal concept. The Old
Testament word has a root meaning, which means to think, and from this concept
of thinking we get calculating, the idea of assigning value. It is an economic
term, which is interesting because sin is often looked at as a debt. The New
Testament Greek word is LOGIZOMAI [logizomai], which comes from logic, [logoj]. These are terms which have to do with thought. It is not a concrete thing;
it is an abstract assignation or assigning of something to something else.
5)
There is an
example of the secular usage of the word in the New Testament, in Philemon 1:18
where Paul tells Philemon: “If he has wronged thee, or owes you in anything,
charge that on my account”—impute it to me: logizomai.
6)
The basis for
justification is the character of God. We can’t understand justification
without understanding the character of God, the character of God relating to
His justice and his righteousness. That has to be resolved.
7)
Man, therefore,
is ethically worthless, not ontologically worthless. We have value because we
were created in the image and likeness of God, but we are ethically worthless
because we have violated God’s standard. Man isn’t just neutralized, we don’t
move from a positive value to zero, we move into, negative territory. We don’t
just lose righteousness; we acquire an unrighteousness. Isaiah 64:6, “But we
are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness's are as filthy rags.”
It doesn’t say our unrighteousness's, it says all our righteousness's, i.e. the
very best that we do is viewed by God as filthy rags. That is the deficit that
we approach God with. We are not in a position of neutrality; we are in a
position where there is an ethical deficit.
8)
Therefore,
there must not only be forgiveness of sin in the process but there has to be a
positive addition of righteousness. Where this is important is that if we are
ever witnessing to a Roman Catholic or someone who is out of a Roman Catholic
background, their view of sin going back to the Middle Ages is that sin is a
privation. Privation simply means you are missing something. As far as they are
concerned evil is just the absence of righteousness, it is not the presence of
a substantive evil or substantive unrighteousness. So they diminished at the
very core of their understanding of man’s being, what evil and sin is, to where
it is merely an absence of righteousness and absence of good. That ends up
making man neutral, and if man is neutral what can man do? He can do something
to please God! All this fits together, and that is why it is so difficult.
9)
Because the
essential problem is a legal problem, not experiential, man can’t solve the
dilemma through ritual or through works. The problem is Adam’s sin, and because
of Adam’s sin we are condemned, not because of our own sin. Because of that we
can’t solve it by doing something ourselves. We can’t turn back the clock on
Adam’s fall in the garden. Romans 4:10, talking about Abraham’s faith, “How was
it then reckoned? when he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in
circumcision, but in uncircumcision.” Circumcision was the ritual, which was
the sing of the Abrahamic covenant, and circumcision isn’t introduced until
Genesis chapter seventeen. So in chapter fifteen we just have the formal
cutting of the covenant between God and Abraham, but the sign isn’t given until
chapter seventeen, and we have already seen that Genesis 15:6 predates even
chapter twelve. So Paul’s argument is, how was righteousness imputed? It is
whether it was circumcised or uncircumcised. Not while circumcised but while
uncircumcised. In other words, it is imputed before he does anything, before
there is any ritual on Abraham’s part. Romans 4:11, “And he received the sign
of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet
being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe,
though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them
also.” So it can be seen that it is completely apart from ritual, it is
completely apart from obedience on the part of the believer. Man can’t solve
the legal dilemma through his own ritual or through works; it is a total
reliance upon God. He is the one who gives us the righteousness.
10)
Legal justification
requires a perfect righteousness, an absolute righteousness, there can’t be any
flaws, any failure or any other problem, and it has to be perfect. Therefore,
we can’t produce it. It can’t be experiential.
11)
God in His
wisdom came up with a plan called imputation, which is crediting one person,
someone else’s perfect or positive righteousness. That is how God solved the
dilemma.
12)
The
justification that we have is based on a perfect righteousness that comes
outside of man, not inside of man. It is not based on some ethical improvement
that takes place. It is not even exemplified by some ethical improvement that
takes place, that is the error that came out of Roman Catholic theology, it is
the error that is present in Lordship salvation, it is the error that is present
in a lot of holiness theology—that somehow, if you are really saved,
there is this ethical difference. But, you see, where do you get ethical out of
legal? We are talking about a legal concept, not an ethical concept. The
ethical concept belongs under sanctification.
13)
This
distinguishes justification from regeneration and sanctification. Justification
comes first, and then because we have this legal standing before God He can
regenerate us. Sanctification is subsequent to that. We have to distinguish
these. If we connect them too closely we end up saying, “Well the spiritual
life [sanctification] is how you know whether you were saved.” It’s, well so
and so doesn’t live like a Christian; he can’t be one. The whole presupposition
of that is that if you are really saved you are ethically changed on the inside
so you won’t do certain things. That confuses sanctification with
justification.
14)
Thus,
justification must precede both regeneration and sanctification.
15)
It is distinct
from regeneration and sanctification. This isn’t understood today. It was
understood by Martin Luther; it was understood by the Reformers; and that is
what gave birth to the Protestant Reformation and the historic position of the
Anabaptists in the 16th century, the Lutherans in the 16th
century, and the Reformed Calvinistic Huguenots in the 15th century.
They understood this and they died for this. For them this wasn’t abstract
theology.
16)
Attempts are
often made to try to base justification on some inner quality of the sinner.
That is what happens in Lordship salvation, i.e. How do you know whether you
are saved? If you are saved you are going to exemplify a certain kind of
behavior. Therefore, if you claim to be saved and you lie or commit murder or
some sexual immorality then maybe you weren’t really saved. And if you renounce
Christ then you definitely were never saved, because if you were really saved
there would have been this inner ethical transformation. That is just false. It
ignores grace and it is a back-door legalism.
17)
The first real
imputation was Adam’s original sin to the sin nature at birth. Historically
there have been four different views related to imputation or how Adam’s
original sin affects the human race. In the early church there was a first
class heretic by the name of Pelagius. He said it is not imputation, it is
imitation and every person is born just as neutral as Adam was created. He was
opposed by Augustine. Pelagius denied original sin and he was declared to be
so. Another attempt was Jacob Arminius, the man from whom we get the school of
theology known as Arminiainism. He is almost as bad as Pelagius. Pelagius said
they were fully alive, they were neutral; Arminius said they are just partially
dead. Calvin came along and his contribution to this theology was called
federal headship, and that is that Adam was the federal head of the race and
that he represented all of us. Augustine, going back in time again, introduced
the concept of seminalism, that we were actually seminally, physically
participatory. Both of these last two views are true.
18)
The first
judicial imputation is the imputation of our personal sins to Christ. The
second judicial imputation is the imputation of His righteousness to each
believer at the point of faith alone in Christ alone.
19)
The result,
then, is that man is declared righteous; he is not made righteous. It is not just as if I had never sinned. We are covered;
we are given someone else’s righteousness.
20)
The model is
Abraham. The picture of Joshua the high priest in Zechariah 3 gives us this
picture of righteousness. The Old Testament always gives us those images.
Zechariah 3:1-6, “And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the
angel of the LORD, and Satan [Satan is the accuser of the believer]
standing at his right hand to resist him. And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke you, O
Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke you: is not this a
brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments
[picture of the sinner], and stood before the angel. And he answered and spoke
unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from
him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused your iniquity to pass from
you, and I will clothe you with robes.” It is that clothing with robes that is
the picture of imputation. We are clothed with Christ’s righteousness. It is
His righteousness, not our righteousness. It is His righteousness that God
looks at and declares us to be just.