SPROUL: You mean the righteousness by which I will be saved is not mine?
When I discovered that, the doors of paradise swung open and I walked through.
In the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written,
“The just shall live by faith”—a verse taken from the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament that
is cited three times in the New Testament. Luther was stopped short and said: “What does this mean?
That there’s righteousness that is by faith, and from faith to faith? What does it mean that
the righteous shall live by faith?” Which again, as I said, was the thematic verse for the whole
exposition of the gospel that Paul sets forth here in the book of Romans.
And so, the lights came on for Luther. And he began to understand that what Paul was speaking
of here was a righteousness that God in His grace was making available to those who would receive it
passively, not those who would achieve it actively, but those that would receive it
by faith and by which a person could be reconciled to a holy and righteous God.
Now there was a linguistic trick that was going on here too. And it was this. The Latin word
for “justification” that was used at this time in church history was—I
mean, it’s the word from which we get the English word _justification_—the Latin word _justificare_.
And it came from the Roman judicial system. And the term "justificare" is made up of the word
"justus", which is “justice” or “righteousness,” and the verb, the infinitive "ficare", which means
“to make.” And so, the Latin fathers understood the doctrine of justification is what happens when
God, through the sacraments of the church and elsewhere, makes unrighteous people righteous.
But Luther was looking now at the Greek word that was in the New Testament,
not the Latin word. The word "dikaiosynē", which didn’t mean “to make righteous” but
rather “to regard as righteous, to count as righteous, to declare as righteous.”
And this was the moment of awakening for Luther. He said, “You mean here Paul is not
talking about the righteousness by which God Himself is righteous, but a righteousness that God
gives freely by His grace to people who don’t have righteousness of their own?”
He was confirmed in this understanding by reading an essay from Augustine on the letter
and the Spirit in which Augustine made that very comment—that in Romans Paul was not talking about
God’s righteousness but rather a righteousness that was made available to believers by faith.
And so Luther said, “Whoa, you mean the righteousness by which
I will be saved is not mine?” It’s what he called _justitia alienum_, “an alien righteousness,” a
righteousness that belongs properly to somebody else. It’s a righteousness that is "extra nos."
“outside of us—namely, the righteousness of Christ. And Luther said, “When I discovered that,”
he said, “I was born again of the Holy Ghost. And the doors of paradise swung open
and I walked through.”
There’s no way to understand Luther’s tenacity, Luther’s unwillingness to compromise on the
doctrine of justification by faith alone apart from this life-changing born-again experience,
when for the first time in his life he understood the gospel
and what it meant to be redeemed by somebody else’s righteousness.