Reggie Weems Blog

The idea of being justified by faith is something 21st believers take for granted.  We inform friends of this life-changing experience as we pass the salt and ask for another tea while dining out in the convience of modern America.  But climbing the high ground of faith-based justification has been a holy hill on which many previous generations have bled and died.  We should not suffer from short-term memory loss on this issue.   

At the expense of his own well being, Martin Luther claimed that justification by faith was the reformation’s cornerstone without which the newly emancipated church would have plunged back into a millenia of darkness under Catholicism’s tyranny.  Invoking Scripture against approximately  twelve hundred years of religiously endorsed biblical ignorance he thundered “that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28).  And it wasn’t that long ago. 

Less than a century later in the early sixteen hundreds, the only existing seven particular English Baptist congregations in the world (imagine that!) whose numbers amounted to less than five hundred congregants (imagine that!) published the world’s first Baptist Confession (the 1644 London Baptist Confession) in an effort to stake their claim to the Reformers creed that Christians are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  As Luther had struggled against the Pope, they both wrote and published the Confession anonymously for fear of Henry VIII’s Anglican church.  These Baptists were friends and neighbors to the very separatists who with them had first emigrated to Holland under Anglican persecution, only to return to England (and then on to America as Pilgrims) when Spain threatened war against the Dutch.  A century earlier more than 100,000 Muslims, Jews and nonCatholic Christians had met their eternal fate at the hands of the infamous Spanish inquisition.  Our saintly forefathers fully understood the ramifications of living as “strangers and exiles on the earth“ (Hebress 11:13). 

Living as justified by faith we are also called to live out the historical distinctives of that faith.  We cannot rightly enjoy the privileges of sainthoood without also relishing its history and traditions.  Our faith is not founded in these distinctives but it is certainly furthered by them.  As such, we stand on the shoulders of “a great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) whose testimonies of God’s faithfulness to them in their time encourage us to live well in our own time.  It is, by the way, His faithfulness and not theirs, to which these witnesses offer testimony.  We are indeed jusitifed by faith but we are also enlightened to that truth by the works of a multitude of people chose to, in Luther’s own words, “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” 

Their God is our God.  His truth is our truth.  He is a “faithful Creator” (I Peter 4:19) who will certainly complete in us what He has by grace begun (Philippians 1:6).  Remember our memorization verse for the week.  “Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhaibtants of the world stand in awe of him!  For he spoke, and it came to be; he commadned, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:8-9).  Whom then should we fear but God? Ours is the God Who created this world with a word; will one day refine it by fire and is even now creating another world in which we will live with Him forever. 

Let us then stand firm in the biblical conviction that we are justified by faith.  In so doing we stand amongst an innumerable gathering of people “of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38) but who discovered their place first in Christ and then with Christ.  Whether in the initial days of 2006 or in some other year soon to come we will also be with them and Him.  To that end let us this year live soli deo gloria!