Justification is an act of God’s grace, flowing from his sovereign good will and pleasure; the elect of God are said to be “justified by his grace”; and as if that expression was not strong enough to set forth the freeness of it, the word “freely” is added elsewhere; “Being justified freely by his grace”, #Tit 3:7 Ro 3:24. Justification is by many divines distinguished into active and passive. Active justification is the act of God; it is God that justifies. Passive justification is the act of God, terminating on the conscience of a believer, commonly called a transient act, passing upon an external object. It is not of this I shall now treat, but of the former; which is an act internal and eternal, taken up in the divine mind from eternity, and is an immanent, abiding one in it; it is, as Dr. Ames {4} expresses it, “a sentence conceived in the divine mind, by the decree of justifying.”
Now, as before observed, as God’s will to elect, is the election of his people, so his will to justify them, is the justification of them; as it is an immanent act in God, it is an act of his grace towards them, is wholly without them, entirely resides in the divine mind, and lies in his estimating, accounting, and constituting them righteous, through the righteousness of his Son; and, as such, did not first commence in time, but from eternity.
John Gill
Recently, I preached on Eternal Justification and in order to answer questions that naturally arise I’ve decided to take John Gill’s work paragraph by paragraph over a series of posts to answer those questions.
It must be kept in mind that though we are looking at the Baptist Gill there have been more than a few traditional Reformed who have held some form of the doctrine. The first prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly held to eternal Justification. The Scottish Divine Robert Traill held to this doctrine. The Dutch Reformed Abraham Kuyper held to Eternal Justification. Others had glimmerings of the doctrine in their works.
We gladly concede that the embrace of this doctrine has been a minority opinion in Reformed Church history and while that does give me some pause it does not move me to full stop. Truth does not come from counting noses and so we press on.
As to the quote above what should be drawn out is the difference between an immanent act of God and a transient act of God. To say that Justification is an immanent act of God is to say that the act of justifying was eternal and in the mind of God as decretal reality. To say that justification is a transient act of God is to say that the decretal reality of justification immanent and eternal as it is in the mind of God is is published to the consciousness of the one who was eternally justified so that they now are conversant with that divine reality.
Much of this debate gets roiled in the issue of time. All orthodox Reformation believers understand and embrace that eternity conditions time and not time eternity. That is all justification from eternity argues for in what it embraces. It is the recognition that what God has decreed as an immanent and eternal act in His mind is a irresistible reality that time is only scrambling to catch up to in order to instantiate. Scripture gives us hints of this when it is said of the Lord Jesus Christ in Revelation 13:8;
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
If the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world then it is no stretch to insist that the saints elected in Christ stood justified likewise from the foundation of the world. Their corporeal mortal lives only awaited the time when that eternal and immanent act of God of justification would become a transient act once the Spirit applied what was accomplished on the Cross being a certitude from eternity.
To insist on eternal Justification is only to agree with the Scripture that
God calleth those things which be not as though they were (Rmns. 4:17).
To believe that God was gracious to His people before He was gracious to His people is a concept we find throughout Scripture;
Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: 4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.
Notice just as earlier the Lord Christ is slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8) so God’s people are chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. Notice also the language “having predestined us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself.” In light of that statement is it really so difficult to see that justification comes with adoption? Especially when it is said in Ephesians 1 that we have been blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. Is not Justification a spiritual blessing?
Notice finally, the last sentence that notes that Justification did not first begin in but from eternity. No Reformed believer holds that Justification only becomes a real reality when someone is converted as if the decree and cross are waiting for their activation from someone saying the magical words “Jesus please come into my heart.”
