Justification and Sanctification: Distinguished and Related

Many of the practical mistakes in the Christian life come from not properly distinguishing between justification and sanctification.

Recall that justification is the one-time declaration of God that the believing sinner is both (1) fully forgiven and (2) perfectly righteous; whereas sanctification is the progressive work of the Spirit, through our efforts to pursue holiness and conform to the image of Christ.

Both are necessary to salvation, but no confusion should arise as to which comes first, or as to whether that which follows (sanctification) could ever undo the reality of its foundation (justification). If someone is truly a believer in Christ, then they are justified (Gal. 2:16-17); and all who are justified simply will be glorified (Rom. 8:30). Therefore the same will be sanctified. Paul elsewhere guarantees sanctification for all whom God elects in eternity, “even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4).

So there can be no doubt that these go together. The key will be to relate them in the right way: without blending them together, but also without undermining one by means of the other. 

Distinguishing Justification and Sanctification

The first thing to do is to be able to tell them apart. Beyond reading their definitions side by side, it can also be helpful to make a comparison between the two over a number of categories. Think of it in this way.

Justification is legal-declarative. Sanctification is moral-transformative. Sometimes the word “forensic” is used for justification, and the word “experiential” for sanctification. But it amounts to the same. God is making us both positionally right and truly good.

Justification is unilateral. God is the sole Actor. Sanctification is cooperative. Although the Holy Spirit is the sole efficient cause, the now spiritually animated human nature takes part in various secondary causes.

Justification comes first. It happens all at once (at our very first exercise of faith) and is never added to or taken away. Sanctification gets started there and is a lifelong pursuit of holiness.

Justification occurs in God’s courtroom. Our works have no place there. Sanctification occurs in God’s house, and is absolutely filled with our works, as we are free to pursue them with no condemnation. 

Some, even shortly after the Reformation’s start, like the Lutheran Andreas Osiander, wanted to meet Rome halfway between home and court, and so mix together again the legal and the moral work. Calvin took him to task in the Institutes—“This distinction between justification and regeneration (Osiander confounding the two, calls them a twofold righteousness).”1 Of course, the reader must be aware that Calvin used the word “regeneration” in a broad fashion to cover the whole renewal of the believer by God; so, in a way similar to how Evangelicals will use the word “salvation” or even “saved” or “being saved,” in all of its temporal connotations.

There have always been those, from brilliant theologians to laypersons of all types, who simply do not see the point of there being a legal dealing with sin that is distinct from a moral work. Or else, they are forced to imply that grace kills nature—that is, pardoning grace kills moral nature. They want to keep things simple in a false way. Good is good and bad is bad, and you are either one or the other! That might seem straightforward enough, but then equally clear in the course of life is that, no matter how much we may wish to be good, we cannot quit the bad in us. Is the delusion that others have it better any comfort? As it is, it also happens to be untrue.

Now aside from the “legal fiction” objection to the Reformed doctrine of sola fide, another notion at the heart of Roman Catholic misunderstanding is that the courtroom is fundamentally at odds with the house unless they are in some way conflated. If God makes us righteous, well, then either He does that all at once or He does the whole thing gradually. But this is to beg the whole question. By what testimony from Scripture or law of logic would we say that God cannot declare the sinner to be “in the right” on account of His Son, and then transform that same sinner into a saint over time? This is not a question that anyone has ever satisfactorily answered.

Naturally the opposite misgiving is to think that there ought never to be any works in the house either. We call antinomianism that error that is “against law.” It sees in justifying grace a different kind of new chapter that Christ’s work wrote into history. It has taken many forms in church history, but at the heart of it is the same notion as that either the legal work and moral work are really one (no distinction) or else they must be kept light years apart (no relation). The antinomian acts as if he has never heard of the three uses of the law—commonly called evangelical, civil, and directive (or normative)—so that if the law has done its work to convict sinners and drive them to the cross, it could not possibly have any other place in the Christian life. If I walk out into the courtroom on the basis of Christ’s work alone, then I have simultaneously left behind any of my own. So the thinking goes. Yet Paul does not allow us to pit the ground and seed and against the produce when he said,

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10)

Works are no part of the efficient cause of salvation as a whole (grace alone is). They are no part of the instrumental cause of justification in particular (faith alone is). But Paul tells us that they are indeed one important end cause. Notice that it is by grace, through faith, unto good works. Paul’s use of “for” and “that” come together in this way. Paying attention to those little prepositions will do wonders for our doctrine. And this brings us, by way of causal analysis, to our next point, which is more often arrived at to respond to another set of persistent misunderstandings.

Relating Sanctification to Justification

Once we clear the ground of any attempts to smuggle our own works back into God’s work of grace, we are prepared to move in the other direction. While God’s courtroom and God’s house must be kept distinct, we must not divorce the significance of what happened in that courtroom from our reason for being in the house. To get our minds wrapped around this, we may approach it from the perspective of two very common objections to the Reformed doctrine. 

Objection 1. “But don’t we have to keep the commandments?”

Answer. Yes, we are obligated to do so. For several purposes, but justification just isn’t one of them. The real purposes of keeping the commandments are to show that we love him (Jn. 14:15), to truly love both God and neighbor (Mat. 22:37-39), to examine ourselves (2 Cor. 13:5), to put to death the deeds of the flesh (Rom. 8:13), and to glorify God (Mat. 5:16).

Objection 2. “But won’t this eliminate personal responsibility for fighting sin?”

Answer. No. There are a few reasons why Christ’s legal work, and justification, ensure that sanctification will actually establish our sin-killing. One is that with sin legally put away, we have peace with God (Rom. 5:1). We now have a new set of motives for mortification of sin that won’t lead to the extremes of either despair or pride (Rom. 7:6).

So, justification is not sanctification, and vice versa. However, justification provides the sturdiest support for sanctification one could ever ask for.

But how so? The Romans 5:1 verse roots our peace with God in justification, and the Romans 7:6 verse speaks of “new way” of bearing fruit to God. The maturing Christian will want to know how this works. A good way to find clarity is to ask ourselves how motivated we would be to perform acts for someone else if we knew that they were at war with us and if we discovered that no such action would ever do justice to their honor or fulfill what was required. Both dimensions are in play for the children of Adam. All outside of Christ are at war with God (Jas. 4:4) and have God at war with them (Jn. 3:36); and by the works of the law no one will ever be justified (Gal. 3:10).

Now imagine the opposite state in both cases. If we have been reconciled to God, in fact, adopted by Him, and that by Christ obeying the law in our place, such that His position of “righteous” now covers us forever, how might this change our attitude toward the things that God has given us to do? Far from watering down the commandments or making good works meaningless, it is only free sons and daughters who could ever be sanctified. In fact, it takes a completed justification for sanctification to ever get off the ground. 

Now we do not obey because we are terrified that God will punish us in the end. Rather, we obey out of gratitude for the grace we have been shown and for the glory that will come to God as a result. Grace and glory are an infinite well that can never fail to fuel obedience, whereas hoping in the flesh before God and seeking applause before men are a sure recipe for burnout.

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1. Calvin, Institutes, III.11.11.