Green Baggins makes reference to something I wrote in RINE (p. 174), while talking about the justification of Jesus. The fact that Jesus was justified is seen in this great passage from Timothy.
“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory” (1 Tim. 3:16).
Typologically, we can see that this is an important salvation text simply because the reference ends in 3:16. Just kidding.
But this is a basic statement of the gospel. God manifest in the flesh is referring to the Incarnation, and I take “justified in the Spirit” as a reference to the resurrection. The resurrection can be referred to as the justification of Jesus because it was in that resurrection that Christ was fully vindicated. It was in the resurrection that He was declared, with power, to be the Son of God (Rom. 1:4). When God the Father says to the Son, “Today I have begotten you” in the second psalm, this is a reference to the resurrection, as Paul plainly asserts in Acts 13.
Lane says, rightly, that to talk about Jesus being justified in the same sense we are justified (that is, forgiven of sin and being granted the righteousness of another) would be simply blasphemous. I agree with him on this. But we are justified in the resurrection of Jesus (Rom. 4:25). He was raised to life for our justification. Christ’s righteousness in His resurrection is (in part) the ground or basis of our justification. This does not exclude the Cross any more than references to the death of Jesus exclude the doctrine of the resurrection. The terms function in the New Testament as synecdoche; to refer to one is to include the other. We are not justified by a resurrectionless cross. We are not justified by a crossless resurrection.
But how does this work? We participate in all that Christ did and said, and we do so by faith alone. Christ was publicly vindicated as the true Messiah, the Sinbearer for His people, the Son of God, by and through His resurrection from the dead. Because we participate in that vindicatory event by faith, our sins are forgiven, and His righteous status is bestowed on us, and we receive it by faith. So Christ’s justification is not just like ours, right alongside ours, but is rather the archtypical justification, in which all our little justifications must participate if they are to be justifications at all.
The telos toward which Christ’s life pointed was that great vindication, which was then crowned with all glory and honor in His ascension. When we are baptized into His death, and raised to life in His resurrection, we are forgiven and His righteousness is given to us. But I would argue that we cannot participate in His resurrection for justification unless His resurrection was a justificatory event. It was different for Him than it is for us, obviously, but not an entirely different thing in an entirely different sphere. Christ’s justification and ours are related.
One other thing. Christ was justified, vindicted, in this way because He had lived a perfect, sinless life. This was not brownie points in the bank, as though Jesus had somehow lived autonomously, earning raw merit. It was not a transaction with Jesus’ works on the one hand, and the Father’s rewards on the other. Rather, Jesus was justified as the culmination of His obedient life, but it is not possible to live an obedient human life without faith in God. This means that Jesus lived a life of perfect faith, which was the foundation of His obedience — not that He would be saved from any sin of His own, but rather that He would be delivered through all temptations, preserved during His abandonment on the cross, and vindicated in His resurrection. Jesus believed all this because Jesus believed that Scripture could not be broken. He chided His disciples for not believing it. This means that Jesus lived and died and rose by faith. We participate in His great obedience, and the fruit of His great obedience, on a derivative level, by faith as well. In the Pauline vocabulary, works and faith exclude one another — they displace one another. But obedience and faith are not contrary principles at all. To believe is itself an act of obedience, and is the ground of all future obedience. When Christ believed God He was obeying God. When we believe God we are obeying God. There is nothing meritorious (in the quantitative sense of acquiring bookkeeping points) about this whatever. We are only doing what we were told.
So the resurrection was God’s crowning vindication of all Christ’s obedience. We are granted the blessing of that obedience as we believe in Jesus, by faith alone.