In modern Protestant theology, the term “salvation” immediately brings up a host of connotations associated with its meaning. At times, the mention of the word salvation automatically brings up the notion of substitutionary atonement where Christ took the punishment from God for our sins so that we will not have to experience God’s eternal wrath because Jesus bore it upon himself already (Isaiah 53:5, Romans 3:25). This substitutionary atonement is then supposed to enable Christians, those who have chose to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, to attain eternal life in heaven with God because Jesus Christ has provided a way to connect sinners with God through the penal substitution that was enacted when Jesus was crucified and then resurrected from the cross. The notion of sanctification is then sometimes included as an afterthought of what it means to be saved, where the Christian, through the Holy Spirit after one has been justified through Christ, grows in grace, holiness, and good works. Although I agree with these orthodox ideas of the Protestant understanding of salvation, it is my understanding that the popular understanding of salvation in our Western culture lacks a logical connection between salvation and sanctification that is intrinsic and natural in and of itself, rather than just theoretically being stated that the two are connected on an abstract level somehow. Upon theological reflection and understanding, I have arrived at the conclusion that the notions of justification and sanctification in the Protestant understanding of salvation need to be understood in a way that makes sanctification a natural outworking of justification that is intrinsic in its essence, instead of being incidental in its nature. It is my understanding that a proper understanding of heaven will aid this endeavour.
If heaven is understood merely as the absence of eternal punishment, then it follows that all humans would want to spend their afterlife in heaven, rather than in hell. However, if heaven is understood as a place where everything and everyone is going to worship God (serve God out of reverence for who he is) for the rest of their afterlife, the question of whether or not a person would like to spend eternity there has to be rethought carefully. Since it is clear that some humans in this lifetime abhor the idea of worshipping God an hour or two a week, it would be absurd to think that these same humans would desire to spend the rest of their afterlife in a place where worshipping God every moment will take place.
With this proper understanding of heaven in mind, it is easier to see why the idea of justification under the penal substitution model of salvation in and of itself can have a difficult time showing the intrinsic connection between justification and sanctification. While being helpful to understand certain aspects of soteriology, the penal substitution model of salvation may find it challenging to show how its idea of justification (God declaring a sinful person to be “just” on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus which leads to God’s peace, God’s Spirit, and God’s “salvation”) inherently causes one to desire to spend eternity in a place where the core and central activity is going to be the eternal worship of God. With this understanding of justification under this model of salvation, it is problematic to see how the “justification” of a person in front of God with the “imputed righteousness of Christ” inherently causes the justified person to have a transformed inner desire to spend an eternity worshipping God, instead of spending an eternity worshipping something idolatrous (whether it is money, fame, power, or lust).
An illustration of a legal judge in human affairs may be of some help in illustrating this point. Suppose a judge is to justly punish a criminal who stole a new car worth fifty thousand dollars from a car dealership. However, just before the judge punishes the guilty person, a generous businessman decides to pay the fifty thousand dollars out of his own pocket to take the punishment for the criminal. All the criminal has to do is to “freely accept this gracious offer”. If he does, then the criminal has the legal right to be declared “righteous” in front of the judge, and is legally absolved from the punishment for his crime. However, it is possible for the absolved criminal, who accepts permission from the judge to accept this gracious offer from the businessman, to have unchanged desires in his heart to continue stealing after he has been acquitted. Although he is declared “righteous” in the eyes of someone else, namely the judge, and even may have a degree of gratitude in his heart, he may not have decided to become the type of person who finds stealing unattractive, and the opposite of stealing (which we will identify as generosity for the sake of illustration) attractive. For the judge to grant him the freedom that a law-abiding citizen has in civil society, because somebody else has paid the price for his crime, has no connection of whether the inner desires of his heart want to be a law-abiding citizen that honours societal laws in the future.
In the Christian understanding of “eternal citizenship”, the true Christian is understood to be a person whose ultimate citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) while being a “foreigner” in this world (Hebrews 11:13-16). With this in mind, it can be understood that the destiny of someone justified is to go to a country where everything and everyone worships God forever. This is where a proper understanding of sanctification can help us understand the inherent link between itself and justification. It is my understanding that a crucial (although not exhaustive) aspect of Christian sanctification involves the changing of one’s inherently sinful desires into inherently holy desires. Sticking with this theme of going to a country where one worships, serves, and reveres God for the rest of one’s life, in Hebrews 8:10 we are told of the New Covenant where God will start to change the hearts of the people who truly belong to him. He will do that in a way that involves the laws of his country (the Old Testament laws including the Ten Commandments) being “written on the hearts” of his people. In contemporary terms, this involves the laws of God being internalized in one’s heart which results in changing one’s heart’s longings to pump out desires that are inherently in conformity to the order of God’s kingdom.
With this in mind, perhaps an analogy following the same theme of citizenship will help us grasp how a biblical understanding of justification should be inherently linked with sanctification. Suppose that one is a son of immigrant parents from China. This son, while he is in Canada, commits a crime against the Chinese government. Since he has committed treason against the Chinese government, he is denied access to ever again enter and live on Chinese soil. However, someone else has graciously offered to take the punishment for his crimes against the Chinese government, so that he is “justified” in the eyes of the government of China and has gained his citizenship in China. If only this were the case, it does not follow that this act of the Chinese government naturally causes the son to desire to live in China, where (for the sake of illustration) Chinese people eat Chinese food on a daily basis, interact with others using Chinese customs, speak the Chinese language in everyday life, engage in Chinese arts and entertainment every night, want to abide by the laws of the Chinese government, and want to serve and honour the Chinese government. Whereas, if the Chinese government not only accepts the “justification” of this son of Chinese immigrants, but also sends a native Chinese citizen to live with this son in Canada to model, embody, promote, and encourage this son to desire more and more the permanent destiny of one day spending the rest of his life in China, the yearnings of his heart will inherently change and he will have greater and deeper longings to live in his home country more and more over time, because he will be desiring the natural outworking of what he was “justified” in attaining by grace.
Returning to the Protestant understanding of justification and sanctification, this illustration shows how justification and sanctification, while distinguished from one another in abstract analysis, cannot and should not be separated in reality. If one fundamental (although not exhaustive) aspect of sanctification is the inherent changing of the desires of one’s heart from originally desiring to hate, be proud, covet, and worship something created to the changed desires of desiring to become the type of person who is more loving, humble, content, and desirous of worshipping the Creator Yahweh, then one can better understand how justification (a sinful person being “just” on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness so that one day he/she can enter heaven) is intrinsically connected to sanctification (partially the changing of one’s sinful desires to holy desires congruent with the order of God’s kingdom which are perfectly implemented in heaven). Although one is never justified in God’s eyes because of the changing of one’s heart’s desires, we have seen here how one cannot really be justified in the end if one does not have a change of desires in one’s heart as an intrinsic effect of justification.
One practical implication of this failure to see the inherent connection between justification and sanctification in modern day Protestantism is the erroneous notion that one can be saved by Jesus without longing and yearning for the journey of becoming like Jesus (which includes having the transformed desires that Jesus had while he was on earth). This, in turn, sometimes leads to the notion that one can be a “saved Christian” without being a disciple of Jesus, who is someone who desires more and more to follow Christ and emulate his lifestyle not because one has to, but because one desires to. Although one will never be perfect in this lifetime, a truly saved Christian should be one who, in this life and the life to come, is not only saved from the guilt of sin (eternal damnation), but from the power of it as well. And one is saved from the power of sin largely by having sin lose its inherent attraction, so that it is no longer attractive, but disgusting. One reason for this is the fact that heaven will be a place where sin is not only absent on the menu of spiritual food, but is realized to be as distasteful, filthy, and repulsive to play with as dung.
