L.S. Chafer in his 1948 Systematic Theology said that “thirty-three stupendous works of God” took place the moment we trusted Christ as Savior (Volume 3, 234-265). Justification and imputation are two of these supernatural works. Justification is a legal courtroom word where the judge declares the person either guilty or innocent whereas imputation is a business word.
Wiersbe explains that in “the word ‘imputation,’ you find God speaking to the banker because it is a financial term …. Our English word ‘imputation’ comes from the Latin word which means ‘to reckon, or credit, to one’s account.’ When you go to the bank and deposit money, imputation takes place. They deposit that on your account, and they write it on your record …. Right in the middle of that word ‘impute’ you have p-u-t, righteousness put to our account” (Warren Wiersbe, Key Words of the Christian Life, Lincoln: Back to the Bible, 1982, 55, 56, 58).
Before we examine the three imputations, let’s distinguish between inherited sin and imputed sin. Inherited sin is the sin nature you and I inherited from our parents (Psalm 51:5). This sin nature is in my body. Paul confessed in Romans 7:14, “I am carnal sold under sin” i.e., I possess a carnal or fleshly nature.
Imputed sin is the sin from Adam that was directly credited to my account in heaven or as Wiersbe says “put” on our record. Imputed sin does not affect me personally like inherited sin. It makes my legal standing before God guilty.
Both Charles Ryrie and Wayne Grudem discuss three imputations
1. When Adam sinned in the garden, sin was “put” on my account in heaven. This transaction did not affect me personally.
2. When Christ died on the cross, my sin was “put” on his account in heaven. This transaction did not affect Christ personally.
3. When I trusted Christ as my Savior, Christ’s righteousness was “put” on my account in heaven. Again, this transaction did not affect me personally.
While justification and imputation are related and associated they are not the same. For example, justification is based on imputation. When God “puts” or credits to my account in heaven the righteousness of God, God then justifies me or declares me righteous.
Again, neither imputation nor justification affects the believer personally. They give the believer a legal standing in heaven of more than “not guilty” but a standing of being as righteous as Christ.
Regeneration, however, does touch the individual at salvation. Here is how John Murray explains the difference:
Regeneration is an act of God in us; justification is a judgment of God with respect to us. The distinction is like that of the distinction between the act of a surgeon and the act of a judge. The surgeon, when he removes an inward cancer, does something in us. That is not what a judge does---he gives a verdict regarding our status. If we are innocent he declares accordingly. The purity of the gospel is bound up with the recognition of this distinction. If justification is confused with regeneration or sanctification, then the door is opened for the perversion of the gospel at its center (John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955, 121).
Now that we have observed the differences between imputation and justification and regeneration, let’s learn about the three imputations every believer has affected his standing in heaven.
The Three Imputations
1. The Imputation of Adam’s sin in the Fall to my record (Romans 5:12)
Paul says death passed on all men because of Adam’s sin and then he adds that “All have sinned.” We sinned in Adam. How did we sin in Adam?
Paul in 5:13 then adds that although there was no Mosaic Law to disobey from Adam to Moses, sinners still died. Why did they die? Not because of personally disobeying God’s Law, but because they sinned in Adam.
The covenant theology view states that Adam was the representative for all of mankind and when he sinned his sin was passed on to those he represented. We suffer for his sin, not ours which does not square with the justice of God.
Scripture teaches that we sinned in Adam not just our representative. Like a giant oak tree is at one point in an acorn, we were in Adam. This is foreign to our thinking in the 21st century Western civilization. This kind of thinking, however, was not foreign to Old Testament Israel.
When Achan stole, God said, “Israel has sinned” (Josh 7:11). Michael Horton observed, “Just as the sin of Adam was imputed to the human race” in the Old Testament we see “the notion of imputing the sin of one person to each Israelite and thus to the nation” (page 633). Another example is Levi who lived 200 years after Abraham but paid tithes in Abraham to Melchizedek according to Hebrews 7:9, 10.
Proof that we sinned in Adam is the death of infants between Adam and Moses. Infants died because they sinned according to Romans 5:12. How did infants sin? Infants did not personally sin.
John Piper in his book Counted Righteous In Christ wrote: “Infants died. They could not read the law on their hearts and choose to obey or disobey it. Yet they died. Why? Paul’s answer in the context would be: the sin of Adam and the imputation of that sin to the human race” (page 96). Infants die like all people die because they sinned in Adam.
2. The Imputation of Our Sins to Christ on the Cross
Paul says that “God made Christ sin” in 2 Corinthians 5:21. Just as the imputation of Adam’s sin to mankind was not personal neither is the imputation of our sins to Christ. Christ did not become sinful on the cross.
The wages of sin is death. What we earned through sinning, God deposited into the account of Christ in heaven. When God looked at His Son’s record as He hung on the cross, at that moment He saw, not His Son’s righteousness but our sin. That is when He judged Him in our place. That is when Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled: “He was wounded for our transgressions….”
3. The Imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us at Salvation
The rest of 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “That we might be made the righteousness of God.” Paul in Romans 4:1-5 further explains that like Abraham in Genesis 15:6 believed, not worked, it was counted or imputed to him for righteousness.
This is in stark contrast to Roman Catholicism's infusion. R. C. Sproul in a YouTube lecture on imputation exposes the Roman Catholic doctrine of infusion, which states that at baptism, God’s righteousness is infused or poured into the Catholic soul. The Council of Trent declared baptism the instrument for the beginning of justification. In biblical imputation, it is my standing before God that is changed once and for all.
If the Catholic mortally sins, his mortal sin kills the infused righteousness. The Catholic must be justified again with the second sacrament of penance. Catholicism calls our belief in biblical imputation Legal Fiction because God counts someone personally righteous when in reality he is not righteous. Catholicism confuses imputed righteousness with sanctification and thus creates a works righteousness system of salvation.
The Scriptures teach that the righteousness imputed is real righteousness. There is nothing fictional about the righteousness on our record in heaven.
Imputed righteousness cannot be lost as can infused righteousness. In Romans 4:7, 8 Paul reads David’s praise for God’s imputed righteousness on his record in heaven on which sin can never again be imputed.
In this lecture, Sproul also defines what he calls Double Imputation. In double imputation, our sins are imputed to Christ on the cross, which is true. But the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us at salvation, Sproul says, “He would not have unless He lived a life of perfect obedience. His life of perfect obedience is just as necessary to our salvation as his perfect atonement on the cross.”
This is called active obedience in His life, in addition to the passive obedience of Christ on the cross. This logical inference based on Romans 5:19 is not a proper exegesis. In Romans 5:19, Paul wrote that for “one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” The contrast is between the one act of disobedience of Adam in the garden, not a life of disobedience, and the one act of obedience of Christ in his death on the cross. The verse just before 5:19 makes this clear in the ESV: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.”
Imputation is based exclusively on the sufferings of Christ on the cross, not His life sufferings or his active obedience. Of course, Christ lived a perfectly holy life; he was and is the sinless God/Man. However, his atonement, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is based on his death. The OT atonement was based not on a blemishless lamb but on the shedding of the blood of the Passover lamb. God said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us “(1 Corinthians 5:7).
Like David in Psalm 32:2, we should bless the Lord because the righteousness of His Son is once and for all on our record in heaven that sin will never again be imputed to our account.