Spurgeon on Active Obedience
“Christ comes to magnify the law: how does he do it but by obedience? If I am to enter into life by the keeping of the commandments, as the Lord tells me in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew, and the seventeenth verse, how can I except by Christ having kept them?” - Pyromaniacs
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Agreed and why I think the idea that justification is "just as if I never sinned" doesn't fully capture what justification actually is. We need obedience, a tested righteousness, not just untested innocence or forgiveness. We need Christ's active righteousness and that is what is imputed to us when we are justified.
We find the apostle Paul putting Christ's obedience in contrast to the disobedience of Adam: "As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous." Now this is not Christ's death merely, but Christ's active obedience, which is here meant, and it is by this that we are made righteous.
This reminds me that, while he was a great preacher, Spurgeon wasn't always that careful of an exegete.
Just one verse before Romans 5:19 Paul says, "So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men."
Discussion