The Verb Behind Justified: A Survey of dikaioo

When I wrote about how Paul and James use the righteousness word family, I ended by admitting that I had not resolved the hardest part. I had shown that the family is wide and that Paul and James reach for different members of it. I had not gone and looked at every place the verb actually appears.

So I went and did that, and this is the result. It is the second half of the earlier study, and our class arriving at James 2:18-26 is what finally made me finish it.

A word about method first. I did not search an English concordance for the word "justify." That was the whole problem. English translations render this one Greek verb as justified, acquitted, vindicated, freed, and shown to be right, depending on the verse, so an English search finds some occurrences and silently walks past others. What follows is a search on the Greek verb itself.

The verb and its range

The verb is δικαιόω (dikaioo), Strong's G1344. Its broad idea is to declare, regard, demonstrate, or vindicate someone as righteous or right. Context decides whether the emphasis falls on God's forensic justification of sinners, on public vindication, on self-justification, or on acknowledging that God is right.

It occurs thirty nine times in thirty six verses.

Matthew	11:19; 12:37
Luke	7:29, 35; 10:29; 16:15; 18:14
Acts	13:38, 39
Romans	2:13; 3:4, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30; 4:2, 5; 5:1, 9; 6:7; 8:30, 33
1 Corinthians	4:4; 6:11
Galatians	2:16, 17; 3:8, 11, 24; 5:4
1 Timothy	3:16
Titus	3:7
James	2:21, 24, 25

Three verses carry the verb more than once. Galatians 2:16 has it three times. Romans 8:30 has it twice.

Two notes on the counting, because both of them turn out to be instructive rather than merely technical.

Acts 13:38 and 39. If you read this in the King James Version you will find both occurrences inside verse 39: "by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." In the Greek the sentence runs across the verse break, and the older versification divides it in a different place than the critical text does. So the first occurrence, "could not be justified by the law of Moses," actually closes verse 38, and only "everyone who believes is justified" belongs to verse 39. This is a small thing, but it is the same lesson as the one above: the English and the Greek do not always line up, and it pays to check.

A count of forty. Some concordances built on the Received Text report forty occurrences rather than thirty nine. The extra one is Revelation 22:11, where the Received Text reads "he that is righteous, let him be righteous still" using a form of this verb, while the critical text reads "let him do righteousness still" instead. The difference is textual, not lexical.

Romans 6:7, the one an English search misses

Before the categories, one verse deserves singling out.

"For he that is dead is freed from sin" (Romans 6:7). The Greek is ὁ γὰρ ἀποθανὼν δεδικαίωται ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας. Literally, the one who has died has been justified from sin.

Almost every English translation renders it "freed," and rightly so, because Paul is talking about the believer's death with Christ and release from sin's mastery. But it is our verb, and no English search for "justify" will ever find it. That single verse is the best argument I know for doing this kind of study on the Greek word rather than the English one.

Five categories

The verb does not carry the same nuance everywhere. Below is the whole set sorted by what the verb is doing. A few passages genuinely overlap, and I have marked those rather than force them into a clean line.

1. Justification before God

A person's standing before God: being regarded, declared, or accounted righteous. This is the dominant Pauline use.

Scripture	Use	Meaning
Luke 18:14	The tax collector went home justified	God accepts and declares the repentant tax collector righteous rather than the Pharisee
Acts 13:38-39	Believers are justified through Christ, as they could not be by the law	Through Christ believers receive a justification unavailable through the law of Moses
Romans 2:13	"the doers of the law shall be justified"	Declaration of righteousness before God. Who these doers are is itself debated
Romans 3:20	"no flesh be justified in his sight"	Works of law cannot establish righteousness before God
Romans 3:24	"being justified freely by his grace"	God's gracious declaration through Christ's redemption
Romans 3:26	God is "the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus"	God declares the believer righteous while remaining just Himself
Romans 3:28	"a man is justified by faith"	Justification by faith apart from works of law
Romans 3:30	God justifies the circumcision and the uncircumcision through faith	One God, one basis, for Jew and Gentile alike
Romans 4:2	"if Abraham were justified by works"	Paul considers, and rejects, works as grounds for boasting before God
Romans 4:5	God "justifieth the ungodly"	The most explicit forensic use in the New Testament
Romans 5:1	"being justified by faith"	The result is peace with God
Romans 5:9	"being now justified by his blood"	Christ's blood is the objective basis
Romans 8:30	"whom he called, them he also justified"	Justification within Paul's sequence of God's saving work
Romans 8:33	"It is God that justifieth"	God's verdict answers every accusation against His elect
1 Corinthians 6:11	"ye are justified"	Washed, sanctified, justified, all together
Galatians 2:16	Justified appears three times	The central Pauline statement: not by works of law but through faith
Galatians 2:17	"we seek to be justified by Christ"	Right standing sought in Christ
Galatians 3:8	God would justify the heathen through faith	The Abrahamic promise anticipates it
Galatians 3:11	"no man is justified by the law in the sight of God"	Explicitly about standing before God
Galatians 3:24	"that we might be justified by faith"	Faith, not Torah observance, is the instrument
Galatians 5:4	"whosoever of you are justified by the law"	Those attempting it have fallen from grace
Titus 3:7	"being justified by his grace"	Justification makes believers heirs

2. Vindication, or being shown to be right

Here the verb cannot mean that an unrighteous person becomes righteous in standing. Someone or something that already has a certain character is shown, acknowledged, or vindicated as right.

Scripture	Use	Meaning
Matthew 11:19	"wisdom is justified of her children"	Wisdom is shown to be genuine by its results
Matthew 12:37	"by thy words thou shalt be justified"	Words are the evidence at judgment. This one overlaps category 1
Luke 7:35	"wisdom is justified of all her children"	God's wisdom vindicated by its fruit
1 Timothy 3:16	Christ was "justified in the Spirit"	Vindicated, shown to be righteous. Not forgiven of sin

That last verse settles something important. Jesus was sinless. So "Christ was justified" cannot possibly mean "a guilty sinner was made righteous before God." It has to mean vindicated, demonstrated, shown to be right. Once you have granted that the verb can carry that sense in the New Testament, you cannot rule the sense out of James by definition.

3. Justifying oneself before other people

Scripture	Use	Meaning
Luke 10:29	The lawyer, "willing to justify himself"	He tries to establish that his question was right
Luke 16:15	"Ye are they which justify yourselves before men"	Presenting themselves as righteous in human estimation

Luke 16:15 is unusually helpful because Jesus names the sphere out loud: before men. The verse itself tells us that this verb does not always concern God's justification of sinners.

4. Declaring God to be right

These are remarkable, because God is the object of the verb.

Scripture	Use	Meaning
Luke 7:29	The people and the tax collectors "justified God"	They acknowledged that God's way, through John's baptism, was right
Romans 3:4	"That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings"	Quoting Psalm 51:4. God is vindicated in what He says

This is the firmest control of all on the meaning of the word. No one makes God righteous. No one confers righteousness on Him. In these verses the verb can only mean to acknowledge as right, to declare righteous, to vindicate. So the verb cannot inherently mean "transform someone from unrighteous into righteous."

5. Other, and contested

Scripture	Use	Meaning
Romans 6:7	"he that is dead is freed from sin"	Release from sin's dominion. The judicial idea may remain, but the emphasis is freedom
1 Corinthians 4:4	"yet am I not hereby justified"	A clear conscience is not an acquittal. The Lord judges. Overlaps category 1
James 2:21	Abraham "justified by works"	See below
James 2:24	"by works a man is justified, and not by faith only"	See below
James 2:25	Rahab "justified by works"	See below

Why I put the James verses in category five

I could have placed James 2:21, 24, and 25 in category one or in category two. I have deliberately done neither.

There are two long standing readings. On the first, James is using the verb the way Matthew 11:19 uses it: a real faith is shown, demonstrated, vindicated by works. Paul asks how an ungodly sinner is justified before God, and answers, by faith apart from works. James asks how a professed faith is shown to be living rather than dead, and answers, by works. On the second reading, James is describing a real relationship between obedient works and God's own declaration, and should not be reduced to works merely proving something to human onlookers.

Sorting the verses is a lexical exercise. Deciding between those two readings is a theological one. If I assign the James verses to a category here, I have quietly decided the theological question by filing it, which is not honest. So they sit in category five, marked as contested, and I take the question up properly in Paul and James on Abraham.

The conclusion the survey actually supports

Here is what I think the complete list establishes, and it is more modest than either side usually wants.

The lexical evidence by itself cannot settle the question. The same verb demonstrably means all of the following in the New Testament:

• God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5)
• People justify God (Luke 7:29)
• People justify themselves (Luke 16:15)
• Wisdom is justified (Matthew 11:19)
• Christ is justified, that is, vindicated (1 Timothy 3:16)
• A dead man is justified, that is, freed, from sin (Romans 6:7)

So it is a mistake to argue that Paul uses the verb forensically and therefore James must be using it identically. And it is equally a mistake to argue that the verb can mean vindicate and therefore James must mean only vindication. Both arguments try to settle a contextual question with a dictionary.

James's own context has to decide it, and James gives us more contextual help than most disputed passages do: dead faith against living faith (2:17, 20, 26), "show me" (2:18), faith working together with works (2:22), faith being completed by works (2:22), and Genesis 15:6 being fulfilled in Genesis 22 (2:23).

A related word, since it comes up

While I was at this I checked the noun δικαίωμα (dikaioma), G1345, which the King James renders "justification" at Romans 5:16 and which belongs to the same family. It is a noun, not a verb, and it occurs ten times: Luke 1:6; Romans 1:32; 2:26; 5:16; 5:18; 8:4; Hebrews 9:1; 9:10; Revelation 15:4; 19:8.

Its translations show how wide this family runs: ordinance, judgment, righteousness, justification, righteous act. I noted three of these verses in the earlier study as places where our English word "righteousness" is standing over a Greek word that means a righteous act or requirement. Here is the full list for anyone who wants to trace it.

What I take from it

The same thing I said the last time, and I have not found a reason to change it. Watch the part of speech. Watch the author. Watch the question he is answering. And hold the conclusion loosely enough that the text can still correct you.

What the survey adds is a warning against a particular shortcut. When someone tells you that a Greek word "means" something, ask how many times it occurs and whether they have looked at all of them. Thirty six verses is not many. And it turned out that the range of the word was the most important thing about it.