This is a legitimate reason for driving through the red light. I drove through the red light because I needed to get home to see the opening face-off of the hockey game. Justification, in scripture, has nothing to do with explanations of any sort, whether genuine reasons or shabby rationalisations. When he says that God justifies the ungodly he means that God puts in the right with himself men and women who are now in the wrong with him. To say that we are justified, then, is to say that we are put in the right with God, made right with God.
Obviously justification is the kernel of the gospel.
The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ sets people in the right with God. Our Lord stops at the foot of the tree in which Zacchaeus is perched. For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost. Plainly Zacchaeus was so thoroughly in the wrong before God as to be on the edge of ultimate loss. John bluntly tells his readers that if they deny themselves to be sinners at heart, sinners to the core, they are making God a liar.