God’s Righteousness Through Faith In Christ Series

PATTY HEARST was kidnaped at gunpoint from her Berkeley apartment on Feb. 4, 1974. She was the granddaughter of legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. The kidnapers identified themselves as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Her father paid millions of dollars for her release. Later she was viewed with a rifle in her arms participating in a bank robbery. The attorney general viewed the video footage and decided Patty was a willing participant. The ransom had been paid and Patty could have escaped but she did not want to escape.

The same is true of sinful man. He was utterly unable to liberate himself. God paid the ransom price which redeems man from the bondage of his sin. God paid our sin indebtedness through the death of Jesus on the cross, by the shedding of His innocent blood as the ransom price. Through faith in Christ man can be set free because they have been purchased back by Christ (and thus belong to Him), but man refuses to trust Christ and be set free.

Verse 25 begins by speaking of “the propitiation in His blood through faith.” “Propitiation” could be translated expiation, or appeasement. It means “the placating of anger.” Jesus’ shed blood appeased, satisfied, or placated the wrath of God against our sin. Thus God gave Himself to save us from Himself. This expiation was foreshadowed down through Israel’s history by the blood of an innocent lamb on the mercy seat (Lev. 16:1-34; Heb. 9:5). The substitute lamb’s blood on the altar turned aside the wrath of an offended God.

“God, because in His mercy He willed to forgive sinful men, and being truly merciful, willed to forgive them righteously, that is, without in any way condoning their sin, purposed to direct against His own very Self in the person of His Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they deserved.” (Cranfield, Critical & Exegetical Com on Roman. T. T. & Clark.Vol 1. p 215)

God gave “Jesus Christ to be a propitiatory sacrifice in order ‘that He might justify sinners righteously, that is, in a way that is altogether worthy of Himself as the truly loving and merciful eternal God.’ For God to have forgiven their sin lightly would have been ‘to have compromised with the lie that moral evil does not matter and so to have violated His own truth and mocked men with an empty, lying reassurance, which, at their most human, they must have recognized as the squalid falsehood which it would have been’” (Ibid, Vol. 2, 827).

III. RIGHTEOUSNESS DEMONSTRATED, 25b-26.

Verses 25 & 26 continue by stating that Christ is the agent of salvation and the cross was the instrument of salvation. “This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; (26) for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

We have looked at two words to describe the cross, redemption and propitiation, now we come to a third, demonstration (endeixis). The cross was a demonstration or a public revelation of God’s righteousness. The sins that people committed throughout human history needed to be punished. Yes, men did reap what they sowed but none received the full measure of judgment due them for their sins. Divine forbearance postponed judgment and left unpunished or passed over sins previously committed.