ROMANS 3: 21-26
GOD’S RIGHTEOUSNESS THROUGH FAITH IN CHRIST
[Job 9:2-20]
All human beings, of every race and rank, of every creed and culture, the immoral and the moralizing, the religious and the irreligious, are without any exception sinful, guilty, inexcusable and will be speechless before God. That is the terrible human predicament described in Romans 1:18-3:20. There was no ray of light, no flicker of hope, no prospect of rescue.
With the words “but now” a new section of the book begins with God Himself intervening on behalf of sinful, rebellious man. But God’s grace must be consistent with His righteousness. How can a mere human being have a right relationship with God who is perfect, holy, infinite, and just? Scripture makes clear that there is a way to God but it is not based on anything men themselves can achieve or merit. Man can be made right with God, but not on his own terms or in his own power. All men are equally incapable of coming to God in their own power. They can be saved only by the provision of God’s grace. Only by the cross of Christ can man find God’s justification (CIM).
I. A Righteousness of God, 21-23.
II. Righteousness by Grace, 24-25a.
III. Righteousness Demonstrated, 25b-26.
The finale for redemption by the righteousness of God begins in verse 21. “But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,”
“But now” (emphatic transition), after all this bad news about our sinfulness and God’s condemnation, here begins the wonderful news. At that very strategic moment in redemption’s history (Gal. 4:4) “a righteousness of God has been revealed.” God’s righteousness is not subordinated to or derived “from the Law.” This righteousness has God as its the author, because it comes from Him, He gives it, and consequently is acceptable in His sight. [Charles Hodge. Romans. Banner of Truth.]
The fallen condition of man is dark and dismal. His depravity and despair is hopeless and universal. It envelopes one and all. Then suddenly a light shines. Hope revives. This light, this ray of hope, does not come from within man but from God. God reveals the way to be righteous before Him. His righteousness comes to man’s rescue. God now comes to save those who have made themselves completely unworthy of being saved. Yet God must save unrighteous man without sacrificing His righteousness or removing the witness or demands of the Law and the Prophets, or the Old Testament Scriptures (Mt. 5:17; 7:12; Lk. 16:31; Acts 13:15). Even before the coming of Christ the Law and Prophets “testified” that the method of bringing man into right relationship was by faith and not by law (4:1-25; Gal. 3:1-20).
Why God performed this mystery of redemption by faith we cannot fully understand. Such love is infinite and incomprehensible. For God’s grace made a way to be declared not guilty and verse 22 proclaims it. “Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for (into) all those who are believing, for there is no distinction;”
With great emphasis and joy the apostle repeats the thought of 1:16b. “God’s righteousness” is “through faith.” His righteousness is received and appropriated by faith “in Jesus Christ.” “God’s righteousness” is granted to all those, and only those, who put an active faith or “for all those who are believing (pres active ptc) in Jesus Christ.” God has made available to mankind a right relationship to Himself “through faith in Jesus.” Trusting means putting our confidence in Christ to forgive our sins, to make us right with God, and to empower us to live the way of faith in Christ and His Word.
Justification, or settling accounts with God, is offered to all on the same terms. It makes no difference our background or behavior, whether a person is good or bad, rich or poor, young or old, male or female, educated or uneducated, Jew or Gentile. All need God’s solution and it is available to all who place their faith in Jesus Christ, in His death on the cross, and in the power of His resurrection.
Verse 23 sums up the reason “there is no distinction.” “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
“All,” there is no distinction, “have sinned” (timeless past tense). The whole human race is gathered up into one all-inclusive and all-conclusive statement. We have all missed (present tense - we keep on missing) or fall short of the glory of God. The glory of God is His perfection. In Matthew 5:48 Jesus declares God’s expectation for us. “Be ye therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” God’s law demands perfection and no one is perfect in God’s sight. [The glory of God is seen in man as he was in Adam before the fall, in man as he will be in heaven, and in the divine likeness that God intends for man to have now.]
Some sins seem bigger than others because their obvious consequences are much more serious. Murder, for example, is worse than hatred, and adultery seems worse than lust. But this does not mean that because we do lesser sins we deserve eternal life. All sin makes us sinners, and all sin cuts us off from a holy God. All sin, therefore, leads to death (because it disqualifies us from living with God), regardless of how great or small it seems.
Picture all of humanity lined up around THE RIM OF the Grand CANYON. The object is for each person to jump from one side of the rim to the other. Suppose each person’s ability to jump is directly proportional to how many good deeds he has performed. A mass murderer goes only one foot and plummets downward. The average person can jump 8 to 10 feet, but this too is still far short of the goal. An exceptionally good person jumps 25 feet away from the bank. But the same thing occurs to everyone who jumps; each falls far short of the other side. There are great differences among people in their levels of goodness, but all of mankind falls short of perfection. No one can make it to Heaven on his own. The Bible says, “For all have sinned, & come short of the glory of God.” Man cannot save himself. Some may pride themselves in their good works, fine reputation, and charitable deeds, but everyone falls short. To break the law in just one point is to be guilty of all (Jas. 2:10).
[Don’t minimize “little” sins or overrate “big” sins. They all separate us from God, but they all can be forgiven. Until we call our sin - sin we will not see our need for a Savior. ]
Friend, no matter how good or how bad you are, you need Christ. He lived a perfect life, and His death on the cross has bridged the gap between you and a holy God. So place your trust in the Lord. The Scripture says, “There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).
According to sociologist Robert Bellah, “One of our current psychological gurus says that 98 percent of Americans are DYSFUNCTIONAL. No doubt he is right. He has just discovered original sin, though he is mistaken if he thinks 2 percent are not. This “discovery” that we are, in current jargon, “dysfunctional” is simply a rediscovery and a restatement of the Bible’s inspired verdict: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
But what can we do about this universal inability to function as we ought in our relationship with God and one another? Researchers are constantly proposing new methods and new drugs for dealing with frustrating maladjustments. Yet there is only one guaranteed cure that deals with the eternal consequences of sin and opens the way for overcoming sin’s pull. The cure is God’s grace working in our lives as we put our personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (6:23).
II. RIGHTEOUSNESS BY GOD’S GRACE (24-25a).
Verses 24 & 25 capture the essence of Christianity.“Being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus (25) whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith.”
Justification is a legal or forensic term belonging to the courts of law. It means to acquit, or to put in the right, to declare righteous. It is the opposite of condemnation. Both terms are pronouncements of a judge, in this case the all-knowing Judge of man.
The sense intended here is sinful man is guilty before the bar of a righteous judge. He stands awaiting the dreadful sentence that he merits because of his sin or law breaking. But because he pleads what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross as his sole defense the guilty may hear the Judge pronounce the verdict, “acquitted!” God has changed the judicial standing of the sinner before Him. The justified sinner is instated into the favor and fellowship of God.
When God justifies sinners today, He anticipates His own final judgment by bringing into the present what belongs officially to the last day. Justification, the imputing of Christ’s righteousness, is distinctive from sanctification - where God gradually imparts Christ’s righteousness to the justified. Justification declares righteous or legally just. Sanctification is the process of making one righteous or morally just. God does not justify whom He does not sanctify.
How does God justify sinners? God justifies sinners “as a gift of His grace,” not because of who they are or anything they have done. By definition a gift is something freely given, unearned and unmerited by the recipient (1 Tim. 1:9; Titus 3:4). Man cannot earn the great blessing of justification before God. He can only accept it as a gift (Isa. 55:1). Grace reveals and gives God’s righteousness to those who trust Jesus. That gift of grace cost the suffering and death of the Son on the cross so that for those who place their faith in Jesus for their justification, or right standing before God, there is nothing left to pay.
If God justifies sinners freely by His grace, on what grounds does He do so? How is it possible for a righteous God to declare the unrighteous to be righteous without either compromising His righteousness or condoning their unrighteousness? God’s answer is His “redemption” or the pardon of the cross.
Without the cross the justification of the unjust would be unjustified and immoral and therefore impossible for a holy God. The only way that God can justify the wicked (4:5) is that Christ died for the wicked (5:6). Because He shed His blood in a substitutionary sacrificial death for us sinners, God is able justly to justify the unjust.
Redemption and the cross go together. Redemption is a commercial term borrowed from the marketplace. Redemption meant “to ransom or to pay the price to free slaves or prisoners of war” (ἀðïëõôñþóåùò, from ἀðï - from and ëõôñïù -ransom, a release by paying a ransom price).
God did not set men free with nothing needing to be done about men’s sins. Man was sold into slavery to the power of sin and Christ paid the ransom price so that man could go free. Jesus said that He came to give His life as a ransom ( ëõôñïí, Mk. 10:45; Mt. 20:28). Every man has been ransomed, but why are men not saved and free of their sin? Each individual must decide to leave sin and follow God.
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.
God left unpunished the sins of previous generations, letting the nations go their own way and overlooking their ignorance (Acts 14:16; 17:30), not because of any injustice on His part, or with any thought of condoning evil, but in His forbearance (2:4), and only because it was His fixed intention in the fulness of time to punish these sins in the death of His Son. [John Stott. Romans. IVP; Downer Grove, IL. 1994.116] Jesus’ death took care of sins both past and future. In this way God would be both just, having demonstrate His justice, and the One who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (26b). Both justice and justification would be impossible without the cross.
Again, the three technical terms to explain what God has done in and through Christ’s cross. Jesus redeemed His people from sin. He appeased His wrath for sin. He demonstrated His justice against sin. Through the sin-bearing, substitutionary death of His Son, God has propitiated His own wrath in such a way as to redeem and justify us, and at the same time demonstrate His justice. We can only marvel at the wisdom, holiness, love and mercy of God, and fall down before Him in humble worship. The cross should be enough to humble the proudest heart, soften the hardest heart, melt the iciest heart, and break the most rebellious heart. [Stott. 117].
God is both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Justification is by grace alone, in Christ alone, through faith alone. An amazing incredible miracle of grace occurs when God Himself justifies the sinner who by faith will come to Him through the only way man can be justified, through faith in Jesus. Faith’s function is to receive what grace offers. Have you?
CONCLUSION
The way of grace revolves around what God can do and has done for man. There is nothing we can do to achieve the forgiveness of God. Only what God has done for us through Christ Jesus can buy forgiveness. Christ’s death and resurrection show the need for redemption and provide the way of God’s acceptance of sinners. The way to a right relationship with God lies not in a desperate and doomed attempt to win acquittal by our performance or our goodness but it lies in the humble, repentant acceptance of the love and grace which God offers us in Jesus Christ.
Christ’s sacrifice is our atonement and God’s satisfaction for sin. [In other words,] Christ died in our place, for our sins. God is justifiably angry at sinners. They have rebelled against Him and cut themselves off from His life-giving power. But God declares Christ’s death to be the all-sufficient, designated sacrifice for our sin. Christ stood in our place, paid the penalty of death for our sin, and He completely satisfied God’s demands. His sacrifice brings pardon, deliverance, and freedom.
The question remains will you give your allegiances to Him who purchased you through His death for your sins? Or will you continue to ignore, despise, His ransom price by continuing to live in the way of the world? Will you rely on His grace, or your goodness. The choice is your’s. John 3:16.
