A. God’s provision (3:21–31)
3. The Way of Righteousness: the Universal Need Met (3:21–5:21)
A. God’s provision (3:21–31)
But now a new way to acceptance with God has been opened up, a completely different way from that of legal obedience. Yet this is no new-fangled way, thought up by ourselves; it has ample witness borne to it in advance in the Old Testament writings—in the Law and the Prophets. It is the way of faith in Jesus Christ, and it lies open to all who believe in him, Jews and Gentiles alike. We have already seen that there is no distinction between these two divisions of humanity, since both Jews and Gentiles have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, the true end for which God created them. But by this new way both Jews and Gentiles can be brought into a right relationship with God, can have the assurance of acceptance by him and receive his free pardon. They receive it freely, by his sheer grace, because of the redemptive work accomplished by Christ. It is Christ whom God has set forth before our eyes as the one whose sacrificial death has atoned for our guilt and removed the imminent retribution which our rebellion against God had incurred. What Christ has thus procured for us we can make effectively our own by faith.
This, then, is the way in which God has demonstrated his righteousness—he has vindicated his own character and at the same time he bestows a righteous status on sinners. This is why God, in his patient dealing with men and women, could pass over the sins which they committed before the coming of Christ, instead of exacting the full penalty; he was showing them mercy in prospect of the demonstration of his righteousness in this present era. And this demonstration shows us how God remains perfectly righteous himself while he pardons those who believe in Jesus and puts them in the right before his judgment bar.
If this is so, who has any right to boast? All ground of boasting in one’s personal righteousness is removed, not by the works prescribed by the law but by the principle of faith. Where Jew and Gentile alike are justified by God’s grace, through no merit of their own, none can say, ‘I achieved this by my own effort.’ The conclusion of Paul’s argument is that human beings are set right in God’s sight by faith, quite apart from the law’s requirements. If acceptance by God could be attained only by keeping the Jewish law, then God would be in a special sense the God of the Jews. But he is as much the Gentiles’ God as the God of the Jews, for in the gospel one and the same way of righteousness is opened up for both. He will accept Jews by virtue of their faith, and he will accept Gentiles on exactly the same basis.
For Paul, the division between Jews and Gentiles was the basic division in the human race. He himself was a Jew by birth and upbringing and had been taught to look on non-Jews as benighted sinners, lacking the knowledge of God’s law by which alone it was possible to gain acceptance in his sight. And indeed the cleavage between Jew and Gentile was one of the most unbridgeable in the ancient world. There are other cleavages which may appear larger in our eyes today—cleavages of race, nationality, class and colour—whose recalcitrance presents us with far more acute problems than does the division between Jew and Gentile. But Paul’s argument is as valid in the light of our contemporary cleavages as it was in the face of those of his own day: there is no distinction between east and west, black and white, for all are equally in need of the free mercy of God and all may receive his mercy on the same terms.
The Roman poet Horace, laying down some guide-lines for writers of tragedies in his day, criticizes those who resort too readily to the device of a deus ex machina to solve the knotty problems which have developed in the course of the plot. ‘Do not bring a god on to the stage’, he says, ‘unless the problem is one that deserves a god to solve it’ (nec deus intersit, nisi dignus uindice nodus / inciderit).1
Luther took up these words and applied them to the forgiveness of sins: here, he said, is a problem which needs God to solve it (nodus Deo uindice dignus).2 True, for sinful man cannot solve it, though he desperately needs a solution to it: it is his problem; it is he who needs to be forgiven. And what Paul tells us here is that the problem has been worthily solved by the grace of God, who has presented Christ as the solution, the means of forgiveness, the guarantor of our acceptance. All that is required of sinful men and women is that they should embrace by faith what God’s grace has provided.
It might be asked, however, if God’s law is not nullified by this principle of faith. Far from it, says Paul. By the principle of faith the law is upheld, sin is condemned, righteousness is vindicated and the Old Testament scriptures are fulfilled. This he now proceeds to show.
21. The righteousness of God. ‘God’s way of righteousness’, as in 1:17.
22. Through faith in Jesus Christ. Lit. ‘through faith of Jesus Christ’, where the genitive is objective: Jesus Christ is the one in whom faith is placed (this is confirmed by the unambiguous wording of verse 26: ‘who has faith in Jesus’).
There is no distinction. As here there is no distinction between Jews and Gentiles (or between any other opposed categories of mankind) in respect of sin, so in 10:12 ‘there is no distinction’ between them in respect of the mercy of God.
23. All have sinned. These identical words (pantes … hēmarton) appear at the end of 5:12 where, however, the reference may be to the participation of all in ‘man’s first disobedience’; here the meaning is that all human beings, as individuals, have sinned.
Fall short of the glory of God. The image of God in which man was created was believed to involve a share in the divine glory, which was forfeited through sin. The words of Isaiah 43:7, ‘whom I created for my glory’ (spoken, in the context, of ‘every one who is called by my name’), came to be applied to humanity in general. Cf. also 1 Corinthians 11:7. The ‘hope of sharing the glory of God’ awaits believers in the coming age (5:2).
24. They are justified by his grace as a gift. Paul’s hope, before he became a Christian, was that, by dint of perseverance in observing the law of God, he might at length be pronounced righteous by God when he stood before his judgment-seat. But in this way of righteousness apart from the law, the procedure is reversed: God pronounces believers righteous at the beginning of their course, not at the end of it. If he pronounces them righteous at the beginning of their course, it cannot be on the basis of works which they have not yet done. Such justification is, on the contrary, ‘an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight’.3
And when it comes to the question of our acceptance by God, how much more satisfying it is to know oneself justified freely by his grace than to hope to be justified ‘by works of law’! In the latter case, I can never be really satisfied that I have made the grade, that my behaviour has been sufficiently meritorious to win the divine approval. Even if I do the best I can (and the trouble is, I do not always do that), how can I be certain that my best comes within measurable distance of God’s requirement? I may hope, but I can never be sure. But if God in sheer grace assures me of his acceptance in advance, and I gladly embrace his assurance, then I can go on to do his will without always worrying whether I am doing it adequately or not. In fact, to the end of the chapter I shall be an ‘unprofitable servant’, but I know whom I have believed:
He owns me for his child;
I can no longer fear.
In Isaiah 40–55 Israel’s deliverance from exile in Babylonia is Israel’s ‘justification’—and God’s. ‘Only in the LORD … are righteousness and strength’ (Isa. 45:24), and his righteousness and strength are shown in his people’s deliverance: ‘In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall triumph (lit. “shall be justified”) and glory’ (Isa. 45:25); ‘This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD and their vindication (lit. “righteousness”) from me, says the LORD’ (Isa. 54:17). Why is their deliverance their justification? Had they not deserved their punishment of exile? Yes; Jerusalem had ‘received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins’ (Isa. 40:2); but God’s free grace restored them, and their restoration was both his victorious vindication of his name among the nations (Isa. 42:13; 48:9–11) and his people’s salvation.
Through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. The redemption (apolytrōsis) or ransom is the buying of a slave out of bondage in order to set him free.4 Here too God’s merciful dealings with Israel provide an Old Testament background to Paul’s language, whether we think of Israel’s redemption from Egyptian bondage (Exod. 15:13; Pss. 77:15; 78:35) or of their later deliverance from the Babylonian exile (Isa. 41:14; 43:1). The grace of God which ‘justifies’ those who believe has been actively manifested in the redemptive work of Christ.
As I was walking up and down in the house, as a man in a most woful state, that word of God took hold of my heart, Ye are ‘justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 3:24). But oh, what a turn it made upon me! Now was I as one awakened out of some troublesome sleep and dream, and listening to this heavenly sentence, I was as if I had heard it thus expounded to me: Sinner, thou thinkest that because of thy sins and infirmities I cannot save thy soul, but behold my Son is by me, and upon him I look, and not on thee, and will deal with thee according as I am pleased with him.5
25. Whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. The two phrases ‘by his blood’ and ‘to be received by faith’ (lit. ‘through faith’) are independently epexegetic of ‘expiation’. The key-word is ‘expiation’, as RSV renders hilastērion. This Greek form may be taken as masculine, the accusative singular of hilastērios (‘propitiatory’, ‘agent of propitiation’), in agreement with ‘whom’ (hon), or as neuter (‘means of propitiation’, ‘place of propitiation’). The commonest LXX usage of the word (in the neuter) is as the equivalent of Hebrew kappōret (the place where sins are atoned for, or blotted out), the golden slab or ‘mercy seat’ which covered the ark in the holy of holies (so more than twenty times in the Pentateuch). In Ezekiel 43:14, 17, 20 (five times) it is used to render Hebrew ‘ăzārâ, the ‘ledge’ round the altar of burnt-offering in Ezekiel’s temple.
The form hilastērion is related to the verb hilaskomai, which in pagan Greek means ‘placate’ or ‘make gracious’, but in LXX takes on the meaning of Hebrew kipper (‘make atonement’) and cognate words, among which is included kappōret (‘mercy-seat’). Exception has been taken to the use of the verb ‘propitiate’ and the noun ‘propitiation’, used to render these words in the older English versions of the New Testament, on the ground that the English terms smack of placating or appeasing.6 We may compare the avoidance of these terms here in RSV, NEB (‘God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death, effective through faith’) and GNB (‘God offered him, so that by his death he should become the means by which people’s sins are forgiven through their faith in him’). But if hilaskomai, hilastērion and their cognates acquired a new meaning from their biblical setting, it might be expected that by dint of long usage the English terms ‘propitiate’ and ‘propitiation’ should have acquired a biblical meaning in the same way. In any case, misunderstanding is excluded by Paul’s insistence that it is God, and not the sinner, who has provided this hilastērion. The Old Testament similarly ascribes the initiative in this matter to God’s grace: ‘The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life’ (Lev. 17:11). It is an Old Testament text like this, moreover, that explains Paul’s use of the expression ‘by his blood’ in the present context and justifies the NEB interpretation of it as ‘by his sacrificial death’.
The death of Christ, then, is the means by which God does away with his people’s sin—not symbolically, as in the ritual of Leviticus 16 in which the material mercy-seat figured, but really. And really in a twofold sense: the sin has been removed not only from the believer’s conscience, on which it lay as an intolerable burden, but also from the presence of God. The writer to the Hebrews similarly associates the sacrifice of Christ with the realization of God’s promise in Jeremiah’s prophecy of the new covenant: ‘I will remember their sins no more’ (Heb. 8:12, quoting Jer. 31:34).
Once justice is done to the initiative of divine grace in the efficacy of Christ’s self-offering, there is no reason for excluding from the meaning of hilastērion the averting of divine wrath, if the context so warrants. And the context does warrant the inclusion of the averting of divine wrath in the meaning of hilastērion in Romans 3:25. Paul has already said in 1:18 that ‘the wrath of God (NEB ‘divine retribution’) is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness’; how then is this ‘wrath’ to be removed? The hilastērion which God has provided in Christ not only removes the ungodliness and wickedness, but at the same time averts the retribution which is the inevitable sequel to such attitudes and actions in a moral universe.
If it were not that it is awkward to have Jesus spoken of as an object or place—the mercy-seat—a strong case could be made out for giving hilastērion that meaning here. Before the disappearance of the ark of the covenant at the time of the Babylonian exile, the mercy-seat which covered it was the place where national atonement was effected in the annual ceremony of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:15–16). Paul ‘informs us that in Christ there was exhibited in reality that which was given figuratively to the Jews’ (Calvin, ad loc.).7
According to T. W. Manson, the contrast between the old hilastērion and the new is pointed by the words ‘whom God put forward’. The old hilastērion was concealed behind the curtain which separated the holy of holies from the outer sanctuary, and was seen by none except the high priest, when he went through the curtain on the Day of Atonement. But in Christ ‘the mercy-seat is no longer kept in the sacred seclusion of the most holy place: it is brought out into the midst of the rough and tumble of the world and set up before the eyes of the hostile, contemptuous, or indifferent crowds.’8 This is an impressive statement in support of the rendering ‘mercy-seat’. But ‘mercy-seat’ would in any case be used by metonymy for ‘atoning sacrifice’ and perhaps it is best to translate hilastērion as ‘atoning sacrifice’. Christ, that is to say, is the atoning sacrifice whom God has ‘put forward’ or (as NEB has it, preferring the alternative sense of the middle proetheto) ‘designed’.
The phrase by his blood refers to the sacrificial death of Christ as the means by which the one effective atonement for sin has been made (cf. 5:8–9, ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God’).
Paul has thus pressed into service the language of the law-court (‘justified’), the slave-market (‘redemption’) and the altar (‘expiation’, ‘atoning sacrifice’) in the attempt to do justice to the fullness of God’s gracious act in Christ. Pardon, liberation, atonement—all are made available to men and women by his free initiative and may be appropriated by faith. And faith in this sense is not a kind of work that is specially meritorious in God’s sight; it is that simple and open-hearted attitude to God which takes him at his word and gratefully accepts his grace.
This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. That is, ‘to demonstrate that God was not unrighteous when he passed over sins committed in earlier days, in the period of his forbearance’. The redemption accomplished by Christ has retrospective as well as prospective efficacy. His atonement avails for the whole human family; ‘he is the expiation for our sins’, as a later New Testament writer puts it (using the word hilasmos, from the same stock as hilastērion), ‘and not for ours only but also for … the whole world’ (1 John 2:2). With the description of the ages before Christ as the period of God’s forbearance may be compared Paul’s announcement to the Athenians: ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now …’ (Acts 17:30). Although the problem in theodicy may not be as obvious to the modern mind as it was to Paul’s, yet to pass over wrong is as much an act of injustice on the part of a judge as to condemn the innocent (see comment on 4:5, p. 117).
26. It was to prove. Lit. ‘for the demonstration of his righteousness’ (pros tēn endeixin tēs dikaiosynēs autou), practically a repetition of ‘This was to show God’s righteousness’ (eis endeixin tēs dikaiosynēs autou) in verse 25. The repetition has been explained, notably by R. Bultmann9 and E. Käsemann,10 by the suggestion that in verses 24 and 25 Paul reproduced (with minor amplifications) a primitive formula, the gist of which he then repeated (verse 26) in his own words. The repetition, with the general amplitude of style, is more probably due to Paul’s carefulness to omit no element in the situation.
At the present time. Catching up ‘But now’ (verse 21); cf. ‘but now’ in Acts 17:30.
That he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus. In the self-offering of Christ, God’s righteousness is vindicated and the believing sinner justified. For Christ occupies a unique position as God’s representative with man and man’s representative with God. As the representative man he absorbs the judgment incurred by human sin; as the representative of God he bestows God’s pardoning grace on men and women. The words recall Isaiah 45:21 (‘a righteous God and a Saviour’) and Zechariah 9:9, LXX (‘righteous and saving’).11
28. Apart from works of law. Paul does not mean that such works need not be performed, but that, even when they are performed tolerably well, one is not thereby justified in God’s sight. He is cutting the ground from under the feet of those who say, ‘I always do the best I can … I try to live a decent life … I pay my lawful dues, and what more can God expect of me?’
Luther (like Origen and others before him) emphasizes ‘apart from works of law’ by adding ‘alone’ to justified by faith: ‘man becomes righteous without works of the law, through faith alone.’12 He pours scorn on the criticisms which he incurred for this ‘addition’ to the Word of God. In fact, he expressed Paul’s meaning accurately: it is by faith alone, and not by legal works, or by any other fancied means of justification, that men and women receive the righteous status which God by his grace bestows. When this is grasped, it can be seen that they have no ground for self-congratulation as they contemplate the way of salvation: it is sola gratia, sola fide, soli Deo gloria (‘by grace alone, through faith alone; to God alone be the glory’).
Yet, while justification in this sense is received by faith alone, ‘the faith which justifies is not alone’; it is, as Paul says in Galatians 5:6, ‘faith working through love’—and just how it so works is set out in practical detail in Romans 12:1–15:13. But this belongs to a later stage of the argument; what is important at this stage is to insist that it is by faith, not by what they do, that human beings receive the justifying grace of God.
31. We uphold the law. If Paul had expressed himself in Hebrew, he would have used the verb qiyyēm. This is the verb used in the rabbinical assertion that Abraham ‘fulfilled the law’. Paul may have some such assertion in mind when he goes on to argue that Abraham did indeed fulfil or ‘uphold’ the law, but that, according to the testimony of Scripture, he upheld it through receiving God’s gift of righteousness by faith.13