11. The God Who Declares The Guilty Just
11
The God Who Declares the Guilty Just
At a certain level the title of this chapter almost seems perverse. The following, I think, is how we would prefer that things work:
Members of the jury, I am not asking for mercy or pardon. I want justice. I am demanding full acquittal. Yes, I committed the murder of which I am accused. But I am not guilty. Members of the jury, you must consider all my good deeds—not merely as mitigating circumstances but as reason for exonerating me. The goodness of my other deeds outweighs the crime I committed. My good deeds require a “not guilty” verdict. If justice is to be done, you must find me innocent.
So writes Todd Wilken.[1] We grin because the argument is so ridiculous. Yet suddenly we see that an approach to God that depends finally on our balancing of good deeds and bad deeds must be no less ridiculous. For this is the lamest of all forms of self-justification—yet this is the case we want to make before God. This argument is not a plea for leniency; rather, it is a bold assertion of innocence. It assumes that guilt is cancelled by good deeds. God must acquit us and declare us “not guilty” because we have done enough compensating good things. This is self-justification. And it is no more believable before the bar of God’s justice than it would be in a contemporary court.
So how should we think that God looks at things, this God who is himself spectacularly holy and who does not see our good deeds as things that are weighed in a balance against bad deeds but sees even this futile effort at self- justification as one more example of our mortal defiance against him? What is the Bible’s solution? God does not pretend that good deeds make up for bad deeds. Rather, he has found a way to declare the guilty just—and retain his integrity while doing it. Instead of self-justification, he finds a way to justify us; he finds a way to grant us justification that is not self-justification but justification from the God who is our Maker and our Judge. That is what this chapter is about.
We shall shortly focus on Romans 3:21–26. Martin Luther, a Reformer who lived five hundred years ago, called this paragraph the center of the book of Romans and indeed of the whole Bible. But before we actually look at these verses, we should remind ourselves where they fall within Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans 3:21–26 in Light of Romans 1:18–3:20
Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome falls within the New Testament. The New Testament opens with the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) followed by the book of Acts (which recounts “the acts of the apostles” from Christ’s resurrection on through the first three decades or so of the church) and then a sheaf of letters written by the apostle Paul. The first of Paul’s letters in the New Testament is written to the Romans. But before we get to Romans 3:21–26, which is our focus of interest, we must recognize that Paul’s entire argument in Romans 1:18–3:20 shows us we are guilty. What these two and a half chapters do is unpack in theological terms the thrust of what the Bible says about human beings from Genesis 3 on.
This long section begins with the words, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them” (Rom. 1:18–19). The following two and a half chapters show that whether you come from the line of Abraham through the covenant with Moses and have received a lot of revelation from God, or, alternatively, you have come from outside that line from some sort of Gentile heritage, nevertheless, both lines—Jews and Gentiles alike—without exception end up guilty before God. Knowing what God wants does not enable you to meet those standards. Alternatively, if you come from a heritage where you have been exposed to very little of what God has said, and you adopt some lesser standard, you do not even come up to that standard. On every front we are a guilty people.
This is so out of line with contemporary self-perception that when you read some of what Paul says without developing a feel for the whole of the Bible’s storyline, it can easily be dismissed as over the top. He finishes the section in 3:9–18 with a raft of quotations from the Old Testament:
9What shall we conclude then? Do we [i.e., Jews] have any advantage? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10As it is written [and now you get these quotations, all snippets from the Old Testament Scriptures]:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
11there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
12All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
13“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
14“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
15“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16ruin and misery mark their ways,
17and the way of peace they do not know.”
18“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Romans 3:9–18
Now if you come from a thoroughly secular background and you opened this book in your hand at this page and read the lines quoted above, you might well think, “Has the author taken leave of his senses? Oh, I know that there are some bad people out there—Stalin, maybe, and Pol Pot, I suppose, and Hitler, of course—but what about ‘Doctors without Borders’? Aren’t there a lot of people doing good things out there?”
At a certain level, Paul would agree with that conclusion. Historically, Christians have often seen in such good things the fruit of common grace, that is, grace that God gives commonly to all kinds of people. But Paul’s probing cuts deeper into the human heart. The question is not whether many good things are done (e.g., pieces of art, a wonderful symphony, self-sacrificing doctors on the frontier of a horrible disease, and much, much more). We have already seen that the Bible presents human beings to be horrible contradictions: we have so much potential reflecting something of the goodness of creation and the glory of God, and on the other hand we are corrupt, abusive, twisted, and above all self-focused. The heart of evil, according to the entire storyline of the Bible, is the broken relationship with God that sets up idols that de-god him. This results in destroying the beauty and goodness of the created order. The heart of all evil is not Auschwitz, as unimaginably evil as it is. The heart of all evil is first of all human beings, you and me, wanting to go our own way and disowning the God who has made us.
When you probe these texts line by line and discern that this is what God has in mind when he talks about evil, all the lines make sense. “There is no one righteous, not even one” (3:10). It makes sense if you remember the quotation from Todd Wilken with which we began the chapter: the issue is not a matter of balancing good deeds and bad deeds. None of us can claim to be righteous, “not even one”—and most of us recognize the truth of this assertion, if we are honest enough.
“All have turned away, they have together become worthless” (3:12)—not worthless in the sense that there is no intrinsic value in human beings, in God’s image-bearers, but worthless in the sense that we have all violated our Creator God. This is easier to understand when we remember what Jesus told us is the “most important” commandment: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29–31). I confess with shame that I do not love God with all my heart and soul and mind and strength. If Jesus says that this is the most important commandment, then I am guilty of breaking it. Aren’t you? In fact, loving God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength might be thought in our culture to be a bit fanatical. But God says, in effect, “Listen, don’t you understand? This the way I created the universe in the first place. If you don’t see it, that is already a mark of how fallen this order is.” Similarly with the second command, the command to love our neighbors as ourselves: it seems so over the top, ridiculously utopian. But God says that such inferences show how badly we have forsaken what he sees as normal, healthy, good, godly, right, clean. No wonder, then, these quotations say,
12“All have turned away,
they have together become worthless. . . .”
13“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
14“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
Romans 3:12–14
Oh, I know many of us come from civilized backgrounds where there is not all that much cursing and bitterness unless we bang our thumbs with a hammer or get fired from work when we think it is unjust. Despite all of our civilized behavior, however, when we face enough pressure we find it desperately easy, in the back of our minds (even if we are disciplined enough not to let it actually escape from our mouths), to nurse bitterness and curse our perceived opponents. This is scarcely a mark of loving our neighbors as ourselves; it is not a way of praising God; it is not a reflection of the shalom—the utter well-being that only God can establish—God intends us to enjoy.
The truth of the matter is that, as the last line of these biblical quotations puts it, “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (3:18). So we are still enmeshed in the central problem disclosed in the drama of the entire Bible. How do we human beings get restored to God? If, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, self-justification will not work, how about simple denial? Here is part of the testimony of a philosopher named Budziszewski. He writes,
Everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things he has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. . . . The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. . . .
Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is “written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness” [that’s a quotation of Romans 2:15]. . . . That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind. . . .
Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how many he pulls out, there are still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. [That is what he means by saying that he became stupid. Christians have so much to think about. People who write God off and all of his truth have much less to think about. They become stupid.][2]
He goes on to say that before he was converted, he thought he was becoming more focused, he thought that he was brighter than the fools around him—until he saw that he was himself the fool.
Now this is the background Paul has established and now simply presupposes as he writes the spectacular paragraph that Martin Luther calls the center of the entire Bible: Romans 3:21–26. We shall add a few verses more.
21But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement [propitiation], through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
27Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the “law” that requires faith. 28For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law. 29Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, 30since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.
Romans 3:21–31
Frankly, these paragraphs are so condensed that even if you have been a Christian for quite a while, when you hear them read you may start hearing strings of God-words going by you without being able quite to follow the flow. The only way to understand the thought is to go slowly enough through these lines that you unpack the logic and discover how the entire passage is put together. The passage will certainly repay careful reading: I know no passage in all of the Bible clearer on what the cross achieves than this one. This is what Jesus did on the cross.
So we shall follow the argument, first of all, in verses 21–26, and then, secondly, in verses 27–31.[3]
Romans 3:21–26
1. The Revelation of God’s Righteousness in Its Relationship to the Old Testament (Rom. 3:21)
Now remember, Paul just spent two and a half chapters showing how much guilt, ingratitude, idolatry, and sin there is—and this in the face of God being a righteous God. So how will we be righteous in his eyes? How will we live under him?
“But now” (3:21) means at this point in the Bible’s storyline, at this point in redemptive history: now that Jesus has come.
“Apart from the law” refers to the law given by Moses, the law-covenant under which the Hebrews, the Israelites, lived for a millennium and a half.
“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known.” That is to say, the righteousness of God that transcends the ages, the very character of God, his perfect righteousness, has now been disclosed or made known not in the framework of that old law-covenant with its sacrificial system and its priesthood and so forth. God’s righteousness has now been made known apart from that. To use language that Paul uses elsewhere, what he is saying is, “We have now arrived at the new covenant; now a new frame of reference, a new covenant has arrived.” He has not yet explained how it is grounded or how it works.
But that does not mean that this new situation is entirely off from the old law-covenant, for Paul adds an interesting clause at the end of verse 21: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify” (emphasis added). That is, if you read the Old Testament carefully and listen well, you will see that the law-covenant that Moses gave actually anticipated what is coming now. For example, the blood of bull and goat borne by the high priest into the Most Holy Place in the tabernacle on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, pointed toward the ultimate sacrifice that pays for sin, the sacrifice of Christ.
Even those laws that we call moral laws (e.g., “You shall not murder,” “You shall not commit adultery”)—these point forward too. For example, imagine the final state of things, a new heaven and a new earth, perfect righteousness, resurrection existence, with absolutely no sin or death or decay anywhere. Do you think there are going to be little signs posted here and there saying, “You shall not murder” or “You shall not commit adultery”? Probably it is pretty hard to commit murder and adultery in resurrection bodies in the perfection of paradise anyway! But quite apart from such considerations, do you really think that those sorts of laws will be needed? If you say yes, then you have not yet imagined perfection. If you say no, then you might ask yourself, “Does this mean that God’s law has changed?” Oh no, that misses the point entirely, because ultimately the laws that say “You shall not murder” and “You shall not commit adultery” anticipate a time when murder and adultery, hatred and selfish sexual lust, will all be gone. In that sense, the laws point to the perfect righteousness when people love one another, when murder and adultery are not so much prohibited as unthinkable.
So the law-covenant, which set out many commands and prohibitions, along with its sacrificial system and its structures for the nation—in many ways these things pointed forward to what is now being introduced by Christ. If the righteousness of God is now made known “apart from the law,” that very law bore witness to this new state of affairs and anticipated this day.
2. The Availability of God’s Righteousness to All without Racial Distinction but on Condition of Faith (Rom. 3:22–23)
“This righteousness [which has now been made known in a fresh way] is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:21–23). Observe the two italicized instances of the word “all”: it is this pair of “all’s” that connects this paragraph with the previous two and a half chapters. The previous two and a half chapters have argued at great length and in immaculate detail that all people need this righteousness. We are all guilty before God. But now there is a righteousness from God that meets our needs. It can be our righteousness. And it is “given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe,” Jews and Gentiles, “for all have sinned.”
The old covenant was for the Israelites. Of course, even in the Old Testament, God presents himself as sovereign over all the nations of the world. Even in the Old Testament it is written, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people”—and God holds all to account. That is why, for example, the God of Israel in the Old Testament can be depicted as holding, say, Babylon or Assyria to account. Today he holds America and China to account. He is still the sovereign Lord who holds all to account. Nevertheless in Old Testament times the focus of the law-covenant tied God to the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But now, we are told, this righteousness from God that is in some ways detached from that old covenant, is given through faith in Jesus Christ. It is not given on the old covenant grounds where you were supposed to be born into the nation or adopted into the nation in some sense. No, it is “given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, the grace is extended as far as the need, and the need is everywhere: Jew and Gentile alike.
One of the wonderful things about the last book of the Bible is that it pictures around the throne of God on the last day men and women from every language and ethnicity and nation. Millions of them! On that last day around the throne, there will be lots of Chinese, Hutus, Tutsis, Serbs, Russians, Bolivians, Arabs, Europeans—different colors, different senses of humor, different languages, different ethnicities. God draws out his people from all of those nations. Today, Christians who travel discover that wherever they go, they will find Christians in amazing places. I’ve been in Papua New Guinea with brothers and sisters in Christ who a generation-and-a-half ago would have been cannibals. I have visited Hong Kong: what a spectacular city with such a mix of styles: Gucci and Saks Fifth Avenue, and two blocks over an open meat market. Such a colorful array of people—and a fair number of Christians in that lot, too. And on and on all around the world: Africans, Asians, Europeans, Americans. Around the throne on that last day people will be found from all over the globe and from every ethnicity, because under the terms of this new covenant God has made available the righteousness that we so desperately need to all who believe because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Now Paul has still not explained how God has done this. But that is the thrust of the point he establishes.
3. The Source of God’s Righteousness in the Gracious Provision of Christ Jesus as the Propitiation for Our Sins (Rom. 3:24–25)
“There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement [propitiation], through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:22–25).
Now we are getting into some theological words that have to be unpacked.
REDEMPTION
What does redemption mean? For us, redemption is a word belonging to God-talk. We do not use this word very much in ordinary speech anymore. A generation or two ago we still used redemption in some business dealings. If you went to a pawn shop and hawked your grandfather’s watch to obtain a little money, and then you managed to earn some money a few weeks later, you would go back and redeem the watch. You bought it back and thus freed it from where it was. Likewise people would speak in economic terms of redeeming their mortgage, finally paying it off.
In the ancient world, redemption terminology was used even more commonly. It was not restrictively God-talk vocabulary. For example, in the ancient world you could become a slave because there were no Western-style bankruptcy laws (like Chapter 11 or 13 here in America). Supposing you borrow some money, you start a business, the economy flounders, and your business goes belly-up. What do you do? In the ancient world what you have to do is sell yourself and/or your family into slavery. That is what you do; there is no Chapter 11.
But suppose you have a rich cousin twenty miles away, close to a day’s journey, who hears that that you have had to sell yourself into slavery. Suppose he cares for you and decides that he is going to do something about it. What he might well do is come along and buy you back. Now, there was a complicated process for doing that through pagan temples, a process we need not go into—but what he would be doing would be redeeming you. He is buying you back and thus freeing you from your slavery.
So now what Paul is saying, in effect, is this: “We too have received a redemption, a liberation from our slavery to sin. We have been bought back, and as a result we have been freed from what would otherwise enslave us.” In fact, what Paul asserts is that all of us “are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (3:24). This is astounding: we are all justified—declared just before God, declared righteous before God—how so, when we are not just, when we are not righteous? We have just traversed two and a half chapters to say that we are not righteous. Yet now we are told that this righteousness from God has declared us righteous. We are justified freely by his grace through this redemption, this buying us back, our freedom now secured by Christ Jesus, through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. How does this work? What does it mean?
To understand, we must come to grips with another word Paul uses.
PROPITIATION
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith” (3:25, emphasis added). Or as the ESV rightly has it, God presented Christ “as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (emphasis added). Now what does that mean? We need to pause for a moment and work through this word “propitiation” or “sacrifice of atonement.”
Propitiation is that sacrificial act by which God becomes propitious, which doesn’t tell you very much, does it? “Propitious” simply means favorable: to say that propitiation is an act by which God becomes propitious is to say it is an act by which God becomes favorable to us. He is set over against us in wrath, but now by this sacrificial act he becomes favorable to us. That is propitiation.
Others prefer to use the expression “expiation.” Expiation is the act by which sin is cancelled, wiped out, taken off the board. So the object of expiation is sin. The object of propitiation is God. God becomes favorable.
In the pagan world of the first century, when pagans offered sacrifices to their gods, very often it was with the desire to make them propitious, to make them favorable. So if you want to make a sea voyage, you make a propitiating sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea, in the hope that he will not be bad-tempered or angry with you, and then you will have a safe sea voyage. It was a sacrifice to Neptune to make him propitious. It was a propitiating sacrifice.
But this text says something rather astonishing. In that old pagan way of looking at things, the human worshiper offers a propitiating sacrifice to the gods. But this text says that God presented Christ as a propitiating sacrifice. So does that mean that God, presenting Christ as a propitiating sacrifice, propitiates God? How can God offer a sacrifice that propitiates himself?
Partly because of the strangeness of this thought, many have rejected this interpretation entirely. They think it is silly. How can God propitiate himself? Besides, some of them just do not like the notion of blood sacrifice or God being wrathful. In the 1930s an influential professor in the United Kingdom, a man by the name of C. H. Dodd, argued strongly that “propitiation” makes no sense as a translation. Surely God cannot propitiate himself; therefore, this must be expiation, in which by the sacrifice of his Son, sin is cancelled. Further, Dodd argued, God so loved the world that he gave his Son (see John 3:16). If he was already so favorable to the world that he gave his Son, how could we properly imagine that the Son is then propitiating God, making God favorable? God is already favorable. So surely what is happening must be expiation (cancelling sin), not propitiation (averting God’s wrath).
Those who responded to Professor Dodd pointed out that in the Old Testament when propitiation is mentioned, it is regularly in the same context where the wrath of God is mentioned. In fact, the word rendered propitiation is used two-thirds of the time in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to refer to the top of the ark of the covenant, where on the Day of Atonement the blood of the bull and goat was shed—precisely to turn away God’s wrath. God ordained that this sacrifice be offered for this purpose. And in the passage here in Romans, we have just had two and a half chapters that begin, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness” that we human beings have deployed in suppressing the truth (1:18, emphasis added). So the wrath of God is the backdrop to the usage here in Romans 3:25.
God’s response to our sin is deep, personal, unavoidable. That wrath must be set aside, or we cannot be “justified,” declared just in his eyes. But how can God propitiate himself? The answer, of course, is that the entire storyline of the Bible has taught us that God stands over against us in wrath because of his holiness, but he stands over against us in love because he is that kind of God. Both are important.
On the one hand, if God does not stand over against us in wrath when we have sinned, then he is immoral: “Oh, I don’t care, they can blaspheme and kill and rape and steal and lie. No sweat. I don’t care. No skin off my nose.” But God is righteous; he does stand over against us in wrath, especially because we have marginalized him. We have de-god-ed him.
God knows that it is for our good that he be at the center of absolutely everything. It is not that he wants to have a certain preference among peers: he is not our peer! When you and I want to be especially praised by our peers, by our fellow human beings, we want to be stronger or wiser or richer or more beautiful than they are; we want to be thought of as in some sense superior. But God is superior. He is not just like us. He is God. Equally important, God in his love knows that we must see him at the center of everything or we are lost and undone. To see him this way is for our good. It is out of love that God insists that he be God, that idols must be banished. And he is correspondingly angry when by our actions, thoughts, and deeds we declare, “It will not be so.”
God does stand over against us in wrath because of his holiness, but, on the other hand, he stands over against us in love because that is the kind of God he is. This text says that God presented Christ to be the propitiation for our sins. Now in fact you cannot have propitiation (i.e., the turning aside of the wrath of God) without expiation (i.e., the cancelling of sin). The two hang together in the Bible. Even in the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement that was so, which is why some people have preferred the more embracing expression “sacrifice of atonement”: “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement” (3:25) for our sins, cancelling our sin and turning aside the wrath of God in one act. What you must not lose sight of in the context of Romans is that the righteous wrath of God must be set aside without tarnishing God’s justice.
We need to think about this just a little more. It is not as if the Father stands over against us in wrath, really angry, and dear Jesus comes along and stands over against us in love. That would be a barbaric notion: the Triune God would not be pulling together in harmony to free us human beings, his image-bearers, from the tyranny of our sin. The whole Triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit) stands over against us in wrath, and equally he stands over against us in love.
I think that one of the reasons we find it hard in the West to visualize this is because of our judicial system. In virtually every Western country, the judiciary is independent, and the judge is someone who must not be a victim of the criminal who is under review. Suppose, for example, some person charged with mugging is brought before a judge, and it turns out that the judge is the one who was mugged. In our system the judge must therefore recuse himself or herself because the judge is not to stand in judgment of any person where the judge himself or herself is the victim of the crime. That is because the judge administrates a bigger judicial system. That is all a judge does. The judge is supposed to be administering, in an equitable way, the larger system. The criminal has not in any sense sinned against the judge. The criminal sins against the state, the law, the constitution, the people. If you are in a monarchy as in Great Britain, then you sin against the crown. But you do not sin against the judge. The judge is supposed to be an independent arbiter who is using the structure of the judicial system to apply the law fairly and evenhandedly to the person who is under review.
But that is not the way it is in God’s court. God, as we have seen again and again, is always the most offended party. He is the one we have mugged, and he is our Judge: he never recuses himself. Yet his justice is not for that reason unfair. He is perfectly fair. He is himself the very embodiment of justice. He is perfectly righteous. He knows everything. Nothing can be hidden from him, not even our thoughts. His justice is perfect. But he is also the most offended party. Always. Thus, in wrath he demands that justice be done. Then in the person of his own dear Son, he pays the penalty.
In our system of courts, that is just so stupid it is unbelievable. Perhaps you have heard illustrations where you picture someone who is brought before a judge and the judge finds the person guilty and orders a fine of five thousand dollars or, alternatively, confines the criminal to five years in jail. Then the judge descends from his bench, takes out his checkbook, and writes the check for five thousand dollars, or, alternatively, takes off his robe and goes to jail for five years in place of the guilty criminal. That is called substitution. I suppose the illustration does get across the notion of substitution, but in our system it would nevertheless be incredibly corrupt. No judge in our system could do that. The judge is supposed to be an independent arbiter whose passion is the fair administration of the law, the majesty of the law. He does not have the right to take the prisoner’s place. That would be a corruption of justice.
But in the courts of heaven, God sets up the system. He is not only perfectly just, but he is also the offended party. And in the person of his own dear Son he absorbs the penalty on behalf of the people who put their faith in him. This last point is searingly important.
4. The Demonstration of God’s Righteousness through the Cross of Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:25–26)
“He did this [i.e., God set forth Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins] to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:25–26).
God “did this to demonstrate his justice,” not simply to love, forgive, or redeem us—but to demonstrate his justice. If God had forgiven our sin without sin in any sense being paid for, where would the justice be? If justice is not served, how could God say, “I forgive you,” without fostering injustice? The sin must be paid for.
“In his forbearance [God] had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished” (3:25). This refers to all the sins of God’s own covenant people in the past. They had often received temporal punishments of some sort or another. For example, under God’s justice the corrupt people of Israel did go into exile. They faced pressures and earthly punishments of various kinds. But now Paul points out that they never faced the full weight of God’s condemnation. That was coming on Christ himself. They had been spared this condemnation. In some deep way, God had left their sins still unpunished. God now demonstrates his justice in sending Christ to the cross “because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” Jesus bears their sins as he bears my sins. Jesus does this “to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (3:26, emphasis added). In other words, not only by this means does God declare guilty people like you and me just (i.e., he justifies us because someone has paid for our sin), but he demonstrates his own justice while he is doing it.
Do you want to know where God’s justice is most powerfully demonstrated? On the cross. Do you want to know where God’s love is most powerfully demonstrated? On the cross. There Jesus, the God-man, bore hell itself, and God did this both to be just and to be the one who declares just those who have faith in him. There is thus a sense in which God views me, Don Carson, through the lens of Jesus. That is to say, my sin is now viewed as his, and he has paid for it. And his justice, his righteousness, is now viewed as mine. God looks at me and declares me just, not because I am (I am guilty!) but because he has set forth his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Romans 3:27–31
Repeatedly in Romans 3:21–26, Paul tells us that the way we receive this righteousness, this justification, from God is faith. In the last few verses of the chapter, Romans 3:27–31, Paul underscores three emphases on faith. Briefly:
1. Faith Excludes Boasting (Rom. 3:27; 4:1–2)
“Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the ‘law’ that requires faith” (Rom. 3:27).
That is to say, I cannot come before you and say, “I am a superior person. That is why I am accepted by God.” At the end of the day I am declared to be just before God not because I try harder but because I have received God’s gift by faith. The very nature of faith excludes boasting. No one in the new heaven and the new earth will brag about the way personal merit attracted God’s approval.
2. Faith Is Necessary to Preserve Grace (Rom. 3:28; 4:3–8)
“For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law” (Rom. 3:28).
If somehow I can get pardon from God (i.e., God can look on me with favor) because I earn it, then grace is no more grace. We have already seen that when we are dealing with a God with whom we cannot barter, the only way that we are going to be forgiven is by his sovereign grace worked out in the cross. That grace is demonstrated in the cross, and we receive it by faith. Faith preserves God’s sovereign grace. If somehow we earned God’s favor, then God’s favor would not be dispensed on the ground of God’s grace.
Not only does faith exclude boasting, not only is it necessary to preserve grace, but . . .
3. Faith Is Necessary If Jews and Gentiles Alike Are to Be Saved (Rom. 3:29–30; 4:9–17)
“Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised [i.e., Jews] by faith and the uncircumcised [i.e., Gentiles] through that same faith” (Rom. 3:29–30).
One of the necessary implications of monotheism, belief in one God, is that in some sense he is the God of all, acknowledged or otherwise. He is the God of Jews and Gentiles alike. The way that you and I receive this bold declaration that we are just before God is by faith. For on the basis of the cross, and only on that basis, God justifies believing Jews (the circumcised) and believing Gentiles (the uncircumcised).
4. Christian Faith, Far from Overturning the Old Testament, Fulfills and Upholds It (Rom. 3:31; 4:18–25)
“Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law” (Rom. 3:31). Paul thus closes the circle: he brings us back to verse 21, where he has already established that this wonderful display of God’s righteousness, though it now appears apart from the law-covenant, was anticipated and announced by that same law-covenant. By saying something similar here, he is emphatically insisting that the whole Bible hangs together. God’s purposes have been unified all along—layered, complex, interwoven, but wonderfully unified, so that now, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, the law-covenant is fulfilled and its long-term purpose in the plan of God spectacularly fulfilled. Guilty men and women are declared just and reconciled to God, not because they are just, not because they try to balance up good deeds and bad deeds, but because by faith they trust Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf—a sacrifice that simultaneously pays for their sin and establishes God’s justice.
A Final Word on Faith
We cannot have failed to observe that “faith” or “believing” are crucial terms in this chapter of Romans. Yet we can easily misconstrue these words, because today in the Western world the word “faith” commonly has one of two meanings, neither of which Paul uses:
1. In some contemporary contexts “faith” is the equivalent of “religion.” We say there are many faiths, many religions. You have your faith, and I have my faith; you have your religion, and I have my religion. In this usage, “faith” is simply a synonym of “religion.”
2. But when it is not used in that way, in our culture “faith” means something like personal, subjective, religious choice. That is, it is not tied in any sense to truth or to fact. It is a personal, subjective, religious choice. So if you say to some people today, “You must have faith in Jesus,” it sounds like an invitation to a blind leap: some opt for Jesus, others opt for Allah and Muhammad, and others opt for Buddhism. But although the word “faith” is used in a variety of ways in the Bible, not once is it ever used that way. Not once.
In the Bible it is crucially important to establish faith’s object, that is, what or whom you believe. For example, in another of Paul’s letters, a letter in which he is writing to the Christians in Corinth, Paul insists that Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead (see 1 Cor. 15). Suppose, he argues, that Jesus did not rise from the dead; suppose that claim is historical nonsense. Then what happens to your faith if Jesus did not rise from the dead?
One, the first witnesses are all deceived or liars; you cannot trust any of the five hundred of them from different sites, different times, different circumstances. They are all liars. Two, it means that you are still lost because the Bible teaches that it was Christ’s dying and rising again that brought our redemption. That’s how we are reconciled to God. Three, your faith is useless. In other words, if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead when in fact Jesus did not rise from the dead, your faith is worthless because faith’s validation depends in part on the truthfulness of faith’s object. That is why the Bible never encourages you to believe something that is not true or something that it is not prepared to declare to be true. That is why in the Bible faith is strengthened by articulating and defending the truth. The Bible never says, “Just believe, believe, believe, believe, believe—it doesn’t matter if it’s true, just believe. So long as you are sincere in your belief, that is good.” And four, Paul goes one step farther and says that if you believe something that is not true (like the resurrection of Jesus, if it never happened), you are in fact of all people most to be pitied. Your life is a joke. You are believing something that is nonsense.
So as long as you are convinced that Christ did not rise from the dead, I am the last person who is going to urge you to sort of tighten up your stomach muscles and pretend to believe it. That is not faith. It might be the onset of a stomach ulcer, but it is not faith.
Even here, however, it is important that we avoid deluding ourselves. If someone were to object, “I prefer not to have any faith. I shall live my life solely on the basis of verifiable evidence,” the obvious answer is that faith is unavoidable. If you hold that any claim to superior knowledge about God cannot be true, that itself is an object of faith, an object of religious belief—that is, a belief that shapes your frame of reference about everything you hold to be important. If you insist that no one can decide which faith is true, you are yourself making a claim grounded on a certain kind of faith, a perception of reality you have come to trust. So why should we believe you? All of us, without exception, make truth-claims of some kind or other. Doubtless it is difficult to evaluate them. But we have no alternative except to try.
Thus when Paul here in Romans 3 commends faith, what he is wanting from us is a God-given ability to perceive what God has done by hanging Jesus on the cross, reconciling us to himself, setting aside his own just wrath, demonstrating his love, and declaring us just even though we are not, because the righteousness of Christ Jesus is now counted as ours and our sin is now counted as his. And he has anchored this in God’s gracious self-disclosure across enormous tracts of time, across the Bible’s entire storyline, climaxing in the shattering reality that the God who made us, the God who is our Judge, bled and died for us and rose again.
Certainly that is the kind of Jesus you can trust. It is the kind of God in whom you can place your faith.
Concluding Prayer
Dilemma wretched: how shall holiness
Of brilliant life unshaded, tolerate
Rebellion’s fetid slime, and not abate
In its own glory, compromised at best?
Dilemma wretched: how can truth attest
That God is love, and not be shamed by hate
And wills enslaved and bitter death—the freight
Of curse deserved, the human rebels’ mess?
The Cross! The Cross! The sacred meeting-place
Where, knowing neither compromise nor loss,
God’s love and holiness in shattering grace
The great dilemma slays! The Cross! The Cross!
This holy, loving God whose dear Son dies
By this is just—and one who justifies.[4]
Open our eyes, heavenly Father, that we may see the truth of what you have done in Jesus, and in seeing the truth, believe. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.