Universal Condemnation
UNIVERSAL CONDEMNATION
ROMANS 3:21-25a
Paul has painted a dark picture of human sin. He is now ready to describe the wonderful way in which sinners are put right with God.
The way is now clear for the great affirmation. It has been demonstrated that Jew and Gentile alike stand condemned, and that the only advantage the Jews had was the clear proof of their need by the impact of the Law and the revelation of divine demands implicit in it. Nor, says Paul, was this unfamiliar to the Old Testament, in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets, if they had been properly read and understood (3:21). This is important. Paul implies that the legalistic Judaism, from which he was set free by his conversion, was not a true development of the Old Testament, but a sterile perversion of it.
There was another tradition, traceable to Abraham, who later is to provide a striking illustration of the theme (chapter 4), and also prominent in the message of the prophets, who in no way saw the Law as the final revelation of God (Isaiah 1:1-18). Paul was abundantly right. The theme of the New Testament emerges again and again in the Old Testament (Isaiah 51:16f.). Therefore the heresy of Marcion in the second century, calling on the church to abandon the Old Testament; therefore the need today to reaffirm the unity of the Bible. Paul was preaching no new version of God’s revelation. He was calling Jewry back to their real heritage, from the blind road into which Pharisaism had led it.
God’s righteousness is shown to be unattainable by the Law. To fall short of his glory is to betray the prime function of our being, to demonstrate the marring of the divine image in which we were created. Therefore a clear definition of sin (3:23). See Psalm 4:4 and Isaiah 43:7 for the germ of Paul’s thought in his comprehensive statement.
Justification (3:24) is, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight.” This is through “the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption, in the meaning of the Greek word, is the act of buying a slave out of bondage to set him free. A ransom, in other words, is paid, just as Israel was redeemed from bondage in Egypt (Deuteronomy 7:8) and in Babylon (Isaiah 51:11). See also Galatians 3:23-27. Our justification rests on the fact that God, of his own free grace, has intervened to rescue his people from bondage to sin. It follows that the redeemed are those who accept emancipation. It follows, too, that they must believe to do so.