Studying His Word and His Works

Listen to the study here: Romans 3:21-31

Read here: Romans 3

• Review
  • Calvin on the theme of Romans: “Man’s only righteousness is the mercy of God in Christ, when it is offered by the Gospel and received by faith.”
  • Really important to connect back to Romans 1:17, and how the righteous shall live by faith, which is connected to Habbakuk 2:4. This is really emphasized in Romans 3:21-31.
  • Schreiner’s summary:
    • 1:18-32 covered unrighteousness of Gentiles, 2:1-3:8 unrighteousness of Jews, and 3:9-20 is unrighteousness of all. God’s righteousness is the focus of 3:21-31.
    • 1:18-3:20, Schreiner argues the fundamental reason God reveals his wrath is people fail to honor and esteem His name. The point of today’s verses is God vindicates his righteousness in the cross, satisfying his wrath by sending his Son as a substitute for sin.
  • Another recent theme is that people were saying Paul was teaching others to do evil so that good may come (v. 8). Or, that God is unfair since we can’t be righteous anyways, and then turn around and accuse people of unrighteousness. But, sin is a curse on humanity for disobedience that started with Adam and Eve, like a genetic mutation that affects all future generations. But some might say that is unfair, too, that all generations were affected by the parents’ original sin. Why can’t God just provide some grace? Well, He did, in the form of His Son! Why did He choose this way? I don’t know, but look around, look at history, look at the story of humanity, of following one false god after another in order to get some sort of relief or assurance of your eternal destiny. Where does THAT come from? It’s like a linear regression, you can estimate the line that best fits a set of data, but in the end there is only one that is the BEST. Or you can get better and better estimates of slope at a point, but it’s only when you consider eternity that you get the one true value. All the other ones have traces of truth, but they aren’t true.
    • I know, I’m talking like a math nerd, so if that doesn’t make sense, just consider that God has designed the universe to point us to him. Back to math, there are even things like true slopes at a point that are mysterious but true(how can you have a tangent and a secant simultaneously, to have delta x=0 and also > 0 simultaneously?).
    • All around us are false representations of the truth. But, because they are false, their “falseness” is actually evidence that there is one true way, and for eternal life, believing Jesus (v. 22) is the one true way. It doesn’t have to make complete sense, but faith is the evidence of things hoped for(Hebrews 11:1).

Intro

• The doctrine of Sola Fide, justification by faith alone, is the doctrine Sproul believes provoked the most serious controversy in the history of the Christian church.
  • What justification means
    • What it’s not
      • Not a divine pardon of the sinner.
      • Not a partial pardon either, where we become righteous on our own, or have to go to purgatory after we die (like Catholic doctrine teaches) until we are “purged” of all unrighteousness, removing the dross and only then can be admitted into God’s heaven.
    • What it is
      • Biblical justification is the act by which God judicially declares a person to be righteous in His sight.
        • The good news of the gospel is that God pronounces people justified while they are sinners (Romans 5:8). 
    • Why does the Roman Catholic church still believe we have to be made righteous rather than declared righteous?
      • Word meanings matter! During Martin Luther’s day, the Catholic church used only the Latin Bible, not the original Greek.
        • The Latin for justification is iustificare, where ficare means “to shape” or “to do.” Iustus means righteousness, so iustificare literally means “to make righteous.” We believe that is what sanctification is about, not justification.
        • The Greek words used for justification are dikaioo and dikaiosune, which mean “to declare righteous.” 
    • What the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write here is justification is NOT a pardon. It is NOT God’s declaration of what he finds in us, how much fuel is in our “righteousness tank” and we don’t get to heaven until our tank is full. (Mormons also believe there is this “other place” we can go to work our way to “heavenly father,” performing made up rituals like “baptisms for the dead” to start this journey for the deceased). Justification IS the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us, when we receive the gift of faith, while still sinners.Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner. A phrase Luther used to say.
• Verse 21
  • A right understanding of justification is Paul’s point in these verses, and he begins by declaring the righteousness of God, distinguishing that from the works of the law, where the point of the law is to show us our unrighteousness. 

• Verse 22
  • The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus, given to all who believe. Paul is saying this is not a new claim, the Mosaic Law and the Prophets were pointing this out for thousands of years beforehand.
    • We are justified through faith, not because of ourselves and our ability to have faith. The righteousness of Christ is placed on us through faith. It is a God-prompted faith, it is trusting his righteousness, not our own, including our own faith. This is why in previous verses Paul was hammering so hard on our inability to be justified on our own. It is why later in v. 27 he says our boasting is excluded.  
  • No distinction means no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave or free, etc. all have sinned. See also Rom 10:12, Gal 3:28.
• Verses 23-24
  • This is why Martin Luther said “memorize all of Romans,” It is challenging to keep up with all that is happening! There are thousands of years of history throughout which God’s plan has unfolded, so many Scriptures Paul has already referenced. Here in v. 23 he reiterates what he has been trying to get across, that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” “AND”, not but, but “AND”, so at the same time justified by his grace as a gift, redeemed by Christ. Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner!
• Verses 25-26
  • Propitiation, a “Bible word” that Sproul says is one of most glorious words in NT. I will probably never enjoy words as much as someone like Sproul, but it is good we have people to learn from who love words this much, because words matter!
    • Defined: To satisfy the demands of justice. In biblical terms, propitiation means to satisfy the demands of God’s wrath.
      • Christ’s work on the cross satisfied the demands of God’s justice. Christ satisfied this for us, paid our penalty. 
  • Schreiner says these verses solve the problem that has been building since 1:17, that the saving righteousness and judging righteousness of God meet. God’s justice is met in the death of his Son, who pays fully the debt of human sin. God also extends mercy (saving righteousness) by virtue of Jesus death to those who put their faith in Jesus. God is both justice and mercy, a righteous judge who also wants to have a relationship with us.  
  • God is both just and the justifier, which is another way of saying verses 23-24. All have sinned because God is just, AND we are saved from wrath because God is the justifier, giving the free gift of grace through Jesus Christ. Ultimately, it’s the relationship He is after. A relationship with believers.
    • Sproul: “what happens in the gospel is that God freely forgives sin because he is such a loving, dear, wonderful God, and it does not disturb Him that we violate everything that is holy. God never negotiates His righteousness.” God doesn’t set aside his righteousness or holiness to save us, but demands and requires that sin be punished. There’s two ways for that to happen, Hell or Jesus. That is why the cross is the universal symbol of Christianity. That’s where Christ made the ultimate sacrifice for all who believe.
    • “The marvel of the gospel” is that Christ is both just and justifier.
• Verses 27-28
  • Schreiner says in v. 27-31 that Paul is drawing conclusions from 21-26. “Righteousness is a gift received through faith in Jesus Christ,” he writes.
  • Boasting is excluded because we are not saved by our righteousness, but God’s.
    • Think about it, the faith we have to believe is not completely our own, otherwise we could boast about how faithful we are. This is part of the relational aspect of Christ, this miraculous moment where His spirit enters and basically supercharges our faith, our eyes are opened, the blind now see.
    • The righteous shall live by faith, v. 1:17. Look at the close connection between righteousness and faith in that verse we keep returning to. We are covered by Christ’s righteousness, and at the same time have faith to believe. In a moment, in a “spiritual handshake,” Christ’s righteousness mends the break between us and God. 
• Verses 29-30
• IMPORTANT: It says the God, not “a god.” An enormous difference with just one word, “a” or “the”! This is followed in verse in verse 30 with the statement that God is one. All are justified the same way, by faith in this one, trinitarian God.
• Verses 31
  • There is no “faith law” that overthrows OT law, it upholds it. The law crumbles without faith and has no support structure without it. Faith and law are intricately connected in ways we don’t fully understand.
  • Think about this, Paul was being accused by some of having a “faith trumps everything” theology in the same way that Bishop Berkely accused Newton of a faith-based (and therefore unreasonable) argument in calculus with infinitesimals, which Berkely mockingly described as “ghosts of departing quantities.”
    • I can understand 0. I can also understand how a distance can get smaller, then smaller still, and so on. What I can’t understand is how something can be 0 AND an infinitesimal at the same time. How can something also be nothing?! That makes no sense, so I just trust it to work and guess what, it does work!
    • Does faith in calculus overthrow the rules found in calculus? By no means! Faith upholds the rules.  And what DOES make sense is that if God designed the world to work in these ways, with faith upholding the law, that we would see this reflected in other places, like calculus. And that is not to say either that faith in calculus is the same thing as faith in Jesus, a saving faith, because as 3:24-25 says, saving faith is a gift from God that we receive in faith. But even here there is a deep connection, this moment where we “receive and believe,”
    • Which comes first? Do we even worry about that question or do we understand this as a “both/and” kind of thing? Like a handshake, where both reach out, there is an action on both sides that occurs? I think that is how that moment of salvation is, that moment where separation becomes separate AND connected, where Christ covers our unrighteousness AND the Holy Spirit enters and embeds the gift of faith in Jesus in our souls AND we have access to God, Father, Son and Spirit. So, faith is the foundation of our eternal destiny.
    • Some have faith that there is no God, or that there are many gods, or they have faith that they aren’t sure. But those all have discontinuities. The “no God” crowd rejects all forms of faith. The unsure crowd does as well. The many gods crowd creates a discontinuity in saying there are separate gods. The “faith upholds the law” crowd get it the most right, because we can see real examples of how this works (like in calculus, or in pretty much anything God made from water to humans), where there is this unity AND diversity, where there is continuous AND discontinuous, where we fall short AND are justified by his grace as a gift!
    • How can stuff be continuous AND discontinuous like this law AND faith, or a pixelated computer screen AND the appearance of continuity (that what you see on the screen looks real and not like a bunch of little squares), or a human body AND billions of individual cells performing different tasks, or our US coins saying “E pluribus unum”, “out of many, one”. How does this work! It only makes sense in Christ.
• Up next, Romans 4:1-8.