God’s Righteousness Revealed in Christ (Rom. 3:21–26)

Don Carson: In this session, I would like to invite you to turn to Romans 3:21–26, which is a paragraph that Martin Luther, the great Reformation hero, called “the chief point and the very central place of the epistle to the Romans and of the whole Bible.” That’s pretty sweeping. Whether he was right or not, for someone as serious as Martin Luther to think so means we ought to give this passage our most careful attention. I’ll begin simply by reading these verses.

“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness 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, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, 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—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

God, in his mercy, has given us the Bible, written in many, many different literary genres: some narrative, some letters, some parables, some genealogies, some beatitudes, and many others. This particular kind of discourse material is particularly challenging, I think, because it is so condensed.

I suspect that for most of us in this room … unless we’re very familiar with this text and have already studied it very closely … as I read it through just now, already it was blurring over in your mind. There are lots and lots of “God” words … religious, theological words … that sort of pile up on one another very quickly. But at the end of the day, could you summarize in three sentences what we just read? We just read it, for goodness’ sake! Could you summarize it?

Because this is one of those passages where the only way you’re actually going to come to understand it is by taking it apart … phrase by phrase, phrase by phrase, line by line … until you see how the whole thing is put together. Once you do see the whole thing put together like that and then go back and re-read it, then it coheres. It’s wonderful. But you have to take it step by step to put the pieces in place first.

Before we look at this paragraph line by line, it’s important to put this in the setting of Romans. After a general introduction about what the gospel is in Romans, from 1:18 all the way to 3:20 (this long block of material immediately before this paragraph), Paul spends all of his energy showing that the world is bad. Not only is it bad but, because of its badness, it stands justly under the wrath of God.

The section begins in 1:18 with, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against every kind of sin.” We’ve rejected what God has disclosed of himself in creation, what God has disclosed of himself in his own revelation and, as a result, we’ve twisted our lives up sexually, morally, relationally, theologically, and existentially. We’ve just twisted them again and again.

We’ve mucked things up, both Jews and Gentiles alike. If you receive more revelation from God, then you reject that revelation. If you receive less revelation from God, you don’t even live up to the standards that God has given. Whatever the standards that you’ve received, you don’t live up to them. So the whole section, 1:18 to 3:20, comes to a spectacular climax in a series of quotations from chapter 3, verse 9 on.

I still speak in a lot of universities, doing university missions and trying to explain what the gospel is to people. Let me tell you, when I come to this one, students look at me sometimes as if they wonder what planet I’m on. Just listen to the text and see. You, who are Christians, does this make you comfortable? Now put yourself in the place of your favorite unbelieving friend, your favorite secularist companion, your buddy whose company you really enjoy the most but who really doesn’t know anything about Christianity. How do they respond to this?

“What shall we conclude then? Do we Jews have an advantage? Not at all. We’ve already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’

‘Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.’ ‘The poison of vipers is on their lips.’ ‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’ ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.’ ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”

“No one who does good”? What about MÈdecins Sans FrontiËres (Doctors Without Borders, the French organization)? Don’t they do some good? “There is no one who seeks God”? People are seeking God all over the world. We’re a horribly religious race. “Deceit under all of their tongues”? One might respond, “I’m a reporter; I make it my job to tell the truth.”

“No one who understands”? Well, we have more PhDs in Berkeley and the various Universities of California. Good grief! “No one who understands”? We give our whole lives to academic understanding. And on and on and on. This just sounds hopelessly right-wing and negative. Where’s the joy in this? And yet, from Paul’s point of view, you cannot make sense of what he’s about to say in 3:21–26 until you make sense of this section. You just cannot do it.

I speak to non-Christians often. I enjoy it. It’s such a privilege to talk about Jesus and the gospel. Do you know what is the hardest thing, by far, to get across to non-Christians today in the Western world? It’s not the doctrine of the Trinity. That’s conceptually challenging, obviously. You could spend quite a lot of time trying to explain things, and they’ll look at you and say, “That’s a bit odd, but okay, if that’s what Christians believe. Quite interesting.”

It’s the not resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Whether they believe it or not, that’s another issue, but conceptually they understand it. They don’t get angry at it. It’s not claiming that Jesus is uniquely God and human being. They might believe it or they might not, but nobody gets angry at it.

Do you know what the hardest thing is? The hardest thing, by far, is getting across what sin is. But the fact of the matter is that until people know they’re lost, they don’t ask to be found. Until they know they’re under sentence of death, they don’t ask for life. Until they know that they’re under the wrath of God, the love of God won’t mean anything to them. Until they know that they’re guilty, they won’t ask for pardon. Paul himself spends almost three chapters getting there before he spends six verses on explaining the solution.

So if we’re serious about evangelism, one of the things we have to learn to do is how to get across notions of sin and guilt, as a setup for talking about what the gospel is, before we actually talk about what the gospel is. Otherwise, we don’t know what the gospel is addressing. If you say that the gospel is “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” that’s true.

But on the other hand, to people who have virtually no background, what does that mean? “A wonderful plan for my life? Hey, nice. Better job? More sex? Something fulfilling? Happy marriage? Decent kids? Good salary? Retirement benefits? Hey, I’m all for a wonderful plan for my life!” Even expressions like abundant life.… What does that mean?

Unless we have something of the background of the Old Testament that Paul summarizes here, in which, from a God-centered perspective, we really don’t do good things. “All our righteousnesses,” the prophet Isaiah says, more than 700 years before Christ, “are like filthy rags.” Even the good things we do are so often bound up with a kind of self-promotion. We pat ourselves on the back about how we’re doing good things.

Even the good things that we do thus become corroded with a certain kind of self-absorption. Haven’t you noticed that? Where does it end? Here is something by a philosopher called Budziszewski. Budziszewski became a Christian after being an atheist philosopher teaching in Texas. He recounts something of his conversion along these lines.

“I have already noted in passing that 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. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve him in diverse ways. 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. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all.

That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students. Now that’s sin. It was also agony. You can’t imagine what a person has to do to himself—well, if you’re like I was, maybe you can—to go on believing such nonsense.

St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ ” This is quoted, you see, from these chapters in Romans. “The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. 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. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value.

Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, if love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are, in any sense, in his control?

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 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.

But because there was less and less I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. But I was the fool.”

We’ve just come through the bloodiest century in human history. It is estimated that, apart from war, we human beings have managed to bump off not fewer than 170 million fellow human beings. This is apart from war. We’ve lived through Auschwitz, Pol Pot, and apartheid. Choose your own brand of sin, in this country and in other countries.

We come to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and now we say, “All it takes is that we just love one another and tolerate one another, and we’ll all get along fine.” God knows we need more genuine toleration, but I think that the biblical analysis of the heart being deceitful above all things and desperately wicked is a little closer to the bone.

Have you ever been to Auschwitz? The little road outside the camp is still there, with the iron gates, and across the top the words “Arbeit macht frei,” work sets you free. There, two kilometers down the road, is Birkenau, with its ovens. The little courtyard where they shot I don’t know how many thousands.

I had a friend who was converted there, in Southern Poland. He had been taught so much to hate the Germans that when he was genuinely converted and his heart free of hate, he asked to be baptized in the river that runs just on the other side of the road from the entrance to Auschwitz. “There,” he said, “I buried my hate.” He glimpsed that the very hate that was operating in Auschwitz was operating in him against the people of Auschwitz. Where does that end?

For the truth of the matter is that the fundamental evil is idolatry. It’s not breach of law, exactly. It’s idolatry. It is de-Godding God. Anything, no matter how good in itself, that becomes of utmost importance to you becomes god to you. That’s why the apostle Paul can say, for example, that covetousness is idolatry. You want something badly enough that that’s what you think about, that’s what you daydream about, that’s what you fantasize over, and that’s what you plot to get, then, that becomes god for you. That’s why covetousness is idolatry.

Even good things can become idols. Pursuing education can be a very good thing, but if that is your whole self-identity … that’s what you want the most, and you will trample on other people to get there and don’t care about anything else (not your parents, your loved ones, your family, or your kids), just academic achievement … if that’s it, that’s your self-identity, then that becomes god for you. At some point, it is de-Godding God. That’s idolatry.

All of human existence becomes a spectacular vanity fair of choices of idolatry, so that even in the “good” things we do, God speaks and says, “There is no one who does good, no, not one.” Not one. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all of this ungodliness, this idolatry, by which we suppress the truth and find ourselves alienated both from God and from one another.

We just have to understand that Romans 1:18–3:20 is the necessary precursor to 3:21–26. I don’t have time to unpack it all now, but the reason I mention it so strongly is this: you cannot truly understand the gospel, the good news, until you can understand what the good news is addressing.

I know some students in the Chicago area who have recently opened up a home in North Chicago, one of the slummier parts on the North Side. They opened up a home, and they’re living with the poor. They’re helping, and they’re doing good work. I admire them. They speak of holistic ministry. So I ask them from time to time, “And as you’re doing holistic ministry, how often do you talk about what Jesus suffered on the cross and why he went there? How often do you talk about the need for new birth and being reconciled to God?”

“Oh, we haven’t got there yet.” My answer is always the same. “You don’t believe in holistic ministry. You barely have “half-istic” ministry, maybe “quarter-istic” ministry.” I’m not denying that genuine gospel transformation makes people want to help the poor. I insist on it. But that’s not the gospel.

The gospel is what God has done, and what it meets is, first and foremost, our alienation from God, our lostness, our standing under his condemnation. We must be reconciled to him. In being reconciled to him, we discover that we are reconciled to one another as well, with the transformational power of new birth to bring about all kinds of behavioral changes that will be concerned about human beings wherever they are.

You must understand that the first need, the primal need, the fundamental need (even as it’s manifested in all kinds of barbaric physical circumstances that we are called to address and meet) is, first and foremost, being alienated from God. It’s idolatry, with the wrath of God manifested upon us.

So what Paul does, having set up this stage all the way down to 3:20, is talk about what God has provided in Christ. If you read through these verses quickly, you stumble across the word righteousness again and again and again. “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known. This righteousness is given through faith …” and so on. It shows up four times. Justice also shows up (it’s the same word in the original). “That he might be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” It’s the same word group.

A lot of this is talking about how someone can be just before God, reconciled to him, accepted before God as someone who actually is righteous and just. How does that come about? It’s presupposed from all the talk about the dirt, the alienation, the idolatry, and the sin. But what we really have to deal with is how we can be just before God. That’s what we need. We get at the heart of Paul’s argument by observing that he establishes four points. He sets forth four things.

1. Paul sets forth the revelation of God’s righteousness in its relationship to the Old Testament.

Verse 21: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” Sometimes, the phrase but now is used merely as a logical connector, but as Paul uses it here, I think he is making a temporal distinction.

“In the past, we’ve seen what the law has done, how the law was given to Jews, and how Jews and Gentiles are alike under condemnation. But now something new has happened with the coming of Christ,” as the rest of the paragraph begins. What is it that’s new? In this move from the old to the new, in the move from the then to the but now, what is the nature of the distinction?

Some have said, “Isn’t it the case that in the Old Testament, God really presents himself as a God of judgment and wrath, but in the new covenant, he presents himself as a God of love. So in the Old Testament, God is there in wrath, but now, God manifests himself to us in Christ in love.” Is that the relationship?

I don’t think so. I don’t think so because we saw, last night, as we surveyed some of the evidence, that when you read the Old Testament and the New Testament sequentially and quickly, what you discover is that just as the picture of God’s grace and love in the Old Testament gets ratcheted up in intensity when you move to the New Testament, so the picture of God’s wrath and judgment in the Old Testament gets ratcheted up when you move to the New Testament.

There, you’re dealing with plagues and war; here, you’re dealing with hell itself. What happens is not that the picture of wrath and judgment disappears, and now you have only love and Jesus and the cross. What you have, rather, is a ratcheting up in intensity along both axes, and they come together in the cross.

This but now is not moving from wrath to love, as if now, under this new era, there’s no place for wrath left. No, it’s a new context in which God’s righteousness is disclosed. In the Old Testament, God’s righteousness was so much bound up with the law, wasn’t it? The law says, “Do this. Don’t do that. This is what God requires. Be holy for I am holy.”

All of this was bound up with the fact that God is God. This is the way God’s righteousness is disclosed. It’s disclosed in the narrative, the experiences of the people, his displays of grace, and in all kinds of things. It shows up in his decrees, but that’s the way that the righteousness of God is manifested, again and again and again.

But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known. That is, apart from the law covenant. We’re now under a new covenant. It’s, as we’ll see, the Christ covenant on the cross. The righteousness of God was manifested in the Old Testament through the law, but now, the righteousness of God is manifested in a different context.

That does not mean that the Old Testament context has no connection with the present. Do you see what Paul goes on to say? “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” That is, if you read the Bible correctly, the Law and the Prophets (that is, our whole Old Testament) look forward to the righteousness of God that is being disclosed now in Christ.

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you know, in principle, how this works. In the Old Testament, for example, they celebrated the Passover sacrifice year after year after year. They remembered the time when they were in Egypt, and God gave instructions that a family would slaughter a lamb and daub the two doorposts of the house, and the lintel at the top, with blood from the slaughtered lamb.

They would eat the lamb inside. If that were followed, then when the angel of death passed over the land, those in that house would be spared. It was the Passover lamb, the Passover sacrifice. It was as if to say that instead of the firstborn being slaughtered, there would be a substitute death: the death of a lamb.

Paul comes along and says, when he writes to the Christians in Corinth, “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us.” That is, there has been a sacrificial substitute, another lamb, so that when the angel of death passes over you and me, as it were, instead of coming upon us in the judgment we deserve, there has already been a death that has taken place: our Passover Lamb, Christ himself.

By this and many, many, many other pictures, the trajectories are established from the Old Testament to the New, so that the Old Testament points forward, it anticipates, it announces in advance, what must be. Now, in the fulfillment of times, Christ has come. “But now, this righteousness from God comes apart from the law covenant, to which, in fact, the Law and the Prophets did point all along.”

If you read the Old Testament properly, it is heading in this direction all along, and now we are at the time of fulfillment. We are at the time of the turning of the ages, the time of the coming of Christ. That’s the first thing Paul establishes. He establishes the revelation of God’s righteousness in its relationship to the Old Testament.

2. Paul establishes the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings without racial distinction but on condition of faith.

Verses 22 and 23. The point is that under the Old Testament, under the law, under the law covenant, God displays his righteousness primarily amongst those of the old covenant, namely, the Israelites. But now God shows his righteousness to all human beings without racial distinction.

Racial distinction (being a Jew) is not part of the conditionality. If you were a Gentile who wanted to come under that covenant, you had to be circumcised and swear to allegiance under the Mosaic covenant. But now God establishes the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings, without racial distinction, but on condition of faith.

Verses 22 and 23: “This righteousness …” That is, the righteousness we’ve just discussed in verse 21. “… 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.” We need to pause there for a moment.

Some of you who read theological books will know right away that in the last 30 years or so, there has been a tremendous debate about the meaning of verse 22 (and three or four other passages in the New Testament that are similarly worded). The reason this debate has arisen is, in part, because of something we miss in English. Faith, the noun, in English does not sound like the verb to believe in English. In other words, if I say, “I believe by faith,” that doesn’t sound incongruous to us because they’re two different-sounding words.

But in Greek, it’s the same word group, so to say, “I believe by faith,” just sounds bizarre in Greek because it’s the same word group. It would be like saying, “I trust by trust.” It’s tautologous. You don’t say stupid things like that! What Paul seems to say, here, is (if I may use trust instead of belief or faith to get a common sound), “This righteousness is given through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.” That sounds bizarre or, at best, repetitious.

So some have argued that the expression faith in Jesus Christ does not actually mean trust in Jesus Christ at all, it actually means faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In Greek, the expression could mean that. In which case, the sentence reads, “This righteousness is given through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

That makes good theology; there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, the faithfulness of Jesus Christ is what took him to the cross. Doesn’t he cry out in Gethsemane, “Not as I will, but as you will”? It’s his faithfulness to his Father’s will that takes him to the cross. That’s a point made in the Synoptic Gospels; it’s made in the epistle to the Hebrews. He endured, and he persevered through the things that he suffered. He wanted to please his heavenly Father. He persevered to the end, and we’re called to persevere as we follow in his line.

Then you’ve got rid of the repetition. But although that interpretation has become very popular, I don’t think it works. I don’t deny for a moment that Jesus displays great faithfulness and that that theme is treated elsewhere. I don’t deny it for a moment. But right through these two chapters, 3 and 4, the word faith shows up again and again and again and again and again and again. Everywhere, it has as its object Jesus Christ, its trust in Jesus Christ.

Then you have to explain why, then, the repetition. Why, then, does the text read, “This righteousness is given through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust”? The answer is the little word all. Read it again. “This righteousness is given through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust, for here is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Now you see the connection between this paragraph and the two and a half chapters that precede.

The two and a half chapters that precede have argued, line by line, line by line, quoting the Old Testament, working out the logic of it all that all human beings, Jew and Gentile alike, are alienated from God, under God’s wrath, under God’s curse, and lost. Whether they have the law or don’t have the law, it doesn’t really matter. Isn’t that what 3:9 says? We’ve established now that Jew and Gentile alike are all under this curse. “All have sinned; all have come short of the glory of God.” There is no hope apart from what God might do.

But now Paul establishes the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings without racial distinction, but on condition of faith. So the righteousness that has now come apart from the law (to which the Law and the Prophets testify) and that has now come with Christ, this righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ. Not through circumcision, not through bowing to the Mosaic covenant, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

How this works has not yet been explained (it’s going to be explained in the next verses), but it comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have faith in Jesus Christ, for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. All have sinned. It’s the universality of human guilt across all racial categories that, praise God, is the ground for the universality of God’s grace across all racial categories.

It doesn’t require that you be Kikuyo from Kenya. It doesn’t require that you be Aboriginal from Australia. It doesn’t require that you be American. It certainly doesn’t require that you be Canadian! What it requires, only, for all people of all racial backgrounds, is faith in Jesus Christ. Now we have not yet exposed the mechanics of this. That comes in the later verses. Yet what is established here is of fundamental importance: the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings, without racial distinction but on condition of faith.

So you can say to your neighbors, “I don’t care what color you are. I don’t care what nationality you are. I don’t care what your social index might be. I don’t care what your income is. The gospel I’m talking about … this good news that I’m talking about, by which sinners like you and me are reconciled to this God … is designed for all human beings, without racial distinction but on condition of faith.”

Then if somebody says, “But you know, I don’t think I’m good enough,” my response is, “You’re far, far worse than you think, but it’s not designed for good people. It’s designed for damned people. It’s designed for lost people, for people who are already under the curse. That’s what it’s designed for. For all human beings without racial distinction, but on condition of faith.”

3. Paul establishes the source of God’s righteousness in God’s gracious provision of Christ Jesus as the propitiation, or the sacrifice of atonement, for our sins.

(We’ll unpack those terms.) Verse 24 and the first part of 25. Here we have to go very slowly and take it step by step.

So we’re told, beginning in verse 23, “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.” So there’s the first God word: redemption. “God presented Christ as a propitiation …” Or expiation or sacrifice of atonement. Our translations vary, but it’s another God word. “… through the shedding of his blood, by faith.”

There are so many words piled on top of each other that we have to take them one by one before we can follow the flow of thought. For most of us, today, I suspect, redemption has become exclusively a God word in the Western world. It’s not a word you use in any other discourse. That is, you don’t use it when you’re talking about football or the Lakers. You don’t speak of redemption when you talk about who won the World Series.

A few decades ago, it was still used in some economic circles. You redeemed a mortgage. Or, when we still had a lot of pawn shops around, you could go and hock a watch or something, and then you’d go back and redeem it. You’d buy it back with a small percentage for the pawn shop owner. But we hardly use redemption even in that sense anymore, do we?

In the first century, redemption was a pretty common word. It wasn’t a word that was only used in “God talk,” in theological discourse or the like. It was used, for example, in connection with slavery. In the ancient world, slavery could come about by quite a lot of different means. It could come about because of military prowess on the part of one group that raided another group and captured slaves; yes, it could.

One the other hand, slavery could come about because there were no bankruptcy laws in the Roman Empire. So if you borrowed some money then the economy went belly-up and you lost your business, legally you had no recourse but to sell yourself (and perhaps your family) into slavery. So there were many people who became slaves because of financial troubles.

That, incidentally, was one of the reasons why slavery was never associated, in the Roman Empire, with a particular race. In the American experience, of course, initially, all blacks and only blacks were slaves. No whites were ever slaves. You could have whites as indentured servants but not slaves. But in the ancient world, of course, there were Africans who were slaves, Africans who were free, and Africans who were nobility.

There were Germans who were slaves, Germans who were free, and Germans who were nobility. There were Brits who were slaves, Brits who were free, and Brits who were nobility. The same with Italians and so on. There was not an association with one particular race and slavery. That was, in part, because anybody from any race could go belly-up financially and then find themselves in the place where their only recourse was to sell themselves into slavery.

Supposing, then, because of the financial downturn, you sold yourself into slavery, and you have a rich cousin 20 miles away. Twenty miles away in the ancient world with no cell phones or fast cars.… It might be a while before he hears about it. It’s a day’s walk. But eventually your rich cousin hears about it and now wants to redeem you. That’s the word that they used. He wants to buy you back and set you free.

There was a mechanism for it. What happened was that he would come along to one of the pagan temples, and he would pay the price of you as a slave to the temple plus an additional cut for the temple priests. Then the temple would pass on the payment money to your owner. Thus, you would be transferred so that you now become a slave of the god of the temple.

So that meant that you were free from all human servitude. You were redeemed. You were free, strictly and legally speaking. You were now a slave to the temple, but what it meant was that you were free to do what you wanted. It was a legal fiction, in effect.

That’s one of the reasons why Paul himself sometimes speaks of himself as a slave of Jesus Christ. Most of our English translations have “a servant of Jesus Christ” because we don’t like to use the word slavery since we used it so badly for the first 150 or 200 years of our historical existence. Nevertheless, Paul uses the word doulos, which always means slave.

Very powerfully, it becomes one of the most dominant themes in Paul for talking about his own commitment to Christ. “Either,” he says, “you’re a slave to sin, or you’re a slave to Christ. The choice is not whether you’re absolutely free or a slave to Christ. If you think you’re free, you’re actually a slave to sin. What the gospel does is come along and set you free from slavery to yourself and to sin, and sets you free to become a slave to Christ.”

We used to sing about that sort of thing in our older hymns. It’s a theme that seems to have dropped out of contemporary music.

Make me a captive, Lord,

and then I shall be free;

force me to render up my sword,

and I shall conqueror be.

I sink in life’s alarms

when by myself I stand;

imprison me within thine arms,

and strong shall be my hand.

Now within that framework, then, Christians are redeemed people. We’ve been set free from slavery to sin, set free from its curse and its guilt, and set free from the wrath of God. We are redeemed people because we have been transferred to another owner. We have become slaves to Jesus Christ. That’s the way salvation is first of all mentioned by the apostle here.

He says, “We are all justified freely by his grace …” This word justified is the same root as righteousness. We are declared righteous freely, by God’s grace. “… through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” That is, somehow, we have been justified, declared righteous before God, by this act by which we are no longer slaves to sin and guilt and to the Devil himself.

We have been set free so that we’re now Christ’s slaves. We’re redeemed creatures, and this is sheerly out of God’s grace, not because we bought ourselves. A slave can’t buy himself. He doesn’t own anything. By definition, all that a slave has is the asset of the slave master. How can a slave ever redeem himself? It can’t be done.

So, in fact, we have been redeemed by grace. We have been set free by grace. This is the basis on which we have been justified, declared righteous, before this God who, for the last two and a half chapters, has declared us guilty. It still hasn’t explained how this has taken place, but that’s the frame of reference that Paul is using as he describes this scene.

Let me read it again. “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.” The redemption, that act of Christ Jesus, by which we were bought back and freed from all of the effects of sin’s captivity. How does this come about? Verse 25a tells us. “God presented Christ as a …” Let’s use propitiation. “… as a propitiation through the shedding of his blood.” We need to pause here and unpack two or three terms: propitiation, expiation, and sacrifice of atonement.

We’ll begin with propitiation. If you’re using an ESV (and some other translations), you have propitiation there. If you’re using an NIV, you have sacrifice of atonement. If you’re using an RSV, it’s expiation. If you’re using the NEB, it’s remedy for defilement. What on earth does the word mean that produces such a variation as that? Well, if they use enough technical terms, nobody knows what they mean; so it doesn’t matter too much in any case, does it? Let’s unpack the words and then see where we’re going and what Paul is trying to do with this language.

Propitiation is that sacrificial act by which God becomes propitious (that is, favorable). That’s what propitiation is. So in propitiation, the object of the act is God (or in the pagan world, the pagan gods). Let me back off and explain, because the word propitiation is used in pagan circles as well. In the ancient world, of course, there were many gods. The Greeks and the Romans had thousands of gods. (Modern Hindus have millions; nobody knows them all.) But the Greeks and the Romans had thousands, and these gods had particular domains of interest.

So supposing you want to make a sea voyage across the Mediterranean to Tarshish, modern Spain. Then what you want, of course, is for the great god of the sea, Neptune, to be on side. So you would offer a sacrifice in a Neptune temple to make Neptune propitious (that is, to make Neptune favorable) because you want Neptune on side before you get on board that little boat.

Or supposing you have to give a speech before the Roman Senate. Then you want the god of communication (Mercury in the Roman world, Hermes in the Greek world) to be on side. So you’d offer a sacrifice to Hermes, a sacrifice of propitiation, to make Hermes propitious, or favorable, to you.

Now in the early 1930s there was a professor in Britain, born in Wales (at this point he was teaching in England) called C.H. Dodd. He wrote one of the most influential essays that has ever been written on this particular subject. It convinced a huge number of people. He said, “Listen. In the pagan world, the gods are viewed as bad-tempered, irascible, and whimsical. That’s why you have to offer them sacrifices to make them propitious. You want them on board; you want to make them favorable.

But how can you speak of offering sacrifices to God, the God of the Bible, to make him propitious? The Bible says God so loved the world that he gave his Son. He’s already so favorably inclined to us that he loves us so much he gives his Son. So how can we speak of the sacrifice, therefore, making God propitious? How can you do that? He already loves us so much that he gives us his Son. So how can the Son’s sacrifice, therefore, be making this God propitious? He’s already so propitious that he gave us his Son in the first place.

Therefore,” Dodd said, “this cannot be propitiation. This must be expiation.” Now in expiation, you have a sacrifice by which sin is canceled. In propitiation, a sacrifice by which God (or the gods) are made favorable. The object of propitiation is God, but in expiation, the object of expiation is sin. You cancel the sin. It’s a sacrifice that cancels the sin. So this must be, “God set forth Christ as the expiation for our sin.” That is, it’s not to make God favorable. He’s already favorable. It’s merely simply to cancel the sin that is still clinging to us. That’s what it’s for.

So Dodd wanted expiation and not propitiation. Well, this set off a furor of books and articles and so on. An awful lot of people thought that Dodd was right. Roger Nicole (some of you will know his name; he used to teach at Reformed Theological Seminary and, before that, he taught at Gordon-Conwell) wrote an essay, way back in 1955, to begin to answer it.

Then there was an Australian by the name of Leon Morris, who wrote a book called The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. It’s still available. If you don’t have a copy, sell your shirt and buy it! It’s that important. There are not many books whose legacy continues in importance. If you don’t have that one, get it. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross by Leon Morris.

What Morris pointed out is that where the word that is used here (whether propitiation or expiation) occurs in the Old Testament, it’s regularly in the context of wrath. In this context, too, isn’t that the way it is? We’ve just had two and a half chapters showing that all human beings are under the wrath of God. How does 1:18 begin? “The wrath of God is disclosed from heaven …” So there is a sense in which that wrath is precisely what must be removed. Therefore, you cannot change propitiation into expiation.

Then others came along and said, “Yes, yes, but in the pagan world, here I am, and I want to make this sea voyage. I, the worshipper, offer the propitiating sacrifice to make the god propitious so that I can have a safe sea voyage. But this text says that God presented Christ as the propitiation? How does that make sense?

After all, if God is the one that’s offering the propitiating sacrifice in order to propitiate God, that’s not even coherent. If you have us offering the sacrifice to make God favorable, okay, you can at least understand it. But if God is offering the sacrifice to make God favorable, where’s the sense in that? It’s just logically incoherent,” they said.

This built up so much heat that C.H. Dodd came to be known as someone who just hated anything to do with the historic Christian doctrine of the atonement. He just hated it. In fact, when he was senior editor of the committee that translated the Bible into what became the New English Bible, as they were working through this passage in Romans together in committee and he was reading the Greek text, he was heard to mutter under his breath, “What rubbish this is!” This prompted someone on the committee to write a limerick.

There was a professor called Dodd

Whose name was exceedingly odd;

He spelt, if you please,

His name with three “D’s,”

While one is sufficient for God.

Now that’s a quintessentially British form of theological argumentation. That is, it doesn’t answer a blessed thing, but it’s funny, and it sure brings the guy down!

But the responses that came back (to this charge that it’s not coherent to talk about God propitiating God) were simply, “Don’t you understand? That is the gospel.” God stands over against us in wrath because of our sin and our guilt (two and a half chapters to establish that point), but God also stands over against us in love because he’s that kind of God. How do you put it together?

He stands over against us in wrath, not because he’s bad-tempered like Neptune and has to be manipulated by an appropriate sacrifice for which you pay a fee in a temple where we offer the propitiation. It is not that God is bad-tempered, and if somehow we can just offer the right sort of sacrifice, do the right sort of self-denial, have our devotions properly, then somehow God will be propitious.

He stands over against us in wrath, not because he’s bad-tempered or whimsical, but because we are guilty. We are idolaters. There is no one righteous, no, not one. The wrath of God does abide on us. But he stands over against us in love, not because we’re so intrinsically lovable, but because he’s that kind of God: full of compassion, plenteous in mercy. “He will not always chide.”

He is the God who cries, “Turn, turn, why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” Then in the fullness of time, he sends forth his Son, presenting him as the propitiation for our sins. That is, the one who sets aside God’s wrath. God himself provides the sacrifice that satisfies God’s own sense of justice and sets aside God’s wrath.

In fact, that is done, as we shall see, by canceling sin and its debt, so there is expiation that takes place. That is, in the one act, there is both expiation and propitiation, which is why some translations prefer, as the NIV does, sacrifice of atonement, which is meant to be a big enough category to include both. There is expiation (the canceling of sin) and propitiation (the turning aside of God’s wrath). I can live with that one as well.

I can’t live with the one that C.H. Dodd came up with in the NEB, the New English Bible. “He sent him as a remedy for defilement.” It’s sort of like liquid soap or maybe spiritual bleach. The Bible can speak of cleaning us up on occasion, but now you’re talking about death on the cross and what is achieved by this death in the context of wrath and righteousness.

Let me press on this one a little harder before we come to what is still the central point. The central point has even yet not quite been unpacked. One of the reasons I suspect we have a little difficulty coming to grips with this in the Western world is that, in all of our experience of judicial systems, the judge cannot be the offended party.

Supposing you go and beat somebody up. Then you’re arrested and hauled into court, and it turns out that the bloke you beat up turns out to be the judge. This is not a good situation! Well, actually, you’re safe, at least so far as that’s concerned, because that judge is bound, in our system, to recuse himself or herself. That is to say, the judge is never supposed to be the offended party, but always a neutral arbitrator of a bigger system.

When you commit a crime under American law (or Canadian, French, British, Australian law, or most legal systems in the Western world and even beyond; not everywhere, but pretty often), you have not, in any sense, offended the judge. You’ve committed a crime against the state or against the law or against the constitution (or, in Great Britain, against the crown) but not against the judge. The judge is merely the independent, neutral arbitrator of the system so that the system is applied fairly to you so that an accurate judgment can be made. That’s the way our judges work.

Have you ever used the illustration when you’ve tried to explain what the gospel is (I’ve used it myself) that it’s like a judge who pronounces sentence upon some ruffian: $5,000 or 2 years in jail or whatever it is. After having pronounced sentence, he steps down off the bench, takes off his robes, and then goes down and writes out a check for $5,000 or goes to jail instead of the convicted criminal. Have you ever used that sort of illustration to explain what substitutionary atonement looks like? Maybe you haven’t.

I’ve used it often myself, and I never do anymore, because although it gets across the idea of substitution, in our system that illustration makes no sense at all. For one of our judges to do that would be unjust, because our judges are sworn (whether they act this way or not) to be equitable, to be just, to be fair. Supposing the one before him is his son and he decides to write the check himself. That’s not an equitable judgment.

The point is that he is supposed to be an independent, neutral arbitrator of a system that is bigger than he. He does not have the right to go ahead and somehow manipulate it like that so that the guilty party can go off scot-free while he pays for it himself. He doesn’t have the right to do that. Therefore, it’s not a telling illustration in our context.

But God is always the most offended party, and he never recuses himself. Have you thought about that? Do you remember the horrible sin of David with Bathsheba in the Old Testament? He seduces the pretty woman next door while her husband is out at the front fighting David’s wars. She gets pregnant.

He gets the young man home on a pretense, thinking that he’ll sleep with his wife. Then, if the baby comes a bit early, what’s a month or two here or there. But her husband is so locked up into loyalty to his mates at the front he doesn’t actually go home, and King David knows that he’s snookered.

So David actually arranges for the young man to be bumped off by the corruption of the military. He orders the brass to arrange a skirmish at the front; everybody else in this bloke’s squad gets some sort of signal to retreat at a certain moment, and he’s left at the sharp end. The inevitable happens, and he’s killed.

David thinks he’s got away with it, but the prophet Nathan confronts him. In due course, David is deeply conscience-struck by his guilt and shame. Eventually, he writes what, in our Bible, is Psalm 51. One of the things he says in Psalm 51, as he pours out his guilty conscience before God, is, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” When you read those lines, you want to say, “David, give me a break!”

Against God only he sinned? He certainly sinned against the young woman; he seduced her. He sinned against her husband, Uriah the Hittite; he had him bumped off. He sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb. He sinned against the military brass; he corrupted them. He sinned against his family; he betrayed them. He sinned against the nation; he was supposed to be the chief judge, and he’s acting corruptly.

It’s hard to think of anybody that he hasn’t sinned against! Yet, he has the cheek to say, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” Yet, at the most profound level, that was exactly right. Oh, at one looser level of talking, of course he sinned against all of these people. He wouldn’t deny it.

But at the most profound level, what makes sin sin … what makes it so horrific, what gives it its transcendent quality of ugliness and perversion … is precisely that it is offense against God. “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” He hasn’t loved God with heart and soul and mind and strength. He hasn’t obeyed his laws about adultery. He has sinned against God. So the most offended party is God.

If you cheat on your income tax next April 15, the most offended party is not Uncle Sam. It’s God Almighty. If you cheat on your spouse, and he or she finds out, the most offended party is not your spouse. It’s God, whether or not the spouse finds out. If you find yourself addicted to porn, the most offended party is God. If you nurture bitterness against other people, the most offended party is God.

Haven’t you heard the tenor of the previous three chapters? The wrath of God is manifested against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men and women. What we must have is reconciliation with God. We must have God declaring us righteous. Our text says that God has, in grace, declared us just by redemption, by freeing us from our enslavement to sin, through presenting Christ as the propitiation for our sins. Christ is the one who has turned aside God’s wrath. How has that worked? What sense does that make? That brings us to the last point.

4. Paul establishes the demonstration of the righteousness of God through the cross of Christ.

We’ll pick it up halfway through verse 25. “God did this …” That is, he presented Christ as this sacrifice of atonement, as this propitiation through the shedding of his blood. “… to demonstrate his justice [his righteousness] 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.”

Let me unpack that a bit. We so often think of the cross as demonstrating God’s love for us, and it does. This passage says it demonstrates God’s justice. Supposing God were to come to us and say, “Okay, Stalin, I don’t care if you bumped off 20 million Ukrainians. It doesn’t really matter. No skin off my nose. I love you anyway.” Would that make God more admirable? Where would God’s justice be?

So now he comes to Don Carson. “Okay, Don, you may not have bumped off 20 million people, but I know your heart. I know all the corruptions in it, the secret recesses of hidden things, lusts, idols, and all the rest. I know the whole lot. But I’m a pretty nice God. I’ll forgive you. It’s no problem.” Would that make God more admirable? Would it make him just?

This text says that the fundamental reason he presents Christ in his bloody sacrifice … the shedding of his blood to turn aside his wrath … is so that God may be just and the one who justifies the ungodly. Normally, what a judge is supposed to do is to justify the righteous. That is, he declares the righteous to be righteous and he declares the unrighteous to be unrighteous. That’s what a judge does.

But God justifies the ungodly while being just. He does that by bearing this guilt, this shame, this death, this curse, in the person of his own Son. He thus preserves his integrity. Sin must be paid for. It cannot be washed away. It cannot be hidden under the carpet, swept away as if it’s not really there. It can’t be done. If God does that, then God is not just. The cross demonstrates God’s justice as well as his love.

In particular, it demonstrates his justice for all the sins left unpunished. What is meant by that is all the sins of all of God’s people in antecedent times, in Old Testament times. Abraham was presented as being with Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom on the last day. On what basis was Abraham forgiven? Because he shed some animal’s blood? Is that the real, final foundation for Abraham’s acceptance before God? No, no, no, no. Their sins were left unpunished until Christ came and bore the punishment.

All those punishments in the Old Testament (temporal punishments that fell on the nation such as the exile and all of that) are only partial payment. They’re not the real punishment. Those things were left unpunished until Christ came, and God presented Christ to be the one who is the propitiation for our sins. Not for ours only, but for all of God’s people in times past.

He left those sins unpunished, even as he declared those people just, received them by faith, because he knew that in the fullness of time, Christ would come as the propitiation of our sins. In consequence, God would be just while justifying the ungodly. “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.”

This is at the heart of the gospel. If I had time to unpack the following verses, I would show you that in verses 27 to 31 the whole focus then turns from justice to faith, by which this is received. Then in chapter 4, the faith is tied up with justice again. All through these following verses, all the way down to 5:1, at the heart of it all is Jesus’ death on our behalf: what Luther calls “the heart of Romans and of the whole Bible.”

So.… What is the gospel? It’s the good news of what God has done. That can be measured along several different axes. One of those axes is men and women are reconciled to God in justification, received by faith on the basis of the cross work of Christ. Another one of those axes is men and women are transformed by the new birth, which is secured by Christ being lifted up on a pole, and the Spirit is poured upon us so that we are renewed and transformed from within.

Salvation involves our being reconciled to God, receiving a new status before God. It involves being transformed so that we don’t do the things we used to do. One of my favorite quotations in this regard is from John Newton. Did some of you see the film Amazing Grace? It had a lot of history right, but it had some wrong.

There was a scene with Newton as an old man saying, “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly. I’m a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.” That’s Newton all right. He had been a slave trader. He estimated that he took 20,000 slaves from Africa across the Atlantic. After he was converted and he abandoned all of that life he says that he never slept without dreams of hearing their cries from the bowels of the ship. Small wonder, then, that he wrote, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”

So I raised the question in the last hour.… How do you know that you’ve done enough to testify to this saving grace of God that has justified you, has given you new birth, and has transformed you enough that your profession of faith is credible? How do you know? Listen, the ground of your acceptance before God is always the cross. It’s always Christ. It’s nothing but Christ.

When you get to heaven, if Saint Peter stands at the door and says, “Why should I let you in here?” your answer is not, “Well, I think there is quite a lot of evidence that I have been born again.” Your answer is, “I have no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me.” God sent forth Christ to be the propitiation for our sins. My confidence is there.

On the other hand, there will be some evidence that you have been transformed. I love the way Newton puts it. He says, “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what one day I will be. But I am not what I was and, by the grace of God, I am what I am.” That’s how Christians continue to walk in humility, looking at the changes that God has made and deeply ashamed of the things that still need changing, as we press on for the final transformation still to come. Let us pray.

Merciful God, we are debtors still. We remember how the Master taught us that we are, at best, unprofitable servants. Yet, you have made us sons and daughters of the living God, joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. How wonderful is that! All on the basis of presenting your own dear Son to be the propitiation for our sins, so that you yourself might be just and the one who justifies ungodly people like us.

Open our eyes to the wonder of the cross. Enable us to see that of our own deserts, of our own need, of our own choices, of our own will, we rightly stand under your wrath. Yet, by the sovereign grace by which you sent forth Christ to be our redeemer, we stand under your love, unmerited though it be, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Make our hearts sing with this understanding of the gospel. For Jesus’ sake, amen.