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The Cross (Part 4)

Romans 3:21–31

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Redemptive History from Romans 3:21–31


We come now to what Martin Luther once called “the chief point and the very central place of the epistle [to the Romans] and of the whole Bible,” Romans, chapter 3, verses 21 and following. It has to be said that today in a lot of studies of Paul that is not the view that people have dominantly of this paragraph.

I have to say that in my view, they’re profoundly mistaken. This paragraph is of extraordinary importance. Last night there was a young woman in the question and answer session who asked a question along this line:

“How do we get at our friends today who have relativized all evil? With the impact of postmodernism, how do you get at people who don’t really think that evil is anything more than a socially defined construct? Evil is evil for a particular group, but it’s not transcendently evil. Evil is relativized very broadly, not only in the intellectual circles of the arts divisions of our universities but in the mass media and beyond. If we can’t see what evil is, we can’t really see what the gospel is about.”

That’s a very shrewd question. It’s a question that has to be asked again and again and again and again because it is one of the dominant features of our age. I don’t intend to answer that this morning, but it is important to spend just a few moments on the first point in the outline before we come to this text itself. We are condemned in the Scriptures apart from the cross of Christ. That is the great burden of Romans 1:18 all the way down to 3:20. I would like to approach it a bit tangentially. This is a story that I told at the university mission last week.

A friend of mine about my own age (I only met her about a year ago) has an important post in Washington, DC as editor of an influential political weekly. Up to a year or so ago, 18 months now perhaps, she was a self-defined postmodernist, a gifted woman, and she would’ve been one of the most vociferous in insisting that all evil is relative.

It’s relative to the particular group, to the particular cultural structure. It’s merely sociologically defined. She, at the same time more recently, had been involved in a Bible study with a friend of mine, Mark Dever, who pastors a church in that city. She was trying to win him over and he was trying to win her over.

She’s an able and intelligent woman who likes to interact with people, but she was by no means convinced by what she was reading in the Bible. Then she went on assignment to Papua New Guinea to cover some political events in Port Moresby. While she was there, just before she left, she heard of a rather ugly situation.

There had been a priest there who had served in the field of education for about 35 years. Then just before he retired to fly home and enter his retirement at home in the United States, he was arrested. It turned out that over those 35 years he had been engaged in very aggressive pedophilia. He had sodomized quite literally hundreds of boys. They didn’t know how many.

This got this woman’s attention. When she cast around in her mind to think of all the damage that was done, not only to the boys but to any future marriages that they were likely to have, to their families, to lack of trust, the spreading ripples of evil out of all this. She couldn’t still bring herself to say that it was evil. She didn’t have a category for that, but she didn’t like it either.

She came home and this was troubling her immensely. My friend Mark said to her, “Claudia, was it wicked?” She replied, “Well, we all know that child abusers are usually the victims of abuse themselves.” “Yes,” Mark replied, “we do know that, for the Bible likewise says that sin goes on to the third and fourth generations of those who hate God. We all know that sin has social effects. Very few sins in the Bible are purely isolated. They touch and contaminate so many other people. That’s not the issue. The issue was this: Claudia, was it wicked?”

She replied, “Clearly for some people they would see it that way, but for those who are afflicted in this way, they don’t see it that way.” “Yes, we know that people see things differently and hide from evil. But Claudia, was it wicked?” She went home and she was finding it hard to sleep. She couldn’t come to grips with all of this. She woke up one night and this was playing in her mind. Finally, almost in agony, she said, “This was evil! This was wicked!”

Then it suddenly dawned on her. If she had a category for wickedness, maybe she was wicked. Within days, she had become a Christian, a very enthusiastic, witnessing Christian. You cannot come to terms with the gospel … you cannot do it … unless you come to terms with what the problem is that the gospel addresses. The problem that the gospel addresses is this: We human beings who have been made in the image of God defy him.

We have defied him, we do defy him, and we have attracted to ourselves his own righteous condemnation. We stand under his curse. We are a lost race. We are a damned breed. What we need above all is to be reconciled to him. That’s the whole thrust of Romans 1:18–3:20. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”

Some have argued that the only obedience to the law Paul is combating in a book like Romans has to do with the so-called Jewish identity markers. That is, things like circumcision and kosher food and keeping the Sabbath. Paul doesn’t focus his attention there. Those interest him because they are bound up with a great deal of reliance in the Mosaic covenant.

But here he traces things all the way back to creation and the fall. In creation and the fall lies the whole secret of Paul’s analysis of the entire dilemma of the human race. We have rebelled against God. We have preferred created things rather than the Creator. “For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

In the words of a chap called Budziszewski, “There are some things you can’t not know.” We may suppress them, but we can’t not know them. I want to quote some of his lines, if I may. Budziszewski was a nihilist, a person who really didn’t think that there were any values at all anywhere.

At the end of the day, you have to go with power. There is no difference between good and evil, none except what is socially defined or genetically determined. There is no transcendent checkpoint, no standard anywhere. For years, he taught this in a university post. His whole dissertation was on this subject. Then he tells how he eventually passed over to becoming a Christian. I want to quote just a few paragraphs.

“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 writing 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 taught these things to university students for 17 years. Now that’s sin! It was also agony. You cannot 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 consciousnesses also bearing witness.’

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, 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 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 all over them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how many the man 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. 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. How then did God bring me back? I came, over time, to feel a greater and greater horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt at first, not exactly a feeling of shame, just horror, an overpowering sense that my condition was terribly wrong. Finally it occurred to me to wonder why, if there was no difference between the wonderful and the horrible, I should feel horror.

In letting that thought through, my mental sensors blundered. In order to take the sense of horror seriously—and by now I couldn’t help doing so—I had to admit that there was a difference between the wonderful and the horrible after all. For once my philosophical training did me some good because I knew that if there existed a horror, there had to exist a wonderful of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self-deception collapsed all at this point. There was no point of return.

The next few years after my conversion were like being in dark attic where I had been shut up for a long time, but in which shutter after shutter was being thrown back so that great shafts of light began to stream in and illuminate the dusty corners. Of course, I had to repudiate my dissertation. At the time I thought my career was over because I couldn’t possibly retool, rethink, and get anything written and published before my tenure review came up.”

Isn’t that lovely? Brothers and sisters in Christ, we who are Christians had better understand, and as part of our witness, we had better get it across. We are condemned apart from the cross of Christ. When you read chapter 2, religion doesn’t save you. The old covenant doesn’t save you. When you get to chapter 3, Paul’s culminating point is that whether you’re a Jew or whether you’re a Gentile, it doesn’t make an awful lot of difference in this respect.

We read, 3:9: “What shall we conclude then? Are we Jews any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

Therefore, we conclude in verse 20: “No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” I would dearly love to take a lot of time on this point to establish the universality of guilt and shame, of lostness, but that is certainly what Scriptures teach.

It is what Paul takes two and a half chapters to teach, and it is the only background that makes any sense at all of chapter 3, verses 21 and following, to which we now turn. Here Paul says, we are justified because of the cross of Christ. In previous talks, I have tended to take fairly long chunks of Scripture and move through their movements.

Here the challenge of this text is not like that. The challenge of this text is that it is so condensed, it is so tight, it takes a little bit of concentrated work to sort out the flow. I know it’s the last session. If I’d been strategically smart, I would’ve handled this one at the first session or something.

Here it really does take some concentration to catch the flow, but once you catch it and stamp your mind with this passage, it will shape all of your Christian thinking all the days of your life. We will get at the heart of this paragraph if we see that the apostle Paul, led on by the Spirit of God, establishes the following points.

1. The revelation of God’s righteousness and its relationship to the Old Testament.

Verse 21. Some people take the now here to be a kind of logical now. “Now then.” I don’t think that’s correct. It is a temporal now. As for example in 6:22. In 6:21: “What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin …”

In that case, there is a now that is a change in the individual person’s experience. Here there is a now that has to do with the whole sweep of God’s plans in history. “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known.” You will see the force of the argument more clearly if you understand that the little phrase apart from law should be linked not with a righteousness from God but with has been made known.

Let me explain. We are not to read this as, “But now, a righteousness from God apart from law, has been made known.” As if God is trying to introduce some righteousness that is rather detached from law, from the covenant, from the Mosaic law. That’s not what is being said. Rather, “But now, a righteousness from God, apart from law has been made known.”

Or we would say better in English, “But now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from law.” Apart from the law covenant, which did establish righteousness in all kinds of ways, a righteousness has been made known apart from that law. In the old covenant, God taught righteousness. God also provided a way of people being declared righteous before him.

Why on faith they were to come to the temple and the high priest would accept their sacrifices. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the priest would offer the special sacrifice of the bull and the goat and he would take their blood and he would enter the Most Holy Place before God and offer up the blood of these animals as an atoning sacrifice that set aside the wrath of God against him, the sinner high priest, and against the people, this group of people who were sinners.

The people of God were to accept this in faith as a gracious gift to them. There was a whole righteousness mechanism under the old covenant. They had a way of being reconciled to God under the prescriptions of the old covenant. But it was a bit of a depressing thing year after year, year after year, year after year to offer the same sacrifices.

It was not always entirely clear how the blood of a bull or a goat paid for our sin. But now, now in the light of all of this ghastly evil, not only in Jewish circles but amongst all human beings everywhere, where the tenure of the law did not run, now there has appeared a righteousness from God. This righteousness from God has been made known apart from the law covenant.

It is not under the law covenant. It is not constrained in terms of the law covenant. It has very little to do immediately with the temple and the sacrificial system and Yom Kippur and the high priesthood. It’s apart from the law covenant, but it is not completely independent of the law covenant.

No, we read: “Now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from the law to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” The Law and the Prophets testify to this righteousness. They look forward to it. This righteousness from God that Paul now wants to talk about is not under the law covenant.

But, he says, that doesn’t mean it’s sort of a brand-new theory that God suddenly thought up out of nowhere. No, if you read the Bible correctly, the Old Testament Scriptures, what he here calls the Law and the Prophets, bear witness to it. They point forward to it. They testify about it. They prophesy about it.

We’ve seen some hints of that in this series. The kingdom was announced. The temple was provided. The sacrificial system was there, and all of these lines move forward anticipating the great solution that God himself would ultimately provide, not under the strictures under the Mosaic law, but now Paul says now when something new and decisive has taken place. What is it then?

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

Verses 22 and 23: “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who argue that the expression faith in Jesus Christ should be rendered faith of Jesus Christ. That is, the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. The Greek, at one level, certainly allows it. In which case, you have to read the text like this: “This righteousness from God comes through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ (the faithfulness of Jesus Christ and that he obeyed the Father and finally went to the cross) and it comes to all who believe.”

They say this makes sense, for example, of the fact that if it’s the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, there is no clash between the faithfulness of Jesus Christ and the expression all who believe. Whereas if it’s faith in Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ the object of our faith, then you’ve got a sort of unnecessary repetition. It comes through faith, our faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. Our faith again. It’s a bit much. It’s over the top. So they say this really should be taken as the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

Now there are some very good people who hold that view, and I toyed with it for a long time myself, but I am persuaded it’s mistaken. I don’t have time to go through all the reasons. They’re not necessary in any case. I will simply say this. Throughout this passage from 3:21 all the way to 4:25, this word faith comes up again and again and again.

We’ll see it down in 3:27 and following. “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith.” Down again in verse 30, “… that same faith. Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith?” Faith keeps showing up again and again and again.

Throughout the entire two-chapter section it is, everywhere else, exclusively the faith of believers. There are other reasons as well that I won’t go into. I hold here that this is talking about the faith in Jesus Christ, as the NIV has it. Faith that puts its confidence in Jesus Christ, that trusts him. So the passage is then saying, “This righteousness from God (that has been introduced in verse 21), this righteousness that comes to us apart from the law, this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Then you say, “Why does he have to repeat to all who believe? He’s already said, ‘He comes through faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” In fact, it’s even more stunning in the original because here we have two different words in English. Faith and believe. They sound like different words. In the original, it’s the same word group, so it’s even more in your face.

It’s a bit like saying, “This, this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have faith.” So why did he repeat it? The point is to emphasize the all. We need to read it like this: “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ, indeed, to all who have faith.” That’s his point.

For so much of the whole inherited understanding of the significance of the ancient Jewish covenant was bound up with the Jewish circle of the covenant. Now Paul has been busy establishing that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. That goes back to creation itself. We’re all lost whether we have the law or not.

We’re all a damned race whether we have the law or not. Now God has provided a righteousness apart from the law covenant to all who have faith in Jesus Christ, to all who have faith in Jesus Christ. Then he makes that point even clearer by adding verse 23. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

In other words, Paul will not allow that biblical Christianity is just for a select group. Just Jews, let us say, or just Anglo-Saxons or just Westerners or just nice people. Potentially, it’s for everyone without racial distinction at all. Thus, the book of Revelation pictures the redemption brought by Christ calling out a people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.

The crowd around the throne is not going to be a nice Anglo-Saxon middle class bunch. There are going to be Chinese faces there and Indonesian faces. There are going to be Kamba faces there and Kikuyu faces there. There might even be some Scots and some Englishmen. There will certainly be some Hispanic faces, and there will be some Japanese faces and there will be some Aboriginal faces.

There will be some Eastern European faces and some Slavic faces all around the throne, because this righteousness from God is not bound up with a covenant that was tied to the Jewish people. Now it is a righteousness from God, which in God’s great mercy extends potentially to all human beings without racial distinction but on condition of faith.

It is to those who believe, to all those who believe. For we’re all in the same mess. There is no difference. We’ve all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Now you see the tie between this paragraph and the first two and a half chapters. You cannot make sense of this paragraph unless you see that what the problem is of the entire human race is our sin.

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

Verse 24 and the first part of 25: “We are therefore justified …” All who believe. “… freely by his grace …” This is the first time in this book that Paul has used the verb to justify.

God’s verdict that we are just, his declaration that we are just, which many Jews expected for the end of the age at the final judgment, God has already brought back in time because of Christ’s cross work, he has declared us just now. He has declared us just. In the history of the last three or four centuries, people have sometimes had trouble with this one because to them it sounded like what they called a legal fiction. He declares us just even though we’re not. We’re sinners.

If you have two people charged with crimes in which one is innocent and one is guilty, when you bring them up to the tribunal then you want a good judge to declare the innocent person just and the guilty person guilty. That’s what you want in a good judge, isn’t it? But what God has done here is to declare guilty people just. That’s what he’s done. If that’s all there were in salvation, it would be a legal fiction indeed. But it’s not a legal fiction for two reasons.

First, it’s not a legal fiction because, for reasons we’ll see in just a moment, someone else has taken our guilt so that in God’s view we are just. That’s how God views us. That doesn’t make us internally just in and of itself. That’s why the Reformation thinkers could sometimes speak of people being simul justus et peccator. Simultaneously just and sinners.

The fact that Jesus takes my sin does not by itself effect a huge change in me. What it has done is meant that God has declared me just, but how does that change me? This brings me to the second reason why this is not some fiction to be passed over lightly. In the whole complex of salvation, God does not only justify us, declare us just, he also regenerates us.

He pours out his Spirit upon us. He renews us. He transforms us. So that although justification in and of itself does not transform us, justification is never, ever, ever alone. It is part of the whole complex of God’s salvation. There is no one who is justified who is not also regenerated. There is no one, likewise, who is truly regenerated who is not justified.

The same God who handles our guilt also handles our feebleness, our waywardness, our lost nature, and gives us a new nature. He makes us new creatures. Right here the focus is on what it is that separates us from God. That is our guilt. This righteousness from God handles that. “All then who have this faith in Jesus,” the text says, “are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

This redemption language is used in the first-century world of paying the price that would free a slave. The image now is that we’re somehow sold out to sin and the price has been paid to free us from that. How does this take place? Now it’s unpacked for us then in verse 25. “God presented Christ as a …” The NIV has “sacrifice of atonement.” “God presented him …” I’m going to say the word. “… as a propitiation in his blood, received through faith.”

What does that mean? In the pagan world, propitiation worked like this. There are all these gods out there are they have their little domains. Some gods look after whether or not the woman who is in child labor has a fat baby. We definitely want Rachel Jensen to have a nice baby and she’s in labor, so we have to propitiate the right god who looks after that sort of thing, if we were pagans.

Then I’m taking a trip tomorrow, so I’ve got to get the right god who looks after trips to secure my safe trip on United Airlines. Then I’m giving a speech now, so I want the god of communication, Hermes (or Mercury in the Latin pantheon), to bless me in my speech. All these gods out there with their domains.

If it were a sea voyage, I’d want Neptune on my side. All these gods are a bit bad tempered and a bit whimsical and a bit arbitrary, but if you offer them the right sacrifices, they become favorable. They become propitious. The idea of propitiation then is you offer sacrifices to make them propitious. The offering of sacrifice is thus an act of propitiation.

You offer sacrifices in the various domains to make the gods favorable to you. Notice, in this pagan worldview, I am the subject and I offer the propitiating sacrifice to the god hoping to make the god favorable. The god is the object. The god is made propitious by my propitiating sacrifice so that I win the god over to my side.

Clearly, that’s not the kind of propitiation that is at stake here. It’s not as if we offer a sacrifice to God. Nor is it quite as if God stands over against us in judgment, and then Christ for his part loves us, and he offers himself as a propitiating sacrifice. In other words, God is angry with us because of our sin (on this view) and then Jesus loves us so much that he sort of stands between his Father’s wrath and us and makes his Father propitious.

Jesus offers himself to make God look favorable upon us. That’s what some have thought. Well, that’s not quite right either. There’s an element of truth in that, but it’s not quite right because God so loved the world that he gave his Son. He is already sufficiently favorable to us that he provided the sacrifice.

To use the language of Paul here in Romans, we’re told, “God presented Jesus as a propitiation.” So if God is the one that’s offering the sacrifice, in what sense is he the one who is being propitiated? Now you’re coming very close to the heart of the gospel. That is exactly the point!

Did you see? Because God is holy, because Jesus is holy, God must stand over against us in wrath. Jesus must stand over against us in wrath. That’s why in the book of Revelation, the wicked people are told to flee from the wrath of the lamb. It’s not as if God is over against us and Jesus is for us. God is against us. His eternal Son is against us because of our sin.

There is wrath in the Father, there is wrath in the Son, but because God is that kind of God, he loved us anyway. Instead of merely imposing on us the curse we deserved, he provided his Son as the propitiating sacrifice. In the Christian way of looking at things, the Father is both the subject and the object of propitiation.

He’s the subject, he’s the one that gives the sacrifice, and the he’s the object. He is the one whose honor is satisfied, whose justice is satisfied, whose wrath is turned aside by the sacrifice of the Son. That’s how God did it, we’re told. “God presented him as a propitiation in his blood.” Blood in Paul is a way of referring to life violently and sacrificially ended.

Everything that Paul says about the blood of Christ he says also about the death of Christ somewhere else. If we are justified by the blood, then elsewhere in Paul we’re justified by his death. Blood is Christ’s life violently and sacrificially ended. God achieved this righteousness now by presenting Christ as a propitiation in his blood, which is received through faith.

4. The demonstration of the righteousness of God through the cross of Jesus Christ.

Here too in recent times, these verses have been set in an entirely different framework and interpreted in another way. I’m not going to go down that rabbit warren. I am persuaded it is profoundly mistaken. I’m simply going to tell you what it means.

Now the text says that, “God did this to demonstrate his justice …” Same word as righteousness. For us, righteousness has overtones of sort of personal righteousness and justice has overtones of public righteousness. It’s the same word in the original. God presented Jesus in this way. “He did this to demonstrate his justice/righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.”

That beforehand means before the coming of the cross, before the coming of Jesus and the death of the cross. What had God done for all the previous centuries? He had not handled sin finally. He had had all of those bloody animal sacrifices, but he had not dealt with sin definitively. He had not closed the human race down as his perfect justice demanded. He was forbearing. He put up with it.

Yet at the same time, his justice demanded that sooner or later all those things be taken into account. What do you do? “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 justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” This is the very heart of the gospel.

Some people find this barbaric, just barbaric. How do you take a guilty sinner and then forgive that sinner on the basis of someone else’s sacrifice? In what way is that just? How does it accomplish anything? You get closer to it when you remember Paul’s ongoing explanation, for example, in Romans 5.

“God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We all quote the verse, but think it through! “God commended his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” It doesn’t say, “God was angry and Christ died.” It doesn’t even say, “God commended his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, God provided someone for us.”

It’s tight. “God commended his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The Christ who died on the cross was the God-man. His death was the demonstration of God taking it. It’s cast in so many ways in Scripture. God’s love is magnificent because he gives his Son and it costs him so much, but the one on the cross is none less than the God-man himself!

It’s not as if God is casting it all on another. It’s as if God is taking it all on himself! Picture a husband and wife. This is not a very good illustration, but it’s so hard to find adequate illustrations of this great truth. Picture a husband and wife. They’re married for 15 years and then he goes off and has a wretched affair. Then he tells his wife.

In the rebuilding afterwards, she determines to forgive him and they get on with their lives. They continue to live as husband and wife. Gradually, they rebuild. In that rebuilding, who is it that is suffering the most? I tell you, it is her. It is she. She can’t ever throw it in his face again. That’ll destroy things. She has forgiven, but in a sense, she has absorbed it too.

He feels forgiven, and she’s so good that she’s not throwing it in his face and scoring points. He views it as behind him. He’s free. He really is sorry for what he’s done, but he’s free. She’s absorbed it. That’s what God did, only on a cosmic scale. It’s not a very good illustration, nor is the one that pictures God as a judge who then takes a guilty sinner and bears that sinner’s punishment by himself so that the sinner can be set free.

There’s some truth to that, but the difficulty with that is that our notion of judge is that the judge administers the law that is above him. So the whole thing becomes a legal fiction because the judge is merely a servant of the law and there’s a sense in which such a judge has perverted the law by letting that one go and taking his place.

But supposing the judge establishes the law. The judge is the law. In our courts, it’s the law that’s offended, not the judge. In God’s court, it is God who is offended, for he establishes the law. He is offended, not some law above him or beyond him. He is offended. He is the one who bears the offense out of love. God does this then both to be just, to maintain his integrity, and to justify the ungodly. That is the gospel.

5. We are believers in the cross of Christ.

Verses 27–31. Here all of the emphasis now is on faith. That is, how this gracious righteousness from God is received, but Paul makes three points along the way. You will see the points clearly if you understand that Paul makes them quickly and then in the next chapter unpacks them in the same sequence by appealing to Abraham.

I’m going to give you the parallels. If you have a pencil and paper, this is where you note the parallels. Romans 3:27 is parallel to Romans 4:1–2. The point is that faith excludes boasting. It excludes any self-righteousness, any self-confidence we have in ourselves.

“Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. We receive this gift by faith.” That is also the way it was with Abraham (verses 1 and 2). Faith excludes boasting. Then, Romans 3:28 is parallel to Romans 4:3–8. Faith is necessary to preserve grace. “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”

Then that is unpacked down there in 4:3 and following. “What does the Scripture say about Abraham? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’ Now when a man works, his wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited to him as righteousness.”

In other words, the whole principle is established. Faith is necessary to preserve grace. If you have to work for it, it’s not grace. Josephus, a contemporary of Paul who also writes at the same time, gets it all wrong. He has lots of passages about grace, but he twists the meaning of grace. He has passages in which God pours out his grace on this person or that group or the other, and then several times Josephus asks the question, “On whom does God pour out his grace? On those who don’t deserve it or on those who do?”

Josephus always answers, “Why, on those who do. Otherwise, God would be unjust.” The poor man hasn’t understood the gospel! Paul does. God’s grace is poured out on the unjust who don’t deserve it. That’s the whole point! Which is why you can’t possibly earn it! You receive it by faith. So that’s the second point Paul makes.

6. Faith is necessary if Jews and Gentiles alike are to be saved.

Romans 3:29–30, which is parallel to Romans 4, verses 9 and following. We look back at Abraham again, and the question is asked, “When was the covenant given to him? When did circumcision come? Was the whole structure set up and then he had faith?

No, Abraham was saved (if we may put it in these terms) as a Gentile. Then after he was saved, as it were, after he had trusted God and the revelation he had given that ultimately issued in Christ, then he became the locus, the founding member, of the new covenant community.” Thus even from the very beginnings of the Jewish race, Paul insists, faith was necessary if Jews and Gentiles alike are to be saved.

In other words, we are believers in the cross of Christ. Paul ends up in verse 31. “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith?” Are we just saying the whole law doesn’t matter? Is that what we’re doing? “No! We uphold the law.” We uphold it, not as a means of salvation. It’s not even quite the point here that we uphold it as a moral guide. That’s not quite the point either.

He’s saying that the whole law covenant was pointing in this direction all the time. It was bearing witness, Prophets and Law together to Jesus Christ, to this faith, to this grace. We are upholding it in all that it was set out in the sweep of redemptive history to do. To bring us to Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters in Christ, do not ever think when you get down on your knees to pray that you approach Almighty God because you’ve had a good day.

Do not ever stop praying because you’ve had a bad day. You approach him because Jesus died for you. You who are here and are not a Christian, do not ever think that you’ve got to try harder in order to become a Christian. God doesn’t accept people who try harder. Not interested. He doesn’t want you if you think you’re good. He came after sinners.

But if you see yourself in the light of Paul’s first three chapters here: a sinner, undone, a rebel against your Maker, and abandon yourself utterly to this Jesus, this God-man whom God placarded as a propitiation to turn aside the wrath of God that we might be declared just and also renewed by his Spirit within us. Ah, then he awaits you with wide-open arms.

Long have I pondered the pain of the cross,

Wood soaked in blood, washed with tears, drenched in sweat,

Whips, cruel nails, crown of thorns,

At a loss I can’t explain why this death is a threat,

 

Cascades of suffering and love shrink my pride,

Silent, I am hushed by his spear-riven side.

Long have I pondered the shame of the cross,

Jeered by the troops, by authorities scorned,

 

Mocked by a brigand, society’s dross,

Christ is abandoned, rejected, ignored,

How can I focus on triumphs and things?

Here writhes my Maker, Redeemer, and King.

 

Long have I pondered the curse of the cross,

Sinless, the Christ bears my guilt and my pain,

Thundering silence, a measureless cost,

God in his heaven lets Christ cry in vain,

 

Now I can glimpse sin’s bleak horror and worse,

Christ dies and bears the unbearable curse.

Long have I pondered the Christ of the cross,

Gone is the boasting when I’m next to him,

 

Loving the rebel, redeeming the lost,

Jesus’ pure goodness exposes my sin,

Self is cast down by this triumph of grace,

Christ’s bloody cross is the hope of our race.

Let us pray.

Forbid, Lord God, amidst the plethora of alien siren voices that we should lose a firm grasp of what the gospel really is. Draw us again and again to the cross, which is not only the hope of the race but the sole ground of our acceptability before you. Forgive our sins. Forgive my sin by the merits of your dear Son and so fill us with your Holy Spirit that with gratitude and thanksgiving, with praise and obedience, we grow in conformity to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Merciful God, give us an eternal view of things. Forbid that we should live with all of our attention and hopes focused on what is transient. Grant that we may live with eternity’s values in view and grow bolder with this glorious gospel, more thankful for it, responding with humility and gratitude and reverence and lifelong worship in every domain of our being, for the praise of him who loved us even to the death of the cross. We pray in his name, amen.