Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Justification from Romans 3:21-26
It’s my privilege to be with you. This evening I want to direct your attention to Romans 3, verses 21 to 26. This is the tightest of the three passages we’ll be looking at together as we focus on texts on the cross. Romans 3:21–26.
“But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 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, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. 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 Word of the Lord.
The first thing to be said about this passage before we plunge into the text itself is that it shows up in Paul’s argument to the Romans after about two and a half chapters of unrelieved gloom and damnation, and it is becoming increasingly important to see that. As a general rule, you cannot get agreement on what the solution is unless you get agreement on what the problem is. Unless we come to agreement on what it is we are being saved from, we are not going to get agreement on what salvation itself is.
Thus, in some ways, chapter 1, verse 18 all the way to chapter 3, verse 20 is more important in our culture than the passage we’re talking about. Certainly, in the 25 years I’ve been doing university missions, I have learned in the last 10 or so that the hardest thing to get across by far is not the resurrection from the dead or the deity of Christ or the doctrine of the Trinity or substitutionary atonement or any of those sorts of things.
It’s sin, for the very simple reason we increasingly live in an age where the one wrong thing to say is that somebody else is wrong. One of the impacts of postmodern epistemology is precisely that we all have our own independent points of view, and we look at things from the perspective of our own small interpretive communities, and what is sin to one group isn’t sin to another group, and so forth.
Not only does the Bible insist there is such a thing as sin, it insists the heart of what is ugly with sin is its horrible odiousness to God, how it offends God. Thus, 1:18 begins not with analyzing sin from a social perspective but by observing God’s response to it. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,” and so on.
The next chapter shows religion by itself doesn’t help. Chapter 3 concludes the Jews and Gentiles alike are all under wrath. Then this catena of quotations in 3:9 and following … “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. 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.” And on and on and on …
That’s hard to get across in a contemporary frame, and if I had more time, I would suggest some ways of doing it, but I am persuaded unless this sort of stance is absorbed deeply, the verses immediately in front of us make very little sense because we do not see what the nature of the problem is that is being addressed.
Some of us have a view of the gospel that makes Jesus out to be something like an automobile club repairman. “Jesus is a nice man. He’s a very nice man. He’s a very, very, very nice man, and when you break down, he comes along and fixes you.” Yet, what is depicted here is that the nature of our brokenness turns, first and foremost, on our offensiveness to God.
It’s the wrath of God that is disclosed from heaven. It’s not that there are not all kinds of social parameters to sin. Yes, there are. It’s not that sinners cannot also be victims. Yes, we can be precisely because sin is so social. The Bible does say precisely that point. The very perpetrators have often themselves been the abused. Sin is a social thing. We commit sin, and we affect others. Yes, that’s true.
On the other hand, if we think of ourselves only in terms of victim-hood, then we need only a healer, a repairer, and it’s true the Bible does picture God and his salvation in those sorts of categories, but I suggest to you the most fundamental category of all (we’ll come back to this at the very end) in which the Bible itself portrays the nature of the problem is our offensiveness before God.
Therefore, what is needed, first and foremost, for us to be saved, for this situation to change, is to provide a means by which we may be reconciled back to this God. Adultery first. Then murder. Deceit with respect to the covenant before the nation as he tries to cover up his sin with Bathsheba and so on.
If we get the sequence right, he has the cheek to write in Psalm 51, addressing himself to God, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At one level, you want to say that is a load of rubbish. There’s scarcely anybody he hasn’t sinned against. He sinned against Bathsheba, sinned against Uriah, sinned against the baby in her womb, sinned against the high command of the army, sinned against the covenant community. I mean, there isn’t anybody he hasn’t sinned against.
Yet, there is another sense in which he is simply being profound. What makes sin odious? What makes sin so damnably awful? What makes sin so condemning is not, in the first instance, all the social ramifications, and all the social betrayals as ugly as those are, but first and foremost, its sheer offensiveness before an almighty and holy God.
So we learn the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the unrighteousness of human beings. It is important to keep saying this precisely because there is so much in our culture that denies it. Here is the testimony of J. Budziszewski. You may have read some of his writings. This is his little piece, “Escape from Nihilism,” which tells of his own conversion.
“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 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 I even taught these things to students. Now, that’s sin.” He taught at the University of Texas for many years.
“It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself—well, if you were like I was, maybe you can—what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences 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, and 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 on them. They all have God’s image stamped on them, so that 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 that 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?” He begins to tell, then, of the steps toward his conversion.
A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a church in Washington, DC. The senior pastor there is Mark Dever. Some of you, at least the graybeards, will know him. He was in this country for quite a number of years and has been over on occasion. After the service, he said, “Don, I want to introduce you to someone,” so he dragged me back to the back of the church.
It was a woman. I don’t think she’d mind if I told you her name. Her name was Claudia. Claudia was managing editor of probably Washington’s most prestigious political weekly, and when he introduced me, he said to Claudia, “Claudia, tell Don how you got converted.” She said, “I got converted six months ago.”
“How did that happen?”
“Well, I really was one of your quintessential postmoderns. I really did believe we are, in our thinking, the product of our social environment. Good and evil depends on your point of view, and that depends not only on your personal opinion but on the social construct of the individual interpretive community that you inhabit. Even something like the Holocaust, at the end of the day … Well, obviously to those being burned in the ovens, it was not a very good thing, but to the Aryan supremacists, it was a good thing.
The only difficulty was it didn’t work. It didn’t go far enough. It wasn’t accomplished. It all depends on your point of view. Who’s to say who is right or wrong in any sort of fundamental sense? But Mark and Connie invited me to this inductive Bible study on Mark, and because I like texts and I didn’t know anything about the Bible, I thought I’d go along. I didn’t believe any of it, but it was interesting.”
During the midst of this, she was posted for political reasons to PNG (Papua New Guinea) because of what was going on there, and toward the end of that stay she discovered a story of a priest who had been arrested just as he was about to leave after 35 years of missionary service in PNG, arrested for pedophilia.
It transpired as she tracked the story that he had sodomized something like 200 boys during the 35 years he had been a missionary in PNG. Somehow this story got under her skin. It really troubled her when she started to think of whether or not they would ever have stable marriages and the fact that most abusers were themselves abused, what would they do? When you think of the relationships and the lack of trust and what it might mean for Christian families down the road, it just got under skin.
She came back, and she told Mark about it. Mark smiled and said, “Claudia, was it wicked?” Claudia replied, “Well, Mark. Come on. We all know in most cases where you have this sort of abuse, the abuser has himself been abused. Probably he himself is as much a victim as anything.” Mark replied, “Well, that’s probably true, but the Bible says as much. ‘The wrath of God is visited on the third and fourth generation of those who despise me.’ The Bible insists sin is social. There is very little sin that’s purely private. The ramifications affect everybody. That’s not the question. The question is … Was it wicked?”
Every time he saw her, he asked the same question. “Hi, Claudia. Nice to see you. Was it wicked?” She’d come in the door for the Bible study in the evening … “Welcome, Claudia. The next chapter in Mark. Was it wicked?” Every time he saw her. “Was it wicked?” He got under her skin, and she was losing sleep, and she couldn’t integrate this into her postmodern epistemology, and she didn’t know what to do with it.
She woke up one night unable to sleep and getting angrier and angrier and fussier and fussier, and finally, she said, “This was wicked! This was wicked! This was evil!” Then it dawned on her. If she had a category for wickedness, maybe she was wicked, too. Within weeks she had become a Christian. You cannot get across the gospel clearly unless you know what it is we are being saved from. I wish I had much more time to go through these first two and a half chapters. They are extraordinarily important in our culture.
Then we come to these verses (chapter 3, verses 21 and following). The controlling expression in this paragraph is the righteousness of God. The expression shows up four times in these six verses, the verb dikaioō, to justify, two more times, and the adjective righteous or just once, but I suspect we’ll get at the heart of this paragraph by reflecting on the four things Paul establishes. He builds his argument by establishing four points.
1. Paul establishes the revelation of God’s righteousness in its relationship to the Old Testament.
Verse 21. He says, “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” We’re not going to have time to work through every word and expression here in detail, but there are several expressions we need to probe pretty closely.
The first is, “But now …” What precisely is the nature of the contrast Paul is drawing? He spent two and a half chapters talking about how we’re all under sin and condemnation and all facing the wrath of God. Then he says, “But now …” What is the nature of the contrast he is laying out?
Some people have said the nature of the contrast is, “In the past, God disclosed himself in wrath, in judgment, but now he has disclosed himself in the grace and glory of the gospel. All of this doom and gloom, this judgment, condemnation, and the wrath of God are in the past, but now, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his Son.’ ”
That is a huge mistake. It’s a huge mistake. It’s a huge mistake, first, because it doesn’t make sense of the rest of verse 21, as we’ll see. We’ll come to that in a moment. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a huge mistake because it is far too gloomy a picture of the God of the Old Testament. Yes, there is judgment in the Old Testament, but after all, the Old Testament, likewise, depicts God as the One who is slow to anger, plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide.
As a father pities his child, so the Lord pities those who love him. He remembers their frame. He knows that they’re dust. God is not pictured as some bad-tempered, short-fused boor who is just anxious to go Zap! in the Old Testament, and then suddenly the clouds lift and it is a gorgeous day once you turn into the book of Matthew.
It’s also a false picture when you think of New Testament descriptions of God. Yes, there are some wonderful descriptions of God and his love (we’ll come to reflect on some of them in due course), but which figure is it in the New Testament who spends most energy in providing us with the greatest number of new, colorful, metaphorical descriptions of hell? Jesus. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. It’s not long before you come across passages like this one. This is what the Word of the Lord says:
“Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, ‘Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.’ The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.”
Of course, the picture in the first instance is of these great stone vats they had at the time with little holes at the bottom and channels through which the grape juice ran. You would plunge in the grapes at the right part of the season. The servant girls would kick off their sandals and roll up their dresses and start tramping around in this vat, making all the grape juice run out of the bottom. This would be the first step toward making wine.
Now you’re putting people in, trampled down in the great winepress of God’s wrath until the blood rises to the level of a horses’ bridle for a distance of 200 or 300 kilometers. Now tell me the picture of God in the New Testament is of a softer, kinder God. I suspect the reason why we even think like that even for a moment is because in the Old Testament the pictures of God’s wrath, such as they are, are primarily in historical terms.
In the New Testament, the pictures of God’s wrath, such as they are, are primarily (certainly not exclusively) in final, eschatological, and apocalyptic terms, and we don’t really believe the latter. We’re not really afraid of them. We’re far, far, far more frightened of war, pestilence, and plague in this life than we are of final judgment in the life to come.
As a result, we skirt through these kinds of pictures of judgment and they don’t bother us much at all. Yet, when it comes to plague and pestilence and war, then we’re scared witless. That says much more about our focus on this life, which is one of the characteristics of the church in the West: its inability to think creatively about eternity.
No. I don’t think it is correct to say as you move from the Old Testament to the New Testament you move from a God of wrath to a God of love. I think it would be truer to say as when you move from the Old Testament to the New, you ratchet up the picture of God’s love so as you move from the Old to the New, you ratchet up the picture of God’s wrath.
If the temporal judgments of the Old Testament are ratcheted up to eternal judgments, so the great displays of God’s elective choice and mercy and benefits for his people, so often cast in temporal terms in the Old, are ratcheted up, likewise, in their clarity of presentation in the New. It’s not that they’re not there in both Testaments, but the portrait of both is ratcheted up so you have, as it were, barreling through the Scripture this joint theme of God in his holy wrath and God in his tender mercy confronting this broken world.
Both themes barrel through the Scripture until they’re both ratcheted up and come, as we shall see, to a resounding climax in the cross itself. For all these reasons, this but now cannot possibly be taken to constitute a change in God from God of wrath to God of mercy. That would almost make sense if you only looked at what preceded. “All this wrath, but now …” Maybe something other than wrath. But when you read verse 21, it’s not exactly what is said.
What is said? What is the nature of this but now? It transpires that the but now is, “In the past, God’s righteousness has been displayed again and again and again, but now righteousness from God has been displayed rather differently. But now, a righteousness from God apart from law has been made known.”
Precisely what that means depends a bit on what you think the little phrase apart from law is modifying. You can read it two ways. You can read it this way: “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known,” in which case apart from law is modifying this righteousness from God. That is, this is a righteousness from God utterly removed from law.
I don’t think that’s correct. There are people who argue that, but I think it rather misses the point. You can read it instead, “A righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known.” You can get away with that in Greek, but to put it in English order you would say, “But now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from law.” That is, this righteousness from God that has been disclosed with the coming of Christ and the gospel, which is what this whole paragraph is about, has come to us. It has been disclosed apart from the law covenant.
It is apart from the law covenant, but, the author quickly goes on to say, that doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with the law covenant, as if you have the law covenant, and then along comes Jesus. It just stops, and there’s no point of continuity. At this point, there’s a fresh start, and you begin with something brand new. No. He says, “But now a righteousness from God, has been made known, apart from law, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.”
In other words, if you rightly understand the Prophets and the Law, you will see that, although the law covenant does come to an end, the Prophets and the Law have all along been looking forward to, anticipating, prophesying, and pointing to … In other words, testifying to (the word Paul here uses), that which is now come in the ministry and life of Jesus.
At this point, we are really getting into tomorrow’s theme. This is not the theme for the Residential Conference. This is really the theme for the Day Conference when we consider together how the Old Testament is reconfigured in the New, how the New uses the Old. What the author is saying here is the righteousness that has now come through Christ Jesus …
Yes, in some ways it is new, all right. It’s not that which has been made known under the law covenant. The law covenant has come to an end, but that does not mean this is so brand new there is no connection. Rather, we are the fulfillment of that law covenant. We are that to which it testifies and the means of such testimony we shall explore a little more tomorrow.
That’s Paul’s first point, then. We’re justified, he says, because of the cross of Christ. Yes, that’s unpacked with the whole paragraph, but the first thing he establishes is 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: “This righteousness …” That is, the righteousness he has been describing in verse 21. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”
If you have taken a course in Pauline studies recently, you know there is a long debate going on about this expression, faith in Jesus Christ, pistis Jesou Christou’, or related adaptations of it. Whether it means faith in Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ as the object of faith, or pistis, understood as faithfulness, the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.
Grammatically, both make sense, and there are voluminous books on both sides of the issue, countless essays to argue one side or the other. The church, for most of its life, accepted the objective genitive. That is to say, this is faith in Jesus Christ, as the NIV puts it, but more commonly today, I suspect, it’s tilted, at least in the Western world, in the other direction.
In my view, the most compelling linguistic arguments by far are in an essay by MoisÈs Silva that has not yet been published. It’s showing up in Volume 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism. It has now been typeset and will go to press in due course. It is superbly done. The chap knows his linguistics and knows the arguments and has read the literature on both sides.
Let me deal with just one argument here so you will understand the issue. In English, our noun, faith, has a different stem from our verb, to believe, but in Greek, it’s the same stem: pistis and pistuo. If I tried to account for that by over-translation in English, it would read like this. Verse 22: “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.” You start saying, “Why does he repeat himself?”
It comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust. Why to all who trust if we’ve already been told it comes through trust in Jesus Christ? Doesn’t it make much sense, therefore, to understand the first one is really not talking about trust at all; it’s talking about the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. It comes through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ (that is, in going to the cross) to all who trust. Isn’t that a better way of taking it?
There’s nothing heretical with the opposite view I hasten to add. There is a sense in which Jesus is entirely faithful as a Son in going to the cross. That’s not the issue. But it seems to me the repetition here is transparent. The reason for it is transparent as well. Listen again. “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust. There is no difference, for all have sinned.”
In other words, the all gives the whole game away and connects this paragraph with the previous two and a half chapters. The point is Paul has spent all this time showing that all are under sin and all are condemned. Now he says, “This righteousness which comes apart from the law and to which the Law and the Prophets have borne witness comes to all who sin.” He builds the argument line by line.
He starts saying, “This righteousness comes from God through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust in Jesus Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, because all have sinned …” Thus, the whole passage is now tied to the previous two and a half chapters. “… and fall short of the glory of God.” So then, what Paul does is establish the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings without racial distinction: Jews and Gentiles alike, Jews and Arabs like, blacks and whites alike, Westerners and Easterners alike, Northerners and Southerners alike. It makes no difference.
After all, the ultimate vision of Scripture is a vast humanity around the throne drawn from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, because after all, we must all trust since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We’re a lost and damned race. This is the way out for all, without exception. There is this same way out.
3. Paul establishes the source of God’s righteousness in the gracious provision of Jesus Christ as the propitiation for our sins.
I know that’s larded with theological words, but I see no way of shortcutting the statement. Paul establishes the source of God’s righteousness. That’s what he has been talking about all through here, the righteousness of God that comes to us. It comes to us. It’s disclosed apart from law, though the Law and the Prophets did testify to it. It is received by faith. He has established that now.
The source of it is the gracious provision of Christ Jesus as the propitiation for our sins (24 and 25a). Verse 24 begins by talking about redemption. For most of us today in the Western world, redemption is God-talk language. It’s not the sort of thing that is used on the streets of London in everyday conversation.
Not long ago, people spoke of redemption money, or if they went to a pawn shop, you could redeem something, but even that is not used very much anymore. Other terms are used now with respect to mortgages and so on, so redemption money is not the sort of thing everybody talks about anymore.
But on the streets of Jerusalem or in the streets of Rome in the ancient world, people spoke of redemption and to redeem and so on quite commonly. It was common talk. It was used in a variety of frameworks. It was used, especially, in the Roman world in connection with slavery. If someone fell into arrears, there were no bankruptcy laws to protect the businessman who made a miscalculation in the ancient world, so you sold yourself to your creditors or you sold your family to your creditors. Thus, you became a slave.
Yes, you could become a slave in the ancient world because of military conquest, but in many parts of the empire, far more common was it to become a slave not because of military conquest but because you fell into bankruptcy. The question is whether or not you could be bought back, whether you could be redeemed.
The way it worked out was if you had a rich cousin, let’s say 20 kilometers down the road, who some weeks later heard about your predicament and decided to free you, what that rich cousin would do is pay the purchase price to one of the local pagan temples plus a small percentage on top for the priest. Then the actual price would be paid by the temple to the slave owner, and nominally, the person would still be a slave but now would be a slave to the local god, which meant on the street that he was as free as he was before.
That’s the way redemption worked. Likewise, there was redemption money in Israel. Every firstborn male, for example, had to pay some redemption money in memory of the Passover. There were redemption procedures for slavery, likewise, in Israel. Redemption language was not uncommon. Paul picks it up and says, “We are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” Then he tells us how the redemption came about in the next half verse.
That is, he pictures us as somehow enslaved, enslaved by sin (after all, that’s what this whole catena of quotations at the end of chapter 3 is about), enslaved by sin, enslaved under the wrath of God, and we’ve been redeemed, bought back, freed from our slavery to sin by the redemption that came in Christ Jesus which was graciously given. It didn’t have to be given. It was graciously given.
Exactly how was this payment made? People knew how the payment was made in the ancient pagan world. What exactly was paid so that we should be redeemed? He tells us. “God presented Christ as a …” Now this tough expression. “… sacrifice of atonement …” Expiation. Propitiation. “… through faith in his blood.”
Many of our older versions have propitiation. Some have expiation. The NIV goes for sacrifice of atonement. No matter which term you use today, you’re going to have to explain it, aren’t you? Is everybody here fully confident in what expiation means? Is everybody here fully confident with respect to what propitiation means? Is everybody fully confident as to what sacrifice of atonement means?
I don’t have a clue what sacrifice of atonement means. It could mean half a dozen different things depending on what you mean by sacrifice and what you mean by atonement, so one way or another, you still have to explain it, don’t you? If you’re going to have to explain it, why not use the word that is closest, which is propitiation, although that needs explaining, too?
In the pagan world, propitiation worked like this. The gods out there have various domains. There’s a sea god. If you want to go for a sea trip, you want Neptune on side, so you offer the appropriate sacrifices in a temple to Neptune to get Neptune on side. If you want to have a fat baby, then you go to the appropriate fertility god or goddess. If you want to give a speech, you go to the god of communication, Hermes in the Greek world, or Mercury in the Latin world.
If you want to go to war, you make sure Zeus is on side or Jupiter in the Latin world. There are all these gods, and they’re a bit bad-tempered and a bit whimsical, but you can make them favorable toward you, you can make them propitious toward you, if you offer a propitiation, a sacrifice, to make them propitious, a sacrifice to make them favorable. In this model, I, the human being, want the gods on side. I offer the propitiation to make the gods propitious. That’s the way propitiation works in a pagan world.
But in the 1930s, C.H. Dodd, a Welshman who taught for many years at Manchester and then eventually had the Lady Margaret’s Chair at Cambridge, argued this certainly is not the image we can use in the Bible because, after all, in the pagan world, the gods are viewed as bad-tempered and off side until we offer our propitiation, and we’re the ones who are offering the sacrifice, but the Bible pictures God as so loving that he sends Christ to come in the first place. “God so loved the world that he gave his Son …”
If God is so much on side already, so much a God of love already that he gave his son, in what sense, then, can the Son’s death bring about God’s propitiation? He’s already so propitious he sends his Son in the first place, so how can the sacrifice of the Son, then, be that which makes God propitious when God is already so propitious? How much more propitious can he get?
Thus, he argued, you cannot translate the word here, hilastērion, as propitiation. He preferred something like expiation. Expiation means the canceling of something, the canceling of sin. Propitiation has as its object God, propitiation of God. Expiation has as its object sin, the canceling of sin, the expiation of sin, so “God so loved the world that he gave his Son …” to cancel our sin.
He produced this first as an essay, and then it came out in a book about 1934, The Bible and the Greeks, and that view became very popular in the Western world, not least in this country, and there were little bits and pieces of protests and minor rebellions and pop articles from the right. In 1955, a scholar who is still alive, in fact, a chap named Roger Nicole published an article in the Westminster Theological Journal arguing, in fact, when you look at the root of this in the Old Testament, it is tied to passages where there is God’s wrath. In some sense, it is turning aside God’s wrath.
After all, here in this passage, you have two and a half chapters proving God’s wrath. There is some sense in which God does stand over against us in wrath, isn’t there? You see, what Dodd would have said to that was, “Well, you have to understand that wrath as sort of the way things work in the universe, not deeply felt and not personal. After all, God loves us. How could he be angry with us? He loves us. He loves us so much as to give his Son.”
No, no, no. “The wrath is merely a metaphorical way,” he would say, “of saying, ‘Bad stuff happens if you do bad things.’ If you do wickedness, then bad things happen to you in a moral universe. Judgment comes upon you. That’s all it means, but God himself doesn’t have to become more propitious. He’s already propitious.”
Leon Morris, an Australian scholar, came out with his magnificent book, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. If you haven’t got it, get it. If you have got it and haven’t read it, repent and read it. It is still one of the best books on the atonement. It is now dated in many respects to current discussion, but it is still very, very important and teaches us to think these things through pretty carefully.
What is pointed out is the very word propitiation here, the very word hilastērion, was used as the way of rendering the word for the mercy seat, the top of the ark of the covenant. The high priest went into the Most Holy Place and on that top of the ark of the covenant once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, sprinkled the blood of bull and goats both for his own sin and for the sins of the people to turn away God’s wrath.
That’s the whole frame of reference in which the Old Testament’s storyline is put. In fact, by this time it had become increasingly clear dear ol’ C.H. Dodd (bless his heart), though in many ways was a very pious man, so despised any notion of penal substitution or anything like that (he just loathed it with a passion). When he was working on the New English Bible as the general editor, he was heard, when he came to this passage in Romans 3, to mutter under his breath, “What rubbish!” whereupon some wag wrote the 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.
This is, of course, a quintessentially English way of handling theological debate. It has very little to do with the argument but it is telling in its own provocative fashion. The point of the matter is that God stands over against us in both wrath and love. The closest we can come to experiencing that sometimes is when we’re parents and we can be really ticked at something our kids do while in a strange way loving them.
Of course, parents can really blow it and just be so ticked they don’t love them at all and wish they’d vaporize and just disappear off the face of the planet. We don’t really mean that. We sort of have a quick oscillation and feel guilty that we blew it. That’s the way we respond, but in our best moments we can simultaneously say, “I have to punish this little tyke, but I do love her just the same.” If you haven’t been there yet, you’re not a parent, but it does happen. Believe me.
There is God and all of his holiness, all of his besmirched honor, all of the actions of his image-bearers who have de-Godded God and have tried to make themselves the center of the universe. All of these things necessarily bring down his wrath, but he is, nevertheless, the sort of God who loves us anyway not because we are so loveable or so cute or so worthy of his affections but because he’s that kind of God.
That brings us to the fundamental difference between pagan propitiation and Christian propitiation. In pagan propitiation, I, the worshiper, offer the sacrifice to make the god propitious, but this text says God sets forth Jesus as the propitiation. That is, God is both the subject and the object.
God is the one who provides the sacrifice precisely as a way of turning aside God’s own wrath. God, thus, becomes the propitiator and the propitiated. God the Son becomes the propitiation. We’ll get closer to understanding this, I think, if we look at the last point Paul establishes. Paul is still explaining how this works. I should tell you this last bit (25b and 26) is understood in an entirely different way in the new perspective theology.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, there is an entirely different way of taking these verses. In my view, the new perspective is linguistically astonishingly improbable on these lines, and I’d be glad to give you some references afterwards if you need them, but I’m not going to go through that debate here. I’ll just tell you what I think it does mean.
“God did this …” (25b) He’s going to explain it now. This is the explanatory power of this last few lines to explain this business about propitiation. “God did this to demonstrate his justice …” In other words, he didn’t do it in the first instance to save us, although he did save us. He did it in the first instance, we’re told, “… to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished …”
That is, the sins committed by human beings all the time before the cross, even those who were justified by faith, like in Abraham. In one sense, although there were some temporal judgments that were poured out on Israel or on Abraham or somebody else, nevertheless, they were not finally handled. They were not treated with all the severity they deserved. They were not finally handled. They were still substantially unpunished.
Now we’re told, although in his forbearance God had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished, God now sets forth Jesus as the propitiation for our sins “… 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 come at this through the side door. Have you ever done some evangelism, whether in a large meeting or one on one, and you’ve used an illustration like this to try to get across this vision of the atonement? Suppose you have a judge who pronounces the verdict and imposes the sentence on the prisoner at the bar. “You shall pay $5,000.” Then he steps off the bench, takes off his coat, walks down, and writes out a check for $5,000.
Have you ever used that sort of illustration? Alternatively, to make it more severe, “Five years in Her Majesty’s Prison in Holloway.” Then she steps down and goes into prison instead of the perpetrator. Have you ever used that sort of illustration? I have used it many times. I’ve repented, but I have used it many times.
The reason why it doesn’t work very well is in all of our Western judicial systems (they vary a bit from country to country, France and Great Britain and America and so forth) the judge is the administrator of a bigger system. The offense is not against the judge. In fact, where the offense is against the judge, the judge is supposed to recuse himself or herself.
We speak of the crime having been committed against the state or against the law of the land but not against the judge. Thus, there is a sense in which, if this judge, then, stepped off the bench and took the punishment himself or herself, it would be profoundly unjust. That doesn’t really work very well. It gets across the notion of substitution, but it feels somehow arbitrary, doesn’t it?
Supposing the judge is the one against whom the offense has been committed, this judge is perfectly fair. He doesn’t respond in mere pique. His wrath is not bad temper, but it is deep, principled revulsion and judgment against all that de-Gods him. Would this God be more loving if he simply said of a Hitler, “I don’t really care; you can do whatever you like”? Would he be more loving if he simply said to all of his image-bearers who de-God him and relativised him and stand in judgment of him, “No skin off my nose. I don’t really care”?
No. He stands over against us in wrath, but to satisfy his own notions of justice precisely so all may see sin deserves the punishment which he has himself imposed (death), he himself stands in our place so as simultaneously to be just and the one who justifies the ungodly. Justification is, first and foremost, about the vindication of God. It is about the vindication of sinners. Yes, that’s true, but it’s the vindication of sinners not because the sinners are just but because someone else has paid for them.
At the same time, this text says it is about the vindication of God, so God can never be accused of being merely soft-headed, sentimental, grading on a scale. No. His vast love is displayed precisely in this: that he acts in such a way by the death of his own dear Son that he simultaneously preserves his justice while justifying the ungodly.
That’s the heart of the gospel. There’s a lot more to it. The gospel is more embracive, but that’s the heart. You will hear voices in the theological education you are enjoying that will say this is a violent image and only a minor one, that we should think in other terms regarding the gospel. This is only one metaphor, and so forth, but with all due respect, it seems to me this way of thinking about the cross is precisely what holds all the rest of them together, for two reasons.
First, all the other ways you can think of the Bible’s language and the cross are tied to this. For example, the cross reconciles us to God. Why do we have to be reconciled to God? Isn’t it because we’re alienated? What is it that alienates us from God? Isn’t it our sin? Isn’t it the dealing with our sin that precisely reconciles us back to God?
Yes, yes, yes, new birth is critical. We must be born again. We must have a new nature. That’s true. We must have the work of the Spirit to transform us. There is more at issue here than whether we’re simply forgiven. That’s true. On the other hand, does God give us a new nature without reference to all the sin and ugliness, the rebellion, the odiousness of transgression we have committed in the past?
Or is all the power of the new nature contingent upon us being reconciled to God by the sacrifice Christ has himself offered? That is why the gift of the Spirit in John’s gospel is seen as flowing out from the cross. It’s the gift that flows out from Christ’s triumph on the cross. It’s conditioned by the cross, but it’s more than that.
The second great reason why this way of looking at the cross lies at the heart is that it is embedded in the Bible’s storyline. When people first sin against God, God responds, pronounces death. You get Genesis 5, for example. So and so lived so many years and he died; so and so lived so many years and he died; so and so lived so many years and he died. Then the flood. Then more stories of judgment. God responding in judgment all along.
You see, the picture is of God responding to sin because God himself is so deeply offended. When you read the Old Testament and you come across passage after passage where God is wrathful, what is it that really narks God in the Old Testament? What sin is it above all that really sets God off, if I may put it that way, in the Old Testament?
Is it rape? Idolatry, the de-Godding of God. “For the Lord your God is a jealous God because he alone is God.” All the social evils that come come from the Bible’s perspective, first and foremost, because we’ve de-Godded God. Sometimes in our efforts to get across what Christianity is about we focus on the social structure of sin to show Christianity is socially relevant, but in a sense, we miss the heart of what sin really is.
Although all the social manifestations of sin are horribly ugly and they have to be dealt with in their time and place, they themselves must be put within the larger frame of reference of idolatry, the de-Godding of God. That’s why, when Paul preaches to a pagan crowd, for example, in Acts, chapter 17, the way he defines the problem is in terms of idolatry, anything that dethrones God, that makes me the center and makes him no longer the center.
Because it is this God who is offended by our sin and who stands over against us in judgment, it is this sort of passage that deals most powerfully, most potently with the problem and provides the remedy. God in the fullness of his time sent forth his own Son. He brought to bear all the sins that had been left unpunished, but now in this one climactic sacrifice, he takes action both to punish sin and to forgive sinners.
They had been unpunished. Now they’re punished in the very person of his Son. He is now both just and the one who justifies the ungodly. This is received by faith. It’s important to understand these themes have often been picked up very powerfully, both by old hymns and new. You’re familiar with this one by William Rees.
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God’s mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And Heav’n’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.
The great theme of God’s wrath and justice barreling through Scripture, the great theme of God’s forbearance and love barreling through Scripture, climax in the cross, and God’s peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love. Or in the well-known hymn now of Stuart Townend (1995), “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us.”
Behold the man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders;
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished;
His dying breath has brought me life;
I know that it is finished.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, in all of our theologizing, our debates about difficult points of how the Old Testament uses the New, our debates about the precise meaning of inerrancy, and our debates about whether Jenson has it right on the nature of the Trinity, and on and on and on, don’t ever lose the heart of the issue. Just summarize two chapters on. “God was in Christ Jesus, reconciling the world to himself.” Let us pray.
In truth, Lord God, we discover enough in these few lines to keep us occupied and reflective and adoring and humbled for countless hours of meditation, for new explorations in Christian thought and understanding in this life and, doubtless, for all eternity.
Forbid that we should ever become inured to the gospel, seduced, perhaps, by some superficial understanding of it but no longer broken under its compelling power, no longer deeply ashamed of sin and all of its entailments, no longer humbled by the matchless, illimitable dimensions of your love for us in sending your own dear Son to be our Redeemer.
As we think later on of the cross and Christian ministry, the cross and Christian living, forbid that we should lose sight of the foundations. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
