Understanding Salvation: Motivation for Righteousness in the Light of Sin and Grace

Don Carson addresses two key questions about Christian faith and sin, exploring theological interpretations of human inability to sin and the motivation behind striving for righteousness despite salvation. He examines the paradoxical relationship between sin and salvation, urging a deeper understanding of salvation not as an excuse for passivity, but as a powerful motivator for living a God-honoring life. Carson’s insightful exposition offers a nuanced view of Christian doctrine, focusing on the transformation and motivation that come from being reconciled to God.

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Susan asked me if I would respond to at least two of the questions that have come in so far so that there is no misunderstanding before I direct your attention to the passage we’re looking at today. Both emerged from things I said last night, and it would really be a shame to have misunderstanding on these two points before we press on, so it’s probably a good thing to take a couple of minutes.

Question number one: “If we cannot sin since Christ’s blood permanently deletes our sins, why try? Why work so hard to follow the law? In short, since we are saved, why try?” Well, I would say two things. First, you must remember that the cannot, as we discovered last night, is not saying that it is, as the philosophers would say, ontologically impossible, impossible in reality to sin; it is a moral impossibility.

That is, you cannot chew gum here. You cannot sin here. Sinning is not done here, which is a bit different from saying it is impossible in reality for anyone to sin. It really is important to see that since there is so much of the New Testament, even while it abominates sin, even while it insists that sinning is done, that also says that, God help us, we still do sin even though we’re in Christ, including the very same book in which that cannot expression is found.

The second part of the answer is really more important. In short, if we are saved, why try? The biblical way of looking at things is just exactly the opposite. Because we are saved, we’ll want to try. In other words, what does it mean to be saved but to be reconciled to the God of holiness, both for this life and for the life to come?

If that’s the case, then what I will want will be what he wants. I will want to love him with heart and soul and mind and strength. In other words, the Bible does not really have a lot of space for the old evangelical slogan, “Let go and let God.” It’s much too passive. There is a small sense in which it’s correct. You really do trust Christ to reconcile you to God, but that does not induce passivity.

Again and again in the Bible, “Because of what Christ has done, therefore press on. Exert every passion to do such-and-such. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” That’s everywhere in the New Testament. But it is not, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God has done his bit and now it’s all up to you.” It’s “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God in you, both working and willing, to do his good pleasure.”

In other words, the assurance of the gospel, the promise of the gospel, the power of the gospel, the regeneration of the gospel, the transformation of the gospel is precisely what motivates us to pour our whole heart, mind, soul, and spirit into loving God, and instead to take the attitude that says, “Because we’ve been saved, therefore we don’t have to try; we just have to sit back and coast,” really reduces itself to being another form of self-indolence, self-focus.

“I’ll just sit back and let it happen. I’m at the center of the universe, and God exists to make me happy and save me and let me free to do whatever I want.” No, we receive our greatest freedom when we are free to do what we ought to do as God’s creatures. The first responsibility of the creature is to recognize his or her creatureliness and thus dependence upon God and thus the importance of being reconciled to him and thus loving him on his terms. You really must see that salvation involves all of that.

Second question. It’s sort of a checklist. “No sin allowed here; I agree. I love the Lord God with heart and soul and mind; I agree. I have the Spirit of the Lord in my heart; I agree. I have experienced rebirth in Christ; I agree. So why do I continue to sin?” That’s a very good question too. One day, transparently, you won’t.

The Bible does insist that ultimately the consummation of all things is a new heaven and a new earth, a home of righteousness, with a resurrected body, and then we will not sin anymore. To use Paul’s categories, there is still something of the old nature that is at war within us. We have not yet been finally and totally transformed. We have a new birth, yes, but we still are in our old decaying bodies, and the old nature is not obliterated.

Yes, we have been forgiven. Thank God for that, and we can go back to the cross and beg forgiveness again. Yes, all of the promises of God are there, and the God who has begun a good work in us will perform it till the day of Jesus Christ. That’s true. But at the end of the day, we have still not yet reached the consummation. That’s why in the New Testament there is a running tension between what some have called the already and the not yet.

The kingdom has already come. Christ has already died on the cross. We have already received forgiveness of sins. The Holy Spirit has been poured out upon us. Those are already sorts of statements. Yet the kingdom hasn’t come in its consummated form. It is not yet here. We do not yet have resurrection bodies. Jesus is the first fruit of the resurrection, but the rest of it is still to come. All of that’s not yet here, and we live between the already and the not yet.

After World War II, there was a theologian by the name of Oscar Cullmann who gave the illustration of the distinction between D-Day and V-Day. By the spring of 1944, the Russians were pressing in from the east. The other Allies had cleaned out North Africa and were pushing up the boot of Italy, and then they landed on the beaches of Normandy and dumped in 1.3 million men and tons of war materiel in three days.

Anybody with half a brain in his head could see that the war was over. That was D-Day. So what did Hitler do? Did he say, “Oops! Sorry. I sue for peace”? No, some of the nastiest fighting in the war took place after that, as the Russians pressed in from the east, and on the west we had the Battle of the Bulge. V-Day or VE-Day (Victory in Europe Day) was still off. Anybody could see that the war was over, yet at the same time, there was a lot of struggle before VE-Day.

Biblically speaking, at the risk of a bad illustration pushed too far, the cross and resurrection are for us D-Day, and anybody with half a brain in his head, spiritually speaking, can see that the war is over. Death has been beaten. Sin has been atoned for. Christ has died on the cross. God has propitiated. Sin has been expiated. We are justified. The thing is over.

Does that mean the Devil sits back and says, “Oops! Made a mistake. I give up”? No, read Revelation 12. Instead, he is filled with fury because he knows his time is short. For us, V-Day is the consummation, and until then some of the nastiest fighting still goes on. That’s why we struggle. Now that part was free. Now we come to the address for this morning: Why Trust a Cross? I want to begin by reading Romans 3:21–26.

Of the various passages I’ll be treating this weekend, this is by far the tightest of them. The argument is so condense that even experienced Bible readers, experienced Christians, can read these verses and find their eyes glazing over a wee bit as you get all of these theological terms thrown at you one after the other. How do you make sense of it? I want to read it, then set it within its context, and then we’ll unpack it line by line so you can see the flow, and then re-place it again in the book of Romans to see its relevance for us as believers. Hear, then, what Scripture says.

“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.

Can you see how condense that is, that after a while you sort of get lost in all of the theological terminology? After having read it, could you summarize the whole thing for me in about 100 words? Before we plunge into this passage, it is important to remember what comes before this in Romans. From 1:18 to 3:20, Paul offers one sustained argument to demonstrate that all human beings without exception, Jew and Gentile alike, justly stand under the wrath of God. That is where we stand because of our sin.

You remember how the section begins. Romans 1:18: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them.” I don’t have time to expound those two and a half chapters, yet there is a sense in which we’re not really prepared to understand what’s going on in 3:21–26 until we’ve absorbed something of the weight of what precedes it. We’re just not.

I still do quite a lot of university missions, and today the degree of biblical illiteracy on most campuses is really very high indeed, but the hardest thing to get across today on university campuses is not something like the Trinity or the resurrection of Jesus or the deity of Christ or something like that. If I say that’s what Christians believe, they say, “Okay, uh-huh, if you say so,” and might ask a question or two.

The hardest thing to get across on a university campus today is the biblical notion of sin by far. Don’t you see? We cannot possibly get agreement on what the solution is unless we get agreement on what the problem is, which is why you always get a lowering of the doctrine of sin when you have a lowering of the doctrine of the cross, and vice versa. The two stand or fall together. Let me illustrate this a bit. We need to spend a bit of time on this to make sure we’re set up properly for Romans 3:21 and following.

When we try to explain something of Christianity to a larger watching world, how do we talk about sin and evil? Don’t we almost always talk about the horizontal dimensions of wickedness? Everybody knows. The statistics show us. Sociologists will even admit it. If you have stable God-fearing families, you’re more likely, statistically speaking, to produce citizens who are reliable and honorable and taxpaying.

You have endless broken homes or you have endless families absorbed in Hedonistic self-worship, and pretty soon things begin to fly apart, and it can have nasty deleterious effects to the second, third, and fourth generation. That’s when you start talking about structural poverty and things like that, which is why you can’t fix those things by simply pouring more money into them. There are whole structural things and alignments that have to be changed. We all know that. Therefore, become nice Christians so we can be good citizens.

We don’t put it quite as crassly as that, but isn’t that part of what we’re trying to say when we talk about the justification of Christianity in the larger culture? By contrast, how does the Bible most typically talk about sin? It certainly talks about adultery and murder. It talks about social inequity and the evil of squashing the poor. Read Amos. Read Isaiah. It talks about all of those things. But in the Old Testament, and also in this passage, what is it that most typically is said to make God very angry? Lust? Don’t read your Bible? Idolatry. That’s a vertical invention.

That’s why the sin in the garden is portrayed as being so awful. It’s not just, “Ate the wrong fruit, hehe.” The point is God said one thing and these people were doing the opposite, and this within a context in which it was very carefully explained by the Serpent, “God knows that if you do this, you will become like him.” In other words, what is at issue is the overthrowing of God, the de-Godding of God, so that I might be God.

In the beginning is God, and human beings are rightly related to him. They wake up in the morning and think of him. They look at all of life in relationship to him. They love him with heart and soul and mind and strength. He is their center, and they are rightly related to each other because they’re rightly related to him, but with the fall, each individual thinks he or she is at the center of the universe.

Oh, we don’t literally say, “I’m at the center of the universe.” On the other hand, if I were suddenly to hold up a picture of your graduating class from college or wherever and say, “This is your graduating class,” which face do you look for first to make sure it’s there? Or you have an argument, a real humdinger, a knock-down, drag-out, one-in-ten-years argument, a real first-class roustabout argument.

You go away, and you’re seething and thinking of all of the things you could have said and should have said and would have said if you had thought of them fast enough. Then you replay the whole argument. Who wins? I’ve lost a lot of arguments in my time. I’ve never lost a rerun. The problem is if I think I’m at the center of the universe, you, you stupid twit, think you’re at the center of the universe too.

Now, instead of God being at the center, each of these God image-bearers thinks he or she is at the center. God? Well, if he or she or it exists, he’d jolly well better serve me, or else, quite frankly, I’ll find another god. That’s the beginning of idolatry. So what kind of God do you believe in? It’s a stupid question, isn’t it? The real question is what kind of God is there? Otherwise, you’re just manufacturing your own. It’s called idolatry.

Meanwhile, because I think I’m at the center of the universe, I’ll reshape God so that he, she, or it suits me. Otherwise, I’ll find another god that suits me a little bit better, since obviously, whatever god is there has to suit me. God exists in order to fulfill my spirituality and give me my full potential. Talk about idolatry.

I’m also now in conflict with all of these other people who want to be at the center of the universe, and there is the beginning of war and hate and rape and fences, all because I say I will be God. God finds this deeply, profoundly, personally offensive. It’s not only tragic. It is tragic. He can talk about sin in terms of tragedy. It’s tragic for us because we’re destroying ourselves. It is also abominably disgusting to God. It is degrading God. It is de-Godding God. That is the beginning of idolatry, and that is why wrath in the Old Testament is so connected with idolatry.

That’s also why in the New Testament, for example, covetousness can be talked about in terms of idolatry. If you want something badly enough, that thing becomes god for you. It’s idolatry, which means instead of wanting God you want the thing, which de-Gods God again. That’s why Jesus says that the first commandment is the commandment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.

That’s the way we were built. That’s the way we were constituted, and anything less than that is the de-Godding of God. The first commandment, as defined by Jesus, is the one commandment that you always break when you break any other commandment. That’s why it’s the first commandment. That’s why in any sin, in every sin, the person who is most offended is God.

David understands that. After the sin of Bathsheba and the killing of her husband, after he is found out, he writes Psalm 51. He has the cheek to include the lines addressed to God, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At one level, that’s just a load of malarkey. I mean, he certainly sinned against Bathsheba.

He sinned against her husband; the poor guy is dead. He sinned against the high command of the military; he has corrupted them. He sinned against the covenant community. He sinned against his own family. It’s hard to think of anybody he hasn’t sinned against, yet he says, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

At the deep level at which David was writing, he has it exactly right, because in every single sin we commit, the person most offended is God. That is an utterly transforming way of looking at evil, and we have to confess that very often the church has not seen things that way. Oh, at a certain theoretical sense, yes, but when we start talking with our neighbors to show the relevance of Christianity, we’re immediately onto the social effects, all the horizontal dimensions. No wonder nobody is convinced.

When the Bible says, “Flee from the wrath to come,” it’s not saying, “Flee from the horrible social effects of sin.” Yes, there are social effects of sin. Yes, God sometimes does pour out a kind of relative temporal wrath even now. We’ll come to that. But beyond all of that, there are final eschatological displays of God’s judgment, for the one to whom we must be reconciled is God or else we have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Were it possible to create a utopian society here, with the crime rate going extremely low and justice prevailing in the land and everybody convinced that it is wise to work hard and be industrious, faithful, full of loyalty in the home, and full of integrity at work, and we decrease the number of lawyers and increase the number of engineers, a wonderful society, yet if we have no love for God, we’re still idolaters and under terrible threat of judgment.

Unless you see that, unless you believe that with all of your heart, you’re not ready for Romans 3:21–26. That’s why Paul spends so much time on it before he gets there. This affects a lot of how we think about God. Here is something from J. Budziszewski. It’s an essay he wrote called Escape from Nihilism. He was a philosopher of religion, an atheist, teaching in Texas when he was converted, so he was a long way down the pike before he closed with Christ. This is what he writes as he looks back on his conversion some years later.

“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 these 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.” He was a postmodern philosopher. “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 … what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense.

Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ ” That’s quoting from these early verses of 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, 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. 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 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 in the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes, but I was the fool.” That’s what the Bible says, isn’t it? “It is the fool who has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” I have a friend in Australia who often does university missions. He has a lot more courage than I do.

He sometimes addresses university crowds with this as his title: “Atheists are Fools and Agnostics are Cowards.” I’m not suggesting this is a pastoral way of doing things. He’s an Aussie, and Aussies are always in your face. It’s part of the culture. I understand that. Nevertheless, at a certain level you understand what he’s saying. From God’s perspective, it’s the fool who has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

So read the last verses of this section, Romans 3:9–20. Let us confess quite frankly that when we read these verses we’re embarrassed. Most of us are at least. “What shall we conclude then? Are we any better [we Jews over against Gentiles]? 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.’ ‘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.’ ”

I know that Paul himself teaches the doctrine of common grace. There are some relative goods that we do. I know that. Paul would be the first to insist upon it. Elsewhere in the New Testament someone like Cornelius, still not yet converted, can be thought of as a good man. In relative terms that’s still the case. But in this absolute sense of measuring up to God’s standards, that’s what Paul says.

The interesting thing about this long catena of references is that they’re all from the Old Testament. He’s quoting the Bible. He’s saying, “This is what God really says about the situation, and until you see this, you’re not ready for what I’m next about to say.” After Paul establishes the universality of guilt, he thinks he has gotten his readers to the place where he shares with them a common vision of what is wrong with the human race, of what the problem is.

If you come to common agreement on what the problem is, then you’re ready to talk about what the solution is. This is true when you start thinking about what spirituality is. If spirituality merely is some kind of mystical understanding of feeling united somehow with the Great Other, with whatever the other is, then you can pursue spirituality as mere technique. Transcendental meditation. You sit on top of a pile like Simeon Stylites. Self-flagellation, or whatever. It’s all part of somehow being absorbed into the mystical Other.

Today, it has to be said, an awful lot of writings in this area of spirituality are basically writings about technique without any reference to the reality that is alleged to underlie the whole thing. I am not for a moment suggesting that there are not some disciplines that further us in our walk with God, but unless such disciplines are nestled into the larger question of who we are, who God is, and our need to be reconciled to him and to love him with heart, soul, mind, and strength, then all the talk of spirituality, quite frankly, is only so much humbug.

Otherwise, it’s merely a question of technique, and who or what God is or who or what the problem is doesn’t make any difference at all. At this juncture, then, Paul tries to talk about what God’s answer is to all of this alienation from God, this lostness, this being under the curse, this sinfulness, this rebellion, this idolatry, this being under the wrath of God. What’s the solution? What Paul does is establish four points in the verses I laid out.

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

“But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” What does this but now mean? Most agree it is a temporal now. “But now something has happened.” What is the nature of this change? “But now something has happened.” What is it?

Some have argued that under the Old Testament God presents himself as a God of wrath, a God of justice, but now in Christ Jesus grace has come. But now we have gentle Jesus, meek and mild. But now we have the cross. That’s not quite right. It can’t be. One of the reasons we think that’s the way it is is because we look at all of the Old Testament manifestations of wrath primarily in terms of war and plague and famine, and we think, “Boy, that stuff is pretty awful.”

In the New Testament, there are descriptions of ultimate judgment in terms of hell, and because we don’t really believe that, we’re not nearly as terrified by hell as we are of war, famine, and plague. But do you know which person in the New Testament introduces us to the most colorful descriptions and metaphors for hell? It’s Jesus, gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

What do you do with this description? Allow all the space you like for the fact that the language is metaphorical. This is from Revelation 14. “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.” Do you hear the image? People took the grapes that were gathered from the vineyards and put them into great whopping stone vats, which had little holes down in the bottom.

Then the servant girls would kick off their sandals and pull up their skirts and go in there and start tramping down the grapes, squishing the grapes. At the bottom, where the little holes were, the juice ran out into channels and then was collected into bottles and eventually turned into wine. Now people are being thrown into the great winepress of God’s wrath, and they’re trampled underfoot until the blood runs as high as a horse’s bridle for a distance of 200 miles.

Now tell me that the New Testament depicts God in a softer way. I don’t think the “but now” in Romans 3:21 is saying “But now God has decided to be a little softer.” Well, what is it that he’s saying? “But now a righteousness from God apart from law has been made known.” A lot turns on this little expression apart from law. That little expression apart from law could be understood to modify what comes before or what comes after.

“But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known.” It could be understood to read, “But now a-righteousness-from-God-apart-from-law has been made known,” or it could be understood to mean, “But now a righteousness from God apart-from-law-has-been-made-known,” or to put it in English order, “A righteousness from God has been made known apart from law.”

For various reasons I won’t go into, I think that’s what is being said. The text reads, “But now something has happened, such that a righteousness from God has been made known apart from the law covenant.” The law covenant displayed righteousness within all of the covenantal stipulations of that covenant, with the sacrificial system and Passover and Yom Kippur and the death of a bullock and goat on the high feast of atonement and the high priest taking the blood behind the veil and putting it on the ark of the covenant.

That was all part of the manifestation of God’s righteousness, but now (and it turns out in this paragraph it’s now with the coming of Jesus) a righteousness from God has been made known apart from this law covenant. We’re under the new covenant, and the structures are a wee bit different. That does not mean it is so brand new it has no connection with the old covenant, because you have the last line of verse 21 in there.

“But now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from law, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” The Law and the Prophets pointed forward to this new situation that has now arisen. If you’ve been a Christian for some time and have read your Bible and gone to church, you know in general terms at least what this is talking about, don’t you?

We’re used to the fact that when you put the Bible together structurally, the Old Testament tabernacle and temple ultimately point forward to Jesus as the supreme temple of God, the ultimate meeting place between God and human beings. The Old Testament high priestly structure ultimately points forward to Jesus as the ultimate High Priest, the ultimate one who mediates God and human beings, the ultimate one who is simultaneously God and a human being and mediates between us.

These Old Testament structures had a kind of proleptic function. They pointed forward. They bore witness to what is now here. So although there is a new covenant, it’s not so removed from the old covenant that it has no connection at all with it, as if the old covenant said this and this and this, and now we have something over here. “Oops! I think I’ll try something different. We’ll try that and that and that.”

Rather, there is a new covenant, and its structures are somewhat different, but the old covenant, the Law and the Prophets testified to it. So Paul establishes the revelation with the coming of Christ of God’s righteousness in relationship to the Old Testament. He says, “But now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from the law covenant, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.”

Now do you see the connection with what precedes? The previous two and a half chapters have pointed out all the sin, all the guilt, all the unrighteousness, all the dirt. Isn’t that what we saw all the way back in 1:18 and all of the argument that develops? “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men, who suppress the truth because of all of their unrighteousness.”

But now there’s a righteousness that has appeared. This is going to be the solution. He’s going to explain how it functions, what it does. He says this righteousness has appeared. It has been revealed from heaven apart from the old covenant, apart from the law, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. That’s the first point Paul makes.

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

Verses 22–23. He has introduced this righteousness from God, which has now been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify, and then he picks up this righteousness again. Verse 22: “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

To get the power of this, I need to tell you a bit about a controversy that has erupted very powerfully in the last 30 years amongst those who write and read commentaries. It turns on the fact that in English, our noun faith sounds different from our verb to believe. They sound like different words. You almost don’t realize they have the same sort of idea. Faith … the thing itself. Believe … what you do.

In Greek, it’s the same root. It’s pistis and pisteuo, the same pist root. If you render it that way and find some sort of equivalent way of putting it in English, then it sounds a bit like this: “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.” Then you say, “Wait a minute. That sounds a bit repetitive. Does that make sense?” But that’s what the Greek seems to say.

“This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.” I’ve used the word trust now, because trust can function in English both as a noun (trust is what we place in Christ) and as a verb (we trust Christ). All I’ve done is replace faith/believe by trust/trust. As soon as you render it that way, it just sounds a bit too repetitious. So what’s going on here?

That’s why some scholars have tried to argue that the first word trust, the noun trust, is here being used in its other sense, which does actually occur, not to mean trust but trustworthiness or faithfulness, and then they want to render it like this: “This righteousness from God comes through the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ, the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.”

So Jesus Christ becomes the one who is exercising the faithfulness. He’s not the object of faith; he is the one who is being faithful. “This righteousness of God comes through the faithfulness, the trustworthiness, of Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Then you have gotten rid of the repetition. There are many people who argue that that’s what’s going on in this passage.

It’s not heretical. It’s not a necessarily wrong view. After all, there is a sense in which Jesus is very faithful. He does all that his Father wants him to do, and that’s what takes him to the cross. He’s obedient to his Father. That’s why he goes to the cross. Isn’t that what Gethsemane is about? “Not as I will but as you will.” Yet with all respect, it just doesn’t work anyway.

All through this chapter and the next where the word faith comes up again and again, it really does mean faith. It doesn’t mean faithfulness. The object of this faith here is Jesus, but then you have to explain why Paul repeats himself. Why the repetition? Because it is an awkward way of putting it on the surface of things. “This righteousness from God comes through trust in Jesus Christ to all who trust.” Why does he repeat himself?

As soon as you’ve asked that question, you see the answer. It leaps out of the page at you, and it is what ties this paragraph to all of the first three chapters, which is why I spent time on them. It’s the little word all. Look at it again. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have faith in Jesus Christ. For there is no difference. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

In other words, the reason he repeats it is because the second time around he introduces the notion of all, which carries you back to all of his argument in the first two and a half chapters. This faith in Christ is needed by all because all are sinners, Jew and Gentile alike. The old covenant found its locus in the Jewish people. A few other people were tacked on, but the locus of the old covenant was for the Jews.

Now he has established that all have sinned in the first two and a half chapters, and he says that this righteousness from God about which he’s now speaking, this righteousness from God under the terms of the new covenant, is for those who have faith in Jesus Christ; indeed, for all who have faith in Jesus Christ (and thus he repeats himself), because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Now do you see what is being said? Paul establishes the availability of God’s righteousness to all human beings without racial distinction. Under the terms of the new covenant, you can’t make the distinction between Jew and Gentile anymore, not for the purposes of being reconciled to God. You can’t do that. The locus of the new covenant is structured somewhat differently.

The old covenant pointed toward it, but at this juncture this righteousness that is available is explicitly available on the basis of what Christ has done. We have faith in him, and it is for all who have faith in him, Jew and Gentile alike, because at the end of the day, all have sinned. Once you get agreement on what the problem is you begin to see that this is the only possible solution.

There’s not a whiff of racism here. We’re all guilty before the cross, and the cross is our only hope, which is why in the New Testament you have these glorious consummating visions of the end, as in Revelation 5. “Around the throne are men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.” Well, of course. All have sinned, and we are freely justified before God by faith in Jesus Christ. That’s the second point Paul makes.

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

Verses 24–25a: “God presented him as a …” The NIV, which I am reading, has sacrifice of atonement. Some have expiation. Some have remedy of defilement. Some have propitiation. Let me tell you quite frankly the correct translation here is propitiation. It’s just that nobody knows what it means.

But cheer up. Nobody knows what sacrifice of atonement or expiation means in any case, so you might as well put in the right word and explain the right word rather than having to explain all of the wrong words. It’s important to understand what this means, because all the rest of this paragraph turns on it.

Propitiation is the action by which God becomes propitious, favorable. The object of propitiation is God. It’s that action by which God becomes propitious, favorable. Expiation is that action by which sin is expiated. The object in that case is sin. Expiation just means cancellation. If you have expiation, you have the canceling of sin. If you have propitiation, you have the turning aside of the wrath of God.

The particular word that is used here is regularly bound up with propitiation, the turning aside of the wrath of God. I really do think that’s the way you need to render this particular word. Once again, there has been a marvelous debate that has gone on for almost a century. There was a professor by the name of C.H. Dodd, a Welshman who eventually became professor at Manchester in biblical studies, the Rylands chair, then moved to Cambridge and held the Lady Margaret chair.

He was the last of the old-fashioned really pious liberals, and in the 1930s he wrote some very interesting and somewhat disruptive essays. Eventually, a couple of these essays that included discussion of this passage came out in his 1934 book The Bible and the Greeks. What he argues is this. He says this can’t mean propitiation, because God is already so favorable toward us that he sends his Son.

If he’s already so favorable that he sends his Son … God so loved the world that he gave his Son … he’s already favorable toward us. How can you think of Christ’s cross work as making God propitious when he’s already being so propitious that he sent his Son? So how could this be thought of as propitiation? Don’t you see? Propitiation is very common in the pagan world with all the various different gods.

You want to make a sea voyage, so you offer to Neptune, the god of the sea, so you’ll be safe on the sea. Then you want to give a speech, so you make a sacrifice to Hermes in the Greek world or Mercury in the Latin world, the god of communication, so that your speech goes well. You offer the right sacrifice to the right god to win their favor, to make them propitious. That’s propitiation. We offer the sacrifice, and we make the gods favorable.

But, he says, in the Christian way, that doesn’t work at all. We’re not making the sacrifice. God is making the sacrifice, and he’s already so propitious toward us that you can’t speak of God’s sacrifice of his Son making God propitious when God was already so propitious he gave us his Son in the first place.

Well, that put the cat among the pigeons. There were debates and learned essays. Eventually, Roger Nicole, who taught down at RTS Orlando, wrote a long piece in Westminster Theological Journal in 1955. Probably the best answer came in a book by an Australian scholar called Leon Morris. This is a book you still need to read today. Sell your shirt and buy it. It’s worth it. It’s still in print. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross.

What Leon Morris does is show that where this word is used in the Old Testament it’s regularly connected with the removing of God’s wrath. He points out that even in this passage, what have you had for the past two and a half chapters? The wrath of God is revealed from heaven. Isn’t that right? So although God is so loving toward us he sends his Son, yet the fact of the matter is he’s so wrathful against us he still demands a sacrifice. You have to do something with God’s wrath somewhere.

The fact of the matter is in the Bible God in his holiness stands over against his rebellious image-bearers in wrath, but God stands over against us nevertheless in love because he is that kind of God. You have to say both things to be faithful to the Bible. Now how do you remove that wrath? That’s the question.

C.H. Dodd so loathed the notion of Christ dying on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins … He was, at the end of the day, an old-fashioned liberal. He so loathed it that when he was working on the translation of the Bible, what came to be called the New English Bible, he was heard in the committee when he got to this passage to mutter under his breath, “What rubbish!” Whereupon, in true English style, some wag wrote a limerick.

There was a professor called Dodd

Whose name was exceedingly odd.

He spelled, if you please,

His name with three Ds,

While one is sufficient for God.

That, of course, doesn’t answer anything, but it’s a quintessentially British way of handling theological controversy. You have to see that this is the removal of God’s wrath, and there are entailments, then, in how you present the gospel. Have you ever shared the gospel this way? I’ve done it myself many times. I’ve since had to repent, I confess, but I’ve done it many times.

You present the gospel this way. It’s as if God the judge stands over you, and you’re a prisoner in the dock. He finds you guilty, and he sentences you to paying a fine of a quarter of a million dollars or going to jail for five years. Then after he’s pronounced sentence, he steps down out of the dock, takes off his robes, and goes down and either writes the check for a quarter of a million dollars or goes to jail in your place. He’s that kind of God.

Haven’t you used that sort of illustration to explain what the gospel is all about? I have. In one sense, it’s not an entirely bad illustration. It shows something of the nature of substitution, of substitutionary penal atonement. That’s right. But there’s one part of the illustration that is really manipulative and fundamentally wrong-headed. It gives us an entirely wrong view.

In our systems of jurisprudence, in any system of jurisprudence in the Western world, the judge is never the one who has been sinned against. If the ostensible criminal, the malefactor, the defendant has mugged the judge, then the judge is supposed to recuse himself or herself from the case, because the judge is not supposed to be the offended party.

The judge is an administrator of a bigger system, and the offense is always said to be against the state, the constitution, the law, the people, or, in a royal society, the crown, but not against the judge. That’s why in our system of jurisprudence if a judge took off his or her robes, came down, and wrote out the check, it would be a terrible perversion of justice. The guilty person should pay. You don’t have the right to do that. That’s setting aside the law.

Let me put it another way. Supposing, God forbid, on your way home from this conference you’re attacked, really beaten up horribly by a gang of thugs, maybe even raped, left in the hospital half dead, bones broken, defiled and violated. I go and visit you in the hospital a few days later and I say, “Be of good cheer. I have found your attackers, and I have forgiven them.” What would you say to me?

It would probably give you a relapse right on the spot, maybe a coronary. “What right do you have? You’re not the one who was violated. You’re not the one lying in a hospital. What right do you have to forgive them?” Isn’t that what you would say? So what right does the judge have to forgive these wretched people? It’s not mercy; it’s a perversion of justice.

Don’t you see? In the biblical way of things, our Judge is always the one most offended, and he never, ever recuses himself, because his justice is just in any case. He is that good. He is that perfect. He never makes a mistake. But God is not simply administering a bigger system of morality, a system bigger than he is and he’s not the offended party. He is the offended party. It is his justice that must prevail.

There is not some arbitrary system of morality that is offended. He is offended. It is the wrath of God against us that is at issue, and that wrath of God must be satisfied or he is saying, in effect, “I don’t give a rip. You can do what you like.” Would that make him a holier God? “Oh, Hitler, you can bump off a bunch of people. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I don’t give a rip. I’ll just forgive you. Oh, Don, all of your sins of omission and commission, I don’t give a rip. I’ll just forgive you.” Would that make him a better God? He is the most offended party.

Now listen to the text again. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have faith in Jesus Christ, for all have sinned and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a propitiation, through faith in his blood.” Blood here stands for death, life violently and sacrificially ended.

Here the faith comes back again. We exercise our faith in Christ’s blood. That is how he has brought about this propitiation. We are justified, then, freely by grace. We don’t earn it. We’re not good enough for it. We don’t achieve it. We’re justified freely by his grace. This justice is what comes to us. We are justified through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Now redemption is another one of those theological words one needs to say something about. Even when I was a boy, redemption was still sometimes used in the marketplace. You could go to a pawnshop and hawk your watch, and then later if you got some money back you could go and redeem it, but I don’t think anybody talks like that. Do you talk like that in Memphis? Different parts of the country have slightly different vocabulary.

You could sometimes speak in Canada when I was a boy growing up, if you were talking in English, of redeeming a mortgage. Nobody speaks of redeeming a mortgage today. They speak of paying off a mortgage, or something like that, or buying back what you hawked in a pawnshop, except there aren’t many pawnshops anymore either. In the first century, redemption language was pretty common. It was used all the time.

It was used in the slave world, for example. You sold yourself into slavery because your business went belly up financially, and then your rich cousin 20 miles down the road heard about it, and he came and redeemed you. He bought you back. There was a whole technique for doing it that we needn’t go into, but he redeemed you and thus released you. He freed you. So here we’re told we’re guilty before God. We’re under God’s wrath, but we’re now justified.

We’ve met the standards of God’s justice freely by God’s grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus, through the buying back, through the freeing of us, so we’re no longer in slavery. How so? Well, God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, as a propitiation, turning aside God’s wrath, meeting the standards of God’s justice through faith in his blood, through our trusting Christ in his death. That’s what Paul establishes.

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

Verses 25b–26. We’re told, “God did this to demonstrate his justice.” It’s the same word as righteousness. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness. Why did Christ die on the cross? Wouldn’t you say to save us from our sins, to display his love, to reconcile us to God? All true, but that’s not what this text says.

This text says God did this, put Christ on the cross as the propitiation for our sins, to demonstrate his justice. How so? How does that make sense? Well, in the past, in his forbearance, all of the sins of his covenant people, all of the sins of his people in the past … Oh, I know he sometimes chastised them with the demolition of a city or going off into exile, but those were only temporal judgments. Those weren’t the ultimate punishments.

All of those things we’re so afraid of, sword and famine and plague, were only temporal judgments. That wasn’t the ultimate display of God’s punishment. No, he left their sins committed beforehand unpunished. They still hadn’t finally been dealt with. He did it to demonstrate his justice. Now we’re back to the first verse. “But now.” “… at the present time [with the coming of Christ], so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

Do you see this? The cross is not only the demonstration of God’s love. It is the demonstration of God’s justice, because God poured out his just wrath by his own decree on his own Son, which is another way of saying that God arranges this to bear it himself. That’s why two chapters later Paul explains further, “God commends his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” The death of Christ is the demonstration of God’s love, as it is also the demonstration of God’s justice.

So barreling through the Old Testament are all of these massive structures that talk of God’s judgment falling upon his people and the inevitable results of sin and ultimately judgment before the tribunal of God. Barreling through the Old Testament are all of those passages that speak of the fact that God is merciful, slow to anger, abounding in love and grace, promising great release, restoring his people on the last day.

Barreling through the Scripture is the picture of God as King coming in a messianic figure who will rule with a rod of iron. Barreling through the Scripture is a picture of this ultimate suffering servant, who comes and bears the sins of others, wounded for our transgressions. They barrel through the Scriptures and meet climactically at the cross.

Justice and peace kiss each other, and the cross becomes the ultimate demonstration not only of the love of God but of the justice of God, and all this so that God may himself be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. If he had just said, “I forgive you,” where would his justice be? But he bears our sin in his own body on the tree. As a poet has put it, the great dilemma of the storyline of Scripture meets in the cross.

Dilemma wretched: how shall holiness

Of brilliant light unshaded, tolerate

Rebellion’s fetid slime, and not abate

In its own glory, compromised at best?

Dilemma wretched: how can truth attest

That God is love, and not be shamed by hate

And wills enslaved and bitter death—the freight

Of curse deserved, the human rebels’ mess?

The cross! The cross! The sacred meeting place

Where, knowing neither compromise nor loss

God’s love and holiness in shattering grace

The great dilemma slays! The cross! The cross!

The holy, loving God whose dear Son dies

By this is just—and one who justifies.

Had I time, I would then show you how this passage opens up the entire rest of the book of Romans, and that’s why it constrains our notion of spirituality. The next few verses, for example, talk explicitly about faith. We’re told in verse 27, “Faith excludes boasting.” Verses 28 and following: “Faith is necessary to preserve grace.” Verses 29–30: “Faith is necessary if Jews and Gentiles alike are to be saved.”

Then those three points are expanded upon all the way through chapter 4. You keep moving in the argument until you come to chapter 8: “There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Instead, out of the cross comes the gift of the Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance, and meanwhile, the entire created order is groaning in travail, waiting for the final adoption of sons, the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth. All of it coming from the cross.

All of our experience of grace, all of our walk with God, all of our knowledge of God, all of our growth in grace, all of the blessings we now receive, all of the blessings we will one day receive, all of our experience of God comes from the cross. Why trust a cross? To whom else shall we go? He has the words of eternal life. Amen.