What the Gospel Tells Us, Part 1 (Rom. 3:21-23)

What do you think salvation is?  What do you think it means for a person to be saved?   And what do you think is the Bible’s answer to these questions? How we answer these questions is very important because we are not going to be able to understand the message of the gospel if we get them wrong.

For example, it is possible to think of salvation entirely in man-centered terms.  We can be convinced that we are sinners, that we have made a mess of our lives and the lives of those around us, and that we need to change.  But we only want to be saved because we want to stop having lives that are wrecking balls, that end up destroying everything around them.  Or we want to be saved and forgiven so we can get on with life without having to worry about the sword of God’s judgment hanging over us.

But do you see that these are completely man-centered ways of thinking?  God may come into it, but only as a means to get us to a better life, both now and after we die.  God is a means to an end, instead of the main thing.  And if you are thinking this way, you are not really ever going to understand what the gospel is truly saying.

The Bible does not teach us to think about salvation in such terms.  Instead, it teaches us to think of salvation primarily in terms of our relationship with God.  And it teaches us to think of our main problem (that is, our sin) in terms of our lack of a positive relationship with God.  So, for example, notice how the apostle restates the teaching of 1:18-3:20 in one sweeping statement in verse 23: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  To sin is to come short of the glory of God.  What does that mean?  It means that we have utterly failed to reflect the glory of God in our lives by sinning against him.  We have dishonored him by turning to idols, by loving and trusting in other gods, by valuing the creature over the Creator, by breaking his law and rejecting his authority over us.  We have trashed the glory of God.  Man was meant to reflect the glory of God in the world, to be God’s image bearer, but instead we have defaced the image of God in us through sin.  The glory of God has been insulted and defamed through our sin, and as a result we have been cut off from his friendship and fellowship.  Indeed, we are under the wrath of God (1:18).

Do you see that the main problem is not how my sin is affecting the quality of my life in the here and now, or how it’s affecting others?  Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about those things, of course we should, but this is not the fundamental problem.  Our fundamental problem, of which all these other things are symptoms, is our broken relationship with God, our falling short of the glory of God. 

Salvation in the Bible is therefore primarily about how we relate to God, and therefore how we can be reconciled to God from whom our sins have alienated us.  It is primarily about the matter of our being able to be accepted by God and in such a way that the glory of God is restored.  And this is the main thing the gospel is about.  The gospel is the good news that sinful men and women who have defaced God’s glory can be received back into God’s love and fellowship in a way that magnifies and glorifies him.  It tells us how this is done and how we can receive this great blessing.

And that means that the gospel is primarily about the justification of the sinner before God.  What do we mean by this?  The Westminster Shorter Catechism does a good job giving us a succinct definition.  It says: “Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”  Justification is the act by which God accepts us as righteous in his sight.  The gospel is the good news that the unrighteous can become righteous before God through faith in Christ and by becoming righteous we can be reconciled to God.  We can be restored into God’s favor.  

And this is what the apostle Paul is talking about here in these verses (3:21-26).  Having demonstrated that the human race, both Jew and Gentile, is ungodly and unrighteous and therefore under God’s wrath (1:18-3:20), he now show that the good news is that this state of unrighteousness can be reversed by the righteousness of God.  When Paul tells us about “the righteousness of God” (21-22), he is talking about the gift of God’s righteousness which is given to those who believe.  It is on the basis of this gift of righteousness that we are then pronounced to be righteous before God.  This is what justification is: it is the declaration of righteousness.  And it is what Paul is talking about in verse 24 when he says that we are “justified freely by his blood through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  We are told here that we can be declared righteous before God, not on the basis of personal righteousness, but on the basis of the righteousness of God in Christ (26).

As we look at this text, therefore, I think it is absolutely crucial that we understand what justification is and what it does.  What makes it possible?  How do we receive it?  These are all very important questions that get us to the heart of the gospel and to the meaning of these verses.  To that end, I want to consider the following things: the nature of justification, its author, reception, basis, and cost.  We are not going to get to all these things today, but we’ll make a start.

The Nature of Justification

We’ve already looked at the definition of justification, but we need to work this out a bit more.  We need to do so, partly because of the confusion that the fourth/fifth century bishop Augustine of Hippo caused when he (and those who followed him) defined justification in terms of making a person righteous.  In other words, he confused it with sanctification, the process of making us more godly and holy and like Jesus in our character.  Though we heartily agree that this is part of salvation (and a necessary part), for we are predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son (8:29), that is not what Paul is talking about here.  What Paul is talking about here is more basic and fundamental than that.

Justification is not God making someone righteous by infusing grace into them to make them holy; it is God declaring someone to be righteous by imputing his own righteousness to their account.  This is a forensic, or legal, reality.  You can see this by noting that the opposite of justification is condemnation.  Condemnation is not making someone guilty but declaring them to be so.  For example, in Prov. 17:15, we read, “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.”  Surely it would not be wrong to make the wicked righteous!  But it is an abomination to declare them to be so when they aren’t.  On the other hand, it is surely wrong to declare the just to be unjust. 

 

Or consider the way the apostle puts it in the eighth chapter of Romans.  He writes, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?  It is God that justifieth.  Who is he that condemneth?” (33-34).  Here again you see justification contrasted with condemnation.  The scenario here is that of the law court, of charges being made against the elect.  But against it all is God’s declaration that they are righteous.  They are justified by God.

Now this raises a very important and serious question.  If it is unjust to justify the wicked – then isn’t God being unjust here?  In fact, this is what Paul says God does: “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (4:5).  How can God justify the ungodly without being unjust himself?  Now I’m going to consider that question more fully when we consider the cost of justification.  But for now, I want you to note that God is able to do this without compromising his justice, as he says in 3:26, “that he might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.”  And of course the key is that God does not justify us on the basis of our righteousness – that is not what he is looking at when he makes this pronouncement – but rather on the basis of his own righteousness, which is perfect.

This is what happens when a sinner is justified. They are forgiven of their sins and receive God’s righteousness as a gift. It is something which is freely credited to them (this language is used, we will see, in 4:6 – the language of imputation) so that in the court of God’s law they are seen as clothed in his own righteousness, and it is on that basis that God declares them to be just in his sight.  Now that still begs the question as to how God can give them his righteousness, on what basis can he do this?  The answer is that the basis is the person and work of Christ and our union with him.  We will look at this more fully later.

To sum up: justification is the act whereby God, having forgiven us of all our sins and credited his own perfect righteousness to our account, can on that basis declare us to be righteous and receive us into fellowship with himself. 

But again, we must ask, what is the purpose of justification?  Why is this so necessary?  It is necessary because God will not have fellowship with guilty men and salvation is all about bringing us back to God.  The guilt of our sin must be dealt with.  Our sins must be forgiven, and we must stand as righteous before God.  We note that justification is not less than the forgiveness of sins, but it is also more than that.  A justified sinner is not only someone whose guilt has been erased, but also who stands positively righteous in God’s sight.  Forgiveness means that we are no longer exposed to God’s judgment; imputed righteousness means that we are accepted in his sight.  We need both forgiveness and righteousness, and justification gives us both.

The Author of Justification

Who does the justifying?  God does; God is the author.  This is plain in the language that the apostle uses over and over again.  It is “the righteousness of God” (21-22).  God is “the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (26).  “It is God that justifieth” (8:33).  

And it is God in Christ.  Now you may remember that in the definition of the Shorter Catechism, we are told that it is the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us.  Technically, that phrase is never used in the NT.  But I believe the idea is Biblically sound, because the only way the righteousness of God comes to us is in Christ.  We receive it in Christ, in union with him.  This is how Paul puts it to the Corinthians: “For he [God] hath made him [Christ] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21).  There is a double transfer here: our sins to Christ, and God’s righteousness to us. And the only way we receive that righteousness is “in him,” in Christ. 

All this shows us that justification is not something that we create.  It is not something that we do.  It is not something that we earn or make possible.  When we say that God is the author, we mean that God alone is the one who can bring this about.  You see that further in the way Paul begins this paragraph: “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference” (21-22).  Note those words: “But now.”  Paul was writing this letter just a few decades after the earthly ministry of Christ.  So when Paul says “now” here, he means “now in the present time.”  He is referring to the ministry of Jesus, to his death, burial, and resurrection.  

“But now the righteousness of God is manifested” – or “has been manifested” in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  We must never forget that the gospel is primarily about history, the manifestation of the Son of God in history to save us.  As the apostle John puts it, “For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2).  Elsewhere he tells us that Christ “was manifested to take away our sins” and that “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (3:5, 8). What is manifested in the gospel is not a program of self-enrichment, or self-discovery, much less of self-salvation or self-righteousness.  What is manifested is the person and work of Jesus whose life and death achieves for us the righteousness of God to save us.  The gospel, as Paul put it to the Corinthians, is first and foremost the fact that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:1-4).

Then notice that the apostle goes on to say that the righteousness of God is “being witnessed to by the law and the prophets” (21).  It was the Lord Jesus who was witnessed to by the law and the prophets.  The entire structure of the OT is a witness to Christ.  The OT is simply the record of the outworking of God’s promise that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent.  The promises that God made to Noah, Abraham, and David were promises to bring this about.  

Then the structure of the OT worship was meant to point to Jesus Christ.  The blood sacrifices are inexplicably gruesome and pointless unless they are pointing to something or someone that will actually take away sins.  Jesus is that someone.  He is the “lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29).  

Then there are explicit prophesies that predicted the very details of our Lord’s life and death.  For example, when Isaiah writes, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” (Isa. 9:6-7).  Or even more to the point:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.  (Isa. 53:3-11)

His birthplace (Mic. 5:2), his manner of dying (Ps. 22:7-18), his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem (Zech. 9:9), his announcement by an Elijah-like figure, fulfilled in John the Baptist (Mal. 4:5), and many other details are foretold by the prophets.  

This means that we don’t have to wonder if Jesus is the one.  As he put it, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me” (Jn. 5:39).  But more than that, the OT reminds us that God is the one who saves his people.  The OT refrain is that salvation is of the Lord (Ps. 37:39; 68:20; 130:7-8; Lam. 3:26; Jonah 2:9).  Jesus is that salvation.  He is the righteousness of God: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, The Lord Our Righteousness” (Jer. 23:5-6).  The OT testifies to the fact that the righteousness of God is not a program; it’s a person, and that person is Jesus of Nazareth.

The manifestation of God’s righteousness in Christ is contrasted with the law.  The gospel reveals a righteousness “without [or, apart from] the law” (Rom. 3:21).  We cannot be saved by the law (20).  But let’s think more carefully what this means.  “Without the law” means, in part, without the sacrifices of the Levitical priesthood.  We are not justified by standing before a bloody altar with the dead body of an animal upon it, but before the cross of Christ.  We may not be tempted to want to go back to that, but the human race is still devoted to being religious and thinking that religion will save them.  But religion apart from Christ will save no one, any more than the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.  Jesus alone is the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6).

“Without the law,” means, in part, without circumcision.  Again, we may not be tempted like many of Paul’s contemporaries to trust in our Jewishness, especially if we are Gentiles!  But how many of us are tempted to trust in some sort of tribalism, to identify with some group and place our significance in belonging to that. I think for many today it’s a political party.  It is troubling how people have reacted to the last election, both on the right as well as on the left.  It’s clear that they are finding their identity and their salvation in politics and in political figures.  This is a problem.  Political figures and powerful people won’t save you.  They will always disappoint you.  But God does not call us to trust in earthly kings.  The righteousness of God comes apart from all that.

“Without the law,” means, in part, without law keeping, going about to establish one’s own righteousness.  We noted in our last message how futile this is.  God’s law cannot justify us; it cannot save us.  It can only condemn us.  That is not the way the righteousness of God comes.  It comes through Christ, and Christ alone!

I cannot emphasize this enough.  The righteousness of God is not something we achieve; it is something we receive.  We are not saved by our merit or righteousness or being good enough.  We are saved solely through the intervention of God in history in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are justified not because of us but because of Christ. The author of justification is God in Christ.

That leads me to one final consideration this morning.  It has to do with how we receive this gift of the righteousness of God, how we are justified.

The Reception of Justification

I’ve just said that justification is not something we achieve; it is something we receive.  Now the question is: how do we receive it?  To see the answer this question, I want you to note carefully what Paul says in verse 22: “the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe.” 

How does the righteousness of God come to us?  “By faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe.”  In other words, it comes through the instrumentality of faith in Christ.  “Faith of Jesus Christ” means “the faith of which Jesus Christ is the object,” or, if you like, “faith in Jesus Christ.”  There are some who object and say that it means “the faith of which Jesus Christ is the subject,” or the “faithfulness of Jesus Christ.”  At the end of the day I don’t think it matters that much because they both express true statements.  However, I do think Paul means faith in Jesus Christ, partly because of the way he goes on to qualify this: “unto all and upon all them that believe.”  In other words, Paul is answering the question, “Are all who have faith in Christ justified?”  And the answer is yes, it is unto all and upon all them that believe in him.

You see this also in verse 25, where we are told that Christ has become a propitiation – an atoning sacrifice – “through faith in his blood.”  You see it in verse 26, where we are told that God is the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus.

In fact, you see this all over the NT.  It would probably take me too long to list all the references.  But let me support my case with a few others.  In Gal. 2:16, Paul tells us, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.”  Note that: “even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ.”  He doesn’t say, “We believed that we were justified.”  He doesn’t say, “We believed because we were justified.”  He says, “We believed [in order] that we might be justified.”  

He will press the issue further in the 3rd chapter of Galatians [note especially verse 8]: “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham” (Gal. 3:6-9).

Now you may wonder why I am emphasizing this.  I do so because you have all sorts of people today who will tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a person comes to faith in Christ or not.  You can be justified before God even if you reject the gospel of Christ.  Certainly many non-Christians would want to say that, but even some professing Christians who think that God is going to save everyone, universalists, will say this.  But as you see, this is not the Biblical position.  On the contrary, we are told, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (Jn. 3:36).

There are others who downplay this for other reasons.  There are those who preach eternal justification, that God from eternity justified his elect.  But this is not a Biblical position; it is confusing God’s purpose to justify with the act of justification itself.  The Bible clearly says that we believe to be justified.  That makes justification follow faith, not the other way around.  We are called to faith, and then we are justified, according to the apostle in Rom. 8:30 (cf. 2 Thess. 2:13-14).

Now at this point I hear an objection: but what about infants dying in infancy?  There are other categories of people they will usually trot out in addition to this, but I will deal with this one for the sake of the argument.  The objection, you see, is this.  If we insist that a person is only justified when they believe, well then, infants can’t believe and so therefore any infant dying in infancy is automatically lost.  They think this is an unanswerable argument!

The first thing I want to say to this is that it totally ignores what the Scripture actually has to say.  The Bible never says that we are justified in eternity, for example, or that it doesn’t matter if we believe in terms of our eternal salvation, but it says again and again that we are justified by faith, and calls upon us to believe that we might be justified.  And, by the way, justification by faith is not something which is reflected in my consciousness; this is not about the assurance of our justification.  Rather, it “is the divine act of acquittal and acceptance, and it is precisely this which is said to be by faith” (John Murray).  There may be real problems that we perceive this causes, but perceived problems don’t give us an excuse to ignore or twist the meaning of the apostle here.  Let’s accept the Bible for what it says, rather than letting our objections cause us to ignore it.

But the next thing I want to say to this objection is that it not only ignores the plain teaching of Scripture, but what they are claiming doesn’t even logically follow, even if you accept that all infants dying in infancy are saved (I am happy, by the way, to accept that!).  Let me give my daughter Emma as an example.  She cannot eat food through her mouth.  It has to go directly into her stomach through a G-button.  A fork would therefore be a useless instrument for her.  But that does not mean that forks aren’t useful instruments for everyone else!  So even if you say that infants can’t exercise faith in the way Paul envisions here (that’s not necessarily obvious though), so that faith isn’t an instrument in their justification, that doesn’t mean that faith isn’t an instrument in the justification of others.

Now at this point I anticipate another objection.  And the objection is this: “Aren’t you advocating for two ways of salvation?”  And the answer is no.  The answer is no because faith is the instrument, not the basis of our salvation.  A fork may be an instrument that gets the food to the mouth, but the fork doesn’t satisfy your hunger!  Faith is the instrument, the hand that receives the free gift of God’s righteousness; it is not the righteousness itself.  Everyone, no exceptions, is justified on the basis of God’s righteousness.  Faith in Christ is simply the divinely appointed means that brings that righteousness to us.  And even that faith is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8).

As a minister of the gospel, I have to ask myself what the Bible commands me to say to my audience.  What is the message I am commanded to deliver?  I am supposed to be an ambassador of Christ. I don’t get to choose my message; I have to be faithful to his message.  I’m a kerux, a town-crier, telling out the message of the King.  What does he say to us?  What is my message?  It is this: I am commissioned to tell you that you have sinned against God your Creator, that all of you are rebels.  You are therefore under the ban of the universe and the wrath of God is upon you.  But there is good news; the King against whom you have sinned has sent an embassy of peace in Jesus Christ, and the terms of this embassy are that you are to repent of your rebellion against him and to embrace Christ as Lord and Savior.  And the promise is that all who do so will have all their sins forgiven and will be declared righteous before God and accepted into his family.  This is the message again and again as we see it in the book of Acts.  Peter preached to his audience: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19).  Paul preached to his audience: “Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses” (13:38-39).

By the way, there is not a shred of contradiction between saying that and believing in the doctrine of election, is there?  For just a few verses later in Acts 13, we read, “And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (48).

Why does God do it this way?  Why does he bring his righteousness to us through faith?  It’s not because faith makes us worthy.  Faith doesn’t merit God’s favor; faith is not the righteousness. Remember, it is simply the open hand of the beggar that receives the free gift.

I will tell you why I think God saves us by grace through faith.  It is because faith is extrospective.  Saving faith causes us to look away from ourselves to Christ.  Faith is the lens through which we see the glory of Christ in all his saving work.  It is by faith that we see and know the glory of God in Jesus.  You see, at the end of the day, the glory of God is the end for which God created the world.  It is in our unbelief that we sin and fall short of the glory of God.  And it is by faith that we arise again to see and love and know that love that God has for us.  God not only saves us, but he causes us to know it.  He wants us to see it and to savor it, to taste and see that the Lord is good.  God brings us to faith because God loves us, because the best thing for us is to be satisfied with the saving goodness of God in Christ.  As John Owen put it, “The contemplation of the glory of Christ . . . .will lift the minds and hearts of believers above all the troubles of this life, and is the sovereign antidote that will expel all the poison that is in them; which otherwise might perplex and enslave their souls.”  It is faith that gives us the ability to contemplate the glory of Christ that is the sovereign antidote that expels all the poison that is in us.

And so, my friend, Jesus Christ is presented in the gospel as the one, and the only one, through whom we can obtain God’s righteousness and be justified and saved.  And he is presented as the one on whom we are called to entrust ourselves.  Repent, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out through Jesus Christ.  And to all of us, let’s keep coming to Christ, keep embracing him as our Lord and Savior, always resting upon his for our salvation and life.