Three Gospel Inferences (Rom. 3:27-31)

Book Illustration of the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector

The fundamental, and therefore the most important, reality in the universe is God.  God is the reality upon which every other thing exists.  Atoms exists because God exists.  The laws of physics operate because there is a God of physics.  There is right and wrong because there is a Judge of all the earth.  There is beauty because God is the ground of all that is truly pleasing, the ground of all that is good.  There is love because God is love.  To know God is eternal life, and to be included in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity is the destiny for the eternal wellbeing and joy and God’s chosen people.

On the other hand, to be cut off from God is to be cut off from the ground of all order, holiness, justice, beauty, love, and joy.  It results in chaos.  Hell will be the place in the age to come where this chaos will be fully manifest: a place of fathomless darkness and unrelenting pain and unremitting grief.  Our sins have separated us from our God and our iniquities have hidden his face from us (Isa. 59:1-2).  Our willful rebellion has brought upon us the just wrath of God, and unless this wrath is turned away, there is no real hope for us.

But the message of the gospel is the good news that there is hope in Christ, that he has bridged the gap between man and God, a gulf created by Adam and enlarged by our own deliberate depravity.  The message of the gospel is that sinners can be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ on the basis of his atonement which redeems us from our bondage to sin, propitiates God’s holy and just wrath against us, and expiates the guilt of our sin.  The gospel tells us that this is not something we have to work for or merit or even prepare ourselves for.  It is something that we receive by faith as a gift of grace.  By faith, our sins are forgiven, and we receive the righteousness of God in Christ, upon which we are declared to be righteous in his sight. That is the gospel.  There is no better news than this, and this is what the apostle Paul has been unpacking for us in the previous verses, negatively in 1:18-3:20, and then positively in 3:21-26.  

Now the apostle will go on in these verses (27-31) to say that the gospel has very practical implications for our lives.  But I don’t want us to think that the gospel is valuable primarily because of these practical implications.  The gospel is valuable primarily because through faith in Christ we are reconciled with God.  That is infinitely more important than any other problem we are facing or can possibly face.  You and I need God, and, having God in Christ, we have everything.  In Christ, God is our Shepherd so that we will not want (Ps. 23:1).  I can be like the poor beggar who was laid at the rich man’s door, but if I have Christ I have eternal hope.  On the other hand, I can have every earthly blessing, but if I do not have Christ one day I will lift up my eyes, being in torment (Lk. 16:19-31).  

But that doesn’t mean that the gospel should not have a profound effect upon our life in the here and how, and upon the way we think, feel, and act.  Yes, it does.  And we will see that in these verses.  After all, news as big and monumental and hope-giving as this is going to necessarily have ripple effects spreading out into every part of the lives of those who are affected by it.  And this in fact is true.  The realities of the gospel which  transform our relationship to the God of the universe naturally transforms our relationship to God’s universe and everything in it. It impacts all of our life. And so now in the verses before us, the apostle is unpacking a few of these inferences from the doctrine of justification by faith.  

So what specifically is Paul doing here?  Having elaborated the gospel in the doctrine of justification by faith, he now draws three inferences from it.  The inferences are that (1) justification by faith promotes humility by excluding boasting, (2) it promotes missions by removing distinctions, and (3) it promotes holiness by upholding the law. 

These issues were of particular concern in Paul’s day, especially in terms of the interaction between the church and the Jewish community.  Remember that Paul generally began his evangelistic efforts in the synagogue.  And moreover, he defines the gospel in this very letter as that which has Jewish priority: it is the gospel “to the Jews first.”  They are God’s historic covenant people.  So it is not merely a matter of missional convenience to address their concerns; it was a matter of theological fidelity to do so.  And so the apostle wants his Jewish family to see that the gospel does not invalidate faithfulness to God’s own word in the law.  That is essentially what he is doing here; there is nothing in the gospel which is fundamentally contrary to the law of God.  Indeed, the law is upheld by the very gospel that Paul proclaims.

Let’s consider each implication in turn.

The gospel promotes humility by excluding boasting

“Where is boasting then?  It is excluded.  By what law?  Of works?  Nay: but by the law of faith.  Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (27-28).  We might not normally think of the OT in terms of the prohibition of boasting, but the emphasis in it on the dangers of pride, which is everywhere, especially in the wisdom literature, illustrates the fact that what Paul is doing here is showing that the tendency of the gospel message is not in a different direction from the OT.  “Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly: but the proud he knoweth afar off.” (Ps. 138:6).  Of the seven abominations that Solomon mentions in Proverbs 6, “a proud look” is the first on the list (Prov. 6:16-17).  And then there is that great word in the prophesy of Isaiah: “For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” (Isa. 57:15).  So here we see that the message of the gospel is in keeping with this emphasis in OT.  The two are compatible in terms of this spirit of humility which is promoted in both.

Now it’s probable that Paul’s main reason here in pointing this out is to undermine the pretense for pride in some of his Jewish brethren, who looked on the Gentiles with disdain.  Apparently some Jews found a reason for boasting in the law, by interpreting it as a law of works.  That is, they saw the law as a way to merit the favor of God by their law-keeping.  Of course, if you have merited the favor of God, then that means that you are better than those who haven’t, and that gives you a ground for boasting.  The apostle will come back to this in 4:1-5.  There he will say that Abraham didn’t having anything to boast about since he was justified by faith and not by works: “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.  But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” (4:4-5).

This emphasis on works-righteousness therefore put the law-keeper at odds with the requirement for humility before God.  But the apostle says that the gospel undermines this.  Why?  Because the gospel is not a law of works but a law of faith (or “principle of faith”: here I think the apostle is using the word law metaphorically in terms of a principle).  Though Paul’s Jewish brethren thought they were keeping the law by opposing the gospel, the apostle shows that actually the gospel preserves the very spirit of the OT better than themselves.

In opposition to works-righteousness or salvation by merit, the gospel tells us that we can only be made right, not by looking to ourselves but by receiving by faith what Christ has done for us.  We are “justified by faith without the deeds of the law.”  Thus there is no room for boasting in yourself.  For you can’t boast in yourself if you are not looking at yourself or trusting in yourself.

I want to emphasize again two things about the role of faith and justification.  First, the fact that Paul consistently puts faith in contrast to works shows that faith is not the reason we are justified; it is not the basis of our justification.  Faith is simply the divinely ordained means by which we freely receive the gift of salvation in Christ.  God has chosen faith to be the occasion upon which the sinner is justified because saving faith is reliance upon Christ, not upon one’s own works.  

But there are folks who talk about faith as if it were the reason we are saved, as if faith by its very nature causes God to become favorable toward us.  Faith really is looked upon by some as if the gospel were merely a dumbed-down law of works by which we merit heaven by something we do, namely, believe.  But faith does not justify us because of its quality, nor does faith make us worthy before God.  You don’t become more justified if your faith becomes stronger, nor do you become less justified when you are weak in faith.  Faith in Christ only justifies us because by it we receive the righteousness of God.  Again, it is not man’s righteousness that saves us; it is not our righteousness in any sense.  It is the righteousness of God in Christ that saves us, received as a gift of grace by faith alone.  Faith is the instrument of justification, not the basis or ground of justification.  We are justified by or through faith, not on account of or on the basis of faith.  Faith is the cup that God puts in our hands by which we receive the water of life in Christ.

The other thing I want to say about the relation between faith and justification is that since faith is the divinely appointed means of justification, it follows that faith in Christ in necessary for salvation.  There are those who want to make faith more than what it is.  But there are also those who want to make faith less than it is, and that is what we are dealing with here. Justification is essential to salvation.  Clearly, you cannot be saved if you are still under condemnation by God.  The Bible explicitly tells us that God has determined that he will justify those who believe (Rom. 3:28, 30).  And on the other hand, we have express declarations in Scripture that those who reject Christ and the gospel and go on in unbelief will not be saved.  We are told that our Lord Jesus will return “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:8).  We are justified by faith, which means that if we do not have faith in Christ, if we have not committed ourselves to him as Lord and Savior, then we are not justified.  And if we are not justified, then according to Rom. 8:30, we have not been called by God, nor, if we remain so, will we be glorified in the age to come.  Trusting in Christ is not just a temporal icing on the cake of eternal salvation; it is inseparable from it, and God has made it so.  May we never put asunder what God has put together.

The emphasis here upon humility and the exclusion of boasting is important for a number of reasons.  For one thing, it’s the only position consistent with salvation by grace.  As Paul will put it in 4:16, “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace.”  Salvation by grace humbles us before God by reminding us that we cannot save ourselves.  This is just reality: to fail to humble ourselves before God is to live in a delusion.  We do not receive salvation because we earned it; we receive it as beggars. In fact, the way God saves people underlines the fact that he alone is the one who ought to receive the glory (1 Cor. 1:26-31). We need to be reminded of this because this is not just a Jewish problem, it’s a human problem.  As John Stott puts it, “all human beings are inveterate boasters.  Boasting is the language of our fallen self-centeredness.”  Paul had already written to the Christians in Corinth who loved to boast in their wisdom, “For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).  Every boast is a denial of grace and a brick in our own Tower of Babel of pride and achievement.  Better to knock it down than to have God humble us: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

Another reason this is important is because the reason we exist is to glorify God.  But we cannot live lives that glorify God if we are boasting about ourselves: these are incompatible modes of living.  Either you live for the glory of God, or you live for yourself; you cannot do both.  This is the point of the Isaiah passage we referred to earlier.  God dwells in two places: he dwells in the high and lofty place, and he dwells with those who are lowly and contrite.  In other words, God does not dwell with those who worship themselves.  Rather, God seeks those who worship him (Jn. 4:24).  

And this leads us to a third reason.  If God made you to worship him, it is futile to seek true fulfillment in any other way.  In other words, if you want to be truly happy, don’t live for yourself; worship God.  Now this is not to say that there aren’t plenty of people out there who are perfectly content without God.  I don’t deny that there are.  However, to use C. S. Lewis’ analogy, it is also possible to be perfectly content making mud pies in the slums because you don’t have any idea what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  In fact, however, we know by experience that the best way to become a miserable person is to become fixated on yourself.  I like the way John Piper put it once: to worship yourself is like going to the Alps and then locking yourself in a room full of mirrors.  Everyone knows what it means to be “taken out of yourself,” to experience something transcendent as the way to experience something truly delightful and wonderful.  But the one who transcends every category of wonder and beauty and power and wisdom is God himself.  Everything else that we worship can only be a faint image of the God who made it.  If we refuse to worship him, we are only robbing ourselves of the purest and best and lasting joy.  And it is the reason idolatry is not only wicked, but pathetic and heartbreaking.

Pride is dangerous because it is the root of so many evils.  It is the root of selfishness because it puts oneself before others.  It is the root of unforgiveness because it blinds us to our own need for mercy.  It the root of lust and covetousness because it makes us think that we deserve better than what we have.  It is the root of anger because we fail to see that the people who annoy us are less important than people themselves.  And on and on.  This is the reason why we read that humbling ourselves always precedes God’s blessing upon us, as in the famous words of God to King Solomon: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).  Or as the apostle James put it, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (Jam. 4:10).  And the apostle Peter: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time” (1 Pet. 5:6).  If pride is the root of sin and destruction, humility is the root of virtue and of God’s blessing upon us.

This means that if we kill boasting, we will inevitably become better people: more forgiving, more sacrificial, more loving, more longsuffering, and more contented.  Isn’t this the kind of person you want to become?  The only path to it is the path of humility.

And the gospel is the only sure path to humility.  Again, I want to point out that I’m not saying there aren’t humble people out there who don’t believe the gospel.  We should expect that there would be since all men and women are made in the image of God whether they are saved or not.  However, I do want to point out that secularism, which is the clearest alternative to the gospel here in the West, gives you no reason to be humble (despite protests to the contrary).  For secularism has no place for the grace and mercy of God.  The only salvation it knows is a salvation that man bestows upon himself.  And that being the case, the secular mind has every reason to boast and pride.  Secularism has no argument against despising those who are different than yourself.  Secularism gives no reason to show grace to those who are not in its tribe.  The gospel, on the other hand, says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” whether that neighbor is a conservation or liberal, white or black, Christian or non, your spouse or your enemy.  Why?  Because we are saved by a love that we didn’t deserve and which we received, not by merit, but by faith alone.

But that’s not the only inference the apostle draws out.  

The gospel promotes missions by removing distinctions

“[Or] is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.” (3:29-30).  Another emphasis in the OT is the emphasis on the world-wide extent of the blessing of Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).  However, the Jewish exclusivism that plagued Paul’s nation lost sight of this facet of the blessing of Abraham.  Salvation is not just for the Jews but also for the Gentiles since God is the God of both.  Unlike the false gods of the nations, the God of Israel is not just a tribal deity, but the God of the whole earth.

When Paul says that God is the God of the Jews and Gentiles, I think what he is saying is that God is the God who saves Gentiles as well as Jews.  Yes, God is the God of all men in terms of creation.  But sometimes when God says to people, “I am your God,” what he means is that he is for them in a saving way.  This, surely, is the point of the New Covenant (Jer. 31:33), and what lies behind Rev. 21:3, “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”  So the apostle is arguing here that God saves Jew and Gentile.  This is, of course, in complete agreement with the message of the OT.

The apostle is saying that the gospel proves that God saves both Jew and Gentile because salvation – justification – is not a matter of law-keeping but rather a matter of faith.  By wrongly emphasizing the law – both its ceremonial and moral aspects – the Jews had made salvation a matter for Jews only.  The only way to be saved was to be part of the people of God which they defined solely in terms of belonging to Israel and that meant obeying the law of Moses.  However, in doing so they actually ended up running contrary to the actual teaching of both the law and the prophets.  Salvation, even in the OT, is not seen as only for Israel but for all the nations.  The gospel, on the other hand, maintains this balanced perspective.

Salvation is available for all because justification is not offered to us on the basis of law-keeping but on the basis of faith.  Neither Jew nor Gentile could keep the law as the basis of acceptance with God.  But faith opens a door through which all may go in.

And this means that the gospel is a gospel for all the world.  The word for “Gentiles” is the word for “nations.”  The gospel is a gospel for the nations (cf. Matt. 29:18-20).  Of course, it begins with those around us here at home.  We ought to be a light so that those around us can see the gospel in our lives and hear it from our lips.  But we don’t stop there: we go on to help those who are bringing the gospel into all the world and to take it there ourselves if God so allows us to go.  The gospel is not something for us to hold on to; it is something for us to share and if we are unwilling to do that, it means that we have missed something very fundamental to the gospel.

There is another way to look at this as well.  To believe the gospel means that we do not see our particular tribe to be more favored than others in terms of our worthiness before God.  It means that we do not look down on others or maintain a posture of superiority.  For God is not the God of the Jews only, but also of everyone else.  We are not saved because our upbringing was better than someone else’s.  We are not saved because of our education.  We are not saved because we aren’t as bad as the next person.  Justification by faith rules that out completely.  To accept this doctrine means that we accept the fact that we cannot save ourselves, that we are not good enough.  That cuts out racism, and it cuts out snobbery of any kind.  It makes us approachable and sympathetic people.  That is to say, it makes us more like our Savior.

Now I’m not saying that a Christian can’t be a patriot or love his country.  I’m not saying that a Christian can’t appreciate aspects of his heritage and culture and upbringing.  But what I am saying is that if we have truly embraced the gospel, we don’t make these things barriers for bringing the gospel to others or welcoming others into our lives.  Rather, we follow our Savior by welcoming the outcasts and the marginalized and loving them with the love of our Savior – who loves us with a love that is both infinitely to be desired and yet complete undeserved.

This brings us to our final point.

The gospel promotes holiness by upholding the law

Finally, the apostle concludes by saying, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law” (31).  Now the first question here is, what does Paul mean by “the law”?  Because a lot of people read that and just think Paul is talking about the boundary markers like circumcision and the like, which distinguished Jew from Gentile.  However, as Tom Schreiner points out, “law” in Paul regularly refers to the commands of the Mosaic institution.  Though some of these are boundary markers, most of them have to do with living before a holy God and which are applicable to Gentile as well as Jew.  The argument against the gospel would have been that it led to antinomianism and licentiousness.  For if we are saved simply by faith, what need have we for holiness before God?

Paul answers by saying that “we uphold the law.”  What does he mean by that?  How does the gospel uphold the law?  Though Paul does not give a complete answer here, I believe he does address this later on, especially in chapters 6-8, and this indicates what the apostle meant.

First, he surely meant that faith in Christ incompatible with a life in sin.  This is certainly what he is getting at in Romans 6.  Faith upholds the law by enabling the Christian to live under the grace of God which empowers us to truly fight the sin in our hearts.  Faith empowers obedience.  Faith is not an excuse for sin but the freedom to truly fight it for the first time.  We need to remember that the apostles didn’t just preach faith, but faith and repentance, for you cannot have one without the other.

The irony is that the law itself gives no power for obedience.  Faith actually gives us the power to be law-keepers: not in the sense of keeping the law for the purpose of meriting God’s favor out of fear, but for keeping it for the purpose of pleasing the One who saved us out of love.  Faith upholds the law; the law can’t uphold itself.

Another way that faith upholds the law is by pointing us to the one who fulfills the law in every jot and tittle (Mt. 5:17-18).  Yes, there are aspects of the law that no longer apply, but the reason they don’t apply is because they are fulfilled in Christ.  For example, we don’t sacrifice goats because Christ is our sacrifice.  In this way, the law is not abolished but fulfilled.

He also fulfilled God’s moral law by expiating the sin that brought the just wrath of God against us (Rom. 3:25-26).  God’s law has thus not been done away; it has received notice it deserves, being fulfilled by Christ for us and by the Holy Spirit in us.

So let me ask you: has the doctrine of justification by faith made a difference in your life?  Has it made a difference in your relationships?  Has it promoted humility in you?  Do you really believe that what makes you different in any good way is the grace of God and that on your own you only deserve God’s just wrath?  Has it promoted a desire to see all the families of the earth to taste and see that the Lord is good?  Do we have this missionary impulse both individually and corporately?  And has it promoted holiness in us?  The gospel of grace doesn’t lead to hedonistic libertinism but to a holy lifestyle.  Christ not only fulfills the law for us but he also creates in us a desire to live for and please God.  Indeed, let the fragrance of the gospel sweeten every aspect of our lives and adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things (Tit. 2:10).