This morning, we are continuing our series on Romans title Paul’s Magnum Opus. And in this series, we will be going verse by verse through what is arguably Paul’s greatest work, and that is saying something considering Paul wrote over a third of the New Testament.
And to this point, Paul has spent a considerable amount of time explaining the situation that we as humans find ourselves in … and it isn’t great. As we have seen for the past few weeks, Paul has been demonstrating to his Jewish audience the reality that they and all other Jews are in the same place as the Gentiles when it comes to facing God’s judgment and wrath.
Sure, there are advantages to being a Jew, but all humans have this problem that leaves us in a bad place … sin. Paul has been making it clear that our sin problem leaves us all unrighteousness and facing a righteous God, which isn’t a great place to be because that means we are subject to His judgment and wrath.
But with Paul talking about this for so long, I think we can forget how we arrived here. Paul has been talking about this major problem we all have, but why? Why has he used so much ink to tell his audience this? To answer this, we need to remember where we started … 1:16-17.
Romans 1:16–17 ESV
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Paul made it clear that he is not ashamed of the gospel … the good news. He goes on to say that this gospel good news is the power of God for salvation for all who believe. So Paul is talking about this incredible news that all who believe in God will not face God’s wrath. Instead, they will be saved! That is truly good news.
And this is the main point that started everything in this letter. Paul talks about the gospel, and how it is our salvation. But our salvation from what. Well, that is what so much of what follows was about.
God is righteous, and we are unrighteous. So God’s wrath and justice are against those who are unrighteous. And the Jewish people and Christians should not think that they will not face God’s justice and wrath simply because they have things like the law … God’s will and way and standards and expectations… and practices handed down from God like circumcision.
Instead, all humans are under God’s judgment and wrath. Again, God’s righteousness is against the unrighteous, which is all of us because of sin … our rebellion against God. And that is how it has to be because God is God. And let me explain what I mean by that.
When we defined righteousness as it pertains to God, we defined it this way: the righteousness of God is the work of God in the world and in our lives to bring us into right relationship with Him while always acting in accordance with His nature and who He is
So each part of that is important. God’s righteousness is His work to bring sinful humans back into right relationship with Himself. But as the second part makes clear, God will always act in accordance with His nature and who He is.
To understand this, just think of His attributes. God is good, loving, just and so much more. So while God desires to bring us back into right relationship with Him, He cannot act outside of His own character and attributes.
And that makes sense, right? God is obviously always God … He cannot act any other way but with what makes Him God. So when it comes to God’s righteousness, He will always act in accordance with who He is.
And that may start to get a little confusing, but it is important to understand. For God to be God, He is a certain way with certain attributes like goodness, love, and justice among others. And God must act in accordance with His attributes … it is what makes Him righteous.
And that doesn’t seem like great news for us as sinners. While God wants to make us right with Him, He will always act out of who He is … He will always act justly. He cannot act any other way but justly. God cannot be unjust. If He was, then He wouldn’t be God. So that means the just thing to do is to judge us and punish us with His wrath since we are unrighteous sinners.
Paul talked about how all humans have at least a general idea of who God is and what He demands (our conscience), but as humans, we have traded the glory of God for other things. We have rejected and rebelled against God.
So while God wants to bring us back to Himself … to make us righteous … He can’t just overlook our sin and unrighteousness. To do that would be unjust, and God cannot be unjust since He is a just God. So this leaves us in a bit of a pickle. How can God make us righteous?
Well, we saw how God’s righteousness is demonstrated in His law. God’s law is His will and way and standards and demands for us as humans. So, if we could just keep the law of God perfectly, well, then we could be righteous. Hurray! That’s the ticket to being right with God again!
But there is a problem, right? It is impossible to keep God’s law perfectly. So while God’s righteousness … His work to bring us back into right relationship with Himself … is demonstrated in His law, we cannot fulfill it. So we become lawbreakers, which seems to just make matters worse. So despite our best efforts, we can’t get to God through the law.
As a matter of fact, that is why God gave the law. It wasn’t to give us a way to get to Him ourselves and make us righteous through our works and effort. Instead, it was actually given to show us clearly how far we fall short of God’s righteousness and how helpless our situation really is when it comes to earning our way back into right relationship with God.
The truth is, we can never measure up on our own … we can never do enough in ourselves to be made righteous.That is why last week we saw how Paul quoted the scriptures that said that no one is righteous, not a single person. No one does good, not a single one.
What this means is that God desires to bring us back into right relationship with Himself, so He gives us this law … not to provide the way for us to get back to Him, but to instead highlight how bad and terrible our sin problem is …
If that seems weird, just look at something absolutely critical to the lives of God’s people … the Day of Atonement.During this special day in the life of God’s people, the people’s sins would be forgiven … atoned for … by different sacrifices. And when that happened, they could be right with God.
But as we know now through the lens we have now as followers of God who understand Christ and all He has done … and having God’s word to explain everything to us … the practices that the people did on this special day did not actually take away their sins and make them right with God … the blood of goats and bulls could never take away sins (Hebrews 10:4).
Instead, what was actually happening on that day was a yearly reminder of the people’s sin problem (Hebrews 10:3).Again, the people were faced with their sin problem every year, and they were reminded of their inability to remedy it.
They needed something else besides what they could do to be made right with God. Unfortunately, even though they participated in that day, they were still unrighteous facing the just wrath of a righteous God. So they needed another way to be made right with God.
So that was a whole lot that I just went over. Let’s take a breath for a second. But it is important we understand all of it before we get to where we are going. Really, you can boil it down to this … we are sinners and that makes us unrighteous before a righteous God … which means we are facing His judgment and wrath.
Now, as I say this … going back to what Paul said earlier in chapter 1 … this hardly seems like good news like Paul said it was. Remember, Paul talked about the good news … the gospel … that is salvation for all who believe. But where is this salvation and good news?
Well, verse 17 gave us a preview. Paul doesn’t talk about God’s righteousness being manifested through the law as it had been before. Instead, Paul talks about God’s righteousness being revealed from faith and for faith.
So instead of God making us righteous by living according to the law and keeping it … which we saw could not make us righteous because we can’t keep it … now, Paul says the righteous will live by faith. In other words, we won’t be made right with God through what we do, but we will be made righteous by faith. And this is the good news Paul has been talking about.
So after using almost the entire book so far to unpack our human sin problem and how we can’t fix it ourselves, Paul now begins to finally unpack the solution to our sin problem. And it directly echos what he talked about earlier.
Last week, we saw Paul establish the imagery of us in the courtroom facing a just and righteous judge’s wrath because of our sin and unrighteousness. We are the defendant standing before God … the righteous judge. And the law is making a case against us.
And the law is making the perfect case against us that we should be judged and face God’s wrath because … as is demonstrated clearly through the law … we cannot live up to God’s standard and demands.
Every human falls short and misses the mark of following God’s will and way. We don’t have the ability to keep it, and it reveals the extent and problem of our sin problem. So the case against us through law that we are unrighteous and should face God’s judgment and wrath is so strong that we cannot even say a word in our own defense.
It is a slam-dunk case against us. All of us have rejected and rebelled against God. Even those of us with God’s law … the way we could be right with God … we don’t come close. We fall short and all it does is show us the helpless and miserably unrighteous sinners we are.
We can’t be made right with God through the law, so it seems like we have no hope. Only God’s just and righteous wrath is left for us …. But then we get to the glorious verses that we are looking at this morning:
Romans 3:21–25 (ESV) 21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. …
All of a sudden, Paul pivots by saying that God’s righteousness is now demonstrated apart from the law. God’s work to bring humans back into right relationship with Himself is now being manifested outside of us being able to perfectly live up to God’s will and way and demands.
And that is good news because we could never do it due to the extent of our sin. So how is it being manifested in a new way? In verse 22, Paul tells us what this new way is … it is God’s righteousness as demonstrated through Jesus Christ through faith.
So instead of works and trying to fulfill the law for our forgiveness of sins and righteousness, now faith is the mechanism for our righteousness. And it is through faith in Jesus and what He accomplished for us in His life, death, and resurrection that we will be made right with God. And incredibly, it is available for all who believe. We don’t have to do or earn anything!
In verse 23, Paul brings has been saying about our sin problem to this new reality of God’s righteousness. All are humans are sinners and have fallen short of God and what He demands and His glory (and how we should glorify Him).
If you were to go back to verse 20. Paul said that we can never be justified by the law and trying to do what the law required. It wasn’t the point of the law and it is impossible. Instead, He says that we are justified by God’s grace. And that loving grace takes the form of Jesus.
And verses 23-25 are so critical. This should be underlined and highlighted in all of your Bibles. It is a beautifully succinct and theologically rich way that Paul boils down the entire gospel message. Again … expounding on what he said earlier in chapter 1.
We all are sinners and fall short. We are justified not of anything we do or can do. Our justification … how we are made righteous and right with God … comes from only one way … God’s loving grace. And it is completely a gift.
And obviously, you don’t earn a gift. When you are given what you deserve, that is your payment or due. But that is not what is happening here. God’s grace is a gift. So don’t run past that descriptor. It is truly a gift.
And it is truly an incredible gift by God. God did not owe us anything. Think back to the courtroom imagery. We are the defendant who cannot defend themselves at all. We cannot say anything in our defense. We rightfully deserve God’s wrath.
But God is showing us grace. He is not only not giving us what we deserve, but He is actually giving us what we don’t deserve through redemption in Christ Jesus.
Jesus came to live the life we could never live … perfectly fulfilling the law … and die as a sacrifice for us and be raised from the dead in power so that we can receive salvation and not face God’s wrath … we can finally be made righteous. And all of this is received through faith.
Whew! Is everyone OK this morning? I mean, we covered some ground. There was more theology in this message than you may have ever had in any other message before. It was so difficult to write because there is so much there … it is so dense and rich …
But as I say this, you can maybe think that this seems like a wasted message of sorts. Of course, if you knew all this before, you understand it is important, but you could say, “Of course we know this Bo! I was hoping for some other deep good stuff! We know the gospel already!”
But that is often our problem, isn’t it? We are looking for something else when we either forget or don’t understand the gospel like we claim to. And the words Paul uses here, he is not only reaffirming what this good news is, but he is boiling it all down to a few incredible lines.
That is why I said that these verses should be underlined and highlighted in your Bible. Committed to memory honestly. Because in these few words, Paul makes it clear what this good news he is talking about is. And it isn’t just John 3:16 … these are theologically rich!
And it is something we should all be able to recall and repeat at all times. It is that important. If we could remember these words and what they mean, so many of our problems and issues as Christians would be eliminated or at least quelled.
These verses are so important that some argue this is the central point of Paul’s entire letter. Martin Luther thought it was and even went as far as to say that this point of the entire Bible. I mean, if the great reformer thought this, you know they are important!
That is how powerful and important these words are. And so, for the next couple of weeks, I am going to unpack these verses to help us understand them to a greater degree. To really make sure we get these important words.
Because if you forget everything else about this series … if you remember nothing else … man, I hope that you remember verses 23-25 (and really through verse 26 as we will see). I truly believe if we knew and understood these words, we would be changed.
But before I jump into a deep dive into these verses, let me make sure this is clear … the center of these verses … the main thrust is simple … we all have a sin problem and are under God’s wrath …
There is nothing we can do. But God’s righteousness is manifested … God’s glorious plan to make us right with Him and bring us back into relationship with Himself … it is not manifest through the law like it seemed before …
Instead, God’s plan to make us righteous is manifested through the loving grace He gives us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus … that is our redemption. And we do nothing for this … it is a gift. We simply receive it by faith.
So to boil it down … these verses and this entire section come down to this reality … we are justified by faith alone!!
So incredibly, all this is how God’s righteousness is made clear … how God could make us righteous again while acting completely within His character and who He is. It is incredible who God is able to do this …
It almost doesn’t make sense when you think about it … through Jesus, a just God can justify the ungodly … the righteous can spare His wrath against the unrighteous … and He can do it all while maintaining His character and righteousness.
And in these few words that we looked at this morning, Paul summarizes how it is possible to balance these realities. And it is the key to the gospel.
So again, highlight these unbelievable words, and I hope you memorize them also. That is how important they are. But this isn’t just an academic exercise. This truly is good news for all of us and our lives. And I hope that every person has experienced this themselves …
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