Romans 3

Subdivision 3. (Romans 3:21-31; Romans 4:1-25; Romans 5:1-11.)God manifested for us in Christ risen. We come therefore now to what is essentially Paul’s gospel, which, though it is based on what has been done on earth, was revealed to him from the opened heavens. In his ministry of it we are continually made to realize the manner of his conversion, which, spite of the exceptional miracle which was in it, he assures us to have been a pattern one (1 Timothy 1:16). The risen Christ is the central object before our eyes in all his presentation of it. Our justification, our acceptance, are in Him; and in Him God manifested as the Saviour God in raising up Jesus. He who was delivered for our offences has been raised again for our justification. It is just this resurrection side of the gospel -and there is no true gospel short of resurrection -which has been so much obscured in general; even in what is commonly known as evangelical doctrine; and this is what has made the epistle to the Romans itself to be accounted so difficult a book, which, as confessedly laying the foundations of our position before God, we should not expect it to be.

Here everything should be fully ascertained and assured; and we cannot but notice how careful Paul is to establish all he says, and to answer every gainsayer. In no other epistle is the appeal so constant to the Old Testament; and the objections from the side of experience are as carefully reviewed and answered. It is indeed as a wise master-builder that he lays the foundation (1 Corinthians 3:10), and if we are not able to realize this wisdom, it must be greatly to our loss. Without a firm foundation, we shall endanger all that is built upon it.

Romans 3:21-31

Section 1. (Romans 3:21-31.)A propitiation, for grace in righteousness towards an. The righteousness of God we have seen to be the power for salvation in the gospel. It is just that of which the convicted sinner is most afraid. He can believe that God is good; he can believe in His love to man; but that is not here the question. While careless himself, he could believe or hope that God would be found equally careless as to sin; but now the question of righteousness cannot so easily be settled; and God must be righteous in all He does. It is indeed the wonder of divine grace that it should reign through righteousness -that righteousness itself should provide and secure blessing for the lost and hopeless. And this is what we are now called to consider, -a righteousness which not only makes possible the security of all who flee for refuge to it, but absolutely ensures it. The procuring cause of this is a propitiation which displays fully God’s righteousness as to sin, so that there can be no more question of it when He receives the sinner, but the opposite: “He is faithful and just to forgive him his sins” (1 John 1:9).

1. Law then is confessedly unable to produce any righteousness on man’s part which can be accepted of God, or enable him to stand before God. It has done its work in convicting of sin; and that in such sort that it is proved that man’s way of works can never avail for him: he can bring nothing that is not soiled by the hands that bring it. Thus his mouth is stopped: he cannot perform, nor therefore promise; he is helpless and hopeless; the account as to man is closed; he is simply in the hands of God, to do with him as He will. If there is to be gospel, therefore, that is, “good news” for man, “apart from law” it must be. The law may witness to it, as it did, in its many types and shadows, in sacrifices which, as of bulls and goats, could never take away sin, but which thus by their own inefficacy pointed away from themselves to what they represented. The prophets amplified and made clearer these types of the law; and the hope of a Saviour to come grew through the ages of suspense. But the time of expectation merely is over: “righteousness of God is now manifest through faith of Jesus Christ towards all, and over all them that believe.” In the salvation of Israel yet to come, the Lord speaks through Isaiah of His righteousness as to be revealed (Isaiah 41:10; Isaiah 46:13; Isaiah 51:5-6; Isaiah 51:8; Isaiah 56:1). For a Jew, therefore, these thoughts could not be strange to bring together; and we must not fail to connect with such passages those which declared their righteousness to be of the Lord (Isaiah 45:24; Isaiah 54:17). These are not at all equivalent things, though they are things that would fit well together, to enable truly convicted souls to think peacefully of a day when God would act in righteousness and for the salvation of His people. But the salvation of Israel in the day to come is nevertheless very different from the gospel salvation with which we have here to do. Righteousness will be then displayed in judgment upon the foes of His earthly people; in the salvation here, though it act in judgment, yet only contrast is seen in this “strange work” indeed to which the Cross is witness. Here is a judgment upon sin which is the salvation of sinners!

The apostle has already spoken of righteousness of God revealed in good news to man; here also, as there, it is through faith or upon that principle, that such a thing can be. It is thus towards all men, and therefore where faith is found, it is over all such as have it: that is, it becomes for such like the roof that shelters from the storm, or like the shield that turns off every arrow of the enemy. That this is the true force of the statement will be clear, I think, if we take into consideration what it is connected with, as the apostle goes on to explain himself in what immediately follows. “Being justified,” he says, “freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Thus it is of justification that he is speaking, as plainly through all this part of Romans. This justification is by blood, or what is equivalent, “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus;” and here is that in which God’s righteousness in justifying is declared. But justification is acquittal: it is from sin -from any charge of it -and it is divine righteousness that acts in justifying, righteousness is just that attribute of God which is concerned in it: thus it is like a broad, effectual shield stretched over the believer, and for all like a house that with its open door invites men to take shelter from the coming storm of judgment. We must not make any confusion between this and the righteousness which is ours in Christ. The righteousness of God is not the robe that is put upon us, nor is that the theme in this first division of the epistle. In its nature also, the righteousness of God cannot be imputed to us; righteousness is imputed, as the apostle afterwards says, but that is another thing. “Over,” therefore, rather than “upon,” seems the proper rendering in this passage, which also seems preferable because it better implies the activity of God’s righteousness in justification. It is this that is directly and specifically concerned in a question of this nature. We hear it often put as if God’s being just and justifying meant His being just, though justifying; but that comes short of its proper force. For, as already said, in acquitting it is righteousness alone that has the case in hand.

In forgiving love may act; but in justifying, righteousness. And this is what makes the question of such intense importance for the convicted soul, and sets it so perfectly at rest when the divine sentence is pronounced. As to men in general, there is one need, and one gospel: “All have sinned,” says the apostle; and then he brings forward once more the verdict of the law, which Israel so well knew: “all come short of the glory of God.” That was what the veil hanging ever before the holiest, where God in very mercy to man must hide His glory from those who could not stand before Him, proved for those very people among whom He was pleased to dwell. Love came as near as it could come, and be love. And even to Moses, the mediator of the covenant, it had been said, “Thou canst not see My Face.” Such was man at his best under the measurement of law, which, chosen by man in his self-confidence, darkened the glorious Face that longed to shine upon him. But now, when the full object of law has been attained, and its tale of man has been told out, the grace to which after all the law was meant to minister is free to show itself; condemned by law, we are “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption, a “ransoming from,” owns and meets the requirements of righteousness, delivering us from the condition of convicted men. The price is not yet stated, but being accepted and paid, righteousness has no further demands upon us, but is henceforth on our side: it now demands our discharge from every accusation, and in Christ Jesus is this redemption found. Notice that it is already the risen Christ who is before us, as the order of the names distinctly indicates. Jesus was, as we know, the name given to Him at His birth, and is therefore His personal name as man; while Christ is His name of office upon which, His work of atonement being accomplished, He has now fully entered. Thus the precedence of either shows which is the predominant thought, whether Person or office. We are never said to be in Jesus, or in Jesus Christ; always in Christ, or in Christ Jesus. Here redemption is found for us in the Christ, who is Jesus, -in Him who has accomplished His work, and is in possession of the fruits of it. Him has God set forth a propitiatory, through faith, by His blood; this, as the Revised Version has it, is no doubt preferable to the common one, which reads, “through faith in His blood.” The word “propitiatory” is that used in the Septuagint for the “mercy-seat,” as it is also in the epistle to the Hebrews (9: 5), the only place in which it is found again in the New Testament. The mercy seat was the place in Israel in which atonement, or propitiation was “set forth” as the formal basis upon which God dwelt in relation with a sinful people. It was the throne of God, where He dwelt between the cherubim, and was made a “mercy-seat” by the blood sprinkled upon it. Thus “a propitiatory by His blood” is right; faith being that by which it is available to us, who now have such a throne of grace, the antitype of that ancient one, really accessible, as for Israel that ancient one was not. We have boldness to enter into the holy places, (where the mercy-seat stood), and Christ gone in to God is He through whom “grace reigns through righteousness.” The rent veil is here implied as the characteristic of Christianity, though the theme in Romans is not worship, as in Hebrews, but that acceptance with God which is fundamental to it. The gospel of the glory (Paul’s gospel) is thus in fact here. The typical blood upon the mercy-seat had to be renewed year by year; for the past year it manifested God’s righteousness in having gone on with the people as He had done; while it displayed for the future the basis upon which He could still go on. This aspect of the day of atonement is surely that to which the apostle now refers, though the survey now is as much more extensive as the blood of this one offering goes beyond all merely anticipatory ones. The propitiatory now set forth declares God’s righteousness “in regard to the passing by of sins done aforetime, through the forbearance of God;” as well as His righteousness in the present time, “that He may be just, and justifying him who is of the faith of Jesus.” That is, faith which has Jesus as its object. The Cross stands thus among the ages with its light shining over the generations past, and more brightly in the present time. It is strange that the apostle’s words should have been taken, with the help of the misleading “I say,” preserved in the Revised Version, to define the gospel justification as simply from past sins, leaving the future unassured to take care for itself. It is true, indeed, that one cannot speak of sins put away before they have been committed, and that the question of the future is not taken up as yet. But “the sins done aforetime” are not the sins of a man’s past life, but those of bygone ages, when yet the gospel was not, as now, declared, and sins for which the legal sacrifices had no provision could only be met by what was truly uncovenanted mercy. At the best also, there was and could be no inherent value in the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. But how many questions did all this imply!

How different from a sentence of justification, the hope of mercy! But now every question is answered, every shadow gone: Christ’s sacrifice has proclaimed God’s righteous judgment upon sin as nothing else could do; and enabled Him at the same time to justify him who is of the faith of Jesus. 2. Truth has wrought with grace: God could not justify man upon any ground which would give him opportunity for boasting. His principle of faith gives God, not man, the glory. That pride which is the devil’s own sin, and into which he has led mankind to imitate him, is broken down, not fostered, by a blessing so gained. A law, or principle, of works, if it had been possible in the nature of things for him to have been justified by it, could only have wrought disaster for him morally. Merit is not possible to a creature, from whom obedience is his constant due. “When ye have done all,” says the Lord, “say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was our duty to do.” No ladder of works, if it were long enough to reach to heaven, could give the spirit of worship which is in heaven, and which alone could make it heaven at all.

Faith has a moral quality which makes it worthy to be God’s principle: it glorifies Him and blesses man, while the ruin of his self-confidence prepares him for it. It suits also a God to whom all His creatures are alike a care.

A faith which can grow out of one’s own nothingness, the babe characteristic, needing not the wisdom of the wise, nor power of any kind, but according to which are chosen the foolish things, and the weak, and the base, and the despised, manifests One before whose greatness, and to whose love, the lowest is as the highest. In the adoption of such a principle none that do not banish themselves are banished from Him: for the highest can come down to the lowest level, when it would be impossible for the lowest to rise up to the highest. Man naturally thinks that God should be found most on the mountain tops; but the sun warms most the lower plains upon which men build their cities and live their daily lives. How would the most expert climbers of the peaks enjoy having these things reversed? Nay, the highest peaks send down their tribute of enrichment to the plains, and nature is in harmony with her glorious Maker. So says the apostle here: “We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” The very exclusiveness of the law, which was the boast of the Jew, was thus the witness that it was not after all the way of blessing. Could God have thus forgotten the Gentile? “Is He the God of Jews only? is He not also of the Gentiles?” What can one answer? what but with the apostle: “Yea, of the Gentiles also; since it is one God who will justify the circumcision by faith” -upon that principle; and then, and thus, if he be found possessor of it, the “uncircumcision through” that “faith” which he possesses. God is drawing near to men would it be a greater and better thing to say, to the Jew? One might better plead for him the exclusive right to sun and rain, or to those blessings which the more necessary they are, the more widely they are found diffused. But then, says the objector, you are making the law to be of no effect through this advocacy of faith. As if the sowing of the field showed the plow to have been vainly used! “Far be the thought,” says the apostle: “nay, but we establish law.” For the real purpose for which God gave it, the law still abides, and its use is clearly manifested.