Romans 3:21–31 (ESV)✞: The Righteousness of God Through Faith
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this passage since I started blogging through Romans. For the last five passages Paul has been going to great lengths to show that we’re sinful – unrighteous, to use his word. All of us. All of us. Every single one. For thousands of years God’s chosen people had been the Jews and they’d been sinful; before He’d even given them the Law people had been rejecting Him for all of human history before that. In the last passage especially Paul really hammered home the fact that everybody is a sinner. Everybody.
As usual it’s worth reading the whole passage✞ before I blog through it bit by bit, but before that, I want to zoom in on the first two words: “But now.”
Paul has called out that humanity has rejected God since the beginning of history; that we’ve judged each other regardless of how sinful the judge is; that the Jews might have felt superior because they had the Law yet they were just as sinful as everyone else… he’s been unrelenting! So when he starts this passage with, “But now,” it’s the beginning of the answer to this daunting problem.
I remember a pastor once hammering home just how important these two words are, and he was right. Romans 1:18–3:20 show us just how helpless we are, and how hopeless the situation would be if we were left up to our own abilities, but now Paul is going to show us how God Himself solves the problem we can’t solve on our own.
Paul has mentioned that the Law wasn’t able to save us and he now comes back to that point:
21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law,
emphasis added
Because the Law can’t save us God has to manifest His righteousness in a different way. Which means throwing the Law out, right? Nope!
although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it
It’s the same point Paul made in 2:12–29 (and other places in recent passages); it’s why he says the Jewish Christians have an “advantage,” even though they’re still sinful. Even Christians thousands of years after Paul wrote Romans—after Christianity and Judaism are much more separate than they were in Paul’s day—even now the Law helps the Christian understand who God is.
It’s worth reiterating, however, as I mentioned in a previous passage, that Paul is saying “the Law,” not “the Laws“ (plural). Jews of Paul’s day used to call the first five books of the Scriptures (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) “the Law.” And I think sometimes people might even have used the phrase “the Law” as a short-hand for the entirety of the Jewish Scriptures, though I can’t swear to that. (I know they did sometimes use the phrase “the Law and the Prophets” in that kind of sense, though, as a shorthand to refer to all of the Scriptures.) So “the Law” (including but not limited to the rules and regulations we think of as the “laws”) points to the righteousness of God. It’s not the whole story, you need to see and understand Jesus’ work on the cross for that, but at the same time we get a much deeper picture of God’s holiness, His love, His grace, His patience… all of His attributes, by seeing His relationship to His people in the Old Testament, not just in the New.
With the advantage of being on this side of the cross we can look back over the entirety of Scripture and see God caring for His people, see that the Law was never making anyone righteous, and understand that this was a problem He was always going to handle Himself, by His Grace.
Which is exactly what Paul says next:
22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
Paul has been saying over and over again in the last few passages how unrighteous we all are; some of us have had the Law and some haven’t but we’ve all been unrighteous. So what’s the solution? The righteousness of God. We aren’t righteous, but now He has provided His righteousness – it’s the only solution!
But it can’t be a righteousness we earn, because… well, that would just be the Law again, and we’ve already seen that the Law never made anyone righteous. If Jesus had come down to Earth and said, “Well, the rules and regulations didn’t work, so… here’s a new set of rules and regulations, let’s see if that works,” we’d have been no better off. We’d simply have failed to follow the new rules just like we failed to follow the first ones.
In fact, though it’s not the point Paul is making, not only would it not have worked, it would have meant that God Himself is not worth worshipping! If every single human who ever lived had failed to be righteous simply because God gave us the wrong set of rules, while another set of rules would have worked, that would mean that God had screwed up! He should have given us the “correct” rules in the first place!
So no, it can’t be a matter of following new rules. It has to be God’s righteousness, since we don’t have any of our own, and it has to be through faith instead of through our own actions.
And it applies to everyone – Jew and Gentile:
For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified
The point here is not for Paul to reiterate again that we’re all unrighteous, but to point to the flip side of that: just as we are all unrighteous on our own, we can all be justified by faith in Jesus. Paul was a Jew, I wasn’t; Paul studied the Law, I didn’t; but now Paul and I are both equally justified before God, through our faith in Jesus. For all of the previous passages where Paul was going on and on about how unrighteous we are, the point was not for us to feel bad, the point was for us to appreciate what God has done – and to treat each other accordingly, since every Christian has this same Grace; “there is no distinction.”
I’ve used the word “Grace,” and Paul uses it here, too:
24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
Again, I am fully justified before God, but not because I earned it; not because I made the right decisions in life and did what I needed to do. I didn’t. But now I’m saved by His Grace – it’s a gift! I am redeemed by Christ. And this is how:
25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
We don’t throw the word “propitiation” around very often these days. Pretty much the only time you’ll see it is in this specific passage, because it has such a specific meaning – which, unfortunately, I found a couple of different versions of, but probably the best was from the Gospel Coalition website, which says propitiation is the “averting the wrath of God by the offering of a gift.” So… yeah, not the kind of word that will come up in everyday conversation, unless that conversation is specifically about the death of Christ on the cross on our behalf.
But that is exactly what Christ did: He averted the wrath of God by offering a gift: Himself! And what do I (and other Christians) do with that gift? We receive it by faith.
As I keep harping on, Paul has spent the last few passages going into laborious detail about how unrighteous we all are, but now God supplies the righteousness Himself. In a way, this plays into the “advantage” Paul was saying his fellow Jews had in 2:12–29: who would better understand the Grace of God than His people who’d been experiencing it for thousands of years? I’ve often said that one of the reasons Paul was the best person to articulate the Gospel of the New Covenant is that he understood the former Covenant so well! Paul knew his Scriptures, knew his God, and therefore, when he saw how God’s Grace was playing out through the death of Christ, Paul truly understood how it all fit together.
All of this is good news, but also, is it though? God is a God of patience, yes; and love; and mercy. All of this is true. But God is also Holy, and Just, and… well, to use the word we’ve been using, Righteous. If I’m so bad (which I am), and God is simply bestowing His righteousness on me, for free, without me having earned it, wouldn’t that mean He wasn’t just? It’s all well and good for me that He bestows this on me, for free, as a gift, since I could never have earned it on my own, but what about the people I have wronged? And, as negatively as I tend to view my own sin, it’s nothing compared to sins that have been committed by others over the millennia; is God just wiping all of that away? Because if He is, that isn’t really justice at all – quite the opposite!
And let’s extend that a bit further: Christ died around A.D.33 (or the year 33 of the Common Era, or 33C.E.), which was after thousands and thousands of years of human history. If we’re all as sinful as Paul has been claiming for the last few passages, that’s a lot of unrighteousness to account for – a lot of people have “gotten away with” a lot of sin for many years. What about all of that? Wasn’t God being unjust when He allowed all of that to happen?
Paul says no. This was God’s righteousness:
This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Paul has been pointing out that we were helpless to save ourselves. The only way God could have treated us according to our sins—the only way He could have been just in His dealing with us—would have been eternal damnation. There just wasn’t any other way; if we’re as sinful as Paul is claiming, and as helpless to fix that as Paul is saying, then God’s only choice, if He is to be just, is to condemn us as such.
But He had a better way, that we never could have thought of. Instead of punishing us as we deserve, He punished Jesus as we deserve. All those sins I’ve committed, that my victims wouldn’t just want ignored? Jesus was punished for them. All of those sins that were committed over the thousands of years before His death? He was punished for them, too. God is righteous; He must punish sin. He is also patient (He has forbearance); He wants to have a relationship with us, which is impossible with beings as sinful as we are. Jesus’ death on the cross covers both of those problems. Sins are not forgotten, they are punished, but, at the same time, God can show forbearance to His people (before and after Jesus’ atoning death).
God is just, and I am justified through my faith in Jesus.
Paul rounds out this passage by countering our natural tendencies. Despite everything that was just said about how God’s Grace is a free gift to me, I did nothing to earn it, it’s all Him and none of it is me… there is still a tendency in the Christian heart to boast. “I’m a Christian and you’re not, because I was smart enough to accept God by faith and you weren’t!” It’s… frankly, it’s twisting the Gospel beyond recognition! But it’s a thoroughly human trait to do exactly that, and Paul is having none of it:
27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.
If my justification is through works (that is, through my own actions), I have something to boast about, but if it’s through faith I don’t. No Christian can look at any other human being on the planet and feel superior; it’s just incompatible with Christianity! (We do it, all the time in fact, but it’s not Christian. It is, in fact, further sin that Jesus had to atone for!)
And, since one of Paul’s reasons for writing this letter in the first place is to address divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians, he finishes this passage (not that Paul thought of himself as writing “passages”) like this:
29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, 30 since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. 31 Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.
One of the problems Paul would have been addressing would be the Jewish Christians feeling they’re somehow more Christian than the Gentile Christians – they would have been boasting along those lines. “We’re God’s ‘Chosen People’ – now that we’re saved, we’re obviously more His children than others!” But Paul says no: we’re saved by faith, not by works, so boasting is excluded.
Another of the problems Paul would have been addressing would be the non-Jewish Christians feeling they’re somehow more Christian than the Jewish Christians – they would have been boasting along those lines. “God has obviously rejected His former ‘Chosen People,’ who were never able to obey the Law anyway – now that we’re part of His family, we’re obviously more His children than others!” But Paul says no: regardless of how well anyone has ever obeyed God, the Law shows us who He is, and is to be upheld.
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