With chapter 3 verse 27 there begins a whole new section of Romans.
The first three chapters were occupied with the life of mankind in sin and under God's wrath and condemnation. Then in 3:21-26 Paul gave a highly compact summary of the remedy God has provided. From there on Paul expounds our new life in Christ under grace when we are justified. In fact, the chapters 4-8 are a patient unfolding of phrases, one by one, in that crucial paragraph.
He begins with the statement that justification is 'by faith.' It is by faith that we are 'rightwised' to God. That is all Paul is concerned to say in ch. 4 of Romans ... faith is the way to be righteous. To what sort of righteousness faith is the way he will develop later, though there is a hint of it in this passage. All we are concerned now to hear Paul say is that rules cannot make us righteous, only faith can. The essential nature of righteousness is not duty but faith.
Two things Paul says about this faith:
1. The faith Christ begets in us offers no grounds for boasting because it is a gift.
2. The faith Christ begets in us is itself the true righteousness.
Paul launches into his argument in a way that falls strangely on our ears.
"Then what becomes of our boasting?" he asks. (v. 27)
What made him ask the question? To begin with it, he must have felt it was important. Why? Does it matter all that much?
Yes it does. Paul is bothered by it precisely because while the least hint of pride remains, it is not righteousness at all that we have. If we think of righteousness as something we build by following the path of duty ... as something we win through to by diligently keeping the rules ... then the possibility of pride can never be ruled out.
The Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the Gondoliers, has a song the public servants sing which contains the line, "The compensating pleasure that we treasure without measure is the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done." The satisfying feeling that our duty has been done is the serpent's nest that lies concealed in the heart of all moral achievement not born of faith. While that element of self-satisfaction is present, our righteousness is poisoned at its springs. If there is the least hint of it in me, then I am not a good man - I am a moral prig ... even though I ascribe my moral effort to the help of God. Be I never so humble about it, the fact will always remain that at the secret centre of my heart I will be saying "I did it. What a good boy am I!" Smother that under as many blankets of assumed humility as I will, it will still be there. The very idea that righteousness can arise out of the deeds we do is false from the beginning. An unblemished record of moral achievement is not what makes a man righteous; all it will ever do is make him self-righteous.
There must be no ground for boasting - none whatever - or the goodness a man or a woman has is not the genuine article. Pride is alien to real righ-teousness, and we know it.
But how do we get to be truly good without it?
The answer is - by faith. Paul plainly says that pride is excluded, not on the principle of works, but on the principle of faith. "What becomes of our boasting?" he asks. "It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. For we hold that a man is rightwised to God by faith, quite apart from works of law." (3:27)
Works of the law (keeping God's rules) have nothing to do with it. Neither a good record nor a bad record can make the least bit of difference to our becoming truly righteous. The true righteousness is wrapped up in the faith which is God's gift to us. We get to be righteous by trusting God, not by doing right.
Paul knew very well that what he was saying here is deeply offensive to us. It offended the Jews, because if what Paul said was true, they argued, where was the point in having been given God's Law at all, and where was the point in all their earnest striving to keep it? But it is not only the earnest Jew who protested. If we really hear what Paul is saying, it upsets us too. Paul is saying, "You don't become good by doing good." So where is the point in trying, we are bound to ask.
And Paul's answer is, "It is not by trying that you get to be good, but by trusting. God justifies Jews, who have the Law, on the ground of their faith, and the non-Jews who don't, on the ground of their faith." (3:30) Faith, not good behaviour, makes us righteous.
We say we believe it ... but I wonder. One of the clearest indications that we have not really grasped the point Paul is making here is the curious fact that the only way most of us know to eliminate pride in our righteousness is to insist that we are not righteous at all. There must be no boasting. We agree. But the only way we know to rule it out, it seems, is to deny that we have any goodness at all of which to boast. "We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and there is no health in us," we say ... and mutter under our breath, "There, no boasting, see?"
It is all very well to say that of ourselves before we are born again. But after...? Are we really to say, after we have been born again, 'there is no health in us'? Has God accomplished nothing, then, by giving us new birth? Are we still nothing but 'miserable offenders' after God has accomplished His work of grace in our hearts? Does He impart no real righteousness to us after all?
We are so convinced that righteousness is a matter of doing good works that the only way we know to eliminate pride in them is to insist (or pretend) that we have none. But Paul insists that the way pride in our goodness is ruled out is that real goodness becomes ours by faith, not by works. "We hold that a man is justified by faith, apart from works of the Law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is He not the God of the Gentiles also, who are without the Law? Yes, of course, of the Gentiles also: there is only one God, and He is not one sort of God with us, and another sort of God with them. And He will justify us Law-abiding Jews on the ground of our faith, and He will justify the Lawless Gentiles on account of their faith." (v. 28)
How does faith eliminate pride in our goodness?
It does so first, because it is a gift. As Paul said in Eph. 2:8, "By grace you have been saved, through faith - and that (that faith) not of yourselves: it is the gift of God."
Dr. Howard Guiness's little book 'The Sanity of Faith' (Omega Press, p. 12 ƒƒ) threw a flood of light for me on the nature of faith as a gift to us from God. "In what sense is faith a gift?" he asked, and the gist of his answer is as follows (paraphrased and condensed):
"God's gifts come to us in two ways: either independently of any action on our part (like the sun, rain and fresh air) or when we cooperate with Him to make them ours (like the harvest and the bread on our breakfast table that comes from it, or like insulin, say).
"The second kind are just as truly gifts of God, but they do not fall out of the sky like rain. We have to cooperate with God to receive them, along the lines He has revealed long ago. The bread on our table which is God's gift only got there because farmers planted and harvested wheat, and millers milled it into flour, and bakers baked it, and lorry-drivers transported it, and shop-keepers stocked it, and we worked for a living and exerted ourselves to go and buy it. The same with discoveries like insulin: they are a true gift of God, but they do not come to us except as we cooperate with God along the lines of scientific enquiry and experiment. *
"Now faith too is a gift of God. But it is a gift of this second kind. Faith does not just drop out of the sky to us. There is a way of cooperating with God to receive it; it is a way that we all know and do not find difficult at all. Faith in God comes to us in the same way that faith in our friends comes to us - in the simple experience of our personal relationships with them.
"Think for a moment of some friend you have whom you trust. How did you come to have that confidence in them? Did you have to screw yourself up to a pitch - 'psyche' yourself - to trust them? The likelihood is that you hardly even thought about it. You experienced their friendship: and as you did, your confidence in them grew - because, being the sort of people they are, they inspired confidence. It was their gift to you. You did not have to work at it ... it just came. All you did have to do was to expose yourself to their company.
"That is how faith in God comes to us. We do not have to do some unnatural thing or twist ourselves out of shape in some strange way to get it. All we have to do is give ourselves some exposure to Him. And we do that first by giving our attention to the things He has said and done, as recorded in the Bible, that reveal Him for the sort of God He is. 'Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.' (Rom. 10:17)
"Faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a gift which is born in us as we meet Him in the pages of the Bible, in the lives of our Christian friends, or in the worship, it may be, of some hallowed church where His Word is truly unfolded.
"At first we look at Him, perhaps, with distant admiration; after a while, we find ourselves warming to Him; as our understanding of the Gospel grows and we see what His real nature is, we discover that we are beginning to love Him sincerely; and finally we learn to trust Him in earnest, and give Him our willing cooperation and obedience in ever-enlarging areas of our life.
"This process during which faith is born varies in its length and manner of development from individual to individual. But however slow or swift, however calm or troubled, however conscious or unconscious the process may turn out to be for any one of us, the one thing that does hold good with us all is - the faith which binds us to Christ is His own gracious gift to us."
It has become ours because He inspired it. We simply respond to Him ... and as we do, we grow like Him.
There is no great mystery about this. Open our heart to a villain so as to admire and believe him and a villain we too will become. Open our heart to a good man so as to admire and believe him and a good man in some real measure we will become. When our heart is open to people that way we imbibe their spirit. Open our heart to God so as to believe Him, and a good man, a good woman we will become indeed, with the goodness which is His. We will imbibe His Spirit.
Righteousness is 'rightwisness' - the state of being 'rightwised' to God - and the only way to be rightwised to God is just to trust Him open-heartedly. As we do, we imbibe His Spirit. His righteousness grows in us without our thinking much about it. In fact, the less we think about ourselves and our own state of grace, and the more we look adoringly at Him, the better the whole thing works. And if it is pointed out to us that by responding like that to God, we are indeed becoming righteous, all we can answer is, "Really? Well that's no credit to me. All I'm doing is look at God. If that's making me righteous, then it's God you have to thank, not me." No grounds for boasting.
Righteousness is a matter of right response. Right response to the God we see in our Lord Jesus Christ is righteousness. As noted on p. 24, the faith which the Gospel begets is itself righteousness: "Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." But that response is a thing God produces in our hearts, not we.
"To one who does not work, but trusts Him who rightwises the ungodly," says Paul, "his faith is reckoned to him as righteousness." His faith is.
The faith that God inspires in our hearts is not a 'good work' of ours ... not in the sense in which the Bible speaks of 'works' as the means by which we acquire merit. It is a good work of course, but a good work of God's. From beginning to end, the faith which is righteousness is something God brings to birth in us. It is not our achievement, this faith - it is God's achievement. It is He who begets it in us, just by being the God He is.
And the sort of God He is we see revealed in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God Paul described in those verses which speak of Jesus in the blood of His sacrifice as a Mercy Seat. What that passage taught us is that God is a God we may fully trust, because He is at the same time a gracious, forgiving God, and a righteous God Who will not sign any truce with the sin He forgives. That is the sort of God we respond to when we hear and believe the Gospel.
What the Gospel tells us is that we may be forgiven only because God, in the person of His Son, bears our sin. When God receives us to Himself, He receives with us to His heart the sin that is in us, and it is 'death' to Him. That 'death' He suffers to receive and hold us to His heart. That is what the cross of Jesus shows us. God forgives us - truly forgives us so as not to 'count our trespasses against us' or call us to account for the wrongs we have done; but it costs Him. Forgiveness is by way of the Cross. It is only ever by way of the Cross.
When that dawns on us, it awakens in us a solemn sense of the hatefulness of our sin. If it is so hateful to God that He must bear pain like that to forgive it, then it really is a thing we cannot love. But at the same time it awakens us to the very real love God has for us. He has 'been through hell' for us. And when both those truths dawn on us - the hatefulness of our sin, and the marvel of God's loving - a whole new motivation is established in our heart. How can we sin against the only love that can release us from the guilt of it?
The grace of God, when we trust it, begets a whole new disposition is us - a new heart. That is why faith - the faith of the Gospel - is righteousness: the faith the Cross inspires in us is rooted in it.
So we must be always "looking to Jesus, the inspirer and perfecter of this faith in us, Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross for us, despising the shame, and rules now from the Throne of God. Consider Him ... be always considering Him." (Heb. 11:2)
That is how faith comes ... the faith which is righteousness in us.
This is as appropriate a point as any to share what has for me been a quite exciting discovery. **
There are three Greek words associated with righteousness which all sound alike, but for which we do not have three English words to match so they sound alike, and it is a very great pity; because the odd word out in our English translations puts us off the scent.
The Greek word for righteousness, the noun,
is 'dikaiosune.'
The Greek word for righteous, the adjective, is 'dikaios.'
And the verb in the Greek which belongs with those two words is
'dikaiow.'
Unhappily the English word used to translate it is almost always 'justify.' But 'justify' does not sound at all like 'righteous' or 'righteousness.' We need an English word to render 'dikaiow' so it has 'righteous' in it. The case presents an uncommon difficulty; we usually have like-sounding words to render the noun, the adjective and the verb of a root, like the noun 'purity,' the adjective 'pure,' and the verb 'purify.' But we cannot get 'righteousness,' 'righteous,' and 'justify' together that way. Should we make up a new word? 'Righteousify' perhaps?
Interestingly, there used to be three such words in old English. One of them is not used any more; but if only we could recover it, we could translate all three Greek words so their meanings and their sound corresponded. The old noun was 'rightwisness,' the adjective was 'rightwised' and the verb was 'to rightwise.' They used to be able to say 'rightwise' instead of 'justify.' Instead of saying 'we are justified by faith,' they would say, 'we are rightwised by faith.' God did not 'justify the ungodly,' He 'rightwised' them. A righteous man did not have to be described as 'a just man;' he was described as a 'rightwised man.' A man possessed of righteousness was possessed of 'rightwisness' - he enjoyed the condition of being 'rightwised'
Now it is a simple fact of language history that our modern words 'righteous' and 'righteousness' are both direct descendants of those old words: we habitually pronounce words as lazily as we can, so the adjective 'rightwised' became 'rightwis' (the 'd' dropped off), and survives into modern English as 'righteous'.
If we had retained the verb 'rightwise', half the theological arguments that have consumed the energies of earnest Christians for so long (often to so little effect) as to whether the righteousness Christ gives to the repentant and believing is imputed or imparted righteousness would have been short-circuited. For the meaning of that old verb 'to rightwise' combined both. It was very much a word to describe what happened when there was a change in the relationship between two people because a real change occurred in one of them.
If things had gone wrong between two friends over a misunderstanding, or the bad behaviour of one of them so that they fell out with each other, then when things were put right between them so they became friends again, they were said to have been rightwised. For that to happen of course, the person who had been in the wrong had to recognise it, admit it, ask pardon for it, and come to a state of mind where he was in agreement with the way the offended party had seen it all along. He had to have the other's mind on his own wrong-doing, and be quite sincere about it. In other words (religious words) he had to 'confess and repent.' And the offended party had to put away from between them the wrong that had been done, be willing really to forgive and forget, and receive his old friend back into favour again.
Now that is exactly what happens when we are converted. We confess and repent of our sin, God forgives and receives us into His grace and favour, and we come to have His mind on sin (our own included) and righteousness.
That is what happened between the prodigal son and his father when the lad returned home. When the son said, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and am no longer worthy to be called your son," and the father answered, "Bring quickly the best robe (the robe of honour), and put it on him; and put a ring (the ring of authority) on his finger; and shoes (the shoes of sonship) on his feet," they were 'rightwised.' On the boy's side there was repentance and faith; on the father's side there was forgiveness and reinstatement. Where shall we find a better description of what happens when a man or a woman is converted? It was our Lord's description of it - it strikes me as a rather vain exercise to look for a better one.
The point is that in the process of such a reconciliation the son came into a state of mind and heart where he took his father's view of things - embraced his outlook again, supported his interests again, pursued his aims and adopted his values. In a word, he had his father's mind on things again.
That is exactly how our reconciliation with God is described in the Bible. That is what happens when a person is rightwised. In the process they come to have ' the mind of Christ.'
On this basis I have frequently rendered 'justify' as 'rightwise' and 'justification' as 'rightwisness.' If it threatens to suggest a confusion between the concepts of justification and righteousness as we normally understand them, I am unrepentant. The so-called confusion is in fact a correction! Justification and righteousness are so closely related in the New Testament as to be virtually synonymous, and both words have a relational content before they have a forensic content; of that I am fully convinced.
* A point Isaiah made. Referring to the
latest agricultural techniques of his day like crop rotation, he
said, "This also comes from God Who is wonderful in counsel and
excellent in wisdom." Scientific know-how, in other words, is a gift
of God. Isa. 28:29
** From a translator's note in Theology of the New Testament" R.
Bultmann [SCM] 1965 p. 253
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