The paragraph 3:21-26 carries an importance in Romans out of all proportion to its length. It is in fact the fulcrum on which the whole epistle turns.
So far we have been occupied with the pressures that bear down on one side of the fulcrum, so to speak. From here on Paul is concerned with the counter-balancing pressures that bear down on the other side.
On the one side appears the wrath of God, bearing down on the whole of life by reason of our sin, and crushing us down into the dust of death. On the other side appears the righteousness of God, which reaches down over the whole range of life to raise us up from that death of sin into newness of life.
The title over Romans up to this point might
read: "The Wrath of God - Manifested in the World."
The title over the section we enter now might read: "The
Righteousness of God - Manifested in the World."
And the essence of God's righteousness is that it saves. Its central quality is not that it condemns our unrighteousness (the Law does that) but that it makes us righteous.
NOTE 1 - The Unity of the Theme in the Bible.
It is worth observing that Paul's understanding of God's righteousness here is entirely consistent with what is said of it in the Old Testament. It is quite surprising how often righteousness there means the same thing as salvation: Psalm 98:2 for example, "The Lord has made known His salvation, He has revealed His righteousness to the nations." The parallelism of Hebrew poetry makes the two phrases mean substantially the same thing.
We understand righteousness to mean that a man is right, or in the right: but in the Old Testament it was understood to mean more than that; it meant putting right, too, what was wrong. You did not qualify to be described as righteous merely by keeping your integrity while everyone around you compromised theirs; you had to do something about the wickedness around you.
Righteousness is not a passive quality: it is an active quality, in God especially. So in v. 26 Paul says that what shows God's righteousness is that "He justifies all who have sinned and fallen short of His glory."
NOTE 2 - The Balance of the Theme in the Epistle
The evidence for God's righteousness is the same sort of evidence there is for His wrath. The evidence for His wrath is the wretchedness of human life, because His wrath imprisons us in our sin: the evidence for His righteousness is the blessedness of human life that arises when His salvation frees us from sin. God's wrath is revealed in the actual conditions of life; His righteousness too is revealed in real, but changed conditions of life.
If chapters 1-3 presented a gloomy picture of our life as we abide under His wrath, chapters 12-15 will present a bright and shining picture of our life when we abide under His saving righteousness (soon Paul will call it grace). Paul's whole argument spans a broad range of chapters. The table, 'Romans Plan', demonstrates the symmetry and balance of the epistle. For now, we list the things Paul says in this paragraph about the revealing of God's righteousness.
1. v. 21 It happens apart from the Law.
2. v. 22 It happens through faith.
3. v. 24 It is a gift of God's grace.
4. v. 24-25 It is made possible through the Cross.
5. v. 25-26 It demonstrates the real character of God.
The righteousness of God that saves us, Paul says first, is neither seen in His Law nor conveyed to us through it; v. 21, "The righteousness of God has been manifested quite apart from the Law." God's righteousness is not at all the same thing as His Law. His Law condemns us; His righteousness rescues us from that condemnation. So God's righteousness is something quite different from His Law - for 'justify' us is the one thing His Law can never do.
The Law of Commandments does not show what God's righteousness is. Something else altogether is needed to show that. That something else is His grace, and the gift of His grace which is wrapped up in Christ Jesus. That is what reveals His righteousness. So an understanding of God's righteousness is not found in the Law of Commandments.
A very proper thing the Law is, to be sure. It does describe what God wants of us. That is clear from even its very first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." In the light of what Paul has said already about idolatry being the root of all sin, nothing could be more to the point. The Law tells us very clearly what sort of things, when we are righteous, we will do, and what sort of things we will not do: but how we get to be righteous like that it cannot tell us. When the Law has had its say, it has not improved our situation one bit. Let it thunder out of the clouds and darkness of Mt. Sinai till we tremble under it, still it has no power to do anything about our sin but to stab it broad awake in us, so it springs into more vigorous and defiant life than before. Its only effect on us is to make us a worse sinner than ever, and then condemn us for it!
So the way to become a good man, a good woman, is emphatically not to set God's Law before us as our daily task, for that Law is the strength, not of goodness, but of sin. "The strength of sin is the Law," says Paul in I Cor. 15:56.
The Law brings only condemnation, not help. Through the Law comes knowledge, not of God, but of sin, as Paul has just said in 3:20.
"But," we might ask, "aren't the Commandments part of the Scriptures that reveal Him?"
"True," says Paul, "so they are. But they are by no means the only Word He has spoken in the Scriptures ... nor His chief Word. The chief Word the Scriptures speak to us is something quite other, and much bigger than that written code. The chief Word they speak concerns God Himself, not His Law.
The Scriptures have from the beginning shown us that real righteousness comes by way of trust in God, not by way of obedience to His Law.
If I am labouring the point it is for a reason. When we were occupied with coming judgment, we felt perhaps the sting of our failure. And the natural man's natural reaction, if he is honest about his failure, is to feel, "I must do better." What he does then is to say to himself, "I must set the Commandments in front of me again, and try really seriously to keep them." Paul knows that. And he knows what a simply dreadful response to make it is. It leads directly into an experience of absolute wretchedness - wretchedness he describes vividly in ch. 7. Romans ch. 7 contains Paul's description of what it is like, even for a Christian, to try and live a good life by keeping the commandments - living 'by the book' so to speak. To try and be a good person that way will always be a futile and impossible thing. Chapter 7 of Romans was written to sound the death-knell over every attempt to achieve righteousness by keeping the Law. But more of that later. The reason I labour the point is the same as Paul's, to spare us that wretchedness, to steer us away from the reaction that produces it. It leads to misery ... a misery, what is more, which is useless.
Real righteousness, Paul goes on to say in vs. 21 and 25, is not achieved by works but received by faith. It comes to us by a different route altogether than by way of the Law; it comes by way of faith. It always has. All through the next section, ch. 4, Paul will show that faith in God has been the way from the beginning; he will use the life of Abraham to make the point.
For us who live after His life and death and resurrection, Christ is the focus and inspiration of that faith. But those grounds in God Himself, revealed in Christ, on which our forgiveness and His gift of a new life rest, have always been there. God has not changed - nor has the basis of salvation changed between Old Testament times and now. The work of Christ has revealed, as they had never been revealed before, the grounds in God upon which we are forgiven and renewed. The work of Christ is indeed itself integral to them; but they were all part of God's nature from the beginning.
This is what Paul means in v. 25 when he says that Christ's propitiatory work on the Cross shows how righteous God was being when in His divine forbearance, through all the centuries before Christ appeared, He passed over men's sins. The Scriptures have always borne their testimony to us that our hope is in God Himself, not in His Law, and that He can be trusted for forgiveness and new life. Our fathers in time past knew that God did not count their trespasses against them; they knew He was forbearing: but they did not clearly understand how He could be forbearing and still be righteous. Now we can understand, says Paul. The work of Christ shows us how it is that God can forgive sins without compromising His righteousness. (v. 26)
But the Scriptures have always borne their testimony to the truth that He can and does ... and to the truth that when He does, He does so by way of faith, not by way of the Law. The Law tells us what God requires of us, but not how to give it. Now we have been shown the way to give it - and the way is through faith in Jesus. And because this is so, this salvation is available to all without distinction, whether they have His Law or not. (vs. 22-24) It makes no odds whether we know the Commandments or not. Neither enlightenment nor ignorance make the least difference, for whether we know everything or nothing, we are all under the power of sin anyway. All that matters is that there should be opened up a way of deliverance from its power that is accessible to all, whatever advantages they have had ... all or none.
That deliverance, blessed be God, is there. There is redemption, and it is on offer indiscriminately. There is freedom for us all. It has been purchased for us at a huge cost ... to God: and that cost to God of securing our release He has fully met in and through the work of His beloved Son. It is God Himself Who put Christ Jesus forward in His blood to be the propitiation for our sins.
And this is the provision of God's grace - His marvellous and unmerited favour toward sin-cursed men and women. This provision is a blessed gift, to be received, as all good gifts should be received, with simple gratitude and real confidence in the goodwill of Him Who gives it - to be received, in other words, by faith.
Now in the giving and receiving of that gift, something happens, something which Paul describes by the word all our Bibles translate as 'justified.' The sinner - the person who has turned away from God by setting up other things in His place, who has been delivered over to the power of sin in his or her life, who stands under God's holy displeasure, who stands condemned to die - that person is 'justified' ... freely, by grace, by deed of gift through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. (v. 24)
Clearly, whatever 'justification' means, it means the undoing of all those grim realities in which the sinner's life has hitherto been imprisoned. It means that our hearts really are turned back to the Lord; it means that the power over us of sin is lifted away; it means that God's wrath with us ceases; it means that the awful condemnation the Law passed on us is abrogated; it means that we are raised out of our helplessness in sin into an enjoyment of real righteousness, which - gift though it is - is yet a real thing, truly possessed and enjoyed in heart and life. That is what justification means.
We see now why it would have been a mistake to ignore the first three chapters of Romans. We would have lost all sense of the richness and fulness and blessedness of our justification. For our justification means that the lordship over us of all those tyrants who hold mankind in thrall - condemnation, wrath, sin, Law and death - is broken, undone, removed, so that we really are set gloriously free. And if justification is ever allowed to mean less than all that, then it has ceased to be the New Testament reality.
What justification means in terms of freedom from each of these dreadful tyrants Paul will now go on to spell out with patient thoroughness in succeeding chapters.
Ch. 4 will spell out our freedom from condemnation;
Ch. 5 our freedom from wrath;
Ch. 6 our freedom from sin;
Ch. 7 our freedom from the Law;
Ch. 8 our freedom from death.
Paul will plumb the depths and scale the heights of human experience in those chapters. For understand this, and understand it well: a Gospel that fails to meet the deepest anguish men and women can know, or that fails to lift us to the highest joy men and women can know, is not a Gospel that can command our confidence in the long run at all.
The Gospel requires that we make a real effort to understand it - the same effort we feel driven to make to understand life itself. For the Gospel is not an Aladdin's lamp which will produce the genie of its power with a little effortless rubbing and a sleepy incantation. It is a gift and a power of God whose understanding and enjoyment requires as much of us as life itself does.
Clearly the crux of the matter lies in verses 23 and 24: "the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forth as a propitiation in His blood, to be received by faith."
We must see Him - for that is the way faith comes. It comes as we look, and as we listen. We look at Jesus, and we listen to God as He speaks of Him in the Scriptures; and as we do, faith comes.
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