Romans 3

1. WHAT advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision? Much 2 every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God. For 3 what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? 4 God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest 5 be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged. But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous 6 who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a man.) God forbid: for then how shall God judge 7 the world? For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; 8 why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, 9 and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is 10 just. What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved 11 both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; as it is written, There is none righteous, 12 no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They 13 are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth 14 good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used 15 deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitter- 16 ness: their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the 17 way of peace have they not known: there is no fear of God before their eyes.19 Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. 20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the 21 law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is mani- 22 fested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: 23 for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace 24 through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitia- 25 tion through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that 26 are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: 27 that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting 28 then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. There- 29 fore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the 30 God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. 31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.

If God is to be honored and loved by human beings, he must present himself in the light of those qualities which we may call by the name of justice, and of those to which we give the names of goodness, kindness, tenderness, or mercy. Christ united these two sides of character in their due mixture in his one person. This is remarkable in regard to our Lord, that one who should have become acquainted only with his traits of love, as forbearance, patience, mildness, pity, and forgiveness, would be apt to suppose that he had seen the whole framework of his character; while another person who heard his awful rebukes of the Pharisees, and saw with what zeal he defended the rights of God, and observed what he thought of sin and what were his threatenings against it, would take him for a man made out of iron justice alone. But he united in unrivaled harmony both these aspects of character. The strength of his holiness and justice proves the depth of his love, and his love was the stronger, because it rested on the fixed rock of justice and holiness. Christ then, with such a nature, would be the loving Saviour, the friend of sinners, but he would be also the wise law-giver and the just judge. He is thus like God and fitted to represent God; he embodies that idea of God, which, with the help of the noblest passages of the Old Testament, our minds, in their best frames of thought and feeling, are able to form. And if, in a larger sphere, the Son of man shall judge the world he came to save, it will not be in a new character, but only in a new office. T. D. W.

2. Oracles of God. Good men have ever felt that the words must be living oracles, ever flowing forth freshly from the seat of God’s majesty, yesterday, to-day, and for ever the same; addressed to them as to their fathers, to their children as to them. T. A.

3. The faith of God without effect. By faith of God is meant faithfulness of God. The word has not only the objective sense of faith, belief, confidence in another, but also the subjective sense of faithfulness to an agreement, promise, or pledge. We may read, “Because that unto them were intrusted the oracles of God. For what if some were unfaithful? Shall their unfaithfulness make the faithfulness of God without effect?” Crosby.

5. Is God unrighteous? This objection was leveled against that grand pillar of a sinner’s hope, justification by faith only; as if it were a doctrine tending to licentiousness, and to the overthrow of morality and good works. This, the apostle says, some did not scruple to affirm; but he adds that the report was slanderous. Hill.

9. The Greek word, which we here translate sin, signifies to fail of an end; to lose one’s way. The sinner is a being lost; he is a traveler, with a destination before him, but misled to a route which does not lead to it. Or, putting in place of the figure what it signifies: the sinner is one who ought to follow a certain moral direction, and who takes the opposite. Monod.

10-18. The world over, in its serious hours the heart longs, sighs, groans, and travails with sorrows that can not be uttered, to be delivered from the bondage of sin and death. The Scripture has no other doctrine of the matter on any of its pages; and scarcely one page where this is not. Read the burning confessions of the fifty-first Psalm, and of many another before and after it, where the fire of remorse, which is only the lurid reflection of sin, almost visibly scorches the Psalmist’s heart; read the terrible descriptions of that state of man without his Redeemer written by Paul to the Romans; or the tragic picture of Paul’s own fearful struggles with the law of his members; or the awful prophecies of a society forgetting its Lord, given in Jude. Recall the narratives of depravity in Scripture history, and the denunciations upon it by prophets, and the thrilling exhortations against it by apostles. Remember that the Bible begins with the first inroad of sin, and finishes with warnings of its punishments. Above all, remember that the first word of the new dispensation was “Repent,” and its consummation was the Cross built on Calvary to assure forgiveness to “repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ”; and you will hardly need to multiply these convincing tokens that all the ministrations of our religion to the human soul presuppose that we all have sinned, are sinners still. F. D. H.

There is a vast, immortal want stirring on the world and forbidding it to rest. In the cursing and bitterness, in the deceit of tongues, in the poison of asps, in the swiftness to blood, in all the destruction and misery of the world’s ruin, there is yet a vast insatiate hunger for the good, the true, the holy, the divine, and a great part of the misery of the ruin is that it is so great a ruin; a desolation of that which can not utterly perish, and still lives, asserting its defrauded rights and reclaiming its lost glories. And therefore it is that life becomes an experience to the race so tragic in its character, so dark and wild, so bitter, so incapable of peace. The way of peace we can not know, till we find our peace, where our immortal aspirations place it, in the fullness and the friendly eternity of God.

18. If sin is weak, if it is mean, little, selfish, and deformed, and we are ready to set humanity down as a low and paltry thing of nothing worth, how terrible and tragic in its evil grandeur does it appear, when we turn to look upon its defiance of God, and the desperate obstinacy of its warfare! There is no fear of God before their eyes. In one view there is fear enough, the soul is all its life long haunted by this fear, but there is a desperation of will that tramples fear and makes it as though it were not. H. B.

19. This is the genuine voice of the law, “Do and live”; “but the soul that sinneth shall surely die.” It knoweth no middle sentence between these two; it doth not whisper one word of mercy; but the smallest deviation subjects the transgressor to the justice of God, and to all the fatal effects of his indignation. This being the case, it is easy to discern the use of the law to lead men to the Saviour. The law discovers sin, and at the same time demands an unsinning obedience. None of us can plead innocence, and the law admits of no excuse for guilt. Nay, it is not only silent as to the doctrine of forgiveness, but in plain and awful words pronounces the sentence of death. Thus the sinner’s mouth is stopped, and nothing remains for him but to continue in misery, and bear the curse of God, or else to appeal from the law to the gospel, and to claim the benefit of that indemnity which Christ hath purchased with his blood. R. W.—Alas! he who boasteth himself in the works of the law, he doth not hear the law. When that speaks, it shakes Mount Sinai, and writeth death upon all faces, and makes the Church itself cry out, A Mediator! else we die. The law out of Christ is terrible as a lion; the law in him is meek as a lamb. Bun.

20. Justified. We seem by the Scriptural language to be introduced to a court: there are a law, a sanction, a tribunal, a judge, an accusation, a condemnation, an advocate, a surety, an acquittal. But there is not a syllable about changing the character; it is only a change of standing, or relation to law. To justify is not to make just, in the sense of making holy, but to declare just. When the judge justifies a man, he does not by that act render him any better than he was before: he simply adjudges him to be innocent. Justification, therefore, is an act of God, whereby he remits our sins, and accepts us as righteous. J. W. A.

21-24. All that merits salvation for sinners is in Christ; and faith accepts Christ as God offers him, and so makes his merit the believer’s own. If there be any worthiness, then, in Christ, any sufficiency in his precious blood-shedding for the removal of sins, any glory in his righteousness and obedience to the law, for man—faith, giving the sinner a personal interest in all these, brings at once a full and finished salvation into his soul. This blessing belongs not, indeed, to the thousands who say they believe, while their whole walk gives the lie to their assertion; but to all who do believe, and that simply because they do. The chief of sinners is a justified person, “justified” eternally “from all things,” that instant that he brings his sins, in humble confession of them, to God, and believes God’s testimony of his Son, that he is indeed the Lamb, the sacrifice provided of God, which “taketh away the sins of the world.” In this way, the vilest may be saved—freely pardoned, through the tender mercy of our God, who has laid our trespasses upon Jesus. “Being justified freely, by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” And as this is the first hope of a sinner, so it is the only hope to the last, by which any man, though holy as Paul himself, can draw nigh unto God. In the pilgrimage of life, in the hour of death, in the day of judgment, his only acceptable plea is summed up in this: Christ my atoneme—, Christ my righteousness. Goode.

25. God hath set forth. If there is a necessity of justification for God’s pardoning the guilty, there is also a necessity of justification for God’s offering up his own Son. How could he do it without an infinite and eternal reason? How could he do it for any expediency or necessity short of infinitude? How could he do it, but under the sanction, which indeed he has revealed to us, of the power of an endless life for guilty creatures on the one hand if redeemed, and the power of an endless death inevitable on the other hand if not redeemed? G. B. C.—To be a propitiation through faith in his blood. Here behold the significance and the life of those bloody sacrifices instituted when man fell and flaming up to heaven for four thousand years! Here see the grand fulfillment of the law and the prophets, as all down the ages they point with unerring finger to this divine man who is to bear sin by the shedding of his blood for the world! Where now are the bloody altars? the priestly sacrifices? the hierarchy of Aaron? the temple service? They heard the cry from the Cross, “It is finished!” The real sacrifice for sin is offered and bled for ever. Altar, priest, temple, all crumbled to dust, while the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world, proclaims to all men free forgiveness and eternal life for every one who in humble faith will receive and obey him as the Redeemer. Now a spiritual, universal kingdom is possible; for humanity is redeemed, and faith, repenting, receiving, loving him, is the sole condition of citizenship. S. W. F.

If the apostolic doctrine of justification through faith be clearly held and cordially admitted, it will occupy the foremost place in our regards; for it is the ground of all our hopes, and the relief of every fear: it is the luminous center of all religious truth. It is the sun in our heavens; it is the source of light and the source of vital warmth. We do not, therefore, hesitate to affirm that it is scripturally held only by those who do assign to it this prominent position; who recur to it ever and again with delight; who never feel it to be an exhausted theme; who build their own hopes upon it firmly; who invite others to do the same with confidence; who neither distrust it in theory nor dishonor it in practice; who enounce it freely and boldly; and of whose piety it is the spring and reason. I. T.

27. It was “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” which separated you from an ungodly world and made you laborers for heaven. It is the same grace that keeps you from forsaking the work which you have begun. You are working out your salvation, solely because God in his mercy continues to “work in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” “Where is boasting then? It is excluded.” The pride of your hearts can find nothing to rest in. The simple question, “Who made thee to differ?” lays it low. And what a crowd of feelings rise up one after another in its place! Wonder, joy, love, praise, and perhaps, stronger than all, self-abasement and shame! C. B.

29. The truth that God is not a national God, not the God of any one tribe or people, but the God and Father of all men, and that the gospel is designed and adapted to all mankind, however little it may affect us, filled the apostles with astonishment and delight. They were slow in arriving at the knowledge of this truth; they had no clear perception of it until after the day of Pentecost. Before that event, they were Jews; afterward, they were Christians; before, they applied all the promises to their own nation; the only Jerusalem of which they had any idea was the city where David dwelt; the only temple of which they could form a conception was that in which they were accustomed to worship. But when they received the anointing of the Holy Ghost the scales fell from their eyes; their nation sank and the Church rose on their renovated sight; the Jerusalem that now is disappeared when they beheld the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven; the temple on Mount Zion was no longer glorious, by reason of the excelling glory of that temple which is the habitation of God by his Spirit. C. H.

31. We establish law.** Grace, in its turn, leads back to the law. Grace, as it is manifested in the gospel, is the most splendid homage, the most solemn consecration, which the law can receive. This grace is of a peculiar character. It is not the soft indulgence and the easy indifference of a feeble father, who, tired of his own severity, shuts his eyes to the faults of a guilty child. It is not the weakness of a timid government, which, unable to repress disorder, lets the laws sleep, and goes to sleep along with them. It is a holy goodness; it is a love without feebleness, which pardons guilt, and executes justice at the same time. It is not possible that God, who is the supreme sanction of order, should tolerate the shadow of disorder, and leave unpunished the least infraction of the holy laws he has given. Thus, in the work of which we speak, condemnation appears in the pardon, and pardon in the condemnation. The same act proclaims the compasion of God, and the inflexibility of his justice. God could not save us without assuming our nature, nor assume our nature without sharing our misery. The Cross, the triumph of grace, is the triumph of law. A. V.

Man must “die, or justice must.” Divine Justice becomes man, and dies to meet the obligation. In the stains of holy blood upon the ignominious tree, upon the accursed earth, and upon the fair, cold body of the lovely Redeemer, the believing sinner reads, as in letters of crimson, Obligation, Obligation. This is a matter of experience. All true penitents find it so. Who shall affront my deepest sensibilities and holiest apprehensions of generous love, by charging that this my view of gratuitous redemption by the blood of the Cross tends to diminish my conscientious sense of duty to him who died! What spectacle in heaven, earth, or hell, so magnifies the law as the spectacle of Christ expiring in the tortures of law, and of vicarious suffering? J. W. A.

The gospel is called the law of faith and the law of the spiritual life. This law of grace is very different from the law of nature that required entire innocence, and for the least omission or accusing act passed an irrevocable doom upon the offenders; for that strictness and severity is mollified by the gospel, which accepts of sincere persevering obedience though imperfect; accordingly it is called the law of liberty. But the law of faith is unalterable, and admits of no dispensation from the duties required in order to our being everlastingly happy. Bates.

28. First in systematic order as well as in magnitude is the doctrine of the propitiation, effected by the Son of God—so held clear of admixture and evasions as to sustain in its bright integrity the consequent doctrine of the full and absolute restoration of guilty man to the favor of God, on his acceptance of this method of mercy; or, as it is technically phrased, “justification through faith.” A doctrine this which in a peculiar manner refuses to be tampered with or compromised, and which will hold its own place or none. It challenges for itself not only a broad basis on which it may rest alone, but a broad border upon which nothing that is human may trespass. This doctrine, when unadulterate, not only animates orthodoxy, but shows us why it was necessary to lay open the mystery of the divine nature so far as it is laid open in scriptural Trinitarian doctrine; for we could not have learned the method of salvation without first learning that he who “bore our sins” was indeed able to bear them, and was in himself “mighty to save.”

Whatever belongs to the divine nature must be incomprehensible by the human mind, and therefore the incarnation is incomprehensible; and

therefore the atonement involves a mystery incomprehensible; but not so the consequent doctrine of justification through faith. This doctrine turns upon the well-understood relations of a forensic substitution; and as to transactions of this order, they are among the clearest of any with which we have to do as the subjects of law and government. A forensic act, authoritatively announced, and in consequence of which the condemned stands exempt from the demands of law, must be in its nature absolute. It is not an undefined indulgence; it is not a weak connivance; it is not a timid compromise; it is not an evasion which must be held to condemn, if not the law, its administrators.