Romans No.6 Righteousness through faith

Let's turn to Romans, in chapter 3, verse 21. Now I sound like Harold Wilson. You'll get the real me in a moment when they get the controls right.

Romans 3, verse 21, but now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance, he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.

He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith.

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then nullify the law by this faith? Not at all.

Rather, we uphold the law. Well, we move into a much more attractive passage of scripture as we make our way through this remarkable epistle of Paul to the church at Rome. I say more attractive because the second and the third chapters, and indeed the latter half of the first chapter, are painted in dull colors of blacks and grays.

It's a bleak, bleak picture. But my friend, it's a bleak, bleak world. It was then and it is now because we're still under the dominion of sin.

And yet when you move into the 21st verse of this third chapter, it's just like an experience I had years ago. I remember having the devastating news of the home call of our brother Brian Armstrong. I was in Tanzania at the time.

In fact, I only had the rumor sent down the line to me that someone I esteemed greatly had died. For a while, I thought it was a member of my own family. And when I got to Nairobi, the rumor was fleshed out and it was still a tremendous shock for I loved Brian very, very dearly.

And on the occasion of his funeral service, I took time out. And I went on the Rift Valley in north of Nairobi, a most spectacular spot. And I spent a vigil during the time that you were having the memorial service here.

And the sky was fairly dark. It was getting towards dusk. But there was still a wide gap in the sky, in the clouds.

And suddenly, the sun just poured through. It was a most remarkable, natural parable, or so it seemed to me. Maybe I was sentimental at the time, I don't know.

But the Lord just seemed to be showing that in the shock of all that had happened and the distress that must be being felt in the CPO family and with dear Eve and the TAB folk here, that nonetheless, he was still in it all. And though the outlook seemed quite bleak, the uplook seemed quite wonderful. And that's how I approach this opening part of Paul's epistle.

I like to get to the 21st verse of this chapter because then you're back in the Rift Valley in Kenya and there's light bursting through. It's not just a chink of light. It's like pouring, pouring through.

I made reference in the notes, which I'm not following in anything but just occasional references to subject matter of title headings. But I do make reference to the fact that one of the greatest sermons that Martin Lloyd-Jones ever preached was on the word but. You might think it's difficult to preach a sermon on the word but.

Yet if you have the vocabulary and the spiritual insight as Martin Lloyd-Jones most certainly had, you would have appreciated that sometimes, particularly in Paul's epistle to the Romans, he builds up a sort of negative argument. He brings all the clouds together, all the somber colors. He paints with extravagance.

And maybe sometimes you think, Paul, that's too much. And then he gets to the but and he moves you into the sunshine of the purposes of God. This is what the world was like.

The Jew and the Gentile, they came under condemnation. The one through the natural law, the other through the Mosaic law. They had a knowledge of God.

They determined not to follow the knowledge that they had. And as a result, the whole world is guilty before God. At the human level, there is no hope at all but.

And then he launches out into the most exquisite piece of theological reasoning that you'll discover anywhere in scripture. You see, what he's doing is he's getting back to the opening verses of the first chapter where he's first introduced you to the concept of the righteousness of God, verse 16 of that chapter. I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes first for the Gentile, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel of righteousness from God is revealed a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. And then verse 18, he starts on a digression that takes him another two and a half chapters.

And at the end of those two chapters, when you're feeling absolutely depressed and despondent, he brings you right back to his starting point, the righteousness of God. And now he opens it up, you see. He makes comment on it.

He's gonna do the same. You'll find him doing more or less the same thing in the fifth chapter when he takes you on an excursion again into the problems of the Jews and into the gravity of human sin. And he'll tell you when sin abounded, grace has much more abounded.

Well, I tell you, you could preach a series of addresses just on the buts that Paul uses here in Romans. But now, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known. And the thing to bear in mind is that this gospel that Paul preaches, which is in effect equivalent to the righteousness of God, God's way of making men and women right with himself is not newfangled.

It's new, but it's not essentially new in as much as it has had some anticipation in the Old Testament. And that's my comment by way of summary in the notes. It's apart, and yet it's joined.

It's new in as much as no one has ever seen it in such stark fashion before as Paul now has through Jesus Christ. But the Old Testament people, they were always straining forward to the day when God would reveal to mankind a way in which ordinary people, Jew and Gentile, can be righted by the grace of God. Now, the law and the prophets.

When you come across that phrase in the New Testament, it's referring actually to the Old Testament. You see, the first five books of the Old Testament are the books of the law. In the Jewish language, the Pentateuch, pent meaning five, teuch coming from the Hebrew Torah, the five law books.

And the prophets, well, that's just a descriptive term of all the other books that follow. When our Lord is speaking to the two on the way to Emmaus, you remember how he opens up the scriptures and he expounds the things concerning himself from the law and the prophets. So although this way of God making men and women right with himself is new, there have been anticipations of it.

The Old Testament has caught something of the color, but nowhere near has grasped the clarity of the gospel message as revealed in the Lord Jesus. You see, he is the Old Testament priest. Now, he's offered many a sacrifice.

And he knows full well that however perfect the pigeon was or the sheep was that he kills, and however careful he is in purifying himself and taking the blood and applying it to the relevant part of the temple furniture, he knows that all this cannot possibly atone for the sins, the literal sins of human being who deliberately have violated the law of this God. But he has an understanding that somehow in what he is doing is an anticipation of the final solution that God has for the sins of the Hebrews, for the sins of the world. Well, this righteousness is made plain apart from, but joined to the Old Testament.

It's a righteousness, says Paul as he develops his theme in the 22nd verse, that has as its source God. It comes from God. It doesn't just have its source as God, but it has its channel as his son, this righteousness from God through Christ.

And what is more, it is directed. It is directed to all who believe in him, in the Lord Jesus. So those prepositions are very useful, aren't they? From God, through faith, in Christ, to all.

You see, this faith that you and I have is not just a sort of fleeting fancy. It's faith in a person. It's not wishful thinking.

In the Greek language, the word faith is a very strong one. If my memory serves me right, going back to my years at London Bible College when I last studied the Hebrew language in any detail, it has the idea of the vine wrapping itself round a tree because the vine itself cannot stand on its own, or if you like, the ivy wrapping itself round. That's more accurate than the vine.

Though the vine needs, as I've been teaching you on a Sunday morning, it needs props to hold up the branches, but the ivy is a better illustration. So you see, your faith, my faith, is intertwined round something solid, and that is none other than our Lord Jesus. And this faith that we have in our Savior, well, it's available to all, to the Jew and to the Gentile.

The condition is belief, this belief, this submission to the gospel of Christ. There's no difference. The way of making men and women right is offered at an international level, and the reason being, verse 23, Paul follows his logic very closely here, because all have sinned.

You see, we all need this solution. If all of us have cancer and someone has discovered the antidote, then all of us would need that antidote. We've all sinned.

We've all fallen short of the glory of God. Now, that doesn't mean to say that we're all as bad as one another, but let's illustrate the nature of our problem, even though human sinfulness has degrees. Let's say that here we have a gap, shall we, between two cliffs, and you need to get across the gap.

Say the gap is 30 feet, and the person who can jump the furthest here in the Tabernacle Lounge can manage 28 feet. Ian Land, definitely a 28-footer, but Ted Davey is at somewhat of a disadvantage. He can only manage 20 feet, so both he and Ian are in trouble.

You might argue that actually Ted is in more trouble than Ian. I argue they're both in exactly the same trouble because they're going to miss the other side, whether you miss by an inch or whether you miss by a mile, you're in difficulty in my illustration, are you not? Now, that's exactly the case here. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Therefore, all Jew and Gentile, sons of Abraham, and those who have no physical way of tracing their ancestry back to Abraham, they all are in the same need because they have all missed the mark. So how does God respond to your need? Well, in the most remarkable fashion, verse 24, he does so by offering you grace, and that grace, it's free. Look at the adverb there, and are justified freely by his grace.

But there's all the difference in the world between something being free and something being cheap. The difference is that you can have something free that's expensive, that's of great value. It comes to as a result of someone else paying the price.

If it's cheap, it's probably something that you've bought for yourself at a sale or what have you. Now, the grace of God is not cheap. It is not available for purchase at the normal human level.

This, of course, was Paul's great problem, wasn't it? I mean, there is nothing that he wanted more than to be righteous before God at the end of his life on the basis of having kept the law of God. That's why he was a Pharisee, not only just a Pharisee, but according to his own evaluation, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. What were the Pharisees doing? Well, exactly the same as the Islamic community are doing.

I would argue exactly the same as the Moon Unification Church is teaching its followers to do, exactly the same as the Jehovah's Witness does. The idea is that if you keep a bundle of laws and regulations, you do this and you don't do the other, then perhaps at the end, you will be right before God. And that drove Luther almost insane.

You remember his story I told you right at the beginning, this man who finished up in an Augustinian monk, in an Augustinian monastery, having escaped death by a lightning flash early on in his life, so worried that God would send him to hell. And he was so concerned to keep all the minute details of the Augustinian order, kept coming back to the abbot, confessing and confessing and confessing and confessing, hoping that somehow at the end of the journey, God would call him justified in his sight. And no wonder a man with the sensitivity of Luther was almost beside himself.

Well, you see, the way that God justifies us, my dear friends, is not by admitting to something at the end of our Christian life and pilgrimage, how terrible it would be if you don't know whether you're saved or not until you get to the end of your life. He does it by granting you a knowledge of forgiveness through what he allows the Lord Jesus to perform on earth. And you can know that at the beginning of your spiritual pilgrimage.

We're justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. That word redemption's a lovely one. We're gonna sing another hymn.

I'm glad that David dug that old supplement out because one of my favorite hymns that never made hymns of faith, probably because he'd had a chorus in and whoever put hymns of faith together didn't do a bundle on choruses, redeemed how I love to proclaim it. Redeemed, it's one of the greatest words in the whole of the New Testament and it's the language of merchandise. If you like, it's the language of the merchant who sells everything he has, every pearl that he's got in his possession so that he can go out and purchase that one pearl that is utterly unique, the pearl of great price.

And you know, because you're good Bible students, that in that parable, it is our Lord Jesus who is being identified as the merchant man and the price is the church. He sells all that he has, so to speak, in order to obtain the redemption of folk like you and me. The language of commerce is always exploited by scripture when it refers to the saving death of our Lord Jesus.

His blood can make the foulest clean. His blood avails for me. That's what Paul has in mind.

You see, we are justified freely by his grace. God's riches at Christ's expense are made available to you and to me. They only come through Jesus.

Paul has no truck with the universal boys as far as their theology, so-called, is concerned today. The idea that you can put in a bit of Buddhism and a bit of Hinduism and this and the other and get yourself in the 20th century a sort of Irish mishmash stew, apologies to the Irish with us this evening, and ultimately that will be the faith of the 20th century. Not a bit, says Paul.

We're justified freely by grace, which exclusively comes through our Lord Jesus Christ. And look at the operation of God there in the 25th verse. God presented him as a sacrifice, as an atonement through faith in his blood.

You know, that's a very, very interesting verse. I wish I had the whole of my 25, 30 minutes to speak just on that. And I'll tell you why, at least I will in summary fashion.

How did the Old Testament priests go on in the temple? Where did they believe that God made an atonement or they made an atonement for the sins of the people in the presence of God? Well, they pushed their way, you recall, through the holy place, into the holy place. And there in the holiest of holies in the temple was the mercy seat. It was underneath two great golden cherubim whose wings touched just over the top of the mercy seat.

And the priest, once a year, would go through into the holy of holies, only the high priest, and he would take blood and he would apply it to the mercy seat. Their atonement was made at the mercy seat. Now, it was all very, very private.

It was all very wonderful. Only the priest, the high priest, had some concept of the greatness of the presence of God. The thousands outside were waiting for the priest to come back from having made an atonement for their sins, to show himself, to prove that he was still alive, that God has symbolically accepted the atonement.

It was all very, very wonderfully done. It was sacred, it was solemn, it was silent. But this is what Paul is saying of Jesus Christ.

God, verse 25, presented him, and he uses the very word for the mercy seat as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. Where did he do that? Not in the confines of the temple, but out there on the top of Mount Calvary under the eyes of a hostile, contemptuous crowd. The blood of Jesus, God's own son, is spilt so that you and me could have our sins forgiven.

That's what God has been doing. This is why I say the grace of God is always to be conceived of as free but not cheap. And in so presenting our Lord Jesus publicly as, if you like, the human mercy seat, he has in mind not only those who will live during the ministry of our Lord Jesus and in the immediate days following his death and resurrection, but all those who lived centuries before.

Halfway through verse 25, he did this to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. You see, many people sinned, didn't they? From Adam onwards, all sinned. All came short of the glory of God.

And although the death of our Lord Jesus occurred in time and space, you could chronicle the event, you could almost work out the exact hour if you had sufficient historical information. Yet in another sense, it's outside of time. Some of you may have seen the rather remarkable surrealistic picture by Salvador Dali of Christ on the cross.

And the cross actually is so drawn that it's on top of the world, it's looking over the world and you don't see the face of the one who is crucified. And Dali's got the right idea because there is a sense in which although the cross was in time and space, it was in the heart of God before man was ever created. That's Peter's comment about the blood of our Lord Jesus, a lamb slain as it were before the foundation of the world.

You see, the power of the blood of Jesus is prospective. From AD 30 or 33 onwards, it will atone for the sins of believing mankind who live then and afterwards. It's also retrospective.

It goes two ways. You see, there's nothing really unusual about this. Once you predicate the fact that the man on the cross is not an ordinary man, he's God's own son.

He has an eternal value inherent in his life and death and resurrection. And so the blessings of the cross are backwards and also forwards. And as a result of the apostle teaching us this, he shows us that God is utterly fair, you see.

It would be most unfair of God not to punish those who are guilty. It would be as great an indication of lack of justice as to punish those who are innocent. Now, our God is utterly fair.

So men and women who lived centuries before are affected to their eternal well-being by the death of our Lord Jesus, assuming they lived, as Psalm 51 illustrates, the author illustrates, penitentially. So God, he takes, so to speak, the mercy seat from out of the security, the seclusion, the reverence of the holy place of the temple, and he places it on top of the skull-shaped hill. And there, for all to see, an atonement is made by our Lord Jesus Christ that covers the sins of those before and after him.

And this is endorsed in the 26th verse, is it not? He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Now, that really is quite glorious. If you followed what I've said, then even if your feet aren't dancing, you're dancing in your heart because you begin to appreciate the fantastic generosity and love of God.

But it does something to you, you see. It does something to the sensitive sinner to be brought face-to-face with this quality of love. You see, in one sense, we're all proud people, aren't we? The majority of us are proud people.

One of the greatest stumbling blocks in our lives is our tendency to human pride. It's there in the Garden of Eden, or rather the, yes, the Garden of Eden. There is Adam and he's so proud and the devil ministers to his pride.

If you eat what is forbidden, you'll become like him who forbids it, to become like God, to hoodwink God. That was a tantalizing opium bait that Adam is proffered by the devil. There is a pride, I say, inherent in all of us.

But when you stand before the cross of Christ, all pride is obliterated. Where is boasting then, says the apostle Paul, verse 27? It's excluded, of course it's excluded. There's nothing that you can bring to God for your salvation apart from the sin that you have committed and from which he will absolve you.

Nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to his cross I cling. You see, you can go two ways in terms of extremism in evangelicalism.

You can forget that you were ever a wretch and you can become pompous and proud. Or you always think that you're a wretch and you're groveling and you forget that you've been made a prince and a princess unto God. But if you come at this doctrine of righteousness, although you appreciate what you have been made by the grace of God, the fact that it is the grace of God that has done it and not you yourself, it excludes all boasting.

This is why the Christian community should be the most harmonious community that ever there was. We should love one another, why? Because we've all been wretched before the cross. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

Remember what you were and remember what you have become. And when you remember the former, it will stop you from boasting. And when you remember the latter, it will stop you from having a low self-esteem.

How has this all come about, on what principle? On that of observing the law? No, Paul has shown us that the law, though good in itself, could not save, no more than the lighthouse can save, the boat that's ignored the danger signal and gone onto the rocks. It's on the principle of faith, objective faith, in our Lord Jesus Christ. That man who recognizes what Christ has done is saved apart from observing the law.

That doesn't mean that he ignores the law. Doesn't mean that you can do what you please. The law was given by God.

Jesus did not come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill the law. Heaven and earth will pass away, but his word will not pass away.

And within his word, there is the law of God, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. They are still mandatory. But our failure to keep those laws does not rob us of eternal well-being because of what Jesus has done.

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. Is God the God of Jews only? No, of course he can't just be the God of the Jews. He's also the God of the Gentiles.

He's the God of both racial groups, so to speak, both national categories, if you can call the Gentiles just one category. There's only one God, verse 30. There's only one salvation.

And this salvation is directed towards the circumcised, the Jew, and to the uncircumcised on the basis of faith and that alone. The last part of verse 30. Do we then abrogate, nullify, dispense with the law, verse 31? No, as I've argued a moment or so before, anticipating Paul.

Far from nullifying the law, we uphold the law. And we uphold the man who kept the law in all its requirements. Now, I've raced through this.

I really would have liked to have taken one verse per week. But then, how many verses were there? 11, 11 weeks, and I haven't got 11 weeks to go right through them. Here, however, is the gist of Paul's teaching and he's inspired by the Spirit.

And here is the sun just pouring down upon you and me because of what the Lord Jesus has done. You're not smiling in your faces. I hope you're smiling in your heart because I think this is wonderful.

I really do. I mean, this is medicine to my soul. This is the manna that I feed on.

This is the meat that I fetch from Scripture. If I don't have this, then life becomes, well, if not completely without attraction, it loses its luster. It loses a great deal of its meaning.

But now, a righteousness from God has been revealed. And my brothers and sisters, you and I are the ones who have benefited from this righteousness through our Lord Jesus. Why? Do you ever ask yourself that? Why, Lord, did you save me? What did you see in me? I sometimes do that around the communion table when I tell you, without being sentimental, it's not always easy to hold that goblet and say that this is the blood in the new covenant shed for many for the remission of sins because amongst the many, I'm included.

He did it for me. I wouldn't have done it for me, if you see what I mean, if you can follow that little bit of Yorkshire illogicality. But he did it.

He redeemed you. He redeemed me. He loved you.

He loved me. Therefore, if he counts us precious, we should be counting one another precious and living within the preciousness of the gospel of Christ. More next time.