"Your child's schoolwork has been of a very poor standard all year. His behaviour is appalling. But now…" "Our company has been performing badly and we were planning to make you redundant. But now…" What a difference those two simple words can make. Never in all of human history has that been more true than here in Romans 3:21. Paul has spent three chapters showing that every human being is unrighteous and doomed to condemnation. Then comes the turning point: "But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known." One New Testament scholar, Leon Morris, describes these verses as possibly the most important paragraph ever written. In them, Paul spells out the essence of salvation using three unforgettable pictures — a courtroom, a slave market, and an execution chamber — to show how God provides the righteousness we so desperately need.
The Solution Disclosed (verse 21)
If there is to be an answer to our hopeless situation, it has to come from outside ourselves. If you are trapped on the top storey of a burning building, you need to be rescued by someone from the outside — there is nothing you can do to save yourself. The one the whole human race has rejected and rebelled against, the God who has been offended by our sin, is the only one who can help us. And what do we read? "The righteousness of God has been made known." In sheer grace and mercy, God Himself has provided exactly the thing we need. We don't have righteousness — so God gives us righteousness.
Paul insists this righteousness is "apart from the law." You cannot get it by keeping the law, because you cannot keep the law. The law is like an MRI scan — it shows what is wrong with you but does nothing to cure the problem, as we saw in Romans 3:9-20. No amount of good works, religious works, or noble acts of self-sacrifice will make us righteous before God. In fact, they don't just fail to count for anything — they count against us. Isaiah 64:6 says: "All our righteousness is like filthy rags." Not our sin — our righteousness. Imagine owing a billion euros to the bank and fishing out a disgusting, greasy rag to push across the manager's desk with a smug smile. That is what our righteousness looks like before God.
This is tremendously humbling — and another reason we know this is not a man-made religion. But it is also deeply encouraging. Imagine if getting into heaven depended on your good works. How would you ever know if you had done enough? How could you ever do enough? But it does not depend on us. It is a righteousness of God, apart from law.
Yet although it is apart from law, Paul says "the Law and the Prophets testify to it." The whole Old Testament points forward to this righteousness. This gospel is not some last-minute Plan B. Trillions of years ago, before the universe existed, God was thinking about you and had set His love upon you. Someone came into the bookshop this week looking for the original Bloomsbury editions of the Harry Potter books — because his girlfriend had lost a box of her favourites in a house move, and he had been spending months tracking them all down as a surprise Christmas gift. Can you imagine the joy on her face? Well, God has been preparing the gift of salvation for His people from all eternity. That is how much He loves us.
The Solution Applied (verses 22–23)
"This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe." Notice it does not say "through faith" full stop. There is nothing magical about faith in itself — everybody has faith in something. The question is: faith in what? If you take a sip of water believing it is water, but it turns out to be concentrated sulphuric acid, it does not matter how much you believe — it is going to kill you. Faith in the wrong place is a terribly dangerous thing.
It must be faith in Jesus Christ. Faith in Mary will not save. Faith in Allah will not save. Faith in human nature will not provide this righteousness from God. It is not even enough to believe in the true God, or to believe the Bible, or to believe in heaven and hell. You must put your faith in Jesus Christ — believing that He is the Son of God, that He lived the life of perfect righteousness you cannot live, that He died the death you deserve, and that He did it to pay for your sins.
Why faith? Because faith is all about receiving, not doing. Faith is the empty hand held out by the beggar to receive a gift. Faith is not so much something we do as an admission that there is nothing we can do. If you are drowning in the middle of Galway Bay, you need to stop struggling and let the lifeguard save you. Sometimes the worst thing a drowning person can do is try to help — thrashing about can knock out the lifeguard and plunge them both under the surface. The best thing you can do is stop trying and let someone else save you. That is what faith is.
And it comes "to all who believe" — regardless of background, nationality, or past. Verse 23: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Everyone needs it. This is the only way to get it.
The Solution Described (verses 24–26)
The salvation Jesus accomplished at the cross is so rich, so glorious, so multi-faceted that no single picture can capture it — just as no one song or poem or film can capture the fullness of love. Paul uses three different pictures to help us understand what Jesus did.
Picture 1: The Courtroom — Justification (verse 24)
"All are justified freely by his grace." The picture is a courtroom. We, the sinners, are in the dock — clearly guilty, as Paul has shown through the first three chapters. The evidence is overwhelming. The judge is a God of blinding holiness who will not acquit the guilty. The courtroom falls silent. And the verdict? Not guilty.
This does not mean you are suddenly perfect. It means God declares you righteous. He treats you as if you have never sinned. All your guilt — taken away, forever. And it is "freely by his grace" — you don't earn it, don't deserve it. If God gave us what we deserve, He would send us to hell.
A good question to test whether you understand this: a Christian who has walked with Christ for forty years and someone who became a Christian thirty seconds ago — which is more justified? The answer is: both are equally and completely justified. You can never be more justified than the moment you first believe.
Picture 2: The Slave Market — Redemption (verse 24)
"Through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." From our perspective, justification is free. But from God's perspective, there is a staggering price to pay. Redemption means to buy back, to pay a ransom — like a prisoner of war released when a ransom is paid, or a slave freed when a price is met. Peter writes: "It was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect" (1 Peter 1:18-19). When you are feeling guilty and ashamed, a miserable Christian — take your eyes off yourself and look at Christ. He paid the price with His precious blood. That is why you are not guilty. It has nothing to do with you.
Picture 3: The Execution Chamber — Propitiation (verse 25)
"God presented Christ as a propitiation through the shedding of his blood." A propitiation is a sacrifice that turns away wrath. A trivial example: a pupil arriving late to school might put an apple on the teacher's desk — a small gift to make the teacher well-disposed rather than angry. But no amount of apples will turn away God's wrath against our sin. We need something infinitely more powerful.
A shark can apparently smell blood in the water a mile away. If we have even a trace of sin in our hearts, God's wrath locks onto it. We carry our sin with us like a homing beacon. Our sin condemns us to an eternal death row — not waiting for punishment, but suffering it forever.
The solution: Jesus stands in front of us and absorbs the full, unabated force of God's wrath in our place. There is a moving scene in Captain Corelli's Mandolin where Italian soldiers on Cephalonia are being executed by the Nazis. At the last moment, Carlo steps in front of Corelli and all the bullets go into his chest. Corelli falls back, saved, because all the death has gone into his friend instead. That is propitiation. That is what Jesus does at the cross — He absorbs the punishment so that not one atom of God's wrath touches us.
The Solution We Must Share
Politicians talk about the biggest problems facing Galway and Ireland — housing, immigration, climate change, infrastructure — and all kinds of solutions are proposed. But not one leaflet mentions our most urgent problem: our sin and the wrath of God. No politician has the answer to that. But we do. We in the Church of Jesus Christ are the only ones in Ireland who have the solution. If politicians are so zealous to share their ideas on how to make life better for a few years here on earth, how much more zealous should we be to make people's lives better for all eternity?
~ ~ ~
This article is part of our Romans sermon series. Listen to the previous sermon: All Under Sin (Romans 3:9-20), or continue to the next: The Implications of Justification by Faith (Romans 3:27-31).
Add comment
Comments