Justified!

These chapters deal with the heart of the gospel.

The apostle has announced the theme of Romans: God’s saving power towards us in Jesus Christ for all who believe. In 1.18-3.20, Paul has explained why the gospel is so necessary, why we need a divinely provided righteousness in the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ — because all righteousness is lacking in ourselves, whether we be Gentiles or Jews.

Paul turns to the great question: how can sinful man be justified before God and how can a righteous God be a righteous God and a Saviour?

He speaks in this section about three things: the divine way of justification, the immediate implications of justification and the spiritual blessings of justification.

The divine provision of justification, 3.21-26

The grand transition that Paul describes here is not so much a transition in my personal life but a transition that has invaded history (verse 24), so that we may be ‘justified freely by his grace’. Let’s pause to ask two questions: firstly, what does Paul mean when he says ‘justified’? Paul is not thinking here of something that happens in my heart. He is thinking about a declaration that is made about me from the judgement throne of God. When Paul uses the language of justification, it’s always the opposite of condemnation.

Why is it that there is no condemnation for us in Christ Jesus? Because, says Paul in Romans 8, God has justified us. Justification is the opposite of condemnation. It’s a verdict that God makes about us, a final verdict.

The justification of God is God’s final verdict on my life, that I am righteous in his sight. If all God said was, ‘Because of Jesus Christ, these people are innocent’, we would simply be back to the Garden of Eden. It would provide us with no assurance of final salvation. Justification is not simply a declaration that I am innocent; it is a declaration that in Jesus Christ I am to be counted before the throne of God as righteous with a final righteousness in his presence.

But, since that is the case, there is a second question. On what basis can a righteous God justify the ungodly? Paul spells this out by saying firstly that, if it is to be God’s justification of the ungodly, then justification must be entirely and all of grace. The ungodly cannot compensate for their ungodliness by trying to keep the law. A righteousness from God apart from law has been made known. From beginning to end, there is one way of salvation in the Scriptures. A righteousness from God, apart from the law, is now fully manifested.

Secondly, Paul says that the justification that is all of grace is all in Christ. This righteousness from God, he says, comes from faith in Jesus Christ (verse 25), whom God presented as ‘a sacrifice of atonement’ (NIV) — older and some newer versions, as a ‘propitiation’ — ‘through faith in his blood’.

He justifies those who have faith in Jesus. The language here is the language of blood sacrifice: ‘through faith in his blood’. Paul uses two words here that help us to picture what he’s saying, that the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross is the payment of a redemption price.

The atonement that was made for our sins as believers was made in Jesus himself. It was not extrinsic to Jesus, it was intrinsic to Jesus; he himself was the propitiation for our sins. It’s all in Jesus Christ, you’ve got to get into Jesus Christ by faith, so that all that he is may become yours. And Paul has been saying we’ve fallen short of the glory of God, so where is the glory of God going to come back to us? It’s going to come back to us in Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ was covered in shame in order that glory might be restored to us. Justification is all of God, it’s all of grace, it’s all of Christ and it’s all of faith.

Notice Paul adds: ‘to all who believe’. Why? Because running through this whole letter is his passionate concern to see Jew and Gentile believer living in sweet harmony together. He wants to emphasise, both to Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome, there is only one way of salvation for both of them.

And it is all of God. God sent Jesus. So often in our thinking, our speaking and singing, we endanger the heart of the gospel by suggesting that it was the loving Jesus who changed the wrathful Father into a Father who reluctantly would love us. That’s such a distortion of Paul’s teaching and the gospel. The good news of the gospel is that the Father so loved the world that he gave his Son. Incidentally, that’s why some of us need to learn to pray to the Father much more than we do, lest we give the impression that it’s easier to go to Jesus than to go to the Father. The Father has poured himself into the gift of his Son and you can be absolutely confident that you have access to the Father.

The immediate implications of justification, 3.27-4.24

Paul raises three questions in verses 27, 29 and 31. Question one: ‘Where, then, is boasting?’ Answer: ‘It is excluded’. On what principle? Is it excluded on the basis of the law? You could boast if you could keep the law, but since you can’t keep the law, you can’t boast, so it’s got to be by faith. But it’s apparently not what Paul means. He says on what principle is boasting excluded? On that of observing the law? No, it’s excluded on the principle of faith.

God has provided a way of salvation in Jesus Christ that comes to us only through faith and yet, in coming to Christ through faith, we contribute absolutely nothing to our salvation. That’s the genius of the way of faith. The one who truly believes never asks: ‘Is there more for me to do in order to be justified?’ Paul had said the person who comes this way has been silenced before God.

Then, he says, in verses 29 to 30: ‘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’. This justification: it’s one way of salvation for all.

In chapter 4 Paul does something that is so brilliant that when you see it, it seems so obvious. He says: ‘Well, when was Abraham justified — before or after he was circumcised?’ It was before he was circumcised (verses 10,11). So he was an uncircumcised, justified believer who was later circumcised. Why? So that he might be the father of all the faithful, those who believe in the promise of God in the days of the Old Testament and those who believe in the fulfilment of that promise in the Lord Jesus Christ in the days of the New Covenant. Abraham is the father of all who believe, and it was staring them in the face.

But doesn’t this way of justification by faith overthrow the law? ‘You preach that to people and they’ll go out and live any way they choose.’ No: when people are gripped by the grace of God and come to trust in Jesus Christ, their lives are transformed. If their lives are not transformed, they’ve never come to trust in Jesus Christ. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not leave you where it finds you.

The spiritual blessings of justification, 5.1-11

‘Therefore’, he says, ‘since we have been justified through faith, what are the blessings that flow to us from justification?’ Let me simply point out three of them.

There is a kind of refrain that runs through Romans 5.1-11. It appears first of all in verse 2: ‘We rejoice’, he says, ‘in the hope of the glory of God’. The word he uses means more than ‘rejoice’. It means he’s exulting in it. This is something glorious that has gripped him.

Second: we rejoice in our suffering. Now why? Because we know that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces tested character and tested character produces hope — hope in the glory of God. You meet somebody who’s been through the mill and you see there is a something, a presence, a dignity, and a grace. What’s happened? God has been polishing them through sufferings to put glory into their lives.

How can we be sure this hope will never be disappointed? Because we’ve already begun to taste a foretaste of that glory. God has sent heaven down into our hearts in the indwelling presence of God the Holy Spirit. We’re sure of that because the Word of God promises it to us, but also because we’ve tasted the reality of it in the Holy Spirit, baptising our hearts with a sense of the love of God for us. How do I know that God loves me? Not because of that marvellous experience of the outpouring of his love; I know he loves me because of his pouring out of his love in the gift of his Son.

We can never be sure of the love of God just because we see good things happening to our lives; we can be sure of the love of God for us only because of what he did in the worst thing humanly speaking that ever happened in the world: the crucifixion of his own Son.

How do we know the greatness of his love? Because of our condition when he loved us. We were weak and ungodly (verse 6). We were sinners (verse 8). We were enemies (verse 10). We know he loves us because he died for us. It makes us ask whether he loves us more than he loves himself.

And there’s one more thing. We rejoice in him because of who he is. We glory in God himself, for himself, because he has given his only begotten Son to be our Saviour.

© Evangelicals Now - September 2005
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