Justification by Faith: Understanding God's Righteousness in Christ

In the very first chapter of Romans, he develops the idea of the universal judgment of God upon fallen humanity that represses the divine revelation that God gives of Himself, and then he expounds how the effects of sin have grasped all people universally, both Jew and Greek. And he brings the whole world before the bar of God's justice with the conclusion that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" and that we are without excuse. [00:00:54]

But as he expounds on the nature of human sinfulness, he appeals to the Old Testament to the Psalm which begins, "There is none righteous, no not one. There is none who understands..." and you know that passage, and when he gets to the end of that citation, he says this in verse 19 of chapter 3, "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God." [00:01:28]

And so he puts us before the judgment seat of God, and he uses the metaphor of the stopped mouth. Of course what that means is that when we are brought before the judgment seat of God and we appear before His holiness, the natural human tendency would be to rattle off every conceivable excuse that we could give for our disobedience. But when we come before God, it will become so clear to everyone standing there that it would be a pure exercise in futility to give any excuse or any attempt to rationalize our disobedience of God. [00:02:09]

Rather at the judgment seat we shut up, not a word can be said before God because His justice and judgment are so evident. But then Paul goes on to say, "Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight for by the law is the knowledge of sin." And now, this brief statement here is extremely important to understand the doctrine of justification, and it also is a particular statement that the apostle makes that has been a subject of much debate and inquiry in the history of theology. [00:02:48]

He begins by saying, "By the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight." Now the first question is, to what is he referring when he refers to "the deeds of the law"? There have been those who are saying that this is a restrictive passage that it only refers to the ceremonial requirements of the Old Testament law, and that what the apostle is saying here is that nobody is justified by going through all of the actions that God commands as he did the Jews, going through the sacrificial system and all of the cultic practices that were associated with the tabernacle and later with the temple. [00:03:40]

The vast majority of commentators however say, "No, Paul is not simply limiting this to the performance of ritual, but rather to all that the law commands including all of the moral obligations that God's law imposes upon His creatures," and so he is saying that by obedience to the law of God, both cultically, ritually, as well as morally, by the keeping of these no one will ever be justified. So in that sense, any kind of good work as we would perceive it to be is excluded from the grounds of justification. [00:04:42]

Again when he is talking about justification, he is not talking simply about a work of divine pardon. There is a difference between being pardoned and being justified. A person is pardoned who has already been declared to be and convicted of being guilty. And after they are convicted of being guilty, the governor or the president may execute their executive privilege of giving clemency and pardoning these people, that is, excusing them from the punishment that is due to their guilt. But justification is not simple pardon. [00:06:21]

Now part of justification involves the forgiveness of sins, but the essence of justification is declaring a person just. So in one sense, you do not have to pardon somebody who has been declared righteous. People who are righteous have no need of pardon and so that the point of justification goes beyond the forgiveness of sins that is ours in the cross and all of rest to the declaration by God that we who are in Christ and who possess faith are counted righteous before Him. [00:07:06]

So Paul goes on to say, verse 21, "But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe." So now again, we are speaking of that righteousness of God, not the righteousness by which He is righteous, but that righteousness that He gives to those who lack righteousness, the giving of the righteousness of God that comes through faith in Christ to all who believe. [00:07:59]

And then later on in this section he says, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." [00:08:47]

The passive obedience refers to His willingly giving of Himself in obedience to the vocation that was given to him by His Father to die for our sins. He acquiesces and allows Himself to be sacrificed for us and in that act of redemption which Paul is referring to here, two things are accomplished, propitiation and expiation. Sometimes, people have a hard time remembering the difference between propitiation and expiation. [00:09:55]

The active obedience of Christ refers to His perfect life under the law where the old Adam fell into disobedience and by his disobedience we are cast into ruin. By the new Adam's obedience, we have now receive a righteousness that is real. It is accomplished in His life. You see, if all Jesus had to do was to pay for our sins, He could have come down from heaven on Good Friday and gone straight to the cross and that would have been it. But it was more than that. [00:14:08]