7
God’s Righteousness in Christ
Romans 3:21–31
Outline
- The New Era of Righteousness (3:21–26)
- Justification and the Law (3:27–31)
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
- Identify the different meanings that Paul gives to the phrase “God’s righteousness.”
- Understand the way in which God has overcome the problem of sin through his Son.
- Appreciate both the continuity and discontinuity in salvation history.
Martin Luther called Romans 3:21–26 “the chief point, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible.”1 High praise indeed! I suspect that most of us would like to advance some other candidates for the honor of being the central place of the Bible, and I know that I would have a very hard time choosing even among the top twenty-five contestants. But no one can doubt that Romans 3:21–26 is one of the most theologically important passages in Scripture. Here Paul weaves together many of the key threads in the biblical view of salvation. The result is a tapestry of awe-inspiring intricacy and beauty. The passage should inspire us to think deeply about the way God has arranged the salvation of his rebellious creatures. But, more than that, it should inspire a new depth of worship and devotion. All true theology should lead to doxology.
Paul’s presentation of God’s righteousness in Christ in 3:21–26 is the introduction and heart of the next section of the letter. This section runs from 3:21 to the end of chapter 4. It focuses on the way in which God has revealed his righteousness, making it possible for sinners to be justified before him through faith. Before and outside of Christ, people are helpless captives of sin and are unable to do anything to escape sin’s tyranny (1:18–3:20). But God has acted to rescue sinners from their plight. In revealing his righteousness, he makes it possible for every person who responds in faith to be justified. Righteousness and justification are, indeed, two sides of the same coin. The two terms translate words from the same root in Greek (dik-). In 3:27–4:25, Paul explores the implications of his central teaching about justification by grace through faith. The short paragraph at the end of chapter 3 (vv. 27–31) briefly sets out those implications. Then, in chapter 4, Paul expands on those implications with reference to a key biblical test case, Abraham.
The New Era of Righteousness (3:21–26)
“But now” signals the transition from the sobering and depressing portrait of sinful humanity (1:18–3:20) to the celebration of the salvation available through God’s righteousness in Christ. As in 1:17, which this passage harks back to, Paul is talking about God’s activity of putting people in the right with himself. The “now,” then, refers to the new era of salvation that has dawned with the coming of Christ. Paul’s presentation is ruled by his basic conception of salvation history, according to which the old era of sin and condemnation gives way to the new era of righteousness and life. Partly because of the disputes between Jewish and gentile Christians within the Roman community, Paul is especially concerned throughout Romans to show how God’s revelation in the Old Testament fits into this salvation-historical scheme. Verse 21 neatly summarizes his balanced approach. On the one hand, the righteousness of God has been made known “apart from the law.” As is usually the case, “law” (nomos) refers to torah, the law of Moses. Paul thinks of this law as a central ruling agent in the old era, and God’s righteousness in Christ cannot be fit within that old era, for it breaks new ground. On the other hand, what God has done in Christ stands in continuity with the Old Testament witness as a whole. The “Law and the Prophets testify” to it. This phrase is a Jewish way of referring to the Old Testament. So Paul makes clear that although God’s activity of making people right before him takes place outside the parameters of the law of Moses, it is an activity that the Old Testament looks forward to and predicts. While falling into two distinct stages, God’s plan for salvation history nevertheless is single and continuous.
In verse 22 Paul qualifies God’s righteousness in a typical fashion: it “is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” God acts in Christ to put people in right relationship with himself. But that act cannot finally be accomplished without human response. People must believe in Christ to experience for themselves God’s righteousness. Before elaborating this point any further, we should be sure of our ground in the Greek text. Most English versions translate along the same lines as the NIV: “through faith in Jesus Christ.” But the NET and CEB translate “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ,” revealing ambiguity in the underlying Greek (this reading is found also in the NIV footnote). The problem is twofold: the Greek word behind “faith” in the NIV (pistis) can also mean “faithfulness,” and the Greek construction (a genitive) only loosely relates this Greek word to “Jesus Christ.” A simple, basic rendering would be “Jesus Christ faith/faithfulness.” The NIV, following traditional interpretation and most commentaries, takes “Jesus Christ” to be the object of the word pistis, which is then viewed as meaning “faith.” The NET, the CEB, and a growing list of scholars, on the other hand, think that “Jesus Christ” is the subject of the word pistis, translated “faithfulness.” Advocates of this interpretation point to a similar construction in 4:16, where “the faith of Abraham” clearly means “the faith that Abraham exercised.” So what Paul might be saying is that God’s righteousness comes “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.” We are put right with God through Christ’s faithful giving of himself to death for us and by our grateful acceptance of that gift in faith.2 No objection to this interpretation can be made on doctrinal grounds. God’s righteousness comes to us only because Jesus was faithful in carrying out the commission that God the Father had given him. Nevertheless, I think that the usual rendering is to be preferred. Nowhere does Paul clearly speak of Christ “believing” or “being faithful,” whereas he regularly (and in this very context [see 4:3]) speaks of human beings believing in God or in Christ. So Paul’s own habits of speech suggest that “through faith in Jesus Christ” is the best translation.3 He adds “to all who believe” to underline the critical point that both Jew and gentile are now invited, on the same grounds, to experience the righteousness of God in Christ.
Paul reminds us that the universal invitation to believe is the flip side of the universal need for salvation. “There is no difference,” he affirms at the end of verse 22, continuing in verse 23 with the well-known summary of 1:18–3:20: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In the situation Paul addresses, this universalism especially has in mind Jew and gentile, but of course it applies to any distinction among human beings that we might imagine: race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Because all human beings have sinned, all are offered the opportunity to believe in Christ and so experience God’s righteousness.
In the NIV, verse 24 is presented as the continuation of verse 23: “all have sinned . . . and all are justified.” A better option is to view verse 24 as the continuation of verses 21–22a, with verses 22b–23 as a parenthesis in the argument. As we saw above, the verb “justify” (v. 24) and the noun “righteousness” (vv. 21 and 22) come from the same Greek root. So it would be natural for Paul to continue his discussion of God’s righteousness by talking about the way in which God justifies people. And how does he do so? First, as to mode, God justifies us “freely by his grace.” The adverb “freely” simply emphasizes the idea inherent in God’s grace. As the sovereign Creator, God is always supreme over his creation. Never can any creature force him to act in any way. All that God does, he does of his own free will. And so his act of justifying sinners is one that he does out of his own loving nature, giving us as a gift what we never could earn or merit. Second, as to means, God justifies us through an act of “redemption.” The Greek word underlying “redemption” (apolytrōsis) was applied to the money that a slave would pay in order to secure his or her freedom.4 The root idea is a “price paid for release.” The Jews who translated the Old Testament into Greek used words from this same Greek root for the release that God attained for the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt (Exod. 15:13; Deut. 9:26). In Christ, God paid a price to secure release from the ultimate slavery: slavery to sin (see 3:9).
In verse 25 Paul elaborates further on how God in Christ redeemed sinful human beings. But exactly what it is that Paul intends to say is debated. He claims that God presented Christ as a hilastērion. Some English versions translate this word “propitiation” (KJV; NASB; ESV). To “propitiate” means to “placate” someone’s wrath, as in the sentence “I propitiated my wife’s wrath by taking her out to dinner.” The Greeks used the word to refer to memorials or sacrifices that were intended to placate the wrath of the gods, and Paul’s focus on God’s wrath in his description of the human dilemma (see 1:18; 2:5) makes it likely that he refers to Christ as a means of propitiation here.5 To be sure, some interpreters have objected to the whole notion of the wrath of God, suggesting that it represents the God of the Bible as a capricious tyrant in the mold of the Greek gods.6 But the concept of wrath has to be interpreted against the backdrop of the larger religious conception. Because the Greeks portrayed their gods as all too human in their petty jealousies, intrigues, and self-seeking, the wrath they attributed to those gods was often selfishly motivated or senseless. But of course the biblical view of the true God is quite different. Attributed to him, wrath is not an uncontrolled emotion but the settled and necessary reaction of a holy God to sin of any kind. We have no good grounds, then, for rejecting the notion of propitiation from the word that Paul uses here.
Model of the ark of the covenant, showing the mercy seat beneath the two cherubim (Lancastermerrin88/Wikimedia Commons)
Still, however, I question whether the translation “propitiation” finally does justice to Paul’s intention. What this translation overlooks is the significant use of the word hilastērion in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. In twenty-one of its twenty-seven occurrences there it refers to the mercy seat, the cover over the ark, on which sacrificial blood was poured. The mercy seat, or “atonement cover” (see NIV footnote), figures prominently in one of the crowning events in the Jewish calendar: the sacrifice offered on the Day of Atonement (see Lev. 16). Since the only other occurrence of hilastērion in the New Testament (Heb. 9:5) also has this meaning, we are justified in thinking that Paul probably intends to refer to this key Old Testament institution. On the cross, Paul in effect is saying, God has presented Christ as the new covenant mercy seat—the place where God takes care of the problem of sin.7 But since God can take care of sin only by satisfying his own wrath, the concept of propitiation is included in the wider idea of Christ as our “sacrifice of atonement” (NIV).
The temple platform in modern-day Jerusalem
In the last part of verse 25 and in verse 26, Paul turns to a final point: the purpose for which God has presented Christ as our sacrifice of atonement. He has done so, Paul claims, to “demonstrate his righteousness”—with reference to sins in the past (v. 25) and at the “present time” (v. 26). We encounter here again the key word in the opening sentence of this rich paragraph: dikaiosynē, “righteousness.” Many interpreters insist that the word here must have basically the same meaning as it does in these earlier verses: the saving righteousness of God, or perhaps the covenant faithfulness of God.8 But in fact, the context of verses 25b–26 justifies giving a different meaning to the word here. Paul claims that God had to send Christ to demonstrate his righteousness, “because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” The allusion is to sins committed before the coming of Christ. How could God simply leave them “unpunished”? Would not his holy nature demand that he judge those who sinned? Yes, indeed, it would. And Paul suggests that it was Christ, our atoning sacrifice, who bore the brunt of that judgment. Thus, God demonstrated his righteousness. But it now becomes clear that this can only mean God’s attribute of righteousness, that intrinsic part of his character that requires sin to be punished.
The end of verse 26 is a fit summary of this marvelous paragraph. Paul has shown how God can both justify the one who has faith in Jesus and, at the same time, remain just. James Denney captures the point very well:
There can be no gospel unless there is such a thing as a righteousness of God for the ungodly. But just as little can there be any gospel unless the integrity of God’s character be maintained. The problem of the sinful world, the problem of all religion, the problem of God in dealing with a sinful race, is how to unite these two things. The Christian answer to the problem is given by Paul in the words: “Jesus Christ, whom God set forth a propitiation. . . .”9
Justification and the Law (3:27–31)
In verses 21–26 Paul has brought together in a paragraph of unparalleled theological density the several aspects of God’s righteousness in Christ, but he has not taken the time to explore any of them in detail. He does this now, but very selectively. We hear no more about God’s redemption, atoning sacrifice, or justice. Paul devotes all his attention to one key element in the establishment of God’s righteousness: the way human beings respond to it. The classic Reformation doctrine of justification through faith by grace is the topic of 3:27–4:25. Paul introduces the key points in verses 27–31 before going on to elaborate them with reference to Abraham in chapter 4.
Paul draws three implications from the truth that people are justified by faith (see vv. 22, 24, 28): (1) human boasting is excluded (vv. 27–28); (2) Jews and gentiles alike can experience the benefits of the one God (vv. 29–30); and (3) the requirement of the law is not put aside but established (v. 31).
Some interpreters think that in verse 27 Paul is talking narrowly about Jews boasting in their covenant privileges.10 The wider context certainly makes this a possibility (see 2:17), but the narrower context points instead to human boasting in general.11 The issue is how any person, Jew or gentile (see vv. 22b–23 and vv. 28–29), can come into a relationship with God in Christ. Since that can happen only by faith rather than by works (vv. 27b–28), no person can brag about his or her contribution to the process. Our “works,” whether done in obedience to the law (in regard to the phrase “works of the law” in v. 28, compare the comments on 3:20) or to some other moral code, never can bring us into God’s favor. Only faith, the humble acceptance of God’s offer of salvation, can do so. And just as a person receiving a gift has no right to boast, so the sinner accepting the gracious gift of salvation has no basis for pride in the accomplishment. In verse 27, Paul uses the word “law” to state a contrast between “works” on the one hand and “faith” on the other. Many interpreters think that “law” here means what it usually does in Paul: the Mosaic law, the torah, viewed either in terms of the obedience it demands or in terms of its demand for, and promise of, faith.12 But it is more likely that Paul uses the Greek word nomos in one of its accepted meanings, “principle.” It would be very unusual for Paul to draw a connection between “law” and “faith”: he is quite consistent in defining “law” as something that people do rather than something that people believe (see, e.g., Gal. 3:12). So it is more likely that Paul is contrasting two principles of justification: one by works and one by faith.
One of the doctrines at the very heart of Judaism is the belief in one God: monotheism. In verses 29–30, Paul turns that belief against the tendency of Jews to confine justification to the law and therefore to Israel alone. If there is only one God, reasons Paul, then he must be the God of all people, and all people must have equal access to a relationship with him. But the law, having been given only to Israel, does not give gentiles a way to be saved. So God justifies both Jews (the circumcised) and gentiles (uncircumcised) in the same way: through faith.
In verse 31, Paul again is careful to guard what he has said against misinterpretation. “Do not think that my emphasis on being justified by faith in any way nullifies the law,” Paul is saying. Quite the contrary, this insistence on the centrality of faith “uphold[s] the law.” But how does faith uphold, or establish, the law? Paul does not explain immediately, so we have to decide where else in Romans he might elaborate this point. Most interpreters think that the very next chapter supplies the answer. Paul’s stress on faith upholds the law, because the law itself teaches that Abraham was justified by faith (Gen. 15:6, quoted in 4:3). This might be right. But note that the word “law” is not being given its usual meaning. To include Genesis 15:6, uttered centuries before the Mosaic law, “law” must refer to the Pentateuch. But, as we have repeatedly seen, Paul usually uses “law” to refer to the commands of God given to Israel through Moses. We therefore are encouraged to look for other possible interpretations of “uphold the law.” In Romans 13:8–10, Paul claims that loving one’s neighbor fulfills the law. So 3:31 might mean that Christians uphold the law by obeying the command of love that Christ made the heart of new covenant ethics. But a better alternative is to look to Romans 8:4 for elaboration of 3:31. In this verse, Paul claims that the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in believers. How is it fulfilled? Not by us, for we always fall short of the law’s demands, but by Christ, who perfectly obeys the law. Those who are in Christ therefore fulfill the demand of the law. I suggest that Paul is alluding to this idea when he claims that his teaching of justification by faith upholds the law. It does so by bringing people into relationship with Christ so that Christ’s own perfect fulfillment of the law might be applied to them.