Checked at the Door

Intro: Defining Justification

Paul is the protestant pastor’s best friend, and the protestant layman’s worst nightmare. The very foundations of protestant theology are built upon these words right here in Romans. Every good protestant, whether Methodist or baptist, knows that core line of theology: “We are justified by faith alone, and not by works”. Yet, how many of us really know what “justification” even means? This is a place of confusion for many, and while pastors love to preach from Paul, few lay people actually understand anything they say! This is truly a shame, because Justification by faith alone truly is a beautiful piece of the good news.

So what is justification? Why does this matter to us? When we hear the words “justify”, “righteous”, “justification” (which are actually all the same word in Greek), many of us might immediately think of a courtroom context for this passage in Romans. These words certainly conjure up the image of a judge in the English language, and that has even been a popular way of interpreting this text in the history of the Church, and yet that doesn’t seem at all to be what Paul is trying to get at here. He makes no mention of a judge or juror, but brings us instead to an aging desert nomad, Abraham. “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Perhaps one reason we’ve struggled to understand Paul here is that we don’t fully understand Abraham.

In , Abraham has been called out of the city of Haran and travels almost 400 miles into the land of Canaan, all because of a promise he’d received from God. God had told Abraham, who was quickly approaching the 100 year mark, that he would grant him a child, an heir, if Abraham would agree to serve and trust in him. Not only would he grant Abraham this one child, but through that child Abraham would have many children, his children would outnumber the stars in the night sky, and God would bless all nations through Abraham and his family. God promised all of this to a 75 year old desert nomad and his barren wife. And you know what? As crazy and impossible it sounded, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

There’s that word again! “Righteousness”. “Justification.” These words, for Abraham, certainly didn’t have anything to do with being right or wrong, guilty or not guilty. No, righteousness had everything to do with being a member of a covenant relationship. God had made Abraham this amazing promise, and by placing faith in the Covenant maker, Abraham agreed to take part in that promise. He was righteous, he was in the right with God, i.e. he was in the correct kind of relationship with him: a covenant relationship, a family relationship, because covenant was all about becoming family in Abraham’s culture. To cut a covenant with someone was, for all intents and purposes, to become family with them.

So, thousands of years later, when Paul begins to preach on and on about “justification” and “righteousness”, he is speaking not about a courtroom scenario, but about becoming a part of the covenant family of God.

Getting in the Door: Justification by Faith

In , then, Paul seems primarily concerned with how someone becomes a part of that covenant family of Abraham. How do you get in the door? Being a member of God’s covenant family, after all, seems like a pretty big deal. You can’t just walk right in, you’ve got to have right credentials. You have to provide justification for being let in. So how do we prove to the doorman that we ought to be let in? How do we justify ourselves? This was a pretty big debate in Paul’s day, as we can see when we read one of his letters. There were some in the early Church who believed that being a member of God’s family, a descendant of Abraham, meant that you had to follow Jewish custom and law. And what that meant, primarily, was that you had to circumcised. Circumcision was the ticket into the door.

Paul, however, strongly disagrees. Pointing us back to the story of Abraham, Paul notes that Abraham was “reckoned righteous” before he was circumcised! Abraham couldn’t have gotten into the covenant family by following the Law, by doing “works of the law” like being circumcised, because the Law had not even been mentioned to him yet! Circumcision had not even been mentioned to him yet! In fact, Abraham goes a whole two other chapters in the story before he is circumcised, and yet he is still “reckoned righteous”, he’s still let through the door into God’s covenant family.

It was, in fact, Abraham’s faith in God, and not anything at all to do with the Law, that allowed him to become a member of God’s family.

Who’s Welcome Inside? (All)

We might ask ourselves, at this point, “Why does this matter to us?” Is this whole passage really just telling me I don’t have to be circumcised? Paul seems to have gone to great lengths to emphasize that uncircumcised people can also enter into the covenant. Why would that have been important to him, though?

While this might seem a trivial thing to us, in Paul’s day it was a shocking, ground breaking discovery. Up to this point it was assumed that God only really intended to deal with the Jews, the ethnic descendants of Abraham who kept the law: they were circumcised, they ate kosher foods, they performed all manner of strange rituals and observed odd holy days, and generally disassociated with unclean Gentiles. Paul, however, has turned that idea on its head. God’s plan from the beginning was not to include only the circumcised, i.e. the Jewish people, but also the uncircumcised, i.e. the Gentiles. Abraham had been “reckoned righteous” before he was circumcised so that he might be,

“the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised.”

This is good news indeed! It means that the doors of God’s covenant family are not barred. All who have faith in this God, and in his son Jesus Christ, may enter into the family. The Covenant Promise, the Covenant Family, is not for one ethnic group, but for all.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus.”

All have been invited into God’s covenant family.

Now that we’re in....

Christ has opened the door for all to enter into a relationship with the Father. This was, according to Paul, always God’s plan. From the beginning, in his interactions with Abraham, God had intended for both the circumcised and uncircumcised, the Jew and the Gentile to know him, to become a part of his family. The only requirement is that we place our faith in God, and in his only son, our Lord Jesus.

This is good news indeed.

The Gospel, then, is more than merely a declaration of “not guilty” by a pallid faced judge, it is an invitation into a family. But what does it mean to be a part of that family? Paul spends a great deal of time arguing for how to get into the family in chapter four, only hinting at the why, but he doesn’t really get to the why until chapter 5 and 6. This family God invited Abraham into, the family Jesus has invited us into, is the family through which God intends to restore all of creation. This is the family, the elect group of people, who are being saved from the effects of sin.

“Therefore,” says Paul, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,  through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”

Because we have placed our faith in Jesus, our entrance into the family is justified, and we have peace with God, and more than that, we now have hope of sharing the glory of God, of being remade into the images of God as was intended since creation. This was the promise from the beginning to Abraham and his descendants,

I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing...and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed

We who have faith in Jesus have recieved the blessing of God, the cure for the curse of sin, and through us, the Church, the descendants of Abraham, God is at work to provide that same blessing to all of creation.

Being a member of this family means that we too are recipients of the promise to Abraham. It means that we are now a part of God’s divine plan to rescue all of creation.

This passage is about so much more than whether we should be circumcised or not. It is about who can become a part of God’s family, the family of the promise, the family through which God is redeeming the world. And the good news Paul offers to us is that all can now become children of God, because of the gracious gift offered to us in Jesus Christ. The door is not shut, it has been opened wide.