Part Three of Justification by Faith
Part Three of Justification by Faith, or Abraham and Grace
(Romans 3:29-4:25)
Introduction:
The title of our lesson this morning is . . . . and in this message we will finish up chapter three and then begin chapter four. And really, our last verses in chapter three are about two groups of people, two families if you will, Jew and Gentile, and it is also about the truth of both groups having the same God. Paul makes it very clear that even though the Gentiles had wandered off and worshiped gods of their own creation, they still had the true and living God to deal with, didn’t they? He writes that God, the God, the only God, is the same for both the Jews and the Gentiles.
Let me review the meaning of the term justification. What does it mean when we say that we are justified before God. To begin with, what is the central dilemma of humanity? God is holy and we are not, right? God is just and righteous and we are a singularly unjust and unrighteous race, aren’t we? And here is the rub: you and I are going to stand before this holy and righteous God and give an account of our lives. And as we have discussed before, God is not merely this vast forgiving machine out there, pumping out neat, sanitized little forgiveness packages, is He? For God to forgive us was a very costly matter. For God to forgive us was a very bloody and savage affair. Forgiveness of sin, the great wonder of salvation, cost God the sacrifice of His Son! So valuable was that sacrifice that God pronounced it valuable by raising Jesus from dead, so that Christ died for us and was raised for our justification.
Through that marvelous, bloody, and miraculous event, God does what? He declares us not guilty; He declares us innocent; and He declares us righteous! He gives us the very righteousness that only God’s own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, ever in fact possessed. And by that gift of Christ’s own righteousness you and I are able to stand before a holy and righteous God. How is this righteousness, this justifacation, this salvation, appropriated by us? Faith!
What we want to look at this morning is that this God, the One who chose the physical descendents of Abraham through whom to work the miracle of redemption, is the God of everyone, isn’t He? He is the God of the Jew and He is the God of the Gentile. And He has always been the God of everyone. He has just chosen a particular people, and their history, to most fully reveal Himself. And in order for faith in Christ to be the vehicle by which God applies the work of Jesus to repentant sinners, in order for the Messiah to take upon the humanity of God’s fallen creatures, He had to choose a people, didn’t He? And He chose Abraham! Why He did is something we will explore in the coming weeks as we continue our studies in this most wonderful of Paul’s letters.
I. Two Families, One God (Rom. 3:29-31)
1. A Universal Remedy (v. 29-30)
(1 Sometimes we get kind of confused about how God could choose the Jews to be His covenant people and not ours. Why did God choose them and not the people group that we came from? I forget what the context of the discussion was, but a guy I once knew asked me this very question. In discussing the truth of God’s choosing of the Jewish people, this guy asked plaintively, “Well, where were my people?” The real question behind this question, I think, was why did He choose them and not mine? Were my people not good enough? And there is an easy answer to this: no, his people weren’t good enough. And neither were the Jewish people either. And listen, while the Jews were never a great missionary people, God has never allowed His Word to remain stagnant and stuck in just one place. Even when He punished His people for their sin and dispersed them among the nations as punishment, part of His plan was undoubtedly to spread the word about Himself. To let the Gentile world know that He was alive and that He had given one people the truth about Himself. Look at your Bible, verses 29-30.
(2 Paul wrote in Galatians 4:4-5: Galatians 4:4-5 (KJV)
4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, 5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. We are all, Jew and Gentile, under the command of a holy God to come to Christ, aren’t we? Jesus was born of a woman, born under the Law. What Law? The Law of the Moses, right? In the book of Acts, Paul, in his sermon to philosophers in Athens, said that God had commanded all men everywhere to repent. Acts 17:30 (KJV)
30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Paul’s sermon on Mar’s Hill, as it is called, was directed toward the intellectual elite of Athens. They held council on one of the hills around the city of Athens, cussing and discussing and passing judgement on the philosophies and religions of the day. Paul was called before this council to give an account of this new religion of his. But was it a new religion? Or was the Gospel Paul preached a continuation of the Old Covenant? It was both old and new, wasn’t it? But the Gospel sprang from the promises God made to the Jewish people, right? And most specifically, Father Abraham from whom the Jews and all people of faith came from. We will begin to see that later in this lesson. But what Paul was saying in his sermon in Athens, and what he is saying in Rom. 3:29-30 is that the God of the Jews is the God of the entire world. There is no other! Jesus said as much too, didn’t He?
(3 You remember the story of the Samaritan woman at the well from the Gospel of John? Let’s turn to the passage and look at it quickly. John 4:19-24. Right after Jesus has informed this woman that He knows much about her personal life–that she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband–Jesus ends this encounter with the Samaritan woman by revealing to her the nature of true worship. Look at your Bibles, John 4:19-24.
(4 The Samaritans were closely related to the Jewish people. Back in B. C. 677 the king of Assyria transported a group of people from Babylon to replace the Jews he had exiled to Assyria. The Samaritans, as they came to be called, were originally idol worshipers, but over time adopted the religion of the remaining Jews in the Northern Kingdom. They also intermarried with the remaining Jews in the Land. However, they didn’t abandon all their pagan ways, they added on worship of the one true God to the religions they brought with them from Babylon. But notice verse 22. Look at it again. What is Jesus saying here?
(5 The Samaritans rejected all the OT revelation with the exception of the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, or the Torah as the Jews call it. Therefore their worship was in ignorance of the entire revelation of God, right? If they had accepted all the OT they would have known that the promised Messiah was to come from the Jews. It was to the Jews that God had given all the Biblical revelation. The salvation that was to be found for everyone was to be found in One who was born of Jewish woman, born under the Law! But, and that is a large word sometimes, this Messiah would not remain Jewish property, would He? He belonged to the whole world! Jesus finishes by telling this woman that God is Spirit and that the worship of Him must be in spirit and truth. He is not some territorial god as many of the ancients believed. He was not just the God of the Jews. As Paul wrote back in Romans, He was, and is, the God of us all. Go back to Romans with me and look at 3:29-30.
(6 There is only one God and He has chosen to reveal Himself through creation, the history and faith of the Jewish people, through the written revelation He gave to His people, and most miraculously, through the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, God in the flesh.
2. Establishment of the Law Through Faith (v. 31)
(1 Paul finishes chapter three by asking a question. It is one that he has answered before and one he will answer again before he is done writing the book of Romans. The question is, does grace abolish law, or render it ineffective and purposeless? Does it set the law aside so that it has no relevance to the Christian? Does faith “nullify the law”? Look at verse 31 for the answer.
(2 The phrase make void means to overthrow, to nullify, to destroy, to abolish, to do away with. Paul said, God forbid, right? How does grace do this? How does a right understanding of justification free us from the law as well as establishing, or upholding, the law? It does so by setting law free from a burden it is not able to bear and was never intended to bear, namely, function as a means of justifying sinners. When we stop trying to use the law and its commandments in such an impossible way, we can then let it perform its proper functions.
(3 When we stop trying to justify ourselves by our own good works we will begin to use God’s law in the way it was intended. What are some proper uses of the law? One is to show us our sin, isn’t it? Look at Rom. 3:20. We clearly see our own sinfulness in our inability to perfectly obey God’s Law, right? Also, it properly functions as a norm or standard for holy living. As DeWelt says (59), under grace we can “preach and teach the real value of the law which is to point out right and wrong.” As Lard says (126), “Law may be wholly useless for one purpose, and yet indispensable for others.”
(4 And here is something that you and I must never forget: as a revelation of God’s will to us, his law is absolutely binding upon us and we have an absolute obligation to obey it. Grace does not change this fact. Listen, we are not under law as a way of salvation (6:14), but we are always under law as a way of life. The law can never save us, but it is absolutely necessary as a guide for our living a holy life. This is something we will eventuallydiscuss at great length. God doesn’t save us and then leave us in the same deadly mire of sin that He saved us from. The doctrine of sanctification is the other side of justification, and that does include good works! That does include an increasingly holy life. II. Abraham, David and Grace (Rom. 4:1-8) 1. Faith of Abraham (Rom. 4:1-3) (1 And as an example of two men saved by grace through faith, Paul gives us one man, Abraham, who came before the Law of Moses, and another, David, who was king of Israel when the Mosaic Law not only the moral and religious law of the land, but also governed every aspect of Israel’s nationaly life. And yet Paul states clearly that both of these men weren’t saved by works of the law, by works of righteousness. They were justified by God through their faith. Let’s look first at Abraham. Look at your Bible’s, verses 1-3. (2 There is an illustration that some of you may have heard before. It is supposed to illustrate how God takes people who try real hard to be good and then delivers them, saves them. It seems that a frog one day fell into a pail of milk, and though he tried every conceivable way to jump out, he always failed. The sides were too high, and because he was floating in the milk he could not get enough leverage for the needed leap. So he did the only thing he could do. He paddled and paddled and paddled some more. And oila!—his paddling had churned a pad of butter from which he was able to launch himself to freedom. The message is: “Just keep paddling, keep on working, keep on doing your best, and you will make it.” There is also that famous Bible verse, God helps those who help themselves, right? Of course, that verse doesn’t exist, does it? It isn’t that God wants us to sit down like a lump on a log, doing nothing. But it is that God helps those who totally submit to Him, relying on nothing but Him for deliverance. Such a man was Abraham.
(3 Scattered throughout Scripture and finding its penultimate expression in the NT is the is the Biblical truth that God does not save the righteous, He saves the repentant. Jonah 2:9, Jonah 2:9 (KJV)
9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD. And in Romans 4:3 we have the NT confirmation of the OT truth that Abraham, and everyone else, was saved by grace through faith. Most of us know who Abraham was, don’t we? Through him God established one of the great covenants of redemptive history, what we call the Abrahamic Covenant. We have looked at these verses in an earlier lesson, but let’s go there once more. Turn in your Bibles to Genesis 12:1-3.
(4 Before we look at the passage that Paul quotes from in Romans 4:3, I want to look at the beginning of God’s dealing with a specific people. In this passage, God begins to call out a people through whom He will reveal His plan of salvation, a people through whom He will bring to the entire world the Messiah, the One who will take upon Himself the sins of the world. And He did so by first calling out a single man, didn’t He? Abraham! While God’s redemptive plan really began in the councils of eternity, and was revealed to man after his fall back in the Garden of Eden, it is here with Abram that we begin to see a more full outline of how God will work this plan out in history. Look at your Bibles, Gen. 12:1-3.
(5 So God called Abraham to leave his own country, leave his own people, and even leave his own family. And to further complicate the matter, Abraham didn’t know where God was going to lead him, did he? “Go to the land that I will show you,” God said. Abram was not told that Canaan was the land God was talking about until he got there. (6 Calvin comments that God said in effect, “I command you to go forth with closed eyes, and forbid you to inquire where I am about to lead you, until, having renounced your country, you shall have given yourself wholly to me.” Abram was asked to believe and obey the bare word of God. And then God said the He would bless Abram and through him all the families of the earth would be blessed, right? (7 Jesus said much the same thing about the Gospel. The call to forsake all is very much like the call of the Gospel. Matthew 10:37 (KJV)
37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And in Mark 8:35 (KJV)
35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.
(8 It was through Abram, later renamed by God, Abraham, and his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, then Jacob’s twelve sons that the nation of Israel traces its beginnings. And as we know it was through the nation of Israel that God gave the Law and prophets, and is was through the nation of Israel, which was descended from Abraham, that the Lamb of God, the Messiah of the entire world, the Lord Jesus Christ came. So this event, this covenant, is vitally important, isn’t it? And as we move forward, we find another defining moment in redemptive history. Turn with me to Genesis 15:1-6. The events recorded in these verses occur many years later. In chapter 12 God promised Abraham great blessings and a heritage. God had told him that he would be the founder of a great nation, a great people. But he was childless. Sarah, his wife, was barren. And after a battle in which Abraham rescued his brother’s son, Lot, the Lord came to Abraham in a vision, and confirmed the Abrahamic Covenant that God had given many years before. Look at your Bibles, Gen. 15:1-6.
(9 It is in verse six that we find the great doctrine of faith, don’t we? And yet as I said grace preceded even this great statement here. The writer of Hebrews informs us that it was the faith of three men that pleased God, not their righteousness: Abel, Enoch, and Noah. Hebrews 11:4 (KJV)
4 By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yetb speaketh. Of Enoch Genesis says, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (5:24). The metaphor “walked” indicates closest communion and intimacy—a righteous life. Enoch’s godly walk grew out of his faith, as Hebrews makes so clear: Hebrews 11:5 (KJV)
5 By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God. And the writer of Hebrews goes on to say of Noah: Hebrews 11:7 (KJV)
7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.
(10 From all these verses it is clear that salvation is not by works of the law and has never been by works of law. Genesis 15:6 says that Abraham believed God, trusted God, and then the Lord counted, imputed, that faith for righteousness. God gave it to Abraham! But you might ask, “If we are saved through our faith in Christ, and in Him alone, how were the OT saints saved?” The ground of everyone’s salvation was the finished work Jesus. And God, who sees the end from the beginning, can save men and women who are looking forward in time to the coming Messiah, even though they may not perfectly understand it all, just as He saves those who look back in time and have a more full understanding of God’s redemption. And we have looked at all of this in order to illustrate the truth of Jesus Christ! All of redemption, indeed all of history, finds its meaning in Lamb of God, right? Let’s go back to Romans 4:2.
(11 That little word if has a big thought behind it. Listen, if we are justified by works, we can do some boasting. But in Romans 3:27, Paul says, Where is boasting? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? Nay: but byr the law of faith. We can point to all the good things we have done and say, “Hey, I ain’t all that bad!” But Paul says categorically that that that is not the case. No one can boast before God about their goodness, can they? Why? Romans 3:10 (KJV)
10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: Romans 3:23 (KJV)
23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
2. Grace and Debt (v. 4-5)
(1 In our next two verses we see Paul further elaborating on the issue of works and grace. He writes something that is so fundamental, and really just such a commonsense comment, that we sometimes might be tempted to pass over it. But it goes to the heart of what the word grace means. So, look at your Bibles, Romans 4:4-5.
(2 So, what is verse four telling us? Listen, if you have job, and you do your work according to all your employer requires of you, your boss doesn’t give you your pay out of a feeling of charity, or because he is gracious, does he? No! He owes it, right? So, it’s obvious, if we can perform good works and enter into heaven, then God isn’t gracious for allowing us into His holy presence, but He owes it to us. But what is the consistent teaching of, not only the book of Romans, but also of all Scripture. We aren’t owed anything by God, are we? Except for judgement. Everything else flows from His amazing grace, doesn’t it?
(3 And grace, by definition, is a gift freely given. You know, somtimes Whenever we speak of the end times, our hearts often quicken—partly out of joy, yet also out of fear. To speak of end times is to speak of somewhat uncertain times. "No one knows about that day or hour," Christ says, "not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son." But the uncertainty of calendars and dates isn't what troubles us most. It's the notion of final judgment. So here are some words that both acknowledge the reality of coming judgment and the grace-filled love of the Judge:
The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will ring down the final curtain on history, and there will come the Day on which all our days and all the judgments upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully. We will be judged, people, but if we are in Christ, we will be judged by One who loved us so much, He died for us, bearing the hatefulness of our sin on His own sinless self. He is not going to give us what’s coming to us, is He? He is not going to give us the judgement we deserve for all our works. Jesus has already paid the debt we owe; He will now give us His grace and compassion. See if illustration about the goat will work here.
(4 Grace carries a price, doesn’t it? The price tag, the cost, of salvation was enormous. And it is a price that you and I cannot pay. Jesus could pay it, though, couldn’t He? Not only could He pay, He did! And verse five again reiterates the Biblical truth that it is through our faith, and not our good works, that we are justified. Look at verse five with me again.
(5 You know, the natural man recoils from the doctrine of justification by faith alone. We naturally think justification ought to go to the good, those who are trying to do their best. Most people’s natural inclination is to get angry when we think about all those folks in prison for instance, those who have committed terrible crimes–theft, rape, murder, and others–being able to receive God’s forgiveness freely offered in Christ. Grace has been called scandalous by some. And to the natural man it is scandalous. Why? Because most people don’t commit any crimes worthy of society putting them in prison, they wrongly conclude that what is true of man is true of God as well. They don’t really believe they are guilty, do they? Most people have never killed anyone; most people have never done anything that they really believe is truly evil. And yet those very same people are pretty pride-filled, aren’t they? And pride will inevitably separate you from your Creator, won’t it? What did Jesus say was the first and greatest commandment? He said in Matthew 22:37, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And listen, no one who is banking on their own goodness to get them into heaven has come close to putting God first in their life. Because the very first thing that Holy Spirit will do to someone is convict them of their sin, revealing to them the enormity of the distance between the perfection of the Lord Jesus Christ, and themselves.
(6 And listen again, God doesn’t require us to get cleaned up before we come to Him in repentance, does He? He tells us to come just as we are. He will clean us up. He will work on our lives, won’t He? Turn to Romans 5:6-8. Let’s close there this morning. Look at your Bibles, verses 6-8.
(7 Jesus didn’t die for the righteous, did He? He died for sinners. Those who are proud of their achievements, who are proud of their own goodness, have a difficult time submitting in repentance, and being saved. Their pride gets in the way, doesn’t it? What did Jesus say? He said, Luke 5:32 (KJV)
32 I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And guys, here’s the deal! Are there any exceptions to the truth that, For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God? No! We are all sinners, so there are none of us good enough to earn passage to heaven by our good works. We are justified by God’s grace alone, through the instrument of our faith alone, in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ alone!
(8 Do you know Him? Have you placed your faith on Him? This doctrine of justification is so amazing, we really need to stop and meditate long and hard on it. God has gone to great lengths to secure our salvation, hasn’t He? The price Jesus paid on the cross was horrific. And we don’t need say to ourselves, “Well, after all, Jesus is God! He could deal with it!” And you are right! He could. But that in no way lessens the horror of a perfect man having the sins of the world placed on Him, and then suffering the fury of the Father’s punishment for that sin. The wrath and punishment that rightly belonged to each one of us. And listen, when God the Father looked down on His beloved Son and saw the hideousness of all that sin, what did He do? He could not look, could He? He turned away! Father and Son, for the one and only time in eternity, were separated. Separated by our sin! Jesus cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me.”
(9 I know you guys might be tired of my ending our time together each Sunday morning by quoting John 14:6, but I am telling you that if God has gone to all this trouble, and all this pain, in order to redeem His fallen creatures, why in the name of all that is holy, would He let anyone into heaven by any other means except Jesus! I don’t believe He would! John 14:6 (KJV) I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me.