Romans
5
Here’s some wonderful news. It seems too good to be true. But it is true – honest to God. God will declare everyone who puts his trust in Jesus Christ “not guilty”, but righteous. Having faith in Christ sets us in the clear. Why on earth does God justify i.e. put right with Himself, the ungodly? Answer – because there are no godly people for Him to justify. We’re all at it – sinning. So God has put all our sins on Christ’s account that He might put Christ’s righteousness on our account. No wonder the hymn writer was ecstatic when he wrote
“Tis done, the great transaction’s done,
I am my Lord’s and He is mine
O happy day! When Jesus washed my sins away.”
As it states in Romans 3:25: “God presented Him (Jesus) as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood.” The same truth is put forth in Ephesians 1:7: “In Him (Jesus) we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”
We’ve been redeemed: a ransom has been paid: paid in full and paid in blood. Jesus Christ, the Righteous One is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the whole world. Philip Bliss wrote this stanza in one of his great hymns. “Guilty, vile and helpless we, spotless Lamb of God was He; Full atonement, can it be? Hallelujah! What a Saviour!”
One of the foundational truths of scripture is that there is no approach to God apart from the blood for “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22)
The Message Paraphrase Bible says this: “God sets things right. He also make it possible for us to live in His rightness … God is the God of outsider non-Jews as well as insider Jews.”
There’s no room for boasting. Jesus did it all. We only have to believe and receive. Here’s the bottom line: “A man is put right with God only through faith, and not by doing what the Law commands.” This doesn’t make the law redundant. As it says in The Living Bible in Romans 3:31: “Well then, if we are saved by faith, does this mean that we no longer need obey God’s laws? Just the opposite! In fact only when we trust Jesus can we truly obey Him.”
The law must be established because breaking it dishonours God. The law is holy but it is our Lord Jesus Christ who has fulfilled it. Did He not say in Matthew 5:17 “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.” His fulfilment of the Law is mine and so the Law is established.
Never suppose that justification through faith is a new principle. It was introduced way back in the Garden of Eden. By faith Abel offered a sacrifice acceptable to God. This is an Old Testament doctrine. The Old Testament does not have one-way by which man is saved, and the New Testament another.
Now we’re starting Romans 3 and “Good News for Modern Man” puts it this way: “What shall we say, then, of Abram, our racial ancestor? What was his experience? If he was put right with God by the things he did, he would have something to boast about. But he cannot boast before God. The scripture says, “Abram believed God, and because of his faith God accepted him as righteous.”
This scripture is from Genesis 15:6. Abram was childless, 85, and expecting his servant Eliezer of Damascus would be his heir when he died. God said that would never happen. He took Abram outside his tent and said something that must have sounded unbelievable. “Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if you can! So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5). And Abram believed God. That’s all he did. He believed and God credited it to him as righteousness. Abram trusted God and God said, “That’s it. You’re righteous now.”
The Living Bible puts it this way, “Abram believed God and that is why God cancelled his sins and declared him not guilty.” (Genesis 15:8)
Now follow me carefully. Abram was declared righteous when he was a Gentile, not a Jew. Fourteen years later he was circumcised and became a Jew. He was declared righteous because he believed God not because he kept the Law. The Law was given 430 years later! This righteousness from God is a sheer gift. What a gracious promise God made to Abram and Abram dared to believe it.
We read in Genesis 17:24: “Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised.” So circumcision was a sign and a seal. As a sign it was the evidence that he belonged to God and believed His promise. As a seal it was a reminder that God had given the promise and would keep it.
So circumcision was the symbol and seal of the righteousness he already had as a gift from God. This was Abraham’s great discovery – justification by faith alone. Abraham believed in the promise of the son God was going to give him, a type of God’s own Son given for the world. That’s why Jesus could announce to the Jews in John 8:56: “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”
David, the sweet psalmist of Israel, also understood righteousness through faith by grace. That’s why he opens Psalm 32 with these words: “Fortunate those whose armies are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate. Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.”
Here’s the problem. The Jews had used father Abraham as the great example of justification by works – because of what he did. But they’d missed the point. Paul corrects them by holding father Abraham up as a shining example of righteousness by faith.
The Living Bible expresses it well in Romans 4:11-12. “Abraham is the spiritual father of those who believe and are saved without obeying Jewish laws. We see, then, that those who do not keep these rules are justified by God through faith. And Abraham is also the spiritual father of those Jews who have been circumcised. They can see from his example that it is not this ceremony that saves them, for Abraham found favour with God by faith alone, before he was circumcised.