Romans 3.21-26
In November 1993, at the Presbyterian “Re-imagining Conference” in Minneapolis, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, made a suggestion which was widely quoted in reports of the progressive Christian gathering. The professor said the church’s proclamation needed to depart away from its historic focus upon the cross of Christ:
“I don’t think we need to dwell on atonement at all…atonement has to do so much with death…l don’t think we need folks fixating on the cross, and blood dripping, and weird stuff…we just need to listen to the god within.”
Of course, if the cross is so easily jettisoned from the gospel, then you can be sure “the god within” you is not the Holy Spirit. Never mind that what the New Testament omits are precisely the grisly details of the crucifixion. Romans 3.21-26, what John Stott calls “the most important paragraph ever written,” drives a dagger through the heart of any attempt to preach Christ but not also him crucified.
Paul pivots out of his diatribe:
“But now, without the law’s involvement, God’s righteousness has been made plain, although it is confirmed by the law and the prophets, that is, God’s righteousness through Jesus Christ-faith for all who believe (for there is no distinction, since all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God, yet all are rectified freely through God’s grace through the liberation from slavery that comes about in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as the very cover of the ark of the covenant. God did this through God’s own faithfulness, by means of Jesus’s bloody death, as a demonstration of God’s righteousness because of the incapacity resulting from previous sins and through God’s forbearance, as a demonstration of God’s righteousness at the present time so that God might be right and might make right the one who is part of this Jesus-faith.”
Quite simply—
We have no other word but the word of the cross.
The Christian faith just is trust in the blood.
The Union Seminary professor, however, is not the first person to recoil at the notion of a crucified God, finding the claim a foolish stumbling block.
Saul of Tarsus was among the first to trip over the gospel.
Keep in mind—
In handing over the commandments to Moses at Mt. Sinai, the Lord issues a condemnation whose clarity allows for no confusion, “Cursed is every one who hangs on a tree.”
Not some.
Not most.
Cursed is everyone who is nailed to a tree.
To a pharisee like Saul, therefore, the primal church’s declaration that Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is somehow Israel’s messiah— the gospel— was as absurd as it was anathema. Quite obviously, Jesus cannot be God’s promised deliverer when God’s own law designates him as accursed.
He is not a deliverer.
He is damned.
He is not a savior.
He is shameful.
He is not a redeemer.
He is wretched.
He was crucified.
Accursed is everyone who is nailed to a tree.
And then the risen Jesus commandeers Saul on the road to Damascus.
Blinded, Paul sees.
He sees that if the crucifixion of God’s Son was not merely a sign of God’s curse but the curse was instead required to redeem humanity, then humanity’s captivity to sin must be total in its effect, universal in its reach, and cosmic in its breadth. If the medicine is Christ and him crucified, then the disease is worse than Paul had heretofore diagnosed from his scriptures.
Just so, Paul moves from his opening thesis to a diatribe that endures for nearly three chapters. After announcing the good news, Paul has brace us with agonizingly bad news. For the balance of chapter one, all of chapter two, and the first half of chapter three, Paul bears down with white-knuckles and surveys the extent of our bondage to the Pharaoh called Sin.
All sin is unbelief.
As Paul sees, our every sin starts with the same sin as at Mt. Sinai; namely, our failure to worship God as God.
This is why it’s inane to suggest, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m basically a good person.”
According to Paul and his scriptures, without the fear of the Lord, our first sin begets all our other sins, our wickedness and our malice. It gives rise to our greed and our lust and our violence. It spawns our slander and our deceit, our hypocrisy and our infidelity. Even our gossip and our haughtiness and our hardness of heart are all made possible by our disbelief that God hears us or knows the secret thoughts of our hearts.
“All have sinned,” Paul charges, religious and irreligious alike. “No one is righteous,” Paul condemns, “not a single one of us.” “No one seeks God. No one desires peace.” Our mouths are quick to curse, our hands are quick to stuff our own pockets, our feet are quick to shed blood, our hearts are swift to indifference.
How quickly, I wonder, did you forget about the children’s hospital in Kiev that Russia bombed on Wednesday?
Did the war crime bother you as much as the price of your last tank of gas?
The awful truth unveiled by the gospel is that your past and your future have been reduced to a present judgment which no good work and no sincere regret can change.
Paul’s relentless litany of our sinfulness goes on and on for almost three chapters, an overwhelming avalanche of indictments.
For almost three chapters, Paul keeps raising the stakes, tightening the screws, shining the light hotter and brighter on our crimes, implicating each and every one of us.
Until, what you expect to hear next from Paul is the word if.
If.
If you turn away from sin…
If you turn back towards God…
If you repent…
If.
If you plead for God’s mercy…
If you beg God’s pardon…
If you clean up your act…
If…
Then…
God will forgive you.
If…
Then…
God will find you righteous.
Paul relentlessly unrolls the rap sheet until every last one of our names is listed in the charging documents. Not one of us is righteous and every last one of us is deserving of God’s wrath, Paul writes. When you follow the logic of the biblical passages Paul piles up at the end of his diatribe, particularly Psalm 143 which lies behind the verse immediately before this passage, the word you expect Paul to use next is if.
If you repent…
If you make right…
If you cry out to God…
No.
Instead of if —but:
“But now” Paul declares.
“But now, without the law’s involvement, God’s righteousness has been made plain…through Jesus Christ-faith for all who believe….” Martin Luther says this “but now” is a word shaped like a fish hook, and it catches us all.
Sir Mix-A-Lot must love verse twenty-one because there couldn’t be a bigger but.
It’s the hinge on which the gospel turns:
We are all unrighteous.
We are all under in sin.
We are all facing wrath.
But now!
You could live to be as old as Methuselah— you could live a billion years—and you would never once put yourself right before God. Time will not help you. Nothing will help you. There is no escape from the righteous judgment of God. There is no exit from his wrath. We could never produce a righteousness that can stand up to God’s searching glance and searing examination and absolute investigation of us.
We are— all together— altogether hopeless.
But now—God!
You were lost.
But now, you’ve been found!
You’ve been found by the righteousness of God made plain in Christ Jesus.
“But now apart from the law— apart from the very thing that was supposed to make us righteous—God’s righteousness has been made plain… through Jesus Christ-faith for all who believe.”
People ask me all the time if there is only one way to salvation.
Thank God there is one!
People ask me all the time if there is only one way to salvation.
Thank God there is one!
As Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes:
“There are no more wonderful words in the whole of Scripture than just these two little words.”
As strong as the cultural pressure is to reduce Christianity to self-help and sentimentality, the gospel truth is that we are all under sin. We are all unrighteous.
We are all justly condemned and deserving of wrath.
"But now!”
Something has happened.
Something has happened that has changed everything.
Something has happened that has changed everything for everyone.
Something has happened that has changed everything for everyone for always.
In a sermon to the inmates at the Basel Prison, the theologian Karl Barth attempted to illustrate Paul’s big but by telling them a regional legend.
Barth preached:
“You probably all know the legend of the rider who crossed the frozen Lake of Constance by night without knowing it. When he reached the opposite shore and was told whence he came, he broke down, horrified. This is the human situation when the sky opens and the earth is bright, when we hear “But now!” In such a moment we are like that terrified rider. When we hear this word we involuntarily look back, asking ourselves: Where have I been? Over an abyss, in mortal danger! What did I do? The most foolish thing I ever attempted! What happened? I was doomed and miraculously escaped and now I am safe!
You ask: “Do we really live in such danger?”
Yes, we live on the brink of death. “But now!” From this darkness he has saved you. He who is not shattered after hearing this news may not yet have grasped the word of God, “But now!”
Something has happened. Something has happened that has changed everything for everyone for always.
The god within?
No!
From outside of us, apart from us— apart from the law even— the right-making power of God has invaded our world without a single if.
Preemptive.
Predestined.
One-way love.
Just as these two little words are the hinge of the gospel, they are also the simplest but most thoroughgoing test of a Christian. You can know, right now, whether or not you are a Christian. A Christian is nothing more than one who hears Paul’s big but and responds in their heart, “Thank God!”
Something has happened.
And it has changed everything for everyone for always.
What has happened?
Or, how?
Fleming Rutledge tells the story of a Ph.D. candidate who wrote his dissertation on the subject of forgiveness in process theology. The candidate mounted his oral defense. When he had finished his presentation and after the dissertation committee had discussed his defense for quite some time, a Jewish professor on the panel finally interjected and offered his puzzlement over the student’s work.
“As a Jew,” he told the candidate, “I know that there is no forgiveness without sacrifice. How is it possible you have written an entire dissertation on the subject of forgiveness and theology yet not once mentioned sacrifice? Atonement must be made.”
“But now…” Paul pivots to the good news, “…all are declared righteous freely through God’s grace through the liberation from slavery that comes about in Christ Jesus…”
On its face, stripped of the cross, free justification through grace is not only immoral under God’s law it is incompatible with the scriptures.
How is it possible for the righteous God to declare the unrighteous righteous without either compromising the Lord’s own righteousness or condoning their unrighteousness?
Straightforwardly, it is unjust for God to justify the wicked.
Straightforwardly, it is unjust for God to justify the assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Again and again in the Bible, the Lord commanded the judges of Israel that they must justify the righteous and condemn the wicked. The Book of Proverbs insists that the Lord detests both the acquittal of the guilty and the condemnation of the innocent. To the prophet Isaiah, the Lord lays down a heavy “woe” against those “who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent.” And to Moses on Mt. Sinai, God promises that he is a God of justice, “I will not acquit the guilty.”
How then can the apostle Paul declare that God does exactly what God forbids? How can Paul say that God does what God himself says he will never do, that is, acquit the guilty? To say that God is a God who justifies the ungodly is an oxymoron. How can the righteous God act unrighteously without invalidating his own moral intent?
Blinded, Paul sees.
Looking back upon his scriptures, Paul sees that in the crucified Christ God has unveiled what once was veiled. “But now…God’s righteousness has been made plain…all are declared righteous freely…in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as the hilasterion”
Often translated as “propitiation” or “expiation,” hilasterion is the Greek equivalent for the Hebrew term kapporet. Literally, the word refers to the cover of the ark of the covenant.
God the Father put forward God the Son as the lid of the ark.
The kapporet is also known as the mercy seat. In the Book of Exodus, when the Lord culminates his instructions for the construction of the ark, God promises, “There I will meet you, and from above the mercy-seat…I will deliver you and make myself known to you.” Once a year on Yom Kippur, Israel’s high priest would venture beyond the temple veil and into the holy of holies in order to sprinkle the blood of sacrifice on the kapporet to make atonement for his people’s sins.
Ever since its construction in the wilderness, the mercy seat— made of wood— had been veiled from human eyes. “But now…” Paul sees, God has unveiled the meeting place of God’s mercy, once for all.
The Father in the Spirit put forward the Son as our atonement cover.
In Christ, on the cross, God meets us and gives us everlasting mercy.
Something has happened that has changed everything for everyone for always.
How is it possible for the righteous God to declare the unrighteous righteous without either compromising the Lord’s own righteousness or condoning their unrighteousness?
The only reason is that Christ died for them.
According to the Book of Exodus, two golden angels, their wings outstretched, faced each other across the cover of the ark of the covenant.
In reality, it was not two angels but two criminals.
And the mercy unveiled between them made possible his promise for them, “Today, you will be me in Paradise.”
Like them, all we need to do is trust his promise.
To still other criminals, Karl Barth continued his prison sermon by preaching:
“You ask: “Do we really live in such danger?”
Yes, we live on the brink of death.
“But now!”
We have been saved…Look at our savior and our salvation! Look at Jesus Christ on the cross, accused, sentenced, and punished instead of us! Do you know for whose sake he is hanging there?
For our sake— because of our sin— sharing our captivity—burdened with our suffering. He nails our life to the cross. This is how God had to deal with us.”
Perhaps that professor of theology was partially correct. Maybe it is “weird stuff” to trust in the blood. But on at least one count she’s wrong.
The cross is not about death.
It’s about life.
“God unveiled Christ Jesus as the mercy seat…God did this through God’s own faithfulness, by means of Jesus’s bloody death…so that God might be right and might make right the one who is part of this Jesus-faith.”
A 2016 episode of the NPR show Invisibilia entitled “Flip the Script,” reported on the true story of two cops named Allan and Thorleif, in the city of Aarhus in Denmark. Back in 2012, the officers Allan and Thorleif received a phone call from distraught parents— distraught Muslim parents— that their teenage son had gone missing. As Allan and Thorleif began investigating, other calls from other parents began to cascade into the police station until eventually over thirty teenage sons of thirty sets of parents were missing. When the Danish cops scratched the surface, asking questions and interviewing people in the community, they began to hear rumors.
About Syria— about how these teenage boys had been radicalized without their parents realizing, about how they’d fled to join ISIS and take up jihad.
For whatever reason, these two ordinary, unimpressive cops, who don’t even have sexy cop jobs— they work in neighborhood crime prevention— they took it upon themselves to determine what they were going to do about these missing boys if ever and whenever they returned to Aarhus. For all the cops knew, when these boys came back, their town would be receiving dozens of angry terrorists. Again, this was 2012 when other countries were pulling no punches when it came to potential threats, pulling out all the stops to detain and prosecute anyone suspected of affiliation with ISIS. And in 2012, the city of Aarhus was second on the list of European countries with a homegrown terrorist problem.
But then Allan and Thorleif elected to act in a surprising, counterintuitive, unmerited manner.
They chose beforehand—
Before any of these teens even returned back from Syria. Before a one of them ever fessed up, expressed remorse, or repented. Before Allan and Thorleif found out what the missing boys had done. Before investigating what the would-be terrorists might’ve deserved.
Apart from the law!
They flipped the script. They chose beforehand, before any of them showed up on the scene, they predetermined to declare them righteous and show them mercy. Before a one of these aspiring jihadists appeared back in Aarhus, these two ordinary cops chose to impute to them a goodness wasn’t even there. They chose beforehand to call these teens what they were not— not terrorists. They chose to call them “Syrian Volunteers.” They chose beforehand to treat them, no matter what they may have done or likely did do, as though they’d been volunteering in hospitals and orphanages and refugee camps. The two cops chose to credit to the missing boys a righteousness that was not theirs, and they chose not require them to do anything to earn it.
And then!
As these missing jihadi teens trickled back home, Allan and Thorleif didn’t meet them at the airport and arrest them. No, they welcomed them home. Later, they’d invite them to coffee to chat. They connected them with mentors. They got them back in school and back into jobs.
Of the thirty-four Aarhus teens who first went missing, six were killed in Syria and ten went missing. The remaining eighteen who returned home were all de-radicalized— rectified— by the one-way love of those two men. Afterwards, they did the same for over three hundreds teens.
We decided to fight radicalism with love…” Thorleif told the Invisibilia host, but he noted that such love was not without cost. Their decision, he said, risked sacrificing their careers and reputations and how befriending terrorists put them in harm’s way.
“We didn’t wait for them to find their way back into the light; we chose not to let them leave themselves in the dark,” Allan told the reporter.
Here’s the point of Paul’s big but:
The three person’d God is just like those two cops.
Come to the table.
This God who gave himself for you gives himself still to you.
The table is now the meeting place of his mercy.
Feed on him in your hearts by faith.
And you will indeed have God within you.
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