October 29 Sermon: The Righteousness of God

As we observe Reformation Sunday we reflect on the Romans 3:19-28. This passage emphasizes the righteousness of God in contrast to human works. The law shows our inability to attain righteousness. Faith in Jesus grants righteousness as a gift. Our response is gratitude, recognizing God's grace.

Consider these questions as you listen to this week's message:

1. What are the three "Rs" used by Pastor Mark to summarize this passage?

2. What role does the concept of the "rigor of the law" play in the passage, and how does it relate to the idea of obtaining righteousness through faith in Jesus?

3. How does the passage encourage a response of humility and gratitude in light of the understanding that righteousness is a gift from God, not something earned through human works?

Transcript:

When you're studying history, there are often those things that you study that kick off much larger movements. I'm guessing even if you aren't all that interested in studying history, you could probably come up with a few big events like this without thinking too much about it. The first one, of national significance, that came to mind for me is the start of the American Revolution. Now, you might remember it with far better precision than I do, but I at least know without knowing all the details, I know, of course it was significant. Now you might remember that it happened on April 19th 1775. I had to look it up. Now. You may even be more likely to remember, especially when I say it because when I read it I remembered that this was the case. It happened in the towns of Lexington and Concord when British forces went to Concord to seize and destroy military supplies that were being stored in those places. Well, the British forces encountered some militiamen and shots were fired, and what we know is the American Revolution was at that point underway. We don't know for sure who shot the first shot, but that event is commonly known as the shot heard around the world, and that phrase is so well known that we actually now use that phrase for all kinds of things, don't we? We say that there was a shot that was heard around the world. Someone could take a shot in a basketball game that won the game at the last second and everybody heard about it, and they would say that's the shot that was heard around the world. These big events become bigger, they become well known, they become a part of how we understand things and the way we talk. Now there are other historical events than that one that, on the surface, by themselves, wouldn't seem like a particularly big deal, but the spark of those events leads to a fire that often becomes unstoppable and it changes the world.

Well, 500 and 6 years ago, there was an event that we're remembering this Lord's Day We've talked about it multiple times on All Hallows Eve, october 31st, 1517. A German monk by the name of Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. At the time, no one really knew that it had happened and it wasn't intended to spark a large movement within the church. We could say that it has become the hammering that was heard around the world, though it started this event, this reformation in the church. Now, if you were to take up what Martin Luther nailed to the doors his 95 theses. You would probably be decidedly underwhelmed by them. If you want to read something to commemorate Reformation Day on October 31st, I would actually recommend a whole lot of other things that would be far better to commemorate that day. They're really quite underwhelming. Because he was addressing a particular problem in the church at the time.

The Roman Catholic Church at the time was offering well, they still offer these, but the Roman Catholic Church was offering what are known as indulgences. Throughout the centuries. What had happened? A doctrine had formed around the Roman Catholic understanding of the sacraments that caused a need for these indulgences. To simplify the idea as best as I can, the church is the gatekeeper of the sacraments. In the Roman Catholic system. These are means of grace by which the grace of God is distributed to the members of the church, but the church is essentially able to shut those off or distribute them. Well, not everyone took advantage of the sacraments like they probably should have, and human sinfulness is such that we understand it takes a lot of grace for people to have enough grace to go to heaven and be before a holy God right. So most people would never be filled up with enough grace to be righteous in the presence of God. And so, through all of this, a doctrine came of an intermediate place, a location between heaven and hell, where the soul could go to be purified and have their souls purged of unrighteousness. That's where the idea of purgatory came from, that there you would be purged of unrighteousness so that you would be purified for heaven. Well, this is where these indulgences came in. You could purchase for yourself or for your loved ones time off of their time that they were sentenced to this intermediate place where they were being purified.

Now I've studied Reformation history at length. It's kind of a nerdy hobby that I have. I enjoy it, and my thought is I think they really missed an opportunity with this. They should have offered extending people's time in purgatory for the people you didn't like. Right there, that's your million-dollar idea, right there. But in my study I've never seen that that was a thing. It was only time off.

Anyway, by the early 16th century this way of doing things was really embedded in the church, and at the time Rome endeavored to build St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican it's still there and they needed to raise funds, so they sent out fundraisers out into the Holy Roman Empire to sell these indulgences to build St Peter's Basilica. Well, at the time when they came in the region of what we now know as Germany, martin Luther was there. He was preaching, he was teaching, but this whole time he had been on a spiritual journey. He had been struggling with how he could have assurance of salvation, how could he know he would be saved. And when he came up against this practice of indulgences, he was disturbed by it that the church was just selling it for money. And so he wrote these 95 statements against that practice. And at that time his understanding of how we are saved and how we can be made righteous before a holy God was not fully formed. It's not fully present in these 95 statements. He nailed to the door, but those statements were the spark that started the fire of the Reformation. Ultimately, it turned out that Martin Luther was not the only one who was struggling with the idea of his sinfulness and how he could be righteous before a holy God. And so from this seemingly harmless moment with an unknown monk and his hammer came a movement of protest against the Roman church that we still celebrate today, 506 years later.

And to do this today we're going to be looking at a passage that addresses this problem of how can I know that I am made righteous before a holy God? And we see this in the third chapter of Romans. Now, to study this today, to look at this today, we're going to break down our passage into three points and to help us remember them better, I'm going to do something different. All three points are going to start with the letter R how fitting for Reformation Sunday, right? So our first R today is the rigor of the law. We're going to see how strict the law is.

In these two verses, the Apostle Paul clearly spells out for us in Romans 3, 19 and 20 that the law of God isn't the solution to our problem. The solution to our inability to keep the law isn't better law keeping. Basically, we need to be made righteous before a holy God and the law is not the solution. In fact, the law and its rigor can become for us a weight that we are unable to bear on our own, and so we need something, and that is our second point today the righteousness of God. That's what we need. We're going to see that there is a righteousness that is, of God and from God, the burden that the law puts on us shows us that we need a righteousness from outside of ourselves. In the book of Romans, let's us know that the righteousness that we need does not come from within us, but instead it's a gift from God. And finally we see our response. So we have rigor, righteousness, response. We are called to live a life of faith in humility, because the solution to our lack of righteousness isn't from us, and so we can't boast. Instead, we respond in gratitude because we have this alien righteousness that comes to us, this righteousness apart from us that makes us holy.

Now, this is a really well-known passage of Scripture, and for good reason. It shows us the gospel at full power, and it does it without pulling any punches, and we see this setup for us as we look right away at verses 19 and 20. Now, it was just a few weeks back that we spent a considerable of time together discussing the reformed understanding of human sinfulness when we looked at the doctrine of total depravity. In fact, we looked at this doctrine nearly every week as we were doing our series on understanding grace. I went back to this doctrine of total depravity to emphasize how our understanding of sin and what it has done to us affects how we understand the grace that God offers to us in Christ. This is something that we see clearly in these two verses that we're looking at here.

We get important information about what the rigor of God's law does to us. We read here that the law speaks to us for the purpose of stopping our mouths and so that we will see that the whole world may be held accountable to God, and here is where we see the level of the responsibility we have, the rigor of God's law, that we have not kept God's law. When we hear it, we have to see that this is not something that we have done perfectly. As we often say in our prayer of confession, we have not loved God with our heart, with our soul, with our mind and our strength, and we haven't loved our neighbor as ourselves. An examination of the law of God informs us that it isn't that we have slipped up a little here and there on a few things. When we look at God's law, we see that we've failed miserably, and so our mouths are stopped. We have no grounds to stand on to make a claim that we have any righteousness of our own, but this doesn't stop us, does it? While our mouths are stopped, we still like to think that we're good enough to merit righteousness by ourselves. We make an appeal to how much better we are than other people, and we convince ourselves of the deluded idea that maybe God will grade me on a curve, that, yeah, I sin and I sin repeatedly. But God knows my heart and he knows I mean well Most, or at least some of the time. I mean well right. But those delusions are quickly done away with as we get to the second of these two verses.

Up here, the Apostle Paul erases any hope we have of meriting righteousness by ourselves when he says by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight. The word justified here is a legal term. It means to be declared righteous. In other words, the law will never win for us a declaration of being righteous. So we find, then, that the law of God not only renders us silent, but the law also doesn't offer us any hope. It's like the law causes us to fall into a pit in the dark of night. We've fallen into this pit. We know it's deep, but it's dark, and as the sun comes up the next morning and small glimmers of light come into the pit. We get excited because in the distance, leaned up against the edge of the pit, we see a ladder and we think, ah, we can get out. But as the light continues to come up and as the sun comes over the pit, we can see fully, as our eyes adjust to the light, and we are in a hundred foot deep pit and we have a ten foot ladder.

The law shows us how sinful we are. That ladder not only can't get me out of the pit, but it shows me because I can look and say that ladder's about ten or twelve feet and it would take me ten ladders to get out of here. The law not only shows us that we are deep in a pit, it shows us how deep the pit is Because it informs us just how dire the situation is for us. We can't get out on our own. We imagine ourselves as we are in this pit. You know, maybe if I climb to the top of the ladder I can flip the ladder over and get up twenty feet.

We have these delusions of how we can climb out of the pit, of our sinfulness, on our own. But when we stop and we look at the situation, we see that the situation is dire. The law shows us that it isn't our means of escaping our sin, because as we examine God's law, we will find out more and more how we've not kept God's law. And so what this boils down to is that the law shows us our responsibility before a holy God. We are liable for our sin debt, and instead of the law helping us pay off that obligation, we just find ourselves deeper and deeper and deeper in a burden of debt. And so this rigor of the law shows us the desperate state of affairs. But as believers, we know the Holy Spirit uses this rigor of the law in us not only to stop our mouths but to drive us to Christ, and this passage has that good news of our salvation, that we can come out of this state of affairs. And this passage does it for us in vivid detail as we move on from the rigor of the law to the righteousness that we have from God. So what we see is that the problem that Paul has spelled out to this point in the book of Romans is actually solved by God himself.

Paul begins the book of Romans telling us that he has an ashamed of the gospel, and then he shows that humanity has this problem of sin, and earlier in this third chapter is where Paul quotes the psalmist and he reminds us that there is no one righteous, not even one With our understanding of being incapable of climbing out of that pit on our own. Paul comes to us in our hopelessness and he tells us yes, you can't climb the ladder out, but someone is coming to rescue and has come to rescue you. That is God, and it is a rescue from Him. The problem in our unrighteousness is that we can't do this on our own, and so Paul comes with a message of a different righteousness, a righteousness from outside of us, the righteousness of God, and he tells us that this has been manifested or made known apart from the law. In other words, it isn't something you obtain by following a particular set of moral commands or religious rituals to obtain it, and Paul wants us to know that this isn't something that shouldn't have been anticipated, while in Jesus, this is a new way of doing things.

The law and the prophets we read actually pointed to this, starting back all the way in the garden. The story of Scripture has been anticipating this From the point in which we are told that the one is going to come, who is going to crush the head of the serpent and win victory for the people of God? This has been anticipated. The moral law showed our need for it. The ritual law in the Old Testament showed us God's holiness, but it also pointed to the sacrificial work that the Messiah would one day do for His people, and the prophets pointed forward to the coming day when this anointed one would come to save a people for Himself. And then we also have the Psalms. It gave people songs to sing in anticipation of Jesus.

But now this is no longer veiled, it's no longer a distant hope. Paul says it has become reality in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so now we have a righteousness from God, not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus. And Paul goes back to the rigor of the law here, doesn't he? Even though he has mentioned this righteousness from God, he gives us this famous statement that we know from verse 23, that all have sinned, all fall short of the glory of God, and he says there is no distinction, because this is a problem for both the Jew and the Gentile. Every one of us is dead in sin, but we have this gift from God of being justified or declared righteous by His grace, and this is an important statement. It is a declaration of who you are in Christ. We've seen that we aren't righteous, but by grace, through faith in Jesus, the people of God are declared to be a righteous people, and I want us to understand something amazing about this fact.

Notice how Paul says this is the righteousness of God, and I want you to think about that truth for a moment. Why is the righteousness of God important to our understanding of salvation? In Christ? This isn't a human righteousness, as we've seen. It isn't something that you and I attain. It is of God and from God, and what this means is that this problem that you and I have in Adam is completely remedied through faith in Christ. In fact, because it's a righteousness of God, we are actually in a better state of affairs than if our first parents had never sinned, because if Adam had never sinned, that righteousness would have been a human righteousness. But in Christ, the second Adam, you have the righteousness of God. You are perfectly righteous because you are united to Christ and it's bestowed upon you as a gift from God, and so we can quote those verses from Scripture that tell us how we are saved to the uttermost, because it isn't a human righteousness, it isn't our righteousness, your righteousness before God is a righteousness of God.

And Paul helps us to fully understand what this means. He gives us a word that describes what this does. Now, it's a big word up here, it has five syllables, but it is a profound meaning for us as believers. The word propitiation. It means to turn aside the wrath of God. You see, we were rightly deserving of God's anger towards us. We are sinners, we are fallen, we deserve judgment, but Christ stepped between us and the wrath of God and he turned it aside. He bore it for us.

And Paul not only tells us that this happened, that this is who you and I are in Christ, but he also explains why it was done. It was to show God's righteousness, and in the past Paul said that God passed over former sins. Now this doesn't mean that God just let sins slide and it wasn't a big deal. Instead, the full punishment for sin was delayed until the fullness of time where God, the Son, would come and propitiate or bear the full wrath of God for the sin of His people. And this shows us something so vital about the nature of God that Paul spells out for us here.

God is holy. He cannot let sin slide or he would not be just, and we need this to be true. As much as we like to think that God could just let sin slide, let some things pass, that's not a good thing. You and I need the assurance that God judges sin, that there is evil in the world and that God is going to do something about it. We need this. We need to know that God does something about the injustice and the wickedness in the world, and as Christians, we can believe that he does that, but that we can also believe that he is merciful, because in the gospel, we are able to understand how God can both be righteous and just and also be merciful.

When God shows mercy to sinners, it isn't because he said their sin was no big deal. It's because someone propitiated His wrath. Somebody took that wrath for sin. The one who bore it was the Lord Jesus Christ, and he took it in full measure on your behalf. And so this is why Paul can say that God is just. The sin of God's people was paid for, but he is also the justifier. He is the one who declares us righteous. We must be sure that we don't miss this because it deeply impacts how we respond to God's grace. When we understand that we deserved our sin and he turned it aside, that changes how we view God's mercy and as we move to our third point and we consider how we apply this with our response.

We see some things from Paul here about the grace of God in verses 27 and 28. Paul tells us that our response isn't to boast. We can't walk around celebrating that we have saved ourselves, that we somehow have turned aside God's wrath on our own. We can't do that. It was the work of God and it was the righteousness of God and from God. If that's the truth, then I have no means by which to boast. My mouth is shut once again, right, not only because of my sinfulness, but because my righteousness isn't from myself. Paul says here that we don't boast because of the law, and so we have a confidence in this because of the law of faith. In other words, it is being saved by grace that we have comfort, so I can't claim any of my virtue or keeping of a ritual has merited righteousness before Holy God. We have seen that this isn't even possible. The remedy to our problem is God's righteousness. That's what we need, and he gives us this by faith.

The understanding of the gospel that we get from this final statement here by Paul that we hold that one is justified by faith, apart from works with the law, is what frames our response to what God has done for us in Christ. Our response is not only that we do not boast and brag that we have somehow inherited this righteousness on our own. It also frames our reformed understanding of gratitude. Notice that my three Rs could have easily been guilt, grace and gratitude. The sections from the Heidelberg Catechism right, because those mere what we're talking about here. The Heidelberg Catechism sections mere what we see in this passage that we understand our guilt before God. God gives us grace and we respond in gratitude. Our response is not to be just avoiding boasting and feelings, sentimental feelings of appreciation towards God. Paul tells us that we hold to this truth of being declared righteous by faith, and this is such a crucial thing for our walk as Christians because it shapes how we love others and how we live. But when we get the truth to this, it will cause us to hold fast to the faith and not be ashamed of it, because we deeply grasp that it's the only hope that we have Now.

In the book of Romans, Paul actually starts out with a statement about the Gospel in verse 16. We know it very well, for I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it's the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also the Greek. Paul tells us that he's not ashamed of the Gospel. Why is that? Because it's a great way to live, because it's therapeutic and helps him to cope with the stresses of life, because it lets him feel intellectually and morally superior to the people around him. No, he is not ashamed of the Gospel because of its necessity. It's the power of God unto salvation. It's not one option on a list. There are two options you can receive God's wrath or you can receive his righteousness, and that should shake us to our core. There is no neutrality. We are children of wrath or we are children of God. And so, in our response to this message of salvation in Christ, we are not ashamed of this saving message, and so we declare it and we hold fast to it. As we sit here on Reformation Sunday, we think of how this little message was recovered, this message that seems so small but was so huge. It was a spark that started a fire, because it was a lost time of darkness in the 16th century, and it was brought to light by faithful servants called by God to proclaim the law and all its rigor and the righteousness of God given to sinners in union with Christ in all of its splendor. And you and I must hold fast to this truth as well. We are not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God under salvation.

As you know, I wasn't here last Sunday. I went to the Reformation and Worship Conference in Georgia and I had been looking forward to the return of that conference for years. It hadn't taken place since 2019, and when they announced its return, I was excited. And I was even more excited when I heard what the theme was going to be Christianity and Modernism. The theme was actually looking back at J Gresham Machen's 1923 book, christianity and Liberalism. It's 100 years old, and that book was a response to the theological decline of the 19th century and the impact it was then having in the early 1920s, as that theological teaching took hold in the churches here at the beginning or there at the beginning of the 20th century. Not only is it one of my favorite books, but it's the reason I hold to Reform Theology. My cousin Derek gave me that book in the early 2000s and I read it and it has had a significant impact on my life.

Well, in the morning of the first day of the conference there was a special pastor's pre-conference. That concluded with lunch and a panel discussion with some of the conference speakers. And so, as we ate our chicken sandwiches, we heard several good questions and answers from this panel, and towards the end of the discussion time they were asked an interesting question Again. We were 100 years removed from Dr Machen's book. So what from our time would people be having a conference about in 100 years? Will all be in our graves? What will they be talking about from our time? And I've wondered this. I've wondered this same thing many times and I was interested to hear what this panel that included three of my favorite church historians was going to say on the matter.

As someone who loves the history of the church, I've often wondered who the Luther, the Calvin, the Machen is in our time. Who will it be? Who will have the courage, who will contend for the faith in our cultural moment? And after they said this, I wrote in my notes we are Luther, we are Calvin, we are Machen. We must hold fast to the faith, this doctrine of the righteousness of God that gives us the assurance of salvation. So may the faithfulness that God gives to His Spirit come to us. May the generation that comes behind us find us faithful to this doctrine of the righteousness of God that gives us hope, that gives us peace. May we live and may we witness in God's world and pass the faith on to the next generation that Christ might be glorified. We are Luther, we are Calvin, we are Machen. May we be faithful to that message that others might hear and believe for generations to come, that God might be glorified for His saving work and giving His righteousness to His people. Amen, let us pray.