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Romans 3:1–8 (ESV)
This is a challenging passage.
For those taking notes, you just heard nine questions being asked in the span of eight verses. I derive some comfort from the fact that today is the Sunday after Christmas and many people are traveling. I also derive some comfort that no less than the nineteenth century Swiss theologian Frederick Louis Godet called this passage “one of the most difficult, perhaps, in the Epistle.” But of course I derive ultimate comfort from the fact that this passage is the word of God for us today and will not return void.
Let’s pray.
I don’t know how many of you have been to court before. Sometimes it's not really that big of a deal, I suppose. Maybe you’ve been called for jury duty, or you have a speeding ticket you have to deal with. In those situations your primary goal is just to get it over with: find parking, go through the metal detectors, find the right room, maybe pay your fine and get back to your life.
There are other situations, though, that matter a great deal. Maybe it involves a dishonest business partner or the custody arrangement for your children. There is still some anxiety in those situations. You still wake up with a knot in your stomach, but at least you’re the good guy and you walk into court and take the oath and sit down in the witness box knowing that if justice wins, you win.
The worst kind of court appearance is one that I hope none of you have ever had to be in. Those are the situations where, if justice wins, you lose.
As an attorney, I’ve represented those people. And let me tell you: for a normal person, to be on the witness stand and be examined by an aggressive attorney or a hostile judge is one of the most psychologically intense moments I think anyone can experience.
Especially if the stakes are high.
Especially if the witness knows that he’s guilty.
People in those situations behave in strange ways. Some become pitiful and shake and cry. Some become aggressive and belligerent. Just a few months ago my law partner, Travis, had a client suffer a stroke while on the witness on the stand. I had one client who would begin to do this with his tie incessantly when he took the stand. I had another client who would sing under his breath between questions. People do strange things when they are accused of something.
I’m wearing a suit today because our passage this morning takes place in court and this is what I wear to court. You may not have realized this, but in our Romans series we have been in a kind of cosmic courtroom since way back in Romans 1:18 and we will continue to be in that courtroom until Romans 3:20.
This section, 1:18-3:20, I will refer to today as the “Trial Motif”. In that section, Paul’s objective is to confront every man, woman, and child who has ever lived - whether Jew or Gentile - with this single incontrovertible fact: that they are guilty of capital crimes against the living God.
Some of this section details Paul’s indictment of the human race and his allegations against them.
Other portions of our courtroom drama deals with the various defenses that the Gentiles make. “We were ignorant of the law!” they say. “We didn’t know that what we were doing was a sin.” And of course Paul refutes those defenses in chapters 1 and 2.
Other portions of the Trial Motif deal with the various defenses that the Jews make. “We are God’s special people!” they say. “The covenant he made with Abraham and Moses guarantees my acceptance before God.” And of course Paul refutes those defenses in chapter 2. Remember what came just before this morning’s passage in 2:29. “But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.”
And lastly, other portions of these chapters describe God’s judgment. In fact, Paul begins the entire Trial Motif in 1:18 with one such passage: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”
This is what I mean by the Trial Motif.
If you were a particularly studious middle schooler you could, in fact, read 1:18 - 3:20 and use a different colored highlighter for the different sections: yellow for Paul’s accusations; orange for the defense of the Jews; purple for the defense of the Gentiles; blue for Paul’s refutation of those defenses; and red for the sentence of God’s judgment.
The title of our Romans series is “Better Than You Think”, but from 1:18-3:20, the series could be called “Worse Than You Think”. You are worse than you think. God’s judgment is worse than you think. The moral bill is coming due and you can’t pay it.
You may have noticed that in describing the different parts of Paul’s courtroom drama - the allegations, the defendants, the judgment - that I didn’t mention our passage for this morning, 3:1-8. Using our Trial Motif, how might we fit these eight verses into Paul’s larger design for these chapters? What color highlighter would we use for these verses?
First, we can see right away that Paul is arguing with the Jewish defendants. They are throwing questions at him and he is answering them. Question, answer. Question, answer. Question, answer.
Here’s how I would describe what is happening here: these verses do not represent the Jews’ defense against Paul’s accusations. Their defense, you will recall, was made earlier in chapter 2 when they argued that their hereditary status as God’s special covenant people was sufficient to save them from their sins. No, what we have here is not a defense but a series of three counterclaims.
Remember how I described earlier how defendants behave differently in court? How some get scared and some sing under their breath and some become aggressive or belligerent? Well, a counterclaim is when a defendant stands up and says to their accuser, essentially, “oh yeah, well you ain’t so innocent yourself! Sure, I may have stolen the money last year, but you cheated me the year before that, so we’re even!” That’s a counterclaim. A defense is: “I never stole the money.” A counterclaim is: “You stole from me!”
That’s what’s going on here in 3:1-8 - three counterclaims of the Jews leveled against God. And those three counterclaims present Paul with an opportunity to give us in a condensed form three profound answers that he will develop later in chapters 9, 10, and 11.
Here are the three counterclaims of the Jews:
In most of scripture, moral accusations run in one particular direction: accusations are made by a holy God, against sinful people.
But sometimes that basic pattern is broken. Sometimes the moral accusations run the other direction. Sometimes it is not God who accuses man, but man who accuses God. Sometimes, it is God who is called to account, the Judge who is deposed, and the Creator of all things who is made to stand before a jury of his creatures. These portions of scripture are unsettling and strange.
Think of Abraham bargaining for Sodom:
Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked. Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?
Think of Job shooting his rhetorical arrows at heaven:
If I summoned him and he answered me, I would not believe that he was listening to my voice. For he crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause.
What these passages present for us are occasions for a theodicy.
A theodicy is a defense and vindication of God’s righteousness in the face of man’s accusations. In response to an act of God, man raises his eyes to heaven and says, “nope, this one’s on you. This time you messed up.”
One of the appeals that the book of Romans holds for modern readers is, I think, the frankness with which Paul entertains these accusations against God and the clarity with which he answers them. The world in which we live requires a confident and intelligent theodicy. Our neighbors do not see Job’s complaints or Abraham’s bargaining or David’s confused pleas as dangerous insubordination but as natural, even essential, acts of philosophical and ethical reflection. And while Romans 9 contains the most consequential theodicy in all of scripture, this morning’s passage offers its own valuable instance of Paul “justifying the ways of God to man” (Paradise Lost, I.25).
By giving voice to the counterclaims of the Jews within his Trial Motif, Paul has occasion to present a theodicy similar in kind to what he will offer in chapters 9 through 11, but shorter and more focused in scope.
Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,
“That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.”
If you remember nothing else from this passage, remember those words. God is true, God will judge, God is good.
I have four goals for today:
The first counterclaim is this: the promised blessings to Abraham’s physical descendants was a lie.
Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? (3:1)
Remember what Paul has just said in Romans 2:28.
For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart.
To this, the Jews protest: If you are right, Paul, then what was it all for? Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon, and all the prophets? What was circumcision for? The passover, the exodus, and the law? What was the conquest of Canaan and the Kingdom of David and Solomon? What had all the priests been doing and what had all the prophets been saying if not this: that Abraham’s physical descendants were special and privileged above all others. Yes, obedience was necessary. Yes, exile, occupation, and subjugation were sometimes necessary consequences for disobedience, but the basic starting place and ending place of the covenant is surely beyond dispute: DNA matters.
And to this, the gospel that Paul is proclaiming here, the one which God had promised beforehand through the prophets in the holy scripture concerning his Son, says something different: DNA doesn’t matter.
If Paul was right, then God had lied. That’s the first counterclaim.
Now, one answer that Paul could have made was to double-down on the statement at the end of chapter 2, that not only is circumcision of no spiritual value now, but that it was never of any spiritual value. He could have said that God’s promises and blessing had always been about the heart, always about faith. And indeed, in chapter 4, Paul basically does say that. But here Paul actually agrees to engage with them on this issue. He accepts the premise that God had promised particular blessings on the physical, hereditary, descendants of Abraham. What he is saying is that that blessing was not salvation. But if that blessing to hereditary Israel was not the gift of salvation, what advantage did they have?
Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. (3:2)
First “much in every way.” Because, in this section of his letter, Paul is addressing the complaints of the Jews in an abbreviated way, he only gives one specific advantage which the Jews possessed. But in chapters 9 and 11 he deals with the question of Israel in greater detail and when he does he names what else is included in “much in every way”. Look at 9:4.
To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.
That is a fuller expression and description of the blessings God gave Israel even apart from his salvation.
But Paul’s not quite there. He’s acknowledging the legitimacy of their complaint, he’s answering it in part, but then he puts a bookmark there so he can return to it later and give the issue a fuller treatment in chapter 9.
For now, though, Paul simply says “much in every way” and then identifies the greatest benefit of being a Jew:
The Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.
And in our passage he leaves it at that. The greatest gift that God gave Abraham’s bodily descendants, irrespective of the spiritual condition of their individual souls, was the “treasure of celestial wisdom” (Calvin’s Commentary, pg. 114) contained in holy scripture.
To properly value something, it’s helpful to imagine its absence.
Consider the great curse described in Amos 8:
Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land - not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of Yahweh. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.
People can endure great deprivation and maintain their sanity. Deprive them of health, deprive them of shelter, wealth, liberty, family, deprive them of land or country. The lack of these blessings causes suffering, but not insanity.
But deprive a person of communication, deprive them of words, language, and voice—and they will soon go insane. What is true of prisoners in solitary confinement is true of civilizations when separated from the Word of God. What’s true for a sailor marooned on an island is true of a culture deprived of the Oracles of the Living God.
God in his kindness has spoken to all people through the Book of Nature. In that sense, he has left no man, woman, or child, completely deprived of his voice. Romans 1 is clear about this. But to Israel he spoke through more than nature, he spoke through words. It is impossible to overstate the significance of the Word of God being spoken and communicated to Israel. Not just in a spiritual or religious sense, but in a secular-historical sense: nothing remotely approaches the significance of the Word of God being given to men. It was not evolution or revolution that gave us human rights, but revelation.
Why that particular word? Why the “oracles of God” instead of the “Word of God” or or “the promises of God” or the “law” or “statutes” or “commands”?
For Paul to speak of the oracles of God is, I believe, to summon to the mind of the Jews the entire history of God revealing himself at “sundry times and in divers manners to their fathers by the prophets”. He is not speaking only of written scripture but of the entire system of divine self-disclosure made to Israel and by which anything is known or can be known at all. I think, in fact, that Paul is intentionally trying to get his readers’ eyes up off the Torah and for them to consider the entire body of divine dialogue and communication that Israel had been the unique and sole recipient of in all of human history.
This term “oracle” is used in only four places in the New Testament. It is used here, in 1 Peter, in Hebrews, and in one of the sermons in the book of Acts.
The one who delivers that sermon in Acts, though, is not Paul, or Peter or John. It's Stephen.
Just before Stephen is stoned he gives this incredible sermon, the whole point of which is to illustrate the history of God’s dealing with Israel that existed outside of the formal temple system. And in that sermon, Stephen describes Moses as receiving from God “living oracles to give to us”. I can think of many ways to describe words written in stone, but “living” is not one of them. But to call the Ten Commandments “living”, changes the entire picture of God’s dealing with his people, doesn’t it? To use such a phrase reimagines Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, not with law, but with life. Not with something cold and hard and rigid clutched in his hands, but almost as if holding out to Israel the still-beating heart of God’s very nature.
And of course we know who was there at Stephen’s stoning. We know who heard, perhaps for the first time, the dead law described as “living oracles.” Paul, himself, was there. The author of these very verses. It had enraged him to the point of murder then. But no longer. Now he sees those living oracles as life giving and as the greatest gift that God had given Israel.
How do we see scripture and God’s commands? Has familiarity bred contempt? Or do we clutch the Word to our chests as the still-beating heart of God?
It makes Peter’s command to us in his epistle all the more thrilling, doesn’t it?
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another…whoever speaks, as one who speaks the oracles of God…in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 4:10-11)
The same oracles that Paul describes as being God’s greatest gift to Israel, Peter identifies as now indwelling us, through the Holy Spirit, so that we might serve others and glorify God.
Those of us who serve others with our counseling—is the advice we give just our opinion, mixed with a little pop psychology, tied up with a Bible verse bow? Or are we speaking the oracles of God to our brother or sister?
Those of us who address the corporate body, whether by teaching Sunday school, leading worship, or giving exhortations - are we just reheating the same thoughts and insights that we’ve had for years, or are the words we bring before God’s church the product of raw, fresh, engagement with the living God? Do we bring those words to his church still hot from the kiln of God’s Word? Do we bring those words to his church with the rich soil of scripture still sticking to their roots?
Remember Ezekiel 3:
And the angel said to me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.
We aren’t talking here about warmed-over devotionals for ourselves and anthropomorphic cartoon vegetables spouting Bible stories for our kids. We aren’t talking about rote Bible verses that we trot out when the kids need correcting. We aren’t talking about a distracted mind casually scanning pages in our daily Bible reading plan. We are talking about something far more consequential. Something far more ancient, mysterious, miraculous, mystic, and supernatural. Something that tastes as sweet as honey on the tongue and that pours forth from our mouths like living waters.
We also shouldn’t miss Paul’s primary point, here: the oracles of God are a blessing even to those who lack saving faith.
I wonder if, as evangelicals, we have perhaps learned the lesson of Matthew 16 too well: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” And I wonder if, as baptists, we have perhaps learned this doctrine too thoroughly: that there are none who are born Christians, but each one is a convert. And while Romans 3:2 takes nothing away from either essential truth, Paul would also have us understand that it is a blessing to live in a culture and in a home governed by the Word of God and that that blessing extends to and is experienced even by unbelievers.
Do you have a child who is not walking with the Lord? That child, no less than physical Israel, has been given the greatest possible gift short of salvation - she has been given the repository of all truth and goodness, she has been given the living oracles of the living God. May God help us to fill and govern our homes and jobs and towns and nation with those oracles in a manner that honors the sacred, life-giving, civilizing gift of God they are to all people.
The Jews’ second counterclaim is that Israel’s unfaithfulness proves that God was unfaithful to preserve the covenant he had made with Abraham.
Let’s hear that verse again:
What if some were unfaithful? Does their unfaithfulness nullify the faithfulness of God? (3:3)
At first, this can seem like an unreasonable charge for them to make against God. How could a guilty party’s unfaithfulness nullify or call-into-question the faithfulness of an innocent party?
Contracts don’t work like that.
Marriage vows don’t work like that.
And yet here is this charge being made against God, that somehow Israel’s unfaithfulness was God’s fault or impugned God’s faithfulness.
To understand why the Jews might make a charge like this against God, let’s look at one of the great covenant declarations in the Old Testament. This is from Deuteronomy 7.
You are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh the king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.
Circumcision was supposed to be enough. The bloodlines were supposed to have been enough. Abraham had done nothing to deserve God’s favor, and yet God had chosen him and his descendants to be his special people. Four hundred and thirty years before the Israelites were given the law at Mt. Sinai, God had sworn an oath to their father Abraham. And if the cords that bound Israel to God had not been fashioned by human faithfulness, how could they now be severed by human unfaithfulness. If it was God at the start, then it is God all the way through. And if the covenant was now defunct, then it was God who had been proven unfaithful.
That, I believe, is their argument.
What is remarkable about the Jews’ counterclaim, here, is that there is actually a lot for Paul to agree with.
And yet, God is faithful. We know this. What did Paul's opponents get wrong?
If this was an Encyclopedia Brown book this is where the chapter would end and you would have to turn to the end of the book to read the answer. In Romans, Paul makes you turn to chapters 4 and 9 and 11 to get the full picture.
Here’s a summary:
The Jews were right that God saves sinners irrespective of their obedience to the law—but it is by faith in Jesus Christ, not their physical circumcision or hereditary descent from Abraham that saves.
And the Jews were also right that God sovereignly ordains every person who is saved from their sins - Seth, but not his brother Cain; Abram, but not his brother Nahor; Isaac, but not his brother Ishmael; Jacob, but not his brother Esau - but it is on the basis of spiritual election, not biological descent that sinners are saved; and on account of the Holy Spirit’s regeneration of the heart, not the priest’s circumcision of the flesh, that the children of our God are distinguished from the children of the world.
But the details of those arguments are yet to be made. For now Paul simply and emphatically asserts God’s faithfulness to the oaths he swore to Abraham and Moses.
By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,
‘That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged. (3:4)
What we get here is not a logical, point-by-point, refutation of the Jews’ claim. Instead, Paul declares the fact of God’s enduring and irrefutable righteousness in the form of two particular attributes:
First, God is true to his Word. “Let God be true though every man were a liar.” What a grounding, orienting, statement that is. I am reminded of the story of Galileo, who after being forced by the Pope’s Inquisitors to recant his determination that the earth moved around the sun, whispered “eppur si muove” which means “and yet it moves.”
There is a sense in which we may limp from the field of battle and have had the worst of it. Not all debates end well. But beneath your breath in those moments, you can whisper truth to yourself. Not, “and yet it moves” like Galileo did, but this, “God is true and all men are liars.” That is a verse you can recite when you turn off the evening news or close your laptop at the end of the day. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
Second, God’s judgment of sin is perfect and will be seen as perfect. God’s justice is perfect in its object and it is perfect in its extent. There is not a drop of wrath that is either too little or too much. We are a grace-saturated church - and that’s a good thing! - but I wonder how many of us meditate on the perfection of God’s wrath. I wonder how many of us marvel at and worship God on account of his justice in judging sin. God’s wrath and justice is not a lesser part of his nature than his attributes of grace and mercy. It’s all God. It’s all good. We sing “Amazing Grace”. Why not “Amazing Wrath”? We sing “His Mercy Is More”. Why not “His Judgments are Just”? This is not to pick on the hymns we sing or the verses we love, but what a verse like Romans 3:4 does is rescue us from thinking that there are aspects of God’s character that are a little unsavory or parts of orthodoxy that we don’t really talk about in polite company.
Do you have any idea what a relief it is to know that on the day that God’s wrath is poured out we won’t all sort of look around awkwardly and shuffle our feet? Judgement day isn’t like dad being in a bad mood. It is the day on which the scales of justice are forever balanced. Hell isn’t a Halloween yard display or a Far Side cartoon. It is the place where God’s justice is displayed for his glory.
Our God is good, he will be seen as good, and he will prevail over and against every accusation, not just by might but by right. The judge of the earth shall, indeed, do what is just.
The Jews’ third counterclaim is that God is unjust to punish the human actions that have the effect of increasing his glory.
Let’s look at these verses again:
But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) By no means! For then how could God judge the world? But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. (3:5-8)
The Jews’ third counterclaim picks up on one of Paul’s more subtle points above: that the unfaithfulness of Israel, when held up to and compared to God’s long-suffering, patient, fidelity to his covenant promises, results in greater glory to God. The Jews understand this but then get a little too-clever-by-half, saying essentially: “Well, if God receives greater glory by demonstrating his patience and mercy, then what’s the problem? You can’t punish someone who has done you a favor, can you?”
This sort of reasoning is similar to that which Paul refutes in Romans 6:1. “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means?”.
Paul spends verses five through eight dealing with this particular error.
What I’m interested in here, is not so much the answer that Paul gives (which is, “by no means!”), but how he gets there.
It’s no accident that Paul begins his dispute with the Jews in verses 1 and 2 by foregrounding God’s Word as the source of all knowledge. And that’s not the first time in the Trial Motif that he has done so. In chapter 2 he has already described the law as “the embodiment of knowledge and truth.” It is well he did so, because it is from those very oracles and from that very law that Paul makes his emphatic denunciation of the Jews’ two counterclaims in verses 3-8.
We should follow Paul’s example. It is always with scripture at our back that we make our strongest defense of the faith.
But just as with his refutation of the Jews’ argument in verses 3 and 4, Paul doesn’t really bother to walk his opponents step-by-step through the logic of his answer. To use a phrase from fourth grade math, Paul doesn’t “show his work,” he just gives the answer.
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a recording of one of my dad’s sermons and in it he mentioned that his favorite commentary on Romans is the one by John Murray. So naturally, I went to dad’s book case and found his copy. Murray does not disappoint and is particularly strong in defending the rhetorical tactic that Paul uses in verses 3-8.
Here’s what he writes:
It might seem that this consideration begs the question. For of what avail is it to affirm that God will judge the world if the question is: how can God be just in executing judgment if his righteousness is commended by our unrighteousness? Categorical assertion of the thing to be proved is no argument! This, however, is what we discover in this instance. Paul appeals to the fact of universal judgment and he does not proceed to prove it. He accepts it as an ultimate datum of revelation, and he confronts the objection of verse 5 with this fact. About the certainty of God’s judgment there can be no dispute. Once the judgment is accepted as certainty, then all such objection as is implied in verses 5, 7, 8 falls to the ground. The apostle’s answer in this case illustrates what must always be true when dealing with the ultimate facts of revelation. These facts are ultimate and argument must be content with categorical affirmation. The answer to objection is proclamation.
The answer to objection is proclamation.
What a profound truth to remember when we are confronted by objections.
There is no theodicy so powerful, final, or true as to fearlessly declare God’s Word in the face of his accusers. Accept no rules of engagement that require you to abandon the high ground of the sacred oracles of scripture. Go ahead and debate the existence of God, debate the problem of evil, debate the historical fact of the resurrection. Debate the legalization of abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, pornography, gambling, marijuana, and the proper relationship between church and state. Debate it all—even if only against that great leering sceptic in your own head—but never agree to “not bring the Bible into it.” The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Heb 4:12). If Paul was unashamed to use it in such a bold and ultimate way, then we should be unashamed to do so also.
But what of the underlying question of justice? Paul has stated that God is just in his judgments. Is that enough?
What Paul does in verses 3-8 is to unearth from scripture certain foundational, incontrovertible, truths. These are the “ultimate datum of revelation” that Murray speaks of and are like huge pillars or cornerstones on which the entire edifice of historical orthodoxy and the gospel is constructed. But those pillars or cornerstones aren’t positioned in a perfect square. In fact, as you stare at them scattered across scripture you can hardly imagine that any kind of coherent building could be built on them at all.
Over there we see this mighty pillar that is God’s sovereignty in salvation - his election, predestination, and calling of all those who for his own good pleasure he has chosen from before time to be a people of his own possession.
And over there we see this mighty pillar that is God’s absolute, perfect, justice that will result in the damnation of many.
And over there we see another mighty pillar that is the free offer of the gospel that is made to any and all that whosoever should call on the Lord will be saved.
And as you sit and stare at these pillars, you scratch your head and wonder what possible structure could ever be built on such distant pillars.
We should do what Paul does. Start with the pillars. Start with the ultimate datums of revelation. Start with the cornerstones of God’s character and promises that are clearly revealed in scripture and when one of them is attacked, defend it to the death. But in some sense, particularly if you, like me, are somewhat limited in your formal theological education, or time, or inclination, we do not need to consume ourselves with imagining how all the pieces will ultimately fit.
But we should take great confidence in this fact: that God is its architect, it will be beautiful, and it will be good.
Here is a passage from a novel called Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin that gets at this idea.
Who said that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence?… Justice is higher and not as easy to understand as common sense. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.
No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. There is justice in the world, sir, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs—like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware.
For our conclusion this morning, I want us to return to where we started: a courtroom. Not an imaginary courtroom that we might use as a rhetorical device to understand Paul’s argument, though. Nor, even, an actual courtroom where attorneys in suits question witnesses who shake and play with their tie. I want us to go to the cosmic courtroom of the last day—the place that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 where the sheep and the goats are separated and that John describes in Revelation and that Malachi describes in chapter 3 of his prophecy.
I want us to go to the place of final judgment where on that great and awesome day of the Lord, God shall judge the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
What defense will be available to you on that day? What counterclaim will you dare to make?
I read a long quote a moment ago and hope you will forgive one more. This one is a favorite of mine, but it's a little odd. It’s from a short story written by the Polish writer Isaac Babel in 1926. It goes like this.
Give us orphans a horse for the Eternal Judgment, a horse, so that our souls may come out on the boundary field with its flanks beneath them.
I can’t exactly explain why this enigmatic little passage has lodged itself so deeply in my mind in the years since I first read it. I don’t even exactly know what Isaac Babel, himself, meant by it. But here’s how I’ve always taken it.
We are all born orphans. Not biological orphans, but spiritual ones. And not the cute kind, either, begging for porridge in an orphanage; but spiteful, malevolent ones, who deserve a good whipping. The kind of orphan conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. The kind of orphan with the venom of asps under their lips. And the great reality of your life and mine is that each day brings us closer to the Eternal Judgment and the boundary field about which our passage speaks. And on that day, and on that field, our orphan souls will shrink in shame from the glory of God.
Our passage in Romans this morning gives us a picture of what some will trust in on that day.
Some will come onto the boundary field of judgment to meet the Righteousness of God with their cultural heritage or family as their only defense.
But Paul tells us: that is not enough.
And some will come out onto the boundary field of judgment to meet the Righteousness of God with their good works as their only defense.
But Paul tells us: that is not enough.
And some will come out onto the boundary field of judgment to meet the Righteousness of God with the delusion that God is unjust to judge them.
But Paul tells us: that is not enough.
But if not these, you ask, then what defense is enough? On what horse can us orphans, nervous in the witness box, shaking at the edge of the boundary field, ever hope to meet the Righteousness of God and live?
What hope is there for those whose minds even now are full of the memory of terrible things they have done.
Dear ones, beloved in the Lord, you know the answer well.
That hope is Jesus Christ who through his shed blood has made a way for us to meet the Righteousness of God, not as our accuser, but as our shield and defense; not as the standard against which we will be judged and found lacking but as the gift we will be given and by which found accepted.
On the field of judgment, the Righteousness of God that once meant nothing but our damnation and death is now offered to us as our salvation and life.
For now the Righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:21).
There on the field, through Christ alone, righteousness and peace shall kiss.
Praise God. Let’s pray.
Here are some other recent messages.
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