This morning if you have your Bibles and will turn with me, we want to continue our study through the book of Romans. And this morning we are finding ourselves at Romans chapter 3:20-31 and I’d like to begin at verse 20.
Romans 3:20-31
20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
21 But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; 22 even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: 23 for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; 24 being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: 25 whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; 26 to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. 28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. 29 Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: 30 seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. 31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
Let’s just bow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Fathers, I come before you this morning, Lord, help us to understand the depth of your mercy, the depth of your grace, the hopelessness of our state apart from that grace and mercy being extended to us freely as a gift given to us through your Son, Jesus Christ. Speak to us through your word this morning and help us to understand as the Apostle Paul lays it out for us. And Lord, help us to grow in our wisdom and knowledge. This we’d ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Last Sunday, we looked at the middle portion of chapter 3 of the book of Romans.
And in that particular portion of the book, the Apostle Paul lays out the fact that we cannot be saved because of who we are, what we’ve done, or any works that we can do. But he laid out the fact that every one of us stands condemned and that the law reveals to us the point of our condemnation. That none of us is righteous and none of us has not broken and defiled the character and law of God.
So the Apostle Paul says, what is our hope? There’s a lot of people today that still believe that the only way that you can be saved is somehow having to do enough good things to offset the bad things and the sins you’ve done. If there was someone that should have been able to do that with his life, it would have been David. David, throughout his life, had trusted in God.
He had walked with the Lord. He had done what God had commanded him to do. And yet we see that David understood.
And when David sinned and it became evident to him of his sin, he understood that his sin wasn’t just at that moment. It wasn’t just when he saw Bathsheba and lusted after her and committed adultery with her. It wasn’t just when he arranged the details of her husband Uriah’s death so that he would be killed and it would look like he’d been killed in battle instead of murdered by David.
And it wasn’t when he lied to all of those around him. He says, I was conceived in sin. Now what did he mean by that, I was conceived in sin? David’s mother wasn’t an adulteress.
The scriptures are clear on that. So how could he be conceived in sin? He understood that he came from a line of sinners. Just as you and I come from a line of sinners that can be traced all the way back to Adam.
It’s very interesting, the Roman Catholic Church wants to trace the popes all the way back to Peter, saying Peter is the first pope. Well unfortunately Peter was not the first pope and they can’t trace the popes back to him and that’s a whole other historical study. I would challenge you, if you think that that is true, go and read the history of the Roman Catholic Church and you’ll find out there’s times they were without popes, there was times that they didn’t have popes, there was times they had two popes, three popes at the same time, and there cannot be traced a pope back until probably Constantine where he began to combine the Roman emperorship with the leadership of the church.
But prior to that, there were no popes. But I want to tell you there’s one thing that can be traced all the way back to Adam and it’s our sin. Every one of us was conceived in sin.
We were given a sin nature by our parents and it can be traced all the way back to Adam in the Garden of Eden. David understood this, he said I was conceived in sin. He says my natural tendency is towards sin.
Now I want you to understand sin because in order to understand what we’re going to be looking at out of chapter 3 this morning, we need to understand sin. One of the things today, people don’t look at sin and they don’t realize how horrible sin is and they don’t give definition to sin and they come and they sit in church services and they’re never told you’re a sinner that needs to be saved by grace and what exactly is sin? If you’re an archer, you know what the term sin means in English in the world of archery. It means that you’ve taken your bow and your arrow and you’ve pointed it at the bullseye and you’ve missed the mark.
You missed the mark, you didn’t get to complete the shot properly. It was an error on your part and so consequently you didn’t score. But sin in the spiritual life is much more grievous than an archer missing his mark with his arrow.
Sin in the spiritual life means that you and I have missed the mark of God. We have shot and aimed at what righteousness is and we have totally missed it. And not only have we missed it, we’ve violated it and we have determined that it’s not worthy of trying to achieve.
That is the depth of sin. Sin means that I am walking in total rebellion to the very character of the one who created me physically and the one who desires to redeem me spiritually but I want nothing to do with him. Instead I will do everything I can to rebel against his authority, his character, his purposes and I will desire to defy who he is instead of embrace who he is.
It was very interesting. At my mother-in-law’s funeral afterwards we went out for a meal and my youngest granddaughter, she loves her great uncle and it’s very, very odd because they don’t see each other a lot but all she wanted to do was hug her great uncle. Wanted to go up and run and hug him.
And I was thinking, is that the attitude that we have as a believer in Jesus Christ towards God? That even though we may not be with him all the time, we want to just be with him all the time and want to hug him and tell him we love him. But what happens if we allow sin to overtake our lives, what we do is we reject him. And instead of running to embrace him, we run the opposite way.
Now Paul is going to tell us what is the solution to this problem. What is the solution to this problem? He says, but now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested being witnessed by the law and the prophets. He’s saying God’s righteousness doesn’t have to have the law to be revealed.
God has given to us a conscience. He’s given to every person that’s alive an understanding of who he is. And every person as they live their lives makes a choice, am I going to walk in rebellion or am I going to pursue and seek and find this God that I can embrace? God gave us the law and the prophets.
As we saw last week, the purpose of the law, it was given to be a schoolmaster to reveal to us and show us what righteousness is, what holiness is, what God’s character is. When Moses brought the people out of Egypt and they came to Mount Sinai, he called Moses up on Mount Sinai to meet with him. And as we said last Sunday, he put a line around the bottom of the mountain and the people couldn’t cross the line because if they crossed the line, they were crossing and they were entering the holy ground and they were unholy and unrighteous.
And he said, you shall die. Now they needed to learn what holiness was and who God was. Why? The Jewish people, even though they had come from the stock of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the sons of Jacob.
And Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had walked in obedience to the Lord and in faith to God. The sons of Jacob had walked in faith to God. They had learned a lesson when they met the brother Joseph in Egypt.
And all of a sudden they came face to face with their own sin and they repented of that sin and they sought Joseph’s forgiveness and God’s forgiveness. But from that time, the people of Israel had lived 400 years in Egypt. And even though God had separated them from the Egyptians, on a daily basis they were still exposed to elements of the Egyptian culture.
The Egyptian gods. The Egyptians’ sinful behavior. The Egyptians’ rebellion against the true and the living God.
And so as they came out, they needed to be reintroduced to their creator and the one that was their redeemer. The one who had set them free and redeemed them out of Egypt. They still needed to understand what his holiness was and who he was.
And so at Mount Sinai, the law was going to be given to the people so that they could see the holiness of God, what his holiness really entailed, what their sinfulness really meant. And that’s the same thing that we need to come to grips with. And everyone that is here that’s a believer in Christ, you came to that point in your life where you said, I am unworthy of God’s grace and his love.
Because I’m not holy and I’m not righteous. I’m one who is a sinner, a rebel against God. Paul goes on, and he says, Even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe, for there is no difference.
I want you to understand Paul’s laying groundwork here because we’re living in a culture today where you have people that believe that God only comes for certain people. And it’s really, they can’t read Paul’s words and understand. First of all, we’re all in the same boat.
Doesn’t matter what church you grew up in. Doesn’t matter what religious system you grew up in. Doesn’t matter what family you grew up in.
We’re all in the same boat. We’re sinners. We’re rebels by nature.
And Paul says, God came and revealed his righteousness to the whole world and revealed his means of salvation where you could become righteous who hadn’t been righteous and could be redeemed and saved. And it wasn’t just for the few. It’s for everybody.
But the problem is, he says, it only ends up being for those who will believe. Because everybody’s given the same opportunity. But you need to believe.
And you need to trust. And you need to understand the depth of God’s mercy and his grace. David had been greatly blessed by the Lord.
As we’re going back to the example that we read in Psalm 51 this morning. David had been greatly blessed by the Lord. And he had, on many occasions, God had protected him from death.
He protected him from Saul’s anger and spears and swords. He protected him from the enemies of Israel. He had enabled him to be the king of Israel, called him to be the leader of Israel.
And I believe, through all of that, David understood the depth of God’s love and saw his graciousness. But he didn’t really understand the depth of his grace. And the point at which David understood the depth of God’s grace and mercy was when he did those horrible things.
And he knew he should be the one that was condemned to death. And he cried out that God would extend his mercy. I’ve had people that have said, you know, we’ve got loved ones that don’t know the Lord.
How should we pray for them? And I was listening to a pastor one time. And he said, one of the most difficult things I had to do is tell somebody that asked me that question. Are you willing to give them over to God and say, Lord, do whatever you have to do to get them to come to the end of themselves where they can see they need your grace.
Are you going to allow them to experience whatever they need to experience so that they’ll give their heart and life to Jesus Christ? Will you trust God that much with your loved one, with your child, with your parents, with your grandparents that don’t know Jesus? Paul is saying here that even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe, for there is no difference. All of us need to come to God the same way. And that is by coming to the end of ourselves and coming to God and calling on his name and calling out and saying, Lord, have mercy on me.
And Lord, I receive the gift of grace that you’re extending. I want to define grace and mercy. We’ve defined it before, but it’s important as we look at this particular chapter that you completely understand and know the definition.
The definition of grace. Grace is unmerited favor. I have done nothing to earn it.
I can do nothing to earn it, but I’ve extended favor by someone who should have shown me judgment or should have dealt with me harshly or should have made sure that I was punished for what I’d done. But instead, they extend unmerited favor towards me and forgive that which I have done. That is grace.
Mercy. Mercy is I know what I deserve. I know that I deserve to be judged for the crime that I committed, but yet I’m not judged.
That’s mercy. I don’t receive the judgment as due me, but instead I receive something through grace that I don’t deserve. Grace and mercy walk hand in hand.
God removes that which I deserve and replaces it with that which I don’t. And Paul is saying here, that is offered to everyone. Why then don’t Christians shout it from the hilltops? Do you realize a number of years ago we were talking and I really had no calling to the mission field, but one day our church all of a sudden had a church full of Haitians.
I never went to Haiti, never been to Haiti, never even heard of Haiti really until the Haitians showed up. And all of a sudden we had a mission field in front of us where we didn’t go to the mission field. We have a mission field in Fargo here.
My son-in-law and I were driving around and he was saying, wow, the demographics of Fargo sure changed. As we were driving around picking up doing errands for my wife, picking up some stuff for her, going and just looking at some stuff that my son-in-law wanted to look at. And he was seeing that it’s not just a northern European community anymore.
You’ve got all kinds of Melanin groups of people here with a lot of Melanin and some that don’t have any. It never used to be that way. And it’s brought some significant problems.
Some of the problems to our community are grave problems, because we’ve got people that have come from foreign countries of totally different backgrounds that don’t believe this book, that instead worship different gods. And they don’t want anything to do with us, but they want to take us over. And one of the things that we can do is we need to understand their goal.
But we also need to understand what Christ has done for us. He’s brought the mission field to us. You look around and maybe you have someone that you know that’s from Africa, that is from Asia, in parts of Asia where they’ve never been preached the gospel, is from India, is from Bangladesh, is from a Muslim country in the Middle East.
Now all of a sudden you’re working with them, or they’re your neighbor, or you meet them at the store. Do you realize that God’s gospel is for them just as much as it is for us? I want to just share with you something. Did you know that the Norwegians and the Germans and the Danes and the English were just as pagan as some of the tribes in Africa? And the people in the Middle East that don’t know Jesus are today as the ancestor worshipers are in the Far East? Did you know that if you’re from Northern European descent that your ancestors worshiped false gods, pagan gods, gods that were demonic in nature? But something happened.
The gospel was brought and lives were transformed. And so you come out of a heritage where the gospel was there. There’s other people that come from those regions that I’ve just mentioned that come from that heritage as well where the gospel was brought and lives were transformed.
But oftentimes today in today’s culture you don’t hear about them. Because people don’t want you to know the gospel is for everyone and it’s the transformation that God has laid out for all mankind. Not just Northern Europeans, but everybody.
And it’s interesting, he says here, why? Verse 23, this is why. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Is just a few people that come short? No, it’s everybody that’s ever lived.
Like I said, we all have the same problem that goes all the way back to our father Adam. A sin nature. A rebellious tone against God.
A desire to rebel against that which is holy, righteous, and pure. And Paul lays it out and he says for all have sinned. And so the gospel is for everyone.
Jesus died for the whole world. The problem is the whole world will not receive him. And Paul says you need to believe in order to receive the gift of salvation.
And you will not experience forgiveness of sins without receiving and believing in Jesus Christ. Now let’s go on and just take a look at why. Being justified freely by his grace.
Justification is a term that’s used in churches. But justification is a term that can be applied to everybody and everyone’s life. You don’t have to be in church.
Justification means that I was standing there guilty. And now God has made a means by which my rebellion is covered and taken off of me so he no longer sees my rebellion. But instead he sees his righteousness in me and I am justified in his eyes to be his son or his daughter.
Not because of what I did because I could never replace what he sees as sin. But something’s occurred where he no longer sees my sin. But instead I’m justified in his eyes as being righteous as he is righteous.
How does that occur? Paul tells us. He says through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now let’s look at the word redemption.
Redemption means bought back. It used to be easier to talk about redemption because you had S&H green stamps and gold bond stamps. And you could redeem and get prizes for your stamps.
Remember my mom used to save those stamps and we’d get all kinds of trinkets for stamps. You could redeem. It wasn’t yours but now it’s yours.
Redemption works the same way in the life of the one who is an unbeliever who becomes a believer. God has paid a price to redeem or buy you back. In order to get those stamps that my mom used to save, the gold bond stamps and the S&H green stamps.
You’d go to the gas stations and you’d buy gas and they’d give you stamps. You’d go to stores that carried them and they’d give you stamps. And you’d fill out your little book and when your book was full you’d take it and you’d get it redeemed.
Yet they were still within the control and confines of Egypt under their control and influence. And God redeemed them out of Egypt. They could not get out of Egypt themselves.
There was no way they could do it. They had to be redeemed by God. God went in and He took them out of Egypt.
He took them out of that which was enslaving them and causing them to be prevented from revealing His power and His might to them and through their lives. And He took them out of that. That’s what redemption does for us in the real sense in our lives.
That’s a type of redemption that occurs when Jesus went to the cross. And we’re going to see what redemption means in another word, propitiation, in a second. But redemption comes when Jesus went to the cross, gave His life for you.
And the Bible says, there is no forgiveness of sin without the shedding of blood. Because why? Blood covers for death. The death that is brought by sin.
And without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness of sin. That’s how serious sin is. And Jesus said, I came to shed my blood that you could be redeemed or brought back out of a rebellious nature where you weren’t walking with me, where you didn’t have fellowship with me.
You didn’t want anything to do with me. And you’re brought out of that and into this marvelous new relationship where you want to walk with me and have fellowship with me. You know, you ought to stop to think about it.
I remember a number of years ago, I thought, wow, it would be really cool one day if I could just know everything that was in every book in the world. And have all that knowledge. Now I’ve got AI and I can kind of do that and it’s not so great.
But there’s somebody that knows a lot more than that. And that’s God. But why don’t we go to God and call on the one who knows all things and just stop and think sometime about how much he knows and the depth of his wisdom, the depth of his knowledge, the depth of his ability to be able to, with a word, bring into being all these systems that are interactive and work with one another to create you, your ancestor, Adam and Eve.
To create Adam out of the dust of the earth and to give him all the systems that work with one another in his body. Now our bodies have been tainted by sin and so consequently we’re in the process of dying, but before that he gave us everything we needed so that we would just go on eternally. Our bodies heal themselves, they do all these amazing things and they still do to a degree, but there comes death at a moment.
But the thing is, you look at this and it’s just amazing and yet often times we don’t want to take the time to spend thinking about it and going to the Lord and realizing that God has redeemed us out of a world that is filled with death and doesn’t give any real long term answers to life and he’s redeemed us out of that and brought it into a relationship with him who’s got all the answers and knows all the truth because he is truth. Now, I want us to take a look at the next word because I said I wanted to get to this word and it says whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood. What is the word propitiation? Propitiation is a word that isn’t used in many new translations of the English Bible.
They leave it out. They change it to a different word which isn’t near as powerful. Propitiation is a covering.
It’s a covering so that you can not see what was there. Jesus became a covering of our sin. So that God looks at your life when you become a Christian as he looked at the life of David even after David had done these horrendous things yet David called out and God forgave him through the blood of his son as his son covered those horrible sins.
I’ll give you an example of another man that I’ve talked to you about before. His name is David Berkowitz. David Berkowitz is a wonderful Christian man.
You will probably never have the opportunity to meet David Berkowitz in this lifetime because David Berkowitz is spending a life sentence in a prison. Some of you who are older will remember back I believe it was in the late 60s, early 70s I think it was New York There was a son of Sam killer and he would kill young people as they would sit in their cars. David Berkowitz was the son of Sam.
He said, I was walking in horrendous darkness and he said, I’m not asking God to get me out of prison but I know that God has forgiven me for all the horrible, horrible things I committed and God has been so merciful and gracious to me He’s given me this marvelous ministry in prison to talk to men about this Jesus who can save them and who can come a propitiation for their sin as well. He covered David Berkowitz’s sin. So God looks at David Berkowitz today and he doesn’t see the son of Sam murderer He sees a man who cried out to God and asked for forgiveness through Jesus his son and his son’s blood became a propitiation for him and his son’s blood covers him and he sees his son’s righteousness He doesn’t see David Berkowitz’s unrighteousness.
Are you willing to allow Jesus to be a covering for your sin? He goes on and he says, Whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God. The remission. To remit means you take out of the place.
Remission. It’s there but now it’s gone. It’s no longer present.
The remission of sins. Some people ask, well what about the Old Testament saints? You know like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob we talked about them a little bit earlier. Their faith in God and God said that because of their faith he brought them into the promised land and he delivered them out of the land of Ur of the Chaldeans and brought them into the land that he was going to give them.
The land of Canaan. It was because of faith. Faith in what? Faith in the righteousness of God and that God’s righteousness would one day become a propitiation for them as he brought the sacrifice that he had promised way back to Adam when Adam and Eve first sinned that he who would come as the seed of woman would crush the serpent’s head and the serpent’s power would be destroyed and they trusted in that.
They were looking forward to the cross of Christ we had the great privilege of looking back to the cross of Christ and yet as we look back and we have so much more knowledge of historical fact that actually occurred yet many Christians today do not understand their walk is covered by the righteousness of God and walk in his righteousness and seek to share that with others but instead we’d rather go back to the things of the world. Paul goes on and he says to declare I say at this time his righteousness that he might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. People say well I want justice the only place you can find true justice is to find it in Jesus Christ.
You know you look at is there true justice if you’re dealing with people of this world the answer is no because you don’t know motives. People may say they’re doing certain things and they want to be just and bring justice about but you really look and all of a sudden the real motive comes out later and they want to grab power or they want to grab money or they want to grab authority God doesn’t do that he comes as a justifier through his justice and it’s going to come only through his son Jesus Christ. Where is the boasting then? It is excluded by what law? Of works? Nay, but by the law of faith.
He’s saying where do you have the right to be boastful and say look at how righteous I am. The Bible talks about the arrogant man. The arrogant man has a high value of himself and exalts himself in his own position and the Bible says that one day he shall fall.
It says that you shouldn’t trust in the arrogant man. But yet the people that boast in themselves and boast in their abilities and boast and look at what I have done. You know the Bible says it’s interesting when a man names buildings after himself he thinks that the whole world will remember but it’s not long before they all forget.
Why? How many of you if I ask you to give me the name of your great grandparents can do it? Maybe some of you can. But go to your great great grandparents I bet you very few if anybody could do that in here. Give me their names, their occupations, what they did, how they lived.
How quickly they forget. You know you look at, I’ve got a great grandfather I’ve shared with you before. He prayed for my grandmother and he prayed for my dad and all of his brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives and his great grandchildren that he would never know in this life that Jesus would grab their hearts.
You maybe had somebody like that in your history and you don’t even know about it. And the thing is, the Bible tells us if we’re going to rely on works and people to remember us because of our works it’s hopeless. But by faith.
But by faith in Jesus Christ. I think there’s going to be great surprises in heaven. People that we think are going to be the great stars aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that get the biggest rewards or the most crowns.
It may be some little old lady that was on her knees in prayer for people, souls, daily. That we don’t even know about. You see, God looks at things different than we do.
And he’s telling us this. And we need to wrap this up, so let’s just take a look at the last few verses here. Therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes. Of the Gentiles also. And this is a whole other, and we don’t have time to go into the depths of this.
Maybe we’ll get into it later on in another message. But the thing is, you’ve got today, and I mentioned at the beginning, people totally ignoring what the Bible says. Is there any difference between the Jews and the Gentiles in the means of salvation? Absolutely not.
Does God desire that they both be saved? Absolutely. Are the Jews different than the Gentiles? The Bible tells us that all the time. Why? Because the Jews are of a special place in God’s plan.
And they are to be the watch piece of where we are in history, of when He shall return and establish His total justice upon the earth. And for people to say that God has no purpose for the Jews, they are liars, and they are not following God’s word, and they’re calling God a liar. And so if you know somebody who’s doing that, you need to talk to them.
And say, read the Bible. And there’s no difference between the Jews and the Gentiles in their sinfulness, and there’s no difference between the Jews and the Gentiles in their ability to come to God, and that is all through Jesus Christ. And then God goes on, or Paul goes on, and he finishes this particular portion of the letter.
He says, Seeing it as one God which shall justify the circumcision by faith and the uncircumcision through faith, how are the Jews the circumcised justified by faith? How are the uncircumcised, the Gentiles justified through faith? The same faith, in the same finished work, the same propitiation, the same sacrifice, the same one that shed His blood, and who He is without sin became sin for us, took our sin upon Himself. Our sin was propitiated to Him. His righteousness was propitiated for covering us.
And that is why it says that when He died on the cross and His blood was shed, He cried out, My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Because He was absorbing all the sin and the penalty for all the sin of all mankind in all time. And He did that for us. And Paul closes this particular paragraph of the letter by saying, Did He then make void the law through faith? God forbid.
Yea, we establish the law. We establish the fact that God is righteous. We establish the fact that God’s righteousness is reflected in His law, His word.
And we need to walk in His righteousness and the only way we can do it is through faith. And so the law, the righteousness of God is established by our faith in Jesus Christ. And we desire to walk as He walks and become as He is, righteous and holy and reflect His character on a daily basis.
Let’s just close. Lord, I pray that You would just be with us. Help us to understand.
For all men are unrighteous and sinners that need to be saved by grace. Lord, help us to understand mercy and grace. Help us to understand propitiation.
Help us to understand justice and justification. And Lord, I pray that You would just speak to us through Your word, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.