Rom 3:19-20 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

The human race is a strange animal! Seriously, when you look at us carefully, there are some things about us that we take so much for granted but which are actually quite strange. They are even more strange if you believed the atheist who says this world is just chance and there is no meaning or purpose behind it. There are two features of every human being that strike me as very strange in the light of that dogma.

The first is the tendency of most people to have a sense of failure or inadequacy. Oh yes, people cover it up and in fact they spend much of their life covering it up, but if you can catch them at a rare moment of honesty they will confess to you that they are not the great person that they would like the world to believe they are. No, they will confess their inadequacies and even their failures (but you will need to get them at a rare point of honesty). All of us have this particular awareness even though, as I've said, we go to great lengths to cover it up. Why should people who are, according to the atheist, random acts of chance, worry about such things, but worry we do!

The second strange tendency, which goes with the first one, is the concern to be seen to be good. We feel bad about ourselves deep down, and yet we want everyone to see us NOT as a failure. We want others to see us as successes. We want to be thought of as nice people, good people, people who get it right and do well. Of course those descriptions vary according to the social group we belong to but we know the standards that our particular group has and we want to live up to their standards so they will think well of us. You see it in any and every social grouping, but why should it be if we are just random chance creatures with no meaning or purpose. Everything within us challenges that assessment of us. We measure ourselves and our assessment is important!

Now the Jews of Jesus' day and Paul's day, were one such social grouping and within that cultural or social group was a sub-group who made the rest feel it was important to abide by a certain set of life-rules, the Law of Moses. They were the people that people refers to as “ under the Law.” The Law was the standard by which they assessed one another. If you were good, you kept the Law. For instance Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, “were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly.” (Lk 1:6); that was the assessment of people who knew them and later told Luke about them. Joseph, Jesus' earthly father was described as “a righteous man,” (Mt 1:19) which would have meant that he was a man who sought to keep God's commandments; hence his action in wanting to quietly divorce Mary.

The not-so-nice people of that society didn't bother about the Law. They were lawbreakers or sinners and were looked down upon by those who did adhere to the Law. Now if you lived in a society where this Law prevailed, where you were very much aware of it, even though others adjudged you righteous, you knew deep down that that meant righteous in most things , for there would always be a little something somewhere where you didn't come up to the mark. Indeed with some it is difficult to know if you come up to the mark. For instance, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut 6:5) Could you ever be sure that that was how you truly loved God? You kept the practical commandments you were aware of, but was that enough to ensure you could say that you loved God like this? Suppose there were laws that you didn't know about? Perhaps you weren't keeping them? No, the truth was that you could never boast of being a perfect law-keeper, which is what Paul meant when he said, “so that every mouth may be silenced.” Yes, you were never quite certain and so it was better to remain quiet. Yes, you knew that deep down, just like were considered at the beginning of this meditation, you had something that left you feeling inadequate and as such you would be “held accountable to God.” Oh yes, you could never stand before God with a totally clear conscience. You feared that future where you knew that one day you would have to stand before him and be answerable for your imperfection!

Thus Paul can conclude, “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” Yes, if you are going to measure me by the Law I can never say I am totally perfect and therefore I can not say with a clear heart that I am righteous. All focusing on the rules has done, has been to make me more and more aware of the bits where I fall short. This is it, isn't it? Whatever set of rules we have to abide by, the Law of Moses or the laws of our little group in society, we fear failure, and we are constantly struggling to achieve approval of others who measure us by the rules, but deep down we know they will judge us because we are not perfect and will fail even their expectations of us! No, if you base life on keeping to a set of rules or even expectations upon you, know that you are doomed to a life of failure and the only way to cope is to pretend you're not, while all the time knowing you are. What a deception!

Rom 3:21-24 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

The point that Paul has been making again and again in a variety of ways, is that however much we try to keep the rules, we fail to be righteous. We've seen his arguments and we've thought through some of the issues, and the conclusions are clear: we are helpless and hopeless and cannot make ourselves righteous. Now if God wasn't a God of love He would just leave us like that and condemn us to this futile way of living, leaving us to our frustrations and our guilt – but He is and He doesn't!

This is one of those passages that starts with a ‘But'. ‘But' here means that is not the end of it, for God has stepped in and done what we couldn't do. We couldn't make ourselves righteous but God can and it is a “righteousness… apart from the Law.” God's righteousness does not depend upon us having to keep that Law, for we've already seen that that is a lost cause! We can't do it, so He has to do it on some other basis.

So what is it? Hold on, we need to see where we find out about this first: “to which the Law and the Prophets testify”. When a writer speaks about ‘the Law and the Prophets', that is simply a shorthand way of meaning all of the Old Testament. Yes, says Paul, this righteousness from God is something that has been hinted at throughout the Old Testament – as we'll see as we go on through Romans. It isn't something that God has just dreamt up; it has been in His heart and mind from before the foundation of the world. There are at least half a dozen references in the New Testament that testify to that (look up 1 Pet 1:20, Eph 1:4, Rev 17:8, Rev 13:8, 2 Tim 1:9, Titus 1:2). It is only ‘now' , says Paul that it has been fully revealed.

So how does this righteousness from God come to us? “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Instead of the Law, God places His Son, Jesus Christ, as the focus of our attention. Are we to become Christians by copying Jesus? No, because again, on our own that would be absolutely impossible – even more impossible than keeping the Law! On our own could we heal the sick and raise the dead? Definitely not! No, the point of Jesus' three years of ministry was not to give us something to imitate (although there is an element of that about it) but to reveal the Father's love to us and to show us that he was God's Son. And that is where the focus now comes, on us simply believing that which we have just said – that Jesus revealed God's love for us and showed us that he was God's Son.

But there is also a third thing that he did which is vital: he died on the Cross for our sins, so that we might be forgiven; that is the third element of belief. This is how this righteousness from God comes: it comes by us simply believing these three things: a) that Jesus revealed God's love for us (He does love us!), b) that Jesus was and is God's Son, and c) being God's Son he was able to step in for us and take the punishment for our sins. When we come to a place of being able to say “I believe” and it is real, so real that it causes us to respond to it and surrender to God and ask for it to apply to our lives, then He declares us righteous. This is what the Gospel is all about. An act of faith? Yes, of course, because the Bible tells us that faith is responding to what God has said. We hear it, we believe it, and we respond to it. That is faith.

Now is this purely for Jews or purely for Gentiles? Who is this for, Paul now considers. No, he says, it is for everyone. Everyone? Yes everyone, because, “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Oh yes, we've seen it already, every single one of us, Jew and Gentile are hopeless and helpless. All of us are in the same boat. We all need God to come and do what we cannot do on our own. Every one of us does wrong and every one of us fails to reach the standard of God's perfection. There's not one of us who could stand before God as an equal in holiness. No, we're all doomed unless we receive the salvation that God offers through His Son.

Look at Paul's final description of this salvation: “are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ” We don't have to work for it; it is something that comes freely from God. It is an act of His grace that He doesn't demand we keep on struggling to be better and gives us a way out by simple belief. No, we have been redeemed, bought by the blood of Jesus, snatched from the jaws of death and hell and from Satan. Jesus has paid the price and we can do no more than believe it and live it! Jesus HAS done it. Receive it, live it!

Rom 3:25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.

Some of us don't like talk about ‘the blood' or ‘the Cross' but, fortunately or unfortunately, they are at the heart of the Gospel. In fact there are words in our verses above that bring great revelation to what the Gospel is all about – if we hadn't caught Paul's flow in the previous verses we've been considering in a number of mediations: we are lost, helpless and hopeless and we need God's help. In the previous verse Paul has just spoken of “the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” We don't often use the word ‘redemption' in modern life, unless we have been unfortunate enough to use the services of a pawnbroker. If we have then we put an article into pawn in exchange for a loan which will need paying back with interest at some time in the future. In the getting it back by a payment, we thus ‘redeem' the article. So when Paul uses that phrase he is referring to the fact that Jesus' death mean that our lives could be bought by his blood and reclaimed from the death cell (life on earth) where we awaited our eternal punishment for our sins.

There is in all of us, this deep down knowledge that wrongs deserve punishing, which is why we spend so much time trying to justify ourselves and make out why such punishment shouldn't apply to us! Yet our innate sense of justice declares that wrongs should be punished. In fact when we hear of the existence of a holy God, we fear even more (and make more efforts to deny Him).

Then Paul speaks of ‘atonement' which, in its simplest form means ‘making up for'. But what can make up for the myriads of failures that we have in life? What can make up so that we do not have to bear the punishment due to us? His answer is ‘the blood' of Jesus, which is simply shorthand for meaning his death on the Cross at Calvary , taking our place, taking our punishment. His death was a sacrifice, in the same pattern as the sacrifices brought into the Temple in Old Testament times. Hence Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God (Jn 1:29 ,36, Rev 5:6,8,12). It is the picture of an animal dying in the place of the sinner, taking upon it their sin and guilt and death penalty.

It is perhaps only when we think on these things do we realise the awfulness of Sin. Much of the time we downplay Sin in our lives and think little of it, but the truth is that in God's eyes, it is so important and provides such a division between Him and us that He was willing to pay the ultimate price of being separated from His very own Son: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (Jn 3:16). Surely if there had been any other way possible God would have taken it? Surely if there any other way possible, Jesus would have taken it. Yet, there throughout the history of the world was this enormous mountain of sin, the sins of every human being throughout history, with justice crying out to be done. If justice cannot be seen to be done, then God can never speak to and correct a single human being, for all that is left is their utter judgment and so why bother to restrain sin? Why not let it just run and get worse and worse until we destroy ourselves?

But God is not a defeatist; He knew from the moment He planned to give us free will that we would first exercise it to reject Him. He knew from the outset that sin after sin would mount up and if nothing was done, it would cause the ultimate destruction of humanity. But, as we said, God is not a defeatist. He planned to call mankind back to Himself. Throughout the Old Testament He is there seeking to forge relationships with individuals and with the nation of Israel , so that they may be a light to the rest of the world, drawing the eyes of the world to God. But how could He do that with all the sins of the world still being there and being there as a barrier between us and God, as much for us as for Him. We feel guilt-ridden and incapable of changing. He sees us constantly doing our own thing and ignoring Him. How was there a way to break into this cycle? It was to provide a means for this guilt to be dealt with, for somehow justice to be satisfied and the price paid for each and every sin that we feel bad about and the millions we don't. The only way, and we really can't take it in even though we seek to explain it, was for the eternal Son of God to take it for us, for him to step into our place and take the punishment – and that was what was happening on the Cross.

How does it happen for us individually? It happens, as we saw in a previous meditation, when we respond to this news in faith. It is faith in his blood , faith in Jesus' death on the Cross on our behalf, which opens the door to God's heart and which brings salvation. It is an act of faith to say we believe God when He has said that this is the way to be saved, by simply believing that Jesus has done it for us. As we act in faith and declare our belief by coming to God to receive the forgiveness that Jesus has earned for us, it enables Him in return to declare us forgiven and declare us adopted, so that He is then able to put His own Holy Spirit within us, so that a new experience can be ours for the rest of our years on this earth and into eternity. This new experience of life means we can live free from guilt, and free to have a relationship with God, whereby He guides and leads us. All of this is the outworking of the atoning work of Christ on the Cross when it is received by us. How wonderful!

Rom 3:25,26 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Justice is a key issue at the heart of life. The word ‘just' means ‘equitable, fair, right, and proper'. Justice is about achieving ends which are equitable, fair, right and proper. In our relativistic age there is a lot of talk about ‘understanding criminals' or understanding why people are ‘driven' to do bad things and we excuse them on the basis of their bad backgrounds, their bad education or their bad parents – until they do something to us! The modern trend is to do away with rights and wrongs – until they affect me personally. It is easy to theorise about such things until they hit home personally. Rape is academic until I am raped. Murder is academic until someone tries to kill me. Theft is academic until someone steals what is mine. When any one of those things happens to us , we suddenly want justice! Until then justice, too, can be an academic thing. It can be academic until we are offended against.

Now put yourself in God's position. He has made a perfect world, given us every form of provision possible for a good life, encouraged us again and again, and all He gets is rejection and reviling, and He has to watch as we abuse one another, abuse His world, and abuse Him. It is very personal for God for He is there and sees it all.

Justice demands that what is wrong is put right. Justice demands that what is stolen is returned. Justice demands that the offender is corrected, even punished, and stopped repeating the offence, for until he does we are all under threat from him. Justice looks at our sins – our wrongs, our failures, our rejections of God, our abuses – and demands they are dealt with, that they be stopped, that they be punished. The easy answer from God's point of view would be to instantly wipe out and remove all signs of the offender so they no longer offend or threaten people or His earth. How easy that would be to God. But He doesn't do that because we are told that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8,16) and love wants to help, to change, to improve, to bless, to remedy. God wants to act to change the person or situation.

But justice is there demanding action. Justice has always been there demanding action. Something needs to be done, someone needs to pay! There is payment in that every sin does bring upon the person some sort of negative consequence. When we fail to ‘work' as we were designed to work, then there are repercussions, but those are just normal consequences, natural outworkings of doing foolish things. Justice still stands in the wings and looks for the wrong to be righted, for the offender to be punished. How to punish every sin without destroying the sinner who God wants to draw out of Sin?

The answer has been for an eternal being to come and stand in the place of execution and to take our punishment. Only an eternal being is ‘big enough' to take any and every sin's punishment, and it happened in time-space history on the Cross at Calvary two thousand years ago when Jesus died for us. That was exactly what was happening, a ‘sacrifice of atonement' or a means of fulfilling the demands of justice. This was God who had come ‘to demonstrate his justice.' This was God ensuring that the demands of justice were fulfilled.

Prior to that there had been the sacrificial system which “left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” The sinner was able to walk away unpunished. Yes, under the sacrificial system an animal died, and animal was seen to carry the punishment for the sinner, and that appeased the conscience of the sinner as they conformed to the law that God had laid down as a means of dealing with their sin. But that, we now understand, simply pointed forward to the coming of the Messiah who would be the eternal Son of God who would died in our place to carry the punishment for each and every individual sin we have ever committed.

This, Paul says of God, “he did .. to demonstrate his justice at the present time.” Yes, now in history, he says, we have witnessed justice being administered as an eternal being has died in our place. He did it “so as to be just.” He made sure that justice was genuinely administered, and in so doing He “ justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” Yes, all those who will come in repentance on the basis of what they have been told about what Jesus did on the Cross for them, are forgiven and released from the sentence of death that hung over them. They have been ‘justified' – made right in God's sight – because their punishment has been taken, their sins have genuinely been deal with, and justice is satisfied. THAT is what this is all about. Receive it humbly and rejoice with thanksgiving for the wonder of what God has done for us.

Rom 3:29-31 Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law

Romans is a steady flow of Paul's thoughts, but nevertheless there are distinct junction points where that flow seems to move up a notch, and so as we come to the end of chapter 3 and get ready to move into chapter 4 we must recognise a change. So far in the last chapter Paul has been creating a level playing field for Jew and Gentile. All are lost and need God's salvation that comes through Jesus. In chapter 4 Paul starts using Abraham as an illustration of saving faith and will move on to open up the theme of justification by faith which he has only briefly mentioned so far. So we are going to draw this particular set of meditations to a close at this point which is fitting.

Because it is a continuous flow of thought we need to remind ourselves that has just gone: “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.” (v.28). That's where his previous arguing had come to. But he wants to emphasise something else now. So he asks this simple question: “Is God the God of the Jews only?” It is something you might think is so, if you casually read the Old Testament, for it is certainly the story about Israel (yet the truth is that they were to be a light to the rest of the world and that comes through literally dozens of times in the Old Testament.) Oh no, comes Paul with a rhetorical question, “Is he not the God of the Gentiles too?” We may think this is a minor matter but in fact it is a crucial matter. God isn't only concerned with the Jews; He is concerned with the whole world.

That had been Peter's stumbling block that we read about in Acts 10 when the Lord gave him a vision about eating unclean animals in preparation for going to a Gentile family. When Jesus had said to the apostles, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem , and in all Judea and Samaria , and to the ends of the earth,” (Acts 1:8) they must have thought he meant to the Jews all over the world. It had come as a real shock to Peter, and most of his fellow Jewish believers, that the Gospel included the Gentiles, the rest of the world! This is important in what is coming, for Paul is soon going to be using the illustration of Abraham and that could have made his Jewish readers think even more it is all about the Jews. But no, this is an inclusive Gospel. The fact that the Gentiles had not had the Law is neither here nor there, for “a man is justified by faith apart from observing the Law.”

Then he answers his own question: “Yes, of Gentiles too,” and then he adds, “since there is only one God.” There is not one God for the Jews and another for the Gentiles. No, the Lord is one and He “ will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.” Yes, the Jews, the circumcised are justified by faith, not by keeping the Law. We've seen a number of times how futile it is in relying upon your observance of the Law because we all fail to keep it perfectly. No, and this might have come as a shock to the Jewish readers, they are justified (accepted by God) by faith, just as the Gentiles are justified by faith. That is the devastating news that Paul is going to open up on in the coming chapters – justification by faith. Everything about our salvation is by faith. It is all about responding to what God has said about His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one against whom all our responses are measured. It's how we respond to Jesus Christ that determines whether we are saved or not. That is the uncompromising message of the New Testament.

Paul then envisages his Jewish readers coming up with another question: “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith?” i.e. does faith render the Law meaningless? Does it mean that the Law is pointless? Then comes his answer: “Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.” Faith upholds the Law? Yes, later in the letter Paul will illustrate this. We have already seen in the preceding verses; it is Law that makes us realise that we are sinners in need of salvation and so, when we respond to the Gospel by faith, we are showing that the Law did its work and was effective in driving us into God's arms. What Paul is saying is that by coming to God, by faith in the Good News of Jesus Christ, we are supporting or upholding the role of the Law. Yes it was there as a means of providing guidance and direction for Israel , but as a means of measuring our righteousness it was a failure. It's role, it turns out, is to show us our sinful tendency and our inability to keep the rules, and therefore our need of God's help. In the next set of meditations we will see how this justification by faith is worked out. For the time being, we conclude with the message that has come over loud and strong from these last two chapters: we NEED Jesus to save us because nothing else can!