The Just and the Justifier
Sermon Notes
It’s great to see you this morning! I want to give a shout out to my MCG and few others that jumped in to help us serve a couple of weeks ago at Choices Women’s Clinic. We were able to do some much needed exterior and landscape maintenance at their newest location by UCF. We believe in the ministry they provide to young moms and dad in an effort to save lives, spread the Gospel, and make the Kingdom of God a greater reality in our community. They deal with a lot of pain and hurt and brokenness that’s a result of sin, but with the hope of peace and healing found in Jesus. In our study of Romans so far this year, we’ve seen that Paul talks a lot about sin, the reality of our sinful state as humans, and the results of that sin, which include both natural consequences and divine judgment. And last week, Pastor Louis pointed out that there is nothing we can do within in ourselves that will ever fix the problem. No amount of Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul, mindful meditation, or trying harder will ever solve your sin problem. We need someone else to solve the problem and that’s Jesus. But even with that answer, it can sometimes feel hard to believe that it’s enough. We still seem to struggle with our sins, so what does it really mean to say that Jesus is the answer and how can we know that believing in him is going to be enough on the day we stand before God?
I want to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Romans 3. If you have a physical Bible with you, I encourage you to follow along, preferably with a pen, because there’s going to be some things that I want you to highlight. Today’s message is going to be a little different. It’s going to be more technical in nature. We’re going to define some terms and dig into some theology that I think is crucial to our faith as Christians.
Let’s start by reading Romans 3:23:
23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;
This is really a turning point in Romans. Paul has been building a case against for our unrighteousness and need for Christ and this verse summarizes that argument. It’s reiterating a point he’s been making throughout the first 3 chapters of Romans, and that is everyone sins and misses the mark of God’s perfect standard, therefore our lives don’t reflect the honor that God is deserves. To put it another way, imagine the winner of the Super Bowl next Sunday get’s no trophy, no rings, no media coverage, no parade at Disney, no merch sold or worn by fans, essentially nothing in life reflects the glory of them being the best. In a similar way, we are sinners and our sin keeps us from reflecting the glory of God. Why? Because sin elevates the sinner, not God. And it’s a cycle that we’re born into. We are unrighteous before a Holy God, but there’s hope.
Look at verse 24:
24 they… Who is “they?” If you read verses 21-22, you’ll see that “they” is all who believe in Jesus Christ.
24 they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as the mercy seat by his blood, through faith, to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his restraint God passed over the sins previously committed.
There’s a lot going in those 2 verses. It’s easy to get lost in Paul’s writing sometimes because he knows how to pack a lot into a little. So, I want you to circle or underline a few words: 1) justified freely, 2) redemption, 3) mercy seat (propitiation), 4) his righteousness, 5) restraint. We’re actually going to work backwards through these words or phrases to unpack what Paul is saying.
In verse 25 he says that in his restraint God passed over sins previously committed. Up until the time of Jesus’s crucifixion God had been forgiving sins, but the full penalty for sin had not been paid. There was the sacrificial system where the priests would make sacrifices on behalf of people, which we’ll discuss more in just a few minutes. These sacrifices were pleasing to God and were in important part of him overlooking their sin, but they were never all-satisfying. They still pointed to the need for a greater, perfect sacrifice because they were never enough. We also know that God did punish some sins. There are multiple instances in the Old Testament where we see God’s swift and immediate judgement for sin, but ultimately all people, for those however many thousands of years, should have suffered spiritual death because there had not been an adequate sacrifice and payment for their sins. We know that many were saved because of passages like Hebrews 11 that tell us about men and women who, by their faith, were “approved” by God. They were saved before the full payment for their sin had been made because they believed God’s promise that he would take care of that at some point in the future.
So, all this created a tension because in his restraint God acted against his character. Instead of punishing the sins that were committed against him, he was storing up his wrath against those sins. I’m sure you know what it’s like to store up wrath. You let the anger build and build until you can’t contain it any more. We do that in a selfish, unrighteous way usually, but God did it in a righteous way. This leads us to the next phrase we circled - his righteousness.
God is righteous by nature. It’s one of his key qualities that make him who he is. To say that God is righteous means that he always acts in accordance with what is right and is himself the final standard of what is right. Deuteronomy 32:4 says,
his work is perfect;
all his ways are just.
A faithful God, without bias,
he is righteous and true.
Righteous is often translated as justice. If God is always right and just, then he can’t just let sin go. Pastor Louis talked about this a couple of weeks ago. A good judge doesn’t just let criminals go. A good judge upholds the law and issues just punishment. God is the perfect judge and he always acts accordingly. His restraint held back that punishment for a season, but he had to eventually act according to his character. That’s what Paul means in v. 24 that he demonstrated his righteousness. He proved his character. We don’t really know why God allowed his wrath to build for such a long time. We can speculate, but what we have to do is trust, Romans 5:6 says, that “at just the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” God had a plan and his timing is always perfect.
Moving backwards we see how God demonstrated his righteousness. The third word we circled is mercy seat or propitiation. God demonstrated his righteousness, or his justice, by presenting Jesus as the propitiation for our sins. A propitiation is theological word that means a sacrifice that bears God’s wrath to the end and in so doing changes God’s wrath toward us into favor. God gave Jesus to be the sacrifice that would appease the wrath of God. Do you see how humbling this becomes? God so loved the world that he sent his only son…to die the death that you and I deserved. And it had to be Jesus. No human could never suffer the wrath of God the way Jesus did for two reasons.
One, even if we did die for our own sins, we could never return to life, which means we would remain dead as sinners. And even if we were to resurrect we still couldn’t live a perfect life, so the process would start over again. We could die for our sins, but not be saved.
The second problem is that if you or I were being crucified and enduring the agony that Jesus went through, we would become resentful and bitter, which would only compound our sin. Only Jesus was able to endure that crushing weight, the fullness of God’s wrath to the very end…until it was satisfied.
Now, some your translations say mercy seat instead of propitiation. This is an interesting translation because the mercy seat was and important part of Jewish worship and the sacrificial system. It was found on the top of the Ark of the Covenant in between two golden cherubim. This was the place where God would meet with his people. It’s where he met with Moses. So, it was literally where God hung out. It was also the place where the Great High Priest would sprinkle the blood of a lamb on the Day of Atonement. He would go into the inner most room of the temple, the Holy of Holies, fill the room with smoke so he wouldn’t see God and die, and then sprinkle the blood from a spotless lamb onto the mercy seat in order to atone for (cover) the sins of the Israelites.
So, when we think of Jesus as being sent as the mercy seat, it shows that not only did he become the perfect sacrifice needed to atone for our sins, he was also the very presence of God. He is the place where we meet God, which is why the inner curtain of the temple, which kept people from being in the presence of the Ark and therefore God, was torn in two when Jesus died. That separation was no longer needed because Jesus had appeased the wrath of God once and for all.
Are you tracking so far? It’s a lot, but it’s really so incredible the way it all unfolds. And we’re now to a point that we can ask what all this accomplished…why is it important? Let’s go to the next word we highlighted - redemption.
24 they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Redemption is one of those words we hear thrown around a lot but may not stop to think about what it really means. Some of you maybe familiar with the book or movie, Redeeming Love. It tells the story of Hosea in the Bible whom God instructed to marry a prostitute. In order to do so, he has to buy her out of that lifestyle. He has to redeem her. Redemption means to take out of bondage, and it carries with it the idea of paying a ransom. What this means is that when God presented Jesus as the propitiation/mercy seat, the purpose was to redeem us…it was to buy us out of slavery. Jesus said in Mark 10:45, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
But why did God need to redeem us? What are we slaves too? If you’re new to Christianity you might even be thinking that there seems to be more freedom without God than with God and all the dos and don’ts, but the Bible teaches us that we are all in bondage to sin and to Satan.
John 8:34, ““Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.”
Hebrews 2:14-15, Jesus also shared in these, so that through his death he might destroy the one holding the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.
Without Jesus, we are enslaved to both our sinful flesh, and we are enslaved to the fear of death, of which Satan holds the power. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this. We all have been frustrated by the sins in our lives that we just can’t seem to shake. We come back to them over and over again. Without the Gospel, there’s really no way out. We also know the fear of death. That looming question of “what happens when I die?” What if this is all there is to life? Most people would say that dying is the worst thing that could happen to you. But Jesus frees us from that fear. When we understand the Gospel, we know that dying isn’t the end of life; it’s just the beginning.
That’s why we had to be redeemed. It’s also important to understand how we had to be redeemed. God’s law established the need for blood sacrifice to cover sins. The inner court of the temple where the priest performed these sacrifices was more like a butcher shop than a church. They would kill hundreds of animals and then splatter the blood on different parts of the temple. This blood was required because it showed that life had actually been given…death had taken place as payment for sin. Just like the death penalty has been used throughout history for certain crimes because the law determines that the only just punishment is death. That was and is certainly the case for breaking God’s laws. But again, all the killing of animals was never enough to pay the full price of anyone’s sin. But, it was pointing forward to Jesus who would become the ultimate sacrifice. His life was the only one that could fully atone for our sins.
1 Peter 1:18-19, “For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.”
When we look at these two concepts of propitiation and redemptions, we see why the crucifixion was necessary. It was a brutal killing that caused Jesus incredible suffering and showed that Jesus’ life really was given to fulfill the death sentence. And even more than that, the finality of Christ’s sacrifice assures us that there is no more penalty for sin left for us to pay. I want to say that again. The finality of Christ’s sacrifice assures us that there is no more penalty for sin left for us to pay. It’s why Jesus said, “It is finished.”
I think we doubt that statement a lot of times as Christians. I think we say we believe that, but we live like we don’t. How many times do you wander if God is punishing you for something you did? How often do we convince ourselves that God must be angry with us and the next bad thing that happens is to us is God giving it to us? There are still consequences for our actions, and sometimes God allows us to really feel those consequences as a way of discipline. We saw that back in Romans 1. And sometimes he lets us go through hard things as a way of testing our faith. But the point is that God doesn’t need to punish us for our sins. If Jesus died to pay the full price for our sin, there’s nothing more we can pay. And to think that we could add something to what Jesus did by paying more for our sins would be to take away from sufficiency and even the necessity of Jesus’s sacrifice. Our debt is Paid In Full.
Now we’re starting to see the power of the Gospel really unfold. God presented Jesus as the propitiation for our sins in order to redeem us by his blood and in doing so this changes God’s wrath toward us into favor.
This takes us to the first word that we highlighted in the text.
24 they are justified freely by his grace
Justification is where we see all the work of Jesus get applied to our lives. Everything we’ve talked about was all for this: justification. It’s a legal term that means to be cleared of all charges. A theological definition would be an instantaneous legal act of God in which he A.) thinks of our sins as forgiven, and Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us, and B.) declares us to be righteous in his sight. A simple definition is to be made righteous. But it’s worth us taking a deeper look at what that means.
Most theologians break the salvation process down into multiple steps that we don’t usually think about. We’re not going into detail on all these but I’ll just preview some:
The first step is to be Called by God - God does some work in your life and stirs your heart toward him. Could be over time, could be in a dream, could be in this service today…
The second step is Regeneration. This is when God breathes new, spiritual life into you which then enables you to believe. It’s what Jesus explained to Nicodemus as being “born again.
Then there’s Conversion. Conversion is our response to the Gospel. It’s when we repent of our sins and put our faith in Jesus.
This then leads to Justification. Justification is instantaneous. If you are “saved,” then there was a moment in time when your legal standing before God changed from being guilty to being justified…all charges cleared.
You don’t have to be able to look back and identify all those steps. They may have taken years for some of you. For others it may have all been in a very short time. Either way, what’s important is understanding your justification. There’s two parts to it:
The first thing God does in justification is to wipe the slate clean. He takes that long, long list of all our past, present, and future sins and erases it. That alone would be enough for us to do a debt free scream. If you’re familiar with Dave Ramsey, you’ve seen the people that go on his show to do their debt free scream. I think that’s what we’re going to start doing here when we baptize people….have them do a debt free scream. Wiping our slate clean leaves us morally neutral before God, which is great, but it’s not all God does.
The second part of justification is that God then counts Christ’s righteousness as our own. This takes us from being morally neutral to being in the positive. It’s what we sometimes refer to as imputed righteousness. The righteousness that belongs to Christ gets imputed, or put on to us. Philippians 3:9 says, “not having a righteousness of my own from the law, but one that is through faith in Christ—the righteousness from God based on faith.
The doctrine of justification is so important because it really is one of the major dividing lines between Christianity and all other religions. Every other religion is based on how many good works you can do to try and build up a righteous standing before God, and the problem is you can never do enough. Even a Roman Catholic view of justification is built on infused righteousness instead of imputed righteousness. Infused righteousness means that we are justified by grace but also by some merit of our own. It’s leave some of the work of salvation to be done by us, which will never work. No amount of confession, sacraments, or Hail Mary’s would ever be enough, which would only leave you wondering where you really stand before God when you die. That’s works righteousness.
Martin Luther realized the problem with this view of justification back in the 1500’s, which led to the Protestant Reformation. He taught that justification was by “grace alone” and not by any human works, which is exactly what Paul is teaching here in Romans 3 when he says we are justified freely by grace. This righteousness is a free gift from God not by any merit of our own.
This doesn’t mean that in an instance God make us righteous; he declares us righteous. There’s a difference. Being justified is done outside of us and for us. The change that takes place inside of us is the ongoing work of sanctification as God gradually changes us into the image of Jesus.
I hope that this is bringing an even greater depth and meaning of the Gospel to you, and I hope that you are seeing that all the emphasis is on God and not us. In 3:26 Pauls says,
God presented him to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
This is the big idea of the message right here: The cross allowed God to be both just and the justifier, punishing your sin and counting you as righteous.
It’s all the work of God. Jesus obeyed God in going to the cross and satisfied the wrath of a just God. God then applies the work of Jesus to our lives and becomes the justifier. We can’t possibly take responsibility for any of it. It’s exactly why Paul says in verse 27:
27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By one of works? No, on the contrary, by a law of faith. 28 For we conclude that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.
29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, 30 since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. 31 Do we then nullify the law through faith? Absolutely not! On the contrary, we uphold the law.
We come to all of this only by grace through faith. Pastor Louis is going to talk more about that next week, so be sure and come back for that.
For today I want you to see that the cross was the perfect intersection of God’s grace and justice. It allowed him to be perfectly just, while at the same time the justifier of the unrighteous. That’s a lot of doctrine and theology, so to wrap up I want to give you two simple implications of this in our lives.
First, we should boast only and always in the cross. Paul says in Galatians 6:14, “But as for me, I will never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The world has been crucified to me through the cross, and I to the world.”
Boasting means to exult in or find joy in. We need to learn to put on our Gospel Glasses and find joy only in the cross. That means we stop trying to find joy in worldly things, temporary things, that can only disappoint us and draw us away from God. But it also means that the cross shapes how see both good and bad things. We can boast in the cross in the highs of life because every good and perfect gift comes from the Father, and through Jesus we are heirs in his Kingdom. We can boast in the cross in the lows of life because we’ve already received all we need in Christ, and this earth is just a temporary stop on the timeline of eternity. Every day and every moment is God’s grace to us. In other words, nothing is as important as being justified before God. This leads us to the second implication:
We should live like we’ve been justified. We spend too much time acting like we’re still condemned, which just makes it easy to go back to the old way of living. We justify our behavior because it seems to just be who we are. But that’s not true. Paul teaches in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” If God looks at us and sees Christ’s righteousness, then why are we content to live like we are separate from Christ. Our faith unites us with him. We have a new identity. We are free to live differently. You can keep coming back for more details on that.
The perfect way for us to conclude this message is by taking communion together. As Christians, it’s meant to be a humble reminder of the price Jesus paid on our behalf, and it’s meant to unite us as those justified freely by his grace. As the elements are being passed, reflect on how the doctrine of justification and imputed righteousness should affect your life today. (Call forward ushers)
If all this still doesn’t make sense and you’re just not ready to accept it, then there’s no need to participate in communion. Let it pass by. But, if you’re ready to accept this gift of salvation and surrender your life to Jesus, take the bread and the cup with us, and then let somebody know before you leave today that you have been redeemed by the blood and are now justified in Jesus.
