_THE ONE WAY OF DIVINE ACCEPTANCE_
ROMANS iii. 21-31
So then "there is silence" upon earth, that man may hear the "still,
small voice," "the sound of stillness" (1 Kings xix. 12),[35] from the
heavens. "The Law" has spoken, with its heart-shaking thunder. It has
driven in upon the soul of man, from many sides, that one fact--guilt;
the eternity of the claim of righteousness, the absoluteness of the
holy Will of God, and, in contrast, the failure of man, of the race,
to meet that claim and do that will. It has told man, in effect, that
he is "depraved,"[36] that is to say, morally distorted. He is
"totally depraved," that is, the distortion has affected his whole
being, so that he can supply on his own part no adequate recovering
power which shall restore him to harmony with God. And the Law has
nothing more to say to him, except that this condition is not only
deplorable, but guilty, accountable, condemnable; and that his own
conscience is the concurrent witness that it is so. He is a sinner. To
be a sinner is before all things to be a transgressor of law. It is
other things besides. It is to be morally diseased, and in need of
surgery and medicine. It is to be morally unhappy, and an object of
compassion. But first of all it is to be morally guilty, and in urgent
need of justification, of a reversal of sentence, of satisfactory
settlement with the offended--and eternal--Law of God.
That Law, having spoken its inexorable conditions, and having
announced the just sentence of death, stands stern and silent beside
the now silent offender. It has no commission to relieve his fears, to
allay his grief, to pay his debts. Its awful, merciful business is to
say "Thou shalt not sin," and "The wages of sin is death." It summons
conscience to attention, and tells it in its now hearing ear far more
than it had realized before of the horror and the doom of sin; and
then it leaves conscience to take up the message and alarm the whole
inner world with the certainty of guilt and judgment. So the man lies
speechless before the terribly reticent Law.
Is it a merely abstract picture? Or do our hearts, the writer's and
the reader's, bear any witness to its living truthfulness? God
knoweth, these things are no curiosities of the past. We are not
studying an interesting phase of early Christian thought. We are
reading a living record of the experiences of innumerable lives which
are lived on earth this day. There is such a thing indeed in our time,
at this hour, as conviction of sin. There is such a thing now as a
human soul, struck dumb amidst its apologies, its doubts, its denials,
by the speech and then the silence of the Law of God. There is such a
thing at this hour as a real man, strong and sound in thought, healthy
in every faculty, used to look facts of daily life in the face, yet
broken down in the indescribable conviction that he is a poor, guilty,
lost sinner, and that his overwhelming need is--not now, not just
now--the solution of problems of being, but the assurance that his sin
is forgiven. He must be justified, or he dies. The God of the Law must
somehow say He has no quarrel with him, or he dies a death which he
sees, as by an intuition peculiar to conviction of sin, to be in its
proper nature a death without hope, without end.
Is this "somehow" possible?
Listen, guilty and silent soul, to a sound which is audible now. In
the turmoil of either secular indifference or blind self-justification
you could not hear it; at best you heard a meaningless murmur. But
listen now; it is articulate, and it speaks to you. The earthquake,
the wind, the fire, have passed; and you are indeed awake. Now comes
"the sound of stillness" in its turn.
[Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =But now, apart from Law, God's righteousness
stands displayed, attested by the Law and the Prophets; but
(δὲ)=--though attested by them, in the Scriptures which all along,
in word and in type, promise better things to come, and above
all a Blessed One to come--[Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =(it is) God's
righteousness, through faith in Jesus Christ,= prepared =for all= and
bestowed upon all =who believe= in Him. =For there is no distinction;=
[Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory
of God,= [Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =being justified[37] gift-wise,=
gratuitously, =by His grace, through the redemption,= the
ransom-rescue, =which is in Christ Jesus.= Yes, it resides always in
Him, the Lord of saving Merit, and so is to be found in Him alone;
[Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =whom God presented[38],= put forward, =as
Propitiation,[39] through faith in His blood,[40]= His blood of death,
of sacrifice, of the altar; =so as to demonstrate,= to explain, to
clear up, =His righteousness,= His way of acceptance and its method.
The Father "presented" the Son so as to shew that His grace meant no
real connivance, no indulgence without a lawful reason. He "presented"
Him =because of His passing-by of sins done before;= because the fact
_asked explanation_ that, while He proclaimed His Law, and had not yet
revealed His Gospel, He did nevertheless bear with sinners, reprieving
them, condoning them, in the forbearance of God, in the ages when He
was seen to "hold back"[41] His wrath, but did not yet disclose the
reason why. [Sidenote: Ver. 26.] It was =with a view,= he says again,
=to this demonstration (τὴν ἔνδειξιν) of His righteousness in the
present period,= the season, the καιρός, of the manifested Gospel;
=that He may be,= in our view, as well as in divine fact, at once
=just,= true to His eternal Law, =and Justifier of him who belongs to
(τὸν ἐκ) faith in Jesus.=
This is the voice from heaven, audible when the sinner's mouth is
shut, while his ears are opened by the touch of God. Without that
spiritual introduction to them, very likely they will seem either a
fact in the history of religious thought, interesting in the study of
development, but no more; or a series of assertions corresponding to
unreal needs, and in themselves full of disputable points. Read them
in the hour of conviction of sin; in other words, bring to them your
whole being, stirred from above to its moral depths, and you will not
take them either indifferently, or with opposition. As the key meets
the lock they will meet your exceeding need. Every sentence, every
link of reasoning, every affirmation of fact, will be precious to you
beyond all words. And you will never _fully_ understand them except in
such hours, or in the life which has such hours amongst its indelible
memories.
Listen over again, in this sacred silence, thus broken by "the
pleasant voice of the Mighty One."
"_But now_"; the happy "_now_" of present fact, of waking certainty.
It is no day-dream. Look, and see; touch, and feel. Turn the blessed
page again; γέγραπται, "_It stands written_." There is indeed a
"Righteousness of God," a settled way of mercy which is as holy as it
is benignant, an acceptance as good in eternal Law as in eternal Love.
It is "_attested by the Law and the Prophets_"; countless lines of
prediction and foreshadowing meet upon it, to negative for ever the
fear of illusion, of delusion. Here is no fortuitous concourse, but
the long-laid plan of God. Behold its procuring Cause, magnificent,
tender, divine, human, spiritual, historic. It is the beloved Son of
the Father; no antagonist power from a region alien to the blessed Law
and its Giver. The Law-Giver is the Christ-Giver; HE has "_set Him
forth_," HE has provided in Him an expiation which--does not persuade
Him to have mercy, for He is eternal Love already, but liberates His
love along the line of a wonderfully satisfied Holiness, and explains
that liberation (to the contrite) so as supremely to win their worship
and their love to the Father and the Son. Behold the Christ of God;
behold the blood of Christ. In the Gospel, He is everywhere, it is
everywhere; but what is your delight to find Him, and it, here upon
the threshold of your life of blessing? Looking upon the Crucified,
while you still "lay your hand upon your mouth," till it is removed
that you may bless His Name, you understand the joy with which, age
after age, men have spoken of a Death which is their life, of a Cross
which is their crown and glory. You are in no mood, here and now, to
disparage the doctrine of the Atoning Blood; to place it in the
background of your Christianity; to obscure the Cross behind even the
roofs of Bethlehem. You cannot now think well of any Gospel that does
not say, "_First of all_, Christ died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures" (1 Cor. xv. 3). You are a sinner, and you know it; "guilty
before God"; and for you as such the Propitiation governs your whole
view of man, of God, of life, of heaven. For you, however it may be
for others, "Redemption" cannot be named, or thought of, apart from
its first precious element, "remission of sins," justification of the
guilty. It is steeped in ideas of Propitiation; it is red and glorious
with the Redeemer's blood, without which it could not have been. The
all-blessed God, with all His attributes, His character, is by you
seen evermore as "_just, yet the Justifier of him that believeth in
Jesus_." He shines on you through the Word, and in your heart's
experience, in many another astonishing aspect. But all those others
are qualified for you by this, that He is the God of a holy
Justification; that He is the God who has accepted you, the guilty
one, in Christ. All your thoughts of Him are formed and followed out
at the foot of the Cross. Golgotha is the observatory from which you
count and watch the lights of the moving heaven of His Being, His
Truth, His Love.
How precious to you now are the words which once, perhaps, were worse
than insipid, "_Faith_," "_Justification_," "_the Righteousness of
God_"! In the discovery of your necessity, and of Christ as the
all-in-all to meet it, you see with little need of exposition the
place and power of _Faith_. It means, you see it now, simply your
reception of Christ. It is your contact with Him, your embrace of Him.
It is not virtue; it is absolutely remote from merit. But it is
necessary; as necessary as the hand that takes the alms, or as the
mouth that eats the unbought meal. The meaning of _Justification_ is
now to you no riddle of the schools. Like all the great words of
scriptural theology it carries with it in divine things the meaning it
bears in common things, only for a new and noble application; you see
this with joy, by the insight of awakened conscience. He who
"_justifies_" you does exactly what the word always imports. He does
not educate you, or inspire you, up to acceptability. He pronounces
you acceptable, satisfactory, at peace with Law. And this He does for
Another's sake; on account of the Merit of Another, who has so done
and suffered as to win an eternal welcome for Himself and everything
that is His, and therefore for all who are found in Him, and therefore
for you who have fled into Him, believing. So you receive with joy and
wonder "_the Righteousness of God_," His way to bid you, so deeply
guilty in yourself, welcome without fear to your Judge. You are
"righteous," that is to say, satisfactory to the inexorable Law. How?
Because you are transfigured into a moral perfectness such as could
constitute a claim? No, but because Jesus Christ died, and you,
receiving Him, are found in Him.
"_There is no difference._" Once, perhaps, you resented that word, if
you paused to note it. Now you take all its import home. Whatever
otherwise your "difference" may be from the most disgraceful and
notorious breakers of the Law of God, you know now that there is none
in _this_ respect--that you are as hopelessly, whether or not as
distantly, remote as they are from "_the glory of God_." His moral
"glory," the inexorable perfectness of His Character, with its
inherent demand that you must perfectly correspond to Him in order so
to be at peace with Him--you are indeed "_short of_" this. The harlot,
the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they
stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you
are as little able to touch the stars as they. So you thankfully give
yourself up, side by side with them, if they will but come too, to be
_carried_ to the height of divine acceptance, by the gift of God,
"justified gift-wise by His grace."
[Sidenote: Ver. 27.] =Where then is our (ἡ) boasting? It is shut
out. By means of what law? Of works? No, but by means of faith's law,=
the institute, the ordinance, which lays it upon us not to deserve,
but to confide. And who can analyse or describe the joy and rest of
the soul from which at last is "_shut out_" the foul inflation of a
religious "_boast_"? We have praised ourselves, we have valued
ourselves, on one thing or another supposed to make us worthy of the
Eternal. We may perhaps have had some specious pretexts for doing so;
or we may have "boasted" (such boastings are not unknown) of nothing
better than being a little less ungodly, or a little more manly, than
some one else. But this is over now for ever, in principle; and we lay
its practice under our Redeemer's feet to be destroyed. And great is
the rest and gladness of sitting down at His feet, while the door is
shut and the key is turned upon our self-applause. There is no
holiness without that "exclusion"; and there is no happiness where
holiness is not.
[Sidenote: Ver. 28.] =For we reckon,[42]= we conclude, we gather up
our facts and reasons thus, =that man is justified[43] by faith, apart
from,= irrespective of, =works of law.= In other words, the meriting
cause lies wholly in Christ, and wholly outside the man's conduct. We
have seen, implicitly, in the passage above, verses 10-18, what is
meant here by "_works of Law_," or by "_works of the Law_." The
thought is not of ritual prescription, but of moral rule. The
law-breakers of verses 10-18 are men who commit violent deeds, and
speak foul words, and fail to do what is good. The law-keeper, by
consequence, is the man whose conduct in such respects is right,
negatively and positively. And the "_works of the law_" are such deeds
accordingly. So here "_we conclude_" that the justification of fallen
man takes place, as to the merit which procures it, irrespective of
his well-doing. It is respective only of Christ, as to merit; it has
to do only, as to personal reception, with the acceptance of the
meriting Christ, that is to say with faith in Him.
Then come, like a short "coda" following a full musical cadence, two
brief questions and their answers, spoken almost as if again a
Rabbinist were in discussion.
[Sidenote: Ver. 29.] =Is God the Jews' God only? Not of the Nations
too? Yes, of the Nations too;= [Sidenote: Ver. 30.] =assuming
(εἴπερ) that God is one,= the same Person in both cases; =who will
justify Circumcision on the principle of faith, and Uncircumcision by
means of faith.= He takes the fact, now ascertained, that faith, still
faith, that is to say Christ received, is the condition to
justification for all mankind; and he reasons back to the fact (so
amply "attested by the Law and the Prophets," from Genesis onwards)
that the true God is equally the God of all. Probably the deep
inference is suggested that the fence of privilege drawn for ages
round Israel was meant ultimately for the whole world's blessing, and
not to hold Israel in a selfish isolation.
[Sidenote: Ver. 31.] =We cancel Law, then, by this faith of ours (διὰ
τῆς πίστεως)?= We open the door, then, to moral licence? We abolish
code and precept, then, when we ask not for conduct, but for faith?
=Away with the thought; nay, we establish Law;= we go the very way to
give a new sacredness to its every command, and to disclose a new
power for the fulfilment of them all. But how this is, and is to be,
the later argument is to shew.
DETACHED NOTE TO ROMANS III.
It would be a deeply interesting work to collect and exhibit together
examples of the conveyance of great spiritual blessing, in memorable
lives, through the perusal of the Epistle to the Romans. Augustine's
final crisis (see below, on xiii. 14) would be one such example. As
specimens of what must be a multitude we quote two cases, in each of
which one verse in this third chapter of the Epistle proved the means
of the divine message in a life of historical interest.
Padre Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), "Councillor and Theologian" to the
Venetian Republic, and historian of the Council of Trent, was one of
the many eminent men of his day who never broke with the Roman Church,
yet had genuine spiritual sympathies with the Reformation. The record
of his last hours is affecting and instructive, and shews him reposing
his hope with great simplicity on the divine message of this chapter,
though the report makes him quote it inexactly. "Night being come, and
want of spirits increasing upon him, he caused another reading of the
Passion written by Saint John. He spake of his own misery, and of the
trust and confidence which he had in the blood of Christ. He repeated
very often those words, _Quem proposuit Deus Mediatorem per fidem in
sanguine suo_, 'Whom God hath set forth to be a Mediator through faith
in His blood.' In which he seemed to receive an extreme consolation.
He repeated (though with much faintness) divers places of Saint Paul.
He protested that of his part he had nothing to present God with but
miseries and sins, yet nevertheless he desired to be drowned in the
abyss of the divine mercy; with so much submission on one side, and
yet so much cheerfulness on the other side, that he drew tears from
all that were present."[44]
It was through the third chapter of the Romans that heavenly light
first came to the terribly troubled soul of William Cowper, at St
Albans, in 1764. Some have said that Cowper's religion was to blame
for his melancholy. The case was far different. The first tremendous
attack occurred at a time when, by his own clear account, he was quite
without serious religion; it had nothing whatever to do with either
Christian doctrine or Christian practice. The recovery from it came
with his first sight, in Scripture, of the divine mercy in our Lord
Jesus Christ. His own account of this crisis is as follows:[45]
"But the happy period which was to afford me a clear opening of the
free mercy of God in Christ Jesus, was now arrived. I flung myself
into a chair near the window, and, seeing a Bible there, ventured once
more to apply to it for comfort and instruction. The first verse I saw
was the 25th of the 3rd of Romans; '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.'
"Immediately I received strength to believe it, and the full beams of
the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the
atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the
fulness and completeness of His justification. Unless the Almighty arm
had been under me, I think I should have died with gratitude and joy.
I could only look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love
and wonder. But the work of the Holy Ghost is best described in His
own words; it is 'joy unspeakable and full of glory.'"
[35] 1 Kings xix. 12.
[36] _Depravatus_: twisted, wrenched from the straight line.
[37] Δικαιούμενοι: the present participle indicates rather the
_permanent principle_ of justification than its actual procedure,
which is, in each case, a divine sentence of acceptance, an act, an
event, single and apart. See on ch. v. 1.
[38] Ὃν προέθετο ὁ Θεός: it is possible to render, "_Whom God
designed_," in His eternal counsel of redemption. But the context just
below emphasizes the thought of "_declaration_," manifestation,
explanation of the hidden Treasure. This seems to decide for the other
rendering.
[39] Ἱλαστήριον: elsewhere in Scripture Greek this word means the
Mercy Seat, the golden lid of the Ark, above which the Shechinah shone
and on which the blood of atonement was sprinkled. Here is indeed a
manifest and noble type of Christ. But on the other hand the word
ἱλαστήριον gets that meaning only indirectly. Its native meaning is
rather "_a price of expiation_." And a somewhat sudden insertion here
of the imagery of the Mercy Seat seems unlikely, in the absence of all
other allusion to the High Priestly function of our Lord.
[40] We may punctuate, "_through faith, in His blood_"; as if to say
"He is Propitiation in (in virtue of) His blood; we get the benefit
through faith." But this rendering seems to us the less likely, as the
less simple. The construction, "_faith in_" πίστις ἐν τινί, is fully
verified by Mark i. 15; "believe _in_ the Gospel."
[41] Ἀνοχή: we think that the word here is a pregnant expression
for "_the time when God forebore_."
[42] Reading γὰρ not οὖν.
[43] Δικαιοῦσθαι: the present infinitive, as in ver. 25, puts
before us the permanence of the principle on which is based the
definite act.
[44] _The Life of Father Paul the Venetian, translated out of
Italian_: London, 1676.
[45] _Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, written by Himself_.