5. “The Good News” (Romans 3, Part 2)

When a group of Christians are discouraged because they feel like they are failing, or they have doubts, or they are divided, they need to be strengthened by the gospel. This is the conviction that drives the letter of Romans. Knowing the struggles the church of Rome is enduring, Paul gives them the best gift he knows how to give: he offers them the strength of the gospel. And in studying this letter, we too can experience this strengthening. We can discover what Paul means when he says that this gospel offers the power of God for salvation to all who believe. 

The passages we’ve been studying for the last two weeks about sin and idolatry have essentially been preparing us for this morning, for what Paul writes in these verses. Here we find in very dense prose a powerful articulation of the good news about what God has done: good news with tremendous power to change us.

It is good news about God’s righteousness. The word righteousness and the words just and justified, which in Greek are versions of the same word, are used 10 different times in our passage. It’s the central focus. And to understand why, let’s consider two truths that Scripture teaches about God.  

Two Truths About God

First, our God is unwaveringly committed to doing good for his people. This is something we are shown from the very beginning about God. When God says, “Let there be light” and the world, and plants and animals and us, when again and again he makes what is good, why does he do this? Not because he was bored or lonely or needed anything. But simply because he delights to give, to share his joy with others. And even after humanity rejected God, this, amazingly, doesn’t change. He comes to Abraham with a promise to bless: I will bless you and through you bless all people. And then, even after Abraham’s descendants turn away from God, even after centuries of idolatry and unfaithfulness that will lead to exile, this doesn’t change. God, grieving over Israel’s unfaithfulness still says in Hosea, “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over to destruction?” Through Isaiah he again expresses this same commitment: “Fear not,” he says. “I will pour out my blessing upon your descendants.” Again and again and again and again we see that God is unwaveringly committed to doing good for his people.  

Second we also see that our God, in his relationship to this sinful world, is a wrathful judge. This actually, and perhaps surprisingly, is identified as part of the good news in Romans 2:16: that a final day of wrath will come when God judges humanity in Christ “according to the gospel.” God in his relationship to this sinful world, is a wrathful judge, and Paul says, this is good news.

To understand how that can be, we first must correct a common and very unhelpful misunderstanding about God’s wrath. In the Marvel comics, there’s this villain known as Kingpin, Wilson Fisk. And what makes him so terrifying is his powerful rage. In the extremely violent Daredevil TV show, there’s a scene where something happens that so fills him with fury that he utterly loses control and just begins brutally beating a person again and again until he has finally spent all of his energy. Blood spattered all over his face and clothing, he begins breathing again more normally; now that he has vented all of his anger on some poor victim, he can once again be calm.

That is not what the wrath of God is like. God does not see red; passion doesn’t take him over so that he loses control until he can get out his aggression. “Wrath” is the word Scripture uses to describe God’s unceasing opposition to all that is wrong. Just as God is unwaveringly committed to our good, he is also unceasingly opposed to all that hinders what is good. He is the God who says a definitive NOT! to lies and injustice and evil.

And understood in this way, we can see why this is good news, can’t we? I have a friend, not someone connected to this church, who as a teen was sexually abused by her youth pastor, an utterly horrible violation of trust and abuse of power. And what made the terrible situation even worse was that when she tried to make this situation known she wasn’t able to get justice. It was her word against his; charges were dropped, and the man continues to work in youth ministry. Tragically, this story is common, and I know some of you this morning can relate all too well to it. Can you see how continuingly awful that is for this woman? How agonizing it is that truth remains covered up, that he might continue doing the same terrible things to others? What he did is crying out for consequences, and there are none.  

And this is just one such story. In this world there are innumerable examples of people crying out for justice as they are exploited by the powerful; people longing to see lies exposed, to see evil destroyed. This world will not be good until those cries are satisfied. You see that, right?

Unless God is a wrathful judge, there is no good news. For this world to be right, God must see every secret the people try to cover up. We only have hope if we know God will not rest until truth comes to light, justice is done, and evil is no more. It is good news that God is a wrathful judge.

It is these two ideas: God’s commitment to do good for his people and God’s wrathful judgment upon what is wrong, that come together in the OT in the idea of God’s righteousness. In the Psalms, those being wrongly treated cry out to God for righteousness. “How long, O Lord will the wicked prosper while your people suffer?” God promises in Isaiah “I will bring near my righteousness; it is not far off, and my salvation will not delay.” I will judge evil and injustice with my wrath, and I will make this world right, and you will experience all that is good. God will do good to his people; God will bring justice for evil, when he brings near his righteousness.

The Tension

Now there’s a tension there, right? How can God do good to his people and judge all evil if his people are part of the very evil he must judge? If the wrath of God is his unceasing opposition to all that is wrong, how can he do good for his people who are themselves wrong?  If you were with us for the series on Judges, you know that this tension was an ongoing problem. God was committed to his people; and yet they kept rejecting him. How could this fit together?

In Paul’s day, many Jews believed they had an answer to this question. They believed that in this world there’s basically a line between the wicked and the righteous, between the bad guys and the good guys. And that dividing line between the two groups was the Law that God had given to them. If you observe this Law; keep the signs of circumcision, eating laws, hold on to all the practices and instructions in this law, then you could be sure that you were the good guys. When God brings near his righteousness, he will judge all those outside of the law, but all of those who keep the law will be safe and secure as God’s righteous people. That’s how they fit together.

But if you were with us last week, you know that Paul exposes the error in this. It’s not enough just to have God’s Law. What matters in terms of righteousness is the doing of it. His point is that even the most faithful Jew, if they are honest with themselves, will recognize their failure truly to keep God’s law, to love God with all of their being. Just as today, if we are honest with ourselves we will recognize the failings in us. Even as we have a sense of what it looks like to love others, we often choose self-protection. Even as we might have deep down an awareness of what it might be to love God and serve him, we know how we have turned away from him. Paul says at the end of verse 22: “There is no distinction.” That is, there is in the end no difference when it comes to righteousness between the Jews who have the law and the Gentiles, between the religious and the irreligious, for as it says in verse 23, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” We’re all now what we should be. If there’s a line between the good guys and the bad guys, all of us are on the bad guy side of that line. 

So again we ask, how can this work? How can God fulfill his unwavering commitment to do good to his people and also in his wrath oppose all that is wrong? How can God make things right for a people who themselves are wrong? Or, to put it another way, how can God treat his people as righteous and still himself be righteous?

The Resolution

If we get this tension this question that feels impossible to resolve, then we can understand verse 21: “But now,” Paul says, after all this time of not knowing how it could work, “But now, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law.” There is a resolution to this tension. Now, God’s righteousness—his act of making all things right for a people who are wrong—has come. And it’s not a righteousness that comes by way of the Law. Instead, here’s how God has done it: “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The way God can both do good to his people and judge all evil is through Jesus.

Whether Jew or Gentile, religious or irreligious, verse 24 says all of us can be justified—that is, we all can be made righteous in God’s sight—by God’s grace as a gift, through Jesus—specifically through Jesus’ death on the cross. And then verse 25 tells us how this can be.  

God did this by putting forward “Jesus as a propitiation, by his blood.” 

What does that mean? Propitiation is a word that focuses on relationship. It’s the idea of dealing with the wrath that stands in the way of moving forward in a relationship so that instead the person who was once angry can now show favor. As kids my brothers and I used to collect baseball cards. My brother Steve’s favorite card was a 1985 Mark McGwire Olympics card, which for a time was worth a lot of money, like $15! Now, imagine if when I was looking through his cards, in the backyard, I accidentally left it outside and it got rained on and ruined. Steve would have every reason to be angry with me—there would be a rift in our relationship. But imagine if I went to our local baseball card collecting store and bought a mint condition 1985 McGwire card, even nicer than the one he had, whose corners were roughed up a bit, and I gave it to him. In that act I would have done something that removed Steve’s anger so that he once again could be happy with me and we could move on in our relationship. I would have propitiated him. That’s propitiation.

Paul explains to us that Jesus, by shedding his blood on the cross, propitiated the wrath of God, dealing with it completely so that there is no more anger on God’s part towards us, only favor.

Now, even as I say this, I must address another common and deeply harmful misunderstanding. Sometimes people try to explain this verse like this: There is a wrathful God, seething with anger over our sin, once again, a Kingpin, Wilson Fisk like figure. And then there’s Jesus who because he is on our side chooses to stand in the way and let God take his anger out on Jesus instead of us. 

This is, to put it bluntly, a horrible, even blasphemous representation of what’s going on at the cross. Not only does it misunderstand the nature of God’s wrath, as we already have mentioned. But look carefully at what verse 25 says: who is the one who chooses to have God propitiated? It says God puts forward Jesus as a propitiation. This is not a division within the Trinity with the Father of wrath against the Son of grace. To begin with Jesus also is passionately opposed to evil—he also with the Father, in the unity of the Spirit, is wrathful towards our sin. And we see here it is also both Jesus and the Father, in the unity of the Spirit, who chooses to propitiate that very wrath; it is the Trinitarian God who deals with his wrath within his very being. 

If we return to my baseball card illustration. Imagine that Mark McGwire card wasn’t $15 but $1500, way more than I could hope to replace on a newspaper route salary. Imagine that there was nothing I could do to propitiate my brother for what I had done. He could respond in two ways. He could remain angry, always holding against me the very costly mistake I had made, waiting until I finally repaid him. Or he could essentially endure the cost of my mistake, accepting the pain in his heart, let it go and forgive me. 

This is a deeply inadequate analogy, but it at least gives us an inkling of what happens on the cross. God chose to forgive by enduring within himself the cost, the penalty for us having wronged him. He endured within himself the righteous wrath for all of our sin. As one writer puts it, “At the cross, God sacrificially takes upon himself the destructive power of his own oppositional work.”

This is a great mystery, and I am confident I will not be able to explain this in a way where we all can say, “Oh, I completely get it.” But let me try to develop this a bit further. Scripture promises that at the end of time as we know it, at the conclusion of this stage of human history, God will judge all things. And in his wrath, his unceasing opposition to wrong, God will make sure that every lie will be exposed; all wrongdoing will receive its just punishment; all evil will be destroyed.  

When Jesus went to the cross, he went there on our behalf, as our representative. He carried in his very self, in his body our guilt and evil. And, at the cross, it’s as if Jesus was brought forward to the end of human history on our behalf. Because there, on the cross, he experienced God’s final, end of time judgment on human sin—on our sin. When Jesus died on our behalf, everything required by God’s wrath was accomplished. His death exposed our lies, and our sin was shown to be evil. In Jesus at the cross, our wrongdoing met its just penalty in his death. In Jesus, at the cross, our evil was destroyed. In Jesus, at the cross, God’s unceasing opposition to evil was satisfied, the divine wrath toward us was dealt with, so that now, through the cross, there is no more anger toward us. Through Jesus we are now right in God’s eyes.

And here, one final time I want to address another harmful misunderstanding. Sometimes people try to explain what has happened by saying something like this. “Yes, you’re a sinner, and sin is dreadful in God’s sight. If God saw you as you really are, well, it wouldn’t be good. But now, when God looks at you, here’s the good news. He doesn’t see you anymore. He sees Jesus. And because he sees Jesus with all of his righteousness, he is filled with love.” And so we imagine ourselves hiding behind Jesus in such a way that God doesn’t notice us. As one theologian I know put it, it’s like we’re an annoying kid that the Father allows to come to his home just because he wants to let his Son have his friends over, no matter how unpleasant they might be. 

This way of thinking can be enormously destructive to our relationship with God. If this is how it is, how can we possibly please God? If this is how it is, can we even imagine God liking us? 

But this isn’t how it is. Listen, God doesn’t love you BECAUSE of what Jesus did on the cross; he doesn’t love you BECAUSE he now sees Jesus instead of you. God sent his son into the world because, even before the cross, he already saw you and loved you. From the beginning, God delighted in the person he created you to be; he grieved over how your sin would ruin you. His love for you is so deep and perfect that it does not rest until nothing remains to stand in the way of a relationship between God and you. It will not be satisfied until your life is completely free of lies, of injustice, of evil, until you are wholly and completely his. And it is because of this unceasing, boundless love for you that he sent Jesus to on the cross expose the lie; to provide the penalty for wrong, to destroy the evil. This is how God loved you. God doesn’t only love you in some abstract, detached manner. He likes you. 

Conclusion

And returning to our passage, this now is how we resolve the tension with which we began our sermon. This is how God can both be unwaveringly committed to our good while also being unceasingly opposed to evil. Look at verse 25: “This”—that is, Christ’s death on the cross—was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just—that he might be righteous while at the same time being the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Or as he puts it in chapter 4, the justifier of the ungodly.

The God who stands at the heart of this universe is deeply, perfectly, wonderfully good. He knows and cares about every terrible thing has happened. When we are wrongly harmed, he is angry; when we experience injustice, he is furious; he is so thoroughly and completely good in every way that he will not rest until every bad and wrong thing is dealt with and the world is perfectly, beautifully how it should be. Because God is deeply, perfectly, wonderfully good.

And this wonderfully good God also deeply, completely, unceasingly loves you. He knows everything about you: he knows everything you feel ashamed of—all the bad habits, the terrible choices, the repeated failures, the way you’ve wronged others and even betrayed him—he knows that better than you do. But him knowing these things about you has not caused him to abandon you in disappointment of what you have become, to turn away in disgust. No, seeing all your wrong, instead he has moved toward you; in Jesus he has joined with you and in his body on the cross he has carried away all of that wrong so that nothing stands in the way of you experiencing his goodness. Why? Because he loves YOU. Because he delights in who you are, the person with all of your quirks that he has made you to be. 

This is what we see in Jesus, God’s righteousness revealed. And all of this, Jesus has done for you AS A GIFT. “Justified by his grace, as a gift.” Before you even thought of him, before you even felt regret for any wrong, before you even thought about loving him, he already loved you and dealt with your sin. God has given you his love; he has given you righteousness; he has given you JESUS. And the way you take hold of this gift is simply by accepting it. To use the words of this passage, you receive all of this by faith. 

Whether you have been a follower of Jesus for many years or whether until this very moment you were not a Christian, the same thing holds true: God in love, offers you everything in Jesus, and even now he invites you by faith to receive his gift. This is the gospel.

I want to invite you to take a few moments to name your sins to God in this act that we call confession: to name them, not just to feel bad, but to acknowledge them so that you can take hold of this remarkable reality: that in Jesus every single one of them has been dealt with and you are right with God.