Rom 3.27-4.12

A particular assurance

Romans 3.27-4.12

Jason Procopio

I grew up in church, but I wasn’t a Christian until I was 21 years old. Part of the reason is that I was simply uninterested: church was the place I went to be with my friends, the place I learned to sing, the place where my buddy Jeff and I spent hours during services drawing pictures trying to make each other laugh. But I didn’t care at all about anything spiritual that was happening there.

The other reason it took me so long was because while some good things were taught in our church, a lot of good and important things were left on the cutting room floor, or were misrepresented.

I clearly remember one example from a youth class when I was a teenager. Someone asked what would happen if a Christian got in a car accident, and just before you died, you said a bad word because you were scared, and you didn’t have time to ask God to forgive you for saying that bad word. Would you be forgiven anyway? Would you go to heaven or hell?

The teacher of that class thought for a minute, and then said (very seriously), “Well, we can’t be sure, can we?”

That’s the other reason it took me so long: because if my salvation depended on my ability do the right thing, then it was a lost cause. I may as well live my life and have fun with it—there was no way I was going to be good enough to be saved, much less stay saved.

Fortunately (I later discovered to my great relief) that’s not how the Bible says it works.

Last week we saw that despite our complete corruption as rebels against God, God did not give us the punishment we deserved, but gave it to his Son in our place. Jesus Christ came to be a “propitiation” by his blood—that is, to satisfy God’s wrath against our sin by taking it on himself. This was, Paul says in 3.25, “to show God’s righteousness”. Jesus came because our sin couldn’t just be swept under the rug; if we were to be saved, God’s wrath against our sin had to be fully satisfied. This is how God is both just (dedicated to punishing sin, because that is right) and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

And part of the reason Paul feels the need to go into more detail in today’s text is because if we take even a little time to think about it, we get the feeling that things shouldn’t work this way. Even the word “justify” means to be proven right. So if God justifies us, that means he proves us righteous—but we’re not righteous.

So we get uncomfortable, and we have the feeling that Paul’s not telling us everything. We’re waiting for the penny to drop: Okay, sure, God is justifying us…but he still wants us to work for it, right?

This is the feeling that Paul is going to be pushing against in today’s text.

The Law of Faith (3.27-3.31)

So remember where we’ve come from. In the first two and a half chapters of this letter, Paul’s been speaking against the temptation to become prideful and judge others, speaking against the Jews who judged their Gentile brothers and sisters for not following the law of Moses. He picks up that thread again in chapter 3, v. 27:

27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. 29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, 30 since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way first: boasting makes no sense in the context of a free gift, but we try to do it anyway. Kids do this all the time: they brag to their friends about their Christmas presents, even though their parents were the ones who bought them. If they really had integrity, our kids would brag about how great their parents are, to give them such an awesome gift (though hopefully, they grow into that).

That’s the kind of attitude Paul is exposing here. If you have been saved despite yourself rather than because of yourself, you have no room to be arrogant in your salvation. If, as Paul said earlier in this chapter, the law cannot save you, then your obedience to the law doesn’t even enter this part of the equation. (And Paul will go on with that thought a little later.)

So boasting is excluded. And in the second half of v. 27, Paul throws us a bit by playing on words. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. There has been a lot of ink spilled over exactly what Paul means by the word “law” in this verse—is it the Law of Moses, or something else? Some people think he’s using the word as a synonym for “principle”; our boasting is excluded because of the principle of faith. That’s probably right, but a lot of people will extend that meaning of the word “law” into v. 28 and v. 31, and I don’t believe Paul goes that far.

Thomas Schreiner is helpful here, saying that Paul “plays on words so that the readers will grasp that the law [of Moses] rightly understood is a law that teaches righteousness by faith.”

This will make more sense as we go on; the important thing to understand for now—Paul’s big point here—is that boasting makes no sense in the Christian life because we are not saved by our own merit. We are not saved by obedience to a principle, or to the law of Moses, or to a set of commands that we have managed to follow; we are saved by faith.

It’s an important point to make. Not all Jews believed that they were saved because they followed the law of Moses (Schreiner was right when he said that this is what the law correctly understood teaches, and there were definitely Jews at the time who understood the law correctly), but many Jews had a way of working out their faith that was “synergistic”—that is, they believed that although God’s grace was necessary, their own obedience to the law played a vital role in their salvation.

And you don’t have to be in the church for long to discover that this kind of synergistic mentality is still alive and well today. You can genuinely believe in God’s grace, and yet still have the feeling he expects you to get your house in order if you expect him to save you. If you want proof, think of how easy it is to doubt whether or not you’re really saved after you’ve sinned.

This mentality crops up very quickly, and Paul rejects it completely: we are not saved by our obedience, but by grace, through faith; we are justified by faith, apart from works of the law.

That means that this opposition we saw in the first three chapters—this question of Jewish Christians who followed the law judging Gentile Christians who didn’t have the law—is completely done away with. We’re both saved the same way. God isn’t just the God of the Jews; he’s also the God of Gentiles. God will judge the circumcised by faith, and the uncircumcised in exactly the same way.

But then Paul throws us a bit of a curve ball, in v. 31:

Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

How does that work? How does our faith cause us to “uphold the law”?

First, we need to specify which “law” he’s referring to. The law of Moses included ritual, civil and moral laws. The ritual and civil laws were designed, as we saw a couple weeks ago, as boundary markers: they were to be visible signs that the people of Israel belonged to God. And Paul has taken great pains to show that these sign-markers (like circumcision) are not necessary for salvation. But the heart of the law, the character that the law produces—in other words, the moral norms of the law of Moses—still hold true. They still display God’s character, and our character should grow to reflect his.

I’m going to quote Tom Schreiner again; he says, “The moral norms of the law still function as the authoritative will of God for the believer. The idea is not precisely that the law is fulfilled by faith in Christ, but rather that those who have faith in Christ will keep the law.”

The really big question now is, how does this work?

faith counted as righteousness (4.1-8)

Paul understands that this might be confusing, so he takes a step back and gives a practical example which certainly all of the Jews—and most of the Gentiles—would have recognized, and that is the example of Abraham. Chapter 4, verse 1:

What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”

They would have remembered the story. In Genesis 15, God chooses to make a covenant with a man named Abraham. We can see in Abraham’s story that he’s not a perfect man, but God comes to him anyway, and makes him this incredible promise—that although he and his wife were both old and had no children, his offspring would be as numerous as the stars.

And in v. 3, Paul quotes Genesis 15.6: Abraham believed God, and it [his belief] was counted to him as righteousness.

In other words, Abraham believed that God would do what he promised to do; and God looked at that belief and said, “On the basis of your belief, I’m calling you righteous,” even though Abraham clearly wasn’t.

This seems nuts, but it actually makes sense if you think about it. God didn’t have to declare anyone righteous. He owed nothing to anyone. He could easily have wiped the slate clean all the way back at the flood. It would have been just, and it would have been easy: just don’t tell Noah to build that ark. God is under no obligation to declare anyone righteous, so if he’s going to do it, he gets to make the rules about what he bases his decision on.

In addition—and we’ll come back to this again in a bit—faith is something that God himself gives us. It is not something we naturally have in ourselves.

So why does faith that God himself gives us do the trick for him? Why is belief that God is faithful to do what he says the metric by which he decides to declare someone righteous?

Think about the way God presents himself in the Bible. When he addresses Moses from the burning bush, God presents himself as the great “I AM”: he is the reason and the meaning behind all that exists, the Creator who made everything “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1.6). The ultimate goal and the ultimate joy of every human being is to know God for who he is.

So it makes perfect sense that, when deciding on what basis to declare someone righteous, faith in God would be that basis. Because faith in God means seeing God for who he is—the great I AM for whom and by whom all things exist—and trusting in his faithfulness to always be God. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness—of course it was, because nothing is more important.

So far so good: every Jewish reader would have recognized that quote from Genesis 15, and most Gentile readers would too.

But in v. 4, Paul adds a very important wrinkle.

4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:

7  “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,

and whose sins are covered;

8  blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

There are two important aspects to what Paul says here. The first is a logical problem related to what he said earlier about boasting. If we worked for our salvation, God’s grace wouldn’t be a gift; it would be a salary. When we work, we get paid—this is how the world works, and it has always been this way. We always want a reward for doing something difficult or admirable. But Paul insists that God has always saved freely, independently of our work or merit, so that his grace may be recognized as a gift.

Secondly, Paul is appealing to the story of Abraham, to show his readers that it still works this way—just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, so too the believer today, who does not work for his salvation but simply believes and trust that God declares sinful people just, his faith is also counted as righteousness. Nothing has changed between Abraham’s day and ours.

And then Paul doubles down on that reality, by citing another hero of the Old Testament: King David. I’m going to make a bit of an excursion outside our text today, but I actually think it’s really important for our text. In v. 7-8, Paul quotes Psalm 32, verses 1 and 2, in which David says the same thing Paul has been saying, but showing the other side of the coin: rather than talking about sinners being declared righteous, he talks about sinners being forgiven of their sin.

Paul knows that his readers in Rome would have recognized the quote, and more importantly, he knows that they would know what comes next in that psalm.

Let’s look quickly at Psalm 32, starting at v. 1:

1  Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,

whose sin is covered.

2  Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity—

(So that’s Paul’s quote. Here’s what comes next.)

—and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

3  For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away

through my groaning all day long.

4  For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;

my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

5  I acknowledged my sin to you,

and I did not cover my iniquity;

I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”

and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Then in v. 8, God speaks to David:

8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;

I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

9 Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding,

which must be curbed with bit and bridle,

or it will not stay near you.

I’m sure you’ve heard that when God saves us, he forgets our past sin, so we should forget our past sin as well. Let it go, love yourself, and so on.

This isn’t just bad advice; it’s unbiblical. When the Bible says that God “will remember our sin no more” in Jeremiah 31.34, it’s not saying God literally forgets our sin—he wouldn’t be omniscient if he did. In that verse, Jeremiah is saying the same thing David says in Psalm 32, the same thing that Paul says in Romans 4: that our sin won’t be counted against us.

But God doesn’t forget our past sin, and the Bible never encourages us to forget our past sin either—quite the contrary. The Bible encourages us to remember our past sin, in order to be continually and perpetually thankful for the grace that we have received. That’s why Paul spent the first two and half chapters in Romans talking about how sinful we all are: we need to know that, so that when the good news of God’s grace in Christ finally comes, we might be absolutely floored by it. The good news of the gospel becomes the defining truth of our lives.

I know that this sounds like I’ve gone off topic, but I think Paul included this quote intentionally in these verses, knowing that his readers would know what came next, because the dynamic we see at work in Psalm 32 is how faith “upholds the law” (cf. Romans 3.31). When we are overwhelmed by gratitude at the grace that we have received, we walk around almost in a daze, amazed as we are at how good God has been to us, and when that is our state, the very idea of not obeying such a good God is unthinkable to us. If such a good God tells us to avoid something, of course it’s because it’s bad for us. If such a good God tells us to do something, of course it’s because that thing is good for us. We obey reflexively, instinctively, because we are so filled with gratitude that all we want to do is serve and honor this God who has been so good to us.

This is how it works. As Jared Wilson writes, “We are not set free by our obedience; we are set free to and for obedience.”

The Chronology of the Christian Life (4.9-12)

In the next few verses Paul gives a very simple and clear example that proves this is how it works. We saw before that circumcision was the sign and the seal of the covenant God made with the Jewish people; it was the physical marker that reflected their belonging to God. Many Jews had begun to view circumcision at the litmus test for determining someone’s right standing before God: if you were truly obedient to the law, then you would be circumcised.

But Paul, in a stroke of genius, uses Abraham once again to say, Guys, you KNOW that’s not what circumcision is. You KNOW that this isn’t how God saves us. V. 9:

9 Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. 10 How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised.

We saw this multiple times before: circumcision was an outward sign that reflected an inward reality. In the case of Abraham, what was the reality that circumcision reflected? It was the fact that Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

V. 11:

11 He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, 12 and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

In every family, there are certain traits that are passed on. Me and my brother Jeremy look like our dad; my brother Jared looks like our mom. My dad looks like my grandfather. And on top of physical traits, there are personality traits, ways of doing things, that we take on as well. There is necessarily a more-or-less-pronounced family resemblance we have if we belong to any family, for better or for worse.

The question here is, what is the defining trait of Abraham’s family? Many Jews saw circumcision as that defining trait: circumcision was “what this family does”.

But Paul identifies something else, something that predated circumcision, and that was the true defining trait of Abraham’s lineage: Abraham’s faith in God to fulfill his promises.

You see, there is an order to these things. God didn’t give Abraham circumcision and say, “Be thou circumcised if thou shalt be saved!” It’s quite possible that if God had done things that way, Abraham would have said no. (“Are you kidding? You want me to do what?”)

God saved Abraham first. He gave him faith, so that Abraham fully and truly believed that God is who he says he is. Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness. And after this, God commanded Abraham to be circumcised, as a sign of his faith. Abraham obeyed willingly, because now he knew the God he was obeying, and believed what he said about himself.

For many Jews, their circumcision was the basis on which they could prove that they were “children of Abraham”—we’re part of this family; you see? We’re circumcised.

But Paul says that the true sign that we belong to Abraham’s family isn’t circumcision, but rather the faith that circumcision reflected. That’s why God gave him faith first; that’s why God saved him first. Faith was what made Abraham a child of God; so we are part of Abraham’s lineage if we share in his faith.

A Particular Type of Assurance

Now Paul could easily have told us all this without talking about Abraham—he did; that’s what we saw last week. So why does he take the time to talk about Abraham’s faith?

Firstly, he takes the time because he’s knows he’s writing to Christians who are Jews. These Jews held tightly to their heritage as descendants of Abraham, as they should do. So Paul is using this example of Abraham to reassure them that he’s not trying to erase the past. But he also wants to confront any false ideas about how God saves us by confirming the past: even Abraham, the forefather of the faith, was saved by grace, through faith. You are not saved by your habits or by tradition or by our rites or rituals, but by faith.

But even more telling, I think, is this text’s usefulness to those Gentiles who would read Paul’s letter. Look again at v. 11: God saved Abraham before giving the sign of circumcision in order to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well. You see what he’s doing: he’s inviting the Gentile believers into the family. He’s saying to all of them—Jewish or not, circumcised or not—if you share Abraham’s faith, then you are his children too. You belong to this family. You are one of us.

Paul is giving us a very particular type of assurance.

It’s really easy for those of us who aren’t Jewish to individualize Christianity: God saved me, and forgave me of my sin, and justified me by faith—and that’s true. But when our faith is mostly “me-centric” in our minds, we end up putting an incredible weight on ourselves that we could never carry. Because it’s all about me, if I’m doing well, then clearly that means that God loves me.

But when I reach a period in which I’m not doing well, all that assurance can evaporate. Why would God stay, when I’m this bad? Why would God love me—because what’s to love? He would be right and just to judge me for my sins—so what’s stopping him?

What’s stopping him is the promise he made to Abraham. It’s the trajectory he set in motion by saving Abraham the way he did, by promising that through his descendants all the nations of the world would be blessed, by promising through the apostles that all those who share in Abraham’s faith are children of Abraham.

If we are not Jewish, we can easily feel detached from this assurance. We can tend to forget about the Old Testament, because it’s long, and a lot of it is boring, but most especially because it talks about things that happened a long time ago to people with whom we feel like we have no connection.

But that is simply not the case.

We are part of a story that is much bigger than the egocentric lives we so often live. If it was all about me, I wouldn’t be surprised if God took one look at me, said, “You know what? Never mind,” and dropped me. It’s what I deserve.

But it’s not all about me. God’s plans are much bigger than me or you. He is not just saving people; he is saving a family.

Parents, which of your kids are most important to you? Of course the answer is, that’s a stupid question. There isn’t a hierarchy of importance in your children. If you’re good to your kids, you’re good to all your kids. If you’re abusive to one of your kids, you’re abusive to all of them (because the threat of abuse is always there). If you’re negligent to one of your kids, you’re negligent to all of them (because the threat of negligence is always there).

The same holds true for God: if he’s unfaithful to one of us, he’s unfaithful to all of us—and to every one of his children that came before us. If he’s good to one of us, he’s good to all of us. It is unthinkable that God would go back on literally thousands of years of faithfulness to his promises just because I’m giving him a hard time.

So don’t neglect the Old Testament. The history of God’s people is our history, and we need it. Abraham’s story is vital to us because it reminds us that God has brought us into something so much bigger than the little lives we’re living. It reminds us that God’s promises are not to people, but to a family, and our Father will keep his promises to his family.

We can rest. No matter how difficult our week has been, no matter how much we are suffering, no matter how uncertain life seems to us right now…we can rest. Our God is faithful to his family.

We can rest, and in that rest, we are amazed at his grace in including us in his family.

So in light of that reality, in light of his grace, how is Paul calling us to respond? He’s calling us to believe. To know that he is not counting our sins against us, that he has declared us righteous through the faith he gave us. And he’s calling us to uphold the law through that faith: to live as God has commanded us, not in order to be a part of his family, but because we are a part of his family.