Justification – Marc Arlt (Transcript)

JUSTIFICATION:

God’s Good News

(Marc Arlt, 17 January AM services)
For those of you who have been on an international flight you may be familiar with the idea of a baggage search. This is where they either find something suspicious when they scan your luggage, or when you’re walking through customs and you’re looking guilty and they pull you aside to poke through your carefully packed luggage. This message is going to be something like that. In Christianity we often use big words and these words carry huge ideas and concepts. This is very helpful at times because with one word we can convey all of the ideas and concepts contained within the word itself. The trouble comes in, however, when we never open up the luggage and unpack exactly what we mean when we use this word. There are two verses in the book of Romans which we will spend time unpacking iun this message. It will give us the opportunity to unpack words like “righteousness”, “Law,” 
“faith,” and “belief”.
These two verses communicate the heart of the Good News of God and in their few words is summed up the entire sweeping narrative of the Old Testament. They state with blinding simplicity the transition from the Law to Jesus.

Before we can look at those two verses, we need to unpack another word first:


COVENANT 

The story of God’s Good News begins at the beginning of the Bible, the beginning of the book of Genesis. In a Garden where innocence was lost. Where beauty was corrupted. Where a door was opened to sin and a twistedness set into all of creation and deep within the heart and soul of man. It was followed with God choosing Abraham and His family through whom He would redeem all of creation and all people everywhere. God made a covenant with them with the intention of fixing the brokenness and twistedness of this world. He did not choose them to be the only people whom He would save. He chose them so that through them God could save the world. God said to them: “I will bless you so that through you the world will be blessed and put right.” This covenant with Abraham was truly amazing for at least two reasons:
– There were no conditions and
– There was no exit clause
Can you imagine putting a business deal together where you place no conditions on the other party whatsoever and you left no room for an exit clause? It’s like saying, “This is what I’m promising to do, and it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m still going to do it, and I am not giving myself a way out of it.” By the way – God is absolutely true to His Word and so what He says is what He will do. No matter what it costs Him. He will remain true to His Word. The only thing Abraham and Israel (which was the nation which would come from Abraham) needed to do was allow God to bless them, and to use them to bless this world. If you know the story you will know that this didn’t go well at all.The very people who were chosen to be the solution were part of the problem. They themselves were part of the world which needed saving. What God expected of them was not moral perfection but rather faithfulness: that they would follow Him and be true to Him.
Unfortunately, they didn’t follow Him. They weren’t faithful to Him. That was the problem. The very people God had chosen to be bearers of His redemptive solution for the world, has dropped the ball and despite numerous attempts to bring them back, they had gone off in another direction. For this reason, God couldn’t bring His blessing to the nations. He couldn’t set the world right. God’s blessing had become stuck within the failure of Israel. There lay then, before God, a dilemma. His options were:-

(1) He could discard Israel and make another plan. 
This is what many Christians think God did. Many Christians believe one of two things about Israel: Either God decided, “My plan with Israel failed so I’m going to scratch that plan and send Jesus.” Or else we think He decided, “My plan with Israel was always just a sideshow anyway, here is the main event.” Besides the fact that this isn’t what the Bible teaches, it would bring the charge of unfaithfulness against God, because He would have promised one thing, but then gone back on His word. He would be breaking His covenant. That is not an option.

(2) He could pardon Israel. This opens up a whole line of questioning: Did they deserve it? If they did how could He do it without condoning their sin? If He did manage to find a way around that how could He not be guilty of partiality? Or of a form of nationalism? Doing it for them and not for everyone? This is the dilemma which lay before God.

You see, God must be true to His covenant but cannot simply overlook the waywardness of His people. So how would God do it? How would He be faithful to His covenant without a miscarriage of justice of the highest order? This is the question at the heart of the first chapters of the book of Romans. In our text for this message – Romans 3:21 – Paul launches into an answer to this dilemma.

Romans 3:21-22 (ESV) 
“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

“BUT NOW THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD HAS BEEN MANIFESTED” 

“Righteousness” is one of those words which needs unpacking because we have carried around a lot of ideas in this one word. In looking at the Old Testament and the New Testament usage of this phrase and others similar to it, we can come to the conclusion that when the Scriptures speak about the righteousness of God they are referring chiefly to God’s faithfulness to His covenant and to His covenant people. The covenant we refer to in this context is the covenant to Abraham. To say then that God is righteous is to say He is faithful to His Word to Abraham. God has now, in the midst of a no win situation, faced with options which offered only dead ends and charges of unfaithfulness on the one hand or favouritism on the other, acted to fulfil His covenant. God had found a third way. A way which wasn’t, on the one hand, discarding Israel and His entire plan initiated with Abraham and just finding another way. A way which wasn’t, on the other hand, a sweeping of the problems under the rug. He has put His faithfulness on display. His faithfulness to His people and to everything that He promised and ultimately His faithfulness to put the whole world right: “His righteousness as been revealed.”

“APART FROM THE LAW” 

We may not appreciate how radical this little phrase is but it turned a whole religious system upside down and would have rocked the Jews to the core of their identity. It was the Law which gave the Jews their identity. It wasn’t what made them Jewish – their birth achieved that. The Law was what identified them as the true people of God. If a doctor wears a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck – does that make him a doctor, or does it only identify him as a doctor? The same is true for the Law. It didn’t make one a Jew, but it identified one as included in God’s covenant people. If you were one of God’s people living faithfully to the Law, then the expectation was that you would be blessed by God and were truly a son of Abraham. Now, however, Paul says all that comes not on the basis of adherence to the Law but quite apart from it. He’s saying that God’s covenant people are no longer marked out by adherence to the Law. The law is not the uniform anymore that identifies you as God’s people. You can imagine generations of Jews turning over in their grave that one of their own would be making such a statement. Paul is quick to add the following words though:


“THOUGH THE LAW AND PROPHETS BEAR WITNESS TO IT”

In other words, this is not something novel. This is something attested to in the very Scriptures we have relied upon for millennia. So then, if God’s people are not identified on the basis of the Law, if that is not the uniform or badge of identity, what is? Paul will answer that question in a moment, but before he does, he must first show the means by which this new way has been made available. This is the third way which we spoke of. It is a way which neither discards Israel and God’s plan to them, and neither sweeps the problem of Israel under the rug. It is the surprising way in which God is faithful to His original word to Abraham.

“THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD THROUGH FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST”
The covenant faithfulness of God is manifested, revealed, and realised through Jesus the Messiah. In the New Testament there are a number of places where we can find the phrase “faith in Jesus.” Well known scholars and theologians tell us that these words can often be better understood not as “our faith in Jesus”, but rather the “faithfulness of Jesus”. In these present verses where we are talking about the faithfulness of God to His covenant, it makes absolute sense to speak about the faithfulness of Jesus.
An important question to ask is: In what way was Jesus faithful? And why would Jesus’ faithfulness be the key to unlocking the covenant? Well, remember the story – God chose Israel but they had failed to carry His purposes forward. Indeed the blessing which was supposed to flow out to the world had become blocked in the failure of Israel. So God sent His Son Jesus, born under the Law – born as a Jew – to be the faithful Israelite. To bring the story of Israel to completion. To obey where they had failed. For the purpose of God being able to make good on His covenant promises. This is a really big deal. If you don’t understand this, then it is so easy to miss much in the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If you don’t understand this you’ll find yourself saying, “I wonder why Jesus said that? I wonder why He did it like that?” If we don’t understand this idea, we are missing an important part of the puzzle of why Jesus died as He did. Let us look at a brief sampling of what the faithfulness of Jesus means and how He brought Israel’s story to fulfilment:
When God speaks to Pharaoh about releasing Israel from slavery in Egypt, He says, “Israel is my firstborn son.” What were the words spoken over Jesus when He was baptised? In Matthew it records God saying, “This is my beloved son”. Paul would later write about Jesus, calling Him the “firstborn”. Jesus is being identified with the nation Israel. Bells should be ringing right now. By the way: Israel came out of Egypt and went through the Red Sea. Paul speaks about this moment later in the New Testament saying that they were baptised into Moses. When Jesus requests to be baptised, John objects. Jesus insists and says that it is necessary for Him to be baptised in order to “fulfil all righteousness.” It was His way of saying, “It is necessary so that I might carry the Israelite story forward and fulfil it as the faithful Israelite”. Jesus was then led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days. How long did Israel wander in the wilderness for? 40 years. When Jesus was tempted to provide for Himself by turning stones into bread, He said, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Why did He say this? Of all the things He could have said, why this? The answer is that this was exactly the point of Israel’s failure in the desert to trust God and His provision. It was precisely at that point in their history where God was teaching them that man does not live by bread alone. Where Israel failed, Jesus succeeded. He is the faithful Israelite. Jesus is fulfilling the Israel story. He is the faithful Israelite through whom God will fulfil the covenant. This is what is meant with the faithfulness of Jesus. God fulfils the covenant through Jesus and thus reconstitutes the people of God around Jesus and no longer around a birth right. Which leads us to the final part of our Scripture:


“FOR ALL WHO BELIEVE “

This covenant status is for all who believe in Jesus. This status is not for those who have been faithful to the covenant – it is for those who trust in Jesus who has been faithful to the covenant.
Here is a paraphrase of Romans 3:21-22:

“But now, apart from the law (though the law and the prophets bore witness to it), God’s covenant faithfulness has been revealed. God’s covenant faithfulness comes into effect through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all those who believe.”

SO WHAT CAN WE TAKE AWAY FROM THIS?

1. God is faithful. 

When we don’t appreciate the bigness of the story and the fact that in Jesus, God kept His covenant with Israel and Abraham rather than finding another way around it, we fail to see the biggest story of faithfulness in the Scriptures. God is faithful. In fact, because of how God has arranged things in this new covenant, even when I am faithless, God still remains faithful. 

Galatians 2:20 (ESV) 
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
What if we inserted our understanding of what it means to speak of “faith in Jesus” and read it like this: 
“The life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
How different is that idea? We do not live depending on our own faithfulness, but we live by His faithfulness.

2. I am justified in Christ. 

If we believe in Jesus, we are declared righteous. We are justified in Christ. The question of who the new covenant people of God are, is not a matter of our faithfulness to God. It is not a matter of birth right. It is not a matter of works of the Law which identify one as the part of the people of God. It is a matter of the faithfulness of Jesus, and our belief in Him. There is no other way. Justified in Christ means:

1. Christ is our representative.
As Christ represented the nation of Israel, so that what was true for Him became true for the nation, so for us: everything that is true of Him is true of us. Whatever favour He has with God is our favour. Whatever status He has with God is our status. So what are you seeking from God that in fact you already have in Christ?
God loves you as He loves His Son. God favours you as He favours His Son. And He does all this not on the basis of anything you have done or haven’t done but only because you are in Christ when you believe.

2. It means God’s law court has found in our favour.
When we have been judged according to the terms of God’s covenant we have been found to be in the right. We have been found not guilty with respect to our sin. We have been acquitted of all charges against us. Again, not because of anything on our part. We cannot earn this status. It comes because we are in Christ.

3. We are therefore part of God’s covenant people.
We are declared righteous and therefore we are part of God’s family. This means we are caught up into the story of history in which God wants to set this world right. He will do it through us. The covenant which God is faithful to is the Abrahamic covenant: God’s blessing comes to His people and it comes through His people to the world. We are those people.

CONCLUSION 

All of this is what it means to be a Christian. Nothing less. It is to believe in the faithfulness of Jesus on our behalf and therefore to be sure that we are in Christ, and because we are in Christ we are part of God’s family of whom we here are but a small part. It is to be declared to be in the right before God.