AND NOW, THE GOOD NEWS!
Text: Romans 3:9-25a
March 6, 2005, Dave Philips
“I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news,” said the captain of the galley to the galley slaves. “First the good news: every slave gets an extra ration of meat for supper.” All the galley slaves raised their oars in the air and cheered.
Then one of them said, “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is,” said the captain, “tomorrow morning my wife wants to go water skiing!”
We’re all familiar with good news/bad news jokes. Almost always the good news comes first. Then comes the bad news that makes the good news seem paltry by comparison.
In Romans the bad news comes first, then the good news. During our study of Romans we’ve read through two and a half chapters of very little but bad news. And that bad news is bad indeed. If we thought we had reason to hope in our own goodness, we are sadly mistaken. If we thought we were in good shape morally, we can forget it. If we thought we had lived good enough lives to get to heaven, we can put the thought out of our minds. If we thought we were “in” because of our being baptized Christians, we’re entertaining a fantasy.
“No one is righteous,” according to God’s word. “No one, not even one.” And this is not just Paul speaking. Paul is quoting. He quotes a string of seven Old Testament verses to prove this proposition. Paul makes two points: first, sin is pervasive in the human personality. Read verses 13-17: our throats, our mouths, our lips, our tongues, and our minds are full of our selfishness and rebellion against God.
All the cognitive and expressive parts of us oppose our good and holy Creator. And what our minds are full of we express not only in our speech but also in our actions. Our feet are swift to shed blood and in our paths are ruin and misery.
So in every part of us, body, mind, and spirit, we are tainted and affected by the influence of sin.
As Dr. Addison Leitch, one of my mentors, used to say, “If sin were blue, I would be blue all over.”
The second point Paul makes with these Old Testament verses is that sin is not only pervasive but universal. Everybody without exception sins. Jews sin. Gentiles sin. Smart people sin. Ignorant people sin. Rich people sin. Poor people sin. George Bush sins. John Kerry sins. You sin. I sin.
So, that’s pretty bad news! No matter our race or color, no matter our religion or culture, we’re all of us tinctured by the “blueness” — to use Ad Leitch’s metaphor — of sin. What’s red and yellow, black and white, and blue all over? The human race!
As we finish reading Romans 3:20, no one is left standing before this holy, righteous, and just God. Not God’s people, the Jews, not cultured and high minded Greeks, and certainly not people, whether Jewish or Gentile, who live as if God does not exist, who carouse, who abuse sex, who lie, who murder, who gossip, who slander, who are heartless and ruthless.
In a television documentary I saw a saintly looking man wearing the garb of an Episcopal or Roman Catholic priest tell of his experience during World War II of shooting a defenseless Japanese soldier. He did it, he said, with no feeling, with no emotion, as if the Japanese soldier were a cockroach he were crushing. We are all capable, whether our weapon is a machine gun or a word, of killing without mercy our fellow human beings. Sin is pervasive: every part of us is tinctured by sin. Sin is universal: all of us do it.
Paul shows us the Grand Canyon. We’re on one side, God is on the other. Between us runs a river of acid. The acid river is sin. Every time we sin, the acid of our sin flows into this canyon and erodes it ever deeper and deeper. Eventually our bank of the canyon will erode away completely and collapse into the river of acid. Our sin will be the death of us. And our death will be a just one, for our sin has been intentional. Knowing that what we do is wrong, we have, nevertheless, gone ahead and sinned anyway.
There’s the bad news. Is there no good news?
Verse 21: “But now,” says Paul, “a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets [i.e. the Old Testament] testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and, AND (!!) are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
And suddenly all that bad news evaporates! It’s good for us to realize the full extent of the bad news. And may I say that this bad news has been soft-pedaled in the church in our generation. Many of us are totally unaware of this message of the bad news that is so dramatically given in both the Old and the New Testaments. Many of us want a feel-good religion with no bad news. We want to believe that although we may make a few mistakes, we’re pretty good people, and God thinks we’re hot stuff. So, we need not repent of anything, because we haven’t really done anything worth repenting of.
But the bad news that Paul tells us is the darkness that highlights the beauty and brightness of the Good News. God who has no obligation to us loves us so much that he makes this unbelievable offer.
John Stott calls this offer the most startling statement in Romans.1 The offer is to justify the wicked.2 Now, notice, God is not offering simply to forgive the wicked. God is not offering to commute the sentence of the wicked. The offer is to justify the wicked!
When Fred Goldman had won his civil case of wrongful death against O.J. Simpson, and when the huge multi-million dollar penalty was announced, perhaps you recall that Goldman offered to nullify the penalty if O.J. Simpson would admit that he had murdered his wife and Goldman’s son. Simpson refused to admit that he had done the murders.
What do you think Goldman’s object was in making this offer? Think about it for a moment. Was it because Goldman had compassion on Simpson? Had Goldman changed his mind about Simpson and now no longer wanted to avenge the death of his son?
I don’t think so. I believe Goldman wanted to exact a more severe penalty than the millions of dollars the court had ordered Simpson to pay. He wanted Simpson to admit that he was a murderer and to live with the public disgrace of his guilt for the rest of his life. His objective was not a merciful one, it was one of vengeance. Goldman did not want to justify Simpson, he wanted Simpson to admit that he was beyond justification.
But what about God’s objective? Does God want to shame us further when he offers us the free gift of justification? Not at all! Is God’s motive vengeance? Not at all! Does God want to make us squirm with discomfort as we admit our guilt? Not at all! Does God want us publicly shamed for time and eternity, always having to feel accusing eyes on us, always knowing when we appear in public that we are miserable offenders? Not at all!
God is moved by compassion for us. God is moved by love. The offer God makes for us is lined out in verses 21-26. Leon Morris suggests that these verses are “the most important single paragraph ever written.”3 In this paragraph we read of the basis of our justification, and the way we lay hold of our justification.
The basis of our justification is the death of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. And the way we lay hold of this justification is our faith.
How in the world can God justify a guilty person? Commuting the sentence we can understand. Removing the penalty we can get. But justification of the guilty party? No way! When a pastor says, as I have said in the past, that even Judas Iscariot, Adolph Hitler, or Jeffrey Daumer could be justified by God, our instinct is to shudder, to recoil, and say, “Surely not those monsters!”
But we have failed to see our solidarity with such monsters! We are human, we are sinners, the wages of sin is death, and sin is a matter of degree, not kind. So, whether our sins are small ones, so called peccadillos, or monstrous sins, they will kill us.
Nevertheless, God offers all of us, whether we’re in the big leagues of sin along with Judas, Hitler, or Daumer, or whether we’re bush league, like most of us, a complete and total pardon, and justification!
Justification, which we’ll be exploring in more depth in coming weeks, means that the guilty are pronounced innocent. They have no more sin on their record. Furthermore, they can begin a process which will eventuate in their becoming like none other than Jesus Christ. Sinners can begin a process that will purify them and make them holy like Jesus Christ. Imagine the cannibal monster, Jeffrey Daumer, transformed so that he is like Jesus Christ! And you may remember that Jeffrey Daumer repented his sins, asked Jesus Christ to be his savior, and was baptized as a Christian before his death in prison.
The basis of our justification is what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross, not our good works. Jesus Christ did what you and I and Jeffrey Daumer could never do for ourselves. First, he lived a life without sin. He was a truly innocent person before God.4
Then, he offered himself as an atoning sacrifice for us. He stepped into our place, suffered the penalty of our sin, took our punishment, died, suffered the pangs of hell, and came back from the grave not to haunt us or to make us suffer, not to be some sort of celestial Fred Goldman always pointing the finger of accusation at us, but, on the contrary, to be our defending attorney with the goal of justifying us.5 It would be as if Ron Goldman, the man O.J. Simpson murdered, were to come back from the grave and to act not as O.J. Simpson’s prosecutor but as his attorney.
And then imagine Ron Goldman, now Simpson’s attorney, working out a deal with the judge that would let Simpson go free while Goldman went to jail for life to pay off Simpson’s debt to society. And furthermore, imagine Goldman giving Simpson a divine medicine that he brought from heaven that would transform Simpson from a murderer into an angel.
There you have it. That’s the deal God offers us, and how much more wonderful the sacrifice of Christ is than any such imaginative reconstruction of the Simpson trial. For this deal is offered to everyone in the world.
That’s the basis of our justification. What about the means? How do we get hold of this justification?
Very simply: we receive it through faith. We do not receive it by being good! Being good comes as a result of our receiving God’s gift. Remember, we can’t be good enough to deserve God’s salvation. God does not prescribe right behavior as a cure for our sin. He does not say, “Swallow ten commandments and call me in the morning.” Paul tells us, “No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law.”6
Instead, God tells us that the means of our getting hold of this justification is simple faith. Just say yes to God. Believe that Jesus Christ has come into the world to save sinners.7 Admit your sin. Receive his free gift. And hang onto that gift for dear life, because dear life is what it gives you.
One of my friends in another congregation told me of her conversion in mid-life. She had grown up in a very legalistic church where the emphasis was on doing good works. Then she got into a neighborhood Bible study and started studying God’s word. She kept seeing this astonishing deal offered in the word of God. She sensed that she had not received this gift. She was terrified that all her good works would not really be enough to get her into heaven, and she had an incredible fear of dying and going to hell. But still she just couldn’t believe that faith was enough. It just seemed too simple.
Finally, she was convinced after lengthy study of the word of God that this simple offer of justification was indeed clearly taught in scripture. This simple offer was what God was inviting her to receive. She became convinced, also, that she could not be good enough to get to heaven on her own merit. She became convinced that the means of receiving God’s gift was simple faith. She trusted Jesus Christ, she turned her life over to him, and ever since she has been free of the fear of death, because she takes God at his word when he promises in Christ that, as Paul repeats in Romans 3:23-24, “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.”8
Does that woman, now happily a Christian and at peace, have any spiritual kin in this congregation? Are there any people here this morning who have thought that somehow, some way, what they have to do to be saved is to be better and better, to do enough good deeds to balance out the bad deeds, and to hope with no reassurance from God’s word and Spirit that they have done enough?
Friends, once again you’ve heard the Great News of Jesus Christ. You’ve heard how to lay hold of it. For some of you, this is ancient history. But I’m going to bet that for some of you, it’s not. It’s a transaction with God you’ve never made, and you need to take care of it.
But for all of you: this is just the beginning! It gets better! The tide has turned in this letter to the Romans. The bad news has been announced. That’s it, that’s all. But from now on through the rest of the letter we learn the implications and the experience of this wonderful Good News.
PRAYER:
Gracious God, we are sinners, all of us. We have no hope apart from your grace shown to us in Jesus Christ. Thank you for this amazing offer of justification to make us right before you, and sanctification to make us like Jesus. Many of us are very familiar with this great news. For some of us it’s brand new. Move all of us to consciously seek your help to direct our lives as we ask Christ to live in us and through us. In his name we pray. Amen.