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Romans 3:21-26
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
God and his anger were never the problem to be overcome. And you, you were never truly an obstacle for the God who loves you this deeply. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Come on back in and grab a seat. We'll give you a moment here. But as you're doing that, let me mention this. Yesterday, there was a big wedding here at the church and I was officiating. And so I was here and it was a hot day.
Speaker 1:People were here in suits and fancy outfits and it was sweltering. And so a group of neighborhood kids set up a lemonade station in front of the church on the lawn. And I thought that was the greatest thing ever because I hope those kids made a fortune because that is some entrepreneurial spirit jumping in on the occasion right there. So we'll have to see on Sunday if they set that up during the summer. Pretty good thinking.
Speaker 1:Today, my name is not just today, every day my name is Jeremy. I don't know where that came from. But if we haven't met yet, then please stop by and say hi sometime. I would love to meet you beyond just being here on the stage and hear a bit of your story, maybe share a bit of mine. Because really that's what we're all here for in community.
Speaker 1:And if you're looking for some of those community connections, but maybe you're not quite ready to jump into a home group yet, then one option is to go to the website commons.life and sign up for our dinner party network. This is just a chance to be in someone's home, to share dinner, and get to know each other a little bit. We just honestly think there is something spiritual about eating and sharing hospitality together, and perhaps that's an avenue for you to get connected. Now that said, we are in a series called When in Rome Part two. Last year, we focused on chapters one and two in this letter.
Speaker 1:This year, it's chapters three and four. And last week, we saw Paul creating this extended compound quote in the middle of chapter three by pulling together a series of passages from the Old Testament. And his basic argument here was that when the scripture say things like no one is righteous, no one understands, no one seeks god, no one does good, no one fears the lord, what they mean is no one. And so you can't get away with saying that all of those critiques apply to someone else but not me. Or perhaps even more pointedly for Paul, you can't get away with saying those critiques apply to them but not to us.
Speaker 1:Because we have to remember here that Paul, before he encounters Jesus, was a Pharisee. And so he came from one of those ruling religious classes in Judaism at the time. And within that tradition, all of the scriptures that Paul quotes in the middle of chapter three were understood to be about them. The Gentiles. Which was just another way of saying anyone that wasn't Jewish.
Speaker 1:And so the Pharisees knew those passages. They just didn't apply them to themselves. And Paul says, no. This is not gonna work anymore. Because whatever God is and however we understand the divine, all of that needs to be reinterpreted in the light of Jesus.
Speaker 1:And because of Jesus, we are now all on the same footing, all with the same access to God. And so if you happen to remember all the way back to last year to Romans part one, there was this passage in the opening chapter of the letter where Paul says, I am obligated both to the Greeks and to the non Greeks. And last year, we spent some time talking about how buried under that English is a whole lot of cultural critique that's going on. Because in Greek, he doesn't just say Greeks and non Greeks. He says Greeks and barbarians.
Speaker 1:And that word that he uses, barbaros, was actually a way of making fun of people who didn't speak Greek by implying that they babble on like little children. Paul says, I am a slave and messenger of Christ Jesus. Remember, that's the first verse of the book. Therefore, I am obligated equally to you, but also to all the people you think are beneath you. And so he has already gone after the elevation of Greco Roman culture in chapter one.
Speaker 1:Now he's going after the elevation of his own culture and his own background here in chapter three. For Paul, Jesus has put everyone on level ground before god. Now, yes, some of us do have some advantages and the Jews had the law and the scriptures to guide them. That's a big bonus. Perhaps you and I were born in Canada or some other culture where Christianity was prevalent and accessible to us.
Speaker 1:This is good, and we should be thankful for that. But we also shouldn't suppose that we somehow have better or more direct access to God because of it. Jesus shows us that above all else, the good news is that God is faithful to his creation, and that means every single one of us. And so one of the themes in this letter to the Romans is Greeks, get over yourself. Jews, stop thinking you're better than everyone else.
Speaker 1:Everyone is flawed. Everyone messes up, but God is at work regardless because he is righteous. And here's the thing you have to keep in the back of your mind when you read. It can seem at times like Paul has this incredibly pessimistic view of humanity. We're all terrible.
Speaker 1:We all mess up. We are all just dirty rotten worms writhing around under the awful gaze of God's righteous indignation. A lot of people have interpreted Paul that way. That's not really his point. Remember, he already made the argument in chapter two that people who know nothing about God can still actively demonstrate that God is at work in their lives by the way that they live.
Speaker 1:In two fifteen, he actually says that those who by their nature do good show that the requirements of the law have been written on their hearts even if they have never heard of God. So Paul actually has an incredibly optimistic view of God's image embedded in humanity. And all of the surprising unexpected places it can show up. But what he has no time for is when we start to say, yeah, I'm not like them. That's where Paul brings out the heavy artillery.
Speaker 1:That's where he uses his most incendiary language. And to be honest, that's one of the ways he is most like Jesus. Remember, time and again, Jesus shows unprecedented grace and peace towards sinners and frustration and indignation to religious robots. Paul is in good company here. Now, that's the first half of chapter three.
Speaker 1:Today, we want to work through towards the end of this chapter And so let's pray and dive in because we have a lot of work to do today. God, who is present at all times, in all places, in every life, and in every breath. Might we come to notice you not only with our own inhale and exhale this day, but within the breath of every person that we come to encounter and befriend this week. For those times that we have fallen into the same trap of thinking that we are fundamentally different from our neighbor, that we are better or superior or that we perhaps have a different path to you. Might you forgive us and reorient us and remind us that your good news is that you are faithful to each of us, That your son is at work in the places we can barely begin to fathom.
Speaker 1:And so Holy Spirit, would you help us to see you in each other? And then in turn, would you help us to see you in ourselves? Working for truth, inviting us into real life, and pointing us to your son through whom the whole world is being renewed. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. I feel like I have warned you every week that we are in Romans that we have some heavy lifting to do, but this is no exception because here we go. So in order to give you at least a little bit of respite before we dive back in, I thought I would give you one of my favorite lines I heard from my son this weekend. On Saturday morning, we usually go for a walk or a bike ride as a family And, we usually end that with a coffee. And, so we are in line at Vendome around the corner here waiting for a coffee.
Speaker 1:And, my son Eaton turns to me and says, Daddy, when I am your age, I will drink coffee. And, when I am mommy's age, I will buy things. And I thought, well, hey, at least you're dreaming big. I'm on the right path there. And then I went and I drank a coffee.
Speaker 1:Anyway, there you go. Now you got to laugh because here we have to do some work. So let's pick up where we left off last week. This is verse 21. I'm gonna read through to verse 26.
Speaker 1:But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify. K. This is a weirdly constructed sentence. Think of it this way. Now we know that the law wasn't God's righteousness at all.
Speaker 1:Jesus was. But when we look back we can actually see that the scriptures were pointing and hinting and pushing us in the direction of Jesus all along. We just weren't ready for it. And if you remember last week in verse 20, Paul ended that section by saying, nobody will be declared righteous simply by keeping the rules. Now he's starting the second half of his argument saying, listen.
Speaker 1:Don't worry. It's okay because we will be made righteous through Jesus. That's what he's gonna argue. Verse 22. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
Speaker 1:Now this is a really important part of Paul's argument. And we're gonna come back to this in a moment, but let's keep reading. There is no difference then between Jew and Gentile. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Speaker 1:So here's an example of what we were talking about earlier. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. People often want to pull this out and say, see, humans are awful. Totally depraved. There is nothing good in any of us.
Speaker 1:And yes, Paul is absolutely making the point that all of us mess up. But that is in service of his larger point that Jew or Gentile, Roman or Barbarian, Canadian, and yes, even American. We are all in the same boat needing to be rescued by God. Notice here, all have sinned and all receive grace and redemption through Christ Jesus. So, yes, this is about sin, but this is not a polemic about the awfulness of humanity.
Speaker 1:This is an argument against in grouping and out grouping. And about thinking that our group is different from their group. We're all in this predicament together, and Christ has come to save us all. That's his point. Now, verse 25.
Speaker 1:God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness because in his forbearance, he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time so as to be just and to be the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. So some heavy theology here. But to help us understand what is going on in verse 25 when Paul says that Christ was presented as a sacrifice of atonement.
Speaker 1:First, we have to go back to verse 22 when he says that the righteousness of God is given through faith in Jesus Christ. Because these are two sort of sort of hinge ideas in this passage here. And it brings us back to one of the big discussions we had a year ago in year one enrollment, which was all about the difference between the objective and subjective genitive in the Greek language. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, there's really no reason that you should, so don't worry. Except that this does play a significant role in how you understand Paul's point here.
Speaker 1:In English, we use prepositions like in or of and these denote the relationships between parts of a sentence. In Greek, however, those prepositions are often replaced by the ways that nouns are formed. And so basically, you add different endings that communicate the relationships instead of prepositions between them. However, the thing is in Greek, the righteousness is given through faith in Christ Jesus to all who believe is exactly the same thing as this righteousness is given through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe. And we've been talking about this a lot in this series because this is absolutely central to understanding where Paul is coming from in Romans.
Speaker 1:But for Paul, salvation is not just a transaction between you and God. Where you believe the right things and he saves you because of it. For Paul, salvation is a dynamic relationship where you come to understand that God is faithful to you And you learn to trust in him because you believe that he is faithful. Now, it's important here to understand that Paul is not downplaying the significance of our faith. Remember, he says right here that this righteousness is given to all who believe.
Speaker 1:So belief is still an incredibly important part of the equation for Paul. But Paul wants to uplift and make central the faithfulness of Jesus. In other words, you believing the right things would not matter if Jesus hadn't come and lived and died and lived again in perfect faithfulness to the story of God. That's what you have faith in. Jesus is the culmination, the completion, the fulfillment of everything that has been unfolding throughout human history.
Speaker 1:And now that Jesus has been faithful to the story, he invites you to put your faith in him. Now, you can look at that and say, well, what's the big deal? He's still talking about our belief. He's still talking about Jesus. Isn't this all just theological technicality without any meaningful distinction?
Speaker 1:And I would answer, a little bit yes and a little bit no. I mean, sure, it's a bit nerdy, but that's kinda my thing. And of course, you don't have to understand the nuance of the Greek genitive in Romans three to experience grace and acceptance in God. But at the same time, when we suddenly begin to think of our relationship to God as nothing more than a transaction where we exchange believing the right things for love and acceptance. We distort the good news into something that looks a lot more like our relationship to amazon.ca than our relationship to our mothers.
Speaker 1:Now look, I love Amazon. Trust me. But the convenience of buying mayonnaise with one day free shipping is not the model I want to understand my relationship to the divine through. I want something a little more complex. I want something more robust.
Speaker 1:I want something more life giving than simply a cosmic purchase. And I understand this impulse to make the gospel as simple as possible. Believe this and you will be saved. But that's not actually what Paul is giving us here in Romans. He's talking about something bigger.
Speaker 1:He's talking about a God who has a plan to save the world. A God who is faithful to that plan against all odds. A God who would come and give everything to demonstrate love to us. A God who hopes that we would see it and catch it and respond to that love. A God who wants to wrap us in his righteousness and begin to transform us.
Speaker 1:A God who invites us to participate alongside him as he heals and repairs and renews all things. That's his good news. And I get that doesn't fit as nicely on a t shirt. But isn't that a far more compelling story to give your life to? That God is faithful to you, and he intends to heal the world, and you believe that you are now part of that story of redemption.
Speaker 1:See, faith is supposed to be something bigger than just what you believe on a Sunday. It's supposed to be what gets you up in the morning on Monday and what drives you to go to work and what motivates you to love, what pushes you to contribute to the common good in ways that transform this world here on Earth into something that looks a little bit more like it is in heaven. See, Paul sees your faith as a dynamic interplay between the righteousness of god, the faithfulness of Jesus, and the trust that you have come to place in that story. And that is far more than a transaction that is a generative flow that you were invited into. Now, with that under our belt, we can move on to verse 25 where Paul begins to talk about what this faithfulness of Jesus entails exactly.
Speaker 1:And so in verse 25, he writes, God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith. And again, you can see here, our faith is incredibly important to Paul. We receive the work of Christ when we come to trust in him. But we have to ask now, well, what is this work of Christ And what does it mean that God presented him as a sacrifice? And to do that, we're gonna have to get technical here again.
Speaker 1:But first, let me say this. This is one of the times that I think the NIV gets it right. People ask me all the time, why I keep reading from the NIV if I am constantly arguing with how they translate things? And the simple answer is, I still think the NIV is great. As we talked about last week, translating one language into another is an incredibly difficult thing.
Speaker 1:And so there are always going to be different places that different scholars are going to disagree with each other. Overall, I I think the NIV is an excellent all around translation. And sometimes your best friends are the ones you have the most friendly disagreements with, and I like to think that the NIV and I are still good friends. That said, what I like about what the NIV has done here is that they have not over translated this. Because this phrase, a sacrifice of atonement, is actually a single Greek word.
Speaker 1:It's the word, And a lot of different translations, especially the ones that want to sound super serious, will go with either propitiation or expiation here. You might be saying, well those don't even sound like English words, so how is that helpful at all? And I would say, well, they probably aren't. I made some jokes last week about Shakespeare inventing new words and it kinda sounds like we're gonna need him again this week. But part of the problem with words like propitiation and expiation, other than that no one actually talks that way anymore is that both in different ways add an outside perspective or nuance onto what Paul is saying here in Romans.
Speaker 1:So let's start with propitiation, which is what is used in the ESV for example. Now if you look this up in an English dictionary, you're gonna find definitions like appease, pacify, placate, or mollify. Essentially, to propitiate is an attempt to appease the anger of someone or perhaps some deity through a gift. This is the idea that God is angry and he needs to be bought off or bribed in order to calm him down. So next time your significant other is upset because you forgot their birthday, you can say, allow me to propitiate you with this box of chocolates.
Speaker 1:Everything will be okay. Who needs Shakespeare? Am I right? I'll tickle your catastrophe. King Henry the fourth part too.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's all well and good as far as the English definitions go but I think most of us would say, that just doesn't sound like the god that we see in Jesus. In fact, it sounds a lot more like the gods of Rome and Canaan and Egypt and various other pagan religions were bought off all the time by gifts. And that's actually where it gets complicated. Because Hylasterion was also used in Greco Roman religions to talk about gifts that were made to the gods precisely to placate them and buy their affections. And so if you take the approach here that Paul writing in Greek to people who speak Greek is primarily thinking in the terms of Greek religion, then propitiation is the valid translation.
Speaker 1:And God is being appeased on the cross. Now, expiation, which is what is used in translations like the RSV, is slightly different. Expiation is the means used to compensate or make amends for an offense. And this time, the problem isn't that God needs to be appeased. The problem is that an injury or some kind of offense has happened and that needs to be remedied.
Speaker 1:So this time, Jesus isn't appeasing God in his death. He is somehow fixing us in his life, death, and resurrection. And the basic theological argument here is that the true God is not like the Roman or the Egyptian gods. He doesn't change. He isn't swayed by our inadequacies, and his mood isn't the problem.
Speaker 1:God is always loving and gracious toward us. God is always angry and wrathful toward what hurts us. The problem is that Paul has already said, we all mess up and we all fall short and we all need rescue. And so that break in relationship needs to be overcome. It needs to be mended.
Speaker 1:We need to be healed. And so expiation is a way of saying that Christ is faithful to take up that task on our behalf. He absorbs the worst that humanity can do to a person and he is still righteous. He is still graceful in response. Jesus makes forgiveness complete, and he invites us into that experience through our trust in him.
Speaker 1:Now that's much better and much more indicative of the language we use here at Commons. And yet the reason I ultimately like what the NIV has gone with here is because this phrase, a sacrifice of atonement, actually does a better job of drawing us back to the Hebrew roots of the word. Now, absolutely, yes. Paul is writing in Greek. And, yes, there are Greek gentiles that are reading this letter in Rome.
Speaker 1:But as we have seen throughout this letter, Paul is very comfortable addressing his Jewishness as the foundation for his trust in Jesus. This is what scholarship on Paul in Romans in particular, has really been trying to bring back into focus in the last fifty years or so. Now we call this the new perspective on Paul. The thing is the new perspective has been around for fifty years, so it's a lot older than I am. That's okay.
Speaker 1:But it's this. That yes, Paul is critical of his Jewish contemporaries. And yes, he has embraced the story of Jesus. And yes, he is firmly committed to the welcoming of all peoples into this expanded story of God. But he's still Jewish, and he still thinks like a Jew.
Speaker 1:He still sees Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. He still understands God as the creator Yahweh who has been at work through all human history leading to this moment in Jesus. And in the Hebrew world, hilasterion was the word that was used for what we call the mercy seat in the Old Testament. And the mercy seat was very simply the place where a sacrifice was made in the tabernacle of Leviticus or in the temple of Judaism. In other words, if you are talking biblically and if you are thinking in Hebrew categories, then hilasterion is primarily a geographic term referring to where something happens, not a theological term describing how it happens.
Speaker 1:And that's why I think the NIV is on the right track here. Because when they go simply with a sacrifice of atonement, that is Christian theology at its most unadorned beautiful. Atonement is a word that was first used by William Tyndale in the fifteen hundreds. And he couldn't find an English word to describe what was happening in passages like this or in the day atonement of Leviticus without adding something to it. And so what he did was he took an old English word, atonin, which meant to be at one, and he turned it into a noun, atonement or at onement.
Speaker 1:In Christ, you are made at one with God. Full stop. That's what atonement means, and that's the good news. See, God's anger is not the problem to be overcome in Romans. He doesn't need propitiation.
Speaker 1:His anger isn't the problem. Sin is. And Paul's point here is that the location of salvation has moved from the temple and from the ritual to Jesus. What he's saying is that the mercy seat, that place where you used to go and take your guilt and shame and make your sacrifice and try to repair your relationship with God. Or if you're a Gentile or a Roman who's familiar with the idea of taking a bribe to the gods to appease them in an attempt to buy their love and bypass their anger.
Speaker 1:Paul says, all of that has been replaced in Jesus with the god who has come to find you. The God who doesn't ask for sacrifices, but who becomes the sacrifice. A God who doesn't ask for appeasement, but who comes to restore relationship with you. The God who takes all of the requirements of all the religious systems onto himself and says, it's all done with. You don't need this anymore because I've come to you so that you can come to me to sit and eat and talk and rest and know that you will never need to buy your place in my presence again.
Speaker 1:As Paul says, God did this to demonstrate his righteousness. Because in his forbearance, knowing that this is where the story was always meant to go, he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it all to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time in the perfect moment just when we were ready for Jesus, and he did it all to be just and to be the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. See, Paul's point here is that with God, justice is about more than punishment. It's about restoration to relationship.
Speaker 1:And atonement is about more than appeasement. Is about being made at one with God. It is the restoration of all things through the faithfulness of Jesus and the invitation for us to trust in him. And so if you have ever felt like you needed to appease God's anger or buy his affection, if you've ever felt like the place of at onement was very far off from you, And please, would you hear Paul today in Romans three reminding you that Christ has already drawn near to you? Because God and his anger were never the problem to be overcome.
Speaker 1:And you, you were never truly an obstacle for the God who loves you this deeply. Let's pray. It's gone. Help us as we continue to wrestle with these words written thousands of years ago in a culture we can spare scarcely recognize, and the language that we struggle to make our own. To see in the midst of it the heart of your grace and your forgiveness and your movement towards us.
Speaker 1:God, by your holy spirit, would you help us to take these ideas and not just sink them into our brains, but sink them somewhere deep into our bones so that we might begin to understand at a full body level just how deeply loved we are. That you have come to us. You have disarmed the rituals. That you have made yourself accessible to each of us. If we would simply turn to trust you, to move towards you, to understand how incredibly faithful you have been to each of us.
Speaker 1:God, remind us that you sent your son not to fix something in God, but to fix something in us and in the way we understand you. Would you disarm our presuppositions and reinvent our imagination of you so that we might see you for the incredibly graceful God that you are? In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.