Redemption in Christ Jesus

Let’s pray as we come to God’s Word.

Heavenly Father, as you lay the bow of your Word across our ears, we ask that you would tune our hearts to sing your praise. We are easily out of tune. And if the Word comes to us and it makes a discordant sound, it is not the fault of your Word, but of our hearts. And so, give us good ears, good hearts, that we may receive what you have for us – training, correction, comfort, the exaltation of Christ and his grace. We pray in his name. Amen.

Our text this morning is Romans chapter 3, just one verse, verse 24. To get the beginning of the sentence, we’ll start there at the end of verse 22. Romans chapter 3.

“For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

We come now to this great theme, one of the greatest themes of Scripture: the doctrine of justification. The word, the verb, was used earlier. Look back at chapter 2:13, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” Though I argued that that is a negative use of the word justified that he’s laying out as he makes his case against the sinfulness of man – that it’s the doers who will be justified – and he will reach then the conclusion in chapter 3:20 that by works of the law, by doing, no one will be justified in his sight. So, he has introduced before this topic of justification and hinted at it, certainly in verses 16 and 17 of chapter 1, but now in the remainder of this dense and wonderful paragraph, he’s going to explain to us: okay, if not by works of the law, if not by doing, how then will anyone be justified? Can be a little hard to follow since verse 24 in the English just continues with this sentence, but Paul is talking about no distinction between Jew and Gentile. Verse 21 introduces that the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. So, he’s not saying that all are justified in verse 24, but as he’s carrying this argument, he’s thinking specifically about those who receive the righteousness of God. There’s no distinction with them, for every one of them has fallen short of the glory of God. And now he continues here thinking about the Christian. How are we justified? We will revisit this doctrine again in verse 26.

As I said last week, we’re moving particularly slowly. We will speed up later to take, you know, sentences at a time in a few verses, but these are so important and so rich, we’re taking over these weeks just one verse at a time. So, we’ll have occasion to come back to justification in verse 26 and elsewhere throughout the book, but here he introduces this grand theme in its positive dimension. And so, it’s worth asking, well, what is justification about? Justification is about guilt – namely, how does one receive the verdict of not guilty? So, justification is this declaration that comes to a people who are guilty. Justification is about guilt. You may say, well, I know that, and I’ve maybe heard this big theological term before, but look, I don’t go living my life most days of the week thinking about my great need for justification. People out there are not living their lives saying, “You know what I need? I need justification.” Well, I would argue that they may not be using that term, but they are, in fact, living their lives desperate for someone or something or the universe to tell them that they’re okay.

I’ve mentioned this article before – came out almost 10 years ago – by Wilfred McClay. He was at University of Oklahoma at the time. Now he’s at Hillsdale. The article was called “The Strange Persistence of Guilt,” and this professor noted that though we think of the Western world as doing away with these notions of guilt, and though perhaps we don’t have the same vocabulary – that people outside of the church don’t speak of transgression and sin and righteousness and justification – yet he makes the convincing case that though the words may have changed, guilt has only grown as a psychological force. That is, think of all of the ways in which you or the people that you interact with day by day feel this weight of guilt.

Think about just food. I know we joke about pastor’s food, diet, and it’s important to eat well, so there’s my caveat, but we have a lot of rules about food. I remember Tim Keller saying one time, “75 years ago there were a lot of rules about sex and not a lot of rules about food, and now that switched.” You can kind of do whatever you want with sex, but there’s a lot of rules about food, what you can eat, and you have to be very careful, and you have to measure it, and you may then feel very bad. And the doctors here want me to not go too far with the analogy, so pay attention to what your doctors tell you, of course, but it adds to a layer of guilt at times.

Or maybe with certain people, it’s a sense of the environment. Every time I’m at a stoplight – I have Googled so many times, someone can tell me later, how to disable the auto stop feature on a new car. I know it’s saving the planet, but I don’t want my car to turn off when I come to a stoplight. You may feel a sense of guilt. Or, maybe more apt for many of us, you set a goal at the beginning of the year, and well now we’re way into September, and you’ve long since left behind those exercise goals. Or you don’t need anyone to tell you, though your pastor does, about how you look at your phone too much or let alone your kids and their screen time. You say, “Time for your brains to get mushy; parents got to get something done.” There’s a way in which all of us feel guilty. There’s a class of people for whom guilt is almost an ever-present reality. That class of people we call parents. All the things that you know you’re not doing, and mistakes that you’ve made, whether your kids are gone and you feel like I’m the only one who has any kids who haven’t just turned out right. Doesn’t everybody else have perfect kids? It turns out nobody does, and even the people who seem like it have all sorts of issues. You feel guilty, or maybe it’s not measuring up to your own self-generated sense of an ideal or an online-generated sense of what beauty looks like in your own person or your wardrobe or your house or your life or your career. Or it may be real personal failures, real objective guilt. You have committed – all of us have – sin this week. You may have egregious sin that hangs over your head like a cloud, or it may be simply perceived failures. I don’t think I was a very good friend this week. Past, present, future. No, the world is awash in guilt.

McClay says in his summary, “Notwithstanding all claims about our living in a post-Christian world, devoid of censorious public morality, we in fact live in a world that carries an enormous and growing burden of guilt and yearns – sometimes even demands – to be free of it. Indeed (this is a good insight), it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves right with the world.” It’s what often motivates our competition. It’s what motivates our behavior online. It’s what motivates us in relational dysfunction or in overweening career ambition. You want to prove to someone – maybe your kids, maybe your parents, maybe a boss that you don’t even like, maybe just to yourself, or you’re not even sure who you’re trying to prove it to – but you want someone or something in the universe to say, “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

I think there’s three ways that most human beings try to find that justification. There’s three things we tell ourselves: I’m better than you; my sins aren’t that bad; it’s not my fault. I’m better than you. So, okay, I have sins, but if I can find someone else who seems to be worse, or if I can find you and your team and show that you’re the real bad guys, that animates so much of online animus. It’s to prove that you and your side are the real problem, and whatever I have, the whataboutism, you’re worse than me. My sins aren’t that bad. Sometimes the therapeutic language or the turn toward the self convinces us, then, that these are not sins, transgressions, iniquities, wickedness, evil. They’re just dysfunctions, or they’re just learning curves or growth edges or mistakes, or I’m just trying to find a better version of myself – all to minimize. They’re not sins against a transcendent being. I’m better than you. My sins aren’t that bad. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. There’s someone else to blame – some set of circumstances in my life, some sort of scenario, some sort of pressures I was under, the way I was brought up, the lack of opportunities. These things are not my fault.

Justification is about guilt. Everyone you meet, no matter how confident they seem, there’s something deep in their God-wired psyche that feels this psychological weight of guilt. Someone or something tell me, “I’m okay. I’m really okay.” Justification is about guilt. Justification is about the courtroom. We’ve seen that all throughout these first three chapters. Time and again, it’s very obvious that the scene is one of a courtroom, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney. Paul is making this case over and over again that you are guilty before the judge. Before God’s righteous tribunal, you stand guilty. Sometimes you will hear people – people in other Christian circles or books or articles – they will argue, well maybe Protestants or Reformed people do too much to emphasize this courtroom analogy. Sometimes you’ll hear, “You’re too focused on the legal understanding of salvation. That’s just because of Luther and Calvin, or that’s because of some medieval Latin view of the law, and you’re too focused on the legal side of our salvation.” Those voices may say salvation is about mystical union with Christ, or salvation is about participation with God. And usually, I would say, the people in our tribe want to raise their hand and say, “I see that in the Bible, too.” But this is also in the Bible, and this is front and center. Sometimes you find in more mystical traditions, liberal traditions, Eastern Orthodox tradition, an unwillingness to see what is right here, especially in Paul’s letters, but also in the gospels, that this is one of those necessary, essential, beautiful dimensions of our salvation. And sometimes when people say, well, you Reformed Christians spend too much time focusing on the legal aspect of salvation, and we say I agree there are other aspects, what it feels like – they mean, “Stop talking about that part of salvation at all.” I just want you to see this is undeniably a courtroom scene. Justification is a legal verdict of acquittal, and more than just a verdict of acquittal, it is a positive declaration of righteousness. It is a vindication that, in fact, you are righteous and innocent.

To give an illustration that means more to me than to almost any of you, the new coach for Michigan State, Pat Fitzgerald, who used to be at Northwestern, was fired by Northwestern a few years ago because it was said that he overlooked hazing violations in the program. He then sued the university for $130 million for a wrongful termination suit, and last year they settled out of court, which means he got a lot, a lot of money for what seems to have been a wrongful termination. And therefore, Spartans hired him, and they’re 1-0. Defeated Blair Smith’s mighty Toledo Rockets.

An acquittal, a vindication. Everyone thought “guilty.” Turns out “not guilty.” Now you might sense a problem there. Well, in that instance, they settled, and the statement did make a case that they found no evidence that he was guilty, so there was a vindication. So okay, he receives acquittal, because in fact he is innocent, and he did not do those things. The problem that you’ll have to wait ‘til verse 26 ‘til we finally get the solution for the problem is, “Well, how can a God of righteousness declare righteous those who are guilty?” It’s one thing if you look into the case and you realize that was a false accusation. New evidence came forward. You did not do the things that you were charged with. But what if you are guilty? Well, Paul’s argument here in 24 and 25, to reach its conclusion in 26, is to explain, well, how can God declare innocent those who in themselves are guilty, because that is not a good judge. If a good judge looks at the criminal and says, “I know you are guilty of murder, but I like you. You can go free,” no one thinks that’s a good judge. That is not a righteous verdict. So, the question that Paul will come to in verse 26, how can God be just and the justifier of the ungodly? And the answer is through faith in Christ. We’ll put that together when we come back to verse 26. The start of the argument that will conclude in verse 26 is here in verse 24. What he’s going to do is introduce these two key terms. How can God be just and the justifier of the ungodly? Redemption verse 24. Propitiation, verse 25.

So, this morning, verse 24, they are justified by his grace as a gift through redemption. We’ve already sung this. We’ve heard it in the Scriptures. If you’ve been around the church for only weeks, you will hear this word redemption. At the very least, this Greek word means deliverance, freedom. The Old Testament classic example is of Israel in the Exodus. They were in bondage. They were slaves. They were redeemed. They were set free so that they are no longer captives. One summer when I was in college, I was a camp counselor. Grateful lots of you have done that. It took me ‘til about lunch on the first day when campers were there to realize I’d made a serious mistake with my summer, but that was me. They were kids toward the younger side, so it felt a little bit like watching kids and not eating or sleeping, but there were fun things. And one of the things we always did was a big camp-wide game of capture the flag. Now, these were fourth, fifth, sixth graders. I was a college student at the time, at the peak of my physical ability. And what a peak it was. But as you would go and divide the camp in two, and you would have, you know, the flag here that they had to grab and then, you know, your team’s flag was hid somewhere in their side. And if you went over to their side to find the flag, you could be, you know, take the sock out of your bag, you could be captured. If you were captured, then you went to the jail. And the way to be released from the jail is somebody from your team – now, they had they had jailers and guardians – someone, brave uncle Kevin, counselor, had to dodge and weave and make his way through all of the sixth graders, reaching for this. I have a scar where a piece of my skin was taken out, but I set the captives free, and I made it to the jail, and they were redeemed. They were delivered. And then you’d lead them out from the enemy’s territory onto your side. Now, this will be an illustration, perhaps, for another Romans sermon: sometimes those same kids would, in the next moment, wander back into the enemy territory. That’s a sanctification sermon. But I would go, and they would be free. Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it. A deliverance.

Deliverance here – notice the ESV uses the word redemption, which is, I think, a better translation than simply deliverance because it also includes the idea of a purchase. Deliverance by price. The word is often used in the Old Testament and in the ancient world of slaves, of prisoners, of those condemned. so that you are set free from slavery or captivity or death by means of a ransom paid. Jesus saying he came to give his life as a ransom for many, a redemption based upon a ransom paid. 1 Corinthians 6:20, “You were bought with a price.” And the price, over and over in the New Testament, we are told that the price is the blood. And we’ll come to the word blood next week in verse 25. Ephesians 1:7, “We have redemption through his blood.” Acts 20:28, “God purchased the church with his blood.” 1 Peter 1, “We have been redeemed not through perishable things, but through the precious blood of Christ.” So, this is part of Paul’s argument: why God is just to justify the ungodly, because there was a purchase paid for this deliverance. That’s what a redemption is. You pay the ransom price. It’s paying the bail, posting the bond, so that the captive can be set free. We’ll say this over and over again. You need to understand God’s justification of sinners does not take place by the setting aside of justice, but by the fulfilling of justice. God did not say, “There is a just claim against you, but I’m God, and I like you, and it’s not a big deal.” That would be the setting aside of justice, and he would not therefore be just. But redemption and propitiation will explain to us why God did not set aside justice, but in fact, a price was paid.

You may say, “Well, to whom was this price paid?” And that’s not the point here in Romans 3. It’s not the big idea, but we know from elsewhere in Scripture and implied in this passage, from all that we’ve seen in Romans 1-3 about God as the judge, that the purchase price is paid to God. Don’t think that it’s bad God the Father and good cop the Son. This whole plan is initiated by a loving God to redeem his own people at the cost of his own Son and his blood. There’s no fissure in the Trinity, but the payment price of the redemption is offered to God because he is the one who is offended. This is why, not to spoil it, we love The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We love The Chronicles of Narnia, but you understand that the atonement picture in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is Aslan’s death is a purchase price to whom? To the White Witch. To Satan. This was sometimes found in the early church, that the atoning sacrifice – the redemption price – was paid a ransom to Satan. Well, the death of Christ is Christ’s victory over demonic powers. Christ our victor. That is certainly an important element of what he did. He routed the enemies of darkness. He made light of them. He laughed and scorned over them. But the purchase price of this redemption is not paid to Satan, but to a just and holy God whom we have offended.

And notice that it is not some abstract redemption, but the redemption is found in a person. Redemption that is in Christ Jesus. In Christ Jesus. Not merely procured by Christ Jesus or paid by Christ Jesus, but the redemption itself is in Christ Jesus. The Passover lamb was the payment price for the deliverance from the angel of death in the Exodus. So, the Exodus was not only a deliverance, it was a ransom paid. This means redemption is not external to Christ, as it might be if you go ahead and pay the check for someone else’s meal. Or someone else is in a bind, and they don’t have their credit card, but you for some strange reason are carrying actual currency with you, and you say, “Don’t worry about it. I have a $20,” and you pay for someone else’s expense. You see a friend that you know, and you quietly in the restaurant tell the waiter to come over, or waitress, and you say, “Go ahead, give their check to me, and I’m going to pay it. I’m going to redeem their meal. I will purchase it on their behalf.” Now, that’s a good thing to do. That is a purchase price external to you. It comes from you, and you have done it, but we have something even more here. Christ did not merely procure our redemption. He himself is our redemption. What greater price can you pay than your own blood? And of course, it’s not that it’s the actual red stuff that comes out of him that is valuable, but blood as the symbol for his whole life. Christ’s life on the cross for your sakes, atoning sacrifice, purchase paid. This was God’s idea, God’s plan. The covenant between God the Father and God the Son. It’s God’s work in you as you are in Christ by faith that redeems you.

I love the connection that Calvin sees here: how, he asks, how could God detest his own work in us? It is not our creation as men, but our uncleanness which extinguishes the light of his image. “When the washing of Christ has wiped away the state of moral defilement” – now listen to what Calvin says here, because if anybody else said this but John Calvin, you’d say, I don’t know if that’s really, can I say that? But here’s what Calvin says. “The washing of Christ has wiped away the state of moral defilement because he loves and kisses us as his own pure work.” We feel nervous about saying kiss. Kiss on the forehead. Of course I love you. It’s my work in you. Christ in you, the hope of glory. The purchase price. The redemption is in Christ Jesus. How can you not have assurance? That’s what the Reformation was about. It was about justification because it was about assurance. And even today – I know we have friends and family, some of us, you maybe even be from a Catholic background – that’s one of the great dividing points. Can you really have assurance? Can you come to the end of your life and know with confidence I belong to Christ, and Christ is in me, and there’s nothing left to be paid for? No purification I need to undergo after I die. But I can know – not because of anything in me, but because of Christ in me – that the redemption price has been paid, and of course God loves me and, as a father to his son or daughter, embraces us and gives us a kiss on the forehead and says, “You’re mine.” That’s why justification works. Because of redemption. We’ll come next week to propitiation.

But I just want you to see those other two words to tell us how it works, because it’s obvious the big theological words, and they come with those Latinate endings, the -tion: justification, redemption, propitiation. So, we’re apt to miss the words that come before that: we are justified by his grace as a gift. So, if redemption is describing how, or rather why, justification works, these two words are giving to us the how it works. It works as a gift. Now this word in Greek is the word “gift” made into an adverb. So, some translations say freely. That’s adverb. You might think of it as giftingly, or as the ESV has it, appropriately: by his grace as a gift. The word means without payment of money. Do you see what Paul is doing here? It’s so wonderful. Redemption and gift. Well, which is it? Is our justification free? Yes. Was it costly? Absolutely. That Christ Jesus paid the cost so that for us it can be given as a gift. And when I say gift, you need to think like a child receiving a gift, not like an adult receiving a gift. It’s nice as adults. People get us something for Christmas or birthday. But usually, it’s the thought that counts. Adults make sure that their gifts come with gift receipts. Why? Because there’s a good chance you’re going to return it. Most of the things that people get us for gifts as adults – if we don’t have it now, we don’t really need it, because we would have bought it for ourselves. But it’s nice. Gave me a gift card, or you gave me a gift, and we have to be specific as adults. You have to send – now people make registries. It used to be just weddings, and it was well, okay, babies. And now it’s just, hey, Labor Day is tomorrow. I got some ideas on Amazon. And we tell people. There’s no guesswork. You don’t have to try. Just here. Just click – your credit card’s already in there. Just hit the link, and get me my gift. Just take the guesswork out of it, because otherwise we don’t know if someone will like it.

I am a brave man, and I have at times tried to buy clothes for my wife for her birthday. Sometimes even dresses. It’s been wild. I have – this is true – I have realized, and she said I could share this. It’s more about me, but I’ve realized there’s roughly about a 10-12% chance that I can pick out a dress that she would like. So, I have been known on occasion to purchase eight dresses for her, knowing that seven will be returned. I don’t know. You know how long, women, it takes me to pick out eight dresses for my wife? Almost eight minutes. A lot of stuff online. I can walk through a store. I just try to get the right size. Just, “I like that. I like that. I like that.” 12% chance. One out of eight. That’s how we think about gifts as adults. It’s the thought that counts.

But you got to think about gifts like a kid. Christmas, birthday. Why? Because you’re going to get something, even if your parents spoil you throughout the year like we do too much, or maybe you get an allowance or you get paid for doing some chores and you have something, but really you’re going to get something that you could not afford on your own. Remember, I still have – my kids have slowly broken it, but they’re still there – some of the big dinosaur Transformers I got for Christmas one year. Man, that thing must have cost 50 bucks back in 1980-something. I still have it. I could never have gotten that for myself, and there it was. That’s how you think about a gift as a kid. I was not expecting this. I don’t deserve it. I could never, ever, on my own afford it. You need to think like a child when you think about God’s gift of justification. His gift is perfectly gratuitous – meaning, as to the mode of our justification and the motivation for the justification, completely gratuitous – that is, entirely without any grounding in ourselves. There was nothing within us that drew us to himself, that he should have given us a gift. But it is according to sovereign, unmerited goodness on the part of God. His justifying decree is not prompted, grounded or constrained by anything we are or do. But it comes to us as a gift.

And not only as a gift because, okay, you give your kids something at birthday or Christmas, and you love them. But this is a gift for those who deserve just the opposite. As if your child snuck into your room, stole your diamond necklace, went out without telling you, and she lost it. And you go up into her room where she sits, knowing that she’s guilty, awaiting punishment, and you open up a bigger and better diamond necklace for her very own. She doesn’t deserve that. Justification through redemption by propitiation is ours by a gift.

And then this last word: it’s so common, but may it not lose its sweetness to us. We are justified by his grace. Grace. Some of you have a flag out at your house, maybe a country flag. People often comment if they from another country and come to the United States, like “Wow, you people really like your American flags.” Yeah, we do. American flags. You know, sorry for our British friends here. I get a little lump in my throat when Mel Gibson comes at the end of The Patriot and just waving that a big American flag. Our Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem, is about a flag that was still there. Fort McHenry through the night, the British didn’t get us, and we still have the flag waving over. Maybe you have the state of North Carolina. Maybe you live over the border. You got the nice Palmetto in the state of South Carolina. It’s a nice flag. Or this time of year, college football starting up. You see pickup trucks. It’s usually pickup trucks, and they got the big Tarheel or Georgia or they got Clemson. Not this morning, but – yeah, I’d rather lose like Clemson than win like Michigan did last night. Text Tom Groelsema, and tell him.

What does the flag say about you? Says this is who we are here. This is what’s important to us. You want to know something about us and kind of what our identity is? We’re going to fly this flag. Grace ought to be the flag that waves over every bit of your life and every bit of this church. You had a hard day? His mercies are new every morning. He’ll give you a new reason to fly that grace flag tomorrow. Talking with a friend of mine this week on a text thread, and they were – these are sort of things we talk about in this text thread – they’re saying, you know, is the American experiment a failed experiment? And be that as it may, political question we don’t have to get into, but one of the things I said in response is we do have a tendency to just see all the negatives, because that’s what the news tells us. It’s not a story when “happy family goes on vacation.” Nobody cares. It’s a story when terrible things happen, and people do terrible things. “City in America functioning well.” Nobody makes a headline. You just see bad things. It’s easy to just count up the no votes. And I said, all of that’s true. Any sort of case you want to make about bad things, there’s plenty of evidence to go around, but you will not find a place that has more evangelical Christians, more healthy churches, more strong Christian institutions, more Christian publishers, more good seminaries, more missionaries sent out. There’s a whole lot of ways that we ought to be waving the flag to say God has shown us a lot of grace.

And in your life – now it may not be the same. We have different stories. You have different grace flags to fly. Some of you, you’re brought up in a Christian home. You have Christian parents. Others you say, “I was saved in the most dramatic way after I had made complete shipwreck of everything.” But you have food. You have shelter. You have friends. You’ve been brought from darkness into light. John 1:17, “The law was given by Moses. Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” That’s what Romans ought to be doing for us. Week after week now, you hoist up that flagpole every morning for you and your family, because you’re a sinner, justified by redemption and propitiation, given as a free, sovereign, unilateral gift. You suffer. There’s suffering. Bad things happen to good people. That’s true. But the story of your life, if you’re a Christian – the story of my life – is the story of grace, which is why when Paul is going to make the turn in the chapters ahead to talk about how then you ought to live, it ought to be so welling up within us that we’re saying, “Well, of course the whole banner waving over my life is grace. Of course I’m grateful. Of course I’m obedient. Of course I present my body as a living sacrifice, because everything I have and everything I am is grace.

What’s the story of this church? It’s a story of grace. What’s the story of your family? It’s the story of grace. What’s the story of your life? It’s the story of grace. And we come as God feeds us. Christ himself, the host and the meal at this table, a table of costly, redeeming, free, sovereign grace, that we might be fed, strengthened, and brought safely home. Let’s pray.

Our heavenly Father, we give thanks for your holy Word, for the gifts that you have given us, the grace that you have lavished upon us. As you have fed us by the Word proclaimed, now we ask that you feed us by the Word that we can see and taste and touch and smell, that we might be strengthened and you might have mercy on these poor sin-sick souls. We ask in Christ’s name. Amen.