Saturday, November 10, 2018

saved by faith


God’s Righteousness Through Faith
21 But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.1
WHERE DOES SINLESS PERRECTION GO IN THIS PASSAGE? GOD TAKES YOUR SIN AND GIVES IT TO jESUS. I GET THE RIGHT STANDING IN CHRIST AND HE TAKES MY SIN AND PAID FOR THEM ON THE CROSS. JESUS IS THE PAYMENT FOR SIN AND WE ARE FORGIVEN BY GTRACE.
Romans 3:24 (NLT)
24 Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.
Romans 3:24 (NLT)
24 Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.
3:24 all are justified. “All” is not in the Greek text but is carried over from v. 23. Justification is an important Pauline theological teaching. Paul uses the verb for “justify” (Greek dikaioō) 25 times, primarily in Romans (15 times) and Galatians (6 times). In addition, many of the occurrences of the related word for “righteousness” (Greek dikaiosynē) relate to the doctrine of justification (Paul uses this noun 56 times, 32 times in Romans and 4 times in Galatians). “Justify” language is taken from the world of a court of law and refers to a declaration of status, not to moral transformation. Justification has a negative and a positive side: God no longer holds our sins against us in his judgment (4:8), and he gives us a righteous standing before him. freely by his grace. Whatever God does for us is done in grace (4:4–5; 5:1). grace. “Grace” is a thread that runs throughout Romans. The display of God’s grace in the gospel is rooted in the character of God himself. As 4:4–5 makes clear, no human can ever make a claim on God because of anything they have done (11:5–6). A holy God can never be indebted to his creatures. Whatever he gives us, therefore, he gives “freely” and without compulsion (4:16). Not only is grace needed at the beginning of the Christian life, but believers “stand” in grace (5:2): we live in the realm in which grace “reign[s]” (5:21; see 5:15, 17, 20). That reign of grace, Paul hastens to clarify, does not absolve us of the need to live righteously before God; rather, it gives us the power to do so (6:1, 14–15, 17). So interwoven is grace in this new era of salvation that Paul can even speak of his own ministry (1:5; 12:3; 15:15) and the ministry of believers generally (12:6) as a matter of “grace.” It is quite appropriate, therefore, that Romans is framed by prayers that God’s people might fully experience this grace of God (1:7; 16:20). redemption. In Paul’s day referred to paying money to secure a slave’s freedom. In Christ, God has paid a price to secure the release of every believer from sin’s slavery (v. 9). The OT uses “redemption” to refer to the exodus: God intervened to release his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt (Ps 111:9; cf. Ex 6:6; 15:13). Christ’s death provides a new, spiritual “exodus” for the people of God.2
PENAL SUBSTITUTION
After the rubric of obedience to the Father, the most fundamental description one can ascribe to the atonement is that it is a work of penal substitution. That is to say, on the cross, Jesus suffered the penalty for the sins of his people (hence penal) as a substitute for them (hence substitution). When man sinned against God, his sin erected a legal and relational barrier between him and God. The divine law was broken; man thus incurred guilt and is required to pay the penalty of spiritual death. The holiness of God was offended, and thus God’s wrath was aroused against sin. This leaves man alienated from God; broken fellowship and even hostility mark the relationship between God and man, who is in bondage to sin and death. If there is to be any redemption from sin and reconciliation to God, man’s sin must be atoned for. And yet man’s spiritual death and depravity leave him unable to pay the penalty for his sin. However, God in his love has appointed the Lord Jesus Christ to stand in the place of sinners to bear their sin, guilt, and punishment and thereby satisfy God’s wrath on their behalf.
For this reason Isaiah characterizes the suffering servant as the one who “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4), who “bore the sin of many” (Isa. 53:12). “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6), and so “he shall bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11). Thus, when Jesus comes into the world, John the Baptist announces him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29)—that is, by taking sin on himself. The apostle Paul declares that “for our sake [the Father] made [Jesus] to be sin” (2 Cor. 5:21a), which cannot mean that the Father turned Jesus into sin in any ontological sense but rather that he made him to be sin in the same sense in which he makes us to become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21b): by imputation—that is, by counting our guilt to be his. The curse of the law that we were under was borne by Christ, who became a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The apostle Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” Then, quoting Isaiah’s account of the suffering servant, he adds, “By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24; cf. Heb. 9:28). The Lord Jesus Christ bore the punishment of the sins of his people and thereby brought them blessing: “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace” (Isa. 53:5).
In addition to these clear statements, the New Testament attaches the concept of penal substitution to the cross of Christ by using four Greek prepositions that all have a substitutionary force: peri (“for,” “concerning”), dia (“because of,” “for the sake of”), anti (“in place of,” “instead of”), and hyper (“on behalf of”). First, Christ “suffered … for sins” (Gk. peri hamartiōn, 1 Pet. 3:18) and thus is “the propitiation for our sins” (Gk. peri tōn hamartiōn hēmōn, 1 John 2:2; 4:10). These texts teach that our sins demanded that we suffer under the wrath of God yet that Christ has done this in our place. Second, Jesus is said to have died “for your sake” (Gk. di’ hymas, 2 Cor. 8:9; cf. 1 Cor. 8:11), another clear indicator of substitution.
Third, the preposition anti is perhaps the strongest indicator of substitution, literally signifying “in place of.” This sense is clearest in Matthew 2:22, where it speaks of “Archelaus … reigning over Judea in place of [anti] his father Herod.” Matthew 5:38 also uses anti to translate the lex talionis—“An eye for [anti] an eye and a tooth for [anti] a tooth”—which mandated that an offender be deprived of his eye or tooth in place of the eye or tooth of which he deprived someone else. Jesus uses this phrase with respect to his own death when he says, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Gk. anti pollōn, Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45). That is to say, while sinners deserved to die because of their sin, Jesus laid down his life as the ransom price in the place of the lives of his people, so that they might go free.
Finally, while anti has the strongest connotations of substitution, hyper is a close second, meaning “on behalf of.” It is also by far the most common preposition to signify the substitutionary relationship between Christ and his people. The body of Christ is “given for you” (Gk. hyper hymōn, Luke 22:19; cf. 1 Cor. 11:24) and “for the life of the world” (Gk. hyper tēs tou kosmou zōēs, John 6:51), and the blood of the new covenant is poured out “for many” (Gk. hyper pollōn, Mark 14:24) and “for you” (Gk. hyper hymōn, Luke 22:20). That is to say, Christ’s body and blood are given as a substitutionary sacrifice on behalf of sinners so that they might avert wrath and punishment. As the Good Shepherd, Jesus lays down his life on behalf of the sheep (Gk. hyper tōn probatōn, John 10:11, 15; cf. 1 John 3:16), and he died on behalf of us, the ungodly (Gk. hyper asebōn, Rom. 5:6; hyper hēmōn, Rom. 5:8; 1 Thess. 5:10). He gave himself for his bride, the church (Eph. 5:25), which Paul describes both collectively (Eph. 5:2; Titus 2:14) and personally (Gal. 2:20). On our behalf (Gk. hyper hēmōn) he was made sin (2 Cor. 5:21), became a curse (Gal. 3:13), and tasted death (Heb. 2:9). The Righteous One suffered the penalty of sin on behalf of the unrighteous (Gk. dikaios hyper adikōn) so that he might reconcile those sinners to God (1 Pet. 3:18).
As the above passages show, there is no more well-attested doctrine in all the New Testament than the vicarious suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ on behalf of his people. Penal-substitutionary atonement is woven into the fabric of new covenant revelation from beginning to end, for it is the very heart of the gospel message. In free and willing obedience to his Father, the Lord Jesus Christ has stood in the stead of sinners, has died as a sacrifice for their sin and guilt, has propitiated the Father’s wrath toward them, has reconciled them to the God for whom they were created, has redeemed them out of the bondage of sin and death, and has conquered the rule of sin and Satan in their lives. Each of those themes—sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, redemption, and conquest—is a different facet of Christ’s substitutionary work and deserves further examination.3


1 The New King James Version. (1982). (Ro 3:21–26). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
2 Moo, D. J. (2015). The Letters and Revelation. In D. A. Carson (Ed.), NIV Zondervan Study Bible: Built on the Truth of Scripture and Centered on the Gospel Message (p. 2297). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
3 MacArthur, J., & Mayhue, R. (Eds.). (2017). Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth (pp. 522–524). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

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