Romans 3:21–26

Original Meaning

The Righteousness of God by Faith (3:21–22a)

IN VERSES 21–22A, Paul reveals the very heart of the good news: God’s righteousness is available to all who put their faith in Jesus Christ. This righteousness is the same as Paul already announced in 1:17. It is better translated “the righteousness of God.” Paul refers to a definite “righteousness”: the process by which God acts to put people in right relationship with himself. The “but now” that opens the paragraph contrasts the situation in the time period before Christ, which Paul has described in the previous chapters, with the situation that now exists after his coming (see also 1 Cor. 15:20; Eph. 2:13; Col. 1:22). In other words, Christ’s coming announces a decisive shift in salvation history.

God’s plan of salvation unfolds in stages—a “history”—and the coming of Jesus the Messiah inaugurates a new stage in that plan. Paul elaborates this idea in the two contrasting phrases “apart from law” and “to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” Some interpreters think Paul is saying that God has made known a new kind of righteousness—one that is “apart from law,” that is, a righteousness not based on the law (the NIV translation suggests this interpretation). But it fits Paul’s focus on salvation history better to take the phrase with the verb “make known”; note the NAB rendering, that “the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” “Law,” then, as usually in Paul, refers to the Mosaic law.

Paul beautifully captures in just a few words the continuity and discontinuity in God’s plan of salvation. The discontinuity? God reveals his righteousness in Christ “apart from” the law of Moses. Like the “old wineskins” of Jesus’ parable (Mark 2:22), the Mosaic covenant simply cannot contain the “new wine” of the gospel. The continuity? The entire Old Testament (“the Law and the Prophets”) testifies to this new work of God in Christ. The cross is no afterthought, no “Plan B”; it has been God’s intention from the beginning to reveal his saving righteousness by sending his Son as a sacrifice for us.

At the beginning of verse 22, Paul reiterates another point already made in 1:17: This righteousness of God is available only “through faith.” Now, however, Paul is more explicit: God’s righteousness “comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” The translation “faith in Jesus Christ” appears in almost all modern translations. But another translation is possible and is being supported by a growing number of scholars: “faith of Jesus Christ.” The debated construction is a genitive: pisteos Iesou Christou. The NIV takes this genitive to be “objective”; that is, “Jesus Christ” is the object of the noun “faith.” But it can equally well be a “subjective” genitive, with Jesus Christ being the subject of “faith” (note the identical construction in 4:16, pisteos Abraam, which means “the faith Abraham exercised”).2

This alternative is particularly attractive here because it removes what otherwise seems to be a needless repetition: “faith in Jesus Christ” and “to all who believe.” Paul would then be making clear that our salvation comes about both because of Christ’s “faith” or “faithfulness” to the task God gave him to do as well as from our faith in him. This idea is theologically acceptable, and Paul does use the noun pistis to refer to God’s faithfulness in 3:3.

Other considerations, however, lead me to keep the usual translation here, “faith in Jesus Christ.”3 In the present context Paul consistently uses pistis to denote the response of believers to God (see, e.g., 3:25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31; also throughout ch. 4). Moreover, Paul’s failure ever to make Jesus the subject of the verb pisteuo (believe, entrust) makes it difficult to think that Iesou Christou is a subjective genitive. Adding “to all who believe” is not needless repetition, because Paul continues to be especially concerned to show that God’s work in Christ is for everyone. His righteousness is “activated” only for those who believe, but it is also for all those who believe.

Bridging Contexts

SPEAKING ABOUT GOD. While God comes near to us in the incarnation of his Son, our world and his “world” are far apart in many ways. As long as we are part of this material world, we will always find it difficult to comprehend the things of God. Thus, to accommodate our weakness, God speaks to us in ways we can understand from our experience. Throughout the Bible, we find analogies used to communicate spiritual realities in earthly terms. Especially obvious are what we call “anthropomorphisms”: attributing to God the “form” (morphos) of a human being (anthropos) to describe his character and actions. Thus, though God has no body, we find the Bible telling us that he sees with his eyes (e.g., Ps. 11:4), hears with his ears (Ps. 130:2), and delivers with his powerful arm (e.g., Ex. 6:6).

The Bible also uses analogies to describe the eternal state that God’s people will enjoy in the afterlife. While a few Christians have thought the language used in Revelation 21, describing the new Jerusalem, might actually describe the reality of heaven, most interpreters agree it is an attempt to portray in common earthly terms a state of existence that cannot be directly described.

Most readers of the Bible have no trouble identifying the use of analogy in these kinds of passages. But the Bible also uses analogies and metaphors to get across theological truth. Romans 3:21–26 furnishes a wonderful example. Paul draws in this passage on several different kinds of human experience to depict the significance of Christ’s death. The language of “righteousness” and “justify” comes from the realm of the law court (see Bridging Contexts section on 1:16–17). “Justification” is what a judge does when he declares innocent the defendant in a trial. God’s “righteousness” carries the legal connotation of “vindication.” When he intervenes in Christ, he is vindicating his name and displaying his faithfulness to the “contract” he has entered into with the world.

The word “redemption,” by contrast, comes from the world of commerce and slavery. One redeems slaves by purchasing their freedom. Paul also uses the imagery of sacrifice, as he depicts Christ in verse 25 as the one in whom God now acts to take care, once and for all, of the problem of human sin.

Some of these metaphors do not translate as well into our society as others. In the ancient world, some scholars have maintained, religion was sacrifice. It was central to the experiences most people had in their religion. But sacrifice is not common in our day, so that the sacrificial language of the New Testament does not speak to us as directly as it did to first-century readers. We have to do some “digging” to get a sense of what sacrifice was and what it meant so that the text can speak to us with full power. Nor is the redemption of slaves common today, though it does occur. In recent days, for instance, people in some wealthy countries have raised money to purchase freedom for slaves in some African and Middle Eastern nations. That transaction is, indeed, a redemption, and it sheds light on what God has done for us in Christ.

But whatever the analogy or metaphor, and however near or far it may be to our own experience, we face two big dangers in interpreting this language. (1) We may misunderstand what is meant by the biblical analogy by failing to recognize differences between the biblical concept and a modern one. The modern person who thinks that God “redeems” people the way we “redeem” a coupon, for instance, will miss what Paul is talking about.

(2) We may unfairly elevate one metaphor over another. To be sure, the Bible uses certain metaphors for theological truth so often that we are justified in giving them a great deal of weight. Note, for example, how often the New Testament portrays God as our “Father.” But both lay people and theologians alike have sometimes made the mistake of focusing on one metaphor so much that they miss others.

For instance, Protestant theologians have often virtually equated salvation with justification. Now the law-court imagery of justification is vitally important in our understanding of what God has done for us in Christ. But it is not the only metaphor used for this reality. God also “reconciles” us (relational language), “adopts” us (familial language), “sanctifies” us (cultic language), and so on. Roman Catholic theologians have sometimes made a similar mistake by focusing too exclusively on the “body of Christ” metaphor. To comprehend fully what God does for us in Christ, we need to make use of all the biblical metaphors.

(3) A third way we can misuse the analogies Scripture uses to communicate theological truth is to take them further than the Bible does. No analogy is ever perfect. A person will use an analogy because it is parallel to the point being illustrated in some vital respect, but it will almost never be parallel in all respects. For instance, we may say that a business executive who resigned his post in the midst of an investigation of his company for fraud “sacrificed himself” for the good of the company. The analogy exists at one key point: As a sacrifice suffers harm for the good of others, so the executive suffered harm for the good of the company. But it is foolish for us to ask what god the executive sacrificed himself to or how he could have lived through the experience. We call this illegitimate extension of an analogy, making it “walk on all fours.”

The theological idea of “redemption” illustrates this tendency well. Paul and other biblical authors, as we have seen, portray Christ’s sacrifice as a “ransom”—a price paid to secure the release of captives. Confronted with this imagery, people have naturally asked, “To whom did God pay the ransom?” The answer given by many theologians, especially in the patristic period, was Satan. The church fathers argued that because of sin, the devil had the right to keep people captive to himself. Human beings sinned, and the devil therefore had control of them. In order to secure their release, God had to pay the devil a ransom, the death of Christ. So popular was this interpretation that Gustaf Aulen called it the “classic” view of the atonement.8

But the Bible nowhere teaches any ransom paid to the devil. The biblical writers repeatedly use the concept of redemption to connote that God in Christ had to liberate people from slavery to sin and that he paid a price to accomplish this. These are the points of contact between “secular” redemption and what God had done in Christ. But biblical writers nowhere speculate on whom the ransom was paid to. Their silence here suggests that this was not part of the analogy they were using.

Sacrifice of atonement. In our exposition above, we argued that the much-debated word hilasterion in verse 25 “refers to” the atonement cover of the ark and “means” sacrifice of atonement. I would like to expand on this interpretation, in two ways.

(1) Note the distinction made between “refers to” and “means.” People who study language insist this is an important distinction. Although we may not put it in precisely those terms, we make this distinction all the time. For instance, when a successful politician is soundly defeated in what looks to be his last race, we may say that he had met his “Waterloo.” Now “Waterloo” refers to the battle lost by Napoleon at that place in 1815, but it means a decisive and perhaps final defeat. To insist that the word can only function in one way or the other is to miss the flexibility of language both to “refer” and to “mean.”

It is precisely this mistake that some interpreters of Romans 3:25 make. They want—I think rightly—to keep the notion of propitiation in Paul’s language here. But they think that if hilasterion refers to the “atonement cover,” they cannot keep this theologically significant idea. Such is not the case. Since the “atonement cover” came to stand for the central act of atonement in Israel’s experience, Paul’s reference to it carries with it all the significance associated with that act of atonement. A fair reading of the Old Testament makes clear that the Day of Atonement ritual included both remission of sins (expiation) and the turning away of God’s wrath (propitiation). The very word “atonement” (from the Heb. root kpr) contains the idea of the removal of punishment due sin and includes a change in God’s attitude toward the sinner.9

In other words, I am trying to have my cake and eat it twice. Atonement cover, expiation, and propitiation are all involved in this single word hilasterion. But this expansive interpretation is justified when we distinguish between “reference” and “meaning.” When the Roman Christians came to the word hilasterion, they would immediately have thought of the Day of Atonement ritual and all that it meant. Those yearly days of atonement are now fulfilled in the one great “Day of Atonement,” when Christ died on a Roman cross for the sins of the world.

Contemporary Significance

“BUT NOW.” Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great British preacher and expositor of Romans, once said that “there are no more wonderful words in the whole of Scripture than just these two words, ‘But now.’ ” How could he make such an extravagant claim? He was thinking of the many occasions when New Testament writers use these two words to contrast the state of people or the world outside of Christ, with the situation in Christ (note: italics added in the following quotations):

What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. (Rom. 6:21–22)

For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Rom. 7:5–6)

Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. (Rom. 16:25–27)

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? (Gal. 4:8–9)

Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (that done in the body by the hands of men)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. (Eph. 2:11–13)

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light. (Eph. 5:8)

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation. (Col. 1:21–22)

You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. (Col. 3:7–8)

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” (Heb. 12:26)

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:10)

For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. (1 Peter 2:25)

As these passages reveal, the “but now” transition can refer to what God did in Christ to bring in the new age of salvation (e.g., Rom. 3:21; 7:5–6; 16:25–27; Eph. 2:11–13), or to the personal experience of transfer from the old life of sin and death to the new life of righteousness and eternal life (e.g., Col. 3:7–8). By using this language as often as they do, New Testament authors suggest we will derive great spiritual benefit from contemplating the contrast between our old life and the new. “Once” we were far from God, alienated from him and his people, stumbling in darkness, and destined for hell. “But now” we have been brought near to the God of this universe. We enjoy all the benefits of belonging to God’s own people. We “walk in the light,” understanding God’s will and seeking to follow it. We are destined for glory.

One of the striking things in these verses is that they are objective in their orientation. That is, they do not say much about a difference in the way we may feel. They focus on the difference of who we are in God’s sight. A basic theme of Romans, coming to expression again and again in the letter, is the need for Christians to understand who they are. Paul will say much more on this subject in chapters 5–8. But he lays the foundation here by reminding us of the great turning point in world history: the revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ, inaugurating a new age in which a restored relationship with the God of the universe is available for all.

I enjoy that restored relationship. The “but now” transition from the old life to the new is something I have personally experienced. It happened for me when I was a senior in college—emotionally messed up because of some broken relationships and insecure about who I was and where I was going. I called out in despair, “God, if you are there, help me.” The amazing thing is that he did. He led me to some students who shared the gospel with me, and I responded. I have been a Christian now for almost thirty years, but it is not always easy to remember what I was like in college. Yet I will never forget how lost I felt. That helps me appreciate all the more how secure I now feel—secure because I am a child of God, experiencing daily his fatherly care. If you are reading these words, you have probably had your own “but now” experience. Take some time to remember who you were and contemplate who you now are.

Grace. As our conversion recedes further and further into the past, many of us have a hard time remembering just how joyous is the “but now” transition we have been talking about. The good news becomes old hat, and we lose the sense of wonder and awe we first had when we understood that God had adopted us into his family. Why is this? There are many reasons, but Paul touches on two of them in these chapters: We fail to remember who we are, and we fail to remember who God is.

Who are we? In ourselves, apart from Christ, we are helpless slaves of sin, held captive by a power that we can never overcome. And who is God? Among so many other things, he is a holy and just. Because he is holy, he cannot tolerate sin. Sin simply cannot exist in his presence. It is foreign to the essence of his being. God can no more exist in an atmosphere of sin that I can exist in a vacuum. Because he is just, he must punish sin. God can do anything, we sometimes think. But he cannot act in a way that violates his own nature; he would “unmake” himself if he tried. Here, then, is the dilemma God himself faces. His love reaches out to us, sinful rebels that we are; but his holiness and justice prevent him from simply sweeping sin under the carpet. It must be punished. James Denney, in a classic book on the death of Christ, puts the problem, and the answer, like this:

There can be no gospel unless there is such a thing as a righteousness of God for the ungodly. But just as little can there be any gospel unless the integrity of God’s character be maintained. The problem of the sinful world, the problem of all religion, the problem of God in dealing with a sinful race, is how to unite these two things. The Christian answer to the problem is given by Paul in the words: “Jesus Christ, whom God set forth a propitiation (or, in propitiatory power) in his blood.”10

C. S. Lewis explores the same idea more imaginatively in the first of his children’s novels, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Because of selfishness and greed, a little boy has fallen into the hands of a wicked witch. Aslan, the God character, cannot, for all his immense power, rescue the boy; for he must acknowledge the “magic,” the law of nature, that has given the witch power over the boy. But there is a “deeper magic from the dawn of time” that enables one who dies willingly for someone else to take on that person’s punishment and let them go free. Thus, Aslan allows the wicked witch to execute him.

Most of us are familiar with this way of understanding the death of Christ. Modern theologians, to be sure, do not like the idea. They think it is a holdover from the Middle Ages, when theologians were obsessed with legality. They think it turns God into a schizophrenic being who has to “buy off” his own holiness with his love. But the view we have sketched above is rooted solidly in this text of Romans and provides a more satisfying understanding of the cross than any other. Only such a conception does real justice to the biblical picture of sinful humanity and a holy God. Pascal has put it very well: “Grace is indeed needed to turn a man into a saint; and he who doubts it does not know what a saint or a man is.”11