Romans chapter 3. As you're turning
there, I'm going to read to you from Proverbs 17. Proverbs 17
says, verse 15 says this, a very, again, a well-known scripture.
He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just,
even they both are abomination to the Lord. To say that a wicked
man is just, or to condemn a righteous man. Both of those are an abomination
to the Lord. Now we know from scripture, especially
from the prayer of Abraham, that the judge of all the earth will
do right. God cannot not do right. He must
be just. It's his nature to be just. He's
righteous, and everything that he does is done right. He cannot
fail to be right. And that is the reason why the
question naturally comes up, how can God be just and yet justify
the ungodly? If it's an abomination to justify
the ungodly, or to proclaim the wicked to be just, or to condemn
the righteous, then how can God justify the ungodly? That's the
real question. And that is answered for our
comfort and our salvation in Romans chapter three. And so
I want to look at these verses again with you, verses 24 through
25 especially, and 26. And today I want to focus on the the redemption and the propitiation. I've entitled this message, Propitiation
Through Faith in His Blood. It's taken right out of verse
25. Propitiation through faith in
his blood. Read together with me from verse
24 again. And as we read this, every phrase,
one thing you'll notice with the apostle Paul is that he writes
very compactly. words that he uses and pairs
of words and phrases are packed with meaning and truth. And he
doesn't waste words. That's how he's able to get the
entire revelation of God's gospel in just a few pages of Romans. If I would have written this,
I would never have finished. I'd still be flailing away. But
he did it very efficiently, according to the will of God. But that
efficiency has to be added. You know, it's almost like a
concentrated... You know, we used to mix up Kool-Aid when
I was a kid. You add a little bit of that stuff in there and
you mix the whole thing with a gallon of water. And the whole
thing tasted good. But that's what we need. We need
the water of life added to these words. So that they just grow
in our hearts and fill us with the awe. and the faith and the
worship towards God for what He said here. But look at this
with me again. And I'm going to read from verse 24. Being
justified. Even the tense of the word being
is important. Being justified freely by His
grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom
God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to
declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are
passed through the forbearance of God, to declare, I say at
this time, his righteousness, that he might be just and the
justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. We're justified freely
by His grace. Sometimes when I'm working on
the sermons or writing a letter or whatever I'm doing, I sit
close to the computer because it's easier on my eyes and allows
me to focus on just those few words. Justified freely by His
grace. And let those words just sink
down into your soul. Justified. Justified means that
God declares that we that the ones he justifies are perfectly
conformed to all his law requires. All his law requires. And it
says here that that act of God, it's an act of God. It's not
an act that we perform. It's an act of God. To be justified
is a declaration, a pronouncement, an assessment by the judge of
all the earth And he pronounces the judgment justified. And God says that he does that
freely by his grace. It's an act of his grace on God's
part. But on the part of undeserving sinners, it's pure grace. It's
a free gift. And that gift of justification
comes to us because God gives us His gift of righteousness.
It's a gift. Righteousness is a gift. The
wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.
Eternal life is a reward for righteousness, and God justifies
by seeing the righteousness of Christ given to us. He gives
it to us. Now, it's God the Father that
justifies, as I mentioned last time, and He justifies His elect
out of a motivation that springs entirely from Himself. It's motivated
by His grace. It's not motivated by what He
finds in us. There's no reason in sinners
that God would justify them. That's the conclusion of Romans
3, 19 and 20. We're not justified. And I was
telling Denise, I like those nots in the Bible. because I
call them the blessed nots. Not K-N-O-T, but N-O-T. Not. He says, we're not justified
by works. We're not justified by works
here in Romans chapter 3 verse 20. Therefore, by the deeds of
the law, there shall no flesh be justified in his sight. And
in Galatians 2.16, it says, knowing that a man is not justified by
the works of the law. And Titus 3.5, it says, not by
works of righteousness which we have done. Those are the nots
of scripture, not. And there are many other things
that we could say about that, but the important thing to take
away from that is that God's justification of His people is
entirely by grace. It's entirely by grace. It's
not by what we do. Now, these blessed nots irritate
and aggravate us naturally in our ignorance and our pride and
in our self-righteousness. But when we come to believe the
gospel, they're the greatest comfort and they're the greatest
joy of every believing sinner. If justification is not of anything
in me, then I qualify to be justified. If justification depends in any
way on me, I will. I have already disqualified myself. So isn't that a blessing? To
know the justification, acceptance by God. God finding us to be
perfectly conformed to his law is not by what he finds in us. It's not by works. It's not by
works of righteousness, which we've done. And works of righteousness
are the very best thing we can do. The very best thing. It's
not by them. And we'll see a lot more what
it's not. But not only is there no cause in ungodly, unrighteous,
sinful man for God to justify him, but it's also true that
there is no God that can justify the ungodly except the God of
Scripture. God claims this as His great
glory. In Isaiah 45, if you want to
turn there with me, Isaiah 45. We're talking about God's justification
of His people as an act of His pure grace, but it's according
to His righteousness. He says here in Isaiah 45, verse
21, In fact, I'll read verse 20.
Assemble yourselves and come, draw near together, you that
are escaped out of the nations. They have no knowledge that set
up the wood of their graven image and pray unto a God that cannot
save. Idols, if you were to sum up
everything about idols, you could say, idols don't see, idols don't
taste, they don't speak, they don't walk, they don't handle,
they don't do all these things. But what you have to conclude
from that is, therefore, idols cannot save. And that's what
God says here. Idols cannot save. This is something
God has been declaring from before the foundation of the world. Who hath told it from that time,
have not I the Lord, and there is no God else beside me? A just God and a Savior. There is none God beside me."
Now if he was just a just God, it wouldn't give me comfort. But he's also a Savior. And the
fact that he's a just God means that he will save in a way that's
just. And the fact that He's a just
God and a Savior means that even those who have nothing in themselves
can find comfort and joy and rejoicing in that God justifies
the ungodly for nothing found in them. There's no God beside
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who justifies the
ungodly. And mostly, mostly, the reason
that justification is not by anything in us, the way we see
this in scripture, is that God says it plainly. He says in Romans
chapter 4, in verse 16, it is of faith, Romans 4, 16, it is
of faith that it might be by grace. God's salvation to us
is the work of Christ for us, and He brings it to us. We receive
it by faith in order that, it's done that way, in order that
it might be by grace. And it's by grace to this end
that the promise might be sure to all the seed. Not one of God's
people will be left out. The promise will be made sure
to them because it's all of grace. If it's of grace, God does the
work. We don't depend in any way on
the work God does. And God will save his people
most certainly because it's all of grace. And if it's of grace,
it's no more of works. Otherwise, grace is no more grace. But most importantly, and this
is what I was trying to get to, most importantly, if righteousness
come by something we do, then Christ died for nothing, and
that cannot be. That is the most unassailable
argument of how our salvation comes by grace alone, because
it's Christ that died. So the second thing we see in
Romans chapter three, and that was really just a summary of
what we talked about last week, That it's God the Father who
justifies freely by His grace. It's grace on His part. It's
a gift towards us. But He doesn't do it just gratuitously. What I mean by that is He just
doesn't do it on a whim or as an act of His will without something
to ground that declaration or that pronouncement, the actual
justification of His people. It's founded on something. Everything
God does is founded on the throne of God's justice and all that
God is. Not just His justice, but all
that God is. And whatever God does, it says,
is forever. Nothing can be added to it, nothing
can be taken from it. It's forever. And this is something
that we see in the next part. This justification, which is
to us a gift, and on God's part a free gift of His grace, is
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now, I know
that we know something about redemption, but it warms my heart
to review again what redemption is. Every time I hear about it,
it thrills me. We were studying, and we'll go
back to it eventually, in Exodus about the children of Israel
being redeemed out of Egypt. Redemption is setting free an
imprisoned debtor by payment of a ransom. It's simply that. It's setting free a lawfully
imprisoned debtor. A debtor who's in prison because
of what he did to get himself in debt, and that prisoner is
set free by payment of a ransom. The debt is sin. That's the debt
we owe, isn't it? And the prison is God's justice,
which calls for a curse from God. The wrath of God, really,
is what we need to be redeemed from. Galatians 3.13 says, Christ
hath redeemed us from the curse of the law being made a curse
for us. It's clear from Scripture that
it's Our redemption from a curse, that's the thing in which we're
held, the justice, the curse of God under the justice of God's
law. The ransom is the blood of the
Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Lord of glory, and payment
is made to God Himself. In old history, men used to say
that the ransom Jesus paid was made to the devil. But that's
totally false. And that shows you how far God
in His mercy has led His people to understand the truth of Scripture.
That over the course of centuries, men believed that that ransom
was actually paid to the devil. It was not. It was made to God
Himself. His justice was compensated. for the debt we had incurred. And the liberty of this redemption
is the freedom of forgiveness of all of our sins. But it's
not just a liberty of the debt we owed, it's a restoration to
the inheritance God predestined us to, which is an inheritance
that's eternal and in Christ. So the basis of forgiveness is
the ransom price of Christ's own blood offered in payment
to God's justice to free us from the wrath of God. That's redemption.
Now, redemption is the work of a Redeemer. And for God to transfer
the guilt of one to another, have you ever thought about that? How could God transfer the guilt
of His people to Christ? Well, there was a provision for
this in the law called the Law of Redemption. And the Law of
Redemption works this way. There must be a Redeemer, one
who has no debt of his own to pay. If he has a debt that he
himself owes and he's indebted, he has nothing with which to
pay. But Christ is the Redeemer. He had no debt of his own. He
was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, made higher
than the heavens, and He's the Redeemer. And, not only must
He have no debt, but He must be near to the one He's going
to redeem by relationship of kinship. He must be very near
to them. And the Lord Jesus Christ, He
is so near to His people that He took their nature. He's called
their brethren. He's so near to them, He's called
the head, and they're called members of His body. And as our
federal head, like Adam was our federal head, he took our case
as our surety. He engaged himself as our surety
to take all the obligations that we owe to God and satisfy for
them. So He is our near kinsman. And
number three, He must be able to pay the full debt in order
to redeem. And the Lord Jesus Christ could
pay the full debt because as God and as man, He was able to
pay a full debt that God's justice demanded. And how did He pay
that? Well, we've already said it.
It's by His death, by His obedience. You see, redemption is the whole
work of Christ, the entire work of Christ, from His incarnation
to His ascension to glory. And even now, interceding for
us as our High Priest, that's our redemption, what Christ has
done for us. And He's acting on our behalf.
He's able to do that. He is the Lord God Almighty. But the fourth thing here is
that he not only must be able to pay, but he must be willing
to pay. The Lord Jesus Christ was willing
to pay. He offered himself to God. He
engaged himself. He says, I give my life a ransom
for many. And then the fifth thing is that
not only must he be able and willing to pay, but the creditor
to whom the debt is owed, which is God's law and justice, must
allow payment from the Redeemer. And so the Lord God Himself approved
of Christ as our Redeemer. In 1 Peter 1, verse 20, it says
that Christ was foreordained before the foundation of the
world to redeem His people by His own blood. That's what the
Lord Jesus Christ. We're not redeemed with corruptible
things, but by the precious blood of Christ, who was ordained before
the foundation of the world to be our Redeemer. God accepted
Him as our Redeemer, to act as the Redeemer for our debts. But
not only that, but God must accept the payment from our Redeemer.
And He accepted the Lord Jesus Christ. How do we know He accepted
that? Because He raised Him from the dead. And then finally, Not
only are all these things true, but the redemption isn't complete
until the freedom is given to the debtor. The one who is imprisoned
and in debt is actually set free, and inheritance is granted to
him. And so the Lord Jesus Christ has set us free from the law,
from sin, from death, from everything into which we were indebted.
Free from sin's debt and guilt. Free from sin's debt and sting. and the death that we owed God.
And we're free from the devil, from the father of sin, and we're
free from the world, the culture of sin. We're free from the grave,
the prison of sin. We're free from all these things
because Christ has set us free. Now, I want you to understand
this about redemption because this is how our justification
comes to us. It doesn't come without payment. It comes by payment. And this
is very important that we understand this, because this is building
up to what it says, finally, in verse 25, where we're about
to read here, about a propitiation. Because when he talks about a
redemption, he's going to talk how the payment was made. The
payment that Christ made was a propitiation. Now, this is
important to see that all these things that God did for our justification,
there's a number of points to make about this, but one of the
points to be made about this is that God did it. We had no
part in it. This is the work of God. God
initiated the work. God provided the Redeemer. It
was His justice that accepted the Redeemer. And it was Christ,
the God-man, who performed the redemption and actually set us
free by His death. and by his resurrection. These
are the things that we see in the redemption. But then we see
something else here in verse 25 where he says this, whom God
has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood. God
has set him forth. You see, God And I said this a second ago,
but God, it was God, not man, who set Christ forth. We didn't
think of redemption. We didn't think of propitiation.
We were not interested in satisfying God's justice. We were opposed
and hostile to God. But God took initiative. And
he didn't just take initiative for His initiative that he took was
something that his own nature required him to take. It was
because of his law and his justice that he not only took this initiative,
but it was his law and his justice that required him to take this
initiative in order to be gracious and to save his people. All of
the perfections of God, His grace, His mercy, His law, His justice,
His faithfulness, His righteousness, His power, His wisdom, all are
magnified to the highest level in the redemption of the Lord
Jesus Christ for His people. So God set Him forth, not man. God set Him forth. God's salvation
of His people was not done in private. It was publicly done. And it was publicly done for
a number of reasons, but not the least of which is to display
God's holiness and righteousness, because He would justify the
ungodly. Not only set forth to guard against an unjust justification, but
also set forth to magnify His grace in justifying His people. And to show forth His wisdom,
how He could be just and justify His people. This was something
that God did. God lifted up Christ on the cross. for all to see, for all of the
universe to see what God thought of sin, the love of God for his
people, and his great grace towards them. God set him forth. Now,
how did God set him forth? Well, it already says it right
here in verse 25. God set him forth a propitiation
through faith in his blood. He set him forth a propitiation. What is a propitiation? A propitiation
means, the word means to appease or to conciliate. To appease
means to pacify, to remove the cause of wrath, to set at peace
the one who is offended. And to conciliate means to restore
or to gain the favor of the one who's been offended. God was
justly, His wrath was justly against His people. And we didn't
take the initiative to appease his wrath. We couldn't. We were
helpless to do something like that, ignorant of it. We had
no wisdom of how to do it. How could a sinner hope to satisfy
the justice of God, apart from his own death? He couldn't. But
God in wisdom found a way to propitiate himself. And that's
what propitiation means, first of all, is that God took action
to satisfy his own justice, in order that he might be just,
and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." And so,
Christ is set forth as a Redeemer, not as one who pays with money,
or who fights with weapons, like we would fight, or even one who
influences men to change by his example, or as one You hear about
this, you've even maybe experienced it. We paint the picture of the
historical sufferings and death and life of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and people understand that in kind of a... A narrative that
they can sympathize with and they see the example that Jesus
set. Oh, he laid his life down for his friends. That encourages
me to be warmed up to God and somehow be reconciled to Him.
But that's not what the death of Christ was for. The death
of Christ was not designed, the propitiation of Christ was not
designed to make a change in us. It was designed to satisfy
God's nature and His character, His demand for holiness and justice,
and to satisfy His grace towards His people, all in one act. Propitiation was God-word. It says in Hebrews chapter 5
verse 1, Every high priest taken from among men is ordained for
men in things pertaining to God. that he might make, that he might
offer sacrifices and gifts and sacrifices to God for sin. So what God does in the offering
is he offers, Christ is offered to God. He's not offered to men.
Christ was offered to God. It was his blood that was shed
that satisfied God's justice. And when we think about that,
we think, you know, we look at the sacrifices of the Old Testament,
we see all the animals slain and their blood poured out throughout
the centuries, and sometimes we think that there's some kind
of a weird, morbid interest that God has in death. But the reason
the death of Christ satisfied God, God's justice, is because
it provided an equivalent payment for God's justice, and that payment
came at the price of one who is so high and out of the heart
of one who was so great that he would give himself willingly
for his people all the way to death so that his death for them
would pacify God in his justice and satisfy it and say, as it
says in Isaiah 53, he was well pleased with Christ. It pleased
the Lord to bruise him. It pleased Him because He made
His soul an offering for sin. The propitiation that Christ
made for his people is Godward. God took the initiative. God
provided him. God received the payment from
him that our sins deserved. Full compensation to his justice. And the fact that it had was
that it made peace between God's righteousness and God's mercy. Between God's, as it says in
Psalm 85, righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Mercy
and truth are met together. Righteousness and peace have
kissed each other. There's a hymn by a man whose
last name was Benny. And in this hymn, he writes of
God's all-seeing, just eye. He says it this way. He calls
God's all-seeing eye eternal light. He says eternal light.
This is who God is. Eternal light. eternal light,
how pure that soul must be, which, placed within thy burning light,
shrinks not, but with calm delight can live and look on thee." And
then he goes on to say, "...the angels that surround thy throne
may bear that burning bliss, for surely they have never, never
known a fallen world like this." But how shall I, whose native
sphere is dark, whose mind is dim, before the ineffable appear,
and on my naked spirit bear the uncreated being? That was the big question that
he had. How can I, whose native sphere
is dark, whose mind is dim, before the ineffable holiness of God
and endure his all-seeing eye on my naked spirit and he says
there is a way for man to rise to that sublime abode an offering
and a sacrifice, a Holy Spirit's energies, an advocate with God. These, these prepare us for the
sight of holiness above. The sons of ignorance in night
may dwell with the eternal light through the eternal love." And
so that captures the essence of what God has done here in
the propitiation. He has set forth Christ openly
to all of the intelligent universe as a propitiation for his sins. He avoided executing war by bringing
his wrath on his people, by making Christ a propitiation for them,
and so making peace with them. And he set aside the cause of
hostility in our sin, satisfying God's justice, and actually made
himself favorable to us. So the essential idea, the essential
truth of appreciation is that it satisfies God's justice. If we miss that, then we've missed
the purpose of what God is saying here. Now remember, the argument
that Paul is making by the Spirit of God is that justification
is free by God's grace apart from anything that is in us,
apart from anything we do. So that the purpose of this propitiation
is its effect on God, not on man. And so a propitiatory sacrifice
satisfies God's justice. It removes the just cause of
His wrath. It makes God favorable towards those His wrath was against. And it does not produce any subjective
change in the one making the sacrifice, that is, man. Does it produce a change in us?
No. It was entirely a transaction
between God the Son and God the Father in providing Himself to
God. The world went dark. God received from Christ, on
the cross, a full payment of redemption, a full ransom price,
in the form of a propitiatory sacrifice. That's what Christ
did. So, propitiation is accomplished
when God is satisfied. You see this? It's accomplished
when God is satisfied, not when man comes to know it or experience
it or even when man believes it. Propitiation is accomplished
when God is satisfied. God justifies freely by His grace. Nothing in man motivates Him
to do that. In fact, everything in us demands that God's wrath
be against us. But God's justice has accepted
from Christ a full payment that is entirely consistent with His
justice. So justification is entirely
owing to what God thought and how he responded to what Christ
did in offering himself unto death as our propitiation for
the sins of his people. And that's important that we
understand that. If we understand this, then we'll understand the
truth of justification by faith. Propitiation means that God is
satisfied because of what he thinks of what Christ offered.
not because he thinks of something that we've done, not because
he performs something in us that makes us holy before him, but
entirely because God accepts his people entirely because of
what he thinks of what Christ has done. That's what propitiation
is saying. God did it. God accepted from Christ for
his people and he was satisfied. Now, when it says that we're
justified by faith in his blood, by faith in His blood here in
Romans 3.25, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through
faith in His blood. Understand this, that when He
says faith in His blood, it necessarily excludes all participation on
our part as the ground of our acceptance before God, doesn't
it? When God says that we're justified by propitiation through
faith in His blood, justified freely through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation
through faith in His blood, He's saying that the thing that is
the ground or the basis of God to be able to freely justify
His people is the blood of Christ, is what God thought of what Christ
did. You see that? To me, that is
the most comforting and liberating and the greatest cause for me
to admire the wisdom and the grace and the justice of God
all at once. That God finds in Himself a reason
that moves Him to provide Christ and then to offer His Son and
then to receive from Christ all that He requires of me. And He
finds in Christ everything He looks for from me. And He received
Christ from the dead, and in receiving Him, He received me
in Him. That gives me the greatest comfort
and the greatest confidence before God. That's what God says when
he means he's justified us through faith in his blood. God directs
us to an outside of me event that took place when the Lord
Jesus Christ offered himself to God as a payment, a ransom
price to redeem us through the propitiation of himself to God.
He's the sacrifice that propitiated God. He appeased his wrath. He
made God favorable toward His people on just grounds of His
own blood. God's justice received from Him
a perfect offering, a perfect sacrifice, and God is well pleased
with Him. And so, faith itself is not the
ground of justification. Can you see that? Faith is not
the ground of justification. If faith were the ground of justification,
then we would be leaving our faith. faith would be depending
on faith, which makes it circular reasoning. But that's what we
need to correct because Naturally, we make these errors. Either we feel them in our subconscious,
we think, I have to find some kind of a reason in me. Denise
and I were just talking this last week. How many years have
you struggled with these things? And we continue to struggle with
them. And we have to keep going back to the scripture to say,
is it true? Is it true? And we read it, hallelujah,
it's true, it's true. God doesn't look for a reason. We don't have confidence before
God because we feel a sense of our sin. We don't have confidence
before God because we have a change of our mind about the things
of God. We don't have confidence before
God for an experience that we can look back to, or an experience
that we can look forward to. Our only confidence before God
is that He received Christ from the dead. And having received
Him, received full satisfaction to His justice. Propitiation
is God-word. It affects God, not man. And
it doesn't change God. It just does something. It does
what God required. It fulfills God's will. It reconciles
God's desire, His will to be gracious, with His justice to
be gracious for His people. And now, because we're justified
through faith in His blood, we know that our justification is
entirely independent from any contribution that we make. If
faith, if the object of our faith is the blood of Christ, the blood
of Him who died for us, then it necessarily excludes everything
from us, doesn't it? If in the Old Testament, Abel
brought his lamb from his flock to God, he was trusting that
God would see the lamb and accept him because of what God thought
of the lamb. He was trusting entirely on God
accepting the sacrifice. He wasn't trusting on his faith
in God. We can believe God about a lot
of things. Do you believe God created the
world? Absolutely. That doesn't save me. Do we believe
God can do anything? Sure, lots of people do. Do we
believe God is holy? Yes. But those things don't save
us. Believing God in the Lord Jesus Christ, that
God has provided him and accepted him as a just compensation to
satisfy God's justice, and we marvel that God would be so gracious,
and God commands us to believe that he's satisfied by what Christ
has done. And we just simply, we simply
receive it. We receive the benefits of what
Christ has done in our soul, in our experience, because God
gives it to us by declaring it to us that his redemption of
us and his propitiation of us is entirely outside of what we
do. Charles Hodge says it this way.
about this verse. He says, there is no more pointed
way of denying that we are justified on account of the state of our
own hearts or the character of our own acts than by saying that
we are justified by a propitiatory sacrifice. This places the ground
of our acceptance out of ourselves. It is something done for us.
Not something experienced, or produced in us, or performed
by us. See, Charles Hodge understood
these verses correctly. That is what God does, not what
we do. And He did it outside. When Christ
died, when He made atonement for our sins, we weren't there.
Not in our physical person. We were there by constitution
of God's putting us there in Christ, just like He put us in
Adam. And so these things are true because God has made them
so. The purpose of this text of scripture
is several things, but one of the main things I think that
this text of scripture is designed to do is what it says here. Look
at verse 25 with me again. Whom God has set forth to be
a propitiation through faith in his blood to declare his righteousness
for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance
of God. Why did God set forth Christ
openly a propitiation? One of the reasons was to show
openly that God's righteousness is the reason that God can remit
sins. There's two ways to understand
this. Most commentators understand this word righteousness to mean
the justice of God, God's holy character, because God's holy
then he set forth Christ in order to show that our justification is consistent
with his justice because he required a payment from Christ, which
is certainly true. But actually, the word righteousness
here is also used, the same word for righteousness used in verse
21 and 22, and here again, and several other places throughout
the Book of Romans. And it has to do with the righteousness
of God. How does God justify sinners? It's through the righteousness
of God. He doesn't look for righteousness from us. We have none, and we
can provide none. So He Himself provides a righteousness. But what is that righteousness?
And this is where so many false doctrines arise from. The only
correct answer here is the righteousness of God is the entire redeeming
work that Christ did for His people. It's what Christ did
in order to save His people. How do we know that's the righteousness
of God? Because Christ is the end of the law for righteousness.
He says, don't think that I came to destroy the law. I didn't
come to destroy it, but to fulfill it. Heaven and earth shall pass
away, but not one jot or tittle of the law will fail. Christ
said, When He came into the world, I come to do Thy will, O God.
That was the will of God. And the will of God was that
He lay down His life, a sacrifice, in order to satisfy God, to please
God and save His people, magnify God's justice and His grace,
His wisdom, and all that God is in His death. Everything Christ
did to save His people from their sins, He did for His people in
their name. to God, and that is our righteousness. That is our righteousness. So
when God says here that He set forth Christ, to be a propitiation
through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for
the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance
of God. I believe what we should understand this to mean is that
the way that our sins are remitted is through the work of Christ.
Isn't it? Without the shedding of blood, there's no remission
of sins. And how did God do that? He made Christ our propitiation. He's the redemption. We're redeemed
by His blood. And so, and all of this is called
the righteousness of God. It's His righteousness that is
the reason for our remission of our sins. The remission of
sins that are past through the forbearance of God, and in verse
26, and the remission of sins that are now. We, ourselves. God, Christ has always been the
only Savior. It wasn't like there was a way
of salvation in the Old Testament and another way in the New Testament.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the only one who has ever been the
Savior. The covenant God made with Him
was established from before the foundation of the world, and
everything else comes because of that. And if we understand
these things from Scripture, then we'll understand the fundamental
principles that unlock the truth of the Old and the New Testaments.
And it will help us, it will guard us against error. Because
there's so many errors. If we think about the era of
experiential religion, it all falls to the ground when we understand
that our salvation is not an experience that we look for,
it's a savior that we look to. It's a righteousness that's outside
of me. And my experience is the faith
God gives me in order to look to Christ. You see that? If we
could understand this, it would set us free in our heart. In our experience, we joy in
God with unspeakable joy and full of glory because we believe
on Him who died for us. That's our experience. Our experience
doesn't really count towards our acceptance before God, but
we enjoy the benefits of what Christ has done by faith. Our
faith doesn't change God, but it does change us. It makes us
the recipients of the benefits of what Christ has done in our
experience. And God always gives us to us.
And there's several reasons God gives us faith. We read about
a couple of them. In order that it might not be by works. In
order that it might be sure to us. But faith does something
for us. that I'm appreciating more and more. I appreciate more
and more as the years go by. Faith causes us to think the
way God thinks. Have you ever thought about that?
It says in Romans, we have the mind of Christ. How could you
have the mind of Christ? It means that we think his thoughts.
It means that we can think the same truth that God thinks. What
does God think? God says, for his people, Christ
is everything. I've received them in my Son.
All the blessings that I intend to give them, I've given to them
in my Son." And faith says the same thing. Faith is convinced
that everything God has said to us regarding what Christ has
done is true, and we receive it with joy unspeakable and full
of glory. And we rest on it, and we walk
in it. This is walking by the Spirit,
resting on what Christ has done. It's such a glad thing. It's
such a soul-comforting thing. And it's a God-honoring thing. What could be more honoring?
than to come to God in the way and to bring to God the only
sacrifice that He accepts, which is Christ and Him crucified.
Hebrews 10, 19 says, having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into
the holiest by the blood of Jesus. What does faith cause us to do?
It causes us to go to God in worship, in dependence, in prayer,
in thanksgiving and admiration by the blood of Jesus. We look
to Christ. We look to Him and Him crucified
and we say, God is so great that He would provide the Lord Jesus
Christ to save my wretched soul from all my sin when I could
do nothing about it and was hostile to God and He made peace with
His justice in saving me by what Christ has done. And Christ offered
Himself freely and continues to give Himself in intercessory
prayer for us. These are the wonders of the
gospel. And these words here in Romans chapter 3 and verse
24 and 25, I think, are the the vortex or the apex of the
highest point in the stake of God's salvation plan. They show
us all that God has done for us in Christ. And he directs
our faith to him. As I pointed out last time, when
Jesus told Nicodemus about being born again, he pointed him to
himself. God gives us faith. Christ is
the author and the finisher of our faith. And when He gives
us faith, what does that faith do? It comes back to God. It
comes back to the Lord Jesus Christ. And it lays hold on Him.
It lays hold on Him. That's clinging to Him with the
gift that God has given us. What an amazing thing this salvation
is. What an amazing thing that God would take it upon Himself
to satisfy His justice. To please Himself in the death
of Christ on behalf of ungodly sinners. and to do it in a way
that to us is pure, free grace without any participation or
cooperation or contribution on our part, but entirely owing
to what God has done in Christ. Doesn't that make you love the
Lord Jesus Christ, to love God's salvation, to think high thoughts
of God, that He would require the death of His own Son? Doesn't
that make you think high thoughts of God's holiness, And His grace
and His love, it does, doesn't it? It's a wonder. And we continue
to speak of these things because this is what God does. The Spirit
of God is a witness. He's a witness to what Christ
has done. His work in us is to point to us, to Christ for us. And if we understand that, then
we'll be guarded against so many errors. So many errors. And we
could talk about all those until we're blue in the face because
there seem to be more errors than we can stay up with. I was thinking about this talking
to Denise. You know, the trouble with talking
to people is that it seems like every time you talk to a person,
you run into a different error that you have to combat. And
it's like you just have to keep trying to figure out what all
these errors are. No, the way you combat the errors
is you hold forth the word of truth and let the errors fall
on that stone. It's a stone of stumbling and
rock of offense. Let's pray. Father, we pray that
you would be so pleased to look to Christ for us, as the publican
prayed, God, be propitious to me, the sinner. Receive from
him for me. Be satisfied with him for me. Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation,
and that you are our salvation in him who is our salvation,
the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for this full and free
grace that provides all in order that it might be your work and
not ours. In order that we can say, as
sinners, there's nothing I need to bring, nothing excludes me
from coming, because God has provided everything in Christ
my Savior. Thank you, Lord, for this full
salvation, so rich and free. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.