What shall we say was gained
by Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh? For if Abraham
was justified by words, he has something to boast about, but
not before God. For what does Scripture say?
Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift,
but as his due. And to the one who does not work,
but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted
as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of
the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart
from works. Blessed are those whose lawless
deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is
the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this
blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised?
For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.
How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had
been circumcised? It was not after, but before
he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision
as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he
was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the
father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that the
righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make
him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised
but also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father
Abraham had before he was circumcised. For the promise to Abraham and
his offspring that he would be the heir of the world did not
come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. Tonight
we're only going to get through verses 7 and 8. But if we remember
what we learned last week is that there is no place, there
is no place in the gospel for the law, for the believer to
hope in. Did you hear that? place in the
law for the believer to hope in. There's no article of law
that the believer can look at and say, wow, there is my hope. Because what we learned is that
we who work, we who strive, we who obey, it's a good thing,
but the wage of that obedience is death. The wage of works is
that we die because those works are not righteousness. Those
works are not what justifies us. But yet Paul goes back to
David, he uses Abraham, and Abraham is the proof text, is the model
to show that righteousness is by faith alone in Christ alone.
Now I recently had a conversation with a sister about antinomianism. And that word means anti-law. Of course, we are not against
the law. We are not against the law of
God. For the Bible, as we've already
learned in chapters 1, 2, and 3, we are subject to the law
in what? and our guilt. We are subject
to the law and God's judgment. We are subject. So the escape
of being subject to the law then is what? The grace of God and
the mercy of God. And it doesn't give us license
then to do whatever we please and disobey the word of God and
just live because we are all about grace. No one's ever taught
that. No one's ever said that. But
it's very easy for us to consider it because it is a very popular
teaching of today. For example, people like Joseph
Prince or, oh, I can't remember any of their names now. It just
escapes me. But there are many hyper grace or anti-law teachers
that teach you that you can go and do and say and anything you
want to do because God gives you the liberty to live in wickedness. Now, from the sense of justification,
there is no sin as a believer that will condemn us, for there
is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, as we'll
see in just a couple of chapters. So we're not teaching that the
law doesn't have its place, but what Paul has taught already
is that the law is a teacher to bring judgment and to bring
condemnation. When we get into chapter 6, we
will see as Paul would ask a question as he does very Very precisely,
what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so
that grace may abound? He says, by no means. How can
the one who has died to sin still live in it? But then John would
illustrate the reaction of, I mean, the thing that we should see
in John's reaction and his illustration in the second letter, where he
says, these things are written to you, beloved, that you, what?
may not sin, but if you sin, you have an advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is our propitiation. Now beautifully, we see that
word also in Paul's writing in Romans 3, and we see the equivalent
of that word in the writing here in Romans 4, as Paul goes further
into the Old Testament, not just to point to Abraham, who was
the patriarch of Israel, but also to the king, David, who
is the man after God's own heart. When he goes to Psalm 32, turn
there with me. Psalm chapter 32. If you have
your Bibles open to Romans chapter 4 and you see verses 7 and 8,
that is Psalm chapter 32 or Psalm 32 verses 1 and 2. But I just
wanted you to put your hand there because there's much more than
I will be able to detail this evening about Psalm 32. It is
worth its weight in gold. It is a very beautiful thing
to teach us about the grace and the mercy of God. Everyone that
I've ever spoken with in my life related to the ministry of the
church would always answer this question in the affirmative if
I were to ask, do you want to be blessed? Of course, I want
to be blessed. If you were to probably, I can't
say that everybody, because I'm not talking to everyone outside
in the world, but I bet you that if you walked up to anyone outside
in the world, any time of the day, and you walked to them and
said, would you like to be blessed, unless they thought you were
trying to get them with a trick question, they would say yes.
Yes, I want to be blessed. Well of course we know what Psalm
1 says about blessed. Blessed is the man who does not,
what, stand, walk in the way of sinners, stand in the counsel
of the wicked, sit among the scoffers and things of that nature.
Probably a different order. We don't, blessed is the man,
but here David is being used by Paul to show that the blessedness
of God, the approval of God, is only found in one way. And
what is it found? How is it found? Blessed is the
one, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and
whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom
the Lord will not count his sin. Now think about that for a second. If you use the ESV in Psalm 32,
you see a little bit different wording, don't you? You see in
Psalm 32, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven
and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom
the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit.
So we see the word iniquity, we see the word sin, we see that
there is a singular here in the Psalm. And then now Paul, because
he's talking to an audience, a plural audience, he transposes
He transposes the pronouns to plural. Blessed are those whose
lawless deeds are forgiven. Blessed are those whose sins
are covered and blessed is the man whom the Lord will not count
his sin. So here we know that this is
not Paul trying to change God's Word. I use this as a polemic
against those people that say that there must be a verbatim
grammatical expression of Scripture in order for it to be true. Paul
not only did things with Scripture to teach the essence of it and
made it true, Paul also used Syriac Paul also used the Assumption
of Moses. Paul also used all different
translations of texts and put them into Greek. Because if the
teaching of the text is true, then the text is authoritative.
No, the Assumption of Moses is not Scripture, but there's a
portion of it that is now Scripture. Because Paul wrote it in. There's
even stoic sayings that Paul would use to the Corinthians.
You say that all things are permissible, or that all things are good,
rather. But I say they're not permissible. Even if they are, I say not all
things are beneficial. You see, that was a saying of
the day, like carpe diem. All things are not permissible,
but you say that. So now it's in Scripture. If
we don't understand the context, if we do not see that Paul is
quoting something, we'll miss out. Paul is quoting the psalmist
here as he's teaching about the mercy of God. So let's use this
psalm. Let's go through this psalm. And let's use the text that is
in the Old Testament in Psalm 32. and let's personalize it
as we look at it today. There's six words I want us to
look at. The word transgression, the word
sin, and the word iniquity. The word transgression, and the
word sin, and the word iniquity. I am not, nor shall I ever be,
nor do I desire to be a Hebrew scholar. For the main reason
that Jesus' Bible was Greek, and that's good enough for me.
But there is some sense in which some people who have this ability,
and this time, and this desire, have done good work, so I shall
steal away from them, and thus teach us a little bit about some
Hebrew tonight. The word for transgression is
peshah. Is that pronounced correctly?
I don't know, so don't quote it. It may not be. I'm not Jewish. But what it means is, is a going
away or a running away. A better word in English would
be rebellion. So when we see the word there
in Psalm 32, the word transgression is that blessed is the one whose
rebellion against God is forgiven. Do you ever look at your sin
like that? Do we look at our sin that way?
And do we need to understand that the righteousness that was
given Abraham, he is not blessed because of what he did, but even
those righteous works that he tried to do in obedience to God
are forgiven. For the righteousness of man
is filthy rags to a holy God. You see that? Paul would say
this, I mean, Jesus would say the same thing to Nicodemus in
John 3, that we're in on the Lord's day, not this Sunday,
but next, we'll finish it up. And he would tell Nicodemus that
he was blind and in darkness and that the works that he was
doing, the reason that he would not come to Christ and openly
confess Him and believe in Him is because everyone would see
that he, as the teacher of Israel, would be darkness. It would be
worthless. It would be fruitless. Blessed is the one whose transgression
is forgiven. This has to do with our relationship
to God, doesn't it? Our relationship to God is that
we're not intimate with God in our transgression. Peshaw is
saying that we have run away from God, that we purposefully
see the way God has shown us to go, but we walk the other
direction. Now, let me say this. Even as
believers, beloved, we do that. So how many righteous works?
How much piety is there required in our lives to counteract Pesah,
transgressions? We rebel against God when we
refuse to hear the Word of God. We rebel against God when we
refuse to pray. We rebel against God when we
refuse to assemble as the Lord has commanded. We rebel against
God when we refuse to love our enemies. We rebel against God
when we do not spend time in the Word. We rebel against God
when we do not do things by faith. We rebel against God when we
follow the Scriptures and it's not by faith, but we do it in
our flesh. We rebel against God in many
ways that are unknown to us because God in His mercy keeps them from
us that we might not throw ourselves off a cliff. But oh, the grace of God ever
so eloquently and ever so tenderly shows us our iniquity day by
day by day. Every heartbeat we see our iniquity
and we are blessed if our rebellion is forgiven. But what is the
word forgiven there? I'm not even going to deal with
the Hebrew text anymore. I'll just tell you what they mean.
The word forgiven. Well, if we think about Isaiah
43, 25, we hear the words of the Lord. I am He who blots out
your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember
your sin. You hear that? God says He is
the one who blots out your transgressions. Forgiveness. and I will not remember
your sin. So forgiveness here, the word
actually means to be blotted out. It's like here's this letter
and it's very dirty, it's very crude and it's hateful. And somebody
blots out all the hateful stuff so the person that reads it doesn't
get hurt. But it's more than that. Here's a record of your
debt. And the payment for this work
of transgression is that God will bring recompense eternally
against you and it is in your permanent debt book. And God
goes in there and He blots it out. He has the book because
He holds the note. He has the pen because He is
sovereign over it all and He blots it. That's what forgiveness
is. It's being that our sins, our
rebellion, our wickedness against God is blotted out. It's blotted out. The second
word there that we look at is sin. Sin. Yes, transgression,
sin, iniquity. These are all in some sense the
same thing. They all mean the same, but they're
different in the context of the Old Testament in their finite
meaning. And here we see sin, and this
sin is being covered. The word for sin in this text
in the Hebrew is shatah. And it's very close to the word
that we use in our New Testament, in the Greek, that means missing
the mark. That means here's the standard
that God has for us, that's holiness. This is different than just rebelling
against Him. Here's the measure. Here is the
law. And we have failed to keep it.
We have failed to walk in that way. I mean, you know a horrifying
thing to me? is when people can say with their
own mouths, I do walk in a manner worthy of the calling of God. Do you? Now you can say that
if you say by faith. You see what I'm saying? But
if you say you walk in a manner worthy of the calling of God,
not by faith, you walk in a manner unworthy because you reject the
gospel of grace. You have become that Hebrews
6 person. who have rejected the sacrifice
of Christ and walk in a manner not worthy of God, but walk in
a manner worthy of wrath. Self-righteousness is worthy
of wrath. And this has to do with our relationship
to the law. This is an issue of, this is
a judicial issue. This is that we are guilty and We have rebelled against God
and then we are guilty of breaking the law. So here is the law giver,
here is the Holy One, here is the King of all things. We've
spit in His face and run away from Him and rebelled against
Him. And then in the same time, at the same time, in the same
manner, then we violate His law through which He governs. We
violate His law through which He exposes Himself in His nature,
in His heart. But blessed is the man whose
sins are covered. Covered. What does it mean to
have your sins covered? We've broken the law and then
the law that has been broken has been covered up so that it
can't be seen as broken anymore. That's what it means. It's like
people that I know who I've counseled through the years who have done
felonies. And one particular person that comes to mind had
some very, very bad things that he did as a young person, 18
years old. taking controlled substances
and then going out and doing stupid things. And because of
the circumstances that he was in, and because of what he had
in his hands, and because of what he had in his truck, and
because of what he said when he went into the door, he ended
up with 20 felony charges, enough to put him away for 300 years. He served seven and a half years
in a federal prison, or a state prison, for his felonies. And
they told him if he could stay clean for 10 years, they would
cover his record up. They call it a sponging the record.
They seal it. No one can see it. They look
on the computer and it's not there. But you know what? It
is there. But it's been covered, it's been hidden. Being forgiven,
having your sin covered means that the law that you broke has
been covered. God covers it. This is a picture
of what was going on in the Old Testament temple. of what was
going on with the sacrificial system, where they would go into
the temple, into the outer courts, into the inner courts, into the
Holy of Holies and the sanctuary. And inside the Holy of Holies,
where only the high priest could go, there was the Ark of the
Covenant. And inside the Ark of the Covenant
was what? The law of God. The very thing
that governs the guilt of man. The very thing through which
God will judge the nations. The very thing that exposes God
for who He is and shows us who He is. It's in the Holy of Holies. And the Scripture teaches that
if anyone were to touch that in disobedience, they would die,
and they did. Not even the law, but in disobedience
to God. And if the man would go in there
and not be right in his heart and not had followed the rules
of the law of Moses, he would also find himself dead in the
Holy of Holies. but what they would do is they
would go into this Holy of Holies and they would take the blood
of those sacrificed animals and this is a God-awful place with
a God-awful smell of rotting blood continually being poured
over this object of beautiful gold laden with the law of God
and the staff of Moses and supposedly a piece of manna inside according
to the writings of the traditions of the Jews. It's, by the way,
the same thing that they were asking Jesus for in John 6 when
they say, what sign do you bring? And they were looking for the
manna that had not perished to prove that Jesus had come as
Messiah. And here on top of this, the
lid of this Holy of Holies, of this Ark of the Covenant, was
an angel on either side and their wings touched here as they sort
of looked like they were guarding. This is just an image. And that
place right there between those angels' wings that fell down
onto the lid of that was called what? Do you know? The mercy
seat where God meets man. And do you know that man and
God cannot meet? except at the mercy seat. Man
and God cannot be in communion with each other or in the presence
of each other except that sacrificial blood is poured in the presence
of the mercy seat. And that's the symbol of covering.
That's what forgiveness is, when our sins are covered. Beloved,
let me tell you this. God put His Son to death to pour
His blood from His body that He might cover our sin for the
glory of His name. That's why Jesus says that no
one who does not forgive will ever be forgiven. How dare we
mock the gospel of grace? May we stand and tremble as we
evaluate our hearts, as we evaluate our days, and as we evaluate
our plans, that we walk in many ways, but that we would not walk
in unforgiveness. Covered. What is the New Testament
word for that? Propitiation. Covered. Satisfied. God's wrath, His legal justice
is satisfied in Jesus Christ. That's how Abraham was justified.
Abraham was justified because God blotted out his sin, and
then God covered his sin. And then thirdly, blessed is
the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. Now we have
a relationship here about our bookkeeping. This is
about ourselves. Transgressions that are forgiven
is about our relationship to God. He blots them out. Sin that
is covered is about our relationship to the law. He takes care of
them and satisfies them. An iniquity that is not counted. What do we count? We count our
money, don't we? 25, 50, 75. There it is. Oops, 79 cents, not 80. What does our account look like
in the face of holiness? What debt do we truly owe God? What is it that we could bring
to pay that off? Nothing. If at the age of four
nanoseconds, we began to speak in Hebrew and worship God without
moving from that table where we were born until the day we
turned 50,000, and never once took our eyes
off of Christ, we would still be judged guilty. Unless God blocks and covers
our sin. The word hawan, if that's pronounced
correctly, is what the word iniquity is in the Hebrew. And it means
one who is evil and corrupted and twisted. And really this
is about how we relate to ourselves. as sinners. Because what we do
is we justify our own desires, don't we? We know what God is. We see Him and we don't love
Him in our flesh, so we walk away from Him and we find our
own way to righteousness. We know what the law says, but
we certainly aren't going to follow that because, you know,
we just can't. So we make our own law and then
we do it. That's what this is. We do it. We're twisted. We know what is
right, and then we do what is wrong. Paul's going to talk about
that, by the way. He's going to talk about that.
And he's not going to talk about anybody. He's going to talk about
himself. Just a few chapters. Paul's already talked about this
issue of twistedness in Romans chapter 1. Those who refuse to
hear the Word of God. You know, Paul would tell those
Corinthians in his second letter, this is what I've told you. This
is what I've instructed you. And if people do not listen to
me, they are not brothers. Be careful. Be careful not to
twist. Too late. We've already twisted. If we show our hands, we're all
raised. We've all twisted. in our wickedness
to justify our own desires. But here the Scripture says He
does not count them. It's a financial issue. It's
a bookkeeping issue. Here's our debt book. It's been
blotted out. It's been covered. And it's not
been counted. But we've already gone through
Romans 3, haven't we? God put forth Christ as propitiation. So it has been counted. Our sin
has been counted. I want you to hear this. Our
sin has been counted, but it's not counted as ours. It's counted
as Christ's. Blessed is the man whom the Lord
counts no iniquity Let's put it into the positive.
That's a negative statement. Let's put it into the positive
as it is intended to be understood in the context of Romans 4. Blessed
is the man whose iniquity has been put in the debt book of
Jesus. The best way of translating that
is to impute. Blessed is the man who the Lord
does not impute his iniquity. Does not put it on him. No, it's
been put on Jesus Christ the righteous. And He is charged,
listen, as guilty. He's charged as guilty for our
crookedness, for our sin. That is why we are blessed. That is how Abraham is justified. And then Paul explains it, 9-12,
he explains it. Abraham didn't refuse circumcision,
he obeyed and took it. But he wasn't justified because
of it. Friends, this is a grave presence
before us this evening. It's a grave presence because
what we've been learning and what we've been doing and what
we've been experiencing our entire lives is caught up in this reality. We sit here tonight because God
forgave us in His mercy and transferred our debt to Jesus. And everything in the entire
New Testament that deals with God's people together demands
forgiveness. If we are not able to forgive,
we are not forgiven. If we are not able to love, Christ
is not in us. These are folks that know! I'm
just paraphrasing the Scriptures. If you say you walk in light
but you hate your brother, you lie. And friends, the most serious,
as I preach Sunday, the most serious example of the purity
of the truth we believe as a people is that we reconcile. It is the only test of truth. The only. Love the Lord your
God and love your neighbor as yourself. I pray that this is
strong. God is faithful. What a text
for such a day as this. What a text. Let me close to prepare our hearts
for what we're going to do Sunday. In Colossians chapter 3, turn
there with me. Colossians chapter 3 starting
I believe in verse 12 and going down through 17. We hear these words, Put on then as God's chosen ones
holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness,
and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint
against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven
you, so you also must forgive. And above all of these things
put on love, which binds everything together, in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule
in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body,
and be thankful. Let the Word of Christ dwell
in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing
songs and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your
hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or
in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks to God the Father through Him. And beloved, this is one of the
most powerful pictures of what the church is to be doing. And
I pray by the Lord's mercy that we'll all be together this Sunday
to hear it.