Well, please turn your Bibles to Romans chapter 3. Okay, so I will read Romans 3 starting in verse 21 and I will read to the end of the chapter. Our focus is going to be on verses 21 through 26, but I'll read the whole thing here just for context. But now the righteousness of God, apart from the laws revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 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. to demonstrate at the present time his righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier, the one who has faith in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish the law. Okay, and like I said, we're gonna focus on verses 21 through 26. So if you recall from last week, as we looked at verses 9 through 20, I kind of painted a courtroom scene. You know, we talked about law and order and how here in these verses, all of mankind is brought into the courtroom. They are presented before God as the judge, the righteous judge. And we see all of humanity. We are the defendant. And then Paul is the one who is sort of reading the prosecutor. He's the one sort of prosecuting the charges on the indictment that God has listed. And when you looked at, we looked at that indictment in detail last week, where we saw in verses 10 through 18, all the charges that were on the indictment. First, we saw the universality of human sin. And then we saw Paul focus on sins of speech, how we have throats that are like open graves, how we have tongues that are full of deceit and lips that have the poison of asps under them. And then he looked at the details, he details the sins of action, how we have feet that are swift to shed blood, how we have destruction in our path and we do not know the way of peace. And then in verse 18, he gives us the root cause of our sinfulness, which is a lack of the fear of the Lord. Because we have no fear of the Lord before our eyes, we commit all these sins. Because as we said last week, and as Proverbs details, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. That is the foundation for a true and right way of living is that fear of the Lord. And then he gives, after the list of charges, he lays out the divine verdict, the final charge, which is in verses 19 and 20, where he says, for by works of the law, no human being or no human flesh will be justified in his sight, since through the law only comes the knowledge of sin. And we talked about how the law cannot save you. The law does not have the power to save you. All the law can do is point out to you your sin. It's a mirror that shows you your sin, but it can't save you. It is only the path, at one time it could have, before the fall in the garden when Adam was there, and in the law, not the Ten Commandments, but a command was given by God to obey, and if you obey, you would then see eternal life, you would see fulfilled, consummated life. The law would have led him to salvation, would have led him to a glorified state. But it was just the pathway. It didn't have the power to take him from that state of innocency to that state of glorification. And there's no escape from the predicament that we are all under the law and the law reveals our sin, it cannot save. That option has been removed from the table ever since the fall. And that is the bad news. The bad news is that no one is righteous. No one. Zip. Zero. Nada. Not a single person. Now, as we've been saying all along, the gospel is the revelation of the righteousness of God. And that phrase, the righteousness of God, if you remember from way back, can mean three things. It can mean the righteousness by which God judges, so his righteous character. And we see that on display all throughout Romans 3. He is the one who is righteous. Let God be true, though every man were a liar. He judges by righteousness. It could also mean the righteousness that God requires of us, that which we lack. Again, as detailed through Romans 1.18 all the way through the end of 3.20, we lack that righteousness that God requires of us. But as we're gonna see here, the righteousness of God can also be that which he freely gives to us by grace through faith because of what Christ has done for us. Like I said, all throughout Romans 118 through 320, we've seen the first two in action. God is a righteous judge who judges righteously, and our failure to fulfill the righteousness of God because of our own unrighteousness and ungodliness. So if we were going to carry our little courtroom drama you know, motif through into verses 21 through 26, just as God is about to bring the gavel down and pronounce final judgment on us, Jesus Christ, our advocate, comes into the courtroom to save the day. So as we're gonna, this section that begins in verse 21 is really a prolonged argument that's gonna go all the way through the end of chapter four. He's gonna talk about righteousness and justification, and it's gonna be an argument that he'll carry on through chapter four, as we are gonna see the saving righteousness of God revealed to us. But for our purposes this morning, we're gonna look at verses 21 through 26, which will show us God's righteousness in the death of Jesus Christ. But then next week as we will finish chapter three and maybe peek our head into chapter four, we're gonna see God's righteousness by faith for all people, Jews and Gentiles. So as we get to verses 21 through 26, that passage begins with two words, but now, but now. And as I like to say, these are two of my most favorite words in the Bible, the but now, because usually when you see a but now, it's the transition from bad news to good news. So Paul usually talks that way. He'll say all these things and then he'll say, but now here's the good news. Here's the change. Here's, here's the reality that has come onto the scene. And of course, these words, he says here, these words connect us back to what Paul had said way back in Romans 1, 16 and 17, where he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, also to the Greek. For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. So from that verse, then you have this interlude I think I said this last week, this sort of parenthesis, this sort of interlude on how the wrath of God is being revealed. But then when he gets to verse 21, he says, but now the righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law. That's the good news. It is a righteousness that is manifest or made known to us apart from the law. Where he says, although the law and the prophets do bear witness to it, So Paul told us in his theme statement of the Book of Romans that the gospel is a revelation of the righteousness of God. But before he can get to that, before he can tell us how the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, he has to spend a considerable amount of time giving us the background. He lays a foundation upon which to build this case. The gospel is the revelation of the righteousness of God because the wrath of God is being revealed against our ungodliness and our unrighteousness. Now he has made his case. Having made his case now, all of us stand guilty before God's bar of justice. And now Paul is going to show us how the gospel reveals God's righteousness. Our backs are up against the wall and now he comes in just like in all those old movies where, you know, if you watch those old cowboy and Indian movies or whatever, I don't know if you can even say cowboys and Indians, that might be politically incorrect, but cowboys and Native Americans, however you want to put it. When the cowboys look like they're about to get slaughtered, in comes the cavalry, right? This is what we're getting to this point here. So he shows us first that this is a righteousness that has been manifested apart from the law. I'm gonna say two things about this phrase, having been manifested apart from the law. The first is to comment about how this phrase, you got this phrase, has been manifested. Now, we're gonna get a little technical in this lesson. I apologize ahead of time, but we're gonna get just a wee bit technical here. So this phrase has been manifested. Now, due to the wonders of the Greek language, those three words are presented in the Greek language as one word alone. and it conveys the meaning of has been manifested. And for grammar nerds out there, if there are any out there, this word is in the Greek perfect tense. Now the perfect tense, it means, when we talk about this word in the perfect tense, the word itself means to reveal or to make known. That's why it's translated as manifested. But when it's in the perfect tense, the perfect tense in Greek indicates something that has happened in the past but has continuing effects in the present, okay? Something that happened in the past, but has effects that carry on into the present and beyond. So in other words, we could actually say the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law and continues to be manifested apart from the law. Now, the second thing to comment on this phrase is that the righteousness of God is apart from the law. Again, this points us back to what Paul had said in Romans 3.20, where he says in 3.20, by the deeds or the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. Therefore, what we need is a righteousness that is apart from the law. Since the deeds of the law cannot justify us, we need a justification that comes apart from the law. That's the point he's trying to make here. That should stand to reason. Like we said earlier and like we said last week, the law can only serve to show you your sin. It cannot give you righteousness. It has no power to save. Even before the fall, the law had no power in itself to save. The law basically just says, do this and live. And in the garden, had Adam done this, he would have lived. He failed to do this, so he was under judgment. And since we fail to do this and live, we are also under judgment. Now secondly, even though it's a righteousness that is apart from the law, the law and the prophets bear witness to it. Now this phrase, the Law and the Prophets, is a popular phrase used in the New Testament to talk about the Old Testament. So when you see the words, the Law and the Prophets, it's just shorthand for saying the entire Old Testament. Just shorthand for the entire Old Testament. Sometimes you see the Law of the Psalms and the Prophets or the Law of the Writings and the Prophets. but it just describes how the Jews themselves sort of organized their own scriptures. You had the law, the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books of Moses. Well, really, all five books of Moses, he didn't write more books. But anyway, then you had the prophets, which not only included the writing prophets, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but also included the historical books, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Joshua, Judges, all those books were considered the prophets, okay? And then, of course, you had the writings, the Psalms, the Proverbs, all the wisdom literature. And what Paul is saying is that all of the Old Testament bears witness to the righteousness of God being manifested apart from the law. We saw this early on in Romans, Romans 1-2, where Paul says the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. So this gospel, this good news, this righteousness of God apart from the law was something that was promised beforehand in the Old Testament scriptures. The law and the prophets bear witness to it. And in John 5, which we'll get to there some Sunday morning, we'll get to John chapter 5, I don't know when, I haven't planned it out that far. But when we get to John 5, Lord willing, you're gonna see Jesus is encountering some resistance with the Jewish leaders. And in John 5.39, he says to them, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but it is they, the scriptures, that bear witness about me. And then later on in verse 46 of that same chapter, he says, if you believed Moses, you would believe me for he wrote of me. So these words, having been manifested and bear witness, are related. This gospel, this righteousness of God, has been revealed apart from the law and has been borne witness to by the law and the prophets. So how is it then, as we move on, how is it then that the gospel has been manifest apart from the law and that the law and the prophets bear witness to it. So it's a question of how now, not a question of what. And that's what we see in verse 22, where he says, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. Now I have to, just a side note here, I have to pick nits here, okay? The people who put the verses in the Bible, okay, we know that the verses and the chapter numbers are not inspired, they didn't exist in the original writings, but more often than not, the verses help you and the chapters are good. In this one section, I think the verse numbers are very, very poorly placed because the verses seem to end almost always in the middle of a sentence. and then you wanna continue the thought, but then it goes on into the next verse, and then it ends in the middle of that verse. It's really poorly planned in here, because you've got in verse 22, it starts as part of a sentence, it's like in the middle of a sentence, and then the sentence ends in the middle of the verse, and then the next sentence begins and goes on into the next verse. Just picking nets here, okay? It has nothing to do with the lesson, just my own. I was noticing this last week because every time I took a quote from the scripture to put in here, I was always quoting half of a verse or one and a half verses or something. It was really annoying. I just wanted to kind of give you my pain here. I'm sure you all feel sorry for me. Anyway, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all or on all who believe. So as we said earlier, the righteousness of God requires of us, what he requires of us, he freely gives to us through faith in Christ. Now, again, I'm gonna get a little technical here. At the risk of turning this into an extended lesson on Greek grammar, there is a major, major, major, exegetical and interpretive decision that is being made here in verse 22. And it revolves around the phrase, through faith in Jesus Christ. And I think I even put the Greek in your handouts, diapisteos Jesu Christu, through faith in Jesus Christ. Now that word through speaks about instrumentality or means. So it is the means by which, or the instrument of, It is sort of how it gets done. It is done through faith, and we understand that. But the tricky part is, what do we mean by the faith in Jesus Christ? Because it could be translated faith in Christ, or it could be translated the faith or faithfulness of Christ. And if you can hear the difference in how those two statements make, there's a big difference there. Are we made righteous? Or is the righteousness of God given to us through our faith in Christ? Or is it given to us on the basis of Christ's faithfulness? How he was faithful to obey the law of God completely. How he was faithful and obedient to go to the cross. How that righteousness then is given to us through faith. I read a lot of commentaries on this. A lot of commentaries on this. There's a lot of debate on this. The old way of thinking, Going all the way back to Martin Luther is that this is faith in Christ. It is our faith in Christ. So it is taken in an objective sense. It is our faith in Christ and what he's done. But more recent scholarship has sort of leaning toward the other way in a more subjective sense. It is Christ's faithfulness. Now, to be sure, let's put it this way. I think it's both and, okay? But I think the weight of the argument that Paul is making here leans more heavily toward faith in Christ, the way it's written, the way it's translated in our Bibles here, faith in Christ. But, I mean, if you think about it, both are kind of true, right? What is our faith in Christ? Our faith in Christ is in his person and work, right? What he has done, his perfect life, his death on the cross, all these things. That's what we believe in. It's not just saying, I believe that there was a person named Jesus Christ, period, and a story. Right? No, you believe in Jesus Christ, who was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, who lived a perfect life, who went to the cross to die for our sins, who was raised for our justification, who ascended to God. That's all of the content of that faith. So I think it's kind of a both-and. But the reason why I side with the way that it's translated here in our Bibles is I think the way Paul makes his argument here, he's contrasting, like I said in verse 20, he's contrasting this idea of works of the law. Now works of the law, that's what we do, or at least that's what we try to do. Right, whereas faith in Christ is something that we're saying, I'm not gonna do works of the law, I'm gonna rest and trust in Christ and what he has done for me. And I think that's where Paul's trying to make this argument here, he's trying to contrast, okay, by works of the law, you can't be justified, but through faith in Christ, you can be justified. I hope that made sense, it made sense in my head. I hope it made sense in your ears. So rather than we are righteous through or by means or via faith in Christ, that's the argument I'm trying to make. In other words, it's not what we do, but it's by trusting what he's done. And this is for all who believe. That's the end of that sentence there. This righteousness through faith in Christ to all and on all who believe. Faith being the operative word there. And it's for all and upon all who believe because all fall short. That's what we see in the end of 22 going into 23, for there is no difference. There's no distinction. Again, by saying this, he's saying Jews and Gentiles. That's what he's been talking about all throughout leading up to this point. The Gentiles are under God's wrath. The Jews are under God's wrath. And now there's no distinction because we have all fallen short of the glory of God. Jew has fallen short of the glory of God. The Gentiles fallen short of the glory of God. We are all guilty. Humanity is universally under the wrath and condemnation of God. All men have sinned, all men have fallen short of God's glory. And this is just sort of the corollary to what he has said in the previous section. None are righteous. No, not one. None seek after God. None, all have gone astray. No one has the fear of the Lord in their eyes. And then he goes on, all have fallen short of the glory of God. But, it's my favorite word in the Bible, but, just as all have fallen short by our works, all can be justified by grace. And that's what we see in verses 24 and 25. So for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness because in his forbearance, God has passed over the sins that were previously committed. Now again here, the key word or the key phrase is are justified, are justified. This word here, is the verb form that we have been using all along for the righteousness. So it's the same word in Greek, but it means justified, also means righteous. In this case here, the verb form means to justify or to declare righteous. And again, since we've been using a courtroom motif here, and I think Paul is intentionally using sort of courtroom language, Let me throw out a word for you that you also hear in a legal context, and that word is forensic. My wife used to work in a police lab, and you were part of the forensic team there in the lab. Now, we hear that word today, and we think of all the scientific procedures that the police do to investigate the crimes. You get the fingerprint duster guy, you get the person who looks at the footprints and measures and tells you this guy was wearing size 10 1⁄2, Converse sneakers that were made in 19-whatever. And then you've got the person who looks at the tire treads and says these were Goodyear. Can we say Goodyear tires now? Or have they been banned? Anyway, there were Goodyear tires from whatever year, so on and so forth. Anyway, that's not how forensic is being used here in a theological sense. The word comes from Latin. I've taught you some Greek and I'm going to teach you some Latin. The word comes from Latin. It just means something that is public, something that pertains to the courts. That's all it means. So it's something that is made public, something that is used in a courtroom to prove a case. So when Paul says we are justified by his grace as a gift, he means this in a forensic sense, in a public sense, in a sort of legal courtroom sense. In other words, we are declared righteous by faith. So because of our faith, God then pronounces instead of guilty, you're under judgment, he says, no, you are now justified. You are now righteous. It is a public declaration by God through our faith. Now, why do I belabor this point? Someone should ask me that question. I'm glad you asked. Why do I belabor this point? Because this is the big debate between Protestants and Roman Catholics. It is the whole reason why Well, it's not the reason why Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses. That was for indulgences. But later on, his view of justification ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church. And because of it, he was excommunicated, among other things. Official Roman Catholic doctrine states that the believer is made righteous before God. So in other words, you go to heaven because you have an inherent righteousness of your own. This is accomplished through baptism. So the Roman Catholic Church believes in baptismal regeneration. So when you're baptized, grace is infused to you. You have righteousness. And then once you get older, once you start committing your sins, you start to lose that grace. So then you have to partake of the sacrament of penance to restore that, to put you back into a state of grace. You have to do works of penance and things like that. It's also the reason why you take the Eucharist, the Eucharist sort of applies the God's grace on you, and then, which is why when you die, if you don't have enough righteousness to get to heaven, you go where? Purgatory. And why do you go to purgatory? It's a purging process. You have to purge the remaining sin from you so that all is left is pure righteousness, and then you're allowed to go into heaven. Now, certain people are able to kind of skip that if you have enough works of righteousness, because let's say you were a saint or something, or in the case of Jesus, you were perfect, you didn't commit any sins. You're allowed to go straight right, and it's like, Jesus, come right in. Or Peter, come right in. Fred, sorry, you have to go to purgatory for a little bit. Whatever. You know, that's the point. But it's all based on having a righteousness of your own and having to work that righteousness. And the point is, if you go through that process, how much assurance do you have that you're going to get to heaven? Zero. You have zero assurance. You don't know if you're righteous enough or if you have to spend some time in purgatory. And that's what Martin Luther saw in the Roman Catholic churches. You had all these people buying indulgences in order to lessen a family member's time in purgatory. And he just saw that and finally it clicked in his brain. He's like, The people are being taken advantage of here. The Roman Catholic Church is using the money that they're getting from these poor people to build up their big cathedrals and such. And they're selling them on this lie of purgatory. Now for the reformers, the believer isn't made righteous. We don't have an inherent righteousness of our own. We are declared righteous. It is a legal declaration by God through Christ because of our faith in Christ. This is a divine innocent verdict, which is better than a not guilty verdict, right? In a law court, in our law courts, if you're declared not guilty, that doesn't mean you're innocent, it just means they couldn't prove that you were guilty, right? But here, God is not saying not guilty, he's saying no, you are innocent. You are innocent because you have the righteousness of Christ applied to you. We are declared righteous because Jesus Christ not only did what we, by our fall into sin, couldn't do, but he also suffered the punishment that our sin deserved. He earned a positive righteousness before God. So the only one who is inherently righteous on his own is Jesus Christ. He did everything the law required. Because he was born of a virgin, because he was born in a non-natural way, he was born without sin. You know, every one of us, we start off already in the hole, right? We are born in sin, so we're already guilty before we've done anything. Jesus Christ, because he was born of the Virgin, because he was not born via natural generation, was able to bypass that. He was born without sin, and then he lived a sinless life. So he has a perfect righteousness before God, and he also took our judgment upon his shoulders. When he died on the cross, it was not for his sins that he was being punished, it was for our sins that he was being punished. Thus, we get into heaven not because we're inherently righteous, but because we have a foreign righteousness, an alien righteousness, not an illegal alien righteousness, but a righteousness that comes not from our own. This is the doctrine of what we call double imputation, which is application, okay? Christ's righteousness is imputed to us, and our sin is imputed to him, which is why Paul can say in 2 Corinthians 5.21, for our sake, God made Christ to be sin, who knew no sin, so that we can be the righteousness of God. God put our sin on him, God took his righteousness and gave it to us. And that is why we can be declared not guilty. Now again, why is this a big deal? Why is this a big deal? Because to this day, to this day, the official Roman Catholic doctrine still looks at this view of justification by grace alone through faith alone as anathema, or as accursed. This is not... Put it this way, you see all these movements for ecumenism between Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church and other Protestant churches, and it's like, can't we all get along? It's like, not according to your documents you can't, because according to your official documents, which have still yet to have been rescinded, we are accursed. Protestants who believe in justification by grace through faith alone are accursed under Roman Catholic teaching. And also, I make a big deal of this because in all honesty, this is the heart of the gospel. This is the heart of the gospel. You get this wrong, it doesn't matter what else you get right. If you get this wrong, it really doesn't matter what else you get right. If you do not get this right, if you do not get the fact that we are justified by grace through faith alone in Christ, that we do not stand before God with our own righteousness but cloaked in the righteousness of God, in the righteousness of Christ that he earned for us, then you're getting the gospel wrong, beloved. You're getting the gospel wrong. I mean, this is depicted in one of my favorite parables of all time, which is the prodigal son, where the younger son goes off and he lives a prodigal lifestyle, and then he repents, and he comes to his right mind, and he comes back to his father, and he goes to repent to his father, And before he can even finish his repentance speech, the father says, hold everything, bring out the best robe, bring out rings, bring out the sandals and put them on my son. And the best robe he's put on is a picture, I believe, of Christ's righteousness being applied to the younger son. He came back to father, repentant. Now this justification, going back to verses 24 and 25, is done freely. It is done as a gift by God's grace, and that grace, a short definition of grace, unmerited favor. It is the favor of God bestowed upon us without having done anything on our own. It is just freely given. That word there, freely given, where it says freely, the word there in Greek is a gift. It is Dorian. It's a gift. God gives us this. We don't have to do anything to earn it. He just gifts it to us. Problem is, particularly in the Midwest, you can't give a gift to anybody. My wife's family is a perfect example of this. She had an aunt who passed away, and you could not buy this woman dinner. I mean, if we went out to dinner as a group, and the check was coming, she would grab that check, and if you tried to pry that check out of her hands, you would meet her wrath, okay? You could not give this woman a gift, okay? And that's kind of the mindset we're in, right? If I went and bought something for Jerry, Jerry might feel obligated, well, I've got to return the gift and buy something back for you, and vice versa. It's like we think of gifts as sort of obligations on the other person to sort of give something back to us at some later point. But that's not what God does. When he gives a gift, he doesn't expect anything in return. He's not saying, OK, now you give me something. No, I'm giving this to you. It is a gift. God's grace comes to us, the believing ones, the ones who believe, by means of the redemption which is in Christ. And this idea of redemption is that of a buying back. I remember growing up, my parents used to collect S&H green stamps. Anybody remember the S&H green stamps? So you'd collect these green stamps, you'd put them in the book, and then when you got the page filled or the book filled, you'd go and you would what? You would redeem it. You would hand it in and get something better than the stamp that you had, right? You get a gift like a toaster or whatever. That's the idea of redemption is a buying back. Christ redeemed us, he bought us back, he freed us, he set us free and he did it by or through his blood. Paul will say this in Ephesians 1.7, he says, in Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace. And now in Romans 3.25, we're going to see this blood-bought redemption accomplished. Here we see that God put Christ forward. He put him forward as a propitiation, another big $50 theological word, by his blood. And here, the key word, propitiation. Now, oddly enough, this is a very important word, but it's only found twice in the entire New Testament, here and in Hebrews 9. So in Romans three, that word is translated propitiation. Here in Romans, or in Hebrews nine, it's translated differently, but it's the same word. I'm gonna read verses one through five of Romans, or keep saying Romans, of Hebrews chapter nine, where Paul, not Paul, we don't know who wrote Hebrews, maybe Paul. Then indeed, even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service, the earthly sanctuary. For a tabernacle was prepared, the first part in which was the lampstand, the table, and the showbread, which is called the sanctuary. And behind the second veil, the part of the tabernacle which is called the holiest of all, which had the golden censer and the Ark of the Covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which were the golden pot that had the manna, Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant. And above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat." And then he says, of these things we cannot speak now in detail. So the word there that we see in Romans 3 is propitiation is translated here as mercy seat. It was the top of the Ark of the Covenant. So you had the Ark of the Covenant on top, you had, you can turn back to Romans 3, on the top you had, if you've ever seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a pretty actually accurate description and depiction of the Ark, but you had the two angels with the wings looking over something, that was called the mercy seat. And it was believed that was where God sat on it. So you see all these things in the Old Testament where the glory cloud comes into the tent of meeting and rests on top of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant is sort of a picture of God's throne. And the mercy seat would be the place where the high priest on the Day of Atonement would take the blood of the sacrifice and he would sprinkle blood on the mercy seat to atone for the sins of the people. So this idea of propitiation is that of turning away the wrath of God, of appeasing the wrath of God, of atoning for our sins. Other translations will say a sacrifice of atonement for propitiation. And the idea is if sin isn't dealt with, then God's wrath remains on us. So the animal's slaughtered in our place, and then that blood is then presented onto the mercy seat. And here, Christ is put forward. He is our substitute. He is the one who stands in our place to take that wrath, and whose blood was then used to appease the wrath of God, to turn away the wrath of God. So he is our substitute and our satisfaction. He not only stands in our place, But he appeases the wrath of God on our behalf. And because of the precious blood of Christ that was shed on our behalf, that wrath is turned away. It is propitiated. It is appeased. And just as the idea of redemption calls to mind the exodus and the first Passover, so too propitiation calls to mind the land that was slaughtered to turn away the wrath of God. And all of this, the redemption and the propitiation, are received through faith. It is received through faith. Faith is the alone instrument of justification, of redemption, and of propitiation. And then finally, we see why God did all of this in verses 25, the last half of 25 and 26. It is here that we see the revelation of the righteousness of God that Paul spoke of back in Romans 1.17, where he says, this was to show God's righteousness. This was to demonstrate God's righteousness because in his forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Christ. So everything we've seen here, all the way in Romans 21 through 25, the first half of that, is a demonstration of the righteousness of God. And first we learn that in his divine forbearance, God passed over former sins. What's going on here when he says that? Think about it, up until the time of Jesus Christ, God has been exercising divine forbearance. You ever wonder why people didn't get slaughtered immediately the minute they sinned? Because God was giving divine forbearance in his power. If the wages are sin of death, then why don't we die the moment we sin? The answer is divine forbearance. Now maybe you might be thinking, if not, I'll think it for you. What about all the sacrifices in the Old Testament? Well, again, the author of Hebrews has a lot to say about that. He says it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. That's the whole argument that the writer of Hebrews is making in chapters nine and 10, is to show the superiority of Christ's sacrifice and the superiority of his priesthood. The point being is that the Old Testament sacrifices were never meant to be sufficient. They always pointed forward to the perfect, once for all, sacrifice of Christ. So all throughout the Old Testament period, God was exercising divine forbearance. He was being patient because he knew in the fullness of time, he would send forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, who would provide perfect propitiation, who would provide the perfect sacrifice for sins. But in the interim, it might seem that God wouldn't punish sin. Sin is committed, no immediate punishment, so it might seem like God is overlooking our sin. So in other words, this demonstration of his righteousness is shown in that it defends his righteousness in that sin is punished. Sin is punished, not in us. But on Christ, in whom we believe, Christ again, He was our substitute. He took the punishment and it shows God as just. It shows His righteousness because sin is punished. It's just not punished in us. It is punished on His Son, Jesus Christ. And then furthermore, God is demonstrated now to be the one who is not only just because he punishes sin, but also the one who justifies the one who has faith in Christ. He is just and the justifier. This is what we have been saying for some time now. God provides for us the very righteousness that he demands from us. It is provided to us freely through grace, through faith, He is just in that he does punish sin, and he is the justifier in that through faith he declares us righteous in his sight by means of the sacrifice of Christ. Now in closing, I'm running out of time. So as we said at the beginning of the lesson, we can stand in God's courtroom. God is the judge, he's getting ready to declare us guilty. Paul's the prosecutor, he's read off all the charges on the indictment. Then at the last minute, Jesus Christ, our advocate, comes in and says that he is the propitiation that God himself has put forward. In other words, you can almost hear Jesus saying, your honor, these people, the ones who believe in me, they are innocent. Their sins have been paid for. I paid for them. I'm the one who died for them. And when the verdict comes in for the Christian, it is better than a not guilty, as we said earlier. It is innocent. We are declared righteous. We are declared justified. And as Paul says in Philippians 3, eight and nine, probably my two favorite verses in the Bible, where Paul says, indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things. and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God that depends on faith.