As we are about to read the Word of God, I ask you to pray with me, please. Our Father and our God in heaven, your Word is a light unto our path. We confess our need of that Word to guide our path, to help us understand who you are and what you require of us as your people. Our Father and our God, we have come in the name that is above every name, the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And for his sake, we ask you to help us in this hour, that we might draw closer to him who loves us and gave himself for us. In Jesus' name, amen. We're reading from the third chapter of Romans, verses 21 to 31. I invite you to follow along in your pew Bible. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine 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 Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since God is one. who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law. Many years ago, before entering the ministry, I worked for a pharmaceutical house, and one of the products that they developed was a cough syrup. It tasted awful. And those who were advertising it said, what should we do about this drug? And I said, why don't you say it tastes like medicine ought to? They didn't go with that suggestion. Anyway, the Bible says, taste and see that the Lord is good and blessed are those who take refuge in him. Up to this point in Romans, we've been reading the bad news. This sort of an unremitting darkness that fills our minds as we read about all the things that are wrong with us as fallen people. But now something has happened that Paul rejoices in and which he will set out very clearly before us. As I looked at these 11 verses that comprise our text for today, I saw three points that we'd like to study this text under. First, the righteousness of God revealed, verse 21, Second, the cost of righteousness put forward, verses 24 and verse 25. And finally, the gift of righteousness conferred, verse 28. The righteousness of God revealed. Now the righteousness of God has been made manifest. Returning to the psalmist, He says, O sing a new song to the Lord, for he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of all nations, Psalm 98. There are great benefits flowing from the righteousness of God. Even as we know that there are problems stemming from that righteousness as well, as the earlier chapters in Romans made so clear. But the benefits flowing from his righteousness, we will see very clearly, flow from the cross of Jesus Christ. That's why we sang this morning, in the cross of Christ I glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time. The cross still stands as the pylon that draws people to Christ. And we, ourselves, have been drawn to him through his cross. That cross answers the question of Bildad, One of the earliest questions to be found in the Bible, in the book of Job, how can a man be righteous before God? Jeremiah says, the heart of man is deceitfully wicked and desperately ill. The Hebrew could be translated incurable. who can know the depths of his illness. About that same time that I referred to in the beginning of this message, I found myself at a doctor's office quite frequently with different symptoms. And he said to me after a while, he said, you know, you've been here a number of times. Are you a medical student by any chance? And I said, no. He said, well, what do you do for a living? I said, well, I write literature for this pharmaceutical house. He said, ah, you've got medical student syndrome. You've been doing research, haven't you? I said, yes. He said, well, you're getting the diseases you've been researching. But it's all in your mind. He said, stop all that reading and start focusing on healthy things. It was at that time that I was a Christian also, so I began to focus more completely on him who loves us and provides for us in our frailty. The same Jeremiah who spoke about the incurable nature of the heart offers up a resolution and he says, there's going to be a new covenant for the people of Israel. A new covenant where God will remember our sins no more and forgive us of all our iniquities. And Jeremiah, who is pretty much by himself in making this new covenant affirmation, says that the one who is going to be spearheading this movement is going to be called Yahweh Tzidkenu, the Lord Our Righteousness. While Judah and Israel were crumbling in unbelief and in false worship, Jeremiah saw through the problem, and he realized that in the fullness of time, God would send forth Messiah who would heal the people of their most deep-seated needs. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, we read in this text, verse 23. What is the glory of God? It is the word kavod, which speaks of a deep heaviness that is so grave and so majestic as to be beyond our understanding. You may recall in the Old Testament there was a time, during the time of the old priest named Eli, where his grandson was born to Phinehas. And they called him Ichavod. Ichavod. No glory. Because the Philistines had taken the Ark of the Covenant. And they had taken not only the Ark, of course, but its contents, chiefly being the law of God, which was the glory of Israel. Where is the glory? Well, that is the question that Eli, before his death, thought about, much to his sadness. The function of the law, although it is full of glory, is not to justify us or to sanctify us. The function of the law is to condemn us. The law reflects the glory of God. Think of the prophet Isaiah, who was confronted with the glory of God. He heard the cherubim and the seraphim. He heard the worship and he realized, he said, I am lost because I am a man of unclean lips. How does a prophet become a man of unclean lips? It uses the Hebrew expression, nibble pet, which means literally, it's used in contemporary Hebrew, a fouling of the mouth. Now, I'll tell you something, Hebrew is a very difficult language to swear in. Jews will swear in all kinds of language, but they won't swear in Hebrew. Perhaps because they call Hebrew Lashon HaKadosh, the Holy Tongue. But Isaiah understood it wasn't just the words that came out of his mouth. It was what was going on in his heart that made him defile before God. And what did God do for Isaiah as he had to deal with this problem? Why, he took a call from the altar, the place of the slaughter, Mitzbik, and he touched the lips of Isaiah. He healed Isaiah at the part where he was most conscious of his sin. And he does that as he manifests his righteousness through the cross. You and I must read the bad news first before we hear the good news. We've made that very clear, and as Paul has made it very clear as well. As Samuel Johnson, in words to his biographer Boswell, was reported to have said, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind most wonderfully. When you see what the bad news really is, you're then in a position to receive the good news. Paul writes to the Galatian church and he says, the law is our tutor to bring us to Christ. We can't find relief in the law, but the law is there to point us. It's a pointer to Jesus Christ. And so Paul can say in verse 21 that we can be saved apart from the law, even though the law, as a righteous standard, makes it very clear that there is something better coming for those who wanted to be saved. "...whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood." Here is the second point. We see the righteousness of God made manifest, and now we speak of the cost of that righteousness put forward. Put forward through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. A redemption requires a redeemer. In the Old Testament, the word for redeemer is the word goel. And the function of a goel was to buy back a lost or forfeited estate. If you lost something, forfeited it through debt, through tragedy of some sort, it would fall to a relative or someone who loved you dearly to come and bring that forfeited estate back to you. Job said, I know that my Goel liveth, and he will stand on the earth in the latter day. But he also prayed in chapter 9, would that there were an arbiter between us. In other words, would that there were a mediator between God and me, someone who could help him in his time of great stress. I recall a time when I was a young man and I had to stand before a judge in a court of law because I was accused of a crime of which I was guilty and could be sentenced to jail. Yes, pastors have some interesting backgrounds. And he asked me, as I stood before the bar of justice, he says, is there any mediating factor that I should consider before I level sentence against you? And I said to him, I prayed with my rabbi about this. He said, how can I know that that will be effective? I said to him, I have disappointed others, but I will not disappoint God. And it moved his heart, and he suspended the sentence. I was undeserving of it, but it was grace. And that is the Lord Jesus Christ working in us. My rabbi. who I suppose wouldn't be so interested in standing in my place today, nonetheless at that time was a highly respected man in my hometown. And to bring his name into the courtroom was to bring a mediator, someone who stood up for me in my time of folly and lawlessness. The law in the Old Testament speaks of the principle of substitution. In Leviticus 17, God says, I have given you the sacrifice upon the altar, the blood upon the altar, to make atonement for your souls. And here we get into this word which is so prominent in our text, the word propitiation. And the Jews knew a lot about propitiation in the Old Testament. That's what the mercy seat was all about. It could be called the propitiatory seat. And it was based on the word from which they would get the word kippur, or atonement. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. That's from the idea of the mercy seat. And if you know your Old Testament, you'd know that the high priest would sprinkle the mercy seat, which was a gold slab across the Ark of the Covenant, And that blood sprinkled was between the eyes of a holy God and the broken law that was inside the Ark of the Covenant. And that sacrifice, that substitutionary sacrifice would avail for the forgiveness of those who had put their hopes in that provision. On Calvary, God directed against himself and the person of his son the entire weight of his righteous wrath, which we deserve. but which he took lovingly in our place. That's why Paul could speak about forbearance in passing over former sins in verse 25. And you may recall how in Acts chapter 17, when Paul is at the Areopagus speaking to the Athenians, he says, the times of ignorance God overlooked. Not that God winked at sins, but He had purpose from all eternity to judge sin in the person of His Son. He condemned sin in the flesh, condemned sin in the flesh of His very own Son for the sake of justifying us righteously. And that is the problem, isn't it? How a just God can forgive righteously. And that's what the Bible answers for us, that God can forgive sin justly by the offering of himself. And you notice how the prophets, as well as the law, bear witness to this, as Paul says. And I think Isaiah says it best of all. He was numbered with the transgressors. He bore the sin of many. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him. You notice how all these are in the past tense? Now here's Isaiah writing seven centuries before Christ, and he's talking about the death of the Messiah in the past tense. The Hebrew is using what we call the prophetic past. Even though it's couched in the past, it can be stated authoritatively. Why? Because God has promised to do this from all eternity. He is the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the earth. It was never a secondary thought for God. It was a first principle that God would give his own Son to redeem man in his fallenness. And so we can come to the third point. The gift of righteousness conferred in verse 28. where the apostle says, we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. To which he adds these words in verse 24, we are justified by his grace. There are a lot of religious words that we are exposed to in life. A lot of them become pretty tired and shopworn but not the word grace. Somehow that word grace has survived and become more precious all the time. And we use it in various ways. We speak of people who are graceful. We speak of someone who acted graciously. Grace is the most precious word in our vocabulary because God has shown grace. The wrath of God is a very real thing, but so is the grace of God. Because of the latter, we do not have to fear the former if we are trusting in Jesus Christ as our Savior. One of the great Old Testament prophets whom I return to often as I think of the consonance between the old and the new is the prophet Hosea. He is the love prophet of the Old Testament. He had the strangest marriage in all of biblical history. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute, a prostitute by the name of Gomer. And he does. And he bears witness through this strange marriage to the fact that God is a very gracious God. And that even though Israel had sinned grievously against the Lord, he would not give them up. And you hear these words, these are words of love in chapter two, verse 19 of Hosea. I will betroth you unto myself forever in righteousness. I will betroth you unto myself forever in righteousness. You should understand that betrothal in Old Testament times, even in the times of the early New Testament, was more than engagement, more than an engagement. the lover would bring the bride price to the father when he was betrothed to the daughter of the father. And this is a very interesting and important truth to realize. You may recall that David, when he wanted to marry Michal, was asked to bring a barbaric price to her father, which we can't even mention in polite society. But here, our Redeemer brought his blood into the presence of his Father. That was the payment. That was the ransom. That was the redemption. Because the earthly tabernacle where Aaron and the priests served was only a working model of the real thing. And Jesus Christ did not go in to a working model, but he went into heaven itself, into the holiest place, bringing his own blood before his Father, which the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit had determined would be the redemption of all those who trusted in that provision. And the objective of it all was more than forgiveness. In the Old Testament, the sacrifice could procure forgiveness for the sinner through the act of substitution. But you notice how Jeremiah, when he talks about the New Covenant, says, And they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. And he uses the word in the Hebrew The verb yodah is the same word that is found where Adam knew his wife Eve. To know in the most intimate possible sense. They will know me in that way. And that's why we can cry as the song enabled us to worship earlier. Abba, Father, Abba, we cry. God is our Heavenly Father. If you want to know the state of a person's religion, ask him what he thinks about God as being his Father. That usually separates a large number of people from the pack. But God is our Father through our Lord Jesus Christ. He becomes our Father through that sacrifice whereby we have come to know him. Even in the law, Moses spoke of that prophetically. He said in chapter 30 of Deuteronomy, the Lord your God will circumcise your heart that you might love me and live. Those of you who were at Eric's class studying in Peter will remember these wonderful words. Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. And that little preposition that Peter uses there, the righteous for the unrighteous, the word huper, means on behalf of or in the place of. the righteous suffering on behalf of, in place of you and me. That is the gospel. That is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Without the cross, there is no gospel. Without the cross, there is no healing. One of the things I learned when I worked for a short time at that pharmaceutical company was how that in the studies with respect to its drugs, a placebo would often be used to test the effectiveness of a drug. Now, a placebo, of course, was just a sugar pill. It had no power at all. And yet it was curious how a number of people taking a placebo would come back to their doctor and say, you know, I feel a lot better having taken this medicine. And eventually, I suppose, most of them had to be told, well, you were only taking a placebo. It's not designed to really help you. It was for a study. Well, there are a lot of people who are receiving placebos today. You can go to any number of churches in Lancaster, in Bryn Mawr, in Wayne, any place you want to find, you'll find people giving you a placebo saying, you're really OK. You're OK. I'm OK. Just feel good about yourself. Look at yours inside. You're really healthy there. Just think positive thoughts. The power of positive thinking, that'll do it for you. I feel like Billy Graham. But you know, it's wrong, and it's not going to bring healing to anybody. Healing is found only in the cross of Jesus Christ. And you notice how Paul, as a good monotheist, in verse 30, reminds us that God is one. God is one. If he were speaking in Hebrew, he would have used the word echad, which is found in Deuteronomy 6-4. It's the great shibboleth. of Israel. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It's interesting to me, however, how that word one is a word which speaks of a compound unity. Maimonides, the great 12th century Spanish Jewish physician, used a different word when he spoke of God as one. And when he penned his principles of the Jewish faith, instead of using echad, he said God is one yochid, which is an indivisible, radical oneness. And yet God is a profound combined unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is one in purpose. That is why there is one gospel. That is why Jesus will say, I am the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me. There is no other way. Without the cross of Jesus Christ, we're all on a trail that'll end in darkness and despair. And Paul is making the fact known here that Israel was not a national, pardon me, God was not a national God for Israel. You know, the Philistines thought that for a while. They thought, well, if we fight Israel on this turf, we'll be more successful because their God really works in this sphere of activity. but they learned of their sorrow. That was not true. He is the one God, one God, who offers one way for all people. And we who believe this, Paul concludes in verse 31, we who believe this, actually support the law, or better, we fulfill the law. If he were writing in Hebrew, he would have used the word kayyim, which means fulfill. How do we fulfill the law? We do it vicariously through Jesus Christ. As I said, the law is there to condemn us, but Jesus Christ stands before us as the answer to our need and says, even though you're condemned by the law, my action on your behalf restores you if you will put your faith in me. Not only did I fulfill the law in your place, but I died your death upon the cross that there may be no judgment against you whatsoever at that high and holy court We have received, John says, the free gift of righteousness, as he invites others to do the very same thing. To as many as received him to them gave thee the authority to become the sons of God. And the question that we ask every Lord's Day is, how is your relationship with the Son of God? Have you received him? Do you trust in him alone as your Savior? At some time in the unforeseeable future, God will ring down the final curtain on history. And at that day, all his righteous judgments will be leveled against us, and the judge will be Christ. He will see, and we will see with terrible clarity, how God sees us, for good or for ill. For the believer, there is this gospel truth that the one who judges us finally and unerringly is the one who loves us most deeply. Oh, may we see with the Apostle Paul the righteousness that we have in him, which comes not through the law, but through faith in Christ. We might receive the righteousness that is from God and depends on faith. God's gift to us that we might believe and live everlastingly. Let us pray. Father, our God in heaven, we thank you for the word of Christ which comes to us today. We thank you that he stands at the door of our hearts and he bids us Open our hearts to him. Receive him and the gift of life that he purchased with his own blood on Calvary's cross. Thank you for that life which is in him and him alone. May it be said of each one of us today that we stand in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. In Christ, that solid rock, we stand. Amen.