27 What is left for us to brag about? Not a thing! Is it because we obeyed some law? No! It is because of faith. 28 We see that people are acceptable to God because they have faith, and not because they obey the Law. 29 Does God belong only to the Jews? Isn’t he also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, he is! 30 There is only one God, and he accepts Gentiles as well as Jews, simply because of their faith. 31 Do we destroy the Law by our faith? Not at all! We make it even more powerful.
John MacArthur shares what salvation does for us...
Justification by faith encompasses two things. First of all, it is a declaration. It is a statement. It is an affirmation. It is God saying - Based upon the merit of Jesus Christ, based upon the death of Christ, based upon the righteousness of Christ and your faith in Christ, I declare you to be right with Me, I declare you to be just, to be righteous. In Romans chapter 4 verse 11 it says that righteousness, the end of the verse, is imputed unto them. That it is ... that is, it is granted to them. Based on the work of Christ, God declares us righteous.
Now, in a very real sense, we are not righteous. We are unrighteous. And we don't, by believing, make ourselves righteous, but God declares that we're righteous and He imputes that righteousness to us in that declaration because Jesus Christ has paid the penalty for our sin. But I said this the other night and I want to make it very clear again. We are not only declared righteous in justification by faith, we are made righteous.... There is that declaration, but there also is secondly a reality of righteousness. We are not only declared righteous, we are made righteous so that you have not only imputation, which is a declaration of righteousness, but you have impartation which is a granting of real righteousness...There is a genuine transformation...we are really transformed. We become one with Him. We become clothed with Christ...when you came to Jesus Christ, you received the covering of the righteousness of Christ, you were in union with His death, you were in union with His resurrection, you are in union with Him in eternal, indivisible union with the living Christ. And that is an identification and so we have no fear of judgment because I we are clothed, as it were, in Christ....
You then are also the partakers of the covenant. You become redemptive family, recipients of covenant blessing. Regenerated to the family of God, identified with Jesus Christ in an eternal and indivisible union, and then identified with all the family of blessing, all the family of promise, all the family of redemption that have sprung from the loins of Abraham. And that's not a racial designation, that's a designation of faith. Abraham is the father of all who trust in God. He is the father of the faithful...for he believed God and became the father of those who live by faith.
And then further into the verse, you see we become heirs according to the promise, we receive all the promises of God. We are blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies....You are no more a servant but a son and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. Tremendous truth. Don't you think for a moment that justification by faith is simply some statement that God makes apart from any reality, there is a reality in justification, you are regenerated into the family of God, you are born again. And the new birth is the implanting of a new nature ... the implanting of a new nature. You are identified with Christ. You literally are cloaked in Christ. You become a Dart of the redeemed seed of faith. You become an heir to all the promises of God and you become the temple of the resident Holy Spirit of God. Now when justification by faith occurs then a person is transformed....
So when I say you are made righteous, that is not to say that you are sinless. It is not to say that you are perfect. It is to say that God has recreated you into an eternally righteous transformed person, fit for eternity. But, for the time on earth, that new creation is encompassed within the flesh, our humanness, and that restricts the full manifestation and the full development of what that potentiated righteous creature is. Understand that? It's as if you're in there and you can't burst out because you're encased in your humanness...But, the longer you live as a Christian and the more you walk in the Spirit and obey the Lord, the more that new I overpowers the flesh.
Salvation does all that for us. But it also does some things for God. We saw the first one in yesterday's passage - it declares and satisfies God's righteousness.
The cross also exalts God's grace (v27). If we were saved by our works, we could boast about our salvation. But we're not saved by works. We're saved by grace. We're saved by what God did for us - and that exalts God's grace.
The cross also reveals God's consistency (v28-30). All Israel would affirm that there is only One God. But if there is only One God that means He has to be the God of both the Jew and the Gentile. And so God has made a way of salvation that is the same for both the Jew and the Gentile. It can't be the law because the Gentiles didn't have the law. It has to be by grace, it has to be by faith. God doesn't have a works system for Jews and a grace system for Gentiles. Everyone has the opportunity to be saved by faith in Jesus Christ. And this applied in the OT as well.
Genesis 6:8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
If he hadn't found grace through faith he would've drowned with everyone else.
Romans 4:2-3 If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 3 What does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Habakkuk 2:4 “See, he is puffed up; his desires are not upright—but the righteous will live by his faith
All of Hebrews 11 speaks about the heroes of the faith and that they were justified by faith, starting all the way back with Enoch.
Men are redeemed always, past-present-future, by believing God. And in that time they had to believe all that God had revealed and now we believe all that God had revealed which is all that He'd revealed then and all that He's revealed in His Son ... but we still believe all that He revealed.
And in this age in which we live, just as before Israel, during Israel's time and now as Israel's been set aside, we are redeemed by faith, by believing. But as James says, "Saving faith will manifest fruitfulness." There's no question about that.
The cross also confirms God's law (v31). If you can't get saved by the law, then is the law useless? No, no, no, never, no way! The law was never given to save us, it was given to show us our need to be saved!
The cross doesn't abolish the law, it establishes it.
The penalty of law had to be exacted. The law said - you sin, you die, so somebody had to die. When Jesus died He said that the law was in effect and its demands had been met.
The purpose of the law was to show the impossibility of keeping it, and to show us our need of a saviour - to drive us to Christ.
Justification by faith makes keeping the law a possibility through the power of the Holy Spirit.
All of this comes by faith.
But how do we know if we have true saving faith? MacArthur shares some insights into this.
You are not saved simply for knowing and believing the facts about Jesus, for going to church, for being in ministry, for being convicted of your sin, for being convicted enough to change your lifestyle, for feeling assured that you're right with God, and not even for remembering a time you prayed a prayer or made some verbal commitment. You could do all of those things and still be lost.
If you have true faith you will have a love for God, you will desire that God be honoured and glorified, you will want to know Him more through study of His Word, He will be your highest desire.
You will also hate sin, and repent from sin when you are convicted of it. You are not just sorry you got caught, you don't just feel bad about the results or consequences, you confess your sin and you genuinely want to turn away from your sin, you are grieved by your sin.
You will also be humble. Your love for God and hatred for sin will cause you to see the sin in your own life and be humbled by it, and come to God seeking mercy.
You will be absolutely devoted to God's glory above all else. Above your glory, above your desires, above your will, above your comfort, above everything else.
You will pray. You will have a heart that seeks communion with God through prayer.
You will have a selfless love for one another.
You will be separate from the world. You will overcome the world and it's desires.
You will continually have spiritual growth. You will not stay stagnant.
You will a life of obedience.
And when you have done all that - you will also have all those things on the first list - you will have a visible and genuine morality, a proper knowledge of God and His Word, you will be involved in ministry, you will convicted of sin, you will have assurance of salvation and that time of decision will have meaning for you. But those things can't and don't stand alone. You can have those things and not be saved. But if you are truly saved, you will have those things as well.
Now, obviously we will fail. We are not perfect. We do not always love God the way we should, we do not always hate sin the way we should, we are not always humble, we are not always devoted to God's glory above all us, we do not always pray, we are not always selfless in our love, we are not always wanting to overcome the world, we are not always growing spiritual, we are not always obedient. And that is why we have a High Priest who intercedes for us, that is why we need to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit. No, we cannot do those things perfectly. But it does need to be the direction of our life. Not the perfection, but it must be the direction.
One more thought from MacArthur to close out Romans 3 - sorry this is getting really long, but I think it's important...
when a person becomes redeemed, there is never a separation between grace and law. And that is a major fallacy in the thinking of many people. They want to so purify grace that they make salvation all of grace and no responsibility or obligation whatsoever. And this is an effort to maintain what some have chosen to call super-grace. But grace and gracious salvation never makes null and void the law but rather establishes the law. Now that statement has all kinds of interpretive ramifications, but just to focus on one--becoming a Christian by grace does not remove from us the obligation to obey God. All Paul is saying is you cannot save yourself by your good works, he is not saying therefore give up and never bother with them. He is saying - when you come to Christ and are justified, and as we shall see later in this epistle, when you are implanted with the Holy Spirit, He then can produce in you those good works, yes, He will produce in you those good works and you will even establish the law or fulfill it.
And it’s very important, I think, that we understand this....when people want to separate grace from law all together, the logical step that follows that is to separate the Savior-hood of Christ from His Lordship. And so, they will affirm that Jesus Christ is Savior and receive purely and only as Savior, and then there’s no other thing required for salvation and hopefully at a later time, you’ll acknowledge Him as Lord and get with the issue of obedience, that is not germane to salvation. Now this is an artificial dichotomy. It does not belong there. It is not biblical. It is an effort to maintain pure grace.... that is one theological perception of salvation, that all you have to do is ask Jesus to come into your heart, no commitment, no change of life, no nothing and you’re still saved. In fact, one writer says: “Believers who become agnostics are still saved. They are still born again, you can even accept Christ and become an atheist but if you once accepted Christ as Savior, you cannot lose your salvation even though you deny God.” Now it says in my Bible and in his Bible, 2 Timothy 2:12, “If you deny Me, I will deny you.” Another author, Dr. Stanford, who is the president, by the way, of Florida Bible College, which propagates a lot of this, says: “Any teaching that demands a change of conduct, either toward God or man for salvation, is adding works and human effort to faith and is an accursed message.”
What he is saying therefore is that you can be saved and have absolutely no manifestation of it. Is that true? I don’t think so. Because if salvation means the life of God is planted in the soul of man, there’s got to be some revelation of that life, just as there was of the life of evil that was there before. We do not accept that. And so, when we teach whether it’s Matthew or Romans or any other book in the New Testament, or even in comparison to the Old, we teach that when a person comes to Christ he receives Him as Savior and Lord and genuine salvation demands a commitment of life to obedience to the Lordship of Christ. Now we don’t always follow through the way we should, do we? But there has to be a willingness to turn from our sin and accept the responsibility to live under the Lordship of Christ. I think Thomas had it right when he said in John 20:28, very simply, “My Lord and my God,” and he affirmed instantly when he saw who Jesus was that this individual had absolute dominion and sovereignty over his life. In Romans 10:9 and 10 it says that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as ... what?...as Lord and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. And by the way, that is a quote from Joel 2:32 and you have there the word “Lord” is the word Yahweh, it is the very name for the sovereign ruler of the universe, Jehovah God Himself. And that is what salvation is. It is an affirmation of the sovereignty of God in my life through the mediator Jesus Christ.
Now that is not adding a works to salvation, that is a recognition of who He is.... Nobody can be saved except through the agency of the Holy Spirit. Nobody can make the proper insight into who Christ is except by the Holy Spirit. Nobody will truly understand Jesus except by the Holy Spirit. And when the Spirit does His work, he will say: “Jesus is the Lord.” And so, there is no reason to dichotomize the saving work of Christ from His Lordship, you do disservice to His person and you miss the message of true salvation. There’s no way in the Bible that you could ever separate; mark this, faith from obedience. Why in Romans chapter 1 verse 5 it says: “We have received grace and apostleship,” listen to this phrase, “for obedience to the faith among all nations.”
In other words, he says as an Apostle, we are proclaiming to the nations the obedience of faith. There’s no such thing as a faith that has no obedience. There’s no such thing as a salvation that does not acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And yet, when I have taught that, people have accused me of teaching a works salvation. In fact, when I was roaming around in south Florida, some years ago, in the environs of Florida Bible College, I got attacked all over the place. People would come and hear me and they’d come up afterwards and say, “You’re teaching works salvation because you’re saying that you have to repent of your sin, and confess your sin and you have to embrace the Lordship of Christ and commit your life to be obedient to Him, that’s a works salvation, it adulterates pure grace.” I think they have a nice idea trying to keep the purity of grace, but in so doing I think they’ve emasculated the doctrine of salvation. And there are a lot of people under their aegis who are running around thinking they’re saved when they’re not because all they’ve done is identify Jesus Christ as a Savior from sin, but because they’ve not submitted to His Lordship, the completion of their salvation has never occurred.
Titus 2:11-12 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. 12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age
When the grace of God appears to us, the first thing it does is teach us to deny ungodliness. And it says in verse 14 that the Lord gave Himself in order that He might redeem us from iniquity and purify unto Himself a people of His own. The purification of life, the submission to the Lordship of Christ, the obedience that comes at salvation is that which marks the true salvation.... God saves us by grace through faith, not human effort. But part of God’s gracious work is to bring us to repentance and to bring us to confession and to bring us to submission to the Lordship of Christ..... Salvation is in Christ and Christ alone. Okay? Not Christ plus something. But within that genuine salvation, there will be repentance from sin and submission to the Lordship of Christ.
Tomorrow's scripture focus: Romans 4:1-3
1 comment:
It is hard to remember sometimes that our good works should come from obedience because we have been saved by faith, rather than to prove our worthiness to be saved on our own merits, which we cannot do no matter how hard we try. I gotta say, I am so very thankful that it works the way it does, because I am not nearly as good at obedience as I would like to be. And then I look at my kids and think "Why can't they just LISTEN and DO what I tell them to do, instead of arguing with me and having temper tantrums?" But don't I do the same thing? Maybe I don't yell "No!" and stomp my feet, like my middle child is fond of doing, but the result is the same, right? Maybe God says "Why can't she LISTEN and DO what I've asked of her, instead of busying herself with all manner of other things?"
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