Online Sermons
God's Righteousness
Rom 3:23 “For all have sinned”
Paul’s emphasis is not on the fact that all have sinned—he spent the first two chapters doing that. The bigger picture is read the rest of the sentence—AND ARE JUSTIFIED BY HIS GRACE AS A GIFT THROUGH THE REDEMPTION THAT’S IN THE ANNOINTED JESUS. You could take out the middle part ‘all have sinned’ and could just say there is no distinction—all are justified by the grace as a gift of the redemption of Jesus Christ. That’s Paul’s point. Paul’s point is NOT that all have sinned. His point is that all are justified, all are made righteous through grace by Jesus Christ. It demonstrates and shows how righteous God is. He was manifested and shown his righteousness in the present time through this act. It shows God’s righteousness in a couple ways. One, because there is no distinction between people—between Jew and Gentile. There’s not one way that a Jew is justified and another way a Gentile get’s justified. It is all by a gift of God through Jesus that he picked. No distinction between Him. It’s righteous, far and just. Two, because it satisfies his prior forbearance of former sins. Back in the past when people were sinning and doing all those things along the way, especially the Jewish nation, God forebear them, He looked over them, He pushed them to the side a bit because in His divine knowledge He knew He was taking care of those things later. He had patience with those things knowing that the price would be paid later. The revelation of that anointed Jesus has demonstrated that God was just in saying I’m going to bear with them-- I’ll have patience with those sins, they’ll be taken care of. But if Jesus had never come would it have been right and righteous and just for God to say I’m going to ignore the sins of these people. Certainly not.
If you’ve been wronged, and someone comes to you and says I’ve come to make this right, you should be the one to say ‘this is how you can make it right’. This will appease the wrong that’s been done to me. And we can imagine this is the case with God. God says we have this sin problem people. So people offer animal sacrifice, do all this stuff, build great grand temples, and God says not good enough. So in order for God to be just and righteous He must put forth the means of justification. God is not only just but he is the justifier, he took the step, he did the thing to repair the relationship. We can personally take a lesson from that-- if you’ve been wronged by someone it’s on you to tell them, it’s on you to repair this relationship. In so doing in setting forth Jesus in that way Paul says, his righteousness has been revealed to use because he took care of our problem.
There’s no boasting allowed before God because we are so unrighteous and He is so righteous. There’s no boasting before God because we really have not done anything. In some churches you get the feeling sometimes churches feel special because we had chosen to pick God. And we say look how good we are—we chose God. In so doing, what are we doing? WE ARE BOASTING BEFORE HIM, GOD I MADE THE CHOICE. What God says when we do that He says, No you didn’t. I made the choice. I put Jesus out there. I sent him to take care of YOUR problem. His righteousness leads to My righteousness through justification. It doesn’t matter what we do, if God hadn’t made the first move.
