Sunday, 14 August, 2005: Today’s Bible readings.
1 What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sins are covered;
8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
We live in an age where many TV programs, books, CDs and movies all compete for public attention by presenting something more shocking than has ever been done before. They want the audience to say, “I can’t believe what I just saw/heard/read!” in the hopes that they will all tell their friends and so increase the ratings.
Well, here before us in today’s passage from Romans is something absolutely shocking. But it isn’t shocking in order to increase ratings. It is shocking because it goes so counter to what we have built into us.
And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness….
What do we learn from this?
God justifies the ungodly. God declares wicked people to be in right standing with Himself. We know He should condemn them. But Paul tells us God justifies the ungodly. And worst of all, when Paul mentions the ungodly, he doesn’t just mean the really nasty person down the street. Paul means you and me. All of us are considered ungodly, because Paul has just established in chapter 3 that we are all guilty of sin before God.
This is shocking to us in another way. Everything in our nature tells us that we have to earn our way to heaven. We’ve got to be good enough. We have to have enough good works to outweigh the bad ones, tipping the scales for us and getting us into heaven. We’ve got to work our way into God’s favor.
Paul tells us that we can’t work to earn God’s favor. Rather, we must come to God, not trusting in our works, but trusting in Him to justify us in spite of our works! That is how we are counted as righteous before God. Our good works are never going to be good enough, and so we must stop trusting in them for our ability to please God.
Where is Christ in this passage?
We must be perfect before God. We need to obey God’s law completely, all the time. We are lacking in the perfect righteousness needed for God to credit us with heaven.
Yet Paul tells us that we can be declared righteous despite our works. We can have perfect righteousness. The perfect righteousness we need to be declared just before God is the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, credited to us by grace through the instrument of faith. Thus Paul tells us that it is through faith that we are justified, and not through our own imperfect and insufficient good works.
So we are saved by good works, but not by our own good works. Our own good works will never be good enough. We are saved by the good works of Jesus Christ, credited to us by faith.
God justifies the ungodly. Now isn’t that something shocking?
